Tiziano Tononi and Southbound - Trouble No More... All Men Are Brothers (Long Song Records, 2017) ****

By Lee Rice Epstein

A founding member of Italian Instabile Orchestra, drummer Tiziano Tononi has a knack both for re-arranging songs to adapt to his diverse ensembles, and his Southbound octet is no exception. In addition to Tononi on drums and percussion, there’s Emanuele Passerini on soprano and tenor; Piero Bittolo Bon on alto, bass clarinet, and flutes; Emanuele Parrini on violin and viola; Carmelo Massimo Torre on accordion; Joe Fonda on both acoustic and electric bass; Pacho on congas, bongos, and percussion; and Marta Raviglia on vocals. Any tribute to the Allman Brothers needs to bring a mighty rhythm section, and Tononi, Pacho, and Fonda sound tremendous here, driving the band through a woolly, funky take on Allman’s blues-rock. Torre fills in the chordal middle on accordion, and Passerini, Bon, and Parrini play lead on most of the album.

Trouble No More… All Men Are Brothers opens with a stellar, genderbent take on two Allman Brothers classics, “Whippin’ Post” and “Midnight Rider.” Raviglia sings lead. In addition to being a woman singing lines written by and for a man, she flips the phrasing on a lot of signature lines, giving a fresh reading to lyrics I’ve heard dozens upon dozens of times. “Whippin’ Post” is atmospheric and rich, and “Midnight Rider” is barely recognizable. The band takes most of the trademark elements, the guitar riff and shuffle beat, and replaces them with an arrangement that highlights the weariness of rebellion.

Tononi composed three songs for the album, including “Requiem for Skydog,” a folkish tribute to guitarist Duane Allman, whose professed admiration for John Coltrane and Miles Davis (particularly, Kind of Blue) creates an interesting feedback loop, with his music now re-arranged for a jazz ensemble. Fonda takes a solo near the end that starts as a duet with Tononi, before the drummer gently drifts away in the final minute. It’s a lovely moment, providing the slightest of breaths before the final burner of a trio: “You Don’t Love Me,” “Soul Serenade,” “You Don’t Love Me (Glorious Ending).” Raviglia returns, again bending the lyrics to her style and Tononi’s hard-driving swing. Fabio Treves guests on harmonica, giving “You Don’t Love Me” one of the more traditional-sounding interpretations on the album, until the bottom drops out midway through and Passerini and Bon take an improvised sax-only duet that leads into a Dixieland coda.

I started this review a couple of weeks before Gregg Allman died, unexpectedly, in May. As with his tributes to Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Tonini’s celebration of the Allman Brothers Band’s music is joyful, sincere, and revelatory, and with the recent loss of Allman, suddenly timely.

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Tiago Morais Morgado - Viola Solos (Nachtstück Records, 2017)

By Stef

To round off the string of strings reviews, here is an interesting album of solo viola by Portuguese sound artist Tiago Morais Morgado. He has already released a number of albums with primarily electronic soundscapes that explore a broad variety of sonic textures. He is a kind of iconoclast, somebody with wild ideas and a strong willingness to break the boundaries of listening experiences. Musical genres are a platform to start with, or a wall to break through, using styles like synth-pop, retro-futurism and chill wave, as well as free improv and classical music. He started his formal musical studies in 2000, studying alto viola, music technology and musicology.

On this short album he brings us improvisations for viola solo, with an explicit reference to Bach's cello suites on the third piece "Minuets first Cello Suite", but then further expanding on the soaring lyrical patterns for his other improvisations. It is a reference which is harsh and at times even violent, but also brought with a delight in the music and an equally powerful lyricism and sensitivity. Purists will cringe at his abrasive and raw sound, which is my opinion also part of the fun. He respects the music for the right reason: for its jubilating pleasure and lyrical dance of joy.  

Listen and purchase from Bandcamp.

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Eyvind Kang & Jessika Kenney - Reverse Tree (Black Truffle, 2016)

By Stef

On the fringes of the music we usually review, here is a wonderful album that merges improvisation with Asian influences and folk music, together with contemporary techniques.

The first side of the album is a long composition by Eyvind Kang, called "Thoughts On Being Exiled To The Frontier, For Lord Wei", with Hildur Guðnadóttir on electric cello, Eyvind Kang on viola, Ilan Volkov on violin, Jessika Kenney on voice and Oren Ambarchi and Stephen O'Malley on electric guitar. The music develops slowly, at a zen-like pace, creating space for sounds to resonate, to be listened at. It is minimal, with stretched tones interspersed with raindrop-like pizzi sounds, without any hurry or intensity. The end result is one of calm beauty, as if nothing needs to be happening, but just does.

On the B-Side, the composition "Elm, is penned by Jessika Kenney and has a larger band, with  Sæunn Thorsteinsdóttir on cello, Eyvind Kang and Melia Watras on viola, Brittany Boulding Breeden and Michael Jinsoo Lim on violin, and Jessika Kenney and Nova Ruth on voice, with the support of Gamelan Pacifica, a gamelan ensemble. The piece starts in the same quiet way, with long horizontal development of bowed single tones and shimmering voices, which come to a quiet almost stand-still before other instruments join to weave a denser soundscape over which the voices soar in increasingly higher notes, singing a "19th century Surakarta poem (attributed to Mangkunegara IV). The poem deals with the idea of a form of knowledge achieved through deeds, as a practice and state of the heart". 

If their previous collaborations had stronger folk influences between the viola and the voice, here the endeavour has more depth, more gravitas, and despite the apparent monotony, a lot is happening with shifting tone colours and deep resonance. Lie down on the couch. Close your eyes and listen.  

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Robert Landfermann & Elisabeth Coudoux - Kehdata (Klaeng, 2017)

By Stef

Could we possibly review three albums in the same week by German cellist Elisabeth Coudoux? Yes, we can. On this album she is improvising with her fellow countryman Robert Landfermann on bass, recorded at the famous Loft in Cologne in 2015.

Even if the label presents itself as a jazz label, the genre's specific characteristics seem to be absent here, except for the fact that the music is all improvised.

Their playing is very expressive, ranging from full-fledged drama over cautious sensitivity to total distress as on the long opening piece.

At times the music and the timbral explorations are baffling, when you hear multiphonics on the arco bass with very pure cello sounds in contrast, at other times both play on two strings creating unsuspected volume and density. "Hagel", the second piece is absolutely amazing, evokating a hail storm in all its intensity and violent beauty that gradually subsides. I'm not sure how they do it, but they sound like more than two instruments. Then "Shelving" is simple and calm intimate pizzi, no drama, no intensity, in stark contrast with the very short "Kalt" that sounds like stretching your nerves and tendons, while "Kleben", with its deep and long bowed sounds is dark and foreboding.

Sounds merge and instruments disappear. Who does what and how? It doesn't matter. Just listen to what you hear. Forget rationalising it. Listen to the sheer beauty of it. Sometimes abstract, sometimes deeply emotional, always inventive, physically intense, and focused on creating new sounds together and unpredictable, new listening experiences.

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Double double basses

By Stef

In March we already reviewed the wonderful double bass duet between William Parker and Stefano Scodanibbio, simply called "Bass Duo". But we love the bass, its sound and its possibilities, so here are some more recent double bass duo albums, interestingly enough by the same musicians, that we wanted to make sure you are aware of.

The artists are Raoul van der Weyde from The Netherlands, and Gonçalo Almeida from Portugal. Van der Weide is thirty years older than Almeida, and they have a very different musical background. The former played amongst others in the Burton Greene Quartet and various bands led by Dutch jazz pianist Guus Janssen. Almeida is based in The Netherlands, and his musical output is becoming quite prolific in the last years, playing in bands such as Tetterapadequ, Lama, Spinifex, Albatre, and recently in a trio called The Selva. 

Both musicians seem to have found an interesting collaboration, one that started years ago in The Netherlands, and resulted in their first album "Earcinema" in 2015. They find each other in instanteneous creation, in-the-moment music. They don't seem to like rules and borders and patterns. We don't either. They seem to like creative insights, uncharted areas and intense interaction. So do we.

Duas Margens - Live at Pletterij (Cylinder, 2017)

The album could not start any better than it does: with deeply resonating sounds of two double basses, hesitating, probing, reaching out, sensing the other one and creating a common flow. It is a short album, only 26 minutes long, with one single improvisation between Gonçalo Almeida and Raoul van der Weide, and recorded over a year ago at The Pletterij in Haarlem, The Netherlands. The title means "two banks" (of a river) as the cover illustrates. Even if they come from different angles, each with their own sound, they move in the same direction, creating the river together, with twists and turns and rapids and quieter passages, with rocks and boulders occasionally. A challenging and rewarding ride.


Raoul van der Weide & Gonçalo Almeida - 8 Pictures (Nachtstück Records , 2017)

We find both musicians back on this album which is a little longer, with 8 improvisations, possibly inspired by the 8 pictures of the title and the cover art. Not much information is offered by the label, but that should not concern us. The difference with "Live At The Plettery" is that each track starts with a different approach, resultig in more variation and different dynamics. At times the changes within a single track lack some unity, but it has a lot of strong moments.

For anyone interested in double bass in improvised settings, both albums can be recommended.

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Violin & Bass

By Stef

Vilde&Inga - Silfr (Sofa, 2017) ****½

Three years ago I praised ECM for having had the courage to release Makrofauna, a daring musical exploration by two young Norwegian musicians, Vilde Sandve Alnæs and Inga Margrete Aas, who met during studies at the Norwegian Academy of Music and started to play together in 2010. In autumn last year they received The Lindeman Prize for Young Musicians, a significant music prize in Norway. Despite the quality of their music and the general acclaim for their debut album, it took several years for the second album which is now released on Sofa. 

Each composition has its specific angle of attack or musical concept, which can be based on relentless and repetitive violin phrases as on "Silfr", the title track (see video below), with the bass offering some slower moaning ground tones or joining in with the frenzy. Things change on the second piece, which is more subdued, quiet and slow-paced, now with the bass laying the foundation for eery flageolet sounds by the violin. The third piece, "Urtjern", is completely built around the contrast of low and high tones, almost flute-like, sparse, precise, slightly wailing over the rhythmic throbbing of the bowed bass. "Røjkkvart" starts with unvoiced rumble and scrapings, and the occasional pluck on a bass string, capturing the attention and building the tension and it stays that way, full of expectation but it never gets resolved. "Sprø Glimmer" is a little mad and playful, with little pizzi notes jumping around like crazy, only to be calmed down by some low bass strokes. "Karbontiden" starts with slow beautiful arco, both instruments together almost sounding like an organ, with double stops on the strings, and gradually distortion sets in, with notes shifting off-kilter, timbre transforming from pure tones to scraping, but every so slightly, controlled and well-paced, until the original fluency has changed into a walk through deep mud. 

Most track titles refer to minerals and metals, including silver, smoky quartz, mercury, gold, mica, or to other ancient natural forms, such as "Urtjern" or ancient lake (which actually exists in Norway) or "Karbontiden" which is the Carboniferious period some 350 million years ago. At the same time they use words like "flimmer" (flicker), "skinnende" (shining) or "glimmer" and the choice of titles all stay within the same realm of hard and basic matter, as core ingredients whose existance creates a reflection, an intangible perception of light and lightness. The tension between the hard and the ethereal, between the everlasting and the ephemeral is what this music is all about. 

I can only recommend this very highly. 

Gunda Gottschalk & Peter Jacquemyn - E Pericoloso Sporgersi, Ma Non Prohibito (El Negocito, 2017) ****

In 1999, Gunda Gottschalk and Peter Jacquemyn released "E Pericoloso Sporgersi" (re-issued in 2009), a first duet between violin and bass, offering seventeen short improvisations, and which was awarded a prize in the young artist forum of the International Society for New Music. The title means"Leaning Out (the window) Is Dangerous", the first sentence in Italian most European kids learned when travelling the continent by train several decades ago, as did your servant. Today, they take it a step further, "leaning out is dangerous, but it's not forbidden", a title that gives a good idea of where the duo is taking us, far beyond the limits of safety. 

And that's how the album starts, with "Viaggio 1" as a staccato dialogue of bowed strings, with short bursts and physical scrapings of strings and wood, and even when Jacquemyn brings something that ressembles a pattern, Gottschalk keeps delivering short and violent attacks with her bow, relentlessly and full of raw energy. 

Gunda Gottschalk is classically trained, yet she switched quite rapidly to improvised and contemporary music, having played and released albums with Peter Kowald, who was also one of the mentors of Belgian bassist Peter Jacquemyn, a self-taught musician and visual artist. 

"Viaggio 2", the second piece is of a totally different nature. The dark tension of the first part gradually shifts to minimalist repetitive phrases, uncanny and bizarre, over which Jacquemyn sings his wordless overtone singing, learned from a Mongolian tuva singer. 

The long third piece shifts the whole time between moods, with even passages on the violin that could be labeled as melancholy or sad, or quiet and subdued, brought by a more paced and less intense dialogue, with both musicians often moving the music forward in the same direction. It offers a gentler side to Jacquemyn's playing, but one of strong interplay and joint musical vision. 

I will not go into the detail of each track - four more to go - of completely improvised music, all called Viaggio (journey" in Italian). There is no plan, no concept, just interaction in the moment, and the duo varies a lot. They tease, they battle, they walk hand in hand, they quarrel and they find beauty, only to tear it to pieces with as much pleasure it took to create it, but most of all they explore, the unearth sounds to show the other, who gets inspired to do the same or to challenge, but they travel on the same journey, they make the journey. It's not easy to be invited with them, but once you are, it's a rewarding trip, participating in the creation of music. 

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Garth Knox & The Saltarello Trio - Leonard, The Book Of Angels, Vol. 30 (Tzadik, 2017)

By Stef

In late 2005, John Zorn started with his Book of Angels project, as part of his Tzadik label's Archival Series. In the series, he offers other musicians the opportunity to present their take on his Masada songbook. The second release was the excellent Azazel by the Masada String Trio with Greg Cohen, Mark Feldman and Erik Friedlander, who actually already performed as an ensemble on the album "The Circle Maker" in 1998, and later on Zorn's 50th birthday celebration series in 2004. The music offers this wonderful mixture of klezmer, classical chamber music and jazz sensitivities.

Now, so many years later, there is another string ensemble taking up the challenge: Garth Knox and the Sartarello Trio, with the leader on viola and viola d'amore, Sylvain Lemêtre on percussion, Julia Robert on viola and viola d'amore, and Agnès Vesterman on cello. Knox is better known from his classical work with the Arditti Quartet and the Ensemble InterContemporain.

Knox takes the Masada material and infuses it with classical sound purity, together with medieval, baroque, classical and contempary music as a wonderful counterbalance to the melancholy klezmer scales and melodies. The result is music full of variation and sudden changes in tonality and mood, full of drama, playfulness, some sadness and darkness but brought with an overall smooth and welcoming warmth.

The Book of Angels series remain a little too programmatic, so this is far from the raw authenticity of the music we tend to review, but it sounds fresh, well performed and arranged, not very demanding for the listener and a real pleasure for the ear.

On a side-note, the album is called Leonard, which does not sound like a very biblical name for a (fallen) angel, since it comes from the old German "Lewenhart" (Leeuwenhart in Dutch, Lionheart in English), yet there is a demon with that name, the three-horned goat from the Dictionnaire Infernal, published in 1818, a book that may be a further source for more Book of Angels to come ...

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Biliana Voutchkova - Modus of Raw (Evil Rabbit, 2016) ****

By Eyal Hareuveni

Biliana Voutchkova is a classically-trained violinist-vocalist-composer-free-improviser, who describes beautifully her art in a short poem:

…my house is this huge wide
land of music,
with many rooms and many
open spaces,
with comforting cozy beds of
notes to rest on,
with cushy pillows of
silence all over,
with slow showers of sounds to
soak my body in,
with boiling tea pots at dark
corners seducing me
with their lovely melodies to sip from
their complex, but simple pleasure,
with loooo-oo-ong corridors of everlasting drowns
where entering eternity
comes natural...
there, in that house, i live my
exuberant life...

Voutchkova comes from a family of Bulgarian musicians, spent 14 years studying in the United States, where she expanded her interests in contemporary music and improvisation, and now resides in Berlin. She performs new works by contemporary composers for violin, often written specially for her, and works with performances work, reaching into the realm of dance and movements. She has collaborated with many innovative ensembles as Ensemble Modern, Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop, Zeitkratzer and the composers-improvisers Splitter Orchestra, co-founded her dance-music groups GRAPESHADE and OSM (Open Sound & Movement collective) and performs regularly with clarinet player Michael Thieke (the duo released Already There, Flexion records, 2013).

For many years Voutchkova refused to release any of her improvisations, “believing that the live experience is so strong and vivid that it can never be recreated by a recording”. But on the summer of 2015 she was invited to a residency in the Swiss alps, where she enjoyed enough free time to think about her work and how she would like to continue. Being in nature all day also contributed to her decision to channel this creative energy and inspiration into a recording of playing solo constantly for about three hours, later edited down to the Modus of Raw.

Each of eight pieces suggests distinct ideas and sonic territory, all focused on her constant investigation on expanding the sonic possibilities of the violin while using an array of commanding, extended techniques, with her expressive voice. Voutchkova's art is totally personal, uncompromising, embraces chaos and weird, raw sounds and immediately gravitates for the most wildest terrains, but on the same time it is totally captivating with its great sense of invention and poetic playfulness. She moves freely from a disturbing drone, explored on the title-piece, to the twisted, layered melodies of the tensed and dramatic “Songs of Anxiety”, to a hyperactive blending of colliding bowing techniques on “Memory imprints” and sketching abstract sounds on exotic-sounding “Chaos & Beauty”.

The last two extended pieces offer more varied improvised strategies. “Gratitudes and sorrows” borrows techniques and ideas from the rich legacy of Norwegian hardanger fiddle, but juggles with the overtones and overlapping sounds in a complete different manner. Voutchkova fuses these sounds into a series of intense, strange-sounding yet equally-tempting shamanic dances. “Poschiavo medley”, after the Swiss Alpine town where she resided, weaves gently the local sounds of the city and nearby nature into a playful soundscpae where Voutchkova’s violin and voice attempt to assimilate with the winds, bird calls, church bells, patiently coloring and morphing the peaceful scenery with imaginative, new sounds and songs.

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Free Jazz on Air - June 16: Unsung Heros

Free Jazz on Air, co-hosted by Martin Schray, returns tomorrow at 11 p.m CET on German public radio station SWR 2 (Südwestrundfunk 2).

Martin will be joining host Julia Neupert on air for another hour of Free Jazz talk and music, about "Unsung Heroes," with music by Howard Riley, Ivo Perelman, Paul Dunmall, Ernesto Rodrigues, Nicole Mitchell and Lotte Anker.

A link to the show is available for on-demand listening for a week after the broadcast.

More info here.

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Solo cello

Elisabeth Coudoux - Some Poems (Leo, 2016) ****

German cellist Elisabeth Coudoux (née Fügemann) may not be known by many yet, but that will not take long anymore. She combines the solid technique of her classical training at the Carl von Weber Music School in Dresden with a strong-willed vision on improvised music. She is member of the Scott Fields Feartet, and of Zeitkratzer ("a perverse subversion of musical genres"), and several other ensembles, as the recently reviewed "The Octopus".

"Some Poems", her first solo project, is a winner. Like poems, the music is intimate, personal and deep, full of wonder and persistent discovery of one or the other musical aspect, as in the alternation between plucking and bowing on "Found Not", or repetitive phrases, as "In Sounding Bodies", leading to little surprises without loosing track of the direction she's taken. Her music is about her interaction with the instrument. It is physical, exploratory and interactive. She does not hesitate to go well beyond the boundaries of comfort, as in "In A Swaying Ship" or on "Besets" with its sliding overtones and out-of-tune instrument. Her music can be playful as "In A Faint Voice", of full of deep gravitas and shifting harmonies as on "Knut". At 2:24 on "Within The Sounding Body", you can hear faint pop music in the background (is it a car driving by, a mobile phone annoucing a caller? we don't know) but funnily it does not disturb the deliberate and electronically looped bowing of the piece, the only non-acoustic moment of the album.

I can only recommend this. She is strong. She has the skills, the character and the musical vision. This is her first appearance on this blog, but surely not the last one. Oh, and by the way, all the tracks together form a poem:

"A faint voice
found not
in sounding bodies

shaken boundary conditions
within the sounding body
in a swaying ship

Knut 
besets
me

Only time, no changes"


Fred Lonberg-Holm - Cabin, Cemetery, Forest (Flying Aspidistra, 2017)

Fred Lonberg-Holm no longer needs an introduction, but what is worth mentioning that his own label, called Flying Aspidistra, named after the George Orwell novel "Keep The Aspidistra Flying", has now put the entire catalogue on Bandcamp.  On the label, you will find other solo cello albums or string duets with Charlotte Hug, Carlos Zingaro, David Stackenäs. For those interested, he also has another Bandcamp website with even more music.

"Cabin, Cemetery, Forest" was recorded in 2009, and may have been released on CD before, although I couldn't find references to it. Now it's available digitally and that is good news. Lonberg-Holm is not a crowd-pleaser, and he even describes himself as an 'anti-cellist', applying a totally unconventional way of playing. His instrument groans, sighs, screams and sobs, sometimes in calm resignation, sometimes in full agony, but it never sings, it never dances, forget about harmony, peace and tranquility. The sounds are agitated, nervous, physical, full of turmoil and surprise, and move without an actual plan but pushed forward by the last-but-one sound in a kind of musical stream of consciousness. It is demanding listening, and I think you need the right context to give it the time it needs. If anything, no matter how often you listen to it, it will never sound familiar. And that's an achievement by itself, because that's where you need to be: out of your comfort zone.

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