Triptych Myth (Aum Fidelity, 2006) ****

In my daily search for music that flies under the radar screen of the more traditional music critics, I can with pleasure recommend Triptych Myth, a trio consisting of Cooper-Moore on piano, Tom Abbs on bass and Chad Taylor on drums, a piano trio such as you've probably rarely heard one. There are some more conventional approaches at first hearing, such as the first track "All Up In It" and the beautiful "Frida K. The Beautiful", but the alienation is just under the surface, really presenting itself in the following pieces. In "Trident" the arco bass leads the piece, with piano and drums giving the rhythmic support, and that is according to me the great strength of this album : the trio is so tight that no single instrument is at the forefront, or rather, all three instruments are in the creative spotlight, giving direction, demanding attention, without the whole becoming a cacophony. The music is familiar yet eerily so, drenched in blues and soul, yet in a refreshing, surprising new way. "Pooch" is in that respect a nice example : the soft melodic line of the piano is heavily counterplayed by the drums, hitting hard and energetic, almost in full conflict, urging for a tempo change, which takes places just to be rehabilitated in the former soft theme. You will hear more candy for the ear at each listen.

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Create (!) - A Prospect Of Freedom (Sounds Are Active, 2006) ****

Before you start reading, please click on this link : Six Dreams Divided.

On this album Create (!) bring non-intrusive, free improvization with a strong melancholic flavor. The band, consisting of Orlando Greenhill (vocals, acoustic bass, percussion); Chris Schlarb, Raymond Raposa (electric guitar, electronics); Lynn Johnston (clarinet, bass clarinet); Kris Tiner (trumpet, flugelhorn); Justice Constantine (drums, percussion), brings a fragile mix of slow tempi and hesitant, tentative instrumentation, which jointly look for musical texture and beauty, yet also for variation in impact and effect. Don't expect any known patterns here, because about everything you hear falls in the category of creativity and inventiveness, they didn't choose their name for nothing, and with success, because the overall sound is more than worth listening to. Emotionally the listener gets torn between tenderness, melancholy, fear, disorientation, tension, and pure aesthetic suprise, and that's the prime purpose of this music, not from the power of the soloing or the creation of a quickly identifiable melody. Common improvization is the key word, with refreshing new angles and rhythms, and new forms of musical expressiveness. Is this jazz? Yes, because it's a typical jazz line-up, yes, because improvization and adventure are at the core of the music, yet on the other hand this music is far removed from the usual jazz structures and melodic or even harmonic approaches. Possible points of comparison are Tortoise, Mazurek, H.I.M. This is modern music, full stop. Brilliant, exclamation mark!

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Mark O'Leary - Two reviews : Awakening & Waiting

Mark O'Leary - Awakening (Leo Records, 2006) ****

Mark O'Leary is an Irish jazz guitar player who has already published quite some albums, yet who is unfortunately too little known, especially Levitation with Tomasz Stanko (trumpet) and Billy Hart (drums) is also worth looking for. But don't look too far, because Leo Records has now issued all its albums, including the whole Braxton catalogue, for download via http://www.lulu.com/, for the democratic price of $ 5.49 per CD. What more do you want? Back to this album, it's a guitar trio, with Steve Swallow on bass and Pierre Favre on percussion. O'Leary's style is great, with a sound which is reminiscent of John Abercrombie on his Homecoming or Getaway albums, with the tone button at the lowest possible level and the reverb high, giving a very soft, warm and spacious atmosphere. Although the music is anchored in bop, with often walking bass and steady rhythm, it is extremely open to new forms, acoustic intermezzi, rock and free jazz influences, yet relatively accessible. "Intimate, or feather-light" may be the best adjectives to describe it, rare qualifiers indeed for a free setting such as this one, but make no mistake, this is adventurous music, full of tension, and in pieces such as "Melting", the atmosphere takes on gloomy and nervous connotations, yet the two qualifiers still apply. O'Leary is a great guitar player, with a very subtle touch, both in the arpeggios as in the fast soloing, yet his major skill is the unity of musical and sound approach he creates. It requires strong musical and compositional skills to keep the attention going for a trio outing, and this band does so extremely well on this album.

Listen to sound samples

Bello Corazon
Last Light

Mark O'Leary - Waiting (Leo Records, 2007) *****

And O'Leary doesn't stop producing great material (and again, thank you Leo for putting all this on http://www.lulu.com/ , making these albums accessible for many among us music fanatics). On this album O'Leary ups the ante by working with Cuong Vu (trumpet) and Tom Rainey (drums), both exceptionally good musicians with their own style and approach and they prove to be a perfect fit for O'Leary's elegant adventurous approach. This album is dedicated to Samuel Beckett, the playwright of amongst others "Waiting for Godot", whose hundredth birthday anniversary was celebrated in 2006. Beckett was a pioneer of absurdist and surrealist theater of the period after the second world war, where religion, the meaning of life, so-called human values were strongly questioned and the incapacity of real communication between human beings emphasized. Yet if there is one thing which is absolutely fantastic on this album, it's precisely the communication between these three musicians. The title piece "Waiting" starts with acoustic guitar, very gently, to which the trumpet adds a beautiful improvization, creating the false expectation that the rest of the album will be in the same vein. This is not about discordance or dissonance, what you might expect from a Beckett tribute album, but quite the contrary, it's about tight interplay among three stellar musicians. The second piece illustrates this even better. "Endgame" offers a strong composition, with high tension nervousness in the strong tonal attack of the trumpet, to which O'Leary offers some fluttering counterpoint on electric guitar, again deep-toned, and wonderfully accentuated by Rainey. The third piece "Lucky" brings an esthetic which could fit the nomer ECM-jazz, highly stylized, creating visions of open space, yet things start to become rougher on "Mr. Krapps Neurosis", with screeching trumpet and high speed distorted guitar, to go even more down the road of madness and disorientation on "Assumption", with electronics, echo effects reinforcing the e-bow sounds. And it goes on like this, deeper and deeper into unchartered musical territory, with the trio creating an high energy high intensity music the likes of which I haven't heard in previous years, and all this with a very clear musical vision, creating a unique sound, with excellent balance between the calm and high intensity moments, hence creating a strong feeling of depth and variation. And also on the calm moments, like on "Godot", the guitar and the trumpet sound like whales communicating, with long and endless sad wails and moans, with Rainey meanwhile quadruple-timing the soloists, and what you believe is free improv appears to be perfectly composed and timed. Amazing. Without a doubt this album will be on the top-10 of the year. One more thing : of many of the best new albums I heard in the previous months, Tom Rainey is the drummer (Tim Berne, Mark Helias, David Torn, Brad Shepik, Tony Malaby). And that's no coincidence either.


Listen to sound samples from Waiting

Waiting
Endgame

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Sean Noonan - Stories To Tell (Songlines, 2007) **

If you notice that some of today's top musicians, Marc Ribot, Jon Madof, Jim Pugliese and Mat Maneri play together on one CD with amongst others African singer Abdoulayé Diabaté, you go "wow, this is going to give fireworks!". Maybe my expectations were too high, because this is lukewarm, if not tepid stuff. The core concept of percussionist Sean Noonan is maybe too ambitious : to combine celtic and African music with rock and jazz. And indeed the album brings all these genres together in a mix, but without any real authenticity, as if every sharpness, every sting has been taken out for fear of the genres hurting each other. You would expect hypnotic rhythms, refreshing musical collisions, emotional outbursts, but there's nothing of the sort on this album, this is mellow background music for the coffee bar on the corner. Allright, admittedly, there is once in a while a soaring guitar solo, but so what? The musicians are good, and that's about all that can be said about this album.

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Free Improv from Clean Feed - two reviews

John Butcher & Paal Nilssen-Love - Concentric (Clean Feed, 2007) **





Playing free jazz or free improv can easily be compared to walking on a tightrope. If you put one step too far to one side, you're gone into into the depths, and that's what I think happened with the music on this album. John Butcher (sax) and Paal Nilssen-Love (drums) are fine musicians with a long track record in free form music, but this CD is to me over the edge. OK, they can get the most unusual sounds out of their instruments, and their interaction speed and interplay are great, but where is the music, where is the emotion? Playing these sounds may be fun for the musicians themselves, but as a listener you don't get involved. Still, kudos of the Clean Feed label to take the risk of publishing this kind of music. I hope others enjoy it more than I do.

Russ Lossing, Mat Maneri, Mark Dresser - Metal Rat (Clean Feed, 2007) ****

Equally risky and equally free improv and equally on Clean Feed, is "Metal Rat", an album by pianist Russ Lossing, with Mat Maneri on viola and Mark Dresser on bass. This music is unusual, to say the least, with eery soundscapes, creating a gloomy, menacing atmosphere throughout. The major difference between this album and the previous one, is that this one creates music, even if not an easy listening experience, it has vision, it paints an aural canvas, albeit an abstract one, that is adventurous, that absorbs the listener in something new, something exciting, with interesting twists and turns, offering unexpected angles. This music sucks you into a different world, pointillistic and microtonal, without allowing the listener to get grip on any fixed pattern or rhythm, yet the overall sound image you get is worth listening to.

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Jason Lindner - Ab Aeterno - (Fresh Sound World Jazz) ***

Jason Lindner's first album, Ab Aeterno, offers a sparkling combination of jazz and world music, in a trio with Omer Avital on bass and oud, and Luisito Quintero on a large variety of small percussion. Lindner himself plays piano, and on some songs also melodica and mbira. The music is light as a feather, not unlike chamber music, with playful influences from the Middle-East, Africa and Latin America. But also Monk and Bud Powell join in. Monk and even Bach are identifiable together in the lightly classical "Song for Amos", Bud Powell in "Sure Thing/Glass Enclosure", a mix of two Powell compositions. On the rhythmically repetitive "Montserrate" the piano is replaced by the melodica, and the bass by the oud. Lindner is a fine pianist and composer, the melodies are harmonically and rhythmically well-crafted, yet it's all a little too composed for me, with not enough climaxes. And that might by due to Lindner's approach of the compositions : once he's got the core melody in his left hand, there aren't too many changes throughout the songs, creating an overall flat impression. On the other hand, the lightly dancing combination of piano, bass/oud, and hand percussion is so refreshing and the compositions so easily accessible, that they form the ideal music for this sunny Sunday morning.

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Mikolaj Trzaska - Kantry (Kilogram Records, 2007) ****

Mikolaj Trzaska is a musician who deserves wider recognition than he does today. He is not only an excellent sax player, as a composer he is also not afraid to take risks and to look for a renewed, more expressive musical language without becoming too experimental or without chasing away potential listeners. He has made some really excellent sax trio albums with the brothers Marcin and Brat Oles, especially "LA Sketch Up" and "Mikro Muzik", both also issued on the Polish Kilogram Records and highly recommended. On these albums, jazz sounds as you've rarely heard it, soft-spoken, sophisticated, nostalgic, yet raw, creative and full of tension at the same time. Interesting. Next to these albums, he's also written a lot of work for theater and television, and this albums fits into that category. It was originally ordered for an internet radio drama, but the music on this album is far removed from the original idea. The input for the music appears to come, not from the play, but from dictaphone recordings made from the author's journey in the Balkans: Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The dictaphone recorded everything that was possible to record, starting with the sounds of streets in Sarajevo, conversations in a Balkan bar and finishing with the singing of a muezzin from a minaret in Sarajevo, but also church bells can be heard, dogs barking, car doors slamming, etc. Right through these ambient sounds Mikolaj Trzaska weaves music in his own specific syle, often solo, or accompanied in the lightest possible fashion, sometimes an accordion, often an organ, or just bass, or drums, but never with the whole band together. It is odd music, sometimes bizarre ("Barbarian's Child"), sometimes of extreme beauty ("The Silence of Fish"), but always airy and accessible. And what he makes of this is really powerful : the human emotions laid bare, pain, longing, distress, anxiety, joy, nostalgia. And it doesn't really matter whether you understand any of the slavonic languages heard on the tape. Just let yourself go and listen to the fragile soul of man, made a little bit more eloquent by Mikolaj Trzaska.

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Chicago Underground Trio - Chronicle (Delmark, 2007) ****

The Chicago Underground Duo/Trio/Quartet has two stable members : Rob Mazurek on cornet and Chad Taylor on percussion. Jeff Parker played guitar in previous configurations and Noel Kupersmith was the regular bass-player, but for this trio he is replaced by Jason Ajemian. This is not what you would call a real trumpet/bass/drums trio, because each musician has an assortment of additional instruments, from the very simple such as a bamboo flute, an mbira or a Chinese cymbal to the more complex electronics, computer of moogerfooerpedals. The album is the chronicle of a transformation in six steps : Initiation, Resistance, Power, Crisis, Transformation and Transcendence. And the music evolves along those steps. "Initiation" is a bass solo, on "Resistance" the percussion starts bringing counterweight to the bass, first with light percussion, then marimba, then electronics until the bass stops, followed by the percussion and only the electronics remain. "Power" begins with light arco bass, marimba and light percussion, rolling on to menacing drumming, first without apparent rhythm, then very rhythmically, with a hard pulsing bass adding power to the playing, offering a solid foundation for the muted cornet sounds of Mazurek, now light and sensitive, then chasing hard, evolving into a quiet bluesy melody, which in terms of trumpet style holds the middle between Lester Bowie and Don Cherry, moving on to light percussion again, an almost-lullaby like melody so fragile and joyful it sounds, soon to die in an electronic chaotic drone of about five minutes, and then you think "that's it, we've had it", but no, out of this chaos emerges a lightly dancing melody of trumpet, arco bass and mbira, the real finale of a track which lasts close to half an hour. And it goes on like that for the rest of the album. The band takes its time to discover the music, to transform it, to think of new angles, but the overall structure is essential, this is free improv along fixed paths. This is avant-garde jazz or experimental jazz, but then with soul. And you can hear this soul at best in the last piece "Transcendence", that unleashes all power with a manic repetitive rhythm, with Mazurek's cornet creating wonderful melodies above this hypnotic drone of bass and drums. This music is probably not to everyone's taste, but the way this band explores new musical avenues is really fantastic to hear and highly commendable. Mazurek suprised us earlier this year with his great album with The Exploding Star Orchestra, but this one is equally brilliant.

Below you can view and extract from the promo video of the accompanying DVD ("Transcendence"):

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Matana Roberts Quartet - The Calling (Utech Records, 2007) ***

Good marks and bad marks for the free jazz label Utech Records. They get the good marks for their existence and for the risks they're willing to take. Bad marks because the sound quality of their - usually live - recordings is lower than what you can expect nowadays. And that's not a problem with this album only, the same problem manifests itself on other albums of the label. But enough complaints. Matana Roberts has her own quartet now, after having led her sax trio Sticks & Stones for the past years. She is now accompanied by Taylor Ho Bynum on cornet, Thomson Kneeland on bass and Tomas Fujiwara on drums. The band takes on a number of classics, such as Billy Holiday's "My Man", Sun Ra's "We Travel The Spaceways" and Armstrong's "Do You Know What It Means (to Miss New Orleans)", the latter piece obviously referring to the devastation created by hurricane Katrina. This band brings excellent free jazz, with lots op spaciousness and creative interplay, combined with quieter moments, yet it does not hesitate either to bring the core melodies in their traditional swing and bop-mode, or even to add a playful call-and-response between sax and cornet. In sum, a nice trip through jazz history brought from a modern free perspective. The quality of the performance makes the lack of sound quality even more of a shame.

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Rob Brown Trio - Sounds (Clean Feed, 2007) ****

Rob Brown is one of those New York sax players who have always been able to combine free jazz blowing fests with melody, rhythm and emotion, but on this album he seems to have reached a state of mental peace and relaxation that is absent on his other albums. He is accompanied by Daniel Levin on cello and Satoshi Takeishi on percussion. His other recent albums are also worth looking for (Radiant Pools and The Big Picture), as are his collaborations with William Parker and Matthew Shipp. Admittedly, his alto does still howl and screech and wail at times, but then above a rhythmic and harmonic basis, with more often than not a recognizable melodic structure. The choice of the cello is a good one, because the instrument can play a more prominent second voice than a bass ever could, both arco and pizzicato, and on top of that Takeishi is a percussionist who manages to give depth to the music by giving the right accents rather than feeling forced to give an explicit rhythmic foundation. The opening track, "Sounds, Part 1, Archeology" immediately offers the musical vision of this band : a subdued unisono melody on a slow tempo, as an introduction to a tearing and heart-rending solo by Brown, followed by some open and equally soft improvizing by the whole band, just to end in joined harmony. This music is characterized by spaciousness and openness. The second piece "Sounds, Part 2, Antics" offers a more abstract feel, with a Mysterioso-like tonal build-up. The third piece starts with a slow cello introduction and Brown's following long solo fits like magic on this. "Stutter Step" is more in the free-bop idiom that we know from his previous albums such as "The Big Picture". "Tibetan Folk Song" starts with a long cello-percussion intro, and Brown again brings a more than credible improvization on this traditional source material. The CD ends in peaceful beauty. Who could have expected that much internal peace and musical quietness from a player like Brown? But the approach appears to be the right one, offering a strong musical unity without loosing any of the free creativity.

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