Phantom Orchard - Orra (Tzadik, 2008) ****

Phantom Orchard is the brainchild of Zeena Parkins (harp, omnichord) and Ikue Mori (electronics). Their first release was issued in 2004, and now they have a new album called Orra on the Composer Series of the Tzadik label. Both artists create a surreal musical environment, which is friendly, warm and accessible on the surface, but the undercurrent is one of displacement, perplexity, mystery, pain and distress. The title of the album refers to a verse by the Scottish poet and dramatist Joanna Baillie.

"Yea, when the cold blood shoots through every vein :
When every pore upon my shrunken skin
A knotted knoll becomes, and to mine ears
Strange inward sounds awake, and to mine eyes
Rush stranger tears, there is a joy in fear"
(Joanna Baillie, 1762-1851 : Orra, A Tragedy)

And this "joy in fear" reflects the sentiment of the whole album well. There is something inevitable in the outcome, an acceptance of fate, which relieves the listener of all anxiety, despite the presence of the fear that a catastrophe will happen. So tension abounds, and a strange beauty too, accompanied by scary sounds, creating an uneasy attractiveness.

The two women are joined by Makigami Koichi on voice and jew's harp, Josh Quillen on steel drum, Maja Solveig Kjelstrup Ratkje on voice and real time processing and Cyro Baptista on percussion. The music is slow, subtle, precise with little sounds clustering together to create a whole which has coherence and a direction. The overall effect is a musical world that you will have rarely heard. It is surely not jazz. This is experimental music, yet focused on the emotional expressiveness of music, regardless of the form it takes, not with the experiment itself as a goal, and some of the pieces are of wonderful beauty, sweet and dark and the same time. I've said before that I'm not a fan of electronics, but these two musicians manage to create something unique with it. Not everything works for me, but most of it, and that's already good enough.

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Solo percussion

I tried to keep away from this topic for a long time : the solo percussion album. Why? Because it's boring. It may be of interest to drummers and percussionists, but it lacks sufficient ingredients to tell a good story.

Some of the best drummers in jazz gave it a try, including Max Roach ("Conversation On Drums", "Sfax"), Baby Dodds, Milford Graves ("Grand Unification", "Stories", "Entelechy"), Andrew Cyrille ("What About"), Eddie Prévost ("Loci Of Change", "Material Consequences"), Andrea Centazzo ("Midnight All Day"), Susie Ibarra ("Drum Sketches"), Brat Oles ("FreeDrum Suite"), Andrew Drury ("Renditions"), Chris Corsano ("The Young Cricketer"), Paal Nilssen-Love ("Sticks & Stones"), Han Bennink ("Solo", "Nerve Beats", but only partly), Jerome Cooper ("From There To Hear"), Tony Scott ("Music For Voodoo Meditation"), Tatsuya Nakatani ("Green Report 12"), and many more. And then of course there's Art Blakey who made "Drum Suite" with a whole percussion band. But despite all the skills and the variations, drumming or just non-melodic percussion (so no vibes or balophon, or the like), makes it really hard to keep my attention going.

And even though there aren't too many duo percussion albums, they do exist.

I recently got this new CD from Canadian drummer Michel Lambert, together with Rakalam Bob Moses.

Michel Lambert & Rakalam Bob Moses - Meditation On Grace (FMR 2008)

The CD consists of four lengthy pieces, recorded live in Quincy, Massachusetts in 2004. If the first track brings some forceful drumming, the second track is a little bit more varied, with softer touches, more creative, conjuring up percussive landscapes, reacting well to one another, doing their utmost to bring that story, trying to make percussion by itself sufficient to tell a story, trying to act as if melodic instruments are no longer necessary. Bob Moses shouts once in a while. The best thing about the album is that both drummers play just for the fun of the interaction. Many solo drum albums are show-off albums, pieces of demonstrations of skills. Here the music itself dominates, and the fourth track is the most powerful one, with some quite intense whipping sounds, rumbling sounds, dry beats, and sizzling brushes. There are some great things to hear on the album, even for non-percussionists, despite the limitations of the concept. Drummers will surely find this of interest.

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Sabir Mateen - Other Places Other Spaces (Nu Bop, 2008) ****

Sabir Mateen is one of those highly active free jazz musicians who play in many bands (TEST, William Parker's Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra, The Other Other Quartet, Earth People to name but a few). By comparison, he has released relatively little as a leader, and that's a pity. Apart from Mateen on tenor, alto, flute, clarinet and alto clarinet, the band further consists of Raymond A.King on piano, Jane Wang on bass and cello and Ravish Momin on drums, talking drums and percussion. Mateen has always been a free jazz man in heart and soul, enjoying the rhythms, enjoying the freedom, enjoying the expressiveness, enjoying the interplay, and going at it to the full. Mateen is great on this album, and so is the band, and they are at their best in the high energy full steam moments, when the four musicians push each other forward relentlessly. The slower tracks such as "For The Unborn One", or the more avant-garde tracks such as "Shades Of Khusenaton" I find a little less focused or less engaging. But all the rest is raw and intense, and especially on the longest tracks do all musicians, and especially Mateen get the space to unleash their musical power. And the last track "Journey Into The Deepness Of Positive Light" is surely one of the highlights of the album, showing both the power and the tenderness of the band. And all that straight from the heart. No embellishments. No pretense. No water added. Straight. The real deal.

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Barry Guy - Phases Of The Night (Intakt, 2008) ****

For once I will let some paintings write the review. Barry Guy rejoins forces with pianist Marilyn Crispell and percussionist Paul Lytton, for four "compositions" that were inspired by paintings of Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, Yves Tanguy and Wilfredo Lam. I could not find the last painting on the internet, so I gave another one with a title that comes close (a doubtful practice, I know). The music reflects the paintings quite well : surreal, figurative yet moving to abstract, lots of open space inhabited by nightmarish creatures or images arising from our collective subconsciousness, conflicting elements trying to merge into coherence, and sometimes they manage to do that, often they don't, yet the overall effect remains imprinted in the brain as an unusal thing, a glimpse into another reality between waking and sleeping, questioning truth, revealing unexpected events, possibilities, harsh, unyielding, scary with an attractiveness of the personal experience of having seen, of having heard, of having been the witness of something unusual, something out of the ordinary, something irrational yet emotionally gripping ... a weird privilege.

Max Ernst - Phases Of The Night

Dorothea Tanning - Insomnias

Yves Tanguy - With My Shadow


Wilfredo Lam - Visible/Invisible

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Poetry and Spoken Word in Jazz -- Why I don't Like It

Some weeks ago, I said that I didn't like poetry and spoken word in jazz. That is unfortunately still the case. Nevertheless, as Chris Monsen on his perfect sounds blog points out, there are indeed good things to hear, and he illustrates this by showing the clip below based on a Gil Scott-Heron tune, and sure he is right. This is good stuff. Unfortunately, most poetry and spoken word is mostly bad poetry, bad spoken word, high brow fake intellectualism and painfully sentimental mellowness. But ... there is some good stuff. Hence the sharing. Thanks Chris!




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Lol Coxhill and Andrea Centazzo - great again

Ictus has not only been re-issuing some of its fantastic catalogue, but it's now also available digitally from several sources (Klicktrack, eMusic, Allaboutjazz). Here are two re-issues with Lol Coxhill (soprano) and Andrea Centazzo (percussion), the first with Franz Koglmann on trumpet, the second with Giancarlo Schiaffini on trombone. Neither album can be considered to form a unique concept, they're rather a collection of recordings, which are all in the same style of improvisation : free and fresh, inventive and interactive.

Lol Coxhill, Andrea Centazzo, Franz Koglmann - Darkly Again (Ictus, 2008) ****

"Darkly Again" is the sequel to "Darkly" (even in creative environments, not everything should be a surprise), and the music is similar yet not entirely the same. Here there are two Centazzo-Coxhill duos, on Coxhill-Koglmann duo and two solo pieces by Coxhill and Koglmann. On the previous album five tracks had them as a trio and three pieces offered a duo Koglmann-Centazzo. The music is again very open-ended, played for the sake of the sound itself, the pleasure of coming up with new combinations, fast interactions, creating unexpected twists and approaches.

Listen and download from eMusic.

Lol Coxhill, Andrea Centazzo, Giancarlo Schiaffini- Moot & Lid (Ictus, 2008) ****

"Moot & Lid" is a little bit different. The six "Mooting" interactions are all trios, and the fast-response dialogue of short bursts of notes are alternated by pieces with more meditative or expansive phrases. The five "Lid" tracks are Coxhill solo, with or without dubbing, and despite the obvious break in concept with the first part, the music remains consistently in the same style and quality, although the overal mood is a little bit more joyful.

Listen and download from eMusic.

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Atomic/School Days - Distil (Okka Disk, 2008) ****

The bands Atomic and School Days share the same rhythm section : Ingebrigt Haker Flaten on bass and Paal Nilssen-Love on drums. Atomic further consists of Magnus Broo on trumpet, Fredrik Ljungkvist on tenor sax and Bb clarinet, and Havard Wiik on piano. School Days has Chicagoans Jeb Bishop on trombone and Ken Vandermark on baritone sax, Bb and bass clarinet and Norwegian Kjell Nordeson on vibraphone. After "Nuclear Assembly Hall" this is the second release by the octet, and again a double CD. All these guys are very prolific, and I think that this year Magnus Broo beats Ken Vandermark to it, this being the 6th release this year to which he contributes if my calculations are correct. The band has the same overall style as Atomic, but the additional instruments give it a broader range while not necessarily having the same sense of focus. Because all musicians are excellent, they also get ample space to improvise and show off their skills. All tracks are composed with the brass section playing the themes in unison as in the best bop tradition, but they can be adventurous and entirely modern at the same time. The first two tracks illustrate this quite well. Jeb Bishop's "Deadline" is a fast-swinging bop piece with a strong solo by Haker Flaten, while "Irrational Ceremony" could count as its slow counterpart, with arco bass, melodic piano, as a long intro for a beautiful horn theme somewhere in the middle of the piece, and for Bishop to take the first solo improvisation, followed by Broo and Nordeson, chaos follows only to flow back into the main theme in full force, dropping dead on one single vibe note, back into gentler regions.

Apart from the superb musicianship, the band's great strength is that they can move within a single piece from one style of jazz to another, making it all sound very consistent as if it was the most natural thing to do to move from cinematic big band swing to screaming saxes, interspersed with some Latin rhythms and once in a while rock attitudes. Listen to Ljungkvist's "Andersonville" to get an idea. And that can only be achieved because this band has not only very open ears and respect for all these subgenres, but more importantly they enjoy every single note of it. Listen to the contrast in styles in the last track, a Vandermark composition, with the reeds and trombone playing a slow eery background tune, over which Broo's trumpet and Paal Nilssen-Love's drums dance like crazy, just to suddenly jump into full bop mode, with the sax, piano and bass taking over. This is wonderful fun to hear. This is not boundary-shifting music, nor does it aspire to great artistic achievements. But it's a great performance by a band (or is it two bands?) that really starts benefiting from playing a lot together. I would love to see this band perform live.

(When talking about this record last week at a concert to a musician, her reaction was : "too many big egos for one band" - I can tell you : it is certainly not the case! - or at least it does not seem to affect the music!)

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PHAT - La Grande Peste (Insubordinations, 2008) ***½

I'm not quite sure what subgenre of jazz PHAT brings, call it underground jazz, dark jazz or doom jazz. The point is that this young French band, with Fabien Duscombs on drums and percussions, Marc Perrenoud on bass and electric doublebass, and Heddy Boubaker on alto and bass saxophones, does not have the most optimist world view. The title itself gives already sufficient clarity about the tone and mood, "La Grande Peste", means "The Great Plague", and the titles of the tracks leave even less to the imagination, "Between The Titty And The Beer", "The Feast of The Cockroaches" or "The Great Purgatory Of Dead Porn Stars" (the last one being a contender for the title of the year award, but also the best track on the album). The music is jazz, with lots of rock and even punk influences, but then without being violent, aggressive or even angry. The overall mood is more one of anguish and gloom, despair and revulsion. You must like the genre to really appreciate the music, but even if you don't, you cannot but admire the unbelievable coherence of the approach, the energy and intensity, the focus and the uncompromising attitude of these three young musicians. They give what they have and they give it without restraint. The musicians are not bad either, Boubaker is a powerful saxophonist, Duscombs is unbelievably energetic and Perrenoud is a wonderful listener with lots of creative ideas. All three manage to deliver the goods : jazz as you've rarely heard it, creating an unusual atmosphere but with sufficient emotional depth to keep the attention going. Many more gifted and skilled musicians could learn a lot from this band's musical vision. To make it even better - and appreciate the coherence here - the music is free, in the monetary sense. You can just download it from their website.

Listen and download from "Insubordinations" for free.

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Matthew Shipp Quartet - Cosmic Suite (Not Two, 2008) *****

Matthew Shipp brings another of his instant classics, like "Pastoral Composure", "New Orbit", or "Nu Bop", his quartet recordings with respectively Roy Campbell, Wadada Leo Smith or Daniel Carter on the horn. The rhythm section here consists of Joe Morris on bass and Whit Dickey on drums, and Daniel Carter plays trumpet and sax, four musicians who've played numerous times together and released regular albums over the past twenty years.

The album brings a suite in 9 parts, starting with an interesting and disturbing piece, that sets the tone for the rest of the record. Carter's trumpet is meditative, and Shipp seems to joins for slow jazzy accompaniment, weaving beautiful harmonics, but only briefly, shifting tone and tempo abruptly, moving into more avant-garde territory, followed by bass and drums. And as Carter moves to tenor, this does not seem to perturb his meditative feel, despite the nervousness playing of the three other musicians. The second part is really calm, without any apparent theme or melody, yet it is structured, with lots of silence and openness, Carter's on bass clarinet, still keeping his cool tone, with Morris on arco, and Shipp and Dickey accentuating the barely audible fragile playing by Carter. This seamlessly moves into the third piece, still calm, but dark and intense, with the piano taking a break. The fourth track increases the tempo and back into bop harmonics and rhythms, with Shipp setting the scene and driving the music forward, just to retreat again and leave the floor to the three others, only to join again for the closing chords. Part six is a piano trio, with very abstract improvisation by Shipp, with lots of variation in mood and rhythm, slowing down for a solo piano piece on the seventh track. After a more intense and propulsive, thundering piece, the last track goes back to the open-ended avant mode of the third part of the suite, but now with the piano joining. It is the most sensitive and most beautiful piece, and that says a lot, because every track on this album is stunning. Lots of variation, sensitive and creative playing, innovative and familiar. Without a doubt one of Matthew Shipp's best records in years. Highly recommended.


Listen and download from eMusic.

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Greg Osby & Andrew Cyrille - Low Blue Flame (TUM, 2006) ****½

A little later than planned, I bought this CD, after I tried in vain to order it through the Finish TUM label on which it appeared and strangely enough no longer figures. Anyway, when two of today's greatest jazz musicians play together, fireworks are the result. The veteran free jazz drummer demonstrates what experience and rhythmic creativity mean for music, while young alto and soprano saxophonist Greg Osby's warm and broad pallette really flourishes in this free and dynamic environment. Apart from Monk's "Work" all the tracks are original material, mostly improvised or composed for the occasion. So, in short, anyone interested in drums and sax should have a close listen at how these two artists bring musical interaction to an almost sublime level. The title track alone is worth the album : a highly intense bluesy piece with a steady opening riff hammered into your head sufficiently enough to keep it in the back of your mind for the rest of the track, and then listen how these two wonderful musicians play around it, moving away from it, doing completely different things, but never missing a beat from the original riff : six minutes of pure musical joy. As Cyrille describes it : "The blue flame of the fire is its hottest part. It does not waiver in its uniqueness. In a similar fashion, let this music be a testament to that uncommon quality". Quite an accurate description. The only downside on the album is a poem recited by Cyrille over a sax solo (sorry guys, I still hate it!). This is further and free-er than Osby has ever played on record, and even if he starts playing melodic and with patterns, Cyrille's dynamic approach pushes him on to go further and further into more adventurous areas, and the saxophonist does it and he does it well, but without losing the warmth and the roundness of tone in his lyrical playing. Andrew Cyrille's drumming is absolutely stunning at moments, not only because of his technique, but more for his creative wealth, his organization of his rhythms, his permanent changes in approach on the same rhythm. Pieces like "Cyrille In Motion", allow him to showcase his fabulous technique and musical ideas, as is "The Music In Us", again a bluesy track with initial slow blowing by Osby, but rapidly gaining speed and intensity, underpinned by a 13/4 rhythm, which results in a strange, energetic combination of sadness and joy. The album ends with Cyrille playing light percussion in a tribute to Roscoe Mitchell, and he does it with lots of silence, creating a spiritual, shamanistic feel. Another wonderful record which has almost gone unnoticed. Don't miss it.

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