Matthew Shipp & Guillermo E. Brown - Telephone Popcorn (Nu Bop, 2008) **½

Here are pieces on which Matthew Shipp is at his most lyrical, playing nice, often hypnotic and beautiful chords and figures, with Guillermo E. Brown on zendrum, laptop and electronics acting as a kind of disturbing element or jamming station, adding odd sounds, even odder rhythms for Shipp to react on. The music was recorded in 2005 and it's only now being released by the Italian Nu Bop label. I can imagine it was hard to find a label to bring this music, because it's far from conventional, let alone that it has any sales potential. Some of the music is still relatively accessible, with themes reminiscent of some of Shipp's best pieces for Thirsty Ear, but most of it is quite adventurous, not in the music per se, but because of the electronics and distortion of the sounds, which are hard and abrasive, as if the normal tunes and sounds are being sandpapered. That is literally what you can hear. On other tracks, every sound is being echoed by static noise. The whole idea was indeed to bring a new angle, a new approach to music, but it only succeeds partly, and then only on some of the tracks. Most of the music here sounds self-destructive.

And by the way, have you ever read words as arrogant as these : "my piano playing is the direct result of the fact that my mind and the cosmic mind that sustains the universe are in harmony-so when I play I intercept electro magnetic frequencies directly from the mind of god and can convert them into lyrical phrases on the piano". On this CD either god had a bad cold, or there was something wrong with the circuitry connecting the almighty to Mr. Shipp.

This is the third release by Matthew Shipp this year. The first one "Right Hemisphere" was excellent. His second solo release "Un Piano" I haven't heard yet, and I am also looking forward to a possible future duo release with Mark O'Leary. I sincerely hope "Telephone Popcorn" is the lesser one of the four.

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François Carrier, Jean-Jacques Avenel, Michel Lambert - Within (Leo Records, 2008) ****½

The reason why François Carrier is a great musician is simple : he has a kind of total approach to authenticity, in the sense that he always tries to bring a deep emotional and spiritual experience. The focus of all his albums seem to be pointed at that one thing, to create a moment in which this experience becomes real and felt by the audience. And whether he does that with a strange mixture of instruments as on Happening, or by having a straight duo CD with just sax and drums, as on Kathmandu, the overall effect is the same. His music has changed over the years to achieve this level of refined directness. His first albums were still encapsulated in the mainstream, with clear melodic lines, themes and structures. In the last years he has moved away from that, playing fully improvised music, but with focus and with lots of technical skills, both on the instrument and on the interaction with the other musicians. His tone is warm and buttery, very sensitive, welcoming the audience into the music, inviting them to share the musical journey (in contrast to many of today's musicians who find interesting ways of creating a distance with the audience, alienating them). Michel Lambert is the perfect partner for his music, adding polyrhythms and creative drumming, often with lots of energy, adding intensity to Carrier's carefully built lyrical sax phrases. Having French bass-player Jean-Jacques Avenel join is a great idea. His skills on the instrument are excellent and he finds the right tone to enrich the trio. The CD constists of three pieces, one clocking even over forty minutes, but that should not deter you. Despite the small line-up, the trio has sufficient ideas for variation to keep the attention going. There is a long bass solo with powerfull percussion from Lambert to create depth, there is a short kalimba piece somewhere in the middle, meditative moments alernate with fierce and intense interplay. Adventurous and welcoming : that is a rare combination. Later this year Ayler Records will bring even more live recordings by him. Enjoy this one and look forward to what's coming!

Buy or download from Leo Records.

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Atomic - Retrograde (Jazzland, 2008) ****½

The Swedish-Norwegian band Atomic is a kind of all-star band, that releases great records every few years, and when they do, it's always something to look forward to. This is their second 3-CD box set, now all recorded in the studio, with new material, although trumpeter Magnus Broo's "Painbody" was also recently released on his album with the same title. The other band members are Fredrik Ljungkvist on tenor an soprano saxophones, who wrote most of the material, Håvard Wiik on piano, and Scandinavia's master rhythm section : Ingebrigt Håker Flaten on bass and Paal Nilssen-Love on drums. And though all of these musicians are more productive within free jazz and avant-garde idioms, "Atomic" is their tribute to their musical heritage and inspirations, the great free jazz musicians of the 60s. That means that form, structure and rhythm still play a role, as a solid foundation for free improvisations. And, man, do these guys enjoy themselves! This is one of the best free bop bands around. The compositions are great, the playing superb, the interactions clever, the improvisations free and liberated, the rhythms enthralling. The last CD is recorded live in Seattle, and all pieces but one already figure in studio version on the previous discs in the box, making it possible and interesting to see how they approach the same material in a live setting. The sound is a little more distant, but the joy of playing even more fun. I won't bore you with an overview of all the tracks on this release, but it's great as usual. Their approach hasn't changed much, and that's good. This is modern jazz as it should sound. A pleasure for heart, soul, mind and body. What more can you want?

Listen and download from iTunes.

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Terje Isungset - Ice Concerts (All Ice Records, 2008) ****

Terje Isungset's "Ice Concerts" compiles tracks from live performances with various artists, including the percussionist himself on ice percussion, flute, voice, icefon, icehorn and ice, Sara Merielle Gaup on joik, Arve Henriksen on trumpet,vocal and icehorns, Unni Løvlid, Lena Nymark and Silvia Moi on vocals, and Jon Halvor Bjørnset on live sampling. As said earlier, Isungset's music defies categorization, yet it is of an extreme simple and true beauty. Most of the pieces are duets between percussion and voice, or percussion and trumpet, or icehorn. But the percussion is the real treat musically, sparse and reverent, of an intense purity, not unlike the sounds of real snow and ice melting, which he also uses on this album. Pretty unique.

The concerts were made outdoors in order to capture the true chill of things. It's hard to believe you can get anything recorded under these conditions, let alone sing or put your lips against the trumpet.





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Misha Alperin - Her First Dance (ECM, 2008) ****

There was a time in my life that I bought all newly released ECM records, then still on vinyl (Jarrett, Old & New Dreams, Abercrombie, John Surman, Lester Bowie, Garbarek, Rypdal, ... the lot). After a while I got tired of their too polished sound. You can't give Manfred Eicher enough praise for what he and his label contributed to modern music, because there are few producers who managed to get such a decisive role in shaping a musical style without actually playing music. Furthermore he managed to create a sublime and unique positioning for his label, with very clever and consistent design and a superb sound quality.

Over the years, I've grown a little bit tired of ECM's too sophisticated approach, because I became more interested in more direct emotional and musical roughness, rawness, adventurousness, ie less control, less discipline, more anger, more madness, more soul, more authenticity.

Yet once in a while, there are ECM records that grab my attention, like the recent John Surman, or Terje Rypdal, or Dans Les Arbres or this one.

This record is ECM at 100%, no question about it. Ukrainan pianist Misha Alperin plays his piano in a style which IS ECM, finding a genre between classical and jazz, with a very melancholy atmosphere, very subdued, never raising his voice, deeply emotional and full of the usual ECM aesthetic. And even when the tunes are a little more uptempo, which is only the case with "Jump", it is closer to Mozart than Oscar Peterson, joyful and lyrical. On half of the tracks he is joined by Arkady Shilkloper on french horn and flugelhorn and/or Anja Lechner on cello. Most tracks, but especially those with the guest musicians, are so sad, so melancholic, that my heart melts and that I crumble to pieces. There is no dissonant sound to be heard, there are no wild jumps into the void of the unknown, but that's not the point. What he does with "the known" is already strong enough, creative and really worth listening to.


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Luis Lopes - Humanization 4Tet (Clean Feed, 2008) ****

I had never heard of guitarist Luis Lopes, and kudos to Clean Feed again for giving a lesser known musician a chance, because he deserves it. His Humanization 4Tet further consists of Rodrigo Amado, whose sax-playing and sense of music I've already recommended before, and with Aaron Gonzalez on bass and Stefan Gonzalez on drums, two young musicians with great skills and even more ideas. Lopes's playing is straight-forward, with a bluesy electric sound, more focused on delivering great music than on pyrotechnics or avant-garde excursions, and that's the overall nature of this album. The compositions are nice, with great themes and especially nice improvisations. Lopes is really in full service of the band he assembled here, as self-effacing as can be, leaving lots of room for bass, drums and sax. On the second track, dedicated to Pier Paolo Pasolini, his only contribution is to add eery feedback sounds and colorings of sustained notes. The third track, dedicated to physicist Stephen Hawking and called "Principio Da Incerteza", starts with a long and strong unison theme, and in line with the title, it brings changing rhythms and tempi, even to the extent that all rhythm, structure and melody dissapear for a powerful open improvisation. Again, Lopes adds sparse notes, but well-chosen, with the right timbre and sound, offering depth to the sax, bass and drums that really carry the tune, that gradually gathers momentum again, leading back to the original theme. "Big Love" is dedicated to Joe Giardullo, which is an excellent idea by the way, and it brings a more abstract energetic melody, which, as on the other tracks immediately leads into a sax solo, which is also a good idea because Amado truly is a great sax player. His tone is warm, his phrasing complex and focused. And what about Lopes? Well, at the climax of Amado's solo, somewhere half-way the tune, when bass and drums have propulsed the sax into higher space, Lopes again adds support, by offering mute echoes and little sounds of admiration, enriching the whole without taking the lead voice. "The Long March", starts with a long bass intro, joined by the drums once a fixed, and indeed march-like vamp has been established, and both sax and guitar join for the nice melodic theme that seems to end with an open question mark. Lopes then plays a solo. It is slow. It is full of openness. It is precise. It is deep. It is beautiful. And the way Amado takes over is brilliant, joining on the same note, extending it and then moving on, intensifying the piece a little, but not too much, moving it into more extravert regions. The last track starts in a totally improvised context, with all four musicians interacting in a hectic way, Amado full-voiced, Lopes with muted distorted guitar sounds, breaking into yet another unison theme, as a lead-in for Stefan Gonzalez to give a fierce drums solo, joined by Amado with a no less fierce sax solo, and then the bass joins, with the guitar adding shredded muted heavy notes, slowing down the massive sounds, bringing the guitar back to normal tones, with again bluesy, very emotional playing, very direct, sounding uncomplicated but again, precise. The strange thing about Lopes's music is that despite the fact that he clearly has a free mind, moving the band into very free territory at times, that he sticks to the usual intro theme, then improv, then repeat theme to end, as if that kind of structure is needed or required. This is a great and stylistically balanced CD, by a musician who deserves more attention, and one who certainly deserves the prize for the most self-effacing participation on his own release.

Listen to
Cristadingo
Paso (For Pier Paolo Pasolini)

Listen further and download from eMusic.

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Matt Lavelle & Barry Chabala - I Like To Play (self-published, 2008) ***

From some of the first tracks of the CD I wasn't quite sure that Barry Chabala could play guitar, but after a while my early misconception proved wrong (again, and sorry for that). The point is, he doesn't play in a conventional way, he creates sounds on the strings - and sometimes on the body of his guitar - regardless of conventions, often hesitantly without much "stage presence". Sometimes it sounds bizarre, or even like a beginner playing around on the strings, but what he does still has coherence and direction. Matt Lavelle builds his lines (on sax or trumpet) around this, reacting fast and intense, leading to a strange mixture of sounds. They play as if they were sitting in the same room as you, that intimate it sounds, yet it is not intimate in the traditional sense, because you don't get any comfort as a listener. They move you to interesting territory, with tradition never far away, and even a traditional blues perks up its head, adding some warmth to the proceedings, while at the same time throwing the traditional elements of the blues overboard. This is friendly and nice, two guys having fun in playing together. No great ambitions, no pretence, just two guys enjoying themselves creatively, although some of the tracks are great, such as "Is That A Trumpet In Your Pocket Or, Um?", which is a long uptempo nervous, boogie-influenced, chasing duet. As the title says : they like playing.

Listen and buy from CDBaby.

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Free Unfold Trio (Amor Fati, 2008) ****

This piano trio consists of Jobic Le Masson on piano, Benjamin Duboc on bass and Didier Lasserre on drums. When I first listened to it, I got some faraway memories of the Chick Corea, Dave Holland and Barry Altschul album "A.R.C.", a brilliant album that I found rich, hard, intense and uncompromising in its avoidance of recognisable tunes (although they covered Miles Davis' Nefertiti). This album is more modern, but it fits within the same legacy of piano trio music. Le Masson is creative and unpredictable while remaining focused, and bass and drums move along as easily as the musical thoughts evolve. The ease with which Duboc switches to arco and back to pizzi is surprising, and Lasserre's being "in the music" with his drums is strong, more accentuating the evolution of the thoughts than offering an explicit rhythm. The intensity and energy with which the album starts is kept throughout the album and that's a major feat in itself, but Le Masson manages to keep in his improvisations a high level of abstract lyricism and sensitive power. And even in the slower movements, as half-way the second piece, their interplay is immediate and on the same level, maintaing their unique cohesiveness, moving their music in a pointillistic kind of action painting. Again an excellent album from this young French label.

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"Do you really like everything?"

Photo by B. Krist for GPTMC

"Do you really like everything?" - that was a question I got yesterday by a young jazz enthusiast on a Dutch jazz forum when we were discussing free and avant-garde jazz.

The answer is simple : I don't.

As a rough estimate, I even dislike 99.99% of the music that is being made, and that currently terrorizes our media (TV, radio, print, web, ...) and public places (pubs, hotels, airports, beaches, malls, elevators, ...).

The dislike is the result of :

- lack of originality
- pretence
- recycled concepts
- clichés
- mediocrity
- dull
- emotionlessness
- self-centered idolization
- bland
- mediocrity
- superficial
- nothing to tell
- lack of authenticity
- mediocrity
- sales as only objective
- ...


Need I go on?


And, truth be told, that is not only applicable to the tsunamis of rap, funk, hiphop, fusion, mainstream and pop garbage that is engulfing us, but also to lots of jazz, free jazz, modern jazz, avant-garde jazz.

Good quality music is not limited to one genre, and neither is bad music. You have excellent music in all of the genres I just mentioned, add to that classical music, world music, and all the other genres.

In each of these genres there are musicians I like - whether it's Mozart, Jimi Hendrix, Parisa (Fātemeh Vā'ezi), Portishead or Wadada Leo Smith. Because they are not only true to themselves, but they were/are able to create their own voice, and had/have a story to tell. Their musical story, one you've not heard before, one that makes you listen, because you have no choice.

So from the totality of the musical spectrum, going from established classical music to the most avant-garde endeavors, I can pick a few musicians in each genre. A few out of the thousands and thousands of musicians who try or who think they've succeeded.

Next to that, I admit that I have a strong interest in the music that fits in the tiny component of that spectrum that is squeezed between free bop and avant-garde jazz. There is still room on the right side of that spectrum. I am currently struggling with what I would call the "whisperer-scrapers", musicians such as Birgit Ulher, Axel Dörner, or the recent Mats Gustafsson & Cor Fuhler record. I appreciate their courage to go out there, where no man has gone before, but I'm not sure they can find anything there that I value in music. Yet I may be wrong. Time will tell.

So, within that tiny piece of the spectrum, I hope to be able to listen to and to review new releases. And that tiny spectrum is not so limited, if you see how many CDs are being released. You should see the stack of CDs here, next to me, that still wait to be listened to, some of which will be reviewed too, if they're lucky. I like this tiny band of the spectrum, because not only some musicians, but the genre itself offers what I like, and it hence increases the likelihood to find what I like : emotional authenticity, adventurous spirit, musical vision, ... and especially the possibility for a great listening experience : emotionally and intellectually.

I love music. I love good music.


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Steve Cohn - Iro Iro (Red Toucan, 2008) ****

Iro Iro means "this and that" in Japanese. Iro means color. On this CD multi-instrumentalist Steve Cohn brings the concept of his chamber ensemble a step further. He plays the piano, shakuhachi, hichiriki, shofar, ektara and percussion, and the band further consists of Masahiko Kono on trombone, Tomas Ulrich on cello and Kevin Norton on drums, vibes and percussion. Usually the concept of chamber jazz is limited to bands without drummer, but Kevin Norton's approach is so light and perfectly fitting the musical concept, that it could still fall within the genre. The music is avant-garde, but varied, with meditative moments, with lots of openness, as on the second track, or extremely hectic and intense moments of interplay, as the beginning of the third track. The fourth track starts with Cohn's subtle and melodyless piano-playing and you have to give it to him : his touch is fresh, unusual, and sensitive, which sets the tone for the rest of the piece. The cello joins in the same vein, with subtle pizzi lines, supported by gently accentuations of the drums. Masahiko Kono truly is a good choice on the trombone, because of his precision and capacity of slow developments, creating sounds and being present without being overwhelming. Nuance and sophistication seem to be the guiding principles of the improvisations and of the interplay. Adventurous though this music may be, it is still sufficiently accessible, with strong emotional moments, and hence, as is too often the case with avant-garde, not only concerned with form. Recommended.

Listen to
Ohio
Konnichiwa

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