What a nice concept - this book, edited by publisher Renate Da Rin and co-edited by bassist William Parker, explores how gender and experiences have shaped the creative work of women who have made their careers in music. I was only three interviews in when I was struck by both the simplicity of the books construct and how, because of its approach, it drew such rich insights from the subjects.
Here is how the topic is approached: each musician (48 musicians in all drawn from a broad swath of the classical and jazz world) are asked a set of questions that are laid out at the start of the book. Ranging from the personal 'Did your parents encourage you to become an artist/musician?' To gender bias 'how has being a woman held you back in the development of your musical career?' to the creativity 'what is your process and system of putting music together?' and beyond (spirituality, truth, politics - you know - the fuzzy stuff). Perhaps from a researchers point of view, some these questions may be a bit leading, but that seems to work well for the editors.
For example, here is what saxophonist Lotte Anker says about gender biases found throughout culture:
The hidden and subtle discrimination is for example when writers (and others) define you as gender/sex before artist/musician/human being. Or when gender stereotypes are reproduced in media, in commercials or in education among kids: for example never questioning why the girls run over to (or are put behind) a vocal microphone and the boys run to a guitar or to drums. Or when some promoters want to be progressive and support female musicians but end up ghettoizing them.
Or Violinist Renee Baker who addresses the historical role of women supporting partners at the expense of their own careers:
A part of me just decided that I could support other artists but my talents would not take a back seat for the sake of saving someone else's ego. I believe men expect to be supported and women don't expect success.
And there are moments of plain heartfelt advice. Says pianist Marilyn Crispell:
My advice to women or men who are trying to live the life of an artist is just to be true to yourself. Follow your heart, and do the best you can. It's probably not going to be easy, financially, emotionally, physically, but if it's something you NEED to do because you can't imagine not doing it and feel driven from the deepest part of your being, you will find some way to do it.
Without a running narrative or an attempt by the editors to intervene, they let their subject's word's fill the page. Some don't even answer the questions as much as improvise off of them like flutist Nicole Mitchell's story telling appraoch. Typographic changes indicate the answers to different questions, and through it, the book ceases to be a Q&A and rather becomes a musical text. The strands of thoughts flow together and apart, creating their own vignettes, clouds of thoughts, and articulated feelings.
The end result is a book that can be read as you please: be deep and methodical, connect the questions and answers, or let it flow around you, absorbing the text like sound. While not exactly focused on free-jazz, Giving Birth to Sound is an interesting book, built upon a simple concept that asks questions without solid answers, and asks you to examine attitudes and challenge perceptions.
Not exactly prolific this band: their first album "And The Missing R" dates from 2008 already, and now, seven years later we get their sophomore album, and that is many years too late, but their music is great. The band still consists of Belgian-Italian Daniele Martini on tenor sax, Belgian-Italian pianist Giovanni di Domenico, Portuguese bassist Gonçalo Almeida who resides in Rotterdam, and Portuguese drummer João Lobo. The first track, "Non Negative Python", is a slow intimate and intense piece, that starts with a minimalst piano intro with sparse notes and without clear rhythm, bass and drums limiting themselves to add accents and color, creating an eery yet gentle atmosphere. Then after some eight minutes, the tenor joins for slow wailing sounds, with sustained notes, increasing the tension even more, encouraging drums and bass to become adventurous and investigative, and the piano's repetitive percussive almost one-chord hammering changes the context again, forcing the sax to become repetitive too, and the whole piece turns again heads to tail, with the eery yet gentle piano intro ending the long piece. "Eprobly Fowler" starts with completely suppressed sounds, like they're trying to escape from somewhere, but are prevented from doing so, giving a kind of suffocating feeling to the listener, yet gradually bass and drums emerge from the background, offering some sounds, and then the piano takes over halfway, for solo, then joined by the rest of the band, with a strong rhythmic pulse that suddenly releases the energy that was waiting to erupt. The album ends with "Monogamy Frightful", again a very intense and fierce workout, that lasts 'only' six minutes, yet the band goes at it with full energy and power. Again, one wonders why it takes so long for a band this good to publish new albums. They don't lack the creativity or the energy or inspiration to do so. True, the musicians have each individually been quite prolific lately as leaders or as members of various bands, so then can be forgiven, as long as they don't forget that Tetterapadequ also exists!
In one of my last reviews I highlighted the underrepresented German saxophonist Stefan Keune and praised NoBusiness for releasing his great trio album Fractions (with Dominic Lash and Steve Noble). Today, this review could be called Part II of a mini series about German musicians that deserve more attention and which NoBusiness has taken under their wings (Part III will follow in autumn).
Trombonist Paul Hubweber (born 1954) is one of the most remarkable players of the second generation in German free jazz. He has worked with many great European improvisers, e.g. with Alexander von Schlippenbach’s Globe Unity Orchestra, Peter Kowald, John Butcher, Martin Theurer, Paul Lytton, Jaap Blonk and recently with young pianist Philip Zoubek.
Hubweber’s work mainly contains solo and duo recordings on which he often experiments with electrified trombone and additional effects like tube screamer, echolette or harmonizer.
Around the turn of the century he started PAPAJO, a trio consisting of himself (Paul), Paul Lovens (dr) and John Edwards (b), with which he released two excellent records on EMANEM and Cadence. However, Hubweber’s music is rather poorly documented (discogs lists just 16 albums).
Therefore it is all the more welcome that this release presents him as part of a generation-spanning project with Frank Paul Schubert (as, ss), Alexander von Schlippenbach (p), Clayton Thomas (b) and Willi Kellers (dr). They called their recording Intricacies, which is an almost programmatic title since it’s a lesson in filigree playing, in listening and stepping back. And it is also an album about taking chances and elegant transitions.
When he was asked if it was even possible to make mistakes in free jazz it was Evan Parker who said that you could consider missing the right moment for a contribution as a mistake because this moment will never come back. Intricacies could be regarded as a perfect example of seizing the right moment and about the subtleties of improvising. The musicians have a feel for the right tone, they build their contributions on excellent skills and on “the capability of making connections with their instruments, of matching, complementing or contrasting the timbres and textures of the other players“, as German critic Peter Niklas Wilson once put it.
Additionally, the whole set was carefully elaborated. The two long pieces on this album have a similar structure: At the beginning there are tutti improvisations (although of different intensity), followed by quieter passages of smaller formations, then there is room for solo parts (Hubweber in “Come To Blown“, Schlippenbach and Schubert in “Intricacies“ – all three are wonderful). Then the tracks seem to fray or even collapse, but at the end the musicians succeed in building up tension again before the whole band comes together to end each piece in a finale furioso.
What is also exceptionally great is the fallback on jazz history, respectively on sets of criteria the players have established in their career. Schlippenbach, for example, starts the second piece as he has often started the second set of a Schlippenbach Trio gig – by playing the interior of the piano using mellets. He also displays his passion for Thelonious Monk during his solo in the title track and when sax, bass and drums drop in giving the track additional drive we are listening to classical hard bop – wild, jazzy, elegant. Intricacies offers a lot free jazz aficionados like: outstanding interplay, energetic outbreaks, introspective moments, harmonic twists and even classic melodic swing interludes. Plus, if you were not familiar with him before, you can discover an underestimated trombonist. Intricacies was recorded in Berlin’s jazz club B-Flat in February 2014 and is available on double CD. You can buy it from the label www.nobusinessrecords.com.
Double-Basse is the duo of Benjamin Duboc and Jean-Luc Petit. We’ve heard from this duo before on Duboc’s Primare Cantus, but here Petit trades his saxophones down to contrabass clarinet. Needless to say, This is Not Art dwells resolvedly in the lower registers.
Without regular exposure, it’s easy to forget how powerful contrabass clarinet is in the hands of a musician like Petit—at times massive and woody, like creaking sequoias, more fluid in others, the rippled surface of a pitch black pool. Duboc is just as versatile a bassist, and he and Petit work around the edges of their instruments, sounding against the timeworn arcade and into the vault of Eglise Saint-Martin. This is Not Art is most effective in its quieter moments, such as the opening and closing minutes of “Craftsmen, Pt. 1,” which loses much of its nuance when the volume increases. Perhaps surprising are Duboc’s vocalizations about halfway through—if not homage, then certainly the quiet influence of Léandre. “Craftsmen, Pt. 2” is a little more consistent in mood than the first piece, rumbling and percussive to start, with tongues slapping reeds and bows slapping string.
The album and track titles, as well as Julien Palomo’s liner notes, make it clear that This is Not Art is a paean to the craft of the instrumentalist: reclaiming music through improvisation, pulling it down from the lofts of culture and back into the hardworking hands of music-makers. A title like “This is Not Art” is to some extent tongue-in-check, but the underlying critique is sound. Double-Basse’s free improvisation is well-positioned to argue that the abstract concerns of aesthetics often side-step the more fundamental—even ontological—pursuit of craftsmanship. We all do well to remember that improvisation is bleeding edge musicianship. Risky. Physical. A product of the will, talent, and passion of musicians toiling in a precarious present moment. This is Not Art emphasizes the doing over what has been done, the act of making, rather than the idolatry of what has been made.
This is Liberty Ellman’s first solo release since 2006’s Ophiucus Butterfly and although it has been a long time coming it has been well worth the wait. As a long-standing member of Henry Threadgill’s Zooid it is not surprising that he brings some of these elements into his own music. With a crack band consisting of Steve Lehman on alto saxophone, Jonathan Finlayson on trumpet, Jose Davila on tuba and trombone, Stephan Crump on bass, and Damion Reid on drums, the guitarist delivers eight originals that are as consistent in artistic endeavour as they are diverse in mood and musical content.
The first track “Supercell” with it’s funky drum pattern and syncopated tuba line instantly conjures up a Threadgill-like feel where jagged rhythmic lines are well oiled and made to groove whilst the saxophone, trumpet and guitar initiate trading short phrases before Ellman excellently opens out his playing with some slick chromatic runs that pour from his guitar. The piece ends with a strong punctuated motivic line from the band whilst Lehman and Ellman, in unison, play a rapid syncopated melody over the top that is beautifully executed. “Furthermore” then offers a great contrast with it’s less overtly rhythmic feel and its open form that allows the individual musicians to really express themselves through their playing as if trying to reach some pinnacle of ecstasy. Whilst “Rhinoceros” grunts along with it’s tuba line that conjures up images of the powerful beast at the beginning before losing some of its programmatic content as the piece develops. Not being frightened to bring in some different sounds Ellman subtly introduces some effected textures into the background as washes of colour, which is also noticeable on the last track “Enigmatic Runner” with it’s inclusion of electronic drum ‘n’ bass type patterns. Liberty Ellman expertly weaves his melodic guitar lines through and around these rhythms to create a coherent and exciting finale to the album. He mainly plays with a warm, smooth tone to his guitar but isn’t averse to overdriving the sound on particular moments and when the piece demands it.
The ensemble playing on Radiate is right on the money and the band groove, swing and motor along on tunes whilst leaving plenty of room for exploratory playing and solos. Liberty Ellman is a fantastic free-jazz guitarist, composer and band leader, who has put together a really great album that contains a focus on a particular style and sonorousness whilst sounding liberating and fresh. Fans of Threadgill’s Zooid, melodic free jazz guitar and well thought out creative music making will want to hear this and hopefully not have to wait so long for a follow-up.
Great musicians are often less skillful than mediocre ones. Proficiency is no guarantee of quality. Peter Brötzmann – who is quite candid about his technical shortcomings – is a good example. His limitations are his strengths: an expressive rawness free of any suggestion of slickness or flim flam. This can be heard most starkly in his solo recordings, now a significant body of work ranging from Solo (FMP, 1976) through Nothing To Say: A Suite of Breathless Motion Dedicated to Oscar Wilde (FMP, 1996) and Petroglyphs (Long Arms Records, 2004) to Solo + Trio Roma (Les Disques Victo, 2012) to which there can now be added Münster Bern, possibly the most impressive yet. The performance was given during the Festival for Improvised Music in October, 2013 at the Münster (Cathedral) of Bern: a generous acoustic in which the full colour and nuances of Brötzmann’s playing are revealed, as seldom before.
There was a time when Brötzmann’s music quite consciously rejected tradition, as if starting from a clean slate, and favoured the anarchic. This reflected a cultural temper – more emotional than aesthetic – particular to post-war Germany, as well as the internal dynamics of his trio with Han Bennink and Fred Van Hove, but he has long since moved on from this. In his solo work, it seems that we’re getting Brötzmann at his most personal, free of any responsibility other to hone his music, dig deeper and explore his own history. His solo recordings are full of allusions to the music he heard in his youth and the great jazz and bluesmen of the past. In the closing section of the otherwise frantic ‘Frames of Motion’ from Solo + Trio Roma, he seeks solace in the ballad ‘Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams’ (originally recorded by Bing Crosby); and on Solo At Dobialab (Dobialabel, 2012) – unfortunately, marred by audience noise – Brötzmann’s now trademark ‘Master of a Small House’ theme keeps returning, like an idée fixe. These tunes clearly mean something to him, though it’s pointless to speculate what, but as Lester Young said: every solo should tell a story. Brötzmann’s music is not programmatic, but it’s clear that a drama is being played out that has not changed significantly in recent years – darkness against light. To a certain extent one knows what to expect, but listen closely and the course of the narrative is never quite the same.
There remains a scorched-earth aspect to his music – and a tone like sandpaper – but there’s something more. As Brötzmann has said: “I’m getting closer to my idea of how the horns should sound”. This process of refinement (a word not generally associated with his music) has brought with it a sense that he is accessing some of our most basic and ineffable feelings. If there’s an inspirational core to his music “it’s the blues that each person has inside”.
The performance begins with ‘Bushels and Bundles’ on the Hungarian tárogató. One sometimes feels that the basic unit of measurement in Brötzmann’s music is the human breath; specifically, what can be done in the time it takes him to breathe out. By all accounts, this has become more difficult as he gets older (the respiratory force is so great that it’s rumoured he once cracked a rib while playing) but his music has become more focussed, less discursive, as each new burst has to make its mark. Here, the ambience allows the intakes of breath to be heard clearly, and the buzzing see-saw sound of the instrument is accompanied by the groan of Brötzmann’s exhalations and the afterimage bouncing back off the cathedral walls. As the piece progresses, other subtleties are revealed – the variations of mouth on reed and the differences in contrasting registers – more pronounced than in Brötzmann’s other solo recordings, even those made in the studio.
The piece seems to be concluding, with a solemn statement of the ‘Master of a Small House’ theme – bathed in an acoustic halo – but any feeling of resolution is destroyed by Brötzmann’s splintered parodies of it. A new theme emerges, heavily distorted in the lower registers, which ascends until stated in its pure, unadulterated form in the treble, to close. If technique is equated with an ability to render a range of emotions with precision, Brötzmann has it in spades.
‘Crack In The Sidewalks’ shows his appreciation of the performing space and relishing the diverse textures and dynamic contrasts it provides. He starts by placing pauses (cracks?) between the alto’s lyrical phrases so they can be filled with the shimmer of reverberation – Brötzmann as Bruckner. He references the familiar tunes – Albert Ayler’s ‘Prophecy’, ‘Master’ and Don Cherry’s ‘Brown Rice’ (maybe even ‘Sentimental Journey’) – but in snatches, like dim memories, or heavily modified as in a dream. A lush tone is set against shrieks and gut-bucket blasts that ring out in the echo chamber of the Münster.
At just over eighteen minutes, it takes on an epic quality with a counterpoint of call and response, and builds into playing of such ferocious intensity that it’s difficult to know quite how to respond. There’s a directness and an emotional pitch to Brötzmann’s music that can be exhilarating but at times frightening, sometimes both. These extremes, which can also be expressed as a single voice, are at the heart of his music. The combined cry of anguish and joy typifies the blues, but arguably the merger of these sentiments also puts Brötzmann in the North European tradition of the Sublime – Edmund Burke’s “delightful” terror. (It should come as no surprise that Caspar David Friedrich, the great romantic landscape painter in whose work the forces of nature have an almost palpable presence, is one of Brötzmann’s favourite artists, after whom he named his son.)
On ‘Move and Separate’ Brötzmann takes up the bass clarinet, initially dividing his time between its extremes of register. In the bass he’s gruff but in the upper registers, soft and breathy, playing another of those melancholic tunes (‘Prophecy’) in a manner that suggests a pipe organ. These layers do indeed ‘move and separate’, as Brötzmann picks out new strata but ultimately, they blur and descend to the depths as a sinewy line of multiphonics and moans.
A Gothic cathedral is a place for music that has a gravity of purpose. Brötzmann dedicates ‘Chaos of Human Affairs’ to the drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson, with whom he played in Last Exit and toured as a duo, who had passed away just over a week before: “a good friend and one of my favourite colleagues”. On tenor, it is ‘Our Prayer’ – which was performed by the Ayler quartet at the funeral of John Coltrane – played nobly and in a coruscating tone. Gradually, clouds pass over and the sky darkens until the tune is almost lost, but the sun breaks through for two final statements of the theme: first defiant then conciliatory. A moving and fitting lament.
The performance closes with ‘The Very Heart of Things’, a revealing title as it’s actually Ornette Coleman’s ‘Lonely Woman’, a frequent encore. Coleman’s plaintive theme is played simple and straight, then repeated with heavy vibrato. It becomes more abrasive, and is eventually warped and fragmented beyond recognition, but Brötzmann closes by playing the tune as he opened. Whether we’ve ended at the place we began “And know the place for the first time” or somewhere else altogether, I cannot say.
Brötzmann’s music can be bleak, but there’s a beauty in it. I’m reminded of comments made by the playwright Harold Pinter, in a letter to a friend, about Samuel Beckett:
“The further he goes, the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, dogmas, tracts, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement…He’s not fucking me about, he’s not leading me up any garden, he’s not slipping me any wink, he’s not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basin full of breadcrumbs. He’s not selling me anything I don’t want to buy. He doesn’t give a bollock whether I buy or not. He hasn’t got his hand over his heart.
Well, I’ll buy his goods hook, line and sinker because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty. His work is beautiful.”
The first time I heard an album with cellist Matt Turner, was on Ken Schaphorst's wonderful "Indigenous Technology", then some years later on the equally wonderful "To The Moon" with Jean-Marc Foltz and Bill Carrothers, two albums on which the cello's lyricism adds a great quality to the beautiful compositions.
In 1999 he released his first solo cello album "The Mouse That Roared", on which the instrument is still used in a very conventional way, bowed and very lyrical, even if he dares color outside the lines from time to time.
Now, on his second solo album, Turner overthrows all conventions, beginning by stripping the hairs of his bow, and playing the strings with the naked wood of his bow. Second, he does no effort at all to sound lyrical, quite to the contrary, his bowing results in dark, sometimes industrial sounds that resonate minimally yet have deep impact, sometimes even animal growls that unleash the most hidden side of the instrument, or repetitive washing sounds of waves coming out of the depths of its wooden body, or even some noise of basic organic 'humanness', you can wonder what it is or what it sounds like, but it is abstract and full of life, full of surprises, even if all the sounds are muted with a dryness that takes out all the fluidity that you associate the instrument with.
You cannot compare his playing to Okkyung Lee, that other iconoclast of the instrument, because Turner is not violent or exuberant or emotionally expressive, no, his approach is incredibly disciplined and focused, played with calm determination to bring other things to life than the instrument has ever done before.
You will need very open ears to appreciate the other sounds of the cello.
The great thing about improvised music is its openness to other genres and styles, its basic inclusiveness often resulting in new and fascinating music, as on this wonderful album, an adjective to be taken in its original sense of being "full of wonder", offered to us here by Albrecht Maurer on violin, Mat Maneri on viola and Lucian Ban on piano, hailing respectively from Germany, the United States and Romania. All three musicians have made a comparable musical journey starting with a classical education, then shifting to the more open ground of jazz and modern classical music, atonal composition or experimental music.
The result is that all three find each other blindly, speaking the same language and easily shifting from one style to another in a seamless fashion, presenting music as a great whole without distinctions, offering us romantic moments interspersed with more hectic microtonal excursions or intense adventures into new realms. The basis is always a minimal agreement on a theme and a structure, but then they move this theme forward, expand on it, and make it all sound so natural, with beautiful improvised passages flowing organically forward, often in relatively compact pieces of around four to five minutes, each with their own character and approach.
As said, a 'wonderful' album full of musical treats.
Rhodri Davies on electric harp, and John Butcher on saxophones bring us a fantastic thirty-five minutes of forward-thinking music, a collaboration with sound technician Chris Watson.
The somewhat complex process was the following : "In January 2014, together with sound recordist Chris Watson, Butcher and Davies visited Routing Lynn, an area of ancient rock carvings in Northumberland, northern England. In this natural setting, Davies and Butcher played music and Watson recorded. Two months later, at a festival in Gateshead, England, Davies and Butcher performed along with the 4-channel playback of the recording made by Watson in Routing Lynn. The performance is documented on this CD as a single 35-minute track. The instrumental sounds blend with the sounds of nature (water, warbling birds) from this area of ancient rock".
The result is quite interesting and fascinating. The two musicians interact with their previous recording and with the sounds of nature, giving feedback (literally and electrically) to birds and water as if they are all part of one organic and natural sound. Butcher's saxes can flutter like birds, but he is equally capable of long extended drone-like sounds, and Davies harp, with electronics, is as we know, unlike any harp sound you've heard before. The two artists blend these sounds into moments of quiet contemplation alternated by moments of heightened frenzy. You also get confronted with the paradoxical juxtaposition of sounds recorded indoors (more intimate) and outdoors (more expansive), yet presented simultaneously.
The amazing natural environment of Routing Lynn, with its cascades and incomprehensible but beautiful rock carvings, finds a great musical extension in this album, which is equally profound, with a touch of mysticism, reverence and wonder. Music to experience.
This is no doubt the most beautiful album I have heard this year, and maybe even in many years. It is a chamber jazz quartet with Luis Vicente on trumpet, Theo Ceccaldi on violin and viola, Valentin Ceccaldi on cello and voice, and Marcelo Dos Reis on guitar and prepared guitar. You will recognise the similarity with the band "Deux Maisons" who already released "For Sale", a magnificent album, earlier this year, but now we have the minor change of percussion being exchanged for guitar.
What I wrote some years ago for "Clocks & Clouds" another band with Luis Vicente, is also valid for this one : "You can rationalise it any way you want, but some people just have 'it', and this 'it' is the unnameable gene of musical sensitivity, the undecipherable element of sonic quality, the unfathomable depth of creative art, the enigmatic possession of sound, the ineffable mysticism of spontaneous interaction, the puzzling poetry of polychromatic pointillism, the baffling blasts of beatic beauty, the hermetic harmonies of hoarse hymns, the syncretic swing of soaring songs. You get it. These guys have it. In spades."
On "Green Leafs" (sic), the three string instruments offer a backdrop of hypnotic intensity for the soaring trumpet, if they are not engaged in some fierce battles around a tonal center.
"Timber Bells" starts with melancholy or even romantic violin, with sparse plucked cello sounds, opening a strange vibrating and hesitating dialogue with the trumpet, slowly evolving into "Some Trees", on which muted and highly resonating attacks on the acoustic guitar change the nature of the music, allowing the dark cello in with more voice and power, while the violin keeps on its eery high flight. Contrasts between light and darkness emerge, between vulnerability and solidity, a context which turns completely into a wild frenetic collision between all four instruments, wild and energetic.
"Wooden Floor" is more abstract, beginning with an intro with high intervals, supported by arpeggiated chords on the guitar, and when violin and trumpet find each other in high repetitive and almost identical phrases, the tension mounts, the energy builds up, as if agony and despair drive the sounds inexorably forward, unwilling but relentlessly, turning into some magnificent symphony of purity with the soaring violin trying to escape the dark undercurrent created by the other instruments, then the intensity disappears and muted horn and muted guitar strings dialogue over a bowed cello, full of deep emotions and quiet resignation, almost bluesy and one of the most beautiful trumpet-cello duets ever heard, until the trumpet goes into mute squeals of pain, and guitar and violin join again, again altering the atmosphere into a more soothing and appeasing finale of subtle low density interaction.
"Lumber Voice", the last track, starts with viola, and the acoustic guitar offers a rhythmic and harmonic foundation for the trumpet to join. The intensity increases, as do the emotions, especially because of Vicente's wonderful and soulful trumpet playing, contrasting strongly with Theo Ceccaldi's repetitive and austere viola phrases. And then, all of a sudden, a human voice comes up, no two voices, wordless and serene and solemn, humanising the improvisation even more, increasing the pitch and intensity into high wails, the crying of humanity, utterly devastating and unnerving.
What more can I say? This is one of the best albums I've heard in many years, an incredibly strong combination of avant-garde form with deep and soulful emotions, full of rich ideas, superb musicianship and interaction. It is relatively unique in its musical vision, full of contrasts of light and darkness, tight interplay and incredible focus within the improvisations. The combination of classical sounds with jazz, all brought in a free improv mode, and turning it all into something new, something unheard, is amazing. I seem to run out of superlatives to describe what I'm hearing.
