Arsis - Désordres (Circum-Disc, 2010) ****

If you like Jim Black's Alasnoaxis, or Chris Speed's "Yeah No", or Tyft, you will possibly like this album too. This French quartet, consisting of Ivann Cruz on guitar, Christian Provost on trumpet, Charles Duytschaever on drums and Mathieu Millet on bass, finds a wonderful balance between improvised jazz, a rock attitude and approach, spiced up by some adventurous excursions in to sonoric possibilities.

Like with Jim Black, the album starts quite nice and sweet, with soft trumpet over plucked folksy guitar chords, and once you're sucked into this welcome universe of warm sentiments, almost lulled to sleep by the predictability of what comes next, a short pause announces a tempo change, rapid beats and a wildly distorted trumpet, while the guitar keeps playing its nice chord changes.

The next five tracks form one long suite, starting with eery electronic sounds, gradually shifting into one long tone, changing into a high speed fusion-like long unison succession of phrases by guitar and trumpet, the basis for some long and aggressive expansive soloing, yet slowing down again for trumpet and arco bass repeating the initial theme. You get the gist: four guys with great technical skills, having fun while sufficiently daring to look for innovative angles. Yes, the entertainment factor is high : they seek effects, whether in the all too obvious contrasts between speed and slowness, noise and calm, the predictability of some of the changes, the demonstration of their instrumental prowess or their rapid-fire interplay. That's part of the fun. Yet they add more to this. This is - luckily! - not fusion!

The music is clever, and puts you on the wrong foot regularly, and they do bring some strong powerful music, with nice compositions, with real drive and emotional delivery. The long "Volte Face", for instance, is a strong piece full of agony and distress, full of avant-garde explorative power, and ending in refined resignation, majestically supported by the arco bass, then shifting to chaos, which turns into a kind of heavy metal unison line between drums and guitar, in stark contrast with the slow trumpet playing.

Relatively accessible, but with sharp fangs. 

Listen and buy from Circum-Disc.

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Braxton

Well, yes, here is some Braxton again. Prolific as ever, open-minded as ever, creative as ever, adventurous as ever, ranging from traditional quartet to pieces for his Ghost Trance Music (GTM), duets with vocals and sax, and a trio with sax and vocals.

Anthony Braxton - 19 Standards (Quartet) 2003 (Leo Records, 2010) ****

Only because of this album, "The Girl From Ipanema", has been playing in my head for weeks. It was a really long time since I had heard it, and this performance by the Braxton quartet takes the original Jobim tune from its lightfooted original melody into a ten minute long open-ended improvisation, with the rhythm becoming quite slow and implicit, the percussion limited to some bell-like sounds, the guitar strumming a few sparse arpeggios, the bass plucking a little now and then, Braxton's alto singing like a breeze, reducing the already vulnerable theme to its bare abstract essence and beauty, still recognizable if you know what the quartet is improvising on, unlikely if you haven't, full of sweet intimacy and warm empathy, and out of this fragile improv the theme comes back in its magnificent melody and compelling rhythm, the four musicians playing like they play this tune in night clubs every night, and yes, dance and weep.

The quartet is Anthony Braxton on saxophones, Kevin O'Neil on guitar, Kevin Norton on percussion, and Andy Eulau on bass. This great box brings you four CDs, the recording of a European concert in 2003, with gigs in Italy, Spain, Belgium, France and Portugal.

The "standards" they play, are wide in range, in terms of style and moment in jazz history : you get "Body and Soul", "Ruby My Dear", but also Miles Davis "Half Nelson" and Coltrane's "Mr. PC".

It's not free jazz, far from it, but the approach of the four musicians, though quite respectful for the original, usually includes some deconstruction and adventurous moves.


Anthony Braxton & Ann Rhodes - GTM (Syntax) 2003 (Leo Records, 2010) ****

If I hate something, then it's modern worldless singing. Especially if it's abstract and without melody. Yet I must confess that although I thought the initial minutes would confirm my taste, gradually as this album evolves, it develops its own aesthetic. Braxton is phenomenal, but that you already knew, and I think it is due to his playing and the weird electronic underscore that Ann Rhodes is pushed into areas of singing that bring her far from the initial minutes. Her singing is not always wordless, sometimes you hear her count, or spell letters from the alphabet, whether these are part of the score or the improvisation is not always easy to detect. Braxton uses his usual range of saxes, from the very high to the very deep-toned, and the latter add great gloom over the dark electronics, that occasionally are likely to pierce your tympanic membranes.

The second CD is more intimate, with unison delivery of a typical Braxton composition full of high intervallic jumps, not really the kind of theme that will stick in your memory. The atmosphere has now become lighter, more playful, yet Rhodes, especially at the end, falls back into the kind of singing this guy hates.

Anthony Braxton - GTM (Outpost) 2003 (Leo Records, 2010) ***

On "Outpost", Braxton is accompanied by Chris Jonas on sax on the first CD and singer Molly Sturges joins the duo on the second CD. The first CD starts with long and meandering unison lines, then the musicians go their own way, examining various approaches and emotions, from soft interacting to raw exchanges, to moments of near silence, only to pick up the original lines again as on clue, resulting in a quite hypnotic listening experience. The composition has a very strong rhythmic pulse, with each note carefully accentuated, as if they are all neatly arranged in a ascending and descending rows, rather than forming part of one continuum.

The second CD is again one long composition consisting of eleven pieces. The inclusion of Molly Sturges on voice works well on some parts, yet not always. This composition is without a doubt the most avant-garde of all the music reviewed in this article. It has its nice moments, yet I often wondered where it was going to. A little less captivating, or in the meantime a little too much of the same.


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Fred Anderson dies at the age of 81

Fred Anderson, the father and the heart of Chicago's free jazz scene, died at the age of 81 from a heart attack.

Anderson is one of my favorite musicians, as regular readers will know. He was an avant-garde player, yet his playing was always full of deepfelt soul, full of blues, and funk at times, rhythmic in his phrasing, emotional and spiritual.

Fred Anderson was one of the founders of the Association for the Advancement Of Creative Musicians (AACM) in Chicago.

He was one of the most important figures of the Chicago free jazz scene, with his own club, The Velvet Lounge, where he mostly played and recorded.

You can find his biography on allmusic.

Here is his discography

• 1967 Joseph Jarman, Song For (Delmark Records DS-410); also on CD (Delmark Records DD-410).
• 1968 Joseph Jarman, As If It Were the Seasons (Delmark Records DS-714); also on CD (Delmark Records DD-417).
• 1977 Neighbours, Accents (EMI-Electrola 06632854).
• 1978 Fred Anderson Quintet, Another Place (Moers Music 01058).
• 1979 Fred Anderson Quartet, Dark Day (Message Records 0004).
• 1984 Fred Anderson, The Missing Link (Nessa Records N-23); also on CD (Nessa Records NCD-23).
• 1994 Fred Anderson and Steve McCall, Vintage Duets (Okka Disk OD12001).
• 1995 Fred Anderson Quartet, Birdhouse (Okka Disk OD12007).
• 1996 Fred Anderson, Marilyn Crispell, and Hamid Drake, Destiny (Okka Disk OD12003).
• 1997 Fred Anderson/DKV Trio, Fred Anderson/DKV Trio (Okka Disk OD12014).
• 1997 Fred Anderson, Fred: Chicago Chamber Music (Southport Records S-SSD 0043).
• 1999 Fred Anderson Trio, Live at the Velvet Lounge (Okka Disk OD12023).
• 1999 Fred Anderson Quartet, Volume One (Asian Improv Records AIR 0049).
• 2000 Fred Anderson Quartet, The Milwaukee Tapes Vol. 1 (Atavistic UMS/ALP 204CD).
• 2000 Fred Anderson, Hamid Drake, “Kidd” Jordan, and William Parker, 2 Days in April (Eremite Records MTE023/024).
• 2000 Fred Anderson Quartet, Volume Two (Asian Improv Records AIR 0054).
• 2001 Fred Anderson Quartet, Dark Day + Live in Verona (Atavistic UMS/ALP 218CD).
• 2001 Robert Barry and Fred Anderson, Duets 2001 (Thrill Jockey THRILL 101)
• 2001 Fred Anderson, On the Run: Live at the Velvet Lounge (Delmark Records DG-534).
• 2003 Fred Anderson, Back at the Velvet Lounge (Delmark Records DG-549).
• 2004 Fred Anderson and Hamid Drake, Back Together Again (Thrill Jockey THRILL 139); with companion video CD.
• 2005 Fred Anderson, Hamid Drake, and William Parker, Blue Winter (Eremite Records MTE047/048).
• 2006 Fred Anderson, Harrison Bankhead, and Hamid Drake, Timeless: Live at the Velvet Lounge (Delmark Records DE-568); also on DVD (Delmark DE-1568).
• 2007 Fred Anderson and Hamid Drake, From the River to the Ocean (Thrill Jockey THRILL 183).
• 2007 Fred Anderson and Harrison Bankhead, The Great Vision Concert (Ayler Records aylCD-052).
• 2007 Irene Schweizer, Fred Anderson, and Hamid Drake, Willisau & Taktlos (Intakt Records INTAKT CD 104).
• 2007 Territory Band 6 with Fred Anderson, Collide (Okka Disk OD12090).
• 2008 Fred Anderson Quartet, Volume Three (Asian Improv Records AIR 0074).
• 2008 Matana Roberts, The Chicago Project (Central Control International 6).
• 2009 Fred Anderson Trio, Birthday Live 2000 (Asian Improv Records AIR 0075).
• 2009 Fred Anderson Trio, A Night at the Velvet Lounge: Made in Chicago 2007 (Estrada Poznańska MIC01).
• 2009 Fred Anderson, Staying in the Game (Engine Studios e029).
• 2009 Fred Anderson, 21st Century Chase: 80th Birthday Bash, Live at the Velvet Lounge (Delmark Records DE-589); also on DVD (Delmark DE-1589).
• 2010 Fred Anderson, Black Horn Long Gone (Southport Records S-SSD 0128).
• no date Art Ensemble of Chicago with Fred Anderson, Peace Be Unto You: Live in Seattle (AECO 0013LE).

He recorded a lot, and last year several albums and a DVD were released to celebrate his 80th birthday.

My favorite albums are "Blue Winter", with William Parker and Hamid Drake, and "The Milwaukee Tapes, Vol. 1", but most of his albums are easy to recommend. His style of playing is quite his own, very recognizable and often within the same stylistic range. The second video below gives a nice example of this. So deep, so real, so much him.

We will miss him and his music.

Thank you, Fred.

Watch a nice trio performance in Le Mans, with Jaribu Shahid and Hamid Drake.





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Commitment - The Complete Recordings 1981/1983 (No Business, 2010) ****

I don't know how Lithuanian label No Business does it, but they have the knack to find back and re-issue amazing stuff. "Commitment" is the name of a band which released only one obscure album, in 1980, and which consists of William Parker on bass, Jason Kao Hwang on violin, Will Connell Jr on flute and alto and Takeshi Zen Matsuura on drums. An unusual line-up, with the unusual mix of Asian and African American musicians. At that time, William Parker was twenty-eight, and Jason Kao Hwang only twenty-three. The original album was released on Hwang's own Flying Panda label. In the label's good tradition, there is a lengthy booklet that gives all the necesseary background.

The first CD captures the five tracks of the original LP. The music is free-flowing, with slow themes setting the scene for lengthy improvisations and communal creation of sound. The first piece is typical, with a slow, somewhat solemn theme, which evolves in all four musicians improvising together, with Parker on arco, resulting in an intimate and light-footed interplay, slowly fading, leaving the original theme well behind them. The second piece is uptempo, with Parker's bass vamp quite recognizable, and Connell fierce on alto, and Matsuura gets ample time for a drums solo.

"Famine", is a staggering composition, with a very sparse discomforting sound environment created by Parker and Hwang working around the same tonal center, gradually increasing the intensity without creating variation, well illustrating and expressing the title of the piece.

The fourth track is again dark, slow and contemplative, with a slowly evolving unison theme. Again the sense of pace and tension is fantastic. Connell's soloing has a remarkable continuity in timbre and expressivity to Hwang's preceding soloing, with both Matsuura and Parker adding to the piece's minimalism in their solos.

"No Name", the last track of the original LP, is a longer work-out, based on a theme which could have come from Ornette Coleman.

As of track 6, the music was not released before, and is the recording of a performance of the band in 1983. The sound quality is a little less, at moments even doubtfull, yet the music is again a great gift to all of us. There is a little less unity in the performance, chaos reigns at times, voices from the audience sound louder than the band during quiet moments, etc, but despite all that, we should be grateful to have this music available for all to hear. The live performance has some stellar moments, like Connell's haunting flute-playing on "Ocean", a mid-tempo hypnotic piece with some middle-eastern influences.

The most remarkable aspect of the whole album is Hwang's violin playing. Like on many of his own albums as a leader, he is not a man of many notes - already then - but someone who so easily finds the right notes, he can stretch them and create his own unusual sound.

Three decades later, we can only be amazed that these young musicians already had some of the great musical personalities and vision that they expanded on during the years to follow, stubbornly sticking to what they learned during the haydays of the loft period in New York, yet adding character, power and expressiveness over the years. But it's all here, already then : the freedom, the spirituality, but also their typical approach to get more of their instruments than artists had done before.

It's not a masterpiece, far from it, but what a joy to hear, and have it back for us, fans of good music, and hopefully available for some more decades to come.

Buy from Instantjazz.

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The Ames Room - In (Monotype Records, 2010) ****

The Ames Room is French altoist Jean-Luc Guionnet with Austrialians Clayton Thomas on bass and Will Guthrie on drums. This album is without a doubt one of the most intense you will hear, with Guionnet setting up the pace and sound from the start and then not letting go at all, despite the numerous variations within the very strict boundaries in which their cry of freedom erupts. This album is indeed one long shout, all in the same spirit : voluminous, expansive, full of drive and energy, relentless and raw, with a take-no-prisoners approach. The accompanying press kit speaks of "terror jazz", and the descriptor is not too far fetched.

The vinyl LP consists of two long improvisations. Side one was performed in Niort, France and Side two in Poznan, Poland, with a year's difference. Despite the difference of one year between both performances, it's clear that their voice is the same and both pieces fit well on the same album. The first side has a strange kind of collapse in the middle, with the audience shouting and the drums keeping the attention going, with Guionnet distancing himself from the mikes, and playing somewhere in the background, but apparently the same happens with bass and drums. It was not dust accumulating under the needle of my record-player, yet for a moment I thought it was. Gradually the bass, and then the drums drag the trio back into sonic clarity. Whatever it is, it shows the non-terror minimalism these guys are also capable of, and this more cautious playing offers an interesting contrast . Or maybe it is just a gimmick to illustrate the band's title, which refers to the optical illusion created by a carefully crafted room.The second piece is more in once voice, with powerplay from beginning to end, and a somewhat better sound quality.

It is not unique, it is not even boundary-shifting, but so much raw energy is by itself a pleasure to listen to.

Listen and buy from MonotypeRecords.

The sound quality on this video is far from good, but it illustrates the energy of the playing quite well.

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Grid Mesh - Coordinates (FMR, 2010) ****½

Musical quality is often the result of a focused common vision on the musical project by the artists involved. This trio manages to do exactly that to the extreme: even if their universe is unusual and full of adventurous soundscapes, the coherence of the music is phenomenal, in the same vein as "Dans Les Arbres", albeit less weird, yet only by a little notch. The trio is Frank Paul Schubert on alto and soprano saxophone, Andreas Willers on electric guitar, and Rudi Fischerlehner on drums and percussion.

The music switches mood quite often, from light, open music, full of surprise and wonder : like a kitten watching a butterfly fly by, or like a baby enjoying its shadow, to the other side of the spectrum : intense and dark, full of emotions of distress and anguish. To their credit, they bring lots of variation without going too far from their basic musical concept : it can be jazzy, noisy, sweet improv, even with skronk guitar or fusion-like soloing, the end result is pretty unique. Some pieces are absolutely staggering, like the soft opening track "Shiva Attempting To Board", or the agonizing and nightmarish central piece, "Wooden Space", or the minimalist "Watertown, Waiting", and if the other pieces are not of the same superb level, they are not far below.

Quite adventurous stuff and a great listening experience.

Buy from Instantjazz.

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Lol Coxhill & Enzo Rocco - Fine Tuning, The Gradisca Concert (Amirani, 2010) ****

It is a short album : one track of thirty-three minutes, with Lol Coxhill on soprano and Enzo Rocco on guitar, yet every minute is a pleasure. Both stellar musicians, each with his own distinctive sound, create in the moment improvisation, slowly, cautiously creating beautiful music, without hurry, yet full of emphasis and expressivity. Coxhill sings and moans, sometimes simultaneously, but to me Rocco is the real discovery. His touch on the strings is light, precise, full of unexpected phrases, with often a hypnotic circling around the same tone, gradually shifting, an easy focal point for the saxophonist to pick up the thread and expand on it. The end result is both intense and refreshing, with the duo a perfect match. Rocco's playing is intimate and pointillistic, as if he's sitting in the room next to you, without any reverb at all, with a low-toned and dry sound, while Coxhill's sax resonates, with his stretched phrases adding expansiveness and a sense of space. Great music is full of contrast. These guys know how to do it. A great album, only too short.

Below the larger part of the concert. Check out 4/5 for Rocco's muted guitar precision - it sounds so simple, yet it sounds so great.












Buy from Instantjazz.

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Peter Evans Quartet - Live In Lisbon (Clean Feed, 2010) ****

Liner notes rarely describe the process used (and why should they?), yet on this album it is almost programmatic : "In addition to being an interesting way to connect improvisation with fixed materials the players are likely to already have under their fingers, it is also great fun to see what elements of surprise we can squeeze out of something that, on its surface, may seem very familiar".So writes trumpeter Peter Evans in the liner notes of this incredibly jazzy yet equally modern piece of music. The familiar material are harmonies and melody from "All The Things You Are", "Lush Life" and "Duke Ellington's Sound Of Love", to name but a few.

Evans is joined by Ricardo Gallo on piano, Tom Blancarte on bass and Kevin Shea on drums. The music is incredibly complex. Themes change, tempos change, rhythms change : and this several times within the same piece, and not at the same moment, but sometimes in overlaying structures, demanding incredible skills (and concentration!) from the musicians. The result is nice. Inventiveness abounds, the music changes itself the whole time, like a kind of sonic caleidoscope: you can't know what comes next, yet it follows logically and unpredictably from the previous notes, all in the same frame and structural context. The creative discipline and musicianship are stellar.

Yet in the end, it gives me a little bit the same feeling as the later albums by the Empty Cage Quartet, or some of Dave Douglas' music: the musical skills combined with intellectual play with structure create a more distant feel than the expressive and soulful straight from the heart jazz that gets my preference. It is musicians' music of a very high level.

Listen and download from eMusic.

Buy from Instantjazz.

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Trumpeter and music innovator Bill Dixon passed away

Yesterday night, trumpeter and music innovator Bill Dixon passed away in his sleep at the age of 84, leaving a wife and two children behind.

You can find more about him on other websites and blogs with substantially better archives than this one. I never saw him perform, and I came to know his music far too late, but caught up with this gap in my knowledge in the last years.

I can only say that I admire the man for his musical vision. Whatever he did, it was with a relentless dedication to his music, not for himself, not to get admiration, but just to get more soul, expressivity, emotional power out of this most ephemeral thing as sound.

Whether in small ensembles on in large orchestras, his music was unique, never the same, evolving over the years, searching, searching, searching ... he seemed never happy with the result, expecting more, deeper, better. Listen to the man's tone, his explorative power, his adventurous spirit, his sense for lyricism, for abstract authenticity... words fail me.

I can only say that all his four latest albums, reviewed on this blog, received five-star ratings :

- Weight/Counterweight

- Tapestries For Small Orchestra

- 17 Musicians In Search Of A Sound - Darfur

- Bill Dixon & The Exploding Star Orchestra 

... which is even by my generous ratings, quite astonishing.

I put him on my list of the top-3 musicians of the year 2008.

He is also one of the first musicians to have solo trumpet and trumpet-percussion duo albums, elaborating the sounds of his instruments and pushing the boundaries of playing and listening.

His musical legacy is huge, and will only be appreciated in some decades from now. He left us musical gems like few other musicians.

Our thoughts are with his family.


Below an obituary written by Ben Young, author of Dixonia: A Bio-Discography of Bill Dixon (Greenwood Press, 1998)

"Trumpeter and composer Bill Dixon died June 16th at his home in North Bennington, Vermont after a two-year illness. He was 84 years old.

Dixon was a revered and idiosyncratic figure in the avant-garde of Jazz music, and a creative force who strived at all times to place the music in ever more respectful circumstances. Dixon developed an often controversial profile as an outspoken and articulate defender of musicians’ rights as artists, and specifically the challenges to Black music as a contender in the culture and society of the United States. His music is known for a dark, poignant, pan-tonal abstraction that remains lyrical without relying on songs or the conventions of Jazz music=making. Through five decades as a recording artist, Dixon’s music has developed a loyal worldwide following.

As a musical stylist and educator, Dixon was the progenitor of an often reserved composition and playing approach that stood in contradistinction to the trends prevailing in the avant-garde in Jazz since the Sixties. He steered an influential through short-lived collective-bargaining movement in New York in 1964–65, the Jazz composers’ Guild. Under Dixon’s leadership, the Guild crafted a stance to preserve the artistic self-determination of Guild membership. Though he lived in Vermont for most of the last four decades, playing only occasionally in New York and in the US altogether, Dixon remained a leader and doyen for musicians of successive generations in a diaspora of alumni of his teaching and ensembles.

The legacy of Dixon’s progressive organizing activities in the music often overshadow the impact of his own music-making. Dixon emerged as a composer and bandleader in what can fairly be called a second wave of the New York avant-garde. Dixon’s legacy of ensemble records (1966, 2007, 2009) frames an unparalleled body of solo music for trumpet (1970 –76, mainly) and a subsequent series of small ensemble recordings (1980–1995) that stand apart in texture, instrumentation, personnel, and orientation from most of the numerous records of the period by Dixon’s contemporaries.

Born William Robert Dixon on October 5, 1925, he was the son of William L. Dixon and Louise Wade. His family transplanted to Harlem at the height of the depression from Nantucket, Massachusetts where Dixon was born. An early aptitude in realistic drawing led him to advanced studies in commercial art during and after high school, well before music became a serious interest. (He was also acclaimed in a group and solo shows of paintings prior to serious recognition of his music, and he was painting, drawing and creating lithographs to the end of his life). Dixon enlisted in the U.S. Army during WWII and served in Germany at the close of European theater.

Bill Dixon’s deliberate study of music began at the Hartnett Conservatory of music in the mid-1940s. His journeyman years as a Jazz trumpet player in the 50s involved activity as a sideman in an array of entertainment and rehearsal projects. Daytime employment as an international civil servant at the UN Secretariat, Dixon also turned to musical advantage. He founded the United Nations Jazz Society in 1959. He worked in the same period to establish the coffee houses of Greenwich Village as a formal and legitimate venue for presenting progressive music, an early manifestation of the spirit that fed the formation of the Jazz Composers’ Guild.

Bill Dixon will perhaps always be remembered for his organization of a concert series to present the new music, the October Revolution in Jazz of October1–4, 1964, at the Cellar Cafe on west 91st Street. Though literally digested by only a handful of eyewitnesses, the concert series focused significant critical attention on the undergrowth of otherwise unrecognized creative musicians, many of whom, including Dixon, shortly would show forth as the newest voices of the new music of the Sixties.

Starting in 1966, Dixon entered a fruitful collaborative partnership with the dancer/choreographer Judith Dunn, whose background lay in the Cunningham and Judson schools. The collaboration with Dunn led Dixon to join the faculty at Bennington College where she taught in the Dance department, and Dixon pushed for the creation of the Black Music Division, a phalanx of the school’s music teaching that had its own faculty, student body, and orientation. Active officially from 1975 until 1985, the program was a prototype of a kind of college-level music study that has flowered only haphazardly since, basing itself in the aesthetics and praxis of avant-garde music-making.

Dixon is remembered by many of his students as a powerful and charismatic teacher who adroitly factored student musicians at various levels of skill and development into classes and his own ensemble pieces. Within the first few years at Bennington, it became the norm for Dixon to design individual and group exercises artistically meaningful enough to become part of the compositions he developed through a term’s work.

Dixon retired from teaching in 1995 and continued to perform and record, chiefly in Europe. His last years saw a dramatic increase in the frequency of his U.S. appearances, and, since 2008, in U.S.-released recordings of his works for ensembles.

Dixon is survived by his longtime partner Sharon Vogel of North Bennington, a daughter Claudia Dixon of Phoenix, Arizona and a son William R. Dixon II of New York City. He also leaves two grandchildren.

A memorial celebration of Bill Dixon’s life and work will be held in New York City at a later date."

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Frode Gjerstad and friends

Norwegian saxophonist Frode Gjerstad is a fierce and prolific musician, who moves more and more into free improv territory with his small bands, getting away from the more jazz oriented approach he had some years ago. This results in blistering high energy music, with lots of unexpected turns. His own style has moved up tonally, with lots of little high notes often coming out organically, like agitated birds whistling, sometimes out of fear, sometimes out of joy, with a difference that is often hard to tell.

Frode Gjerstad, John Edwards & Mark Sanders - Bergen (FMR, 2009) ****

On this album, recorded in Bergen, Norway, last year, he is joined by John Edwards on bass and Mark Sanders on drums. As you can expect, the music is fierce with unexpected evolutions, very much in-the-moment blowing, bowing and hitting, yet quite expressive and focused, varying quite well between powerplay and more subdued dialogues. Raw and real, full of depth and intensity.

Frode Gjerstad & Paal Nilssen-Love - Gromka (Not Two, 2010) ****

This duo recording with fellow-countryman and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, was recorded a year ago at Klub Gromka in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Both musicians had already toured before this performance and that can be heard. the interaction is quite fun to listen to, rapid, telepathic even at moments, which is even clearer in an environment where everything is left to in-the-moment decisions. Gjerstad does fall back quite a lot on the higher registers, making music like excited birds in the trees, as said before. As Gjerstad describes it himself on his blog, about this performance : "Since we last played as a duo which was in August last year in the US where we played 13 gigs, I think the music has become more focused and freer. I have to admit that I think this has to do with the fact that I have been practising a bit more than before and therefor feel more relaxed when playing….".

Nice stuff!

Watch the duo perform in St. Petersburg



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