Cosmic Violence

By Stef

Outer space has been an inspiration for many artists and musicians. For some it gives a cosmic unity and the need for a universal spirituality, for others it offers an exploration into the nature of nature itself, with its paradoxes, infinite un-understandability and sense of wonder. And then you have the ones who see in outer space nothing but violent energy, erupting solar flares, exploding stars and all-consuming black holes.

Two such albums are reviewed here.


The End - Closer To The Sun (Petit Label, 2017) ***½

The first one is by the French power trio Fabien Duscombs on drums, Heddy Boubaker on bass and Mathieu Werchowski on violin. Needless to say that the bass and the violin are linked to amps and pedals. The first track is still a kind introduction to the rest of the album. It's repetitive and with a reasonable level of noise, which changes with the twenty-seven minute long second track, which draws you into an incredibly violent piece of music, relentlessly, repetitively in a kind of psychedelic nightmare of increasing volume, distortion and power, alternated with a quiet moment of feedback and tiny quantum particles of sound flying about, but rest assured (or not!) but the violence and the volume return in full force, as the band ventures deeper and deeper into the blackness of the universe. And so it goes with the last track: slow start, explorative sounds, until gradually all hell breaks loose again, with heavy punk-like rhythms and heavily distorted violin.

This will surely not be to everybody's taste, and I wonder how many people stayed in the audience of this live performance, but the ones who did, definitely got their money's worth. This is not for everyday consumption, yet I can only admire the drive and the power behind it.



Marc Edwards & Mick Barr Duo - The Bowels Of Jupiter (Gaffer, 2017) ***½

The second space travel brings us to Jupiter, and is performed by Marc Edwards on drums and Mick Barr on guitar. Edwards, known from his own quartets and trios, from Slipstream Time Travel, and from his collaborations with Sabir Mateen, David S. Ware, Paul Flaherty and many more, is a great jazz drummer, seemingly more than happy here to become more hard-hitting.

Mick Barr on the other hand, is a heavy metal guitarist (sorry for the dumb description - I'm sure there's some more sophisticated name for his brand of metal), known from bands such as Crom-Tech and Orthrelm, or under his other moniker Octis or Ocrilim. The only other 'jazz' album that he's performed on is on the album "I Don't Hear Nothin' But The Blues, Vol. 2, Appalachian Haze" in a trio with Jon Irabagon and Mike Pride (on which a lot can be heard except the blues).

This duo is also high energy, full power, with a no-holds-barred and take-no-prisoners approach. The speed and the sheer intensity of both drumming and guitar are so fascinating that you really feel propulsed through the universe, and the only thing you hope is that you don't encounter a comet on your path. Luckily, some of the tracks offer some respite, a welcome break. There is also a tongue-in-cheek title with "Deep Space African Drums", on which Edwards sets the tone with some wonderful drumming over which Barr slowly improvises a chordal arrangement, yet the next "Solar Flares" brings us back to the incedible force of both drummer and guitarist to go beyond the normal. Just listening to it is exhausting, let alone perform it.

Like the other album reviewed here, it's hard to call this jazz, unless maybe in its original definition of "energy" in the positive defintion or "noise" as understood by its critics.

And again, you can only admire the total lack of compromise, the willingness to go to the extreme and keep going for it, with no afterthoughts or hesitations.

Safe travels!

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Guillaume Roy, Vincent Courtois, Claude Tchamitchian - Amarco (Emouvance, 2011) ****½

By Stef

Apart from the Masada String Trio, there aren't many trios of violin, cello and bass to be found in modern jazz, yet here is one from France, and one with equally seasoned virtuosi: Guillaume Roy on viola, Vincent Courtois on cello and Claude Tchamitchian on bass.

As can be expected from the line-up, this is chamber music, but one that goes far beyond the classical notion of the music, and far beyond the sweet melodies of the Masada songbook.

The music, the sounds, the approach are new and fully improvised. The music floats, is melancholy, or full of intensity, full of distress, or full of drama.

Listen to the first piece, listen how the tune is built up gradually, out of soft touches on strings, some pizzi cello, then gradually the bass takes over the core rhythm to the very end, for the viola to start adding bowed tension, just to have the cello switch magnicently and shortly to arco, piercing, profound.

The title piece is romantic classicism, with all three instruments bowing around a tonal center,with deep sadness and melancholy, moving slightly away from each other, which accentuates the sadness even more, then all three go into higher regions, before the bass bows the last incredibly deep tones. It is hard to believe that this is improvised, yet it is.

"'Champ Contre Champ" starts with a crazy rhythm on bass, and viola and cello kind of fight their way through the piece, duelling, circling around each other, while the bass keeps on plucking, then bowing the same rhythm hypnotically onwards.

This is serious and abstract music, with lots of gravity and a dark overall feeling, but the kind of music that is gripping in the way it's told, in the way it is created in front of your ears, 

It is also incredibly creative. The eleven relatively short pieces each tell their own story, invite you in a different context, but then without losing the overall coherence of the album.

But why am I ranting on .... this is remarkable music by three fantastic artists. Judge for yourself on the long clip below, that gives an entire performance by the trio.





© stef

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William Parker in Italy

William Parker has something with Italy, he has released several of his own albums on the Italian Rai label, and he has played a lot with Italian musicians. Here are again two new releases, but with a totally different approach.


William Parker & Gianni Lenoci & Vittorino Curci & Marcello Magliocchi - Serving An Evolving Humanity (Silta, 2010) ****

This album starts in the best of free jazz traditions: full blast ahead, with a piano that seems to hammer all keys simultaneously, wild sax-playing and a rhythm section that goes totally berserk. The band is William Parker on double bass, Gianni Lenoci on piano, prepared piano and voice, Vittorino Curci on alto and soprano, voice and megaphone, and Marcello Magliocchi on drums.

The "berserk" piece is suddenly harnessed into a repetitive pattern by Curci, with Lenoci following and releasing the tension too, and the piece turns into calm surroundings creating an atmosphere like rain dripping from the leaves after wind and storm have gone, and the piece goes even quieter, with the playing turning minimal, full unexpected turns, sensitive and raw, until all hell breaks loose again, detonating in your ears, relentlessly, ... and becomes even quieter afterwards ... yet somehow the tension increases.

The second piece of the suite starts with Parker playing arco and pizzi simultaneously, setting the scene for an eery and slow avant-garde piece, yet full of a bluesy soul. I am less convinced of the shouting by Lenoci (we could have done without), yet the rest of the piece is staggering : Curci's alto is wailing with a rare expressivity.

The last part of the suite is totally minimalistic, with Lenoci plucking his strings, carefully, cautiously, precisely, Parker playing his shakuhachi, later his shenai, adding interesting world music textures.

It took me some time to get into this album. At first listening it sounded somewhat unfocused, with no real sense of direction or coherence, yet after listening several times in its entirety, the music on the album does evolve, it does flow, and the three pieces do form one unity. There is a lot to listen to, and its worth listening to, more than several times. Enjoy!

Listen and download from eMusic.

Tiziano Tononi Feat.William Parker And Emanuele Parrini - Vertical Invaders (Black Saint, 2010) ****

Italian drummer Tiziano Tononi is a great fan of the early free jazz of the sixties. He has made several tribute albums to Ornette Coleman, to John Coltrane, to Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and to Don Cherry. He also played with William Parker before, and released "Spirits Up Above"in 2006. Like on that album, Emanuele Parrini plays violin and viola.

The music is quite free boppish, with explicit rhythms and composed themes, yet it still is something else than what you would expect. Parrini's violin is one of the determining factors of the overall sound: his playing is slow, with long stretched notes trying to imitate a horn, often in the lower registers. The opening piece is an example in case, and on the wonderful "Like Leroy Jenkins", to whom the album is a kind of dedication, his minimal kind of lyricism shows its full expressive power.

On the three title tracks, they leave the beaten track completely and start exploring the various possibilities of combining two string instruments and percussion, and with great effect: Parker's bowing changing roles with Parrini going pizzi is quite nice, as is Tononi's rumbling drumming and precise accentuation.

Yet the musicians go beyond their usual instruments. Parker plays his shenai on one piece, and shakuhachi on a long and beautiful composition dedicated to Alice Coltrane.

The last piece is a long mournful reprise of "Like Leroy Jenkins", played solo by Parrini, a very sad ending.

Listen and download from eMusic.


Watch William Parker with Lenoci, Curci, Magliocchi



© stef

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Stefano Pastor - Freedom (Slam, 2010) ****

As a tribute to the free jazz greats, "Freedom" is a bizarre album, but then in the positive way. The line-up is already special, with Stefano Pastor on violin, George Haslam on baritone sax and tárogató, Gianni Lugo on soprano sax, and Giorgio Dini on double bass. So you get three solo instruments and one bass to play the rhythmic parts and the thematic backbone, if any.

As Pastor writes in the liner notes : "It is my belief that, in choosing to play jazz or to relate to jazz, a musician is bound to feel at ease within the context of a libertarian and egalitarian culture, namely a revolutionary and popular culture; he cannot escape it, on grounds of his intellectual consistency".

And the music on this album has this quality : all musicians are free to join as and when they see fit, they react spontaneously to themes thrown into the group, join in unison, or improvise in parallel lines. The end result is quite charming and even intimate, while also trying to make the political statement above come true.

The most typical example of this is the third track, "Emancipation", on which the three solo instruments start quite avant-gardistic with short bursts of sounds without clear pattern, yet reacting to each other like a conversation of birds, yet gradually unison lines emerge, with some great "blue" notes adding a jazz element, then shifting to gospel, still in relative free form, and then halfway through the track Dini's bass joins with a steady vamp, pulling the soloists along with him and Haslam's baritone builds a great theme, with violin and tarogato playing a parallel countertheme, then all three continue soloing through each other, beautifully, respectfully.

Even if there are themes, the fun is to play with them and around them. The fact that Pastor's violin sounds more voiced than you would expect from the instrument, with a somewhat hoarse quality, brings it close in timbre to the saxes, creating a great unity in the interweaving layers of improvised phrases. Some pieces are meditative, like "Elevation", others more "harmolodic" in the Ornette Coleman sense, such as "Dance", that also contains swing elements, and with Haslam by coincidence or on purpose playing a phrase from "Happy House".

Without being too overly adventurous, the musicians create a real fun approach to jazz, alternating well between meditative parts and moments of joy.

© stef

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Szilárd Mezei Trio - Bármikor, Most / Anytime, Now (NotTwo, 2008) ***½

Last year Serbian violinist and viola-player Szilárd Mezei released a quite succesful album combining wind, strings and percussion instruments for quite an interesting musical exploration. Now he's back with fellow compatriots Ervin Malina on bass and Istvan Csik on drums. Mezei's approach to music is an interesting mix of rhythmic and melodic composed elements, with references to modern classical, bop and European folk, interlaced with avant-garde improvisations. His viola has a raw, yet warm sound, and is really at the center of the music, determining the sound, the development of the pieces and the structure of it, while the bass and drums generally placed in a supportive role, although luckily not always. The nine pieces all have their own coherent focus, despite the excursions made here and there. But what is mostly astonishing is the permanent slow to mid-tempo pace, totally unhurried, and lacking much of the nervousness you would expect from jazz. And even on the mid-tempo tracks, the three musicians take their time to build up, to elaborate, to solo, ... what they bring is the opposite of instrumental pyrotechnics, despite their obvious skills, using few notes to tell the story, focusing all of the listener's attention on the qualitative impact of the tonal shifts and thematic development, giving the whole album a quite dramatic sound, full of pathos.

© stef

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ZMF Trio - Circle The Path (Drip Audio, 2007) ****

Rarely has a violin trio album started in such a haunting and captivating way, for a short and plaintive arco bass and violin drama with accentuating drums, aptly titled "Low, Dark and Slow". The second track breaks the mood by a high speed high energy unison theme, side-stepping expected evolutions in the tune with every few bars, adding power, dissonance and raw abrasiveness into the music. The trio consist of Jesse Zubot on violin and Jean Martin on drums, both from Vancouver, and Joe Fonda on acoustic bass. And when you think you've come to understand their approach, you get a "Slow Blues", the most traditional of jam band fall-back positions, but they handle it like you've never heard it before, back into the gloomy territory of the first track, and it becomes something entirely new. And that's the nice thing about this music. It is not avant-garde per se, but rooted in the jazz tradition and creative to the point that everything sounds fresh, the compositions, the overall tone, the interplay. The band is at its best in the slow pieces, when the voice of the violin does not get too mangled in the power of bass and drums, but manages to sound full and deep, as on "Wild Horse", another highlight of the album, in which Fonda plays a wonderful bass solo. The album closes with a reprise of the first piece, ending in power and beauty. I am not usually a fan of violin in jazz, but this one is definitely an exception.

(Thanks Michele for pointing out its existence!).

Listen and download from eMusic.

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