Humanization Quartet - Electricity (Ayler Records, 2010) ****

Two years ago, Portuguese guitarist Luís Lopes released his first CD, called "Humanization 4tet", which I liked a lot. Now the band is back, again with fellow Portuguese Rodrigo Amado on tenor sax, and the brothers Aaron and Stefan González on respectively bass and drums, with no changes in the line-up, ready to further explore the genre-melting approach of their music : jazz, rock, fusion and free elements intermingle.

All pieces are composed, with strong unison themes, often uptempo, full of unexpected turns and sudden changes. Even if it is Lopes project, this is now really a band, with all four members contribution to compositions and to the overall sound.

As said before, Lopes is a kind of "anti-guitarist", being of the fully functional kind rather than the guy in the forefront: his tone is low-toned and harsh, raw and direct but jazzy in its chords and solos. Amado's tone in contrast is warm and full-toned, yet rhythmic and powerful. Both González brothers form a fantastic rhythm section for this music, both combining the supple and versatile jazz approach with the directness of rock.

The album starts with the dark and menacing "Dehumanization Blues", an almost cinematic composition with lots of strong soloing. "Jungle Gymnastics" has indeed an acrobatic unison theme and uptempo drive, evolving into wild chaos in the middle part. "Two Girls" is more funky, starting with a solid sustained rhythm by bass and drums, over which sax and guitar play a nice strutting theme, evoking the title of the composition, with a light-footedness in strong contrast to the opening track.

"Efficy" is slow and more open-ended, with equally slow and sensitive soloing. Aaron González' other composition "Infidelities" sounds like the opener at the beginning, with slow but heavy beat, yet quickly changes into a more mid-tempo boppish mode, evolving into absolutely raw interplay between the electric guitar and the sax, again showing their infidelity to the proposed musical approach, and ending with another betrayal of a single feedback tone.

The last track is a long group improvisation, slowly progressing with close and intimate sax phrases evolving over raw but distant guitar sounds, and when you think the album has ended, there is a kind of bonus track, for those who have the patience to listen to silence for a minute and a half, again upbeat and boppish with funky touches, all rhythmic delight and fun playing.

The merging of styles is not a new thing, but the quality and the fun the musicians have with it transpires with every note and beat. But unlike many other endeavours, this one is very likeable for its straightforward approach and lack of pretence. It is art made human. Like a rock album, it should be listened to as a collection of songs rather than as a single unity.

Nice stuff.

Buy from Instantjazz.



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Alexey Lapin & Yuri Yaremchuk - Anatomy Of Sound (SoLyd Records, 2010) ****½

Russian Alexey Lapin plays piano and Ukrianian Yuri Yaremchuk plays soprano sax and bass clarinet. Both musicians master their instruments inside out, but their musical vision is even stronger. The title "Anatomy Of Sound" may seem somewhat overambitious or pretentious, but when you hear the album, this is indeed what you get.

The first track "Anatomy of Sound : Birth" starts with barely audible tones, vulnerable like a new-born, coming out of the clarinet, with sparse plucks on the piano strings in accompaniment. The piece is fresh, open-ended, full of surprise and wonder in the sounds themselves. For non-accustomed listeners, the opener may sound off-putting, but with the next piece, "Transformations", lyricism enters, in an abstract form, first naive, then moving into a yearning and passionate delivery. "Transmutations" is even more direct, with raw interaction of sax blasts and heavy chords, dissonant yet fully controlled and meaningful, full of inherent beauty and emotion. The intensity is hard to believe at moments.

"Transconfigurations" is calmer, with bass clarinet as the lead instrument, with sparse sounds, yet again nothing is done without purpose or without utter concentration: each note has its place, each phrase its value, with sounds that are sometimes in stark contrast : soft piano with deep blasts on the clarinet, or vice-versa, and the ease with which the two musicians move forward together to create their quite unique interaction is at moments mind-boggling. They don't actually dialogue, they create music together, immediately delivered as a unity, and sometimes with such uncanny precision that you assume that there must have been agreements before or notations lying somewhere, but I've been fooled by that before : some musicians can do this while improvising.

The album ends with two solo pieces: on "The Bottom", Lapin shows the breadth of his piano skills, hypnotic, thundering and refined, with light touches of the right hand ending the improvisation with a sound of relief. On "Epilogue", Yaremchuk demonstrates his skills on the bass clarinet, using multiphonics, overtones and tongue-slapping, resulting in eery sounds, yet captivating and touching, without urgency, but with careful development. Strangely enough, the epilogue ends with tones quite easily ressembling the first notes of "Birth", the circle is closed.

Even regardless of the album's intention, these are two musicians who can tell a story, who can hold the attention by bringing a unity of sound, full of new perspectives and approaches, full of an incredible expressivity and forward motion.

A rich listening experience.

Listen and buy from CDBaby.

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Aeroplane Trio - Naranja Ha (Drip Audio, 2010) ****

I shared my appreciation before about the Canadian bands "Fond Of Tigers" and more recently "Inhabitants", both merging the boundaries between rock music and jazz, with the other common factor being trumpet player JP Carter and drummer Skye Brooks, who we find back on this great trio album with Russell Sholberg on bass.

You all know my special fondness of the trumpet trio format, and it works again for me with this band. The trio demonstrates great versatility and bring lots of variation between the pieces, maybe a little bit too much, ranging from straight ahead compositions with theme and boppish rhythmic base to more adventurous sonic or creative explorations. Even though this is the band's first album, it is obvious that they are quite used to play together. Each of the pieces stands well on its own in terms of musical approach, however different it may be from the next. It shows great listening skills and common vision. I find them at their best when they play in full free improv, but some tracks will even be pallatable for mainstream fans. A little more unity might have made it even better. But nice stuff as you can witness yourself in the vid below.

Listen and download from eMusic.


Watch a performance of two years ago in Vancouver.



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Matt Gagnon

Matt is a writer, poet, educator, and creative music enthusiast living in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts with his wife and daughter. He is the author of the book of poems, Song of the Systole (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017). While a long time listener of jazz, his interest in creative and improvised music began around 2007 when he attended a Matthew Shipp solo concert at the Northampton Center For the Arts, and later, a duo with Evan Parker and Ned Rothenberg at the now retired Magic Triangle Jazz Series at UMass Amherst. These shows really opened up his ears to new sounds and possibilities of making music. He is regularly in attendance at concerts put on by Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares in Western Massachusetts, and the monthly music series, Improvisations Now in Hartford, curated by Joe Morris.

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David Cristol

Photo (c) Petra Cvelbar

David has been actively writing about jazz and improvised music for several French publications since 2010. When not attending festivals or keeping abreast of latest releases, he can be found watching B movies in arthouse theaters or enjoying fine wine, cheese and the occasional truffle delicacy at local vineyards.

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Romantic international piano trumpet percussion trios

A piano, percussion, and the occasional participation of a Norwegian trumpeter and singer, that's the common factor between the two albums shortly reviewed today.

Giovanni Di Domenico, Arve Henriksen, Tatsuhisa Yamamoto - Clinamen (Off/Rat, 2010) ***½

Led by Italian pianist, Giovanni Di Domenico, this album explores the space of interaction, based on composed structures, yet evolving freely based on how the other musicians react. We read :  "'Clinamen,' in ancient Roman philosopher Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, is the magic force that makes an atom change direction during its fall and thus be able to hit other atoms and "create" energy and life". That's how the music sounds, yet still within the confines of traditional harmonic concepts. Tatsuhisa Yamamoto's percussive and highly creative interplay is possibly the most striking aspect of the music, going against the grain, avoiding the subtle forward flow of the music by adding counterrhythms and odd-metered interventions. Arve Henriksen is the most romantic, with slow and electronically altered trumpet playing and angelic worldless singing. Some pieces, like the long "Masks That Eat Water" have lots of variation, unexpected twists, and in this composition a gloomy atmosphere on top. The changes of approach are a little too radical at times, leading to a lack of coherence, as with illustrated by the shift from the new-agey "Vatos" to the mad "Idiot Glee". Excellent playing and creative genre-bending ideas, but stylistic unity might have have made it even better.

Markku Ounaskari, Samuli Mikkonen, Per Jørgensen - Kuara (ECM, 2010) ***½

This album by Finnish drummer Markku Ounaskari, has the typically expansive ECM sound. He was asked to present his own project, and came with "source material including Russian psalms and folk songs from displaced Finnish peoples (Karelians, Udmurtians, Vepsäns) – all approached from improvisational perspectives". Pianist Samuli Mikkonen is the main voice on the album, and Norwegian trumpeter Per Jørgensen joins on several pieces. The "source material" adds a folksy and spiritual flavor to the improvised jazz, with strong and often repetive melodies offering the easily identifiable themes. Some of those are of a stunning beauty, like the slow "Tuuin Tuuin", on which Jørgensen's trumpet plays some heartrending phrases over a sweet piano melody. Some of the other pieces fall back on general ECM romanticism, with sparse notes, and great atmosphere creation, nice but with not much character.

Ounaskari's drumming is really in the background, not driving the music, but adding touches here and there.

Jørgensen's singing is less angelic than Henriksen's, and he is more used to direct singing, as we know from his own albums, but at times he moves a little bit in the direction of Dhafer Youssef, the Tunesian power singer.


Both albums are nice, well-played, quite accessible, with excellent moments.


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Nels Cline - Dirty Baby (Cryptogramophone, 2010) ****½

When I started listening to the first tracks of "Dirty Baby", I couldn't believe my ears: Americana à la Bill Frisell, nice and clever guitar music, making my reviewer's mind wonder whether to make a comparison with the latter's new album, "Beautiful Dreamers". Yet gradually, the sweet country tunes make place for a more modern version of the blues, an incredibly funky "Dirty Baby Part V", containing ingredients of some existential angst, turning into sheer horror with the lengthy "Dirty Baby Part VI", which will suck you up with its demonic and repetitive rhythm and electronic madness, multilayered overdubs and wailing guitars. In short, you get a musical shift, or history if you want, from naive simplicity to complex destruction.

That's only part 1 of the CD, called "Silhouettes", and inspired by the paintings of Ed Rushka.

The second CD gives us not less than 33 snippets of music, also inspired by Ed Rushka paintings, and is titled "Cityscapes".

The short pieces are less united by a story-line that on the first CD, and the musical diversity they offer is huge, ranging from sweet guitar music to absolute noise, with all kinds of avant-garde and electronic adventures in between, and with a combination of it all, inlcuding classical chamber music and folk and world music and pumping blues and jazz and rock and punk and electronic doom and themes from distant pasts, all coagulating in the city's big melting pot of influences and visions, often conflicting, sometimes harmonious, yet always incredibly interesting. In stark contrast to the abstract paintings that Rushka makes, the music has a strong figurative side to it, but the various genres are so purified and reduced to their essence that they almost become abstract.

The music is impossible to pigeonhole, and that is of course part of the fun. Utterly creative, deranging yet equally enjoyable, discomforting and attractive.

A fantastic listening experience!

The musicians are:

Scott Amendola: drum set, percussion, loops/electronics
Bill Barrett: chromatic harmonica
Jon Brion: electric piano, EMS synthi, voice
Jessica Catron: cello
Alex Cline: percussion
Dan Clucas: trumpets, flutes
Jeremy Drake: electric & acoustic guitars, banjo ukulele
Brad Dutz: vibraphone, xylophones, frame drum, bongos
Danny Frankel: percussion, 1/2 drum set
Jeff Gauthier: violin
Vinny Golia: flutes, clarinets, saxophones
Devin Hoff: contrabass, bass guitar, cigarbox guitar
Wayne Peet: organ
Glenn Taylor: pedal steel guitar
Nels Cline: electric & acoustic guitars, lap steel, megamouth, cigarbox guitar, effects, Quintronics Drum Buddy

The CD comes with a booklet of paintings by Ed Rushka, and ghazals (poems) by David Breskin. For listeners who download the music, the booklet is unfortunately not available. Just to give an idea of Ruska's art, here are some examples, with the figurative difference between CD1 and CD2 being quite obvious.

I think this is also the most ambitious and best "merchandised" album by Cryptogramophone, with specifically dedicated website included.

The song titles are also the titles of Rushka's paintings :

- If I was you, I'd do just like I tell you to do
- Do as I say, or ...
- No mercy
- Do as told or suffer
- Agree to our terms, or prepare yourself for a blast furnace

- Note we have already got rid of several like you - One Was Found in the River Just Recently

- Little snitches like you end up in dumpsters all across town
- I'll be getting out soon and I haven't forgot your testimony put me in here
- You dirty rotten bitch

.... not exactly the kind of titles I've come across on jazz albums, but then, this is not jazz either ...


Listen and download from eMusic.

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Dans Les Arbres (ECM, 2008 - US, 2010) *****

I thought albums were released globally, especially in the digital age, and certainly with the big labels such as ECM, but that's apparently not the case. I notice now that the Norwegian-French ensemble "Dans Les Arbres" will only release its first album on ECM in the United States two years after its European release.

Dans Les Arbres is Xavier Charles on clarinet and harmonica, Ivar Grydeland on guitar and banjo, Christian Wallumrod on piano, and Ingar Zach on percussion. They are absolute masters of minimalism and restraint. Listen with what sense of precision and caution they bring their fragile and beautiful music.

You can read my enthusiastic review of their first album here. I think I was the first to review it, and luckily my viewpoints were shared by many reviewers that followed.

I was hoping to hear their second release on ECM (originally planned for this year), but I guess we'll have to wait a little longer.


While waiting, and as an introduction to our US readers, here's already a glimpse of their stunning and hypnotical music, as recorded and broadcasted by French national radio in February of this year.

An exceptional 53 minute vid. 




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OirTrio - Kanata (Not Two Records, 2010) ****½

There is possibly nothing as difficult for the creative artist to improvise on the spot and make something that barely has any relationship with anything done before, while at the same time making a piece of music that is sufficiently solid, meaningful and compelling to make the listener to go back to it time and time again.

In December 2008, at the Loft in Cologne, Germany, Frank Gratkowski on alto sax and clarinet, Sebastian Gramss on bass, and Tatsuya Nakatani on percussion met for this fully improvised live performance.

So, the question is: why do you want to hear this again and again, especially because the music would be classified as "noise" by 99% of listeners (and probably more), while in all truth it is a very attractive tissue of interwoven sounds, fragile, subtle and full of nuance. Elegant. Sophisticated. Fresh. Organic. Pristine. Its real power lies in its emotional depth. You want to listen again because it touches that part of your nervous system that is linked to pure, authentic and profound feelings, somewhere between joy and fear, mostly unnamed, yet coming to life when listening.

There is no logic to this. No explanation either. That's the great thing about it. It is what it is. Great. Substantial. True in a deep human sense.  Don't touch it with your words.

Just listen. And be touched.

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Free Jazz Quartet - Memories For The Future (Matchless, 2010) ****

A strange album. It has been lying here for a while now, waiting to be reviewed. It was recorded in 1992, and is only the second album by the British Free Jazz Quartet. The band consists of the late Paul Rutherford on trombone, Harrison Smith on tenor, soprano and bass clarinet, Tony Moore on cello, and Eddie Prévost on drums.

The music is extremely light-footed, and unlike some British free improv or AMM music, it is "free jazz" as its name suggests, in the sense that there are themes, there is rhythm, but the openness of texture, the gentle breaking of boundaries and the sonic explorations already hint at another kind of music. In that sense the title is apt, taking good jazz memories from the past, and taking the best of it to make the music of the future. No paradox here, just some forward thinking.

The musical result is excellent: mild explorations, full of warmth, great interaction and somehow also surprise on the journey. "Pulsate" offers an interesting cello vamp to spur the improvisation on, and is in that sense more traditional. "Summoning" adds something more, starting with a great percussion intro on the toms only, the bowed cello adds a kind of maddening phrase and improvisation, and once that scene is created, sax and trombone join past halfway the track with mourning bird calls evolving into surreal wailing.

"Vibrational" brings a beautiful soprano solo over a nervous rhythm by drums and cello, evolving into what could be a chase between Tom and Jerry, then turning bluesy when the trombone joins. The title track is led by the trombone, is somewhat more adventurous and atonal in its approach, with the cello and percussion taking over the lead in the second part, full of urgency and intensity."Harmonious Relations" is as jazzy as it gets, with the sax leading the tune, and with cello and drums adding the sparse rhythmic backbone.

The album ends in absolute beauty, with "Blurring Of Boundaries" offering the essence of their music : sensitive and in the musical vanguard, sweet and different at the same time.

It's a shame this band did not record more. It's a miracle and a joy that their second album is now available.


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