Angles - Every Woman Is A Tree (Clean Feed, 2008) ****½

Magic from Sweden, published in Portugal. This Swedish band consists of Johan Berthling on double bass, Kjell Nordeson on drums, Magnus Broo on trumpet, Martin Kuchen on alto sax, Mats Aleklint on trombone and Mattias Stahl on vibraphone. The band brings a strong anti-war album here, and an ode to women in war-time, the "trees" that hold the families together. The music has this unbelievable combination of energy, melodic beauty and emotional sensitivity. Some of the tracks are wonderful, and possibly among the best I've heard this year. The opening track starts with arco bass, followed by dramatic and sad alto sax, with the vibes offering the right supportive touches, then the rhythm instruments move into a unison theme, opening the floor for the rest of the band to join in the sad melody. The bass also has a long intro for the second track, now on pizzi, for another wailing and tearful theme by the rest of the band. The title track is brilliant, with a strong and sweeping melody, very moving and heartfelt, offering lots of possibilities for expansion, and played in a wonderful African call-and-response mode, including percussive polyrhythmics and a staggering trumpet solo by Broo. And the next piece is great too, starting with a gut-wrenching sax solo by Küchen over a slow and bluesy rhythm, which offers the right background for the ensuing vibe and trombone solos. Those who know Küchen and Nordeson from their work with Exploding Customer will find similarities in the music, albeit less joyful here of course, and richer because of the additional instruments. The music is rhythmic, melodic, with a clear structural approach of theme, improvisations and back to theme, although a little more sophisticated than I describe it. But compositional power is one thing, the major achievement is in the performance itself, which is warm, sad and wonderful. A great album.

Listen to
Peace Is Not For Us
Don't Ruin Me

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François Corneloup - Next (Hope Street, 2008) **½

François Corneloup is a great baritone sax player, yet I'm not too sure what to think of this record which is hesitating between genres and styles, with moments that are really good, and are often in shrill contrast with the more beaten-track approach of the rest, so much so that conflict arises and coherence is lost. Corneloup also plays soprano and he is accompanied by Dominique Pifarély on violin, Dean Magraw on guitar, Chico Huff on bass and JT Bates on drums. The album starts with fusion elements, especially in the dialogues between violin and electric guitar, there are some jam band elements to be found too, improvisations which are more based on having fun over a steady funky rhythm than real musical explorations. Other tracks, such as "Luez Entre Deux Eaux", are a little more adventurous and creative, "Cease Fire" offers various approaches consecutively, "Seule" is slow and emotional in a mellow way, but more often than not it's uneventful. So, it funks at moments, guitar, bass and drums play fusion, so does the violin at times, so are some of the fast and rhythmic themes, but ii falls short somehow. After his great release U.L.M, the more avant-garde Nu, and having heard his performances with Henri Texier, Carlos Barreto and Hélène Labarrière, I would have expected more adventure and more musical vision. I would have loved to see him explore more in avant and free environment.




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Stéphan Oliva & Jean-Marc Foltz - Pandore (SansBruit, 2008) ****½

I already appreciated Stéphan Oliva's and Jean-Marc Foltz's "Soffio Di Scelsi" last year, now they continue this collaboration, but then without a bass, limiting the interaction to piano and clarinet. The music is as ethereal, as aesthetically beautiful and sensitive as on the previous album, but a little more accessible. It has jazz connotations, but it could as easily be classified as modern classical music, and once in a while some other influences come through, like middle-eastern scales on "Vestiges". The mood is intimate, introspective and meditative, or dark and gloomy as on "L'Imprévue". These two masters never raise their voices, but carefully develop the themes, meticulously, with lots of precision, lots of attention to detail, to silence, to space and pace, and to a balanced delivery. The often abstract themes are fragile and sensitive, and despite their intrinsic romantic angle, they shy away from sentimentality and mellowness, bringing a rich and innovative style of music with lots of emotional depth. All tracks are beautiful, but the last piece, with Foltz's clarinet bending notes in wailing plaintive sorrow over the slow piano chords are absolutely heartrending.

You can download this album from SansBruit at the cost of 6€. You can't be offered more democratic prices than this.

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Daniel Humair, Joachim Kühn, Tony Malaby - Full Contact (Bee Jazz, 2008) ****½

Swiss drummer Daniel Humair and German pianist Joachim Kühn released their first album together in 1985 ("Easy To Read"), and now, for Humair's 70th birthday, they join forces again, for the first time with Tony Malaby on sax and without a bass. Half of the tracks are newly composed, some others come from previous occasions. "Buried Head" figures on Tony Malaby's "Tamarindo", "Ghislène" is "Guylene" (why the different spelling?) from "Easy To Read", and "Salinas" by Kühn from "Triple Entente" (1998). All three musicians have a fantastic track record in the jazz scene of the last twenty to forty years, and have played in all kinds of settings and genres, from traditional bop and mainstream to more free jazz and fusion. And it's interesting to see that amongst the three of them, the overall mode is free, with often wild improvisations, yet strongly anchored in structure and often with a harmonic basis, even if that's not always so apparent. The same holds true with the rhythm : it is there, sure enough, but more often implicit than anything else. The absence of a bass pushes the three musicians to fill that void, especially the drums and the piano, by going into the lower tones, yet Humair clearly prefers adding to the music, accentuating, participating in creating the overall texture rather than filling in the rhythmic gaps. That gives the music a little more of a harsh and abstract sound than we would expect, but it is all the richer for it. Most tracks are complex and offer lots of variation, changes in tempo, in intensity, moving between slow sensitive lyricism and thundering abstract rawness. All three musicians are in absolute top form, throwing in a wealth of ideas and emotions, feeling perfectly comfortable in this world of musical contrasts and paradoxes, reinforcing each other or bouncing off ideas. Humair is precise, intense and creative, Kühn less romantic than I know him, more percussive than you would expect, yet always lyrical, and Malaby is the perfect fit, free, deeply emotional and also very lyrical, re-using successful phrases from Tamarindo (even on other tracks), even using some from Coltrane, with the superb tone and richness in feeling that he's been cultivating over the years. "Full Contact" is superb.

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Shot x Shot - Let Nature Square (High Two, 2008) ****

Two years ago I was more than charmed by ShotxShot's first release, a live album, and their second album sounds just as solid as the first. The quartet consists of Dan Scofield on alto saxophone, Bryan Rogers on tenor, Matt Engle on bass and Dan Capecchi on drums. The music is real modern free jazz in a style that I like : warm, open-ended, emotional, low-tempo yet also very intense. There is only one short track, by Matt Engle, which is more uptempo and composed till halfway, when the tempo suddenly changes, the rhythm turns odd and the improvisations can begin. The four long tracks work with composed parts and agreed concepts, yet just to build a framework for the strong and long free improvisations, in which the four musicians almost permanently play together, including both saxes, creating interweaving lines and phrases, especially on the contrapuntal "Overlay", carefully listening and interacting, and you never know what's going to happen, one sax may come to the foreground with the other one retreating a little or both come forward, creating a flowing feeling, moving forward, with the rhythm section as crucial to the music's development as the horns. The calmer the music gets, the better it becomes, intensifying, becoming maybe more vulnerable and emotional, as on "Oh No"on which the solos, including a long bass solo, are among the best on the album. What I find powerful about this band is that they manage to create their own voice, or even a signature sound after only two CDs, and this in a very crowded jazz environment, stylistically coherent, and with a strong emotional and creative focus. Great music!

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NovoTono - Wanderung (Amirani Records, 2007) ****

NovoTono are two Italian master clarinet players, the brothers Adalberto and Andrea Ferrari, the former also playing soprano sax and the latter baritone sax. This beautiful record brings a combination between modern classical music, jazz, free improvisation and avant-garde. All tracks have a clear structure, with anchor points for reference to the two musicians, sometimes with rhythmic patterns played by one of them, but those are just the basis for the improvisations. Their approach is abstract yet intimate at the same time. The title, "Wanderung" is the German word for hiking or even stronger for migration, with reference to a poetic line "perfection lies in he who sees the entire world as a foreign land", (probably) meaning that you have to look at things with fresh eyes, full of wonder and surprise at what you see, full of opportunities to explore, even the familiar. And that describes the music well. There are familiar rhythms and patterns, even references to Italian folk music, but it all sounds suprising and new. Don't expect real melodies though, the most you get are sounds over rhythm and sound patterns, often with lots of space in between. Only on the two "Ship's Log" tracks does the excitement increase in some twirling abstract, almost funky line. On the longest and last track "Isles & Lives" Federico Cumar joins on trombone and Luca Serrapiglio on soprano sax, and it is also the most varied piece of the album, with some joyful dance-like tune played by the bass clarinet, once in a while backed up by the other horns, slowing down for the other clarinet to play a mournful solo built around silence, disturbed by some abstract chaotic interference of the other instruments, changing the dance-tune into something sad and plaintive, slowly taking up speed again with other reeds in unison acting in counterpoint until the trombone takes over, deep, dark and menacing, yet all ends well, with joy returned and all four musicians playing together. The Ferrari brothers clarinet playing is stunning, and their music is creative and exploratory, while still remaining intimate and close. This seems to be the hallmark of the label, and it's an approach we can only welcome.

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Point4 - Panopticon (Sofa, 2008) ****

The line-up of two pianists, Kenneth Karlsson and Jon Balke, and two percussionists Bjørn Rabben and Ingar Zach, is highly unusual, and at first sight you would expect interfering keyboards and relentless percussion, but you get the exact opposite : minimalist soundscapes built around silence. What they bring is very fragile, open and totally unexpected music, adding sounds to sounds in a very coherent and focused way. The tracks are short - the CD consists of no less than 19 tracks - which forces the musicians to be concise in their explorations while still being able to create something of interest. You hardly ever have the impressions of four musicians playing together, yet they play single notes, single beats, some electronic sounds that last a little bit longer, but which all together manage to create eery and unreal music.

A Panopticon is a prison concept in which the inmates can be watched without them knowing it, creating to the observer "the sentiment of invisible omniscience". This feeling of dread is clear in the music, but then rather in empty space than in a crowded prison, but the overall effect is there.

The total absence of any sequence of sounds, the perfect sense of pace, the restrained and careful discipline of the musicians make this something special. Only on the last track does the intensity build up to a kind of paroxysm of noise, only to fade away into almost non-existent vibrations in the air.

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Poetry and spoken word in jazz - why I don't like it ...

There are many things I don't like in jazz, but reciting poetry in a piece of music is to me one of the most conflictual combinations you can have. I hate it, actually. And I'm not too sure why it doesn't work, but let's give it a try.

1. Poetry is "text made lyrical", it means that you try to bring musical elements into plain words and sentences. You add rhythm, you add rhyme, you add repetitive elements, you play with words and letters to make sentences flow, or fly, or even halt, or shout ... you make the text sing. And this works perfectly fine as long as you read it (silently!). Great poetry can sing to you as a reader, it can move you, it can surprise, it can make you laugh. Now when you put poetry (text trying to be music) into a piece of music, you put it in sharp contrast with its ultimate ambition. And that contrast is too great to make the poetry survive. It's like making music with the brakes on. It's not good for the brakes, it's not good for the car's speed. And certainly not for the passenger's nerves.

2. The poetry used for music is often of a pitiful quality, penned by the musician, trying to sound like a poet. It's an ambition the musician shouldn't have. The words, the phrases, are often high-brow, with lots of dull cliché images, or spiritual, or romantic elements which are closer to the kitsch of the Bragolin paintings of the boy with the tear on his cheeks than to art. Just like few great poets are truly great musicians, great musicians should not assume they are great poets. Be yourself, don't fake what you aren't.

3. Writing poetry is one thing, but reciting it is still another. Sometimes professionals are hired to do that, sometimes one of the band members does it. In both instances, the reciting is almost always overly dramatic, full of misplaced pathos.

4. And then you have the bad poetry recited badly. That makes the passenger jump out of the car (at no risk, since now the brakes are more powerful than the engine of the car).

5. Singing poetry is still an option. But the odd thing is that this still does not work. You can put words to a melody, as often happens in rock music, doing the opposite is extremely difficult. It sounds artificial and musically poor.

6. What I find most perplexing is that all of the above often takes place a free jazz context. Free jazz musicians who try to find ways to circumvent conventions, to find new ways to express themselves, sometimes fall back on the most horrible conventions of poetry, as they were taught in school, as they think that they are supposed to be written and supposed to be recited or sung. Why is that?

So, hence my often negative comments on poetry in jazz. As said earlier, I re-recorded some CDs to eliminate all the tracks with spoken word or poetry on them, just to make them audible, just to drive without the brakes on.

To end in a positive note. There are some notable exceptions of excellent spoken word in music, although not in jazz specifically, but then only because they managed to get a perfect integration of music and words.

Tom Waits - What's He Building In There (from : Mule Variations - see clip below)
Michael Mantler - The Hapless Child (with Robert Wyatt, Terje Rypdal, Carla Bley, Jack DeJohnette... with weird texts from Edward Gorey, but the whole album is weird, yet worth listening to)
Laurie Anderson - many songs on Life On A String, Big Science, Bright Red, ... (she's a truly under-rated artist)

... but that's still not jazz.




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Per Jørgensen & Terje Isungset - Agbalagba Daada (Norcd, 2008) ****½

Great stuff from Norway again, and by two musicians who make pure music from the heart, sounding like the true heirs of Don Cherry - it is open, joyful, in-the-moment, focused on the fun of the performance and the interaction, in the pleasure of the act of creation itself. Per Jørgensen plays trumpet, heriba-ton, tabla, flutes, coupon, vocal, kalimba, percussion, piano and Terje Isungset plays drums, percussion, wood, stones, goat horn, voice, electricians-tube and mouth harp. That says it all - from the world music influences to the "any-object-is-an-instrument" attitude. These two musicians also play as if they couldn't care less about what the world thinks of them or their music, let alone about which music genre this is. The only thing that counts is the music itself.

And that music sounds like an ode to life, an ode to simplicity, to spontaneity, to spirituality, to human interaction. Yet despite the restricted line-up and the full improvisational aspect of the music, both Isungset and Jørgensen manage to remain captivating for the full double CD, creating rich music with a wealth of ideas and approaches. The first CD is more focused on the core instruments : trumpet and drums, while the second has more of the weird instrumentation and vocals in it. But regardless of what they play, this music is so refreshing, so timeless, and so basically natural, with such an admirable sense of innocence, that I'm afraid it will be overlooked.

Yet for me, this is music in its absolute and pure essence.

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Mark O'Leary - Ellipses (FMR, 2008) ****

Most fusion is bad music. Because it brings lots of technical skills with little or no creativity, often centered around the guy on the guitar who wants to take on self-proclaimed stardom. There are some rare exceptions of fusion musicians who seek other things. John McLaughlin is a true musician in that sense. He is interested in the music, and his fabulous guitar technique helps him in achieving this musical result. Terje Rypdal belongs to the same category, as does Jonas Hellborg, the acoustic bass guitar wizard who made breakneck speed world fusion (if you like the real guitar wizardry in an adventurous environment, check out Hellborg's CDs with the late Shawn Lane or with the fabulous Niladri Kumar on his custom-made electric sitar : mindblowing stuff by guys who still manage to make music despite their skills).

Anyway, Irish guitarist Mark O'Leary belongs to the same category. Sure, the guy has technique, but if you just listen to the variety of music he released in recent years, it covers avant-garde with Mat Maneri, over electronics with Gunter Muller to free jazz with Han Bennink. He is on a clear quest to find new ways of expression, and he sure has covered some ground.

This is his 17th CD since 2005, and it covers yet again other musical territory. Sure, it is fusion-inspired in his guitar style and in the dramatic build-ups, but there are as much electronics to hear, especially on the first piece, as ethnic influences in the rhythms. He is assisted on this album by John Herndon on drums, known from Tortoise and more recently from the Exploding Star Orchestra, and by Ståle Størlokken on synths and samples, known from Supersilent. The band creates soundscapes, not of a dreamy nature, yet full of tension, full of dramatic effect, with lots of musical surprises and expectations of what will come next. Melodies arise once in a while, as does rhythm, but these are only secondary to the overall musical effect, which can be at once flowing and lyrical to jagged, angular and full of pins, sharp claws and pointy hooks. The title track offers everything from pure soundscape electronics to death metal heavy chords, but moving into wild rhythmic and sonic areas. The longest piece "Theme From Jack Johnson", titled after the long Miles Davis tune on "Agharta" is dark, eery at times, full of agony and despair, with no hope of obtaining release or relief, it goes on and on. Herndon's fierce and irregular drumming is fascinating to hear and the role of Størlokken is vital in creating the overall effect (yes, even though I do not usually appreciate electronics), and the real jazz thing is that these guys improvise and react to each other as you would expect in an acoustic context. It's hard to say what is planned and what is not. The music is uncompromosing, not built on expectations, but on surprise and creativity and brought in an extremely coherent new and sustained language. Mark O'Leary himself calls it "epic post-fusion", and that sounds about right. Or call it the fusion version of Downpour by Cline/Parker/Rainey. But don't expect jazz, don't expect fusion, don't expect electronics. Whatever the description, it surely is something you're unlikely to have heard before, and it is worth listening to : demanding but rewarding.

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