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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Survival Unit III - Straylight (Pink Palace, 2015)

Survival Unit III - Straylight (Pink Palace, 2015) ****½

By Eyal Hareuveni

Straylight from Survival Unit III - the trio of legendary trumpeter-saxophonist Joe McPhee, cellist-guitarist Fred Lonberg-Holm and drummer Michael Zernag - celebrates ten years of working together. The trio was initiated by McPhee in 2004, as his third Survival Unit group, when all three played in Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet. This trio has toured extensively on both sides of the Atlantic and recorded this album, its fourth, in the Krannert Art Museum in Champaign, IL, on September 2014.

These three resourceful and highly creative improvisers embody in their respective playing the true essence of freedom, whether we would title it 'free jazz' or 'free improvisation.' Their rich, individual languages, colorful imagination, great intuition and wise, dynamic interplay and lively sense of total freedom turn this live recording into a real gem. Already on the first extended piece “Blood of a Poet”, dedicated to New York-based poet Steve Dalachinsky, the trio follows its immediate instincts, adopting, developing and reconstructing brief ideas. This fast flow of ideas turns to be a loose, poetic narrative that stresses the strong, individual voices and at the same time the trio almost telepathic interplay. There is enough room for an intense, searching-scorching solo of Lonberg-Holm who adds electronics to his sonic palette, contrasted by a lyrical sax solo of McPhee and later by a fractured drumming of Zerang.

McPhee begins the second extended piece “If Not now…” with a commanding solo made of circular breathing on the pocket trumpet, filling the space with strange, agonizing voices. Zerang ornaments this intense, stream of breaths and shouts with light, percussive touches that become faster and more dense as the piece develops. Then Lonberg-Holm joins with his screaming, tenor guitar and ups the temperature into a fiery, wild one. This tight interplay disintegrates later on into spare breaths of McPhee,  experiments of Lonberg-Holm with electric guitar and electronics sounds and Zerang explorations of the skins and cymbals of his drum set. Eventually McPhee takes the lead with a moving sax solo that pierces Lonberg-Holm electric storm and Zerang ceremonial, Middle-Eastern-tinged percussion.  

The short answer to this piece, “When?”, is an energetic free-jazz piece, fueled by Zernag massive drumming, manic bowing of Lonberg-Holm and a gentle, compassionate playing of McPhee.

Magnificent.

Survival Unit III – Straylight (Pink Palace, 2015) ****        

By Martin Schray

Survival Unit is a project by Joe McPhee and this is his third version of that group. The first version (unfortunately not documented) started in the late 1960s and early 1970s with McPhee on his own (on saxophone and on pre-recorded material) before there was a second version with Mike Kull (p), Byron Morris (sax) and Harold E. Smith (dr) (HatHut released a 1971 performance in 1996 on which the band was augmented by Clifford Thornton). In the early 2000s McPhee revived the band with new members (Fred Lonberg-Holm and Michael Zerang). Straylight is the fourth release by this trio and celebrates the band’s ten years anniversary.

On their first three albums you could find McPhee on pocket trumpet, alto and tenor and Lonberg-Holm on cello and electronics, on this one McPhee uses the soprano (and the pocket trumpet) and Lonberg-Holm is on tenor guitar for the first time which changes the band’s  approach to sound completely.

The album starts with “Blood of a Poet“ (for Steve Dalachinsky), a piece dedicated to the New York poet and friend of McPhee’s (he said that he attended almost all of his concerts in NYC). Dalachinsky performs regularly with free-jazz musicians, e.g. at the Visions Festival. His work is inspired by the beat poets, he likes to break rule of the language to create his own - which is the connection to Survival Unit III. The first part of the track is marked by heavy blues beat interruptions, Zerang almost plays time to McPhee’s wide trumpet bows and short soprano trills which Lonberg-Holm counters with wide and spacious notes. The second part features hectic bustle between the three instruments and sudden breaks: first McPhee is left alone and then Lonberg-Holm, who rubs and scratches the strings of the cello in front of electronic debris. McPhee tries to relieve the tension with a tender soprano melody but Lonberg-Holm and Zerang are not easily defeated, they bring in a blues riff which is put through the meat grinder. The end of the track is a violent mess which is stopped abruptly, as if someone had pulled the plug.

One of the band’s qualities is their great variety of styles - from call-and-response schemes to new classical music to rock-related material - as well as different atmospheres, something that is audible on this album as well, for example on the second and third track, "If Not Now …" and "When?" (obviously an allusion to Primo Levi’s novel about a band of Jewish partisans behind enemy lines in Russia and Poland – the partisans obviously being another survival unit). "If Not Now …" presents Lonberg-Holm on guitar and McPhee on trumpet, the latter also opens the piece. The band creates a very sombre and gloomy atmosphere first, Lonberg-Holm’s guitar style is very harsh and full of dissonant splinters, it sounds as if it was reigning glass. Zerang relentlessly pushes his fellow musicians with a dark drive on the toms in the first part, which underlines the brutality of the music.

If "If Not Now ..." represents the dark and violent passages of Levi’s novel, the last track points in a completely different direction - hope. "When?" shows the band’s interest in new baroque music, especially audible in Lonberg-Holm’s cello contribution.

Although they have been playing together for some time now, Survival Unit III is one of the most interesting projects on the scene. Hopefully, they will be together for ten more years.

The album was recorded live during a USA tour at the Krannert Art Museum in Champaign/Illinois on September18, 2014.

You can buy it from www.instantjazz.com and www.downtownmusicgallery.com or directly from the label on bandcamp.

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Clifford Allen - Singularity Codex - Matthew Shipp on RogueArt (RogueArt, 2023)

 By Lee Rice Epstein

It’s a real special time for appreciators of jazz and improvised music, with many recently published tomes, biographies and autobiographies of greats like Sonny Rollins and Henry Threadgill, compendiums of The Cricket and FMP Records, deep explorations of regional collectives like the Williamsburg loft scene. But there’s a kind of book, I’ll say outright to start off, that we simply need more of, which is the kind of slim and sprightly—yet thematically and informationally dense and rich—book Clifford Allen has written on pianist Matthew Shipp: Singularity Codex - Matthew Shipp on RogueArt.

“Sprightly yet thematically dense and rich” is a phrase one could equally apply to Shipp’s piano playing, and one of the key features of Singularity Codex , Allen’s first book, is how well it manages to expand the story of downtown New York music, specifically Lower East Side music. Shipp’s life and art intersect with the stories of dozens of artists and writers who populated or cycled through the Lower East Side, including Michael Bisio, Rob Brown, Whit Dickey, Mat Maneri, Jemeel Moondoc, Joe Morris, Yuko Otomo, William Parker, and David S. Ware. As one of the finest writers about modern jazz and improvised music, Allen has a particularly masterful way of bringing together personal reflections, engaging writing about improvised music, and research with first-person interviews. The result is something of an oral history of Shipp’s time in New York, from his arrival through the production of 25 titles for French label RogueArt.

As described in the book, these titles (some still pending release) comprise a group of work, nearing its completion. Unlike Shipp’s releases on other labels, the works produced with label founder Michel Dorbon are, as Shipp explains in the acknowledgements, “a distinct body of work within the arc of my bigger body of work—one emanation of Shipp.” Allen traces the development of this body, from Shipp’s pre-RogueArt days playing with Moondoc, Ware, and Parker in various groups, to the emergence of his quartet Declared Enemy, which kicked off the French label (though it was ultimately destined to be release number four). Allen moves between researched sections—richly drawn portraits of a vibrant scene in constant motion—and extended interviews with many of Shipp’s long-time collaborators, first Parker, Brown, Dickey, and Morris, and later Otomo, Dorbon, and Jim Clouse, the owner/engineer of Park West Studios, where Shipp recorded all his RogueArt titles (and many more).

The final section, a runthrough of all the recordings, from Declared Enemy’s 2006 debut Salute to 100001 Stars - A Tribute To Jean Genet to as-yet-unreleased duos with Steve Swell and Kirk Knuffke, a final RogueArt solo album, and what will be Ivo Perleman’s first album for the label, and Shipp’s last one, a tidy alpha-omega of sorts, particularly given the huge number of records they’ve made together. It seems, in its own way, just right. As does the final section of Allen’s book, where he reprints in full the liner notes to The Reward, written by the late poet Steve Dalachinsky. It’s a beautiful dual tribute to Shipp and Dalachinsky, two artists whose close bond is reflected on by everybody throughout the entire book.

One final note. In 2019, the French label RogueArt released Symbolic Reality , the first album in nearly 20 years from Shipp’s string trio, with William Parker and Mat Maneri. It was something of a reunion and also something of a rekindling, in its way. Somehow, for me, it represents a key landmark in the RogueArt catalog, just as the earlier albums did with hatART/hatOLOGY. In fact, I’ve only heard about 10 or 12 of the albums discussed in the book. If I heard zero, or only one or two, I would find it just as valuable and engaging; Allen’s writing is about Shipp and, naturally, about much more than Shipp—it is about music, art, and culture, and about the fires still ablaze, obscured by what, from a distance, may appear to be mere embers.

Available from RogueArt

https://roguart.com/product/singularity-codex-matthew-shipp-on-rogueart/222

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Garrison Fewell - Outside Music, Inside Voices (Saturn University Press, 2015)

By Stef

Some months ago, Garrison Fewell sent me the manuscript for his book, asking whether I could write a review of it, something which was in early stages of development, yet unfortunately reality was faster and Garrison Fewell has left us yesterday. So, in memory of Garrison, here is a review of his book, which is quite exceptional.

As Ed Hazell writes in the Foreword : 'It’s a book of musician-to-musician dialogues focused (mainly) on a single topic—the ways in which spiritual values inform the lives and art of improvisers".

And that captures the topic well. Garrison Fewell approached a number of musicians that he valued and that he has played with to ask them about the spiritual side of their music or of music in general.

The interviewed artists are John Tchicai, Dave Burrell, Wadada Leo Smith, Henry Grimes, Joëlle Léandre, William Parker, Oliver Lake, Milford Graves, Marilyn Crispell, Henry Threadgill, Steve Swell, Roy Campbell Jr., Han Bennink, Joe McPhee, Matthew Shipp, Nicole Mitchell, Myra Melford, Pheeroan AkLaaf, Baikida Carroll, Ahmed Abdullah, Rosi Hertlein, Irene Schweizer, Liberty Ellman, Steve Dalachinsky, Sabir Mateen. So, quite a list of artists with a strong experience in improvised music, and interestingly enough many of them also practice some sort of yoga, meditation or buddhism, and whether or not that influenced Fewell's selection, I do not know, but in any case it does not come across as such, so I assume that they were selected based on their musical track record first and foremost.

I think it is typical for Fewell's approach to music to make things happen without taking the center stage. He asks the same questions to each of these musicians, and interjects some additional ones during the conversations, and like with his bands, he coaches these artists to give their response : they actually write the book. Like in his music, Fewell is more interested in what his band members can come up with, than with his own playing. He himself was very spiritual, meditating daily and an adherent of 'Nichiren' buddhism.

His spiritualism guided him to look at "a realm beyond what we perceive through our physical senses or reasoning, and often describes a process of inner development, a seeking to discover and strengthen the essence of one's being. Improvisation is a way of life that involves all the senses and requires a total surrender to the moment".

The book is absolutely excellent. Because of its interview style, it reads very easily, in a very colloquial manner, but Fewell is a good interviewer, pointing the interviewees in the right direction. You get of course many different viewpoints, which is of interest by itself, on the nature of "spirituality" and on the role of spirituality in music. And third, you learn a lot about these artists' approach to music, they tell you little anecdotes to make the reading more attractive.

I will not spoil the fun by repeating too many of those quotes and stories, but just to give you a general appetite, here are some examples.

Steve Swell : "First when I played the trombone in fourth grade, I was ten years old and I had a good music teacher who took ten of us, and he played the Batman theme and said : "When you get to the part where you shout 'Batman!', play whatever you want for eight beats", and then he would come back in with the theme again. We didn't know we were improvising. I didn't know what I was doing, I was just feeling it. I had the trombone and I was making whatever sounds that came out, not knowing what I was doing, but just doing it without thinking about it, trusting whatever was inside of me. The earlier kids get to do this, getting them to improvise without explaining it all, just having them implant that seed and permission of personal creativity and make it a very natural thing instead of it being the sometimes painful and unnatural experience it has become". 

Roscoe Mithcell : "I think it's important that students be exposed to improvisation beyond traditional jazz concepts. You never know what will be their path, so they should have the option to be aware of many possibilities. Learning creative music helps them to expand their ear to contemporary aesthetics and to listen outside of traditional harmony and rhythmical ideas. It allows them to develop the expression of texture, energy, and to develop listening skills and cooperation with others".

Han Bennink : "When I was very young, I always had two disciplines—drawing and playing drums. My father was a professional player. I actually don’t know anything different or better since I was fourteen years old. Of course I was more interested in music from that time, like hard bop and that sort of stuff, but I developed to where I am now and that’s the result of it [the art and music]. If that’s spiritual, or whatever it is, I don’t know. I can’t answer those questions because I play music. Or I hope to play music, and I hope that every night will be a nice forum, and I hope that everyone will be on his best and working on that. But for me, giving it that label, it’s a bit too heavy. I’m not a label person. I like to jump from one box into another box and be, in the good sense of the word, a bit “taste-less” or give it my own taste. It’s like making collages—I make collages from pieces of things I find around me, objets trouvés— and that is how my playing is also. It’s sometimes a bit of this and a bit of that, which you can definitely hear. I’m not a person to use those heavy words. I hope it will be music and I train like crazy.

Joe McPhee - Well, when you mention “spirit,” I think of that not so much in a religious context but more like the center, the soul of the music. Where it comes from, I don’t know. I haven’t found it yet—it’s somewhere around there. The “spirit” is a kind of a force that is the center of what drives the music, where it comes from, the source of it. I don’t think of it so much in a religious sense.

I saw John Coltrane Live, I think it was 1962 at the Village Gate, and it shook me to my absolute core. First McCoy [Tyner], Elvin [Jones], and Jimmy Garrison came on, and I kind of think of it like being in an airplane, a jet plane going down the runway, and just where it starts to take off and you feel that kind of lift—that’s what happened when John Coltrane came on the stage. I couldn’t get any air in, I couldn’t breathe, I thought I was going to die at that time, I couldn’t move. And Albert’s music did that to me as well. The reason I play the tenor saxophone was the sound of Albert’s tenor. Coltrane’s sound, of course, was there too, but Albert’s sound grabbed me in such a way I said, “I want to try this.” And that’s why I play the tenor saxophone to this day".

Matthew Shipp : "Well, how I define spirituality is that obviously, if we exist, or anybody
exists, there’s some animating force that allows you to exist. So, spirituality to me is reverence to whatever that animating force is, however you define it or whatever you call it. That’s what spirituality is to me. You can take away all the religious connotations from that and just use the word “generating force” or think of it in those terms. My assumption is that consciousness is all, and anything can be geared down to consciousness"

Marilyn Crispell -"I think a lot of organized religion doesn’t have anything to do with spirituality. It’s very difficult to put into words. For me, it’s just about trying to be in a place where I’m able to get out of the way and allow myself to connect with some kind of universal energy, to be in the flow. I’ve heard it called “being in the flow.” It’s about pure, creative energy. You could even say it’s about love. Cecil Taylor says it’s about magic, and it’s about love, however you want to define that."


Joëlle Léandre " When we play, and definitely when we improvise, we become the other one. This is the reality when we improvise because everything is open. We are at the same time performer, improviser, and composer of vibration. To communicate with the other one you have to look at the other, to go inside them and to become, a little bit, the other one. Improvisation is the only expression where tomorrow you could fly to Tibet, Africa, Mexico or anywhere to play and improvise with others, because to improvise is to be open to everyone, and everything and ever sense - to open and to say "hey, who are you? Let's do something together. Let's play!". This is what it means to improvise.

I started music when I was very young—less than nine years old. We slowly discover so many different things, like art, and we practice our instruments a lot. But it doesn’t mean you are a musician just because you practice your instrument. Being a musician is life, it’s daily life, every day. Intensity is not only sound. You go into the street and you embrace life. It’s a long process. So we learn, we learn. There’s a moment, though, where we have to unlearn. And nobody gives you the key".

Baikida Carroll - (about Julius Hemphill's Dogon AD) : "The percussionist Mor Thiam and his brother Zak objected aesthetically to the 11/16 rhythm of the piece, so Julius cancelled their participation. I'm not really sure what happened to John Hick's part, but when Julius returned with the finished score, it had been reduced to a quartet. The four of us worked on the music relentlessly, especially Julius and I. Wadud came in from New Jersey, so he was there a week or so prior to the recording date. He didn't seem to have a problem with the piece, given that his reading chops were impeccable. The 11/16 presented a particularly gnarly problem for us all. It's not a piece you can just lay in the cut and drop in your part. You have to be extremely attentive to tempo, rhythm and groove without sounding academic. The basic groupings of the 16ths being 4-4-3 implied a 3/4 metrical scheme with a missing 16th which created a tendency to rush the tempo. I watched Philip's frustration and determination as he gradually transformed this complex jazz approach to a more favorable laid-back gutbucket groove. After days of intense rehearsals, oblique anthropological discussions, and attempts to formulate and incorporate personal methodology to Julius's brilliant concept, we emerged (in my opinion) mask-bearing, language-encoding country preachers, dancing and testifying to a phantom totem somewhere in the Bandiagara Escarpment in Mali".


Some examples to give you a kind of flavour and an idea of the value any reader might get from this book, whether musician, educator, or interested listener, you will get insights into the process of music, in the lives of artists and in understanding what is happening on stage or in albums.

In sum, a very valuable and easy to read book with many of today's most adventurous musicians.

We will all miss Garrison and his music. We can only thank him to have written and published this book so that we can all enjoy it.

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Evan Parker & Matthew Shipp - Rex, Wrecks & XXX (RogueArt, 2013) ****

By Colin Green

At first sight, Evan Parker (tenor saxophone) and Matthew Shipp (piano) might not seem an obvious pairing, representing rather different styles of free jazz from either side of the Atlantic. But duos are not monologues or group discussions; they’re dialogues that highlight both differences and common ground, with a starkness that casts into relief features of the players’ styles that can be lost or obscured in other settings. Perhaps this is why so many great recordings are of duos: the art of conversation thrown into the spotlight.

And of course, it’s folly to pigeonhole creative musicians, whose imaginations are not limited by labels. This was apparent in Parker and Shipp’s previous recording: Abbey Road Duos (Treader, 2007), a set of studies exploring the fundamentals of their shared vocabulary.

Like a number of Parker’s double-CD recordings, this release comprises a live improvisation (some 41 minutes) – recorded at London’s Vortex – and a studio recording made the previous day, consisting of shorter pieces. In an interview printed in Birds and Blades (Intakt, 2003) – a duo recording with Barry Guy (double bass) – Parker gave the following as one of the reasons why he prefers not to play shorter pieces live, and keep them for the studio:

“… I’m scared to discover whether the audience is really enjoying it or not until it’s over. This periodic interruption prompts an applause rating, I find it difficult to deal with.”

One wonders when Parker last had to worry about his applause rating, but you can see his point: good, bad or indifferent, he’s having to measure up to the audience’s assessment rather than his own. 

Although a duo recording, there’s a third (non-speaking) member of the cast: the New York poet Steve Dalachinsky, who wrote the poems printed in lieu of liner notes, which give the tracks their names, and collectively form the alliterative title to the album. I’ll be writing more about him anon when I review his recent release with Joëlle Léandre, but he has associations with both members of this duo. He and Shipp have collaborated on a number of recordings, and the book Logos and Language: A Post-Jazz Metaphorical Dialogue (RogueArt, 2009). Dalachinsky is also an admirer of Parker’s work. His collected Evan Parker poems have been published by Corrupt Press under the title: Long Play E.P. Most were written while listening to Parker play in various settings during a residency at the Stone in 2009, and I assume that the same applies to the poems here: that they are largely real-time responses to what the duo recorded. I’ll say no more about the poems, and focus on the music (readers of my review of the disc with Léandre won’t get off so lightly).

First: the studio recording. This consists of Rex 1 to Rex 6, interspersed with Wrecks 1 and Wrecks 2: solo improvisations by Shipp and Parker, respectively. In Rex 1, after a tentative beginning the two melodic lines expand and merge, like two people meeting in the street, each recognising the other. Here and throughout the album, Shipp displays a wonderful touch and sense and dynamics (it’s no wonder he’s so in demand as part of Ivo Perelman’s recent glut of recordings). Jazz voicings permeate his style, but what is brought to the fore when playing with Parker is his ability to make lightning changes of gear, and to accelerate, reverse, swerve and break. This suits Parker’s atomised phrasings perfectly. 

One tends to think of Parker as having rebuilt his style from the ground up, compressing as much as possible into the smallest space; but what is clear in pieces such as Rex 4, is that within this he has distilled some of the essential phrasings and tone of the jazz saxophone. Although his tenor retains its characteristic edge – like carved granite – there are passages where it takes on a decidedly buttery tone. Smooth tenor and sparkling piano runs? I don’t think it’s stretching matters to see Art Tatum’s last recording session, with Ben Webster as one of the antecedents of this duo. Indeed, in Wrecks 1 – Shipp’s solo – the comparison with Tatum is irresistible.

The duo obviously gave prior thought to the format of some of these pieces. Rex 3 is just over a minute and a half of repeated figures on the saxophone and parallel hands on the piano. Rex 5 consists of witty alternations between the two, each picking up the material of the other, like the party game: The Last Word, where each player has to start a sentence with the last word of the previous player’s sentence. The studio session concludes with Rex 6, an intricate, but lucidly woven fabric of complimentary phrases.

The live disc (XXX) picks up the threads from the previous day, but the uninterrupted performance gives the duo the opportunity to be more expansive: we hear ideas worked out, as in the studio, but also transitions between those ideas. Shipp’s playing is more rhapsodic, and again, there’s a mellowness to Parker’s tone. This is improvisation at the speed of thought, the duo passing and sharing tiny figures, rhythms and contours, each player matching the other in mood and dynamics: soft and playful, pounding and broody. After 25 minutes, both take solos, giving the other time to catch his breath, followed by a reflective passage with some beautifully weighted chords from Shipp. Eventually, the contemplative mood is broken as the pace picks up again, with florid lines wrapped round each other, until the performance comes to a quiet conclusion.

The audience response has been edited out (which is my preference) but I assume the duo received an enthusiastic applause rating. 


You can  purchase it at instantjazz.com. 

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Žiga Koritnik - "Brötzmann in My Focus" Project

Free Jazz Blog: Thank you for taking the time to discuss your current book project, Brötzmann in My Focus, for which you are currently raising funds to publish. To start, can you tell us about the book?

Žiga Koritnik: I started to think about the book years ago. In 2019 I asked Peter if he would give me permission to do it. After he said yes, I started collecting pictures from the concerts, events, and portraits I did from 1994 until 2019. Book will have 152 pages, 99 black and white pictures with one colour exception. Peter sent me his first camera and I placed it next to his text that he wrote for the book. Texts were written by Peter Brötzmann, John Corbett, Mats Gustafsson, Bill Laswell, Heather Leigh, Paal Nilssen-Love and Paul Lovens. In the book I have two poems written by Joe McPhee and Steve Dalachinsky. Book design is done by Nina Šturm. In the book are appearing with Peter: Caspar Brötzmann, Joe McPhee, Michael Zerang, Jeb Bishop, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Johannes Bauer, Per-Åke Holmlander, Ken Vandermark, Paal Nilssen - Love, Mats Gustafsson, Erhard Hessling, Hamid Drake, Kent Kessler, Toshinori Kondo, Marino Pliakas, Michael Wertmüller, Akira Sakata, Nasheet Waits, Jan St.Werner, Konstantin Drobil, Takeo Moriyama, Steve Swell, Bill Laswell, Heather Leigh, Hans Oberlechner, Riccarda Kato, Ralf Dick, Marek Winiarski, Petra Cvelbar, William Parker, Jost Gebers, Bogdan Benigar, Zlatko Kaučič. Pictures were taken in Konfrontationen, Nickelsdorf / Austria; Jazz-it!, Salzburg / Austria; Vision Festival, NYC / U.S.A.; Satchmo Jazz Club, Maribor / Slovenia; Cankarjev dom, Ljubljana / Slovenia; Railway station Ljubljana / Slovenia; N.O.Jazz festival, Zagreb / Croatia; Club Gromka, Ljubljana / Slovenija; Narodni dom, Maribor / Slovenia; Long Story short - Music Unlimited, Wels / Austria; Krakowsja Jesień Jazzowa, Krakow, Poland; MGLC / International Centre of Graphic Arts Ljubljana / Slovenia; Artacts, St.Johann in Tirol / Austria; Ai confini tra Sardegna e jazz, Sant'Anna Arresi / Sardinia / Italy; Not TwoTwenty, Wleń / Poland; Three nights of music, Berlin / Germany. It will be printed in the best possible way.

How long did you know Peter Brötzmann? When did you first see/meet him?

My initial visit to Konfrontationen in 1994 was a powerful musical experience. The world of modern improvised music was foreign to me, and I struggled to connect with it. For three days I wondered what I was doing there. However, while in this puddle of emotion, I encountered Peter Brötzmann’s Die Like a Dog quartet (with Hamid Drake, William Parker and Toshinori Kondo). Their performance was a revelation, offering me a profound new understanding of music and teaching me how to truly listen to modern improvisation.

From that moment, I became a devoted follower of Brötzmann’s work, attending his performances whenever possible. Each experience was as enriching, if not more so, than the last. My collection of concerts, encounters, and photographs with Brötzmann grew over the years, forming a treasure trove of memories. But the first time I talked to him was in 2005 when I asked him if I could make a portrait of him. That happened after the concert he did with Slovenian drummer Zlatko Kaučič 's band. In the following years I met him many times. I helped him to organize his exhibition in Ljubljana.

Did you ever speak about photography with him? Did he have ideas for the images?

We talked a couple of times about photography, about the cameras he liked to work with. He regularly took photographs on his travels, sometimes he used it as as a template for later paintings, prints he made. We found out that we were using the same type of camera Fuji X100.

How long have you been photographing free jazz concerts and musicians?

As I described, free jazz enchanted me in 1994 with the concert of the band Die Like A Dog. Before I was already taking pictures at different concerts, from rock and a few times even classical music. I started in the 80's, I took pictures of the Weather Report's concert in Ljubljana and Miles Davis' concert in Belgrade. Despite that, at that time I was still learning to take pictures. I took one good picture - remember, we were working with analog cameras - and that picture has been used for the Slovenian translation of his biography.

What draws you to this type of music? Or the scene?

I like to be among the creative people. Actually some inner force, the environment I have been living in created my taste of music. In Slovenia, we have Radio Student, which broadcasts "different" kinds of music. Many times, we were waiting for the programme that was broadcasting the music we liked and recorded it on the cassettes. We borrowed vinyl records from friends, sampled them and listened to them countless times.

Do you have other musical interests (styles, settings, etc)?

My answer will be very clichéd, there is only good or bad music. I listen to and follow whatever convinces me and gets into my ears

What do you look for when you take a photo?

First, the music needs to convince me. I try to convey the atmosphere of the action in the photographic medium. It has to be sincere, it must not contain any bluff, most of which I can quickly spot. If not at the concert, then perhaps later when looking at the photos. I like to watch the development of individual musicians into great people. Of course technically it needs to be done in a proper way. Of course you need to know how the camera works and the photographic language.

Back to the book, where are you in the process of publishing it? What do you need? What can people do to help?

On 23rd of May, my 60th birthday, I launched the crowdfunding project on Kickstarter. It will be active until the 24th of June and I hope that I will gather enough finances to print the book. You can find more about it if you follow the link (below), where you can see what I am offering to the supporters. Without supporters, it will not be possible to print the book. I have a very good experience with the community and I am also very grateful to them with my previous book Cloud Arrangers, which I also created with the help of Kickstarter. On 24th of May I traveled to Warsaw, where I built up an exhibition dedicated to Peter at Three Night In Tribute To Peter Brötzmann. In parallel, I am promoting a fundraising campaign on Kickstarter.

• To learn more about the book, visit the Kickstarter.
  
  
• To hear more from Žiga, check out this interview from 2019 on the Free Jazz Blog.
  
  

Žiga Koritnik. Photo by Petra Cvelbar.

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Various Artists - 13 Miniatures For Albert Ayler (RogueArt, 2012) ****

(***** for Joe McPhee's closing track)

By Paolo Casertano

Reviewing a compilation can be a hard work.  Even when the compilation is a large excerpt of a well-matched tribute to such a seminal and groundbreaking free jazz figure as Albert Ayler. RogueArt gives us the chance to have a documentation of the influences and legacies of the great saxophonist. 

Looking at the names of the artists performing in this concert, held in Paris on December 2^nd 2010, is retracing the last thirty years of free jazz and improvisation history. From the saxophones of Urs Leimgruber and John Tchicai to the drums of Ramon Lopez and Simon Goubert, through the pressing poetry contribution of Steve Dalachinsky, the trumpet of Jean-Luc Capozzo and the many voices of Lucia Recio. With giant and superb musicians as Barre Philips, Joëlle Léandre, Evan Parker and Joe McPhee (I’d die to see such a quartet in a jam session) towering for the joy of our ears on their respective instruments.

Listening to the album is indeed enjoyable. And there are, in my opinion, three gems. First is the beguiling dialogue between Joe Mcphee’s sax and Jean-Luc Capozzo’s trumpet. Second is the next piece, a solo by Evan Parker, which takes my breath away with his circular breathing (yes, I know… I’m sorry). The third, and my favourite, is Joe McPhee, the closing act. The author of what I consider as one of the recent best releases, the Ithaca duo with Eli Keszler, offers us here an intimate and touching solo made of silent whispers and feeble moans. Shivers. If one day we will decide to set a new category on this blog for “the best track of the month”, my vote will go to this piece.

I believe Albert Ayler (or Elbert Héileur - as you can appreciate from the French introduction) would have been happy of such a party in his honour.

Listen to excerpts here and buy if you like in the same place. Buy from www.instantjazz.com 

Please take a look at a picture that I particularly like.

© stef

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Matthew Shipp - Right Hemisphere (RogueArt, 2008) ****½

Matthew Shipp (piano) and Rob Brown (alto sax) have played a lot together before, and released some great duo recordings, and Brown, Whit Dickey (drums) and Joe Morris (bass) have performed a lot together too (and recorded at least on all Dickey's albums), but they never released an album as a quartet. That's what we get here. The title itself is a paradox of sorts. Shipp explains in the liner notes that the right hemisphere is "the intuitive side of the brain, the god part of the brain, the part that processes in wholes not in linear sequences, the part that is out of time and rooted in eternity". Now, saying that, and claiming that as the underlying process for the album is very much a left hemisphere thing to do, rooted in the rational, part of the conceptual. Hence the paradox. And the music reflects that paradox. The concept for the 11 tracks are pre-discussed, abstractly without rehearsal, yet the performance results from the musicians' improvisation on it, interacting and creating the concept together. In most of the tracks, Shipp is one of the most decisive factors in the overall direction of the piece, setting the tone and the atmosphere, yet without taking leadership, easily offering the lead voice to Brown, whose unbelievably strong emotional playing is a pleasure to hear. Shipp is a true master in getting the best out of his band-mates, and not only on this album, even to the extent that he is absent on two tracks. And that works well too : Brown, Morris and Dickey unleash all their skills on "Falling In", and then you think you've heard some strong emotinal playing, until you hear the short piano solo ballad on which Shipp demonstrates his sensitivity. But the quartet goes way beyond pure emotions, creating art for the sake of art, searching novelty and pattern-breaking approaches in order to get this new expressiveness, this new sound. It's avant-garde in that sense, but with a high emotional component, as can be heard on "Hyperspace", but especially on "Lava". The last track "Red In Gray" is an absolute beauty, a mid-tempo improvisation, still agitated, but less nervous, more coherent, more soulful too, than some of the other more abstract tracks on the CD. "Pent-up pensiveness erupting like into volcanic tides of overflowing Lava smothering breathing swinging hot drum solo deep within the core where always this earth is alive slipping ever so gently Red In Gray elegantly reuniting us with the flesh where one barely feels the blood as it flows thru the ashes back into our hearts warming our bones", that's how Steve Dalachinsky describes those two tracks, and that's pretty close to what I thought, yet a little more right hemisphere.

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Survival Unit III – Straylight (Live at Jazzhouse Copenhagen) (Astral Spirits, 2015) ****

By Martin Schray

There’s an odd story behind this review. I thought that it would be interesting to compare two recordings consisting of the same material since Straylight (the album reviewed yesterday) was recorded in September 2014 during a US tour in Champaign, Illinois and then released as a CD on Michael Zerang’s Pink Palace label, while this recording was recorded almost a year earlier, in December 2013, on a European tour. The Astral Spirits label, which specializes in cassettes, bought the material and Joe McPhee sent the same titles as on the Pink Palace release.

But it turned out that there was a mixup with the titles as the band was producing the CD at the same time that Nate Cross, the man behind Astral Spirits, was working on the tape. McPhee’s explanation? He said that it was like in the fog of war, signals got crossed. Furthermore, he explained that he was under pressure and therefore made the mistake. But he was also sure that the music would tell the story, making the whole project all the more a collector's item. Another way of putting it is "what’s in a name?"

So: the titles are the same, but the music isn't. Most obvious is the different instrumentation.  For the Copenhagen gig the band used percussion, cello, electronics and tenor, which were their usual instruments for European tours (McPhee sometimes also played the pocket trumpet). "Blood of a Poet (for Steve Dalachinsky)", the A-side of the tape, is an almost classic Survival Unit III piece, on which the band uses all the typical elements that make them such an outstanding formation: McPhee’s Ayleresque style, Lonberg-Holm’s extensive cello arcos, his brutal electronic attacks, Zerang’s elegant drive, the great timing of all the musicians (everybody exactly knows when to contribute), the marvelous solo parts etc.

"If Not Now ..." starts almost tenderly with a very long and intimate duo of tenor (McPhee includes some voicing as well) and cello before there’s a break at the five minute mark. It sounds as if the band was starting a new piece (maybe there were actually four pieces).  It’s almost a classic trio performance, at the beginning you can hardly tell Lonberg-Holm’s cello from a bass. It takes about five minutes before the band gains momentum again when McPhee throws in a blues melody heading towards New Orleans jazz, but Lonberg-Holm and Zerang resist the temptation to follow.

You can recognize cross-album similarities here and there however, especially in "When?", the last track, which also opens with a drum solo and in some respects its structure and atmosphere are similar to the Straylight version. McPhee plays tenor on both, which gives the music a feel of being gloomy yet beautiful. The focus is clearly on jazz, compared to new classical music on Starlight.

Although the production of this album seems a bit confusing, the music is unquestionably top-notch. And it might become an object of desire for collectors as well. If you want a physical copy you better be quick.

Straylight (Live at Jazzhouse Copenhagen) will be available as a download and a cassette/tape in a limited edition of 150 copies, and is released on 13 November.

You can buy it from http://monofonuspress.com/astral-spirits.

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I Use the Music to Use Me: The Visual Improvisation of M P Landis

By Dan Sorrells

Left: P+D 02 01 02 (2024); Right: M P Landis & Michael Sarin, May 18, 2024 at L/A Arts, Lewiston, ME

Adjacent to a drumkit, two large boards hang above a stage clad in drop cloth. A third lies flat on a small table surrounded by paint bottles and upturned pot lids that will become ad hoc palettes. Each board is covered in paper and divided into grids by white painter's tape: the small board into nine squares and the larger two into twelve. It's the end of June 2026 at the Apohadion Theater in Portland, Maine. Just ahead, the fifth meeting of painter M P Landis and drummer Michael Sarin in a collaboration they've come to call, concisely, Paint & Drums.

Fans of creative music may recognize Landis's paintings from the album covers of artists like Flow Trio , [ism] , and Sabir Mateen . His work is part of an estuary somewhere far downstream of the Abstract Expressionists: gestures that range from child-like markings to purposive strokes that convey the whole body's movement; textured clots and layers of color; obscure figures and shapes that could be letters or symbols but offer a mute refusal. But Landis will say he feels less affinity with other visual artists than he does with musicians.

Indeed, what stands out about Landis's work is how deeply committed his methods are to the same reactive, exuberant ethos that drives the free improvisers. Music—especially jazz and improvised music—has long been part of Landis's work, both in the studio and in a live setting. In a 2006 conversation with the writer Fred Schmalz, he described arriving at a point in the 1990s where he began using music "as a jumping off point to get beyond my ideas and find a way of working that transcends technique and becomes more emotional and dance-like."

Joe Maneri/Mat Maneri/Randy Peterson #1 - #4 (2001). Created live at the 2001 Vision Festival, NYC

His career in the decades since validates Mike Heffley's musing in Northern Sun, Southern Moon. "If one were a painter," Heffley wrote, free improvisation "is music that might be the most fruitful aid and stimulus to the process. It encourages one to get physical with one's tools and media, to delight in them as ends in themselves, whatever means they might develop into therefrom." Talking with Schmalz, Landis describes exactly that:

"I feel almost like the music uses me or, I guess I use the music to use me. There is a certain surrendering to what I am listening to which helps me jump right into physically moving; making marks, grabbing paint, etc. It overcomes the endless problems of decision and throws me right into the act of creating."

Some of Landis's paintings bear titles that pay tribute to the music he was listening to as he painted. But music's influence is more deeply seated.

Top: David S. Ware: Onecept triptych (mp13.01, mp13.02, mp13.03) (2013)
Bottom Left: PIANO SKY (JOE MANERI) (2003); Bottom Right: lp13.06 (derek bailey) (2013)

Landis moved from painting on street corners and in the audience at concerts to frequently painting on stage in collaboration with musicians, dancers, and other visual artists in the vibrant Brooklyn arts scene. He remains a prolific collaborator. The live performances of that period culminated in a tour with the Jump Arts American Road Project in 2002, Landis taking the stage with poet Steve Dalachinsky, dancers, and musicians like Tom Abbs, Daniel Carter, Steve Swell, and Okkyung Lee. Cisco Bradley's recounting of the tour in The Williamsburg Avant-Garde touches on Landis's intense engagement with his materials and an approach to live painting that's still present in Paint & Drums:

"[Landis] would paint through the entire evening of performances, with two wooden panels covered in paper on which to work. One panel was covered by one large piece of paper, while the other panel had multiple smaller pieces stapled to it. Landis described his process: 'I painted the whole board, not thinking about where one piece of paper stopped or started. I liked how it gave the work a sense of being midstream, like capturing a sound in time.' He added, 'The intensity of the music made the painting intense. It felt like I was doing months' worth of painting within a few hours.'"

Left: american road project 1L (2002); Right: j.a.a.r.p. [#12.] (2002)

It was during his time in NYC that Landis met Sarin, then drumming in the storied Thomas Chapin Trio (just one facet of his deep and continued embeddedness in the New York avant-garde). Nearly two decades later, Sarin lamented that he never had a chance to see Landis paint in a live setting and asked if he'd be willing to collaborate. Two performances were arranged in May 2024, and the duo have now met three more times in 2026.

A Visual Musician

There's an enticing trap, or at least a long stroll to a dead end, in approaching the relationship between Landis's paintings and free jazz. It is to interpret them as somehow "representing" the music. Landis is clear on this: "I don’t mean for [the music] to define the work because I’m not interested in making visual representations of music, or anything for that matter. These paintings and drawings are artifacts of a creative process; a recording of my reactions to not just music, but to life and my living it."

Establishing that the relationship is indirect, two smaller traps await, both common responses to abstract music and painting. Treading carefully between them, I'm likely to get a foot caught in each. The first comes from the dismissive "Even I Could Have Done That" school of art criticism; the other adopts a transcendental tone that inflates the abstract nature of these artforms until they're lofted into the clouds. Something like "overwhelming directness" versus "overweening mystery," to borrow from Stanley Cavell.

Left to Right: MONK 3. THINK OF ONE (2005); MONK 4. HACKENSACK (2005); MONK 5. 'ROUND MIDNIGHT (2005)

The first response is an almost defensive tensing in the face of such directness. A move to immediately let the air out before the overweeners get too jazzed up. "I get it. Your painting is like free jazz: random and improvised and spontaneous." Nothing enigmatic here. You don't really have to know anything, you just have to do.Splatter the paint, whack the drum, toot the horn. This attitude tends to badly underestimate the skill that's required to achieve the allegedly facile result, but there's something perceived here, a focus on the plain fact of bodies in action, that can't be entirely dismissed. The process, the doing, is integral—it's what's insisted by these artforms, what we can always sense even when we try (willfully or otherwise) to bracket it out. In viewing pieces like the "Monk Work" paintings, those initial impressions of sheer spontaneity belie the fact that, just as in lots of jazz and improvised music, accumulated experience and an incredible depth of consideration are channeled into an application of skill, shaping an ongoing process that didn't have a specific end in mind when things got underway.

What get overlooked are all the particularities: the whorl of circumstance, body, and action that actually birthed that painting or moment of music. Landis's painting isn't merely like free jazz because both can be loud and break rules. Many of his pieces represent a series of events and decisions through time—sometimes over weeks and months—that are fervently attuned to intention and accident and their intertwining.

Left : 16.35T (2016);Right: 19.155 (2019)

We often fall back on visual metaphors when trying to talk about music, but the counterintuitive thing about Landis's paintings is that their material likeness to music is not visual, but temporal: they are "impossible" images that inscribe action-through-time in the same way that music does as it plays out. This sense of movement-across-time leaps from their surfaces. Looking at a piece like 16.35T, I really do find myself reaching for musical concepts: there's a staccato rhythm to the marks, which have a lively motion in their stacks of contrapuntal bands. There's dissonance in the dabs of glowing green, which seem to punctuate moments in the painting's development.

The paintings have no telos, just as improvised music isn't about getting to the end of playing. They aren't planned and realized ends or even a representation of an instant or "the now" but rather they are a holding-open, a paradoxical attempt to spatialize temporality, or express it all at once. The time-taking is the work in the way music is the running of the clock. This temporal nature is never more apparent than during live performance. There, we see the changing cadences of painting, the transformation of color and form as new strokes merge with old, the accumulation of layers that continually supplant the painting's character, even as glimpses of its previous features remain.

Brice Marden once said of Jackson Pollock, "He doesn't apply the image; he lets the image evolve out of the activity." Landis: "I like to push what I make ‘til it feels right, in some inner logic kind of way, even when that leads me to something that might look off or clumsy, but in a way that attracts me." All of these evolved and evolving particularities are exactly why just anyone couldn't create that painting or improvise those sounds. Those unrepeatable elements in concert with the artist's grappling are what constitute the work. If such painting or music could be said to have "content," this is all it could possibly be, and encrypted. You may be physically capable of executing the work, but you could never be existentially capable—you have no access to its means of creation.

Top, Left to Right: wd3060 (2006); wd2034 (2004); wd5625 (2013)
Middle, Left to Right: wd5921 (2014); wd6016 (2014); wd6058 (2014)
Bottom, Left to Right: wd6831 (2016); wd7972 (2019); wd6562 (2016)

This idea of paintings as ledgers or accretions of activity is hyper-concentrated in the wd series ("warehouse drawings"). Landis produced 10,000 wd pieces in the nearly thirty years between October 1996 and March 2025. Nearly all began as a folded piece of paper that Landis would carry with him throughout the day, often marked with notes, reminders, shopping lists. "Later in the studio, I chronologically staple them to boards, usually working on 20 at a time, drawing and painting on them, often in multiple layers over many days, weeks and sometimes months in response to whatever is happening in my world at each session."

Like a recording of an improvised performance, the wd paintings are the record of happenings that can't ever be restaged, a ledger of events that could never be repeated exactly so. Their accumulation of texture, their creases and sometimes ragged edges, are evidence of their travel through the real world, are the grounding reminders that, however abstract the visuals, they are the products of a creative drive that is selfsame with Landis, moving through life. Though Landis has retired the wd series, hints of their methodology have emerged in a new FP series created on small pieces of folded hand-made paper.

Left to Right:   FP26.78 (2026); FP26.103 (2026); FP26.174 (2026)

Paintings from the wd series often made their way back to music, and the influence began running in the opposite direction. Several have been used as album art, and over the years musicians would ask Landis if they could use a painting as inspiration for music. Most notably, Loren Connors and Suzanne Langille took a number of wd pieces and projected them in the studio while recording, which was subsequently released asI Wish I Didn't Dream.

During the pandemic, Landis began a series of smaller, heavily contingent paintings called "Notes." Each month, he starts dozens, which he lays around the house or beneath paintings in the studio, allowing them to gather stains and marks of daily life. "Notes" can be shuffled and combined into larger pieces called "Compositions," forming the basis of graphic scores. In 2024, the Cannery in Penobscot, Maine staged a series of concerts in which "Compositions" were performed by musicians like E. Jason Gibbs, Phillip Greenlief, Leslie Ross, Steve Norton, Laura Cromwell, and others.

Top, Left to Right: Note 138 (2020); Note 126 (2020); Note 154 (2020); Note 1131 (2026)
Bottom, Left to Right:   Note 964 (2025); Note 1121 (2026); Note 1 (2020); Note 702 (2023)

Accepting that there's something more than brute, unskilled doing behind such vast and varied artistic output, the "overweening" approach—a propensity I admit I must actively temper—starts from trying to articulate the interesting whatness of all those coalesced particularities . But it can be quick to flight and risks overstating its case. In seeking some ultimate source for often dumbfounding glimpses into a pure creative stream, it also risks leaving the artist behind entirely. Firebrand critic Robert Hughes famously had little patience for this. He once wrote that all of the "verbose obeisances to the Ineffable" in discussions of Mark Rothko's work tended "to be coercive, because of a deep uncertainty about the nature of his art." (I'm not sure what Hughes would make of something like Paint & Drums, though I can imagine him satisfied, standing before the large paintings at the end of the show, still gleaming and dripping.)

Hughes's warning is not unfounded, but it's also dismissive of the role uncertainty and small-i ineffability play in the experience of art like Landis's (or Rothko's, for that matter). We find the ineffable creeping up not because this sort of art is a direct mainline to the transcendent Godhead or a manifestation of universal Truth, but because it carries the possibility of ringing within us some deeply sympathetic tone, a personal and close-feeling resonance that never quite carries through into words. This isn't absolute or guaranteed. In truth, it is fleeting and infrequent. But we each know our own private tone and we hope in our encounters to feel that vibration. Returning to Cavell, in "Music Discomposed" he says these kinds of art are "known by feeling, or in feeling," and this underlies our anxiety and difficulty in communicating this knowledge:

"I want to tell you something I've seen, or heard, or realized, or come to understand, for the reasons for which such things are communicated (because it is news, about a world we share, or could). Only I find that I can't tell you; and that makes it all the more urgent to tell you. I want to tell you because the knowledge, unshared, is a burden . . . It matters, there is a burden, because unless I can tell you what I know, there is a suggestion (and to myself as well) that I do notknow."

This uncertainty is not a defect. It is an essential component of the improvised musical set, and of Landis's practice as he steps into his studio each day and faces dozens of paintings in various stages. And, Hughes's self-certainty aside, I think it is also the essential, brightly dark core of our aesthetic experience of these works. It's the same doubt the skeptic amplifies until it distorts into nothingness, easy to dismiss. Uncertainty—not-quite-knowing—is the grip that pulls the artist into the stream, and it's also the grip that gets us by the collar and stops us, to look or to listen. Picking up a paint brush or a saxophone are also attempts to convey news about a world we share, or could.

Left: 15.14 (2015); Right:20.03 (2020)

"Somehow Precise, Intense, and Vague All at Once"

The heading is Michael Gallope's description of what he calls music's "affective inconsistency," but it also beautifully captures Landis's paintings and the particular energy of his live collaboration with Sarin.

One of the more charming aspects of Landis's and Sarin's partnership is that they still aren't quite sure of it. Each time, they gently ease into a start and there's always some hesitation about whether they've finished. This thread of uncertainty runs through the whole performance, is what fuels the excitement, but it also feels more palpable than during a musical improvisation.

Left: M P Landis and Michael Sarin, May 15, 2024 at the Apohadion Theater, Portland, ME
Top Right: P+D 04 01 03 (2026); Bottom Right:P+D 03 02 02 (2026)

In the audience, witnessing the real-time change in the paintings draws out tensions between arising aesthetic judgments and a curiosity about what continuing will yield. As elements emerge in the paintings, there are times when things "feel" finished, or where particular sections or forms satisfy some personal preference. I find myself becoming protective, secretly wishing that further actions will spare a notable swirl of black or a blaze of orange that still burns though layer after layer. I wasn't alone. At several of the performances, others talked about fearing a painting was "ruined" at points during the show, feeling satisfied with a certain stage of the process and forgetting that the process must continue, that the painting in the moment they esteemed it also arose by that process. After the April 2026 performance, one enthusiastic young audience member bantered with Landis about the range of emotions he felt during the show: "At one point, I actually felt angry with you, man! I thought you fucked it up!"

Imagining how you think someone should be behaving toward certain sounds or stimuli also leads to subverted expectations. I wonder if the way Landis is moving should be more . . . what? Theatrical? Synchronized? Wouldn't that be inauthentic? How do I suppose live painting and drumming should look, and where'd those ideas even come from? It feels like the risks of improvising are magnified. And are they greater for M P? Notes melt away, but marks on canvas remain.

Left: P+D 01 02 04 (2024); Center: P+D 01 01 03 (2024); Right: P+D 02 02 08 (2024)

It's all quite different from watching two musicians improvising. At times they seem at odds, or moving just past one another. Sarin whips himself into a storm, a deluge of creative energy that—in my mind—is an arc of electricity shooting across the stage to directly animate M P's limbs. But Landis is opening a paint bottle or looking for a brush. All that, just dissipated! But has it? I presume bolts of lightning, but am likely missing the charged potential in the air. In some ways, it becomes easier to sense these shifting emotions when there's a visual element, a continuing remnant. In music alone, things often move so quickly that only the most egregious "missteps" or a complete failure to gel create notable feelings of resistance in the witness. Here, things move as fast, but your eyes are drawn to the canvas, which holds on to the movement of the performance like streaks of light in a long exposure.

Through all these contours, there's an unmistakable resonance between what Landis and Sarin are doing, if not an equivalence. I feel an immense mental force that wants to draw their activities into a neat consonance, but it's like pushing repelling magnets together. As Landis has always maintained, the painting doesn't "represent" the sounds any more than the reverse. Instead, there's a joyous, if ambiguous, exchange of energy. You can see that it's mutually reinforcing. Sarin is palpably exhilarated. The propulsion of his drumming spurs Landis into action, and the emerging images become mutable graphic scores, giant ever-changing "notes" urging Sarin further. The exact how just evades a tight grasp. Together or separately, the painting and drumming are abstract art that many would accuse of being untethered. But there's something stubbornly literal in their doing. The paintings are just that: caked and layered paint, ink, and pastel, thick and viscous or water-thinned and dripping. The drums: driving, rhythmic, sometimes crashing, deafening, sometimes the faintest texture of hand's skin on drumskin. It is all, plainly, what it is, a frustrating tautology because there is yet, as Sarin said at the end of the most recent performance, an alchemy.

"Whole" and "Divided" Painting from Paint & Drums 4, May 9, 2026 at the Loove Annex, Brooklyn, NY

Fever Bed

To quote another M-P, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote in "Cézanne's Doubt" that "before expression, there is nothing but a vague fever, and only the work itself, completed and understood, will prove that there was something rather than nothing to be found there." I'd gently propose shifting the sense of the word "work": M-P wrote l'œuvre, a finished piece of art, an "artifact" of the creative act. I'd like to read it as the doing, le faire, le travail—the undertaking of creating.

I often sense that vague fever while listening to improvised music, like the back of my hand against a warm forehead, and admittedly less often when facing a painting. I vicariously feel it in the dim light, watching Landis and Sarin on stage. Still, I sense in myself an inhibiting self-consciousness, like I'd never be able to start, even as I also discover expectations and opinions welling up and fading away as the performance plays out. Once in motion, there's an odd sort of courage in continuing to mark the canvas, to pound the drum, but I wonder if the central task of the improvising artist is to continually overcome that uneasy inertia and just begin. An unstopping at imagination's edge that risks mistake and awkwardness and dissatisfaction to possibly reach something that at best can only be hazily made out, and not at all while sitting in caution and doubt. Unsure if you can know you've reached it. Something about the feeling of reaching.

Left: FEVER BED (MAT MANERI TRIO) (2003); Right:manifestation (before fire music) (2001)

See much, much more of M P Landis's work, including video clips and other pieces from the Paint & Drums performances, on his Instagram or Facebook pages. You can see what Michael Sarin is up to on his Instagram page.

All photos of paintings used with the artist's permission.

All performance photos by Dan Sorrells.

 

 

 

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