Clara Lai - Corpos (Phonogram Unit, 2023)

By Stef Gijssels

It's a great start to make your debut trio album a winner, and that's the case with this album by Clara Lai on piano, Alex Reviriego on double bass, and Oriol Roca on drums. 

We already met Lai on José Lencastre's Common Ground album from last year, and are not yet familiar with her other recently released albums. She is trained in classical piano and has a bachelor in jazz improvisation. With her new trio she creates music that is fresh, inventive and entertaining. Reviriego and Roca are also from Barcelona, and have been reviewed in several ensembles over the past years. 

Lai's music is one of structural improvisation, sculpting sonic patterns out of the fog of ideas, making them concrete and real, before they disappear again in their original background. It is a music of creative surprise, intimate like poetry at times, introverted, disciplined freedom. Both Reviriego and Roca co-create the sound, and grasp the intentions and voice of the piece perfectly. 

The first tracks are more compact and focused on exquisite and intense interaction. Only on the second part of "Corpo III" does this also lead to an increase in power and volume, and a more extroverted approach, the pivotal centre of the album. The last two tracks are longer exploratory pieces with great space for both bass and drums to demonstrate the power of some extended techniques to create a unique sonic atmosphere. 

Don't miss it. 

Listen and download from Bandcamp. 

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N.O. Moore with James O'Sullivan, Eddie Prévost and Ross Lambert

Eddie Prévost/ N.O. Moore/ James O’Sullivan/ Ross Lambert- CHORD (Shriker Records, 2023) 

James O'Sullivan & N.O. Moore- Time Parts (Ear Shot, 2021) 

James O'Sullivan & N.O. Moore - Repetition Disguises (Scatter Archive, 2023) 

By Stuart Broomer

These three recordings together trace a set of musical relationships. They develop during the Covid lockdown with the tape exchanges of guitarists James O'Sullivan and N.O. Moore, flower with the quartet concert with percussionist Eddie Prévost and guitarist Ross Lambert, then continue with the most recent duet of O’Sullivan and Moore, reflecting the depth of the quartet in the duo.

Back in July 2022, Eddie Prévost played the final AMM concert with Keith Rowe. Rowe (perhaps the most innovative guitarist in 1960’s London when and where the other candidates included Derek Bailey, Jimi Hendrix and John McLaughlin) restricted himself to playing samples and processing equipment. In the previous month, no days specified, Prévost was recording with another band, the quartet heard here on a CD called CHORD, which could be the name of the band as well as the CD title, not out of a fondness for stacked thirds but because of its symmetry of mind. It’s something I’d call lucky listening, a percussionist and three electric guitars playing music that can undermine not just the attribution of instrumentalist but the attribution of instrument.

All of the guitarists present -- N.O. Moore, James O’Sullivan and Ross Lambert -- have been members of Prévost’s long-running improvisation workshops, and that experience may be particularly fortuitous. CHORD doesn’t give away particular organizational clues or cues to identity, but develops instead through sonic tactility and compositional abstraction. Conception and execution blur.

The music is beautiful and in a way that’s hard to describe precisely, though it at times resembles the use of space and texture in the work of the Lisboan guitarist Abdul Moimême, who uses two horizontal guitars and percussion, including steel sheets. Part of what inspires that comparison is the odd concordance between an individual who can play like a group and a group who can play like an individual. Chord might be the most abstract, the most plastic and the most compelling music of the year. On the opening “Accord”, glittering micro-events from amplified guitar strings become, it seems, a kind of audible light, shimmering, vibrating, with a wash of gong or cymbal sound, and an electronic oscillation. Our associations might extend to cultural memories of sci-fi fiction sound, but here there are other traces, other resonances, whether natural or industrial… sunlight reflected on water recalled as a sound, now something like feedback being dialled in, then something suspended between Morse code and chord. As the program unfolds, other trace sounds join in, in a spirit of inquiry, wisps of intervals with shifting volume, a slight rise in volume or a particular silence repeated, becoming a form of echolocation. It has about it the simultaneous airs of the deliberated and the automatic, the ultimate mind meld of collective improvisation in which the emerging result has the ideally reflective pose of a Zen garden.

The ultimate and longest track, “Epiphenomena”, is a miracle of construction -- liquid high notes ringing, delicate electric tones feeding back, metallic percussive scrapes – a gathering, a massing, an overlay of space, an environment, a mind.

Before…

The first release of the James O’Sullivan / N.O. Moore duo was Time Parts , a digital-only release recorded in April-May 2020 and released on Bandcamp on Earshots in 2021. Moore’s note describes the duo’s inception just prior to the Covid lockdown and makes some distinctions about the two guitarists’ approaches:

James and I had played a couple of gigs as a duo, the first organised by Earshots. We had a couple more lined up when the world withdrew. We were both keen to carry on, because it seemed that something might develop.

Both of us are interested in the electric guitar as a sound source – a found object, to borrow Keith Rowe’s lend from Marcel Duchamp - but we approach it in different ways. James tends to use controlled volume as a way to explore the sounds of wood and wire; I tend to use effects as a way to explore electricity. Together, a communicated world began to manifest. Could this world survive without us seeing each other?

We decided to keep it going by exchanging recorded improvisations and overdubbing. I think you can hear authentic interaction in the result, despite the fact that we were not reacting to each other in the moment; rather the moment got extended and stretched out – a sort of temporal virtuality.

Nevertheless, the improviser’s art is audibly there, in the moment of decision and act even in response to our recorded selves. We left a message before the tone.

There is, given the circumstances of its making, a high degree of interactivity here, though the interaction might consist in the shifting identification of electronic sound and its frequent resemblance to glass in its liquid state. The physical abstraction of the process can create a duo music of near twins, e.g., the track “When”, the title an abstraction, in which the seams between the two instruments seem continuous and the wire/wood traces are as abstract as the bleeps and interference patterns. “When” is here very specific — its beginnings might be in the score to Forbidden Planet or in “Telstar”, perhaps the first identification of space and the electric guitar. Made possible by the internet, including Bandcamp, the interactive recording and the record have simply moved. “Error” might exist as some by-product of data collection that has provided a music of tactile delight, here tactility figured along with electro-shock. One leans back, nestles in the comfort of the planetarium chair and closes one’s eyes, the guitars too disembodied for one to recall their shapes. The instruments are returned to us with the opening notes of “Framer”.

…and After

Two months following the recording of Chord, and more than two years following the overdubbed duets of Time Parts, the O'Sullivan/ Moore duo recorded Repetition Disguises, a digital and limited CD release with the two musicians in conventional proximity to one another. In my hearing, something particularly remarkable has happened, especially given Moore’s distinction between the relative physicality of O’Sullivan’s approach and the electronic nature of his own. In the early pieces of Repetition Disguises (it’s programmed in order of recording) both instruments are often highly electronic, the particular buzz and grit of wound string and strike of fingerboard less evident. The emphasis on string texture attributed to O’Sullivan becomes more distinct, ironically, in moments of “Unknown Artist”, but there’s continuous variety in this balance throughout the program. In “Envelop”, it’s subtle, the two already coming close to the orchestral quality of Chord, in the balance that I take to be the percussive attack of O’Sullivan and the continuous electronic sounds of Moore. In the extended Phrase Phase, the “guitarness” of both musicians comes forward, while the later “Whoop Structure” sounds like it’s being dialled rather than picked. In the ultimate “Musicae Volitantes”, both musicians contribute to that mercurial effect, that sound of liquid, subtly tinted, glass. Like Chord, It's work of the rarest subtlety, sounds and gestures continually refracted in the developing sonic dialogue.

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Carla Bley (1936 – 2023)

Carla Bley. Photo by Klaus Muempfer

By Martin Schray 

Carla Bley, la grande dame du jazz, the woman with the signature haircut, the cool witch (as Swiss critic Peter Rüedi called her), is dead. On the scene since the end of the 1950s - her composition “Donkey“ was written in 1958 - Bley has composed and recorded new work constantly. She won several international prizes, was named a Jazz Master by the NEA, and received Honorary Doctorates from the University of Toulouse and the New England Conservatory of Music.

When Lovella May Borg (her birth name) came to New York she must have been an eye-catcher. As a cigarette girl at the famous Birdland she enchanted the young avant-garde pianist Paul Bley, who soon became her husband and encouraged her to start composing. Carla was both muse and respected composer of the young scene, a number of musicians began to record her material. Jimmy Giuffre used “Ictus“ for his album Thesis and Paul Bley’s legendary Barrage (on ESP) consisted entirely of her compositions. In a male-dominated environment Carla Bley became a role model for the upcoming feminist movement, she was cool, beautiful, self-confident and most of all exceptionally talented, something she proved with her composition “Ida Lupino“ (from 1964), which was released on Paul Bley’s Closer album in 1966. In 1964 she was also one of the founders of the Jazz Composers Guild, which wanted to further orchestral avant-garde music. One of her combatants was Michael Mantler, whom she married in 1965 after she was divorced from Paul Bley. With Mantler, she co-led the Jazz Composers’ Orchestra and started the JCOA record label. By this time, Carla Bley was ready to work on a large-scale project of her own. The result was one of the biggest unified compositions jazz has ever produced, the extravagant surreal jazz opera Escalator Over the Hill. The long (nearly two hours) stylistically eclectic work brings together singers and players from all genres - 53 people contributed to the recording, including some of the most productive and original jazz and rock musicians working at the time. Prominent participants were Don Cherry, Roswell Rudd, Jimmy Lyons, Charlie Haden and Gato Barbieri as well as Jack Bruce, John McLaughlin and the very young Linda Ronstadt. The work as a whole celebrates and reformulates rock megalomania, free jazz iconoclasm, and classical sobriety. It’s Bley’s early magnum opus.

Throughout her career Bley has thought of herself as a composer first, which is why she’s always loved writing music for her big bands. She was a master of the musical quote, the collage, and she was able to use irony in her compositions, e.g. in “Spangled Banner Minor and Other Patriotic Songs” from The Carla Bley Band: European Tour 1977, which puts several national anthems through the grinder, beginning with the American one recast as Beethoven’s “Appassionata Sonata“. Here and in many of her works for larger ensembles she mixed elements of the music of composers like Hanns Eisler and Kurt Weill with contemporary modern jazz.

In recent decades, Bley reconciled with smaller formats and her abilities as a pianist, mostly in duos and trios with her life-companion bassist Steve Swallow and saxophonist Andy Sheppard. She’s never considered herself as a virtuoso. “I do the fifty-one Brahms exercises every day,” Bley admitted. “I can’t really tell you what Carla is like”, Steve Swallow once said. “She’s so elusive and ever-changing. She is, however, my hero, and I’ll leave it at that.” It’s this elusiveness that best describes Carla Bley. She was always interested in the process of making music, in new possibilities and new developments.

I saw Carla Bley on the first jazz concert I’ve ever visited - a festival in Freiburg/Germany in 1980, with Chet Baker, Barbara Thompson and John Abercrombie (among others). I was flabbergasted by her charisma and the sheer beauty of the music. But I also remember how angry she was because the Americans had elected Ronald Reagan as President. “Ida Lupino“, with its inner voices and canonic echoes, has remained one of my favorite jazz compositions, Escalator Over The Hill will always be in the canon of avant-garde music. Her death is a terrible loss.

Watch her and Steve Swallow playing “Lawns“. It’s as beautiful as Carla Bley herself:

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Holding Hands - Dancer in The Light (s/r, 2023)

By Sammy Stein

Holding Hands is an octet comprising some of the best-known improvisers in the UK. They are Chris Dowding on trumpet, Raph Clarkson on trombone and electronics. Dee Byrne on alto sax and electronics, Rob Milne on tenor sax and bass clarinet, Ben Higham on tuba, Martin Pyne on vibraphone, Mark Howe samples, electronics, and guitar, and Andrew Lisle on drums. Their EP The Dancer in The Light features the same track in a collection of re-mixes and versions.

The original track ‘Dancer in The Light’ was written by Dowding and dedicated to the Vermont-based composer Kathy Eddy. The intention is that the piece is different every time, especially in the second half of the piece, where there is plenty of scope for improvisation around a series of open repeats.

For different musicians and the full ensemble to explore a single composition and discover different interpretations, approaches, and ways of developing the music, particularly in the freer second half, is a rare opportunity. The piece itself is a flexible, variable number, so it is different when played by different musicians every time in any case. On the EP, versions, and re-mixes alternate, and each sounds so different that in some places, the original track seems so heavily overlaid with the players’ interpretation and lost until the essence re-emerges and the underlying harmonies remind the listener of the inspirational source.

The EP explores variation through versions ranging from the full octet version to interestingly worked solo versions, notably the third track ‘Dancer in Light’ where Matthew Bourne takes a deliciously sweet melodic variation on the piano and detours into classical interpretation, or the incredibly fluid and beautiful fifth track ‘The Dancer in Light’ where Noah Horne plays a solo harp version. Track seven, ‘The Dancer in Light’ on tack piano by Zac Gvi demonstrates a completely different style and interpretation of the same track on the same instrument as that on track three. The final track is a darker, serious version, with searing contrasts offered by effects. It opens the thought there may still be more variations within the composition. It is a brave act to release an EP based around a single composition but in this case, Holding Hands demonstrates there are many ways to interpret music.

This is interesting listening and the opportunity not only to hear top-rung musicians interpreting a track in different ways but also the singularly unique versions provided by the soloists.

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Irreversible Entanglements - Protect Your Light (Impulse, 2023)

 

By William Rossi

The quintet's 2017 self-titled debut album was one of my favourites of that year, I was enthralled by the fiery, politically charged poetry of frontwoman Camae Ayewa, also very active under her fantastic Moor Mother alias, to the tune of unrelenting free jazz assaults and I've been following them ever since, as they continued to release some of the best records in years. Protect Your Light is their fourth album and the first not to be released in partnership with Chicago label International Anthem, this later effort being released by none other than Impulse!, with a slew of collaborators such as pianist Janice A. Lowe, singer Sovei and Jaimie Branches' Fly or Die's cellist Lester St. Louis.

While still being firmly in the realm of free jazz the quintet's music has been in constant evolution from the start, each new release introducing new sounds and new approaches, like the infectious grooves and funk influences of their previous album "Open the Gates'', and this one is no different: hints of Ornette Coleman's afro-futuristic masterpiece "Science Fiction" shine on tracks like the opener "Free Love" with its tapestry of bouncy horn licks and hypnotic mantras or the heartfelt homage to the late Jaimie Branch on "root <=> branch" and the addition of synthesizers and piano to "Sunshine", one of the highlights of the album and possibly the band's first straight-up ballad, with Lowe's singing complementing Ayewa's spoken word poetry that, despite the sorrowful horns and electronic rumbling, still maintains a glimmer of hope, declaring that "the sun will shine in our eyes''. 

The sung vocals are not relegated to "Sunshine" alone and also feature prominently on the title track "Protect Your Light'', a song that merges the band's present with its past, starting out as a rhythmic, latin-inspired jam that later grows into the familiar free jazz fury fans of the band know so well. Tcheser Holmes' eclectic and lively drumming keeps the listener on their toes throughout the album, relentless in its assault even on otherwise mellower tracks such as "Our Land Back", a celebration of displaced indigenous peoples' history we're just now, as the lyrics say, "starting to remember", a hint of progress after many, many years.

 

It's this political radical empathy that makes the band resonate with so many people, myself included, and nowhere is this radical empathy more present than on "Soundness", a track in which Ayewa offers the listener a safe space, a room, where they can be themselves while being protected by the hostilities of the outside world.

Aquiles Navarro's trumpet and Keir Neuringer's saxophone playing are no less impressive, capable of delivering fiery flurries of notes, like on the aforementioned "Soundness", the playful and bouncy phrases of the title track, the slow and melodic dirge of "Our Land Back", the airy and sparse back and forths of "Celestial Pathways", all in a delicate balance between composition and improvisation. "Let the horns cry out" declares Ayewa on the closer "Degrees of Freedom", and cry out with all their might they do, accompanied by Luke Stewart's thumping bassline and Holmes' propulsive drums in a last explosion of free, uncompromising music.

If you're new to the quintet, this Impulse! debut is the best place to start: a joyous, bittersweet, thought provoking, teeth gritting, endlessly relistenable album, more approachable but with no hint of "selling out" or softening their politics and ethos in favor of a larger audience.
A triumph

 

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Céline Voccia - Sunday Interview

 

Photo by Cristina Marx/Photomusix

1. What is your greatest joy in improvised music?

I don't know if the term “joy” is appropriate . I think this is all about a mental process leading to a play-in-flow and a secondary state of mind. This instant when I hear the music and realize : yes, that's it, we reached it, it is working, and we get more and more energy to play further.

2. What quality do you most admire in the musicians you perform with?

The ability to listen to the other musicians and to enable a symbiosis between each other, while keeping their own musical identities.

3. Which historical musician/composer do you admire the most?

This is a very, very difficult question. I would say Johann Sebastian Bach.

4. If you could resurrect a musician to perform with, who would it be?

Without hesitation Jimmy Giuffre !

5. What would you still like to achieve musically in your life?

I don't want to achieve anything , because if I did it would mean this process would end at some point … I would like to develop my music further as long as I am on this earth, continuously get to know new musicians, play concerts and do new recordings.

6. Are you interested in popular music and - if yes - what music/artist do you particularly like?

Of course yes, even if I am not listening to it all the time … I like the old bands from the 70-80's, Deep Purple particularily, Led Zeppelin, also Iron Maiden, Iron Butterfly, Black Sabbath. I also have to admit to I like the soundtrack of “Frozen” of Walt Disney, which I am obliged to listen every day to because my children are real fans of it ...

7. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

I would like to be less shy and doubting about myself , and also to be able to make decisions quicker (which is not easy as I am a gemini …).

8. Which of your albums are you most proud of?

Honestly I am completely unable to make a choice … I am proud of every album, they are all different and have a particular meaning to me. I would not have realeased them if I hadn't be proud of them all.

9. Once an album of yours is released, do you still listen to it? And how often?

Yes I still listen to it, after the release 1-2 times and then later from time to time. It is difficult to say how often as it depends on the album, generally I have some CDs in the car and listen to them while driving.

10. Which album (from any musician) have you listened to the most in your life?

Rachmaninov's. Piano Concerto nr.2 in C minor, the interpretation by Julius Katchen.3

11. What are you listening to at the moment?

Now I am listening to the trio with Ab Baars, Meinrad Kneer and Billy Elgart and to the piano works of Alberto Posadas.

12. What artist outside music inspires you?

I am feeling inspired by abstract painting in general, but Nicolas de Stael in particular has inspired me a lot.

Céline Voccia reviews:

Céline Voccia: Energetic Dissonance and Contemplative Restraint

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Rodrigo Amado The Bridge – Beyond the Margins (Trost, 2023)

By Stuart Broomer

Rodrigo Amado has been putting together international bands for some 20 years, beginning with the shifting personnel of the Lisbon Improvisation Players and his early sessions as a leader, ad hoc assemblies of local musicians (e.g., Acácio Salero, Bruno Pedroso, Ulrich Mitzlaff and Carlos Zingaro) and American visitors (e.g., Ken Filiano, Steve Adams and Dennis Gonzalez). Early on, he put together a trio with Kent Kessler and Paal Nilssen-Love and then a quartet with Taylor Ho Bynum, John Hébert and Gerald Cleaver.

Through the 2010s Amado developed both his Lisboan Motion Trio with drummer Gabriel Ferrandini and cellist Miguel Mira, a group that has played and recorded with guests Jeb Bishop, Alexander Schlippenbach and Peter Evans, and the quartet that came to be known as This Is Our Language, with Joe McPhee, Kessler and Chris Corsano. The Bridge, playing together for the past year, is a new international assembly with Schlippenbach, drummer Gerry Hemingway and bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, a special combination of talents and experience, not least for their leadership of, or membership in, bands with stellar saxophonists. One associates Schlippenbach with his own fifty-year leadership of a trio with Evan Parker, Hemingway with membership in Anthony Braxton’s most celebrated ensemble and Håker Flaten with Scandinavia’s ultimate power trio, The Thing with Mats Gustafsson. Hemingway and Håker Flaten have employed two of the world’s most under-recognized tenor saxophonists in their own groups, Ellery Eskelin and Dave Rempis, respectively.

More than mere expectation, there’s an air of excitement about the group, though its members go about their business with an involvement in the developing music so acute that it resembles a kind of omni-directional, omni-temporal relaxation and tension at once, in which the relaxation/ tension of great achievement accompanies the realization of the event.

The principal work here is the forty-minute “Beyond the Margins”, an extended free improvisation in which every musician is completely engaged in the evolution of a collective creation, each coming to the fore in the on-going dialogue to assume the lead or solo. It’s a kind of ideal conversation while simultaneously a collectively and continuously shaped creation, the substance of the time of its making. Different degrees of known and unknown content will arise, different degrees of formal marking, but at its best, such collective creation cannot be disputed or divided up, each stellar individual contribution conditioned by collective support and response, with Amado achieving levels of articulate intensity that may not have occurred on previous recordings. It’s essentially a trance, trance as transport and journey, its revelations signalled from the pensive grandeur of its opening through all its dimensions, including its abstract fluting, torrential knottings (perhaps matched elsewhere but not exceeded) and sudden liberations.

That epic improvisation is complemented by two brief but deeply traditioned pieces. The brief “Personal Mountains” is, if possible, perfect “free Monk”, tightly structured from the outset by Schlippenbach, Monk’s most thorough devotee, the melody and form picked up by Amado, Hemingway and Håker Flaten, the architecture executed flawlessly, as if it were how they regularly spent their time.

The performance of Albert Ayler’s “Ghosts” calls for a special note. A while ago, a performance video of Amado was circulating in which he played “Ghosts” with a student rhythm section and trumpeter Peter Evans at a workshop in the Azores. It was, as is this, extraordinary, both in its sound and its magisterial presence. On a personal note, once on a solitary midnight walk during a brief visit to Montreal in 1967, I went in search of The Barrel, perhaps the only place in Canada that regularly featured significant free jazz figures. In one of youth’s enchanted moments, my favorite musician in the world just happened to be playing there. Albert Ayler’s sound was blossoming out of the open door, expanding into the August night. I’ve never heard a saxophone sound as full or as complex, never quite caught on record, a broad sound that could begin in foghorn lower-register blast and trail off into upper partials as sweet, gauze-like and airy as those of Stan Getz.

There’s been a sudden flurry of Ayler derivatives in free jazz lately, generally a trivialization, a kind of devout mockery, of one of the greatest figures in the music’s history by some of the least skillful. There’s none of that here—instead that melody, initiated in a whisper, soars as authentic tribute and visionary invocation on Amado’s own rich, complex, precise and distinct timbres, inflections and emotions, each note, each sound as if weighed on an alchemist’s scale. As elsewhere, the group is superb.

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Great Sakata Trio - Siren, Sticks & Circus (Euphorium, 2023)

By Martin Schray

The recordings for Oliver Schwerdt’s projects with Christian Lillinger and the double basses are almost always made at live concerts in Leipzig’s Club naTo. Before the main act, the quintet itself, there is often a trio in which the two basses are left out. That’s how Schwerdt had handled it with the New Old Luten Quintet as well as with Big Bad Brötzmann, and this was also the sequence he chose for the Great Sakata project.

Now, of course, a bass-less trio with Akira Sakata always evokes memories of the legendary Yosuke Yamashita Trio (the second outfit with Sakata on alto), a group that played with the utmost collective energy, ejecting its music volcano-like and transforming it into incandescent lava flows, as the German journalist Bert Noglik put it. But while Yamashita’s playing was always rooted in Japanese traditions, Schwerdt’s is infused with European classical and new music. So here Sakata’s total expenditure of energy, his roaring and writhing, collide with Schwerdt’s sometimes brutal, teutonic force and Lillinger’s postmodern mix of styles, that he can call up within a millisecond.

Schwerdt himself was simply thrilled after the concert because Sakata’s slender alto reminded him a lot of Luten Petrowsky. That said, there are indeed several highlights in this short, 16-minute performance, e.g. when after five minutes Sakata’s lightning-like runs meet Schwerdt’s powerful clusters in the lower registers, while Lillinger remains subtly and calmly in the background. Or the immediately following passage, which comes across like an ultra-sombre ballad.

In general, the set lives from a contrast between high speed and delicacy, prolixity and condensation. Towards the end there’s a passage with bells and whistling, with which the listeners are led astray, because you think you have arrived at the end of the piece. However, the trio starts all over and the tempo is increased tremendously again. The ending comes relatively abrupt. Simply perfect.

Siren, Sticks & Circus is available as a mini-CD. You can get it from Oliver Schwerdt directly or from the label’s bandcamp site.

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Great Sakata Quintet - Tornado (Euphorium, 2023)

By Martin Schray

For more than ten years Oliver Schwerdt has been pursuing a concept. Together with Christian Lillinger and two bassists, he has persistently put a reeds player in front of this cart (preferably saxophone and clarinet). It started with Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky (the fabulous New Old Luten Quintet), and continued with Peter Brötzmann (Big Bad Brötzmann). While Schwerdt was still playing with the Brötzmann group, he was looking for a new alpha dog, who - on the one hand - could be pushed by this monstrous rhythm section, but - on the other hand - could stand up to it at the same time. In the end, he found the great Akira Sakata, who fulfills this task in a grandiose manner.

To begin with, Tornado prepares the ground for the Japanese legend. Lillinger displays his filigree cymbal work and the two basses (this time Antonio Borghini and John Eckhardt) complement each other nicely, alternating bowing and plucking. When the somber piano kicks in, you actually think you’re listening to a rising tornado. It drones and hisses, hums and flashes. The piano lines and chords condense, the energy concentrates. After three and a half minutes Sakata finally enters, the clarinet seems like a salvation and the tornado sets off and immediately blows in any possible direction: choppy sheet lightnings, abrupt piano cascades, clarinet runs like miniature typhoons, short pauses, which - however - only seem to bring relief. When this takes place, the wind instrument, the basses and the very reduced percussion are briefly left alone. However, the energy is never reduced, it only condenses in these passages. Highlights of the improvisation, however, as so often in Sakata’s performances, are his chants. Sometimes he only quotes Japanese epics in a mild voice, this time he roars and rages, he grumbles, screams and almost vomits out the words. At the same time, he moves at a pain threshold, as if he was shouldering all the suffering in the world. The middle of “Tornado“ is therefore also the climax. One believes to hear the force of nature acoustically realized - in Schwerdt’s piano swells, which of course remind of Taylor and Schlippenbach (but the man has worked out his own sound in the synthesis of different styles of the great masters), the wild bass runs of Borghini and Eckhardt and in the snare attacks of Lillinger, which sound as if they are pitched high. Then, in the last third, Sakata switches to the saxophone and immediately the atmosphere changes. The darkness gives way to crystalline clarity, even if the great master likes to blur his tones. The sky clears up, we’re near the end of the storm.

I’ve often praised the soloists in my reviews of the New Old Luten Quintet or Big Bad Brötzmann (always rightly so), and I’ve already emphasized what an incredible development Oliver Schwerdt has made as a pianist over the years. And both Sakata and Schwerdt are quite outstanding on this recording. But this time it’s also time to highlight the two bassists and the drums. You may already know that Christian Lillinger can set-off sheer fireworks. He can hardly be surpassed in versatility and is perhaps the most exciting European drummer at the moment. Borghini and Eckhardt move an ominous mass in front of them on this recording so well matched, that one almost gets scared at some points. Especially together with the dark clarinet sound, the band develops a powerful, intimidating ground noise.

If there is a European formation today that can play in the tradition of Cecil Taylor’s Unit, then it’s this quintet. You just want to be swept away by this elemental force, you want to be part of the storm. The only tornado that creates and does not destroy. A miracle.

Tornado is available as a CD. You can get it from Oliver Schwerdt directly or from the label’s bandcamp site.

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Tomas Fujiwara—Pith (Out of Your Head, 2023)

By Gary Chapin

Tomas Fujiwara brings us the 7 Poets Trio—himself on drums, Tomeka Reid on cello, and Patricia Brennan on vibes—for their follow up to their 2019 Rogue Art debut .

I associate this trio with Mary Halvorson, but that’s probably because the first time I heard Fujiwara and Brennan was in Halvorson’s group, and Brennan’s vibes are very striking! They are a signature sound that immediately commands your attention. Tomeka Reid, I’ve been following for years, partly because I’m both a cello and AACM obsessive, but also because paying such attention has reaped benefits.

Pith begins as it means to go on, with compositions that provoke conversations between the players, the kind of conversations that go on into the night and get you to ignore your responsibilities.

This set of instruments—drums, cello, vibes—is remarkable for a bunch of reasons, not just its rarity. Some have called it a “chamber jazz” group, and that fits. It does a lot of wandering in extraordinary spaces, and there is an attractive coolness—with a story underneath—a very wry sense of humor. But I always wonder, when folks bring out the “chamber jazz” trope for a vibes recording, if they’re just being lured in by the Milt Jackson/Modern Jazz Quartet association. Am I? Associations are strange.

Reid sticks to pizzicato playing most of the time, playing the bass role, but the arco excursions have more impact because of this, as the only sustain sound herein. But they aren’t out there. I am reminded of Ron Carter’s work on Eric Dolphy’s second record. The vibes also bring Dolphy to mind, because of Bobby Hutcherson’s tour de force on Out to Lunch. But Hutcherson did not play on the record with Ron Carter. And there’s no Dolphy to be found in the 7 Poets Trio, but my ear tells me Fujiwara is deeply connecting to Dolphy’s stream. (As Wikipedia points out, the clock face on the cover of Dophy’s Out to Lunch has seven arrows. Seven arrows? 7 Poets Trio? Hm? Hm? Associations, as I said, are strange.)

Leaving all that aside—finally! I can hear you mutter—the experience of listening to Pith is intrigued, delighted contentment, like all of my best jazz club memories. The word “pith” can be misleading. There are a number of meanings, both official and un-, but the important one is that of “importance.” When you are being “pithy,” you aren’t being brief or witty, you are getting to the core of the matter. The unadorned substance. With this sparse and abundant trio, these compositions, and these musical conversations, the metaphor is apt.

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