Rodrigo Amado/ Chris Corsano - The Healing (European Echoes, 2025)

By Stuart Broomer

The Healing is the first in a series of archival releases by Rodrigo Amado, restoring the European Echoes label on which some of his earliest works appeared between 2006 and 2009. It’s a duet with drummer Chris Corsano, recorded at ZBD in Lisbon in 2016, It documents an essential partnership in the quartet that first appeared on This Is Our Language (recorded 2012, released 2015), and which in turn became the quartet named This Is Our Language, with tenor saxophonist and trumpeter Joe McPhee and bassist Kent Kessler. The group has marked the strongest ties to the free jazz continuum of any of Amado’s ensembles, both homage to Ornette Coleman’s assertive “This Is Our Music” and a further declaration of that music’s status as language, a primary unit of communication and community identity alike. That quartet’s debut (as well as subsequent recordings) is likely familiar to long-term readers of this site: it was named its Record of the Year for 2015; eventually it placed third on the site’s “Free Jazz Collective Top 101 Recordings of the 2010s”, a poll in which Chris Corsano was the most frequently named individual musician.

If that first quartet recording stands as ideal reduction of free jazz to its essence: musical, communicative and emotive, this duo is, remarkably, a further refinement to essence – the voice here transmuted through a single tenor saxophone, the drum kit at once environment, time and assertion. This concert recording feels like healing, and a radical healing at that. On the opening track, “The Healing Day”, stretching to 24 minutes, the character shifts constantly, from mood to mood, voice to voice, tempo to tempo. The music might literally drive toward a healing that is at once intense, shared, dangerous, transcendent, the saxophone voice covering myriad approaches -- lyrical, reflective, explosive. The dialogue will suggest similar historic achievements in the work of John Coltrane with Elvin Jones or Rasheid Ali, or Sonny Rollins and Max Roach. The final sustained saxophone calls, each in a different voice and set against a continuum of drum rolls, may be as brilliant a conclusion to such a performance as is possible.

“The Cry” begins as literal stress test, a series of harsh, high-pitched, near squeals, isolated and unaccompanied, a kind of wake-up call that leads to a remarkably interactive performance in which Amado models interlocking phrases in a kind of highly-evolved hard bop that eventually leads to rapid passages that accelerate the tension while maintaining the same kinds of interlocking phrases and brief repeated assertions, ultimately shifting from a free explosion to ballad tempo and voice. 

Chris Corsano’s individual gift for rhythmic creation shines from the outset of “The Griot”, his movement amongst different drums and cymbals recalling the rare gifts of Milford Graves for polyrhythm and sonic variety. Corsano here implies multiple rhythmic patterns, tempos and sounds interacting with the compound precision of planets in a solar system. It will emphasize the essential camaraderie of Corsano and Amado when the tenor saxophonist eventually enters, passing through distinct zones – melodic, dense intense, lyrical – all with shifting rhythmic values built on an overarching kinship of compound form, maintained and expanded together by the duo.

“Release is in the Mind”, a 5-minute envoi , is boppish and liberating. It begins with a pattern of rhythmic honks from Amado in Rollins mode which Corsano will soon join, the two extending the piece into a vibrant explosion of time and melody, eventually with Amado reaching some joyously sustained trills culminating in a lower register groan, communicating those special R&B underpinnings that are the tenor saxophone’s special legacy – instrument and synthesis of sacred bar walking.

This is, in a sense, the continuation of jazz as polyrhythmic community of musicians and sounds alike, simultaneously invoking multiple and interactive times and pulses -- historical, immediate and futurist. 

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Daunik Lazro - Recent Releases Old and New (2/3)

Today is the second installment of an overview of French saxophonist Daunik Lazro's recent archival releases. See part one here.

By Paul Acquaro 

Jean-Jacques Avenel - Siegfried Kessler - Daunik Lazro - Ecstatic Jazz (Crypte Des Franciscains Béziers 12 Février 1982) (Fou, 2023) (Recorded 1982)

"In Nordic countries and elsewhere in Europe, in the hope that young people would venture to the concert, the name "ecstatic jazz" was often used," explains Lazro in a 2023 interview here. "For example, in February 2000, the day before the trio with Peter Kowald and Annick Nozati, Kowald had invited me for a duet in Torino, where we played under the banner Ecstatic Jazz, in front of an audience of young people in a trance. They seemed to dig our music since they danced to it."

 

Are you skeptical of the last assertion? Well, going to back to this release from Fou Records, it may not be so unimaginable. The recording, an unearthed tape of a show from 1982, after a slow coalescing of sounds, begins exuding rhythmic pulses. Jean Jacques Avenel's bass carries this pulse the furthest with an extended solo passage... one can feel the impulse to move growing. Possessed vocalizations follow, but the bass keeps everything moving along. Then, the track splits. We hear a slightly wavering tone of an electric piano joins the sonic landscape. At first it is just the keyboard and bass, then there is a percussive sound ... maybe a prepared piano? The group locks into a groove and the electric piano gets tangled up with the bass. This continues to solidify into a grooving passage. The conventional gives way to free playing, and Daunik finally enters with a piercing line. He's been missing until now and his injection increases the energy, as his lines coil ever tighter.

 

The next track split, '1c,' introduces a new mood. Pensive piano, restrained bass, the piece grows in volume and pace as a slight streak of modal, spiritual playing creeps in. The audience may have been swaying up to now but here is the first real glimpse of ecstasy. Lazro enters and he is a vector of energy. By the time the hit the mid-point of track 3, they have achieved an enlightenment. Is it ecstatic? totally. Were the kids dancing to it? maybe. It is a fantastic statement of free improvisation, melodic invention, and pure swirling energy, imbued with the energy of say late John Coltrane.

 

The next piece is much different. Kessler is playing electronics and the music is even more contemporary sounding than the first. It begins with an intense blast of electronics, 1982 electronics, but sounding contemporary. This set of tracks is more textured, for example after '2a''s electronics, '2b' offers new musical timbers with Kessler switching things up with the flute, and '2c' finds the trio in a jaggedly interlocking groove, then making some accessible modal jazz. The last track, '2d', is most satisfying, as the group explores the spiritual sound again, the piano holding back as the songs ends to enthusiastic applause.

 

Lazro's partners here, Kessler and Avenel, are two musicians who were integral to his playing and development, as well as the development of free music in France at the time. The recording is archival, it is not the cleanest, clearest of recordings, but as a tape from 1982, it captures the energy perfectly ... something clearer may have actually lost some spirit. 

 

Jean-Jacques Avenel - Daunik Lazro – Duo (Bibliothèque De Massy 16 Novembre 1980) (Fou Records, 2024) (Recorded 1980)

Duo is a previously unreleased recording by Jean-Jacques Avenel and Daunik Lazro, captured to tape during a concert at the Bibliothèque de Massy in 1980. The first track names an imaginary encounter between John Tchicai and Jimmy Lyons in Maghreb, while the second pays tribute to Steve Lacy and Anthony Braxton. The duo's music is indeed radical improvisation and stylistic versatility, which, some may say, brought to bear a new legacy of free jazz in France. In the liner notes, Lazro expresses that how this to him is a seminal recording, a document showing that "In 1980, some French musicians had invented their own jazz, freed from its rehtoric and fomalism. Post free, not yet free improv, music was already there, in its splendour."

 

As to the first track, the opening moments reveal the close connection of the two players. Rhythmic and skeletal, Avenel bows an urgent figure and Lazro throws complimentary staccato notes against the taut lines. Tense and melodically confined, Lazro drops out and Avenel continues to erect a rhythmic structure. When Lazro rejoins, he plays more emotively, with a tone that is reminiscent of a more ancient, preening sound. One may detect the 'Mahgreb' in the sounds and rhythms that they two employed, distinctly of abstracted northern African influence. The second track, the one that name checks Lacy and Braxton is as energetic and intense as the first, but seems to invoke more squeals and smears from the sax and frenetic bow strikes from the bass. It feels more concentric and swirling, repetitions and diverging patterns changing suddenly, overlapping and disappearing.

 

The album 'Duo' should be considered an essential piece of free jazz, capturing the intensity and complicity between Avenel and Lazro.

 

Daunik Lazro - Paul Lovens - Annick Nozati - Fred Van Hove – Résumé Of A Century (Fou, 2024) (Recorded 1999)

"Venturing into a record or a performance by Daunik Lazro is not an innocuous experience. You have to fully commit for the duration of the session. It can be intimidating, because you’re sure to tread unto unheard territory. Abandon all cues upon entering. In the end it is all about communion, between the players, and with the audience," so writes David Cristol in his intro to his aforementioned interview with Lazro. These words linger as I try to penetrate the layers of Resume of A Century, another archival recording from Lazro's archives. It is a tough one. The quartet is Lazro on alto and baritone saxes, Paul Lovens on drums and percussion (including saw), Fred Van Hove on piano and accordion and vocalist Annick Nozati. For me, Nozati's intense vocalizations are tough, even as a seasoned listener of experimental music. From the start, the operatic, dramatic and unbelievable dynamic Nozati is an integral piece of the music. Lazro too. He matches the vocals with his own squelching baritone sax as Lovens and Van Hove create a harmonic and percussive structure for the unsettling tones.

 

Stuart Broomer, in his liner notes to the record, provides a perfect encapsulation of the recording when we writes: "What doe the wildly divergent voices of Van Hove, Lovens, Nozati and Lazro have in common? Here, perhaps, everything, for they have constructed a work that poses both and ideal of incongruity and a consistent art that ranges freely, and usually simultaneously between refinement and brutality, elegance and torture, pure song an unadulterated, impassioned screaming." In only the first third of the half-hour long first track, "Facing the Facts," all of these descriptors have been dynamically expressed.

 

While recorded at the very end of the last century, the album feels like a wholly appropriate soundtrack to the current decade. Listen if you dare, and I do dare you.

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Daunik Lazro - Recent Releases Old and New (1/3)

A little while ago, Free Jazz Blog contributor David Cristol interviewed French saxophonist Daunik Lazro (here)- shedding a bit of light on a seminal figure in the development of French free improvisation. Over the past few years, Lazro has been actively filling in the gaps of his already impressive discography with archival recordings on mainly (but not limited to) Fou Records. Over the next several days Stuart Broomer, Paul Acquaro and Stef Gijssels will explore many of these recordings.

By Stuart Broomer

Annick Nozati, Daunik Lazro - Sept Fables Sur L'Invisible (Mazeto Square, 2024) (Recorded 1994)

This duet was recorded at the 11^th edition of Festival Musique Action in May 1994. Nozati is credited with voice and texts, Lazro with alto and baritone saxophones. It is work of the rarest quality, testament of empathy, dreamscape, collaboration of great technical resource. Novati, among the most expressive of improvising vocalists, can also be among the most restrained, reducing her sound to the purest expression, whether executing wide intervals or tracing the subtlest gradations of pitch. These spontaneous songs often stretch tones beyond anything recognizable as verbal. Voice and saxophone proceed with an intimate entwining of lines. The two first tracks are the longest, each developed brilliantly. With “A’loré” we are immediately immersed in an unknown world, Nozati’s voice is a somber, slightly gravelly, invocation, Lazro’s alto possesses a lightness approaching the timbre of a flute; eventually Nozati’s voice will grow in intensity, but an intensity that is tightly controlled, while Lazro’s sound becomes wholly saxophone, sweetly abrasive, subtly multiphonic, fluttering from register to register, the whole a triumph of emotional depth. “Alterné”, the following track, continues the profundity in very different ways, beginning with a solo baritone saxophone that Nozati eventually joins in a duo of breathtaking exactitude of pitch, the two “voices” mirroring and complementing one another. Those qualities are developed throughout. 

Daunik Lazro/ Carlos Alves "Zingaro"/ Joëlle Léandre/ Paul Lovens - Madly You (Fou, 2024) (Recorded 2001)

Madly You, initially released on Potlatch in 2002, was recorded at the Banlieues Bleues Festival in 2001 and places Lazro squarely and fittingly in a quartet of master improvisers and contemporaries – bassist (and vocalist) Joëlle Léandre, violinist Carlos “Zingaro”, drummerPaul Lovens – all marked by an ability, and willingness, to find a unique collective vision, exercising rare, collective genius. Within the first minute of the opening “Madly You”, the four have begun to construct an original space in an interweave of bowed string harmonics from Léandre and “Zingaro”, distinguishable primarily by register and resonance, a duet that continues for an extended period with Lovens’ tidily minimalist, Asiatic abstraction and punctuation of taut drum and shimmering metal, eventually leading to a triumphal veil too translucent to be called a drum solo. Lazro’s entry on baritone straddles a large mammal’s eerie pain and a bank of oscillators, soon calling up a sympathetic whistling of arco strings. Everything is in flux, including the baritone’s high-speed flight in barely accented lines, then the shifting dialogue is sustained without longueurs to slightly over forty minutes, including whispering baritone saxophone (remarkably, Lazaro can play violently and dizzyingly quietly), pizzicato bass, violin and drums, the whole sometimes devoted to a collective skittering in which delineations of identity are under scrutiny. There’s also a march. The following “Lyou Mad”, at about half the length, sustains the quality, with Lazro’s baritone foregrounded and Léandre and “Zingaro” creating squall as well as chamber textures. 

Sophie Agnel/ “Kristoff K. Roll”/ Daunik Lazro - Quartet un peu Tendre (Fou Records, 2024) (Recorded 2020/21) 

Collective genius is invariably social. Here that dimension is insistent.

Quartet un peu tendre (the title is ironic) matches Lazro’s baritone with Sophie Agnel’s piano and the electronic devices of “Kristoff K. Roll”, the duo

Of J-Kristoff Camps and Carole Rieussec. There are two extended pieces: “au départ c’est une photo” (“At the Beginning It's a Photo”) and “l’hiver sera chaud” (“winter will be warm), 31 and 41 minutes respectively. It’s collective improvisation, but the collection of sound sources employed by the Kristoff K. Roll duo take it to other dimensions, from found sound and musique concrète, extended sound samples of a speech, a pitch-distorted children’s choir and various synthesized elements. The cumulative effect may some feel opposite to the intense “live” improvisation of Sept Fables or Madly You. That immediate sense of place and time is here displaced by a compound experience, the instrumental resources of Lazro and Agnel drawn into a kind of compound nowhere, a theatre without walls in which the lost, found and immediate mingle together, elsewhere and nowhere with now, then and maybe in a compound experience of never and somewhere.

There’s a beautiful moment of temporality, almost a lullaby amidst “au départ c’est…” (that time frame might be ironic, the warm winter, too) in which Lazro plays the sweetest of reveries accompanied by only Agnel’s lightly articulated, damped intervals. When other elements enter, quiet and abstracted, they do not disrupt the effect but nonetheless strangely compound the time, eventually situating the duo in a kind of unidentifiable field, industrial, intimate, unknowable.

“L’hiver sera chaud” will take this even further, beginning with an animated crowd scene that includes both a central orator and shouting children, suggesting a post-colonial third world –a documentary that partners with the passionate or profoundly considered improvisations to create a compound time of inter-related realities and responsibilities. Dogmatic? Hardly. Subtleties abound: a piano plays in a dry acoustic; simultaneous random percussion is alive with resonant overtones. Lazar’s baritone wanders through an industrial forcefield and a windfarm. I want my best of ’24 lists back for revision. This “tender quartet”, this multiverse of living tissue, insists. 

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Angharad Davies & Burkhard Beins -- Meshes of the Evening (Ni-Vu-Ni- Connu, 2025)

By Stuart Broomer

Since the release of Eight Duos, another LP of Beins’ duets has appeared, Meshes of the Evening with violinist Angharad Davies, recorded a year earlier at Ausland Berlin. The quality of concentrated attention and empathy is at the highest level throughout the two side-long duets, each a kind of mini-suite in which there are brief pauses between improvised movements” of varying length.

Side One, “Meshes 1”, proceeds as a kind of suite, with a shared attentiveness so profound that they might have had a conductor. The opening passage, some 4 ½ minutes, emphasizes high-pitched metallic tones, scraped, struck metal percussion and sustained upper-register violin pitches. The second passage emphasizes an assortment of mostly lower-pitched percussion that has something of the quality of a construction site, no jest or slight intended, just an on-going awareness that, if the right distance and perspective are applied, construction sites might yield sonic masterpieces, though very rarely this good. The third episode is marked by very high, whistling harmonics that involve both musicians (the listener’s temptation to ascribe much of it to the violin is corrected when the violin enters with a lower register melodic figure as the whistle continues).

Meshes 2 presents another episodic sequence, rich in unpredictability. Within its opening moments, Beins’ percussion gives the impression of a person drumming inside a large metal drum (the industrial kind), the sound muffled and set against the subtly inflected, repeated single tone of the violin. There are moments here when Davies might suggest a saw, Beins too, but an electric one, and there are times when, again, the constructivism seems literal, when the sounds of the duo seem like they might be literally building something, not an ethereal work of free improvisation but something as concrete as a wooden structure, say a cabin or a shed, art achieving the focused attention of unattended, practical activity (which, in a significant sense, it is). There are beautiful sequences here in which Davies sounds like she is wandering through a village under construction, yet one in which every cabin and garage is sentient, every hammer and wrench is sentient, inviting, supporting, engaging the wanderer. By the conclusion, the two musicians barely exist as independent entities, each part an immediate complement to the other, to the degree that effect and cause are simultaneous.

The two sides of the disc achieve a kind of ideal, a music that is both fully conscious of its parameters, peregrinations and potentialities and yet also suggests the possibilities of chance, an intense creativity that is somehow so casually practiced that listeners might feel themselves contributing something of its strange beauty, its complex and allusive organization, its genius that presents itself as common occurrence. An extraordinary recording.

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Burkhard Beins - Eight Duos (Ni-Vu-Ni-Connu, 2024)

By Stuart Broomer

This three-LP set is a dive into a substantial body of work – 1 hour, 57 minutes and 29 seconds – drawn from performances at Morphine Raum in Berlin in March and April 2023. Each of the eight duos is represented by a single track, ranging in length from 7:59 to 21:08. It might also be a dive into semantics, and how one might describe what Austrian percussionist and composer Burkhard Beins does. Yes, he’s a percussionist and, more so, an improviser, for here he ranges far afield, playing strings and electronics. If one were to suggest a similarly engaged musician, Eddie Prévost or the late Sven-Åke Johansson would immediately come to mind, and surely there might be more precise terms for what they do. A percussionist hits things and an improviser does things spontaneously as circumstances invite, suggest or require.

To distinguish, I prefer to think of Beins, Prévost and Johansson as materialists and relationists, artists working in the sonic qualities of material and relationships among sounds, both the ones they choose to make and those of others with whom they work. Perhaps an element of the metaphysical is also present, the interactive transformations of materiality and mind.

Beins has been in the vanguard of European improvised music since the mid-nineties when he joined the pioneering new music ensemble Polwechsel, a group that has now been integrating methodologies of composition and improvisation for over thirty years. In that time Beins has also collaborated with numerous other significant improvisers, including Johansson, Lotte Anker, John Butcher, Keith Rowe and Splitter Orchester.

Eight Duos is drawn from a series of performances in which Beins performed sets with two different musicians. Four of the duos will each fill a side of an LP, four others will split two sides.

That fascination with particular sounds and their interactions defines Beins’ approach here: for each of the duos he chose to play a different instrument or instruments or a selection of instruments from his drum kit, extending his usual range to include electric bass and a host of electronics, while his shifting partners engage a broad range of sound sources, from minimal to very dense. At times a radical minimalism arises; at other times the selection of instruments will be sufficiently mysterious to take on elements of musique concrète. For the concluding Transmission , Marta Zapparoli brings antennae, receivers and tape machines with Beins employing analog synthesizers, walkie talkies and samples, the two creating a robot universe of sound.

On a brief note on the Bandcamp page, Beins explains, “On a conceptual level, the idea was that I would play with different instruments or with a different set-up each time in order to present the breadth of my current work.” The broad range of that work is also apparent in the highly distinct collaborators with whom he works here.

The first collaboration, Expansion (19’55”), is an exercise in a radical minimalism, with Andrea Neumann employing the inside of a piano and a mixing board, Beins restricting himself to an amplified cymbal and a bass drum. It’s a work of subtle minimalism, many of the sounds are not immediately attributable, whether scraped or struck metal, wood or even the shell of a drum; at the same time, the variety and breadth of sounds can suggest a group much larger than a duo. Complex, rhythmic phrases emerge, literally linear, but distributed between the instruments’ remixed sounds, rendering the acoustic, electronic and altered materials at times indistinguishable. A continuous melody emerges, sounding like it might be coming from a power tool. The work – sometimes stark, sometimes dense – possesses a durable mystery, arising between the amplified and the acoustic, the scraped, the tuned and the broad, ambiguous vocabularies of action.

The two shorter pieces of LP 1, side B, are studies in contrast, featuring the most radically reduced instrumentation and the most dense of the acoustic performances. Extraction (7'53”) has Michael Renkel credited with playing strings and percussion, Beins percussion and strings. Renkel’s strings consist of a zither and a string stretched across cardboard, Beins is apparently playing an acoustic guitar and other percussion instruments.

It's engaging continuous music with a delicate dissonance that reflects a long-standing collaboration. In 2020 Renkel and Beins released a 19-minute digital album entitled Delay 1989, recorded 31 years before, each playing numerous instruments.

Excursion, with Quentin Tolimieri playing grand piano and Beins engaging his drum kit, is at the opposite end of the sound spectrum, substantial instruments played with significant force. Tolimieri is an insistently rhythmic pianist, beginning with rapid runs and driven clusters and chords, moving increasingly to repeated and forceful iterations of single chords, combining with Beins’ fluid drumming across his kit and cymbals in a powerful statement that approaches factory-strength free jazz.

LP2, Side A is similarly subdivided. Unleash has Andrea Ermke on mini discs and samples with Beins on analog synthesizers and samples. Shifting, continuous, liquid sounds predominate, suggesting an improvisatory art that is literally environmental (traffic flowing over a bridge perhaps). Here there are prominent bird sounds as well, further drawing one into this elemental world of mini-discs and samples, a natural world formed, however, entirely in its relationships to technology. A door shuts… then a silence… then the piece resumes: bells, struck metal percussion, rustling paper, air, muffled conversation…

Unfold returns to the world of the grand piano and drum kit with pianist Anaïs Tuerlinckx joining Beins in yet another dimension, echoing isolated tones from prepared piano and scratched strings returning us to another zone of the ambiguated world initially introduced with Expansion and Andrea Neumann, though here there’s the suggestion of glass chimes along with the whistling highs from rubbed and plucked upper-register strings, matched as well with muted roars and uncertain grinds.

Unlock, LP2, Side B, initiating a series of three extended works, presents a duet with trumpeter Axel Dörner in which Beins plays snare drums and objects. It may be the most intense experience of music as interiority here. If the trumpet has a mythological lineage back to the walls of Jericho, Dörner’s approach is the antithesis of that tradition, focussed instead on the instrument’s secret voices, at times here suggesting tiny birds, recently hatched and discreetly testing their untried voices. Beins restricts himself to snare drum and objects, often exploring light rustles, as if the snare is merely being switched on and off. Sometimes there are lower-pitched grinding noises, any attribution here unsure. Sometimes it feels like the sounds of packing up, so quietly executed it might be impossible. When the piece ends, one is willing to keep listening. Trumpet? Snare drum? It feels like air and feathers.

The two side-length works that occupy the third LP find Beins leaving his percussion instruments behind. Transformation, with Tony Elieh, has both musicians playing electric basses and electronics, generating feedback and exploring string techniques that complement and expand the subtle explorations of the bass guitars’ continuing walls of droning feedback with whistling harmonics and burbling rhythmic patterns. There’s a sustained passage in which bright, bell-like highs and shifting pitches float over a continuous rhythmic pattern from one of the electric basses, further illumined by bright high-frequencies, only to conclude with low-pitched interference patterns and bass strings that can suggest the echoing hollow of a tabla drum amid droning electronics and querulous rising and falling pitch bends, until concluding on an ambiguous sound and a continuous rhythmic pattern.

The final Transmission is a wholly electronic, layered collage with Marta Zapparoli using antennas, receivers and tape machines, and Beins employing analog synthesizers, walkie talkies and samples. Each sound source seems fundamentally complex – echo, the hiss of static, the semi-lost sound seeping through interference, a factory enjoying itself on its own time, blurring voices of the human intruders until it suggests the voices of distant generals muffled into the meaningless, suggesting invitation into the work’s own dreams, its feedback modulations hinting at travel into deep space, a world of echoes, percussion evident as isolated crackle. It’s the sound of an alternate experience, the acoustic world disappearing into the alien beauty of technology’s sonic detritus.

Start anywhere, with any track. The music will transcend the inevitable linearity of its presentation. Can two people make that much music out of so little? Can two people make and manage that sheer quantity of sound. The works await.

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Toma Gouband/ Stéphane Thidet / Roman Bestion / Christophe Havard / Matt Wright /Juan Parra - Un Peu Plus Loin (Astropi, 2020/24)

Mysteries of Materiality and Transformation

By Stuart Broomer

I know of no musician who more strongly invokes the given material world – “nature” -- than the percussionist Toma Gouband and have appreciated his work since Courant des Vents (“Wind Current”) his first solo recording (released on psi in 2012 and reissued in April 2025 on Bandcamp. In a sense, he might be considered the master drummer of the natural world, sometimes using a horizontal bass drum as a resonator for lithophones (that is, rocks used as percussion instruments), sometimes striking stones together, or, alternatively, playing a conventional drum kit with tree branches (that begin with their leaves intact) as sticks. Watching Gouband play a solo in the latter manner on the stage of the Gulbenkian Foundation’s outdoor amphitheatre with Evan Parker and Matt Wright’s Trance Maps at the 2023 edition of Jazz em Agosto, surrounded by trees and coloured lights, the leaves and twigs disintegrating into their own ascendant, multi-colored dust clouds, was among the most profound visual representations of music that I have ever witnessed.

As with Courant des Vents, Un Peu Plus Loin is a re-issue, first issued on CD in 2020, it coincided with the height of the Covid-19 outbreak and shutdown and received little attention. It was issued on Bandcamp in December 2024. The mystery of the natural world is at the root of Un Peu Plus Loin (“A Little Further”), which began as the middle segment of a three-part installation, Desert, by conceptual artist/sculptor Stéphane Thidet, set in the ancient Cistertian Maubuisson Abbey, founded in 1236 by Blanche of Castile, at thetime Queen of France. “The segment invokes the mysterious moving rocks of “Racetrack Playa, a dried-up lake in California’s Death Valley. While the stones move (perhaps the result of the slow processes of freezing and thawing), leaving tracks (an image recreated in the rocks and trails in clay of Thidet’s sculpture), they have never been seen to move.”

After the performance, struck by the experience and the Abbey’s special resonance, Gouband writes “I returned alone to improvise in the suspended and mysterious presence of the rocks and their traces. Eleven minutes were extracted and then sent to four inventive electroacoustic musicians, each of whom created a variation from this base. What emerges is an intimate connection with the spirit of the work, an interstellar conversation, a setting in motion.” (The preceding two paragraphs contain material translated and/or paraphrased from Gouband’s notes on the Bandcamp page). The resultant pieces are named by fragments of that phrase Un Peu Plus Loin .

Un is Gouband’s original 11-minute improvisation. Its combination of spaces and echoes and brief rolls and elisions around a drum surface and metal percussion create an extraordinary atmosphere in keeping with the underlying phenomenon being represented here—that is the rolling rocks. As it develops that sense of rolling spheres, like ball bearings on the head of a drum, the work becomes increasing mobile, increasingly evocative. If there are drum solos like this inspired by mysterious spheres, then rolling rocks become a privileged phenomenon, never to be observed, yet known, occurring in an interval of human absence. It is a percussion improvisation of unimaginable subtlety, a percussion solo of the imagination, a kind of natural phenomenon in which an artist approaches a profound mystery.

Gouband’s solo is then followed by four electronic compositions exploring the materials of “Un”, each is transformative, a dream of a reverie, a reverie on a dream.

In “Peu’ by Roman Bestion, Gouband’s rolls are apt to move backwards, Reversed sounds grow in volume, metallic percussion multipies, somehow the desert grows aqueous, the burbling of scuba tanks grows louder, appear amid whispers of electronics and is then sustained, a bass underlay. An organ emerges, a deep bass drum, all the live sounds of Gouband’s kit embrace their phantom others.

In Plus, by Christophe Havard, drum strokes will retreat into the distance. The environment seems more electronic, also more distant, with imitations of glitches, skips and sudden interpolations of unaltered sounds. Extended tones suggest winds, ultimately the sound of subterranean echo chambers (reminiscent of the sounds of John Butcher’s tour of abandoned Scottish architecture ( Resonant Spaces [Confront 17]); the strangely gothic organ solo constructed under complex drumming, suggest the rolling stones occupy an epic, underground cavern/cathedral, sometimes growing louder among the stones’ special resonance…then drifting away, the stones growing quieter as if they are moving out of the frame of our hearing…

In Loin by Matthew Wright, there is further submersion, the echoing stones a background to sounds foregrounded yet ironically muffled, gradually expanded to feedback trilling, an increasingly complex chart of artificial distances and multiple competing clicks and whispers, with Hammond organ dribbles against elastic and metallic percussion instruments. All the sounds are shifting then: sudden upward glissandi, patchwork scratches and rubbery stretches.

The concluding piece, Juan Parra’s Desert, is the longest of these works (11:57) and the most strongly connected to the sounds of the original. At the beginning, preserved drum strokes background metallic scraping, some sounds echoing acoustically with the same degree of resonance as Gouband’s own, but here there are other sounds as well as those tangible forms of the original. It is as if a lost explorer has found a dusty sea and a soggy desert, all materiality open to sudden and substantial self-opposition, the wind growing stronger, the drone interchangeable, the metal strokes of the originating drums turned into a sustained unearthly force. The subterranean winds that move the stones, the undercurrents of earthly tides and tilts, are as subtle and forceful as a poet’s unsought dreams.

Perhaps there is another magnetism lost and found in the moving stones, here recovered in Gouband’s instruments, those materials lost and found in nature herein heard initially acoustically, are then reformed and reborn in the imaginative applications of technology. Embracing, expanding, extrapolating on a mystery, bridging spirit and materiality, this recording feels like what more music should be doing. 

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The Free Saxophone and the Hated Music: Die Like a Dog, Live with God, etc.

Paul Flaherty - A Willing Passenger (Relative Pitch, 2025)

By Stuart Broomer

I first listened to A Willing Passenger on Bandcamp and thought it was great. When I got the CD, I realized I was missing an important component. There’s a liner note with a background narrative by Flaherty, describing an incident with a group of construction workers in the 1980s when he regularly played solo saxophone on the street. It’s a strong, if not essential, complement to the recording, as well as the source of both the CD title and the individual track titles. I don’t wish to burden Paul Flaherty’s music with the special burden of the post-Ayler saxophone’s history, perhaps even theology, but I think it’s strong enough to carry it.

One of Flaherty’s most powerful statements -- both musical and titular – is a duet recording from 2000 with drummer Chris Corsano. It’s essential music, in a couple of ways, but its title is essential too: it’s called The Hated Music. It’s out-of-print in all its forms but Bandcamp, but its ideal form is the two-LP reissue on Byron Coley’s Feeding Tube label with extraordinary cover art by Gary Panter and a certain physical mass that the music seems to demand. There’s something both brave and determined about that title, pre-emptive acknowledgement of some element of a music’s reception, free music’s edgy and complex legacy.

It’s a music sometimes tracked by madness, so out of courtesy to the masks and mouthpieces of many, I won’t go so far as to name names, but I’ll make one careful distinction that shouldn’t be ignored. Consider the late Peter Brötzmann, one of Albert Ayler’s first and greatest disciples, who dedicated to Ayler both a recording and a band named Die Like a Dog , a vision of life cruel enough to suggest even a canine shelter gassing or a KKKanine lynching. There’s a crucial difference between the sounds of Ayler and Brötzmann, even given the relative harshness of some of Ayler’s earlier recordings. It long ago occurred to me that Brötzmann’s music sounds like Albert Ayler without transcendence, without God. I know it’s a theological reading, but it’s rooted in timbre, the way Ayler, live or on any decent recording, had a sound that’s full of light, that light a matter of singing high frequencies breaking through and hovering over a sound that could suggest gauze or grit. If Ayler could, at his most enlightened, suggest angels’ wings in an updraft, Brotzmann, with high overtones barely evident in his sound, might supply a hydraulic drill attacking concrete.

Paul Flaherty’s music is deeply rooted in the work of Albert Ayler -- vocalic, impassioned, explosive -- which can be a blessing or a curse. Any close listener of free music will know, or perhaps at least suspect, that it regularly inspires both the greatest and worst of music from profoundly spiritual and existential orations to the most clownishly vacuous exuberance one will ever hear. The style’s explosive core can mask distinctions only so long before the poles of the practitioners get sorted out. It’s a music I’ve been around in various forms for 60 years. Along with Coltrane and Sanders [together] and Albert Ayler, I even managed to hear Charles Gayle in 1966, long before he became memorable. I have heard prophets and poseurs. In case I’m somehow mistaken, I make a practice of never writing about those I consider the latter, unless circumstances make it unavoidable and then its brief, suspecting that the low level of rewards in the field make them at least sincere poseurs.

Flaherty’s opening “Do You Know” defines the recording’s level of intensity. It’s a dirge, beginning in funereal melody, but one that will stretch to the tenor saxophone’s expressive limits – high-pitched squeals to overblown fundamentals in the lowest register that then become multiphonic blasts that cover multiple registers at once, then phrases that range suddenly from contorted to lyrical to circulating lines that stretch amongst all of those boundaries – avatars of music’s ultimate range.

“Would you like to take a ride?” is superbly lyrical alto saxophone, every technique subservient to expression, like Flaherty’s ability to mutate tone from note to note, bending from interjective squawk to sudden illumination in long recirculating lines embodying an essential lyricism.

“Oblivious to Surroundings”, taken on tenor, initially suggests a refraction of something Coltrane may have played but soon proceeds with a distinctive Flaherty mode, a pattern in which a lyrical phrase is then remodelled, clean pitches turned to ambiguity and multiphonics, smooth tone turned to abrasive wail. In the case the exploratory passages become tremendously intense, suspended

The title track is another fine alto performance, the identification based as much on register as tone, for Flaherty has the same breadth of sound on alto that he possesses on tenor, following the same imagination. The work again follows that rapid route from the lyrical to the expressionistic ultimately compressing them into single phrases – moving from torture to sweetness and vice versa.

“Small Lonely Looking Cloud”, on alto and just three minutes long, has an extended melodic exposition that suggests the uninterrupted transfer of image from a vision in nature to a single expository line with expanding sympathy and resonance, recalling certain shakuhachi recordings.

“Almost Finished”, is a powerful envoi on tenor, as expressive as one might be, and a reminder that in this particular field, the intensity of conviction, the depth of expression, is form itself.

A Willing Passenger is, clearly, often harsh, but it’s always vital. Much of it, most of it, has its own intense lyricism. Its greatest strength may be its immediate emotional intensity which in Flaherty’s mind, hands and breath becomes form. Even when there is a sense of developed melody (and virtually everything here is melody), it’s the keening emotional input and a corresponding attention to nuance that defines the shape of individual notes and short phrases. It is as human a document, with as substantial an emotional punch as a recording by Son House, (say “John the Revelator”) or Blind Willie Johnson (maybe, “God Moves on the Water”).

There’s a fine on-line interview with Flaherty where he talks, among many other things, about playing with massed frogs and a train. It’s a great introduction: https://15questions.net/interview/paul-flaherty-about-improvisation/page-1/

There’s also a fine account by Nick Metzger on Free Jazz Blog of Flaherty’s previous Relative Pitch solo release, Focused & Bewildered, from 2019. 

 

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The Word Itself Interrogated: Two duos

By Stuart Broomer

If free improvisers are the bravest of musicians, then free improvising vocalists may be the bravest of all, confronting both the blank slate and the audience without the comforting intercession of a musical instrument. Most of the best will have some special background or capacity. Sainkho Namchylak has centuries of Tuvan throat-singing/shamanic mysticism in her background. Lauren Neuton, who literally wrote the book on the subject (VOCAL Adventures: Free Improvisation in Sound, Space, Spirit and Song, Wolke Verlag, 2022), has an astonishing range of cross-cultural techniques including opera, jazz and everything else. There are musicians as well who are significant vocalisers and self accompanists, like Joëlle Léandre whose voice often joins her bass in profoundly resonant (vocal/cultural) chant that seems to stretch across the Mediterranean from the Iberian peninsula to the Middle East; the drummer Sunny Murray’s rising and falling hum-wail-moan is a background voice on several great records, his own and others; Milford Graves was a master of chant.

John Russell/ Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg - before the wedding (Empty Birdcage Records, 2025) 

Phil Minton & Ståle Liavik Solberg - TRUE (Nice Things Records, 2025) 

These two recordings, in a rare moment of special affinity, appeared within a couple of weeks of each other. Each duet matches a vocalist with a single partner; each presents a single piece from a live performance in which a senior member of the British free improvising community works with a continental confrere. More than that, though, is that each duo wills a crossing of boundaries, testing the notions of speech, language, utterance and the human animal’s potential for transcendence. Each simultaneously presses the culture of free improvisation toward spell, shamanism and vaudeville. In either performance, genius is never far away, nor is the spectre of Ducks Daffy and Donald.

before the wedding (released on guitarist Daniel Thompson’s remarkable Empty Birdcage label) is initially a reminder of how much we lost when we lost John Russell (another is Thompson’s acoustic solo reflection, entitled John, a digital release recorded on the day of Russell’s passing). Russell was a great duet partner (including, coincidentally, a long-running duo with Ståle Liavik Solberg), among his many gifts, and on before the wedding his chorded passages and subtlest rises and falls in dynamics are never far from the voice of the Belgian Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg, a commentator on improvised music of genuine insight as well as a vocalist of special gifts. I wish I had the vocabulary to describe all the things that Van Schouwburg can do with voice from the commonplace whisper to fricative and fortis (a commentator with a richer background in linguistics/phonetics would be better equipped to describe this work).

In a single 26-minute piece recorded on April12, 2018 at Klub Gromka, Ljubljana, Slovenia, parodic opera and grande dame/ grand guignol voices arise. Van Schouwburg and Russell are ideal complements throughout this 26-minute duet. There’s a certain focussed intensity in Russell’s playing, a determination that always expands Van Schouwburg’s mutations and divagations, already rich in meaning and drama, even when dancing with the comic. Transformed cartoon voices that arise here are drawn to something larger, both through their own dynamics and through Russell’s abstract, yet warm, mediations. Sometimes a cartoon-like impression will move toward articulate speech, only to wander backward into voluntary squall and willful chaos. The true complexity of this work gradually asserts itself: it is a guitarist and vocalist, yes, but it is also work moving freely – sometimes at warp speed -- among genres, all comedy, all music, all seriousness… but also no genre at all, some avatar of reality, no mediation between conception and voice. Van Schouwburg is expressing something as close to the vocal range of the human condition that might arise in art, rapid fluctuations from ghostly trill to Warner Bros. cartoons and horror, even nasal snorts, reminiscent of Animal Farm, not entirely neglected.

TRUE, recorded live at Blow Out, Kafe Hærverk in Oslo on November 21st, 2023,begins in the thin, high-pitched rattles of Ståle Liavik Solberg’s minimalist drum kit, followed almost immediately by Phil Minton’s intense and utterly far-fetched song – part senescent ramble, part protest and vision, part rapid-fire triple-talk in an unknown tongue. When Minton breaks briefly, he comes back strangling, combining high-pitched yodelling cries and gagging inhalations, all shadowed by the prospect of language. Solberg’s sounds reduce to the whistle of a light resonant scrape on the surface of something material, gradually expanding to his compounding, shifting tapping, while Minton drives further into an unknown world of whispers and muted cries and sudden bird whistles (eliciting a cymbal tap), word-gagged, shattered, choked, called out in some imaginary station to some unimaginable passengers (us, I assume, by proxy). There’s a gesture toward some gong-like device, then a thin (human) whistle, then more of the gong’s light resonance, a snare-like rattle, a choked chant (added to but not quite interrupted by cough and whistle).

Later there be loud and forceful utterances voiced as if part of a serial opera, and so it goes, every manner of human utterance explored, even a moment that sounds like Minton is channeling two choked voices at once, all subtly underpinned by near-invisible drumming. It’s like a radical, freely improvised oratorio (staged in this rendition by a listener’s imagination). A drum solo will appear, created with a minimal kit that seems to include wood block and cymbals. It’s all technically amazing, but that relatively minor feature is overshadowed by the exploration of life’s vocal extremes of madness, a madhouse production of Lear or Godot (It’s a mere 38 minutes, but it is so compressed that it’s effect is comparable) occasionally joined by Daffy Duck, sometimes searching an imaginary globe for absurd and unknown accents for spotlit shrieks, all accompanied and accented by a Tin Drum drummer who finds some especially sentient metal resonance to accompany a thinly whistled reflection.

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Jeff Parker ETA IVtet - The Way Out of Easy (International Anthem, 2024)

By Stuart Broomer

The Way Out of Easyis the second two-LP set to appear by Jeff Parker’s ETA quartet, and like its predecessor, Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy (Eremite, 2022), it consists of live recordings from the quartet of

Parker on guitars, electronics and sampler, Josh Johnson on alto saxophone and electronics, Anna Butterss on bass and Jay Bellerose on drums. The band maintained that Monday night spot from 2016 until 2023, when the club closed

There are immediate similarities. Each is a two-LP set. While the 2022 Eremite release consisted of substantial chunks from different performances recorded between 2019 and 2021, The Way Out of Easy represents four shaped pieces from a single night, January 2, 2023. The band was still named for the club it played in and recorded, the name of a principal setting in David Foster Wallace’s vast novel Infinite Jest.

As Eremite producer Michael Ehlers pointed out in a press sheet for the first release, it is “largely a free improv group —just not in the genre meaning of the term.” As with the earlier set, the band here largely improvises freely, so freely that the works here will include much that free improvisation leaves out: modes, melodies, key centres and regular (though often multiple) rhythms; in effect, the musicians are free to include the conventionally excluded.

In that spirit, The Way Out of Easy’s first side is devoted to an extended treatment of Parker’s 2013 composition “Freakdelic”, the sole composed element on the band’s two releases. The loose spirit of it already demonstrates the band’s special ease, its essentially conversational spirit, the loose way that Butterss and Bellerose maintain structures and the way the 23-minute jam gently wanders into strangely burbling, electronic territory in Parker and Johnson’s extended improvisations.

There’s some contrast between The Way Out of Easy and the earlier set, if only in the fact that these are complete performances rather than excerpts, but the band’s calm liberation is such that It isn’t a major shift. If The Way Out of Easy seems more refined, more assured, more interactive, those are all the things that arise and expand among convivial musicians who are collectively free to interact musically on a regular basis for years, who also choose to create elemental structures and patterns, sometimes retaining them, at other times gently abandoning them. The group is free to compound polyrhythms and include the repeating, unaccompanied, diatonic melody played by Josh Johnson at the outset of the closing “Chrome Dome”, gradually joined by Parker with a recurring tonal center before Butterss and Bellerose join in. Eventually Parker will assume responsibility for a slightly different melody and Johnson will improvise a counter melody. It’s the kind of thing that comes inevitably from a long-shared musical association, often creating a dream-like ambience suspended between an elemental tunefulness and gentle abstraction.

As with the earlier Eremite release, this record triggers a collection of positive associations. There’s something about the music’s distinctive playfulness, a slightly off-kilter, weird conviviality that might suggest The Scope, the electronic music bar in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 , as well as Wallace’s ETA.

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Onilu (Joe Chambers, Kevin Diehl, Chad Taylor) – Onilu (Eremite Records, 2025)

By Stuart Broomer

I first listened to Onilu on Blue Monday, January 20^th, 2025, the most depressing day of the year, at least according to a notion invented by a British travel company a few years ago. In Toronto, the high temperature for the day was -6° Celsius, the low -11°. There was some snow and an Arctic chill coming from the North. There was a different chill coming across Lake Ontario from the South. Fortunately, Canada had just ended a mail strike, so there was new music in the house: Onilu immediately warmed things up.

“Onilu” is a Yoruba word for drummers and the band consists of three percussionists from three generations: Joe Chambers, Chad Taylor and Kevin Diehl. They’re best known as drummers, but percussion here extends to keyboards as well – pianos, vibraphones and marimbas, crucial melodic components in this invocation of African music. There are also “ideophones” (“an instrument the whole of which vibrates to produce a sound when struck, shaken, or scraped, such as a bell, gong, or rattle,” OED).

The credits are expansive: Joe Chambers plays conga, drum kit, idiophones, marimba, shakere and vibraphone; Kevin Diehl, batá drums, cajóns, drum kit, electro-acoustic drum kit , Guagua and shakere; Chad Taylor: alfaia, clave, clay drums, drum kit, mbira, marimba, piano, tongue drum, tympani and vibraphone. Tracking down descriptions of some of those instruments might resemble work, but listening to Onilu is an extraordinary pleasure, a world of resonant instruments that seem to vibrate, shimmer and transmit light, sounds that might suggest a waterfall of fire, something both benign and impossible. Here one feels the materiality of instruments, and the processes of their making, whether from steel, wood, clay or skin.

The eight tracks, ranging from 4’32” to 7’25”, are mostly compositions on traditional patterns by one or two members of the band. The exceptions will immediately suggest the trio’s range. “Nyamaropa”, with mbira (“thumb piano”) played beautifully by Taylor, is an ancient melody that appeared on an extraordinary collection in Nonesuch’s series of field recordings over fifty years ago: The Soul of Mbira: Traditions of the Shona People of Rhodesia by Paul Berliner, most recently available on CD as Zimbabwe: Soul of Mbira. At the opposite pole is Bobby Hutcherson’s “Same Shame”, with Chambers (who played drums on the original 1968 recording) turning to vibraphone, Diehl on drum kit and Taylor on tympani.

The same levels of virtuosity and flexibility manifest themselves in different ways on every track. On the Diehl/Taylor composed “Estuary Stew”, the group stretches instrumentation to have Chambers on ideophones, Diehl on batá drums and electro-acoustic drum kit, and Taylor on marimba, creating a complex mix of acoustic resonances and electronics. Taylor’s “Mainz” (previously recorded in two different versions by Jeff Parker) is particularly tuneful, with Chambers on marimba, Diehl on drum kit and Taylor on piano and drum kit. For sheer rhythmic energy and complexity, there’s “A Meta Onilu”, with everyone playing drum kits, Chambers adding vibraphone and Taylor, mbira.

Onilu is consistently declarative work, emotionally open, sonically generous, three masters of different generations celebrating a shared musical passion.

Onilu is available at https://eremiterecords.bandcamp.com/album/onilu

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The musical adventures of Gonçalo Almeida

 By Stef Gijssels

Every year, Sergio Piccirilli of the Argentinian jazz website "El Intruso" asks 60 jazz critics from around the world to make their lists of top musicians and top albums. We are very privileged to be represented by several of our "Free Jazz Collective" reviewers: Sammy Stein, Paul Acquaro, Eyal Hareuveni, Stuart Broomer and myself. This was the 17th iteration of the international list, and I can agree with many of the final artists reaching the rankings. 

This task of selecting the best of each is of course almost impossible for any reviewer, and I think we all share the sentiment that we cannot do justice to the great musicians and ensembles that do not make the list. The assessment is very subjective of course, possibly influenced too by the mood of the moment. 

In my list, Portuguese double bass player Gonçalo Almeida, is ranked on the first spot as the 'musician of the year'. I will tell you why here. 

I'll start with the music that we already reviewed in the past year. 

First, there is The Attic's latest album "La Grande Crue" (No Business, 2024), with Rodrigo Amado, Onno Govaert and Eve Risser, and with Almeida on bass. The album received excellent reviews and made many end-of-year lists. The album was reviewed by Stuart Broomer and can be found here. 

From my side, I reviewed "Tabula Sonorum Organum - Sub Aere" (Cylinder, 2024), a highly unusual duet between Bart van Dongen on organ, and Gonçalo Almeida on double bass. You can find the review here. 

My favourite album of the year was "States of Restraint" (Clean Feed, 2024), a strange, adventurous, genre-bending and avant-gardish sound exploration with Susana Santos Silva and Gustavo Costa. You can find my review here. 

Almeida is also a member of the Luis Vicente Trio which delivered their excellent sophomore album "Come Down Here" (Clean Feed, 2024). You can find my review here. 

So here are the not yet reviewed albums. 

Gonçalo Almeida & Pierre Bastien - Dialogues and Shadows (Futura Resistenza, 2024)

The album is a co-created soundscape with French sound artist and instrument builder Pierre Bastien, whom we reviewed earlier on this blog, also in collaboration with Almeida. This album is even better than the first one, more mature, less focused on effects and more on the music itself. It's eery and compelling at the same time. Mesmerising and strange. You hear a whole world of sounds with somewhat familiar sonic bites coming from unidentifiable instruments.  Don't miss this one.

Albatre – Bruxas (Shhpuma, 2024)

After six years, we get a new album by the doom jazz trio Albatre, the brainchild of Gonçalo Almeida on bass, keyboards & electronics, Hugo Costa on alto sax, baritone sax & effects, and Philipp Ernsting on drums & electronics. This is not for the faint of heart, yet it is smart and meticulously organised, with frequent rhythm changes, different accents and sonic colouring. The jazz version of death metal (or something to that extent: I get totally lost in all these 'metal' subgenres). This is as violent as other of Almeida's endeavours are gentle. The title "Bruxas" is Portuguese for witches. Don't say I did not warn you ...

Carla Santana, José Lencastre, Maria Do Mar, Gonçalo Almeida - Defiant Illusion (New Wave Of Jazz, 2024)

 

This album is also quite exceptional. We've already mentioned Carla Santana's work on electronics with the "Variable Geometry Orchestra" and the "Isotope Ensemble". Here is a rare album with her as a leader, in the company of José Lencastre on alto and tenor sax, Maria do Mar on violin and Gonçalo Almeida on double bass. This gentle chamber music is surprising and beautiful at the same time. Apart from the rather unique sound of the ensemble, the interaction between the violin and the arco bass are exceptional, with José Lencastre finding the right level to add to it - and even becoming a string instrument almost. Santana's own electronics are never obtrusive yet fully harmonic with the overall sound. Highly recommended. 

Gonçalo Almeida & Rutger Zuydervelt - Eventual (Gusstaff Records 2024)

"Eventual" is the third release by the duo of Almeida on bass and Zuydervelt on electronics. The latter was asked to create the soundtrack for a documentary, and invited Almeida to join. Even if the music was eventually not used, both musicians continued their creative collaboration. This is their first full CD. In start contrast to some of the other albums reviewed here, the sound is quiet, dark, drone-like with the bass exclusively played with a bow. It's a single track, that evolves minimalistically around one tonal center, with minor shifts in timbre and colour. 

Almeida & Jacquemyn - Encounters (FMR, 2024) 

"Encounters" is a double bass duo with Belgian Peter Jacquemyn, who is also a chainsaw sculptor. The music fits in the tradition of Peter Kowald on bass, a direct physical yet intimate dialogue of two musicians who challenge and celebrate each other's playing. Almost the entire album is played arco. 

Dávila, Almeida, Furtado - Illusions and Lamentations (Phonogram Unit, 2024) 

The trio of Pacho Dávila from Colombia on tenor and soprano saxophones, with Portuguese Vasco Furtado on drums and Almeida on bass gives us a pretty straightforward free jazz trio. The quality of the playing is excellent, with constant good quality and all three musicians in great shape. 

 

Bulliphant - Sleep (Off Record, 2024)

Almeida also performs in the Belgian-Dutch quintet Bulliphant. The other musicians are Bart Maris on trumpets, Ruben Verbruggen on saxophones, Thijs Troch on piano & electronics, and Friso van Wijck on percussion & bells. Like its predecessor "Hightailing", the album presents a mix of modern jazz styles, creative and welcoming, but with in my opinion not enough musical coherence. 

Spinifex – Undrilling the Hole (TryTone Records, 2024)

"Spinifex" is Dutch band led by alto saxophonist Tobias Klein, with Bart Maris on trumpet, John Dikeman on tenor, Jasper Stadhouders on guitar, Gonçalo Almeida on bass, and Philipp Moser on drums. This is already their eleventh album together. The music can be categorised as modern creative jazz, with very strong compositions, great unison themes, tight arrangements, steady rhythms and rhythm changes, and great musicianship, also in the improvised solos. Definitely not free jazz, yet great fun to listen to. 

In sum, Gonçalo Almeida is not only an excellent bass player - and we're really not surprised he's so much in demand in various ensembles and styles - he's especially versatile and creative in developing totally different languages of expression. "States of Restraint" has a relatively unique sound, something special and precious, but so does "Sub Aere", with its unusual duet of organ and bass, the mesmerising collaboration with Pierre Bastien, or the chamber jazz with Carla Santana. Each time Almeida is in the (co)-lead in shaping something new, and sometimes with contradictory and opposite approaches. The quiet contemplative sound of "Eventual" is almost the exact opposite of the doom jazz of Albatre. He shows himself to be a creator, an inventive adventurer, presenting us with sounds unheard, with novel approaches and interesting surprises. Many other musicians have been very prolific in 2024, but none with the same reach and innovation as Almeida. He's not only a searcher, but also a finder, not only a researcher but also a discoverer. Hence my choice. 

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Trance Maps large and small, near and far

By Stuart Broomer

Evan Parker and Matt Wright have been working together since 2008. Wright initially contacted Parker to explore his extensive collection of ethnographic field recordings and it eventually evolved into a duo in which Parker improvised on saxophone and Wright improvised with turntables and samples. The two have since added other musicians to the project (their presence signalled by a “+”), resulting in groups from trios to a sextet, occasionally including musicians’ materials that were recorded apart from the core ensemble’s recording.

The process has extended Parker’s long-term exploration of his Electro-Acoustic Ensemble in which acoustic improvising instrumentalists were paired with electronic musicians, further developing the acoustic input. The original sextet paired the Parker - Guy - Lytton trio with three electronic musicians, with Guy’s own doubling with electronic processing paired with Phil Wachsmann’s viola and processing. That ensemble has been active as recently as 2019 ( Warszawa, 2019 [Fondacia Sluchaj]), while it reached its most expansive form in an 18-member version at Lisbon’s Jazz em Agosto in 2010 (an extended reflection is available here).

Transatlantic Trance Map - Marconi’s Drift (False Walls, 2024) ***** 

Transatlantic Trance Map might be the most remarkable performance of improvised music in recent years, if only for the compound “location” of its performance, 13 musicians on opposite sides of the Atlantic. The significance of the work is tremendous, both in its realization and its potential, in a world where travel is increasingly challenged by environmental and disease concerns. The technical distribution here is apparent in an early “draft” of the process. Parker and Wright initially tried a “dry run” in November 2021, with a quintet version still called the Electro-Acoustic Ensemble interacting with the SPIIC ensemble in Hamburg directed by Vlatko Kučan. This is available on YouTube.

On December 17, 2022, Parker, playing soprano saxophone, and Wright (laptop sampling and live processing) gathered a septet at the Hot Tin in Faversham, England with Peter Evans (trumpets), Pat Thomas (live electronics), Hannah Marshall (cello), Robert Jarvis (trombone) and Alex Ward (clarinet, guitar). Meanwhile, a similar sextet of regular Parker collaborators gathered in New York at Roulette: Ned Rothenberg: (reeds, shakuhachi); Sam Pluta: (laptop, live electronics); Craig Taborn (piano, keyboard, live electronics); Ikue Mori (laptop live electronics); Sylvie Courvoisier (piano, keyboard) and Mat Manieri (viola), most of whom had played in the Electro-Acoustic Ensemble or its Septet variation, while between them, the two ensembles reunited the compact supergroup Rocket Science, consisting of Parker, Evans, Pluta and Taborn.

The most remarkable technological feature consists in the brevity of the time gap between the two groups: in his notes Wright mentions the work of the technical directors at Hot Tin and Roulette and that “After a number of tests we were able to work at high resolution, almost treating each location as a separate room within a studio, albeit with the slight, but workable delay of around 65 to 120 milliseconds,” a gap that Wright was later able to reduce further in mixing while creating a stereo spread that integrated the two bands.

The most remarkable feature, however, beyond the technology is the musical achievement. Parker has been expanding both instrumental technique and applied technology since the late-1960s as well as the breadth of his musical associations. While the Atlantic may separate these bands, the connections are dense. One of the features of the extended piece is a pattern of duets and trios sometimes featuring alike instruments that also draw in other members to create larger ensemble improvisations. The depth of musical relationships? Parker and Rothenberg, paired together here, first recorded as a duo in 1997, while others would be playing together for the first time.

Rather than attempting a description of a work this dense and rich, I’ll leave that to individual listeners. This is an amazing achievement, creative music managing the kind of global event usually reserved for pop superstars. Like several recent events of significance in the field, the project acknowledges the assistance of the Robert D. Bielecki Foundation. 

Trance Map - Horizons Held Close (Relative Pitch, 2024) ***** 

What could be more different and yet somehow the same? In the same period as Trance Map’s greatest expansions, Parker and Wright here return to their original duo form, with Parker playing soprano saxophone and Wright simultaneously employing turntables, software, sampling and processing, transforming Parker’s lines and field recordings into an orchestra of the imagination and strongly referencing his own journey to Mongolia in 2009. Just as it’s rooted in Wright’s turntables, it seems to mimic the LP, though available only as download and CD, with the near identical playing times of two pieces: “Ulaanbadrakh” runs 24:16; “Bayankhongor”, 24:10.

Parker’s intense chirping soprano multiphonics are set amidst an ever-shifting, recycling soundscape in which Parker own’s complex parts are multiplied, repeated, transformed, Parker himself interacting with the variations and the insistent and multiple percussion of Wright’s ever transforming synthetic orchestra, a reflection and extension of Parker’s long-expanding universe of mirrored and transforming musical impulses, as much a communal, collectivist, organic meditation as the globalizing social vision of Transatlantic Trance Map. It is at once constant, hypnotic yet ever changing, an ideal that Parker has been pursuing for decades, and perhaps first fully realized in the solo music of Conic Sections, recorded in 1989.

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