Michael Adkins Quartet - Rotator (Hatology, 2008) ****

This is the second album by tenor saxophonist Michael Adkins and it is a winner. Accompanied by stellar musicians as Russ Lossing on piano, John Hebert on bass and Paul Motian on drums, the quartet brings very intimate structured post-bop improvisations. Apart from the compositions which seem to hesitate between tradition and novelty, and apart from the high quality improvisations you can expect from such a band, Adkins' tenor itself is the great joy of this album. He has a very traditional tone, going back to the late 50s, sounding like Sonny Rollins, Coleman Hawkins even, full, warm, and eloquent, creating an intimacy which brings you back to the sentiments of dark bars on desolate evenings, where the only hope of any human warmth can come from the deep musical voice of this tenor, so recognizable, so true in its emotions, so rich in its subtleties and phrasings, that your spirits will be lifted again ... And yet it is not all mood, the music is also about form, about rhythm and interaction, and with these four musicians it all seem to happen just by itself, without any effort. A little too sweet to my taste at times, but a great album by objective criteria.

© stef

Read More

Feuermusik - No Contest (Standard Form, 2008) ***½

Feuermusik ("fire music" in German), is a Canadian duo with Jeremy Strachan on woodwinds and Gus Weinkauf on percussion. I don't know anything about these musicians nor about their band. I downloaded their CD from eMusic, and these are unfortunately downloads (still!) without liner notes or any further information. On myspace they describe themselves as "trash-can-busted-up-broken-reed-blues", and that does not do the music much justice. True, many of the tunes are very direct, joyful, almost funky pieces, reminiscent in their almost musical innocence and naive approach of the Swiss Lucien Dubs trio, including the heavy rhythmic sax playing and the very polyrhythmic percussion. But that's only how it starts, then some tracks play with clearly orchestrated and overdubbed pieces (since there are no credits to other musicians, that's what I assume), creating a more African feel in the melodies and the counterpoint, especially on "Nearness/Distance". These guys are at their best when they keep it simple, and often the overdubs become a little too much, but it's great fun listening to. And in these sad days, that is a welcome break.

Listen and download from eMusic.

Watch their clips on Youtube (not exactly a performance in Carnegie Hall, but so much the better!).




© stef

Read More

Paulo Curado - The Bird, The Breeze And Mr. Filiano (Clean Feed, 2008) ****

This is the fourth Clean Feed release on which Paulo Curado contributes, on alto or flute, and here as the leader of a trio format, with Bruno Pedroso on drums and Mr. Filiano on bass, for what seems to be eleven improvisations. I say "seems to be", because at times it's hard to believe that it is improvised. Each piece has its own angle, its own logical flow, which remains present throughout the piece even if there is no clear theme or melody, although on some tracks, such as "Escondidas", a kind of theme emerges from the improvisation. Ken Filiano is without a doubt one of the best bass players around, not only because of his technical skills (his arco playing is unbelievably precise), but because of the feeling he puts into it, often bluesy, with lots of soul, and because of his creative musical approach, mixing new forms with old feelings, or old forms with new emotional experiences, and any other combination of this. Listen to his solo piece "As If", where he has a captivating dialogue between arco and pizzi. And Paulo Curado is in the same league, which makes this a great fit. He's a cautious, gentle player, with a warm tone, very creative in his phrasing, which is sometimes very jazzy, and at other times more easily catalogued as avant-garde. Bruno Pedroso, acting as "The Breeze" in the title, plays very open, following the music well, creating the right percussive backdrop to create depth to the music, without falling into rhythmic patterns in the "open" pieces and very dynamic on the more boppish tunes. His duet with Curado on "Pequenos Duendes" is a real delight of interplay. There is lots of variation on this CD, strong musicianship, and great music, with the long "Por Fim Assim" as my favorite.


Listen to
Triptico
Novos Mundos Para O Joâo

Listen and download from eMusic.

© stef

Read More

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

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

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

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

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

© stef

Read More

Solo percussion

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

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

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

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

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

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

© stef

Read More

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

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

© stef

Read More

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

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

Max Ernst - Phases Of The Night

Dorothea Tanning - Insomnias

Yves Tanguy - With My Shadow


Wilfredo Lam - Visible/Invisible

© stef

Read More

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

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




© stef

Read More

Lol Coxhill and Andrea Centazzo - great again

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

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

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

Listen and download from eMusic.

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

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

Listen and download from eMusic.

© stef

Read More

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

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

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

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

© stef

Read More