Rob Mazurek – Rome (Clean Feed, 2017) & Chimeric Stoned Horn (Astral Spirits, 2017) ****½

By David Menestres

Rob Mazurek seems to have tapped an endless source of creativity. He’s been a major force in music since at least the mid-90s, leading the various incarnations of Chicago (and now Sao Paulo) Underground, his large ensemble Exploding Star Orchestra, among many other groups, and has appeared on a massive list of albums from people like Tortoise, Jim O’Rourke, Brokeback, Sam Prekop and more. In the past few years, Mazurek has turned to both solo performance and visual art, expanding his already forceful creative vision into new territories.

Rome

Rome was recorded in 2014 in the studios of Italy’s Rai Radiotre Suite Jazz with Mazurek performing on cornet, piano, and electronics. The influence of visual art is most obvious in the song titles that reference Cy Twombly, Caravaggio, and Fellini, but the influence isn’t as shallow as just song titles. One can feel the depth of Mazurek’s respect and admiration for these artists throughout the album. Rome opens with “Twombly at New Church,” a piano cluster followed by a beautifully unadorned cornet solo, the two instruments alternating throughout the piece. The cornet lines swirl like the endless circular lines Twombly used in work like Untitled (New York City) from 1968 and drip like the red paint of Untitled (Bacchus 1^st Version IV) from 2004. Twombly is also connected to Rome, having lived there for many years.

The subtle electronics of “Gazing Through Walls (Two Paintings By Caravaggio)” counterbalance the piano, both pointing toward the pathos of Caravaggio. The piece brings forth the darkness and vivid imagery of Caravaggio’s paintings without being merely programmatic music. “Gazing Through Walls” covers an impressive amount of space in its relatively brief six and a half minutes.

“King of Rome” is dedicated to Pino Saulo, the executive producer of the original radio session. The electronics sound almost like the work of Bebe and Louis Barron from the 1950s, which are overlaid with a scorching but restrained cornet solo. Around the 10-minute mark, the track takes an unexpected turn into highly rhythmic prepared piano for the last five minutes of the piece.

The final track “Sweet Life in Disrepair” is dedicated to the great director Federico Fellini, another longtime resident of Rome. The cornet feels like a noir-ish character, walking down empty streets in a trench coat, met by blank buildings and empty doorways, footsteps echoing along cobblestone streets. After a round of applause, Mazurek embarks on an intense piano solo. From the relatively spare beginning through clouds of tremolo almost reminiscent of Chris Abrahams. The cornet slowly slips back in, providing a coda to the track. “Sweet Life in Disrepair” alone is worth the price of the album.

Chimeric Sound Horn

Recorded in the wilds of western Texas at the Experimental Studio in Marfa, Chimeric Sound Horn is Mazurek digging deep into the dark side of electronics, using modular synths and samplers to mutate his piccolo trumpet and voice, breathing life into music that dances before your eyes. Most of the tracks are short, almost brutal slices of sound. With the exception of the opening cut “Arrival From a Distance,” the rest of the tracks are under four minutes, with half being under two. The album flows well together, shifting through an array of bright colors and thick textures that play across one’s tongue as it echoes through the ears. This album will give anyone synesthesia, if only for forty-one minutes.

Chimeric Sound Horn is an extension of an art exhibit at URDLA in France featuring Mazurek’s three-dimensional lithograph cutups. Interestingly, Morten Schneider’s liner notes name check Mark Rothko and Morton Feldman as influences upon Mazurek’s art and music. It’s a fun game to see if you can hear their looming presence. There are cassette players in the exhibit with copies of Chimeric Sound Horn waiting to be played. I wonder what it’s like to be assaulted by this music while wearing 3-D glasses and looking at Mazurek’s cutups?

Taken as a pair, Rome and Chimeric Sound Horn represent two of the many sides of Rob Mazurek, one of the more creative people working in sound and visual art. Both albums are worth repeated listening.

Another great album that Mazurek released this year is Blind Curves and Box Canyons, a series of duets with the equally creative Thollem McDonas, also recorded in Marfa. Revisit Philip Coombs’s review from June here.

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Barry Guy / Maya Homburger / Zlatko Kaučič - Without Borders... (Fundacja Słuchaj, 2017) *****

By Eyal Hareuveni

Without Borders... was inspired by a humble hope to rectify an urgent worldly problem - the plight of displaced refugees making their agonizingly slow walk to a more hopeful future. This title also represent beautifully the essence of this meeting between master double bass player Barry Guy, baroque violinist (and Guy’s partner) Maya Homburger, and Slovenian drummer percussionist Zlatko Kaučič, a meeting that dissolves the borders between contemporary composition and improvisation, between free-improvisation and real-time composition.

Kaučič invited Guy and Homburger to perform in Ljubljana on March 2016. The three musicians found out immediately that they shared many interests and concerns, and not only musical ones. Kaučič told Guy and Homburger that he lives close to one of the “corridors” where refugees cross on their way to Northern Europe. Soon, Guy, Homburger, and Kaučič decided to share the resonance of their awareness with the essential relief work of international agencies “whilst many politicians turn their back on the problems”. This album was Inspired also by a poem of Herman Melville - which is also used as a text for Steve Lacy’s “Art”, interpreted here: “In placid hours, well pleased we dream of many a brave unbodied scheme”.

The program is divided between re-arrangements of Guy compositions and free improvisations. The brief and intense “Shadow Fragment” and the extended “The Seeker and the Search”, originally pieces for violin and bass written for a project of New York-based artist Elana Gutmann, capture the unsettling atmosphere of this album. The three musicians shift constantly between a tense, dramatic interplay to a moving, compassionate chamber one. Kaučič improvised percussive work with Homburger interpretation of “Celebration”, originally composed for a solo violin, charges it with disruptive urgency. Kaučič joins Guy for another interpretation, “Peace Piece”, one of Guy’s most beautiful compositions, originally written for a solo bass. Here his contribution is more economic, adding subtle colors to the gentle, lyrical motifs of this composition.

The four “Footfalls” improvisations of Guy and Kaučič suggest even further the chaotic, intense inner turmoil experienced by the refugees. These improvisations correspond somehow with Samuel Beckett play by the same name, featuring an aged pacing woman in tattered nightwear dramatizing deterioration over four parts, each separated by chimes which grow fainter in each sounding. Kaučič idiosyncratic sonic palette, based on his unique instrumentation- ground drums, home-made instruments and zither - fits perfectly with the imaginative vocabulary of Guy and his original sense of invention. There are times when both sound as lost in each other’s restless, dramatic sonic universe - especially on the last, the, more reserved and cinematic “Footfalls IV”. Both become a newer, unified sonic entity that can expand or elaborate on any idea in an instant, transforming it to an altogether different motif.

The last piece, the cover of Lacy’s “Art” (from his album Momentum, 1987) does justice to this wonderful composition. “Art” offers music in its highest form and performance, arresting and provocative, even without Melville inspiring poem recited by Irene Aebi, “music to open up thoughts” as Guy suggests in his insightful liner notes.

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Muhal Richard Abrams (1930 - 2017)

Muhal Richard Abrams. Photo by Peter Gannushkin.

By Martin Schray

Today we received the message that the great pianist, clarinetist and composer Muhal Richard Abrams passed away at the age of 87.

Abrams was one of the pioneers of free jazz, especially the Chicago jazz scene wouldn’t be same without him. In 1962 he founded the Experimental Band, a highly influential (but unfortunately unrecorded) group that included freer musical forms and which served as a springboard for several groups like the Art Ensemble of Chicago. But the Experimental Band was far more than an orchestra that provided opportunities to make music, it was an institution which tried to bring musicians together as a collective in order to improve their economic and social situation, which is why it can be considered as the breeding ground for the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), whose first president Abrams became in 1965.

As a musician Muhal Richard Abrams was deeply influenced by Art Tatum, especially the pianist’s rhythmic concept of expansion and condensation. In general, he proposed a different way for playing the piano compared to Andrew Hill, Herbie Nichols or Cecil Taylor, his compositions and his touch were different, his music was referring back to Scott Joplin and yet it was very free as well. On the one hand, Abrams’ style has always been floating and lyrical, on the other hand it’s full of clusters, rich in contrast and constantly moving.

As a leader Abrams released outstanding albums like Levels and Degrees of Light (Delmark, 1968), Things To Come From Those Now Gone (Delmark, 1975) and Mama and Daddy (Black Saint, 1980). But I particularly love his contributions as a sideman or as a band member, for example on Anthony Braxton’s Three Compositions of New Jazz (Delmark, 1968, with Leroy Jenkins and Leo Smith), the Creative Construction Company’s self-titled debut (Muse, 1975) and Jack DeJohnette’s excellent Made in Chicago (ECM, 2015).

Or, as Vijay Iyer put it, he was a man who consistently built upon his previous achievements, his music embraced a trajectory of growth and discovery.

Mural Richard Abrams was young at heart and wise in time (the name of his 1970 Denmark recording). He will truly be missed.

Abrams was an active musician until the end, listen to a 2017 performance at the Ojay festival with Roscoe Mitchell and George Lewis:

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Michael Gregory Jackson – Spirit Signal Strata (Golden, 2017) ****

By Chris Haines

It seems that Michael Gregory Jackson is the best-kept secret of the free jazz guitar world.  Having played and recorded with Oliver Lake, notably on the albums Holding Together and the excellent live recording Zaki, MGJ (as I shall refer to him for brevity) has also produced a substantial back catalogue of solo work including the albums Clarity and the wonderful Gifts.  These earlier albums contained a much more avant-garde musical material, (although some might argue that Gifts was already moving toward a more straighter fusion sound), and focused on instrumental based pieces, whereas his later work moved into soulful song based compositions.  In recent years MGJ has released albums such as Liberty and After Before, which show a return to the emphasis on instrumental based pieces and his excellent improvised guitar playing that was such a feature of those early albums.  In Spirit Signal Strata we not only have a continuation of the exploration of this improvised element in MGJ’s music, but also as a guitar trio it contains the space for the music to really open up with his characteristic playing right at the forefront.

As a ‘live in the studio’ recording the playing has an edgy, fresh, and explorative sound to it, with all three musicians clearly carefully listening to one another due to the different sound textures that are created throughout the course of the album.  The first few pieces on the album have a more straight ahead feel to them including the beautiful slow blues ‘After Before (For K)’ originally from the album of the same name but this time arranged for the trio format.  Also from the same album is the fantastic ‘JcakJcak (for Ornette)’, a piece with a great head that moves between a hard-edged riff in straight time answered by a soft descending swung phrase.  What we get on the micro-level in this piece is explored on the macro-level with the overarching form replicating this idea with the improvised passages moving from a quick hard at it free-bop style excursion into a great laid-back funky groove after the return of the head.  MGJ lays down some lovely playing here, bluesy-based phrases extending into chromatic runs and punctuated with slightly dissonant chords.  After this we get an early piece of his, ‘Clarity 4’, taken from his debut solo album and given a slightly different feel by the nature of the trio.  The initial angular melody being explored by the group to great effect, with skittering rhythms from the drums, delicate bass harmonics, and volume swells from the guitar adding to the variety of sounds that are on offer in this piece.  ‘Spin’ is an interesting excursion into the use of synthesised sounds incorporating a squishy bass and a credible horn sound on MGJ’s guitar.  ‘Cortex Vortex’ also makes use of a breathy flute sound through a midi guitar set-up.  This is the longest track on the album at twelve-and-a-half minutes and starts with a pulseless soundscape of percussive sounds and bowed bass before picking-up in tempo and a delineating beat being introduced that gradually falls back into a slow groove, which MGJ makes the most of with some very explorative and free playing.

For fans of Michael Gregory Jackson’s improvised guitar playing this is the album that they’ve been waiting for him to make, with the guitar thrust to the fore by the very nature of the trio format along with pieces that are excellent vehicles for the jumping off point of improvised music-making.  With MGJ in such rich form let’s hope there’s more to come from this free jazz guitar maestro.

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Paula Shocron / Germán Lamonega / Pablo Diaz - Tensegridad (Hatology, 2017) ****½

By Paul Acquaro

I suppose it’s a bit of a conflict of interest to write this review since I also wrote the liner notes; however, since I've decided to barrel ahead anyway, I am going to further transgress and paraphrase liberally from the notes I wrote for the album. When I started on them, I took the opportunity to do Q&A's with the SLD trio's pianist Paula Shocron, drummer Pablo Diaz, and bassist Germán Lamonega, and what came out was a story of believing in your art, making connections, and a lot of perseverance. 

The SLD Trio is a group of young Argentian musicians, who along with a small, dedicated, and increasingly beset group of artists, are working to find a space for free improvisation in Buenos Aries. If you can, track down Jason Weiss’ excellent profile of the group and the Argentinian improvisational music scene in Wire 399. Here, you will meet two thirds of the trio along with other prominent players, whom are all interconnected … a term which brings me conveniently to the album's title Tensigridad. From the liner notes:

The term 'tensegridad' is the Spanish translation of the word 'tensegrity' - a portmanteau coined by the 20th Century inventor and visionary R. Buckminster Fuller, who in the 1960 combined the words "tensional" and "integrity". The term refers to the strength and internal cohesiveness of interconnected individual components. The pieces may or may not actually be connected directly, but they are a part of the web of interconnectedness that gives the whole structure its form and structure. A classic example of this term is the geodesic dome, a self-supporting structure that Fuller popularized.The term however, has traveled beyond architecture and into other disciplines like biology, where the term ‘biotensegrity’ is used to describe the body's muscular-skeletal system is a connection of muscle and bone that operates in a comparable manner. 

This concept to me is an apt description of the self-supporting community that is so key to creative/improvised music scene. I met the trio of them a couple years ago when they were visiting New York (part of an annual pilgrimage) after their last album release Anfitrion. They have slowly been integrating and extending the New York improvisation music scene, performing in the city and inviting musicians to perform in Buenos Aires.

Now, about the music ...

The album begins with Lamonega's solo bass introduction to the track ‘Vera’. His tone is rich, and the legato phrases and double-stops lay a strong foundation for his bandmates. When the other join, the piano’s hypnotic arpeggios and the solid pulse of the percussion generate a mounting intensity. Throughout, the motion is generated by the energy of repetition, growing every higher until it breaks, where at the end Lamonega is left alone, again, to end the track.

The Mal Waldron tune ‘Snake Out’ begins with Shocron concentrating on the piano’s lower register, her attack is sharp and determined. These are not delicate or tender melodies being expressed, rather the trio is making a bold musical statement. The interconnectedness of their approach is the focus here, and the intensity of the song is the result of years of close listening and strong reactions.

Skipping ahead, on the title track ‘Tensegridad’, Shocron is melodic and driving, the strident movement of the chords giving the song its geometric shape. A quick build-up ensues with Diaz’s drums follow along, reacting and ultimately reinforcing the angles, and finally hooking up with Lamonega’s brisk walking lines, which adds a heft to the captivating, and all to soon over, track.

While there are many other fine tracks to explore, like the humorous and infectious ‘Casa Rodante’ and the spoken word ‘Universe Tiene Sentido’, the track ‘Connie’- a tribute to Connie Crothers, the New York based pianist, composer, and educator who passed away in 2016 - is a heartfelt tribute from Shocron. The connection between these two pianists developed on the trio’s very first trip to New York several years ago, and the emotion that imbued Crother’s work has deeply affected Shocron. The track is the emotional highlight of the recording and the juxtaposition of intense feeling with quiet reflection is incredible effective.

This is a trio with a calling to reconnect and whether or not you buy into my interconnectedness blather, along the way, the SLD trio is making moving, creative, and thoughtful music and it’s well worth your time to get your hands on the CD or download. Please regard my conflict of interest as your gain.

Here are the full liner notes from the Hathut website: https://static.homepagetool.ch/var/m_1/17/17f/75006/8037157-hatOLOGY-742.pdf

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David Grubbs – Creep Mission (s/r, 2017) ****½

By Daniel Böker

For the last three weeks I've been waiting for the new album from David Grubbs. I've been following his music for years now. Years ago, he had a duo called Gastr del Sol with Jim O'Rourke. This is where I discovered his unique way of playing the guitar. Mostly he uses a clean sound and somewhat catchy chords. But every time, his songs or tracks open up to something that is far beyond pop-music (which is why I think it is appropriate to write about his latest album here).

Listening to the new record I realize that the routes Jim O'Rourke and David Grubbs each took are very different but they both move between song and sound. Every few years Jim O'Rourke releases an album with perfectly composed pop songs. After that he continues to work in the field of improvised music with guys like Keiji Heino and Oren Ambarchi.

David Grubbs has also worked with different musicians over the years whom I have tried to follow. He worked with Mats Gustafsson, with Andrea Belfi, with different electronic sound artists and musicans such as f.s.blumm. Jim O'Rourke seems to separate his two approaches to music completely. David Grubbs puts tracks and songs on the same record, standing side by side.

Another difference between the two might be that Grubbs' way of playing the guitar was and is always recognizable. On some of his records the free often electronic based tracks stood side by side with the more guitar-based songs. David Grubbs often composed songs in which he actually sang. So there was (and maybe still is) a connection with "pop-structures".

On the last couple of releases though something changed. The connection between his catchy approach and the free or improvised tracks grew stronger.

I've been listening to the new record Creep Mission over and over again. All the ingredients are there: The typical Grubbs-guitar, electronics and some drumming, this time by Eli Keszler. Nate Wooley is adding some trumpet sounds on four of the seven cuts.

There are no vocals on this record which might be another indicator for the theory that David Grubbs is breaking down the barrier between the two different approaches he is following. And the outcome is outstanding. The album is not harsh or wild. The sound is very calm but if you are listening closely there are many different layers to it. Listening to it you are waiting for an outburst to release the tension that is there but it seldom comes. Grubbs holds this tension between song and sound, between calmness and outburst.

The first track 'slylight' is a very good example for this. It starts of with a few guitar picks that sound almost shy. There is this bass-tone he plays in so many of his pieces which is a sort of grounding to the open chords he usually adds. It takes more than a minute until Eli Keszler comes in with his drumming. But this also is rather calm, and it is a lot of cymbals. Three minutes in the sound changes as both the guitar and the drums intensify. Grubbs switches to a minimalist guitar pattern, the drums retreat to near silence, and Nate Wooley adds a breathy trumpet. So the course of this piece moves from very calm and kind of catchy (or at least easy to grab) to openness with a minimalistic tone to it. This is the tension I hear within Grubbs' music that I enjoy so much, and on this album he holds it at his best.

The second track 'Creep Mission' is also a very neat interplay between Keszler and Grubbs with Wooley entering after a few minutes again. The other tracks are different and still recognizable Grubbs. 'The Bonapartes of Baltimore' features only Grubbs and his guitar, 'Jeremiadiac' has a strong electronic woof (added by Jan St. Werner) to it, and so on.

The info on the homepage of DragCity describes the album as bi-composed/improvised. Though the credits on the CD go to Grubbs alone with the exception of 'Jeremiadiac'. The relation between composed and improvised is similar to the relation I tried to describe with the 'pop-structures' and the more open parts. All this tension makes this album a worthy listen.

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Flo Stoffner/Paul Lovens/Rudi Mahall - Mein Freund der Baum (Wide Ear Records, 2017) ****

By Martin Schray

When I recently talked to legendary German free jazz drummer Paul Lovens he told me that he had a new project with clarinetist Rudi Mahall (they both know each other from the Globe Unity
Orchestra) and Swiss guitarist Flo Stoffner, a man who’s relatively new on the improv scene. I came across him only this year at the Zurich Intakt Festival when he played a very good duo set with Evan Parker. Lovens has a high opinion of Stoffner and said that he was a musician who’s up and coming.

Stoffner is a promising musician indeed. He says that he’s influenced by guitarists like Jimi
Hendrix, Bill Frisell and John Scofield, but his style rather reminds me of Derek Bailey or Olaf Rupp. Unlike many people he thinks that there’s a lot to discover on this instrument, there were still new fields worth to be explored. His playing is rather lean than offensive and boisterous, he uses precise little melodic fragments here and there. In this trio he foils Rudi Mahall’s swinging approach with very clear reductionism.

Mein Freund Der Baum (My Friend the Tree) is reminiscent of a collage - sound snippets are taken out of contexts, they’re rearranged, just to be rejected, changed, and rearranged again. The music constantly shifts and fractures. The result is a fragmented, diverging, only seeming chaos on the one hand, but it’s actually a perfect piece of work on the other. Blurred and smudged sounds, disgorged and pulled, compete with abstract blues riffs á la Captain Beefheart as if marbles were rolling down a street paved with strings. The music’s a gigantic in-and-out breathing, a permanent stop and go. Paul Lovens is the key figure to me, his rare, accurate tidal-wave-like attacks, which oppose his sublime bevy of percussive clatter, force Mahall and Stoffner into new, surprising dynamic contexts.

Finally, Rudi Mahall is excellently attuned to his band mates. There’s a passage towards the end of “Mein”, which is characteristic for the trio’s music: Lovens delivers an almost steady beat, Mahall responds to the phrasings of the guitar, matching Stoffner’s chopped and scraping notes with a series of squeaky high clarinet tones. The effect is extremely interesting, at times it’s like friends discussing a complex problem - enthusiastic, reflective, and pointed.

The album resembles a chamber-music-like update of the Evan Parker/Derek Bailey/Han Bennink album The Topography of the Lungs, reflecting this cutting edge free improv classic’s ultra-concentrated force and controlled energy. It’s full of excellent musicianship and unexpected twists and turns. Really recommended.

Mein Freund Der Baum is available on CD. You can buy it from http://www.wideearrecords.net.

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Trevor Barre - Convergences, Divergences & Affinities: The second wave of Free Improvisation in England, 1973–1979 (Compass, 2017) ****

By Paul Acquaro

Convergences, Divergences & Affinities: The second wave of Free Improvisation in England, 1973–1979 is Trevor Barre's second book exploring the improvisational music scene in England. This time he moves the timeline from the formative years of the first generation (1965 - 1972) deep into the 1970s, covering the years between 1973 and 1979, covering the rise of the second generation of players and a broadening of the 'scene'. In a sense, he is chronicling a time of change, when the musical revolution of the 60s in which the roots of British improvisation was still energetic and branching out to new venues, new configurations, and beyond London.

The Second Generation had some different ideas than the First Generation players. Barre beings up quotes that had been used, like 'insect music', to describe some of Gen 1's music, and credits Gen 2 with reintroducing the heretofore shunned identifiable 'tune'. This was, as Barre says, a marker of the Gen 2 attitude: a refusal of the refusal found in Gen 1's music. He writes "the gradual reintroduction of these features into free improvisation marks one of the key features of gen two and its influences."

The book spends a good portion of its first half tracing the shifting scene framed through the advance of Gen 1: Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, Paul Rutherford, SME, and AMM are given updates, along with new collectives. Attention is paid to importance of collectives and concert series that settled into new venues, creating a new quilt work of support. This includes organizations like the Musician's Cooperative, (which included 1st Geners like Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, Paul Lytton, and John Stevens) and the subsequent London Musicians Collective. Other folks who figure prominently include Martin and Madelaine Davidson, who founded the essential Emanem label and hosted concerts, as well as Janice Christianson whose Albion Music series was a serious vehicle for Bailey (who later in this period started Company).

Newer arrivals, like Turner and Beresford are situated in the history but it's still very much the Gen 1 story. When Barre then transitions to Gen 2, he begins by digging deeper into the work of Steve Beresford, David Toop, Terry Day, Lol Coxhill, the groups Alterations, Three/Four Pullovers, Promenades, and Recendents, and others. He makes a critical decision to also discuss post-punk bands of the day (Scritti Politti for example) and explores the intertwining aesthetics with the Gen 2 efforts. Interestingly, he observes that most of Gen 2's output did not make it into the seminal Cook/Morton guides, which he argues underscores that Gen 2's approach had cross pollinated with other experimental music had moved further beyond jazz then even Gen 1 (though Incus and Enamen did a lot to preserve their work). As Barre gets into the personalities and pathos of the Gen 2 musicians the reader is left with a good sense of the irreverence that many of these musicians shared, along with the tensions that both drove the music and underscored its place in the punk and no-wave world.

Just as Barre begins with Gen 1 and ramped up to the second generation, he does the same when expanding the scope to include musicians outside of the core London scene. Drummer and future FMR label head Trevor Taylor, and guitarist Ian Brighton (check) get mentions along with several collectives. The take away is that the spirit of free improvisation flourished around the country, with like-minded folks assembling in their respective cities to create self-supporting scenes. The nature of such collectives is their essential ephemeralness and as Barre points out 'the practical difficulties involved in communication between the various collectives would also have been considerable, in those pre-internet days, with reliance on 'snail-mail.' One begins to wonder though, just how much better is it post-internet? Perhaps the 5th volume, covering the years 1996 - 2002 will begin to explore this topic.

Early on, Barre references the release of the Smithsonian Collection of Jazz in 1973 and the rise of the Jazz at Lincoln Center in the 1980s, as a canonization of 'Jazz' and a shift away from valuing creativity and surprise with virtuosity and training. He writes, "the 1970s was perhaps the last gasp of modernism in jazz, as it was in rock. Almost everything subsequent to these years can be described as 'revivalism' of some kind or another." This is not a theme constrained to this publication, for example, the beginning of Michael Heller's recent book Loft Jazz: Improvising New York in the 1970s (which deserves a review here as well), also discusses how this period seems to be where the pioneering free and improvised music made a shift from away from some mainstream focus and major label interest. The connection is not lost on Barre who draws this parallel a few times, notably during his lengthy survey of the rise of the rhizomal improviser collectives in small cities throughout Britain in the late 70s existing in concert with but wholly independent of the London scene. He also explore the feminist discussions that arose in the 70s, and the double standards that seemed to apply to the Femnists Improvisation Group, begun by member of both the improv and rock scenes.

Pluckish prose and nimble nouns abound. I think Barre is feeling less constrained in this book, volume one felt a little more academic in its presentation, not a lot, but more. Here too, Barre is a bit more apt in looking at sociological and psychological underpinnings inherent in his review of the past, he leans on his professional background in this area to apply concepts and vocabulary from the field, which can be interesting and fun in it's own right. The penultimate chapter sees Barre exhuming his stash of Musics, which was a publication managed by many of the folks mentioned in this review, that was  somewhat like a trade 'zine, publishing 32 issues between 1975 and 1979. Here, he speculates on the prescient passages and obscure interpersonal dynamics in retrospect. I suspect there will be some good arguments had between folks who are most invested.

Overall there is a breezier tone in Convergences, Divergences & Affinities than in his first book, and a slightly obsessive search for patterns. There are moments of political commentary on current events like Brexit and Trump (which Barre draws a sharp parallel between a yearning for a golden age and trends in modern jazz). Another item that pops up on occasion is the looming years of Margaret Thatcher's government and the '"less generous attitude towards the arts ... just around the corner." Foreshadowing I hope!

See the review for Beyond Jazz: Plink, Plonk & Scratch, the Golden Age of Free Music in London 1966–1972

Update: earlier reported Kindle formatting issues have been corrected. 

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Two from Squadra Omega

By Derek Stone

Squadra Omega is a self-described “psych/avant/kraut rock collective,” but even that heady set of signifiers doesn’t completely capture what the Italy-based group, whose core members call themselves OmegaMatt and OmegaG8, accomplish with these two newest releases. Acid-fried funk, loop-based electronics, pastoral folk, you name it - the duo (and whoever they tap to accompany them) is seemingly unintimidated by the “kitchen-sink” approach to improvisation. While their previous record ( the stellar Altri Occhi Ci Guardano) comprised a double album’s worth of material, with “Materia Osura” and “Nervoso,” the group have pared down any excesses and simultaneously gifted us with two separate, laser-focused long-players.

Squadra Omega - Materia oscura (GRANDANGOLO, 2017) ****

Opener “Massa mancante” is immediately grabbing. Over propulsive percussion and an ebullient bass-line, joyful synths swirl, with a bouncy, irresistable keyboard calling to mind the effervecent psychedelica of another time. Despite its seeming indebtedness to similarly playful kraut-psyche groups like Neu! (especially those drums), however, the piece never feels stale or played-out. “Mondo brana” rides on a simple two-chord acoustic guitar pattern and lilting drumwork, with OmegaMatt’s incisive electric guitar motif adding a flare of dramaticism. With its additional layers of synth and sax, one can’t help but think of the Rock in Opposition movement of the late ‘70s - there’s an undeniable thread running from those English avant-prog groups to Squadra Omega. After an explosive bridge section in which the combined force of the instrumentation serves to rouse anyone whose attention might have been slipping, “Mondo brana” moves into stranger, more interesting, territory; atmospheric slivers of organ and a wailing sax weave in and out of an electronic stew, the whole thing brews and simmers, and it finally gives rise to a jittery, high-tempo coda. The concluding track, “Le oscillazioni dell’universo giovane,” sees the group at the height of their experimentation. Burbling synths, cavernous electronics, spectral percussion that moves in fits-and-starts - if not perfectly analogous to the “the oscillations of the young universe,” it at least manages to evoke feelings of slippery, unplaceable apprehension. From there, things get even more abstact. Various reed instruments join up in a primeval lamentation of sorts, while swathes of synths act as the implacable wind underneath. It may just be the influence of the piece’s title, but upon hearing this segment, images of “the Spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters” and the like flooded my mind, and I imagined something like the dawn of humankind - newly-formed eyes opening upon a pre-historic dawn. And, fittingly enough, the dawn does come: a cloud of gently-plucked acoustic guitars arises from the aether, vocal chants coalesce, and those ever-present synths wrap it all up in a warm embrace. While the first two pieces on Materia oscura are certainly enjoyable, the final track is the most ambitious and most rewarding, and it’s to be hoped that Squadra Omega develop this kind of open-ended exploration more in future releases.

Squadra Omega - Nervoso (Holiday Records, 2017) ***½

Nervoso is a live recording that captures an improvised session between OmegaG8 (on bass and electronics), OmegaMatt (on guitar, organ, sax, and electronics), and OmegaFrank (on drums). Even without that tidbit of information, it’s immediately clear that the group have taken a differerent direction here when compared to Materia oscura - the instrumentation is lighter, the tempos slower, and the joyous, tightly-wound melodies of that previous record have uncoiled. OmegaMatt’s electric guitar-work too has undergone a transformation - from bold, bright, and near-histrionic, to muted, tremulous, and exploratory. Percussionist OmegaFrank (who I’m not sure was a part of the Materia oscura sessions) takes an approach that is probably more palatable to the frequenters of the Free Jazz Blog: loose and unfixed, with textural shadings that are more in service of the overall atmosphere than any particular rhythmical tack. “Nervoso I” spends the majority of its time in a dank, twilit vault, until the guitars are slowly swallowed up by gaping, wide-screen electronics. Just when you thought they had been totally submerged, OmegaMatt crawls (or rather erupts) out of the muck with a funky, frazzled solo that wouldn’t sound out of place on one of Davis’ mid-70s fusion classics. OmegaFrank supports him and the equally in-the-pocket OmegaG8 with compact, buoyant percussion that belies the airy, loose-limbed drum-work of the album’s first few minutes. Squadra Omega are not ones to let the listener get too comfortable, however - within the spin of a minute or two, the grooves have dissolved into a morass of swirling synths and, at one point, frenzied saxophone bleats. It’s a glorious meltdown, indeed.

“Nervoso II” might open with looped, carnivalesque electronics, but it quickly establishes itself as the darker, more brooding cousin to the first track’s freak-outs. If I had one complaint about Nervoso, then, it would be that the group didn’t take the opportunity to take things in a different direction on this second piece. Squadra Omega are great at jet-black soundscapes, sure, but they are even better at using those soundscapes as launch-pads to other planets entirely. “Nervoso II” shudders and shakes, and OmegaFrank’s nervous, rolling percussion hints at a coming explosion, but it just never takes off in a way that leaves you satisfied with the album as a whole.

In any case, Nervoso is an excellent accompaniment to Materia oscura, and now I’m wondering what it would sound like if the pieces on these two separate recordings had been shuffled around and put on the same album - perhaps, like Altri Occhi Ci Guardano, it would be another genre-busting stunner. Alas, we’ll never know..but you could certainly do worse than simply buying up both of these records and playing them back-to-back, again and again, to your heart’s content.

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Tim Berne’s Snakeoil – Incidentals (ECM, 2017) ****½

By Chris Haines

This is the fourth album by Tim Berne’s Snakeoil, with the usual quartet of Oscar Noriega (clarinets), Matt Mitchell (piano, electronics), Ches Smith (drums, percussion), and Berne (alto sax) being augmented by the guitarist Ryan Ferreira, which along with David Torn’s production and additional musical treatments gives the band’s sound an extended palette of additional colours and textures from previous releases.

The backbone of the album, and not only because it’s programmed right in the middle of the running order is the piece ‘Sideshow’, a 26-minute long flight of fantasy full of daring, intrigue, and musical delights. The piece starts with Mitchell at the piano, whose playing throughout the album is an absolute wonder, pulling all the other elements together as well as combining a very rhythmic and percussive style, at times reminding me of the British improvising pianist Howard Riley. Starting with a syncopated and circular melody in the left hand, this is quickly joined by a complimentary pattern the pianist plays in his right hand forming a delightful texture that’s not too dissimilar to Conlon Nancarrow’s studies for player piano. From here the piece moves through a variety of musical ideas including whole band unison melodies, grooves, growling guitar, a section with Noriega’s clarinet and Mitchell’s piano that offers shades of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of time, atmospheric sounds including carefully placed bowed cymbals, a very free passage for piano, percussion and guitar which develops into a wonderful atonal lead line (again Mitchell’s playing really pins this section down), pointillistic percussive textures, Torn’s screaming guitar sound combined with ceremonial drumming and all this before we even mention Tim Berne’s sax playing. This he thoughtfully adds throughout to enhance the overall composition of the piece often doubling-up with other instruments to form powerful and strong melodic phrases that soar above the complex musical fabric. With such a long piece and with the strong variety of ideas contained within, in lesser hands this could have sounded like the musical equivalent of a patchwork quilt, but there is no chance of that here, the linearity is so smooth and fluid that the musical direction flows in an unhindered and silky way. Surprisingly this piece is the other half of ‘Small World In A Small Town’ from the You’ve Been Watching Me album, the two pieces having been combined into one gigantic composition when played live.

Fear not those who are wanting to hear Berne’s freewheeling sax playing as there is plenty of this on the rest of the album, such as on ‘Incidentals Contact’, a real collage of sound from the band whilst Berne creates virtuosic lines which twist, intersect and writhe over the top, before joining a groove with the rest of the band and allowing Noriega’s clarinet to bubble-up from out of the resulting mix. Both the wind instruments combine again on ‘Stingray Shuffle’ to imitate the sustained guitar sounds with their Siren-like calls. After the atmospheric and restrained chamber music beginning to ‘Hora Feliz’, the album’s opening track, the piece arrives with a chromatic melody played in unison before really opening up with some great free solo improvising with Berne leading the way.

As one would expect from an ECM release the production is highly slick, but more than that is the way the music has been put together by Berne as the leader, and also from this group of musicians who have executed the ideas with clarity and precision. Incidentals provides us with a compositional masterclass in the use of colour and texture, which for me, comes across as a really strong aspect, or dare I say, a focus for the album from a listeners point of view. Unlike the product from which the band derive their name there is no fraudulent substances here, nor any merchandise of dubious quality to be had, instead we find a very well crafted and rich tapestry created from carefully selected auricular elements.

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