Binker Goldings - Abstractions of Reality Past & Incredible Feathers (Gearbox, 2019) ***½

By Sammy Stein

Binker Golding is a musician who has grown and developed in many areas over the past few years. He has shown himself to be a skilled composer, an educator at Tomorrow's Warriors, a collaborator with musicians including Moses Boyd, Frances Tandy, Evan Parker, Elliot Galvin, Gilad Atzmon and many others. He has conducted the NuCivilisation Orchestra. His main projects include the free jazz duo Binker & Moses. The pair scooped up a MOBO award for their debut album ‘Dem Ones’(2015) as well as two Jazz FM awards and a Parliamentary Jazz award. Their subsequent album ‘Journey To The Mountain Of Forever’ was voted number 1 Urban Album of the Year by MOJO magazine in 2017. Golding’s new album Abstractions of Reality Past & Incredible Feathers was recorded at Abbey Road, mixed by the legendary James Farber (Michael Brecker, Joe Lovano, Brad Meldhau), and mastered at Gearbox Records. Due for release on the 27th of September, the record features a distinctive quartet with Joe Armon-Jones ( Ezra Collective, Nubya Garcia Maxwell Owin) on piano, Daniel Casimir (Moses Boyd, Shirley Tettet) on double bass, and Sam Jones ( Tomorrow's Warriors, Trinity Laban, Gary Crosby ) on drums. Binker Golding’s quartet project maps a path between the more through-composed jazz fusion of previous decades and the hip hop/brokenbeat-influenced sound of the contemporary London jazz scene.

The CD opens with ' I forgot Santa Monica' which is introduced by strong double bass and gorgeous piano lines over which Binker's sax drops and immediately something special is in the air. There is a confidence in playing, a strength and perfect placement which makes Binker Golding's sax stand out. Every note is forged, blasted and sounded out with certainty- something which is rarely heard now in more conventional jazz playing. This track is a show piece of Binker's playing and his technical ability. The piano interlude from Joe Armon-Jones is strong, impressively delivered and Armon-Jones gives full rein to his keyboard covering skills. ' Exquisite-She Green' is slower, with a heaving, mesmeric 2/4 rhythms interspersed with triplets which add another dimension to the sax line. There are some lovely changes in style and rhythms across this piece, ably reflected by the empathetic responses from the drums and double bass from Daniel Casimir is at times exquisite. The number builds in volume and textures towards it closing stages, aided and supremely abetted by the drums of Sam Jones. The recurring theme is wonderfully interpreted and changed, not just by Binker but the whole ensemble.

'Skinned Alive, Tasting Blood' is heralded by a bass introduction before the rhythm takes on a sashaying feel with the sax entering introducing an arcing, topping out line. This track has an old fashioned delivery to it, the support offered to the sax solos impressive and exacting. The off-beat emphasis in the intermissions is intriguing, as is the deft percussion line and the stellar tenor reaching out over some impressively tight support and an interesting piano part, which at one point goes gloriously out of kilter which makes it all the more wonderful and clever.

'And I Like Your Feathers' is cheeky, verging on the sleazy but endearingly listenable, with Binker altering the volume in subtle manner to make it feel like a living , breathing thing. There is a great bass solo from Daniel Casimir and the track has a dance-band feel. 'You, That Place, That Time' is 15 and a half minutes of interesting, listenable music with some great playing from Binker and several great solos. The middle section has deft rhythmic variations and the band switch from dangerously verging on the mundane delivery to interesting and diversified switches and changes. A gentler episode altogether , allowing adequate room for development and exploration - and another glorious piano-led section. 'Strange, Beautiful, Remembered ' is both the first of those three. It is a strongly delivered and well arranged number . Once again a dexterous and perfectly placed piano section is supported superbly by the bass and percussion and the sax is powerful, each note sung out with the musical lines make wonderful rainbow arcs over the top. The second half of the track sees interesting sax lines and precision percussion and the clever but subtle key interchanges provide ear-twerking interest. 'Fluorescent Edges With Black' brings thoughts of big band performances, with great backing, good solos and then you remember there are just 4 musicians here. There is an uplift and energy throughout this track, culminating in the soaring sax solo which soars and sighs over the persuasive bass line of Daniel Casimir.

I think with this album Binker Golding and company have delivered something special. It is not very different, it is not exceptional in compositions or arrangements but it is strong, clearly marked out and decisive. There is a sense of many references, many links to the past and some links to modern styles with an emergent pervasive individual identity. Binker Golding showcases the talent with which he surrounds himself on the album and the recording allows plenty of space and freedom to these players. There is much repetition of melody, a lot of the same style and it feels very safe at times but it has innate quality. The label feel this is exceptional and perhaps one of their best releases to date and I would not argue with that.

Binker Golding - tenor saxophone
Joe Armon-Jones - piano
Daniel Casimir - double bass
Sam Jones - drums

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Simon Nabatov's Great Passion for Subversive Russian Literature

By Eyal Hareuveni 

Prolific pianist Simon Nabatov was born in Moscow, Russia, sixty years ago and although he left Russia forty years ago and a decade later settled in Köln, Germany, his great passion for Russian literature never subsided. Nabatov has already released for Leo Records three brilliant albums that introduced some of the heroes of the Russian avant-garde counter-culture. His quartet album, Nature Morte (2001), was based on the poem of Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky, who was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972. His quintet album, The Master and Margarita (2001), was a inspired adaptation of the classic book of Mikhail Bulgakov, a book that was written during Stalin’s regime but published only in 1967, first in France and later its manuscript was smuggled into the Soviet Union. On A Few Incidences (2005) his octet performed texts of Daniil Kharms, an early Soviet-era avant-garde and absurdist poet, writer and dramatist, whose children books were considered as “anti-Soviet”, and he was punished with arrest and exile.

Now Nabatov returns with two more gems of the Russian literature.

Simon Nabatov - Readings: Red Cavalry (Leo Records, 2019) ****½

Readings: Red Cavalry is based on a classic book from 1924 by the Odessa-based, Jewish writer Isaac Babel, describing the life of Jewish gangsters in Odessa and the brutal reality of the Polish-Soviet war of 1920. Babel’s style was far from the Soviet utopian propaganda, and he often portrayed the murderous gangsters as the real heroes. Babel was arrested on fabricated charges of terrorism and espionage and was brutally executed in 1940 by the NKVD (the then KGB).

Nabatov said in a recent interview that the literary works he chose to adapt were all by authors who were suppressed by the Soviet government, like his grandfather who was arrested and killed in 1939 as part of Stalin’s political purges, just like Babel. This formative experience shaped his own aesthetics, and especially his interest how artists and writers were dealing with political suppression.

Nabatov arranged segments of the Red Cavalry book as a dramaturgical narrative of theatrical cycle of songs that projects the disturbing, scary, and horrific atmosphere encapsulated in Babel’s short stories. The free improvised setting of the pieces - performed by vocal artist Phil Minton and reeds player Frank Gratkowski, who both have worked with Nabatov on Nature Morte and A Few Incidences, electronics player Marcus Schmickler, and drummer Gerry Hemingway - cements this unsettling yet highly emotional atmosphere.

The first song “Crossing The River Zbrucz” already sets the subversive atmosphere. Its arrangements deconconstructs Soviet propaganda song, sung by a male choir, into an ironic, free jazz improvisation. Minton acts-recites-sings Babel’s texts with natural charisma, grace and compassion but also with a conviction of die-hard activist against all wars and all forms of political oppression. His sober delivery strips the utopian Soviet lingo from its self-righteousness and puts its zealous ideology in grotesque and macabre perspectives. “Gedali” is arranged as en emotional klezmer song, emphasized by the voice of Minton who mourns “yesterday’s revolution” and realizes that it was led by “bad people”. Hemingway’s playing on “The Tachanka Theory”, “My First Goose” and “Intermezzo 2” is truly imaginative, offering ironic abstraction of military marches on the first and a poetic rhythmic orchestration on the latter two.

Simon Nabatov - Readings, Gileya Revisited (Leo Records, 2019) ****

Simon Nabatov continues with Gratkowski, Schmickler and Hemingway but adds Dutch vocal artist-sound poet Jaap Blonk to Readings, Gileya Revisited.

This albums revisits some of the poems and texts of the Moscow-based circle of artists Gileya (often called Hylaea) who were part of the pre-revolution Russian Futurist movement from around 1910, known for their manifesto, "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste." Poet-actor-playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky was one of the prominent figures in this movement that resonated other revolutionary artistic movements around Europe as Dada, Italian Futurism, English Vorticism and French Surrealism. The writers and poets of Gileya rebelled against the romanticism and realism of writers such as Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and claimed that they “should be "heaved overboard from the steamship of modernity”. Also, there is no real difference between words and images. According to Gileya, poets should arrange their texts like a painters do, discarding logic, grammar or syntax and welcoming neologisms, profane words or onomatopoeia, that was declared as the universal texture of verse.

Nabatov arranged Readings, Gileya Revisited as a suite of contrasting abstract and absurdist texts, art songs with strong melodic core and even wilder free improvisations in order to capture the spirit of these adventurous artistic movement. Blonk was the perfect choice for this project as he already interpreted dadaist classic works with great success (Kurt Schwitters: Ursonate, BVHAAST, 1986, Flux de Bouche, Staatplaat, 1993, and Hugo Ball: Sechs Laut-und Klanggedichte, 1916, Balance Point Acoustics, 2014). Blonk makes these Russian texts his own with his inimitable delivery, being dead serious and totally ironic at the same time.

The wild drama of Readings, Gileya Revisited begins, naturally, with the “Manifesto” of Gileya, co-authored by Mayakovsky , The texts and poems call for eccentric gestures and totally open interplay, and Blonk, Hemingway and Gratkowski clearly enjoy charging these subversive pieces with the healthy doses of the anti-authoritative spirit of free jazz or free-improvised music. “Dyr bul shchyl”, for example, by poet Aleksei Kruchenykh, using the experimental-symbolist Zaum language, which, according Kruchenykh, is "more Russian national, than in all of Pushkin 's poetry", is transformed into passionate and very playful dadaist drunk song-dance. Gradkowski's flute on “Momentwills” spirals the Russian text to the universe of cryptic Zen haikus. Nabatov arranges “Shokretyts” as the emotional center of this suite, a melodic and playful song that even its Zaum lyrics capture its gentle, optimist spirit. And just to remind as where it all began, Schmickler and Hemingway arrange some of the original recordings of the Gileya poets as a chaotic yet colorful tapestry of electronic noises and poetic drumming on “Intermission 3”.

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Tiger Trio - Map of Liberation (RogueArt, 2019) ****

By Keith Prosk

Map of Liberation reunites Nicole Mitchell (flutes), Joëlle Léandre (contrabass), and Myra Melford (piano) for the trio’s second outing after 2016’s Unleashed. Like Unleashed, Map of Liberation is comprised of free improvisations recorded at live performances, this time across two dates in 2018. It exhibits the combinatory wonders of these three masters’ effusive vitalities, their communication culminating in a jubilant fount of inspiration.

Surprisingly, Léandre and Melford have not recorded together outside of Tiger Trio. But Léandre and Mitchell have developed a rich collaborative history in the 2010s with Before After (with Dylan Van Der Schyff), Flowing Stream (with Thomas Buckner), and the essential duo Sisters Where. And Mitchell and Melford have recorded together in the large ensembles of Live At Sant'Anna Arresi, 12 From 25, and Lisa Mezzacappa’s Glorious Ravage. The comfortable communication expected from such frequent contact is apparent here.

Mitchell mostly alternates from sonorous drones, wispy whistles, and long overblows to sprightly flights full of color. Léandre most frequently cycles through a rich array of bowing techniques but not uncommonly summons a plucked protean rhythm or a soulful melody of bent notes. Melford intersperses twinkling, free bursts of melody in between hypnotic, rhythmic canons. The three players rotate these modules of their techniques into several combinations, sometimes overlapping similar approaches to amplify the energy, like Mitchell’s held tones with Léandre’s arco, Léandre’s pizzicato with Melford’s percussive rhythms, Melford’s twinkling explorations with Mitchell’s flights. Some combinations - particularly the pairing of Mitchell’s meditative drones, Léandre’s high-register bowing, and Melford’s muted circular rhythms - seem to contain the energy and wisdom of an ancient and sacred folk music. There’s some more obvious extended technique, like key clicks, bouncing the bow on the strings or bowing circularly, or muting and playing inside the piano, but the playing here is closer to classic energy music. There’s some voicings as well, and some vocal purrs.

There’s an excitement and a joy here that’s not often paralleled in any music. It’s colorful. It’s playful. It’s physical. It’s powerful. It’s an enriching listen that might just stand out in the always-enriching work of these musicians.

Map of Liberation is a CD-only release.

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Ricardo Arias / Santiago Botero / Kim Myhr – Contrived (Raw Tonk, 2019) ***½

By Fotis Nikolakopoulos

For the past three years at least Raw Tonk has been one of the most consistent labels in the whole free jazz milieu. Gradually building a catalogue of superb releases full of the pathos of the great free jazz tradition, always adding something new in this equation. Contrived, the trio release from Kim Myhr (guitar and objects), Santiago Botero (contrabass and preparations) and Ricardo Arias (electronics and objects) is a welcome departure into a more improvisational and less jazzy sound.

Ricardo Arias, writing for the press release of Contrived, isn’t afraid to pinpoint what has always troubled all improvisers: is it possible to catch the moment of improvised live sound? Is it by definition a process that can lead to something worth listening and joyful? By quoting Cornelious Cardew on this, he puts the listener into the great antithesis of this recording.Which is that what is taking place on Contrived doesn’t necessarily catch the moment of this recording made live in Bogota, Colombia. Of course Contrived has its moments and there are many of them. After a rather slow start, an interaction of low energy, on the third track, Charmingly Contrived, the trio start to get on a path that leads to a totally different direction. As the fourth track enters (even though I’m suspecting this less than half an hour recording was divided into six tracks for practical reasons only) Myhr’s guitar tends to be an instrument of menace, while the rhythms derived from the contrabass are never dominant, more often provide a solid backbone to the recording.

Listening to Contrived repeatedly, I got the sense that maybe (again an antithesis here) it’s less than half an hour duration doesn’t allow the musicians and the listener to get a clear look of the direction where this is going. It seems unfinished at some parts. But, yes, this is a strong antithesis: improvisation very often implies that there’s more to come and even more often you have to be there to witness, feel it, watch or listen to it. The cd as a medium for all the above has never been that revealing.

So, is this a mediocre recording? No way. But as Raw Tonk’s catalogue continues to grow, providing us various formations, line-ups and sounds, Contrived seems more like a promise for the near future. It is good but there are better things to come. And, of course, it doesn’t provide any answers, they never wanted that in any case, to the aforementioned question. Can we record the improvisational moment? They are not sure, I do not know.



@koultouranafigo

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Liquid Quintet ‎– Bouquet (Sirulita Records, 2019) ****

By Colin Green

“Fully ‘biodegradable’ structures, starting to disintegrate the moment they have been assembled, are nowadays the ideal.” (Zygmunt Bauman)

The Barcelona based Liquid Trio – Agustí Fernández (piano), Albert Cirera (tenor and soprano saxophones) and Ramón Prats (drums) – was formed in 2011, taking its name from social theorist Bauman’s metaphor of “liquid modernity”: that in the contemporary world our individual, social and political frameworks are in a state of almost permanent flux, spheres in which “fluids neither fix space nor bind time”. The concept resonated with the mutability of musical matter and the trio’s temporal experiences while improvising. There have been three albums to date, all recommended: Primer Dia i Última Nit (“First Day and Last Night”) (Sirulita Records, 2013), Marianne (Vector Sounds, 2016) and The Liquid Trio plays Bernouilli (Słuchaj Fundacja, 2017). Piano, saxophone and drums is not a standard combination but Fernández cites the Schlippenbach Trio as the most direct antecedent. In terms of visceral brio the comparison is apt, with the Catalonia trio having its own distinct, happy-scrappy quality.

As befits its fluidity, the trio has been expanded to a quintet on occasions, as in 2013 with Johannes Nästesjö (double bass) and Julián Sánchez (trumpet). For this latest incarnation it was decided to take advantage of double bassist Barry Guy’s visit to Barcelona in July last year in a session at the Rosazul studio, to which Don Malfon on alto and baritone saxophones was added close to the recording date, increasing the spectrum of reed registers. The tracks are named ‘Fire Rose’ 1 to 10; “La Rosa de Foc” was the name given to Barcelona after the events of the Tragic Week of civil insurrection in the summer of 1909 – another modernist image of a terrible beauty and an epithet for the city that has stuck. As a bouquet the album is anything but decorative however, having the irruptive energy of Cy Twombly’s floral paintings with their phosphorescent blooms flourishing and withering at the same time.

In many ways it’s a now familiar approach to improvisation: music at a molecular level in a state of constant fragmentation and reconstitution. The session adopts a similarly mobile approach to formations, comprising duos, a trio, quartets and quintets. This is geography without maps, a domain in which nothing is fixed – not even instrumental sonority that shifts with each new terrain – moving forward in digressions, advancing by indirection. The music is nevertheless unified by the same animating spirit, a self-replenishing fusion of expressive intent with an understanding of the physical properties and capabilities of instruments, the way transient materials guide and respond, something that has to be learnt in order to be discovered afresh and which in turn folds back giving rise to new locutions, pluralities and pockets of feeling. The pieces have a sensuous immediacy that echoes the rough-and-tumble of lived time and all its quirky drifts and detours, memories prompted but not processed.

The presence of Guy’s fulsome, yet also strangely incorporeal bass ensures that some of the quintet performances reach a level beyond which lies the possibility of complete combustion or total collapse. ‘Fire Rose No. 1’ begins with a series of aftershocks from some primal event trailing off into ephemeral, ever-flowing currents of sound. Like water, the music resists dissection as configurations surge and subside. During ‘No. 2’, the seething broth is so hectic that the ear temporarily leaves the discombobulated mind behind until the waves recede revealing pools of jerky, spluttering activity. In the more placid ‘No. 5’, solids crumble and time is distended as the quintet’s instruments gently dilute and coalesce into gauzy textures.

The other groupings retain this sense of alchemical transformation. The first quartet is a sensory network lit up, navigated by zig-zagging piano; the second made up from charged yet soluble particles in vibrant display where notions of orientation and trajectory begin to lose purchase. The trio with Cirera and Guy features Fernández’ seamless integration of keyboard and piano internals that metamorphose into exotic percussion, spawning jangly, metallic washes and muted twangs.

Malfon appears in all three duos. On ‘No. 4’, baritone and bass explore creaks, squeaks and the Stygian lower registers in a way that makes them sound like a single entity with a dual aspect. With Cirera, the saxophones are mingled in granular multiphonics, and on the pairing with Fernández his scruffy alto, then baritone, are accompanied by deconstructed piano. ‘Fire Rose No. 10’ returns us to the swirling turbulence and scrambled perspectives of the opening quintets; perhaps also – as with Twombly’s roses – a reminder of the fleeting impulses and fragile pleasures that make up our lives.

Bouquet is available on CD and as a download from Bandcamp.

Untitled (2001)

© Cy Twombly Foundation

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Masayuki Takayanagi New Direction Unit – April Is The Cruellest Month (Blank Forms Editions, 2019) ****

By Chris Haines

There’s lots of ‘what if’s in life that can lead us to ponder key crossroads in our lives’ journeys and what might have happened if we had chosen a different path, or maybe if a certain event in history had or had not happened. This is a theme, which in itself has inspired a whole genre of alternative historical settings within fictional literature. Within music would things have been any different if Charlie Parker had managed to study compositional technique with Edgard Varese? Who knows? However, these events and moments can be fascinating to ponder over and if nothing else they add to life’s rich tapestry and our experience of it.

Another such event is the time Japanese free jazz guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi was invited to record a session for ESP-Disk recordings, a good conduit for avant-garde jazz at the time, only for the record label to go bust just before it was due to be released. A catalogue number had even been assigned to it! This was planned to be the first of many Japanese jazz recordings that the head of ESP-Disk, Bernard Stollman, wanted to release on the label, which surely would have catapulted the Japanese scene much more into the global picture, than the actual slow underground trickle of awareness that eventually happened, which would have included Takayanagi and friends nestling up alongside the likes of Albert Ayler within the roster. Apparently Takayanagi was publically quite philosophical about the situation, however, the session was buried and it didn’t see the light of day until just before the guitarist’s death. As with all Takayanagi recordings they can be hard to come by, especially if one doesn’t want to pay the over inflated prices that his recordings currently seem to be garnering. It is welcome news then that this particular session has recently been re-released on Black Forms Editions.

For those new to this recording the New Direction Unit consisted at this time of Kenji Mori (alto sax, flute, bass clarinet), Nobuyoshi Ino (bass, cello), Hiroshi Yamazaki (percussion), and Takayanagi (electric guitar). The title of the album, April is the cruellest month, Takayanagi borrowed from the opening line of T. S. Eliot’s poem, ‘The Waste Land’, and consists of three tracks with titles that have also been pulled from the poem. The first ‘We Have Existed’ is a busy and anxious texture with skittering percussion, fast flitting melodic phrases on the flute accompanied by bowed bass strings and streams of feedback and noise from the guitar. The alternate take of this track that has appeared on previous editions of this album is not included, which gives us the album content and listings in the order they would have appeared if originally released by ESP-Disk. The second track ‘What Have We Given?’ being a bit shorter in length than the first, is characterised by some great playing by Mori on the bass clarinet and accompanied by a range of metal percussion sounds, barbed bass lines, and punctuated chords from the guitar which are allowed to ring on into feedback swells at times. The last track, ‘My Friend, Blood Shaking My Heart’ is a twenty minute, full-blown mass projection onslaught, with rapid drumming and nasally screeching guitar to the fore, which continues with much energy, continually and without break for the full duration of the piece.

The liner notes of this release are taken from Teruto Soejima’s wonderful book, recently translated and published as Free Jazz In Japan: A Personal History, and encapsulates some of the text that he wrote for the original release of the album.

So, we can muse upon the alternative historical aspects of this particular musical event and whilst it’s fun to do this within the cultural context, it’s even more important to enjoy the sounds for what they are and live the music in the moment of now. We are privileged to have such a classic and important free jazz work available once more.



- Postscript – Another release, Takayanagi’s Angry Waves “850113” has also just seen a new release on Octave Labs; this is a classic free jazz guitar trio. This recording seems to be much underrated and is an absolute gem! – Probably my favourite Takayanagi recording of all time.

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Steve Dalachinsky (1946-2019)

We were surprised to learn about the sudden passing of poet Steve Dalachinsky early Monday morning. Steve was a omnipresent figure on the Downtown Music scene, a fan of the music, and one of those ever rarer true New Yorkers. At a show in Brooklyn this summer, he told me "Ahh, I like Berlin, I only have one enemy there. Here in New York, I have lots of them." From what I know, this was a good example of the type of self-deprecating joke that you could expect from him. Steve made his way into the pages of the blog from time to time, whether as the author of liner-notes, interviewed in documentaries, or having a song dedicated to him (see here). His list of accomplishments is long and varied, but some highlights include a book of poetry on saxophonist Charles Gayle, collaboration with pianist Matthew Shipp on an album (Phenomena Of Interference) as well as a book (Logos and Language: A Post-Jazz Metaphorical Dialogue) and had earned the prestigious Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres award for poetry from France in 2014. Our condolences to his friends and family.

Enjoy this short documentary on Steve Dalachinsky:

- Paul Acquaro

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Vergara/Longberg-Holm/Zarzutzki – Five arias for nalca (Inexhaustible Editions, 2019) ****

By Fotis Nikolakopoulos

It makes me really happy that there seem to exist a million ways to explore the possibilities of sound. Inexhaustible Editions is one of those small labels trying to present parts of this adventurous sonic spectrum. The trio of Benjamin Vergara on trumpet, Fred Longberg-Holm on cell and Aaron Zarzutzki on synthesizer and various objects allow us to make assumptions about their unusual instrumentation.

Those assumptions are mostly based on the given that their willingness to explore leaves the listener within a constant flux of sounds. That is a good thing though…They approach their collective sound in the same abstract way the cover art presents us this cd. You, the listener, will find more questions than answers within the five tracks (arias I to V accordingly) that comprise the bulk of this CD.
I would make a guess that calling each track an aria, considering the historical burden of the word, is a way to de-normalize, to provide it with a new meaning. Another thought would be that they really want to be humorous. Could be, but that wouldn’t say anything about how serious they are in what they present us.

Vergara’s trumpet is an instrument of airy blurbs and constant small noisy gestures that never dominate but rather articulate an ego-less way of playing. Longberg-Holm’s cello starts, on the first two tracks, as a constant drone provider but in the process all noises are possible from its body and strings. The role of a synth or various objects in general in an improvisational recording always puts me in a position of trying to really listen hard so to understand what is going on. In Zarzutzki’s case his experimental approach on the synth and his, less is more, attitude by using small objects as percussion instruments, works fine. In fact he provides the glue that brings all the separate pieces together.

I really enjoyed all arias of the CD. There’s a constant flow of ideas, sometimes more than expected. If I had to pinpoint a flaw, it would be this saturation of ideas in some parts of the recording. But there’s another side to this as well. In all five tracks there’s never just a single idea of how the recording will proceed. They seem to decide on the spot, always ready to change direction or choose another path. This is probably the most important lesson learned in collective improvisation.



@koultouranafigo

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Fictive Five – Anything Is Possible (Clean Feed, 2019) ****

By Troy Dostert

On Anything Is Possible, the second release from the Fictive Five, the band continues its efforts to make music with cinematic scope and feel—appropriately enough, given the filmmakers who are often the dedicatees of the pieces. Wim Wenders, William Kentridge and Kelly Reichardt were feted on the group’s self-titled debut, while on the follow-up it’s Spike Lee and Warren Sonbert getting a tip of the hat—along with Cecil Taylor, whose music often had a certain cinematic power of its own.

This isn’t music that relies heavily on pulse or melody, but rather sonority and texture—and a heck of a lot of imagination, as each of these players possesses a command over their instrument that allows them to take full advantage of the freedom built into Ochs’s compositions. Most significantly, the group uses a two-bass approach, with Pascal Niggenkemper and Ken Filiano generally eschewing the traditional “jazz” role of anchoring tempo or harmony. Instead they use the full range of their low-end sonics, complemented by generous use of various electronic effects, to provide atmosphere and mood. Drummer Harris Eisenstadt takes a similar strategy, using his kit not so much to propel the music forward but to contribute as a colorist and commentator, with subtlety and nuance the name of the game. And the dual-horn threat of Ochs, who plays both sopranino and tenor saxophone here, and Nate Wooley, whose trumpet (as always) runs the gamut of expressive possibilities, makes for a superb complementary team, consistently responsive and sympathetic both to each other and to their counterparts.

Three of the pieces are exceptionally expansive and lengthy, with two clocking in at over nineteen minutes, so there is abundant room for ideas to develop and evolve. And although three are formally credited as Ochs compositions, Ochs always remains sensitive to channeling rather than stifling the players’ creativity and spontaneity, thus avoiding the temptation to over-determine the pieces. There is thus a lot of space in this music, and patience is crucial to the listening experience, as much of its value is found in the various interactions between the musicians, often just two or three at a time.

“Immediate Human Response,” the album’s opener, is representative of the group’s aesthetic, as the players enter and recede throughout the piece, occasionally converging on a particular rhythmic or melodic motif, but more commonly occupying a much less determinate space. Moments of energy and fire do arise, but like most of the album, the prevailing ethos is one of a lengthy conversation that takes its time—and with plenty of room for thought and reflection along the way. “The Others Dream,” like “Immediate Human Response” credited to Ochs, is similar, with even more room for individual expression. Ochs in particular is in fine form here, with pointed, acerbic cries, and Wooley characteristically finds his unique space between abstraction and lyricism. But to focus on the individuals over the group as a whole would be a mistake, as Niggenkemper and Filiano generate some exceptionally compelling atmospherics, with Eisenstadt adding the well-timed interjections and steady commentary needed to keep the conversation moving. And when Wooley and Ochs join forces, their mutual interactions are quite stimulating, taking the music’s collective power to another level. “With Liberties and Latitude for All” may be the most ambitious and far-ranging of the five pieces, with smaller exchanges that build gradually to something bigger—and even the emergence of a pulse, culminating in a free-jazz segment that represents the album’s most convincing nod to jazz tradition, as Wooley and Ochs soar over a hard-swinging rhythmic foundation provided by the basses and Eisenstadt.

Interestingly, “And the Door Blows Open,” honoring Cecil Taylor, is both the briefest of the five tracks, at only four minutes, and also the least forbidding, with Wooley in particular sounding especially sensitive and tuneful. Along with the album’s closer, “A Fictive Form of Closure,” it’s collectively improvised; but it’s a credit to the rapport of these musicians that these tracks feel wholly of a piece with the rest of the album, making compositional origins more or less irrelevant.
Far from an episodic meeting of top-flight improvisers, the Fictive Five is a group with a well-honed, distinctive sound and identity, and Anything Is Possible contributes nicely to what will hopefully become a lengthy catalog.

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Recent Solo Piano Albums from Elsewhere

By Eyal Hareuveni

The Elsewhere label offers for its first year anniversary new ways of listening, experiencing or perceiving new and innovative languages and discourses of composers and musicians who compose or play the piano.

Shira Legmann / Michael Pisaro - Barricades (elsewhere, 2019) ****½

The concept of Barricades began to crystallize when Israeli pianist Shira Legmann sent American experimental composer Michael Pisaro a list of her favorite music and included Les Barricades Mystérieuses by French Baroque composer François Couperin (1668-1733). Legmann’s wide repertoire encompases not only compositions from the Baroque but also Olivier Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur l'enfant-Jésus, György Ligeti's keyboard music, Morton Feldman’s late repertoire and Giacinto Scelsi's piano music. Pisaro himself loved the idea of composing a web-like texture that refers to Couperuin’s polyphonic technique of overlapping and interlocking voices.

Pisaro compared the process of composing and working with Legmann on Barricades to “watching the barricades, which I pictured as a network of twisted vines, unravel.” Barricades consists of thirteen “studies” for Legmann’s piano with some sine waves played by Pisaro himself, who adds two interludes where he plays the sine waves. The album was recorded by Pisaro at CalArts, California on March and April 2019, later mixed and mastered by Pisaro.

Pisaro’s subtle, ethereal sine waves sound as organic extension of Legmann’s clean and supple piano presence. Legmann navigates wisely the enigmatic atmosphere of Barricades as if she is determined to blur the transparent sonic barricades between the dramatic and the cool and restrained, between the emotional and the cerebral or between the distant and what may be considered close. Her “studies” with Pisaro’s eerie “interludes” suggest a fragile balance between these somehow abstract concepts. Together, these pieces reflect the very nature of Barricades, a poetic attempt to create a captivating network of sonic vines that grow in their own accord and intensify by their inner logic; a network of pieces that not only echoes the French Baroque but also flows in a unique, fragile equilibrium. A dreamy and hypnotic, Feldman-esque equilibrium between the concrete and the imagined, the acoustic and its electronic extension, the earthly and the celestial.

Melaine Dalibert - Cheminant (elsewhere, 2019) ****

Cheminant presents the diverse aesthetics of French pianist-composer Melaine Dalibert. This is the third solo piano for elsewhere, following his first one for the elsewhere label that focused on one, extended composition, Musique pour le lever du jour (2018), and his debut one, Ressac (Another Timbre, 2017). The five pieces on Cheminant, all composed by Dalibert between 2017 and 2019 and recorded in Saint Maugan, France in February 2019, can be considered as studies in different schools of minimalism. These pieces reflect Dalibert’s interest in questioning how the harmonic shifts could affect the listening experience with subtly evolving chords through a scale or different tones, creating a similar state to vertigo.

The first four pieces of Cheminant are dedicated to colleagues and friends. The opening one, “Music in an octave”, is dedicated to David Sylvian who designed the artwork and advised about the mixing, and corresponds with Sylvian’s latest, poetic abstract-ambient works with its prolonged, resonating and meditative sounds. “Percolations (for right hand)”, for elsewhere founder, artistic director and producer Yuko Zama, is a rhythmic piece that sound as if it dances around itself until losing any sense of direction, “From zero to infinity”, dedicated for American post-minimalist composer Peter Garland, returns to a slow, minimalist mode that calls for another meditation about the accumulated effect of such listening experience. The longest, 21-minutes title-piece is dedicated to Dutch fellow pianist and composer Reinier van Houdt and expands even further and wider the enigmatic meditative ambience, as the highly disciplined delivery of single notes, their resonating sounds and their overtones float slowly through the deep space of the recording studio, gently disappear within each other. Dalibert performs this study in deep meditation with great control and exquisite beauty. The last piece “Étude II” is an exception with its up-tempo, almost playful insistence on repetitive hammered chords.

Reinier van Houdt / Bruno Duplant - Lettres et Replis (elsewhere, 2019) *****

Lettres et Replis captures a unique correspondence - literally - between French composer Bruno Duplant and Dutch pianist-composer Reinier van Houdt. This correspondence combines three Lettres (2017) - letter-form scores personally addressed from Duplant to van Houdt and containing letter sequences distributed across the page, with three more Trois replis d'incertitude (2018) - three letter-form scores but with the notion of 'repli' (meaning 'fold' in a Deleuzian postmodern Baroque sense, as well as 'withdrawal' of incertitude and reactionaries toward the neglect of ecology, humanism, and culture).

Duplant's realization of these ‘reading’ and ‘replying to' scores scores also reflect French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé's notion of textual space and chance, leaving a large room for the interpreter-performer. “The Lettres are connected to a melody spelled out and read in all directions propulsed by memory and gaze”, says van Houdt. “The Replis are connected to the harmonies from a place as they permeate and unravel through the metaphorical holes made by writing, linearly arranged again with recordings of a walk along the river that traverses this place”. The Replis also contain field recordings by van Houdt made on John Cage's 100th birthday on September 5, 2012 along the Maas Harbour in Rotterdam.

This mysterious, contemplative and delicately nuanced piano solo kind of correspondence is performed majestically by van Houdt. He lets the translucent overtones and rich resonances offer a sweet melancholy and nostalgic colors and shades, and only “Lettre 2” adds a fragile dramatic undercurrent to to the quiet exchange of cryptic thoughts and ideas. The words are morphed into a highly personal, suggestive language where “destruction and meaninglessness precede all possible worlds”.

You can trust van Houdt. He sure does know how to draw you into his fascinating musical world.

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