Dave Dove and the Nameless Sound project

By Keith Prosk

I interview Dave Dove, the director of Houston, Texas’ Nameless Sound performance series, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2021 by diving into archives of previously unreleased sound, video, and stories from musicians and related people with deep connections to the series in a project named 20 Years Of Sound . At the time of the interview, these thorough profiles feature Joe McPhee , Maggie Nicols , Alvin Fielder , and Pauline Oliveros and a module on the dialogue between The Aural And The Visual has since been published. Over video chat, we talk about the history of Nameless Sound, the logistics of the project, its future directions, the improvising scene in Houston, and how Nameless Sound is not just a presenter but a cultivator of community through listening and sounding.

Dave Dove is a practicing trombonist and has released a couple of things this year, including A EYES ALWAYS ON YOU with trumpeter and vocalist Jawaad Taylor and The Very Cup of Trembling with Alvin Fielder, saxophonist Jason Jackson, and contrabassist Damon Smith. As becomes clear in the conversation, each of these collaborators have deep connections to Nameless Sound.

Keith Prosk: Hey, how’re you?

Dave Dove: Hey, Keith, how’re you doing? Nice to see you in the flesh.

KP: Yeah, same. How’s your day going so far?

DD: It’s going fine. Lot going on.

KP: Are y’all getting a lot of rain that way lately?

DD: Uh, yes, always this time of year. You’re in Austin, right?

KP: Yeah, and I feel like we usually have a wet month in May and then it super dries out and everything dies again around this time, so it’s been nice to have a little rain our way and keep temperatures a little cooler than they usually are.

DD: Where are you from?

KP: San Antonio.

DD: Oh, you're from San Antonio, so you know the region and all that. I mean this time of year in Houston we’re always waiting for the big hurricane

KP: Yes. Are you or MECA or Nameless ever affected by the flooding that comes with the hurricanes?

DD: I have never been flooded. MECA has definitely… that building has suffered a lot of damage, from Harvey particularly. Damage to the roof, actually. And maybe some flooding... They have a basement, which is very unusual in Houston, so probably some flooding in their basement, I’m not sure.

KP: Man. Well, thanks so much for chatting with me a bit about the 20 Years Of Sound project that you’ve got going on.

DD: Yeah. Thank you.

KP: Of course. I guess, just to get us started - I know you go over some of this in the different profiles and modules - but if you kind of wanna give a brief intro to what Nameless Sound is and maybe how you got started and some watershed moments along the way.

DD: Mmm, OK. Well feel free to direct me cause I might be a little bit redundant with what’s already in the project there. But Nameless Sound is an organization that works with experimental music, improvised music, collaborative music, both as a presenter of local, national, and international artists but also as an organization that has a very thorough and active workshop program. We bring artists from all over the world to perform in Houston in different spaces. We’ve never had our own space, so we’re always moving around, collaborating, partnering, setting things in different locations, curating things to space, responding to spaces. But also we... you know everything that we do is done with partners, so our workshop program is done the same way. We’re going into different spaces and doing workshops with different, well, embedding in different communities, and cultivating communities in different spaces. So that program started a single workshop at MECA, before there was a Nameless Sound in 1997. And then Nameless Sound formed originally as a branch of the Pauline Oliveros Foundation in 2001 and in 2006 we broke off and formed Nameless Sound. By that point we had started to do these workshops not just at MECA - and the workshop at MECA is an open workshop that anyone can go to - but we started receiving invitations to go into different spaces like homeless shelters, after school programs for refugee youth. We had already been doing a lot of in-school work. And then the artists that we bring in will often do work in those communities as well. Sometimes they’ll do one or two workshops but sometimes they’ll do something more extensive like a week or two residency. We have a staff of facilitators who are practicing improvising artists. And through 20+ years of practice, a pedagogy has developed, and that pedagogy outlines that what we are doing is responsive and collaborative work. And, as practicing improvisers, we are in a special position with our practice to be able to immediately respond to the environments we’re in, to ideally work in the most collaborative way with the youth that we work with, to go in without fixed goals, without curriculum, but with our sense of possibility. And to work from our own musical practice in those spaces too. There’s a lot of detail about all of that stuff that I could go into further so if there’s anything you want to zero in on we can…

KP: No, yeah, that’s great. I was kind of aware of the youth opportunities that y’all had, not so much the adult opportunities, but it’s been very clear to me - cause we’ve got PG in Austin kind of close to your practice as well - that you’re not just concert presenters. You are more community cultivators. And pretty much everyone you bring in usually works with the kids and does these workshops. And of the four profiles so far on 20 Years Of Sound, that’s what stuck out to me. That they’re not just there in the capacity of musicians in this context, but they’re all teachers and mentors as well, from Alvin Fielder taking on some of the young percussionists as mentees to Joe McPhee considering them like his kids, and then Maggie and Pauline’s more overt efforts towards cultivating spaces for learning around sound. I know that’s a conscious mission with the program, has that been a conscious perspective that you’ve wanted to show people with these profiles?

DD: Definitely wanted to show people that with the profiles. We’re moving away from… what you’ve seen so far are these editions centered on specific artists and at this point we’re going to have editions more focused on particular themes rather than specific artists, so there will be one just about that, actually. That will just be featuring different work that we do with youth and even sharing our pedagogical work behind that. We’ve developed a whole pedagogy from the practice, right. Much like an artist develops an approach from practice, we develop a pedagogy from our practices - it’s a practice-based research, right. So we will share essays of the pedagogical statement, information about how we assess this work, probably we’ll share information about work that we’ve done with a psychotherapist in being responsive to trauma, which is very specific to a lot of the sites that we work in. So hopefully you’ll even get to see that in more detail. For us, this is not an outreach program. This program, these workshops, predates being a concert presenter. So for a lot of non-profit organizations, a presenter, you sort of do what you do on stage and then you have what’s called an outreach program. For us, it’s kind of the opposite. I Mean I wouldn’t want to put one in front of the other in terms of what we do, our identity, our activity. Because they’re both very active and oftentimes they don't overlap. We do have artists that perform and don’t work in those workshops, and we do have kids that we work with who never meet those artists also. Though they do overlap strongly. And this is to say that in Houston, Nameless Sound reaches a lot of different people for different reasons and in different ways, and that even the people we reach don’t know everything else that we do. I would like them to, but they don’t. It’s just too much, or it doesn’t happen that way. We started… you know, I didn’t have any plan to start a non-profit organization. I had an idea about doing improvisation workshops with kids. And my background is I’m a musician, I’m an artist. And back in the late 90s I had this idea like, ‘Oh I’d really like to work with kids doing music improvisation’ because i felt that music education was very conservative and that growing up I’d never really had an opportunity in my formal education to do something creative. You know in the school band, even in the jazz band we didn’t really improvise. We weren’t composing music. We weren’t experimenting on our instruments. It was sort of through my other musical life, punk rock, that I learned like you go ahead and you don’t wait to make your own music. Someone doesn’t have to tell you that you’re ready. You can start writing your own songs and putting on your own shows. I really feel that when I was 11, 12 years old, when I first started getting into music, I had this formal education and I had this other thing, and it was really important that I had this other thing. And though that’s not the kind of music I do anymore, that thread definitely runs into this period of time where it’s like I really wanna work with kids and give them an opportunity to do something creative. And me, my practice is improvisation so that became the way by which to do that, but I also felt that improvisation was the way that you could immediately start being creative, without waiting for anything to happen. And that it was also a way of working that did not require a common musical background, a traditional idiom, or language. So if I were to compose for an orchestra, I would need people who know how to read music. If I were to work with a jazz ensemble, I would need to know people who could play the chord changes. In improvisation you can have the punk rock kid next to the conservatory kid next to the mariachi kid next to the kid who’s programming on the computer and right away you can start doing something creative with them. So I identified improvisation not only as my own practice but as this thing that could immediately get the wheels turning and get kids working creatively. Like many things in my life - and this is before there was a Pauline Oliveros Foundation or Nameless Sound - Pauline was an important connector in this. She was a mentor who I knew originally through her mother, who was a piano teacher living in Houston, and one day Pauline was in town visiting and she said, ‘Oh i have a workshop I’m giving at this art school called MECA I was invited to give,’ and she invited me and a friend to come along. We went with Pauline to do the workshop and I thought, ‘Oh maybe these guys will let me do this improv workshop. They’re having Pauline in here, so maybe they’ll let me come in and do something regularly...’

Listen to Pauline Oliveros at MECA here.

KP: ...and this was a Deep Listening workshop?

DD: It was not… I mean, in a way everything Pauline does is a Deep Listening workshop because I think she would identify Deep Listening as something that all of her work is connected to. So, yes, but it wasn’t really a Deep Listening workshop from my memory, it was more of an improv workshop. I don’t remember it… this was a long time ago and I’ve been in many Pauline workshops since… but I don’t remember it being a capital Deep Listening workshop in the ways that many have been into it, I remember it as more of a playing thing from my memory. And what was important for me about that day is that it introduced me to that building and I met the director, Alice Valdez, and she was open to me coming and working regularly with those kids. At that same time, I had joined an artist-advisory board at DiverseWorks which is a local art space here and they gave me some opportunities to bring some musicians to town. The first one was Joe McPhee and Arthur Doyle, which is told in that story there, and then I thought, ‘OK well I’m gonna bring Joe to do a concert and I’m gonna also bring him to work with these kids I’m working with.’ This became the seed of Nameless Sound. Which is I had this opportunity to present a concert. I was already working with these kids. And I thought, ‘Why don’t we just mix it all together,’ you know. And I’ve often said it’s great… it was really Joe who gave that workshop, and it’s great that… and I didn’t know Joe at the time other than his music and it’s great that he was such a wonderful, generous, sweet guy, because there are a lot of people who I could have invited to do that might not have been so cool. And I often think that if it had gone a different way I may never have done it again. So there was a couple of years of doing projects like that and then at one point Pauline said, ‘Hey, why don’t you start an organization and you can be umbrellaed under us.’ She kinda poked me about that for a year or two before I did it. You know, we’re both a presenting organization and a community organization, but we were an organization that worked with kids first. I think it’s important to say that. And I don’t see the organization as two halves. I just see it as different sides by which to do this work. It’s like people gather, they have a listening experience, they participate in that experience, we’re cultivating a space, I’m simplifying but the same thing… I have the same priorities, generally speaking, that I do for sitting with a group of kids and playing. Which is making a space where everyone feels comfortable. Where you can have this experience. Where the experience doesn't have to be defined for you, it can be your experience, where you can learn from that, you can heal from that, you can be creative in that space. And it’s important to say that one of our most recent projects - recent meaning the last three years or so - and there will be a future edition about this - is a series called They, Who Sound , and They, Who Sound is our weekly concert series. So in the past our presenting was more like 8 or 10 concerts a year of international artists. But we’ve added a weekly concert series, which is a little less formal, it often has visiting artists but it always has local, original artists on it, so the basis of that is local and regional artists.

KP: Just to give people a sense of the community in Houston, I know the readers of this blog will be familiar with like Damon Smith , Sandy Ewen , and Susan Alcorn . I was surprised to see in these profiles people like Maria Chavez , Bryan Eubanks , and Ben Roidl-Ward . I know Jawaad Taylor . But are there some other people that you want to shout out that are pillars of this weekly or the local community?

DD: Well some of these people you’re talking about, they’re all very associated with Houston - maybe Bryan a little less so, I mean he’s been here a lot and done great things here - but all of the other people you’ve mentioned have lived in Houston and several of them don’t live here anymore, unfortunately for me. But Maria, Sandy, Jawaad, those three came out of our youth program. So I met Sandy when she was a teenager. She was in the record store and she was buying Captain Beefheart and Sun Ra records on vinyl and I was putting up a poster for a Sam Rivers concert and I was like, ‘Oh, do you like that?’ And she was like, ‘Yeah I read about this, it seems like it might be cool, and I said, ‘Well if you like that you might like this - you should go to this concert.’ And then she came to the concert, which was at MECA. And I said, ‘Oh I met you at the record store’ and then I said, ‘I bet you play an instrument.’ And she said, ‘Yeah I play guitar’ and I said, ‘Well you should come to this workshop that we have here.’ This is when Sandy was still playing like this [makes traditional strum movement] and I remember the day that she laid her guitar flat very clearly. Similarly Maria, though she came to us a little older, in her early 20s, she started her practice as an improviser and a sound artist with us. When I met her she was a DJ. And Maria came to one of our concerts and she was doing a music business degree and she said, ‘I need to do an internship’ and I said alright - we had only been around for a year or so, I didn't have any apparatus to take on an intern - but I was like, ‘You’re gonna volunteer, right?’ And she said yeah and I said great. She sent me her resume and her CV all this, I didn’t even look at it. We had a meeting and she was really upset that I didn’t study her resume and I said, ‘Well you just seem like a cool person and you want to help so that just seemed like enough.’ And then I invited Maria… I said, ‘Well if you’re gonna help me out then you should come to my workshop.’ And she said, ‘I don’t play an instrument.’ And I said, ‘You’re a DJ right.’ And she said yeah. And I said, ‘Well, bring your turntable.’ And she brought her turntable and I remember the moment she played - and she tells this story in the edition i think - she often says, ‘The moment I did that improvisation I realized that I’m not going to DJ anymore, I’m going to do this.’ And there are others too. Jawaad was not a teen when he came to us but he was maybe in his early 20s. When Jawaad came to us he was… I might be misrepresenting this but this is my understanding. He came to us as… you know Jawaad grew up as like a rapper, who would like sneak out of his house as a kid and go to rap battles and stuff. This is the story he always told me. I might’ve been at some of those things, you know, who knows. I mean, I know some of the clubs he was going to and I was going there too. Of course he was a kid and I’m older than him. I met him at one of our concerts and I don’t know how I got to talking to him but he told me that he played trumpet and I said, ‘You should come to my workshop.’ And he came to the workshop, playing his trumpet, and I learned, ‘Oh you’re also a rapper, you know you can do that also here.’ So I think the way Jawaad tells it - and he can confirm that or elaborate or deny it - I really think through the improv workshop that’s where he started bringing these two practices together. I think they were sort of separate practices for him. And I think Jawaad is someone really special in that he really has integrated rapping and beats and programming into a really flexible improvisational language almost like no one else I’ve heard I think. Where one doesn’t have to accommodate the other, they’re very flexible, they’re very responsive languages in the way he does that. Some others ones who came up, maybe you’ve heard Jason Jackson , he’s on our staff now. He’s a fantastic saxophone player, he plays in The Young Mothers . Jason was a teenage student of mine and now he runs the education program. There’s a bunch of them. There’s a whole lot of them out there. Who started as young kids in the Nameless Sound workshop and are now… some of them are active experimental musicians, some of them are active in other kinds of music, some of them are artists otherwise. Other people in the Houston music scene that have been... not students but who you may have heard of that are connected to Nameless Sound, well, Tom Carter and Christina Carter , Charalambides . They’re very old friends of mine. Christina’s been a friend since we were teenagers actually, so I go way back with them. Oh Susan Alcorn. When I first started getting into this kind of music in Houston in the 90s Susan was living here and she was like the light for me in a way. I was like, ‘Oh here’s someone else that’s into this’ and she’s doing it at a very high level. So Susan has been a very important inspiration since before Nameless Sound, just being around that level of artistry, commitment, and individuality and talent, that’s just really big. A lot of great music in Houston. We could take that conversation in any direction. And it’s always changing. It’s a city where people are coming and going, it’s a big city. I still find people… I mean we’ve been in a pandemic so we’re getting ready to start concerts again. I think it’s going to be… I think we’ll be learning to see where the scene is now. But people are always moving into this town. You mentioned Damon Smith, he was here for several years and he certainly brought a lot of energy to the city when he was here. And yeah, so a lot of good people here.

KP: Yeah, just to go back to Maria, I think that story in Pauline’s profile really spoke to Nameless Sound, where - I guess Pauline was a little more active in helping out with Nameless Sound or your activities more than visiting musicians - but not just having these people hang out with the kids or present their music to the kids but actually helping them cultivate their practice and providing safe spaces to experiment.

DD: You know one thing I realized, I learned as time went on. And I learned from some of our people leaving Houston, and it’s a little hard for me to see in the center of it. Is not only is it important that like Maria had an experience with Pauline or Sandy when she was a teenager had workshops with Keith Rowe or Jason when he was a teenager he basically had workshops with every great creative saxophone player. Like Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, John Butcher, Marshall Allen, Joe McPhee, Kidd Jordan, Bhob Rainey, Sam Rivers, he kind of experienced the whole gamut. He experienced a pretty thorough runthrough of who were really great creative improv free jazz experimental saxophone players. I think in hindsight what we see is that - and what none of us really saw at the time (I mean these things are still happening) - and I think maria, her story speaks to that - though she maybe doesn’t directly say it - was that it was a very casual encounter too. So much so that these kids, only later sometimes did they realize who it was that they were hanging out with when they were 19 years old. I think Maria kind of speaks to that. I don’t think she quite knew who was in the room with her and who was encouraging her and then later you kind of realize… and I don’t think it would happen it like that... I mean Houston is a big city, and I wonder if it would happen like that in another big city.

KP: I don’t know, I feel like Houston, like San Antonio, has the reputation of being more on the chill side.

DD: It’s a pretty chill scene. I think it’s hard for me, from my position, it’s hard for me to assess that but I was talking to a couple of other people about this recently, there’s a pretty serious scene here, but it’s not very competitive. There’s not much to compete for, actually. There’s probably a downside to that. Well, you know, maybe I shouldn’t embrace such a capitalist framework about the value of competition on quality but I think… there’s something to that but there’s just as much to the opposite because people work together here. And I think they work together even across… they often work together across the supposed subgenre lines of this music in a way that they might be less likely to do so in more competitive music scenes. In music scenes where people have moved to that city to be in that art scene or to be in that music scene. But there’s some brilliant people here, there’s some really brilliant people here, and I think that’s a really healthy thing about it. I think there’s not really like a dominant genre in improvised music here. It’s not like a free jazz scene or an electroacoustic scene or whatever. There have been really strong noise scenes in Houston, distinct from what we’re doing, but they also have a healthy overlap with the improvised scene. As an artist I’ve found it to be a really stimulating and healthy environment. And the audience listens really well here. That’s something I’ve learned over the years. Artists who are on tour come here and they’re like, ‘Wow the audience really listens here.’ There’s a real quality to the listening, they think the audience really supports in listening.

KP: That’s good. I’ve only been to one Nameless Sound show; I drove in for the Radigue quartet a couple years ago. But my impression was that, at least what I thought were locals, were very in tune and very enthusiastic and attentive to the music and that’s a music that requires a lot of focus and attention as well.

DD: Yeah, that concert would have been a good test for that, wouldn’t it. I think the the crowd stayed for the whole thing, do you remember?

KP: Oh yeah, maybe a person left cause a phone went off but I don’t remember anyone just leaving...

DD: Yeah and that was a pretty intense one. That was not a short concert. Yeah I’m looking forward to getting back to it.

KP: Just roping back to 20 Years Of Sound, you mentioned you’re going to have a little stuff on They, Who Sound and your pedagogy, but anything else you’re willing to share that’s on the horizon?

DD: Sure. What we’re planning - and it could evolve, it could shift between now and when it happens - but there’s an edition that’s coming out in the coming days, at some point, any day now, that is around the theme of the aural and the visual. So dialogs, blurred lines, intersections between the aural and the visual. This is around events that we’ve had that speak to that. It’ll have audio of Keith Rowe and Loren Connors each playing solos in the Rothko Chapel , not included just because it’s the Rothko Chapel but included because of the place that Rothko figures in both of those artists’ work. Rothko really hovers as a heavy influence over both of those guys. It’ll have video and audio of a project called Film Noir by the pianist Ran Blake, where he performs to these film noir clips. It’ll have a video of Phantom Orchard, which is Ikue Mori and Zeena Parkins, performing a concert with live video projections that they use. It’ll have audio of Text of Light, which is Alan Licht, Lee Ranaldo, Ulrich Krieger, and Tim Barnes performing to Stan Brakhage films - without the films, even though the concert had the films. Those are those pieces, and then it has a subfeature on James Magee and The Hill , which is a whole conversation unto itself.

KP: Yeah, the installation…

DD: James Magee is an artist in west Texas who has been building this monumental work out in the middle of the desert, off the grid, with no electricity or anything, since 1980. And we’ve done four concerts there. So it’ll have audio of one of those concerts, of Peter Brötzmann playing there. And it’ll also have audio of a concert of James’ with Bob Ostertag that James… the titles of these pieces are these very long poems that are very musically recited by James. And then it has another subfeature about four of our poster artists over the years, three of them writing about the process of designing the posters - three of them are musicians and they’re writing about the process of designing the posters and how they’re responding to music. I’m pretty sure we’ll have an edition about They, Who Sound, which goes...see They, Who Sound is only three years old as a Nameless Sound project, but it’s like nine or ten years old as an independent project of mine. So They, Who Sound used to be my own kind of weekly concert series that was just sort of designed to put me and my friends on. And it was just very DIY and it wasn’t Nameless Sound. And it really became this thing, it became very important, it became like a meeting point for local musicians, and it became an opportunity for touring people to collaborate with locals and it just became really important. So at some point we took it on as a Nameless Sound series officially, in partnership with Lawndale Art Center . So They, Who Sound will actually reach back in its pre-Nameless Sound history, when it used to be held at a bar called AvantGarden . Then we’ll have one about creative music communities, our work with the kids, including some media of visiting artists working with those kids as well as those kids own projects from teenagers to little kids and maybe some pedagogy about that. Hopefully some essays or some voice, well, we’ll definitely have voice of those participants. And then I’m thinking we’re gonna have an edition on Nameless Sound Ensemble. Nameless Sound Ensemble is basically any local ensemble assembled for a specific project, usually assembled to work with a visiting artist. Can I speak to any of those pieces yet? Might not be able to speak to those pieces because I don’t have approvals yet. I’m trying to think of any of them I have approvals for and off the top of my head I don’t think I’ve worked on that yet. But, you know, so and so comes in and then sets a piece on the local ensemble, that’s the Nameless Sound Ensemble. And then we’ll have a couple of editions that they’ll sort of find themes within them, but they’ll just be kind of like curatorial samplings of different concerts that we’ve done with maybe a looser theme connecting them, or subthemes where we might write about a particular venue as a subfeature in there that we use a lot…

KP: So you mentioned approval and these are super deep profiles, with hours and hours of audio and video and multiple perspective from the participants that it seems like are gathered recently. So what have been some of the challenges of this project, cause I know you’ve had to think on your feet a bit too and readjust scheduling along the way.

DD: Yeah.. The challenges for me are just total… the approvals for me have been very smooth. The thing is, my practice, I’m not like wired towards documentation or putting things out. I’m wired towards making the next event. I’m wired towards what is happening in this space right now, that was great, let’s go on to the next one. That’s been my driving thing my whole life really, so this project really stretches me because it’s very much not that. Part of it came up because of the pandemic, what are we gonna do this year instead of putting on concerts. That this pandemic coincided with our 20th anniversary. And also the reality that we have all this fantastic material. And that I have a few very dedicated videographers and audio engineers who have put a lot of work into it and I think they’re very happy to see it come out. So it’s, you know, it’s been a scramble to get it together and we have a fantastic team but the challenges are just going through that material. One is that you actually have to go through that material, and what you’re seeing is only a slice of what there is, right. I couldn’t possibly even go through all the material we have. And in the case of the video, a lot of it isn’t ready until Don the videographer makes the edit so there’s a lot of coordinating of waiting for an edit to come through, or waiting for an approval copy to come through of audio or video, of getting it to an artist for approval, of maybe me seeing it, of figuring out whether it fits into an edition or a theme. And then my fantastic editor Veronica Salinas, her being able to lay this out and to frame it and to be the editor of those essays and help me shape that. She’s really the one helping me shape this, she’s the one shaping it really. In a way I worry that we’re getting into the most challenging phase of it. (1) because we’re getting back to the work that we do when we’re not in a pandemic, so I’m still doing this this year but I’m also getting back to what i was doing before. And (2) because what we have left is - we have a lot of fantastic stuff left - but now I’m like… the process of waiting for those approval masters, getting them to be approved, us seeing it, Veronica and I working with it, everyone is working their butts off to make all of this happen. It’s just like a chain of tasks and protocols that are quite intricate and that’s not normally the ones that I’m working on. You know, that’s the thing about music, time-based art… I mean I know this from releasing records, it’s like yeah that concert took an hour to play but I’m gonna listen to it like 30 times before it comes out. So you have to actually go through the material in real time many many times. Definitely my video editor has to do that. That’s part of the challenge of it.

KP: Yeah, have you had staff throughout the years recording and filming or are these pulled from the community?

See Maggie Nichols at The Silver Slipper here.

DD: The videos have almost all been pulled from two sources. One is a videographer named Don White, who is really like the head of video on this project. The credits are on them but he did all these multi-camera ones that you see. There’s certain years in our history where he caught a lot of them, and certain years where he caught fewer of them. But he has been with us since not the first day but quite early years. I think Don is thrilled to see these finally coming out because he did a lot of work and they were just sitting around on hard drives, you know. Then another person who videoed a lot of them but in a more casual way was Pete Gershon, who used to work with us. Pete used to be the editor of Signal To Noise magazine and he lives in Houston now and he worked for Nameless Sound. He worked with us for a couple years, and it wasn’t his job but Pete is an archivist and he’s writing several books now about the history of visual art in Houston and other topics, so unlike me he’s a real documenter. So when he was working with us, he would always throw a camera up. And some of those videos, he was also working the door, so he couldn’t man the camera, so he would just find a spot, throw the camera up, and work the door. So some of those videos are more appealing than others I think, just in terms of they’re not professionally done. Some of them are gold. Some of them are like like, ‘Oh this is just a side camera of the stage and it doesn’t quite capture this thing.’ But we’ve used a lot of his. And we have a few videos from a guy names Chris Nelson, who is a board member of ours and is a professional videographer and he’s caught some key ones also, just a few. Like between him and Pete they caught the Roscoe Mitchell, Alvin Fielder duet. I mean, you know, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to all these people cause like I told you I’m sort of the one making the thing happen and I’m just not thinking about documentation. But wow this is one of my most proud concerts, to get those guys together. You know that Alvin is very important to us and to me and to our org and you know Alvin was on the very first recording of AACM music which is Roscoe Mitchell’s Sound and they hadn’t played together for forty years before the concert. So to bring those two together to play duet. Of course we want to capture that and document it. So I owe a huge debt of gratitude to all these guys for doing that. And then some of them, like the little things in the workshop, there’s a few little camera phone things in there. Not of like whole concerts, but of just little moments that we want to include. For example Maggie Nicols singing at the Houston blues club, Silver Slipper . You know, the Silver Slipper is this fantastic blues club that’s been around for sixty years in Houston in the Fifth Ward - well actually it’s technically in a neighborhood called French Town, Kashmere Gardens - and we brought Maggie there and she got up and sang and sat in with the band so I just got my phone out. And there’s like two minutes of that in there which is a fantastic camera phone video. Or there’s a video of - is that in there? I think it is in there. Yeah it is in there - there’s a video of Maggie doing a workshop with these kids at a program called Kijana Youth that we do. And Chris videotaped that workshop though he kind of like, yeah, he was sort of videotaping it more for like little one minute bits that could be used for maybe grant purposes or something but I was like, ‘Chris we have to put all of these together because this workshop is a really important document.’ But there’s also a part of that where I was recording it with my phone and one of the kids said, ‘Hey can I take that’ and I gave my phone to one of the kids and she’s walking around recording it. So there’s other little bits that get in there too. Hopefully they’re the right bits when they’re lofi, hopefully they transcend the medium. I mean another lofi bit that’s in there that I hope transcends the medium is the recording from the very first concert I ever presented, and its of Joe McPhee and Arthur Doyle playing together. The only time they ever played together other than the next night in Austin. And this was long before... well we did not record that concert, but there was someone who comes to our concerts who always records these concerts, I see his little recorder, so we reached out to him and he was like, ‘Yeah I have a cassette of that.’ So I thought that document was important enough to like say yeah this is a noisy cassette but these two guys meeting on that night… I’m amazed at how much is documented, calling around. Or things that I didn’t realize. The recording of Joe and Susan Alcorn playing together. You know like I’m very disorganized around here and part of this process is just digging through old shoeboxes of CD-Rs and looking at them and going, ‘Joe McPhee, Susan Alcorn? did we record that concert?’ I pop it in. ‘Oh, wow, we did record that concert. It’s like a really good recording and it sounds really great.’ So it’s been a trip. It’s been a trip. It’s very good that we’re doing this. And it’s also very good that it looks like we’re handing over our archive to the University of Houston’s special collections, so that Nameless Sound will actually properly and professionally be archived at the University of Houston.

See Alvin Fielder and Roscoe Mitchell at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston here.

KP: That’s very cool

DD: Yes, yes I’m real excited about that. So that way all these CD-Rs sitting in boxes in my house will be protected and backed up and cared for and if someone wants to dig into them for research purposes they’ll be there.

KP: That’s all that I had prepared but did you want to go in any other directions?

DD: Be careful, I could go into any direction you send me in. I just hope people dig into this. I know it’s a lot of material. And I hope that we present it in such a way that the casual viewer can go in and skim through and maybe find the media materials that they want, or that the person who wants to go really deep can go in really deep and read it all. I hope it’s laid out in such a way, Veronica and I are trying to do that, lay it out in such a way so that it’s friendly. Maybe someone is seduced into it by a certain Joe McPhee video or a Pauline Oliveros video and that they learn about the organization because I feel like we’re a real unique organization, I feel like we’re very much of our city - I don’t think we could have happened anywhere else. We’re trying to share fantastic documents of fantastic artists who have shaped the organization through their involvement with it. And as you mentioned put in various voices. Nameless Sound are these artists, they’re the kids, they’re the people in the audience, they’re the volunteers, they’re the staff members. We’re trying to have all of these different voices in there because Nameless Sound means something different to any of them. And what we try to do is be a responsive organization, and I think we’re a really unique organization for that reason. And I hope that people will sort of learn a little bit about Houston by reading that maybe. And learn a little bit about the organization by diving into it.

KP: Yeah, I think that came through super clearly. That this is not just an opportunity to present archives about musicians but really to present a model for cultivating community through sound.

DD: Well if it inspires someone to do that, that’s great. That would be the ultimate, you know. And I believe in sharing information. You know I’m not really into… when we present these concerts and when we do these workshops with these kids, for me the idea is to make a space that anyone can feel like they can be part of and that the work and the community and the space will evolve from anyone who chooses to be in it. And also particularly the work we do with kids and the community work we do - and that work is also with adults as you mentioned, we have workshops that adults can go to - that anyone who is interested in that can draw some information and inspiration and do it in their own way somewhere. I think we have to… I think that this is a kind of musicmaking that’s really powerful because… well, let me put it this way, I feel like most movements in the so called avant garde have like a ten- or generously twenty-year period where they’re really vital. And the thing about collaborative experimentation, not just improvisation but creative collaboration in music, is that I think it’s openness to a diversity of voices is what keeps its edge, its what keeps it evolving, and hopefully keeps it out of its complacency. You know I’m speaking out of an extreme bias, as someone who does this work, but I still hear all kinds of improvised music that to me really excites me and is really interesting - and I hear a lot that bores me too, cause I’ve heard a lot, right - but I still hear lots that really excites me. But the problem of the activity that anyone can do… well… the problem is that it’s not enough just to go like, here’s the space, anyone can do it, anything goes. That if you really want an inclusive, diverse, and equitable space in every sense, you have to cultivate that actually. It’s not enough just to say like, ‘Freedom.’ You have to cultivate that, you have to be conscious of that. And that’s a statement that’s as complicated as can be. But I also feel like the vitality of artistic movements are doomed if we don’t make that effort.

KP: Yeah, I’m super behind that. I think you see that in the safety and support of extended family versus the nuclear family, or cooperative models, or biological ecosystem health, the more diverse voices you have, that offers a certain resiliency, just because you can be adaptable, changing, open. That’s definitely the key to longevity. Which is why it’s important that organizations are cultivating it. But it does take work. It’s not something like you can just say, ‘Hey this is a community now.’

DD: That’s right. And if you go out and work with kids - and the reason I work with kids is not to recruit musicians, in spite of what I just said - the Nameless Sound pedagogy identifies that if you do this work in a secure framework and it’s collaborative, then it has the potential for healing, knowledge exchange, creative work, and play. That being said, as you know, there are musicians that have come into this field through our workshops. And I’m thrilled about that. And my life has benefited greatly from that. Most of my collaborators are these people who I knew when they were kids now. Maria, Jawaad, Sandy, Jason, etc. But the thing is you also have to go into that space trying to let go of your idea of what this music is or should be, and ready for the new voice to be part of that evolution. And that’s a really hard thing. I mean it’s inevitable that a teacher of the arts - and I don’t consider us teachers, but just to put it in that framework - it’s inevitable that a teacher of the arts is going to bring the heavy weight of their own style or aesthetic into the situation. And the thing is to be conscious about that. Just like to be conscious about everything about oneself. Like being conscious of yours biases - you don’t lose your biases, you just gain consciousness of them. You know I think if we want this artform to thrive, we have to listen to what potentially is coming into it. I don’t know if that makes sense.

KP: It does.

DD: Yeah. And you know, the obvious becomes more and more clear to me with time. Pauline was visionary about this stuff. I owe everything to Pauline in this work, but there’s also a certain tendency of mine to distinguish it from Pauline’s work. And Pauline would support that, and she did support that 100%. And of course I am my own person and I have the way that I do this. But Pauline was a real visionary when it came to that. You know In the early 70s, she could have just continued on being a great electronic music composer, all these great works that she did in the 60s, Bye Bye Butterfly, Alien Bog, I of IV, all these fantastic electronic music pieces. And the thing about that kind of work - and I don’t do that kind of work but I love that music - the thing about that kind of work is like... it is where the composer really comes closest to being a studio artist. Meaning they don’t really need a performer, they don’t really even need an audience. They work in their studio, alone, and they make this piece, they make their opus or whatever it is. So much so to the degree that we have this confusion now between experimental music and sound art - ha ha ha, we’ll set that aside, that’s another conversation - but she could have continued to do that stuff and in the early 70s she really embraced working with communities and working with people who did not identify as musicians or have musical backgrounds. Originally it was a group of women. And that was a radical shift, I think, for her. And it was a really important moment in the cultural history of experimental arts and experimental music, because she knew that through listening, the type of listening that she was cultivating, and through sounding, that there was so much more to get from this experience than just to make a great piece of art and have an audience that enjoys that piece of art. That there’s community building, that there’s healing, that there’s research, that there’s consciousness expansion, that there’s play, also. I mean Pauline was fantastic at just play. You see it in her titles and stuff, funny little plays on words, humor is in there also. Obviously Nameless Sound owes everything to Pauline, but I realize that more and more as time goes on that she really, before I was born, she laid a groundwork for this kind of work. And she did it so… to me, there was no pretense and it was so inclusive and so open. I don’t know where I was going with that except just to float around on the future of our communities and none of us know where they’ll go, we have to be open to where they will. Cause the kids are alright, huh?

See Tom Bickley, David Dove, Juan J. Garcia Jimenez, and Lisa E. Harris each sound the cistern here.

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Philipp Wachsmann, Kalle Moberg, Paul Lytton - The Punk and The Gaffers (Kamo Records, 2021) ****

By Nick Ostrum

The Punk and the Gaffers is a brief 27-minute set recorded at the 2018 Blow Out Festival in Oslo, which (including this set) Paul admirably covered here . This release captures the first time these musicians played together. And it is a scorcher, albeit in an odd manner.

First, however, the instrumentation. The legendary Philipp Wachsmann plays violin; the esteemed Paul Lytton plays drums; and Kalle Moberg, among the few avant-accordionists of note today, round out the trio. Others, of course, have brought accordions into contemporary improv: Jonas Kocher in his extended style, Guy Klucevsek in his eminent stylistic bridging with Dave Douglas, Rune Larsen in his brief but potently quizzical work with Luther Thomas, Adam Matlock in his solo work and appearances with Anthony Braxton. There are surely others I am overlooking, but Moberg is rightfully among the few who merit such mention.

Now, on to the music. I am not sure whether this is exactly what I expected. I came in with few assumptions other than that this would be strange and compelling. And it is. It begins with airy clitter clatter. Some woody percussion here. A series of violin squeaks there. A range of unconventional, sometimes ear-bleeding, sometimes toyish accordion sounds all around. Wachsmann wavers between brief bouts to romantic and somber melodicism and free improv buzz saw aggression. Moberg runs the gamut of what an accordion can do playing with frenetic keyboard runs and punctuated huffs. Lytton plays in the post-Murray vein that has become the standard aim of much contemporary drumming that seems always several steps beyond anything recognizable as a steady rhythm yet manages to imply time-keeping while forcing itself to the front in this case as an equal partner with the keys and strings. What is remarkable about this trio is how percussive the entire effort sounds. I am not sure what discussions were had before this outing. If any form was discussed, however, it seems to be that the trio would play a set of simmering energy that never quite boils over, that each instrument would shine at times its own solo space, but all would be grounded in the clicks, clunks, and knock of a sputtering engine.

That said, I am confident nothing like those words were spoken, even if they discussed the set beforehand. The connection is too organic, and the responses are too immediate and subtle to be anything beyond reflex and spontaneous but flawless communication. Maybe there was no discussed form, and this this was all concocted on the stage and on the spot, of three musicians with decades and decades of separate practice but somehow of like minds on this particular day. Like any good improv, it is difficult to say. What is not, however, is that is set is curiously satisfying. It is spacious and dynamic, but plays much more with sound, its spikes, warps and textures, than silence or anything conventionally harmonious. The set is short and burns out rather abruptly at the end. Still, the set is full. True, the band could have continued. I would have loved for the album to continue. But, in its understated intensity, it seems Lytton, Wachsmann, and Moberg did what they wanted in a state of intense concentration for the time they had and stopped when they were done. There is a lot to be said for that.

The Punk and the Gaffers is available on CD and via download.

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Sax & Drums (2)

 By Stef Gijssels

Today we continue with our tour of the world of  Sax & Percussion duos, highlighting new albums with even more than one by Sabu Toyozumi, Vasco Trilla and Mars Williams. 

Enjoy!

Sabu Toyozumi & Mats Gustafsson - Hokusai (NoBusiness, 2020)

We know drummer Sabu Toyozumi from his collaborations with the likes of Wadada Leo Smith, Itaru Oku, Paul Rutherford, Kaoru Abe. On this duo album he is joined by Mats Gustafsson for a very open and adventurous album. The Swede is primarily active on his baritone saxophone, demonstrating his skills at producing deeply emotional almost human wails out of his instrument, while at the same time using it as a percussive instrument with tongue clacking and other techniques. 

The album has one solo sax piece, and one drums solo. The former is built around silence, like Japanese calligraphy, using a few powerful black sonic brush strokes on a white background, the latter is a fifteen minute exploration on and of the drumkit. Both musicians come back together for another 20 minutes of improvisation. It's an interesting archival album that will appeal to fans of both artists. 

The peformance was recorded live on 11th and 12th June, 2018 at Jazz Spot Candy, Chiba, Japan. 

Listen and download from Bandcamp. 

Sabu Toyozumi & Rick Countryman - I Am Village (Self, 2020)

Toyozumi also released this duo album with American altoist Rick Countryman, their second after "Sol Abstraction" from 2019. Both musicians have a very intense musical collaboration, with eleven albums released in various line-ups. That they find each other easily can be heard on this album. The nature of the music is totally different than on the duo with Gustafsson: it is more fluid, with both instruments constantly pushing the sonic narrative forward, and less exploratory. 

Listen and download from Bandcamp. 

Skeeter Shelton & Hamid Drake - Sclupperbep (Two Rooms, 2021)

I must admit that I had never heard of Skeeter Shelton, who is a Chicagoan sax-player and son of AACM member Ajaramu, who happened to be one of Hamid Drake's teachers. Shelton has played in various ensembles, including the US Army Band, but most importantly as a member of Faruq Z. Bey's Quartet. 

Drake lets Shelton take the lead, and the saxophonist plays in a true free jazz fashion, with rhythmic phrases evolving into free improvisation. He plays flute on one track. Drake gives the saxophonist full support and dynamic interaction. The performance is charming if I'm allowed to use that word, not very exploratory or unique, but also not presumptuous. It is warm, welcoming, with great melodic lines and sensitive tone. 

Listen and download from Bandcamp. 

The Rempis-Rosaly Duo - The Strobe Sessions (Catalytic, 2021)

On January 30, 2009, saxophonist Dave Rempis and drummer Frank Rosaly recorded their first duo recording at Strobe recording studio, released as "Cyrillic" in the same year by 482 Music. They recorded a second session in 2012 at the same studio but the music was never released ... until now. On five intense and at times lyrical pieces, the two musicians demonstrate their art and their wonderful sense of interaction. Apart from duo recordings, both have performed extensively with other bands, including the Rempis Percussion Quartet. This album nicely fits the gap between "Cyrillic" and "Codes/Myths" that was released in 2020, although we wish the time gap had been smaller. The musical gap itself is not as great as one might expect. Their improvisations range from rhythmic jazzy moments over lyrical and even quieter moments to full power energy play, and everything in between. It is fun, it is intense, it is rich.

Fans will be happy that these tapes were unearthed and eventually released. 

Listen and download from Bandcamp.

Tim Daisy & Mars Williams - Live From Vienna (Relay, 2020)

From the first notes you know this will be one dynamic, energetic, power play. There will be no space for silence, just brutal force and musical passion. The opening track is breath-taking in a very literal sense and you feel exhausted as I'm sure both musicians are after the first ten minutes. Mars Williams gets some time to breathe because Daisy introduces the second piece only with his drumkit, but it does not take long before Williams' horn joins, again invigorated, and encouraged by shouts from the drummer. The third piece, "Klangbrücke" (sound bridge), is a solo improvisation for drums, and the last piece starts with a long sax solo improvisation for about ten minutes when Daisy joins for a ten minute duet of sheer musical joy and powerful interaction, strongly encouraged by the equally enthusiastic audience, and in a kind of mirror structure, Williams now takes a step back to give Daisy the final five minutes for a solo percussion moment. The crowd is truly enthusiastic, which adds to the fun. 

Listen and download from Bandcamp. 

Mars Williams & Vasco Trilla - Spiracle (Not Two, 2020)

Mars Williams is in a different universe in this duo performance with Spanish percussionist Vasco Trilla. Trilla sets the tone of the first piece by creating a sonic environment orchestrated by carefully paced percussion. The saxophonist is more subdued, calmer, getting into the atmosphere that the drums created, and after the while the intensity increases and we get fireworks for a moment. "Stigma", the second piece gets a solo sax intro, again relatively intimate and lyrical, but when the drums join, both musicians play up a storm. This ever shifting perspectives, volume and tonality remains a structural fixture for the entire album. 

Listen and download from Bandcamp. 

Per Gärdin & Vasco Trilla - Singularity (Creative Sources, 2021)

Let me first update you on your knowledge of astrophysics: A singularity is a location in spacetime where the density and gravitational field of a celestial body is predicted to become infinite, according to Wikipedia. Swedish alto and soprano saxophonist Per Gärdin and percussionist Vasco Trilla invite us into their outer space sonic world. Gärdin welcomes us with sparse high-pitched tones, hovering above the even sparser percussive effects that Trilla generates. He uses timpani, gongs, clock chimes, metronomes and his usual drum set throughout the album. 

Most tracks are relatively gentle, but others, such as the third one become more dynamic, and even unexpectedly noisy. The great thing about the improvisations is that even if the overall tone is relatively accessible, the music itself is very exploratory, guiding us through unknown territory as on a long and mysterious space journey. Both artists perform with the same vision of how the music should sound, and they stick to it throughout. A nice achievement. 

Listen and download from Bandcamp. 

Vasco Trilla & Liba Villavecchia - Asebia (FMR, 2021)

Well ... here is Vasco Trilla again. He is not only very productive with his own projects, but also apparently very much in demand by other bands. This is his 39th album in less than two years. He is in the company of altoist Liba Villavecchia, also from Barcelona. He is a music teacher at the Escuela superior de Musica de Catalunya, with a degree from the New England Conservatory.  

The music is freely improvised, nervous and agitated on the first two tracks, Koinos (what is shared) and Eudaimonia (happiness). The music becomes more solemn with "Pistis" (creed or faith), a slow ethereal piece organised on a tight tonal center. Each Greek word gives an explanation or served as inspiration for the improvisations. On "Akolasia" (excess) all hell breaks loose, while "Ataraxia" (freedom for perturbation, complete absence of desire or fears) brings us back to solemn and spiritual territory with sparse sound resonating in empty space. 

The duo go even a step further on "Eidola" (images of the senses, sketches sent from objects to the senses), creating a wonderful soundscape of colliding and harmonising sonic inventions. "Sophrosyne" (spiritual healing) is equally strange and emotionally compelling, with both instruments conjuring up feelings of pain and human suffering. The album ends with "Theion" (the divine, that which transcends man), as you can expect even a step further, creating monotone sax sounds against a slowly changing resonating bass tone, possibly the result of bowed percussion. It is eery and strange. 

The album's title, Asebia, means "a criminal charge for desecration and disrespecting of divine objects". I do not think they will be charged for their album, quite to the contrary. The entire project is a carefully progressing suite of human and spiritual emotions and states, evolving from the profane to the sacred. 

One more example that less can be more, or that you can create a universe of sound with nothing more than a sax and percussion (although I risk to be criminally charged for this reductive description). 

Listen and download from Bandcamp. 

Lao Dan & Deng Boyu - TuTu Duo (NoBusiness, 2021)

For those who love vinyl albums, I recommend you to be fast to get your copy of this one, as only 300 copies exist. It brings a great duo recording full of suprises by Lao Dan on alto and Chinese flute and Deng Boyu on drums and percussion. I can only congratulate the NoBusiness label to make this performance - recorded on October 2019 in Guangzhou, China - accessible to all of us. 

The first side consists of three very energetic tracks, bringing us free jazz in the best of traditions. The sax howls, and almost constant overblowing in the fiercest parts, with the drum kit hit hard on all its components together. The second side is a three-piece suite (no pun intended), inspired by nature: "The Wordless Ocean", "The Grass Against The Wind" and "Cloud Above My Head, Will You Float On To Chicago", and both musicians now fully integrate Chinese elements in their music: the flute to start with, the dramatic and suprising narrative elements of heavy percussion and shouts, is then transformed in high-pitched alto moving back to full free jazz mode, to merge both styles in the last track, which combines Eastern and Western elements, including another unspecified Chinese wind instrument (I assume a suona), ending this great album with a nice level of ethereal and light effects. 

Despite the relative short length of an LP, the duo manage to give listeners a wide and broad musical journey, through styles and continents and time zones, but all brought with a single vision. 

Luckily for fans, the music is also available digitally. 

Listen and download from Bandcamp. 

Liudas Mockūnas & Christian Windfeld - Pacemaker (NoBusiness, 2021)

Lithuania saxophonist - here on contrabass and prepared clarinet, tenor and soprano saxophones - is a musician with many faces, ranging from the powerful free jazz of "Kablys" over the melodic and sensitive excursion with pianist Petras Geniusas, to the angular free improv with Barry Guy on "Lava". On "Pacemaker" he demonstrates yet another side of his art, now in the company of Christian Windfeld on prepared drum kit, drums, drums and cymbals. Windfeld is a Danish musician whose minimalst art tries to explores the full possibilities of one single instrument. 

Each side of the vinyl album presents one long improvisation, the first a quietly and slowly developing atmospheric piece in which both instruments play around and explore stretched notes and subtle variations on silence. Windfeld takes the lead by setting the tone of the piece, with Mockūnas cleverly exploring the percussive possibilities of his wind instruments, by having repeated staccato blows or in contrast lengthening his voiceless release to harmonise with the bowed cymbals or rubbed skins. Only occasionaly does his sax get its full voice and the effect is stunning against the minimalist backdrop. The second piece is introduced by Mockūnas with a melodic soprano solo that gradually invites the percussion in, and once on board, the tempo and the intensity increase for a short welcoming embrace, only to return to a more minimalist soundscape built around silence, after which the baton is handed back to Windfeld for a percussion outro, giving the piece a mirror effect. 

The LP comes in a limited and numbered edition, but is also available digitally. 

Listen and download from Bandcamp. 

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Sax & Drums (1)

 By Stef Gijssels

The records we receive keep piling up. There's no way we can listen to everything, let alone review every album coming our way. The only solution is to cluster albums by label or by genre or by line-up. Today and tomorrow we give you a quick overview of twenty sax & drums duos. Not much in-depth analysis, but it will give the interested reader at least a view of what has been released recently. 

Enjoy!

Andrea Centazzo & Gianluigi Trovesi - Just A Concert (Ictus, 2021)

In 1984, Italian masters Andrea Centazzo and Gianluigi Trovesi released "Shock!!", one of my preferred sax-drums duets of all time, because of its relentless rhythmic power, musical joy and abundant lyricism. 

Centazzo moved to the US West Coast in the meantime, but luckily he found another duo album with Trovesi, the recording of a concert at the Villa Manin di Passariano in Udine, Italy on July 1983 in front of  an audience of 2,000. There are worse venues for a concert. And the duo performance is of the same excellent level as the venue. Centazzo's style - cinematic, dramatic, narrative - is a wonderful driver and contrast to Trovesi's lyrical flights, but he is equally sensitive, inventive and rich in his emphasis of the measured and highly original improvisations by Trovesi. Both musicians get their own solo track, after which they reconvene for a magnificent ending. 

Both Centazzo and Trovesi have changed their styles in the meantime, more sophisticated and polished. It is great to hear them here in a rawer attitude. 

Listen and download from Bandcamp. 

Lol Coxhill & Andrea Centazzo - 79 Hot Landscapes (Ictus, 2021)

This duo performance also dates from 1984, and has now been released on Centazzo's Ictus label. Coxhill's soprano resonates in the open space of the venue. We get two short tracks and one 30-minute improvisation. Both musicians performed and recorded a lot together in the 80s. I can highly recommend their "Darkly" and "Darkly Again" albums in a trio with Franz Koglmann on trumpet. Centazzo's cinematic approach to percussion creates a completely different atmosphere than the saxophonist's more British free improv albums. 

The sound quality is not perfect, especially on the longest piece, but we can be happy that this minor detail did not prevent Centazzo to make the music available. 

Listen and download from Bandcamp. 

Alexis Perepelycia & Albert Cirera - La Melodía del Idioma (Nendo Dango Records, 2020)

Alexis Perepelycia is an Argentinian drummer, composer and educator, and the album was recorded during one of Spanish saxophonist Albert Cirera's visits to Argentina. On the first track Perepelycia shows that he is a very active drummer, using plenty of polyrhythms and percussive pyrotechnics, giving a solid foundation for Cirera to treat us with his creative skills. The second track is slower and more subdued, more in a full free improv style, and the deliberate exploration and co-creation continue on the third piece, which captures the uncertainty of the second track to evolve into the volume and power of the first track, bringing us full circle. 

Listen and download from Bandcamp. 

Graham Dunning & Colin Webster - Terrain (Raw Tonk, 2020)

Colin Webster plays alto and baritone saxophones on this album, and Graham Dunning snare drum and objects. This is a novelty as Dunning is known for his use of electronic tape recordings and other material to create new sonic experiences. It must be said that he works the skin of the snare drum with "motors and fans", and the effect is more than just interesting. It is intimate in its sound, suppressed (restrained/unfree) in its minimal volume yet free and open in its possibilities. 

Listen and download from Bandcamp. 

Colin Webster & Andrew Lisle - New Invention (New Wave Of Jazz, 2020)

We get another duo of Colin Webster on alto and now with Andrew Lisle on drums. This is their fourth duo album and it is one of the fiercest. It is highly energetic, with only alto and basic drumkit giving the most natural of exploratory interactions. It is intense, relentless and worth looking for. 

All the inventive titles of the tracks refer to small villages in Cornwall and Wales: Knucklas, Zennor, Knill, Discoed, Yardro, Kuggar and Gweek. 

Listen and download from Bandcamp. 

Camila Nebbia & Axel Filip - Colibrí Rojo (Ears & Eyes, 2021)

Two other Argentinian musicians worth reviewing: Camila Nebbia on tenor saxophone, voice & effects, and Axel Filip on drums & synth. Nebbia studied classical saxophone in Buenos Aires. She is now based in Sweden to obtain her master's degree in composition. This is her seventh album as a leader over the last four years. Alex Filip has graduated from the Buenos Aires Conservatory, and has released one album as a leader. Their music is fresh and varied, partly because of the use of vocals and other percussion instruments than drums, but also because the eleven short pieces each have their own angle of approach. 

It's nice to welcome young artists with skills and ideas. 

Listen and download from Bandcamp. 

John Butcher & Eli Keszler ‎– First Meeting - #8 (Self, 2021)

Last year John Butcher launched the series "The Memory Of Live Music", which started with "On Being Observed", which we briefly touched upon last year, and "Live In Italy", another sax-drums duo with Riccardo La Foresta. This relatively short album is the eighth one in the series, a duo with New York drummer and composer Eli Keszler. It's always a pleasure to hear Butcher play, to hear the breadth of his tone, the variety and inventiveness of ideas. Even if this is the 'first meeting' with Keszler, the interaction is strong. 

Let's hope that live music is no longer confined to memory. 

Listen and download from Bandcamp. 

Mike Pride & Jonathan Moritz - The Invitation (Astral Editions, 2020)

It's been a while since we heard releases with saxophonist Jonathan Moritz, his first new release in five years since his participation on "Strata" by Carlo Costa's Acustica. On this album - released on cassette -he performs in a duo with Mike Pride on drums and percussion. Both artists have a meticulous approach to music: precise sonic bits, often small and not sustained, merge to present a pointillist canvas of sound. 

Listen and download from Bandcamp. 

Paul Dunmall & Mark Sanders - Unity (577 Records, 2021)

Paul Dunmall has released 165 albums and Mark Sanders 95 under their respective names of which 27 (if my counting was correct) together in various bands and configurations. They have one duo album together, "Pipe & Drum" (2012), on which Dunmall only performs on bagpipe, so it's relatively astonishing that over all these decades of collaboration this would be their first duo album with sax and drums. 

The second astonishing thing is that - as evidenced by this album - they still highly enjoy the collaboration and this sentiment transpires through every note on the five improvisations. The music is warm, energetic and lyrical, brought by two musicians at the top of their art with nothing left to prove. Just the fun of making music together, and allowing us to participate in it by listening. 

Listen and download from Bandcamp. 

Rie Nakajima & Akira Sakata - Umihiko Yamahiko (TakuRoku, 2021)

Japanese sonic artist Rie Nakajima uses objects to reflect on the spaces in which she is located. In her own words, she "produces sound". She is also a visual artist, making installations, that create chance happenings and "raise questions about the definition of art". Saxophonist Akira Sakata no longer needs introduction to the readers of this blog, apart from the fact that this duo performance is much quieter and intimate than we are used from the artist. It has a wonderful casual atmosphere, friendly and lyrical. 

The performance was recorded in front of an audience of ten people (not because of a lack of interest, but because of a lot of virus). The album is excellent, and we can only welcome the producers to make it available to more than these ten fans. 

Listen and download from the label. 

Tomorrow we continue our overview. 

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XPACT - XPACT II (FMR, 2021) ****½

By Martin Schray

As much as readers of this blog might hope for it, free jazz is not going to have a revival that will bring back audiences the music had in the 1960s (and even then, there weren't that many). In Europe free jazz (or improvised music, whatever you want to call it) has established itself as a musical avant-garde that reaches back to the beginning of the 20th century and remains open forward - to all the musical influences that musicians of the third or now fourth generation will create in the future. Stefan Keune (saxophones), Erhard Hirt (guitar), Hans Schneider (bass) and Paul Lytton (percussion, electronics) rather belong to the second generation and therefore one might expect them to conserve a musical style. All the more if you realise that XPACT II is a continuation of a group that published its first and only album in 1984: Frogman’s View on the FMP sub-label Uhlklang, then with the late Wolfgang Fuchs on saxophones. However, the new/old formation sounds excitingly fresh and modern, conservation is the least they want to achieve with their music.

The idea to revive XPACT obviously came from Erhard Hirt. He called Stefan Keune and asked if he would like to join the remaining three. Since Keune has known the other members of the band for a long time from various collaborations and because his style is reminiscent of Fuchs (especially on the sopranino) he was the obvious and ideal replacement. Like Fuchs, Keune is interested in a similar way in the sound expansion possibilities of the saxophone. The programmatic first track “Restart“ displays everything that makes XPACT II such a wonderful album. Drums, bass and guitar, as well as the cleverly used electronics create surfaces over which Keune’s saxophone sprinkles mostly short licks. He trills, roars, growls, whimpers, smacks, bleats and much more. In combination with the others he uses accurate punctuation marks - abrupt staccato stops, instant changes in direction. In general, the music seems like an ocean, with musical islands in free flow. The contrasts between the punctuality of the saxophone playing, the bowed bass, the drum rolls and the electronic surfaces create an enormous dynamic and tension within the improvisation. This is also supported by very quiet, open passages, that give the sounds plenty of time to unfold. The piece ends in a wild chase of great expressiveness. If one were to be malicious, one could call it fragmentary or half-baked, yet it’s the opposite of that.

The band’s broken-off gestures are so fast and absolute they might remind you of an attack of a swarm of birds or an anthill turned into sound. This is energy, intensity, explosion and implosion at the same time. It’s artistic skill, however it’s never celebrated with an end in itself, it’s just radiant beauty. When polyphonic improvisation turns into a kaleidoscopic miracle of sound, when four musicians transcend mundane boundaries like they do on this album, it’s close to magic.

According to Stefan Keune, XPACT are going to continue in any case and - if possible - they plan to release more recordings. I can hardly wait.

XPACT II is available as a CD.

You can order and listen to the album here:

 

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Simão Costa - Beat With Out Byte (un)Learning Machine (Cipsela, 2021) ****

By Paul Acquaro

First off, this is one of the more creatively packaged CDs that I've opened in a long time. Inside a white cardboard shell with stark simple lettering and black and white images of wood or maybe cut stones, the CD itself is wrapped in a folded plastic envelope. Demanding delicacy in just its appearance, pulling at the corners of the wrapper then reveals that it separates into two halves that envelope the disc. The imagery extends to this wrapper as well. The whole concept lends a bit of mystery to the music, imbuing it with a bit of a magic, so kudos to the design team of Marta Cerqueira & Kátia Sá ! Now to the sounds within ..

Simão Costa is a Portugese pianist with broad artistic and inventive interests, researching sound and designing ways to shape it. On Beat With Out Byte, Costa mentions the use of the piano as well as the (Un)Leaning Machine. The latter is explained on the CD sleeve (or on the less inspiring but easily accessed Bandcamp web page) by: "All sounds are acoustic made by piano strings and magnets using action or induction." This is exactly what you hear in the opening moments of "Beat", the first track. Sounds are drawn from the piano strings, extruded through magnetically induced vibrations, they are quiet, creating a gentle, sinuous waves leading slowly up to the kinetic second half of the album.

So, by the time we get to track three, titled 'Out,' the approach has changed. The first few minutes continue with the aforementioned vibrations, but then a key is struck, sending out a different type of tone, one with some punch behind it. This new attack, this time from the keyboard, increases and a strong rhythmic element is added, of course with other reverberating notes. The closing track begins with a different sort of strident minimalist attack note, but soon other sounds are being triggered, an akimbo loop of notes, symmetrical to a point, but dropping beats hear and there, builds to an agitated crescendo.

An inventive and all around captivating recording of an most curious acoustic piano!

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Michael Bisio, Kirk Knuffke, Fred Lonberg-Holm - The Art Spirit (ESP-Disk', 2021) ****½

By Anthony Simon

This trio’s first release, Requiem for a New York Slice (Illuso, 2019), was affective and cathartic. It was dedicated to their friend Mike Panico, co-owner and producer at Relative Pitch Records, whose sudden and tragic death prompted the trio to record the album just three days after his passing. But it turns out that Requiem wasn’t the trio’s first recording. In fact, just two weeks earlier, this bass-cornet-cello trio had completed their first recording session, now available as The Art Spirit (ESP-Disk', 2021). Knowing that this trio so quickly reassembled to record Requiem, under heart-rending circumstances, lends this ensemble a special quality.

The album The Art Spirit is inspired by Robert Henri , a turn-of-the-twentieth-century artist, teacher, and organizer against restrictive establishment forces in the art world, whose 1923 book The Art Spirit has been a guide and inspiration for artists.

I can’t resist noting that the album begins with what sounds like a solitary cicada just awakening with the dawn. (If you’ve not witnessed this, it’s fascinating.) That’s Kirk Knuffke’s brassy finesse (cornet, soprano cornet), and within seconds his sound is not only awake but airborne. Meanwhile, Michael Bisio (bass) overturns a basketful of pizzicato, tumbling all over and around the listener like bright blossoms. Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello) bows diagonal runs, scrapes, tremolos, warped dyads, and summons many distinctive sounds from his instrument, sounding not unlike a communiqué from another galaxy. He also broadcasts, oh so quietly in the background, a subtle electronic haze. With such creative gestures these three artists transmit ebullience in song that’s a delight to behold, titled “Not a Souvenir of Yesterday.” The sympathetic contrast of their sounds and styles is a big element of what is so pleasing about this ensemble's music.

Each of these artists have a multitude of notable works. Read here for more about Michael Bisio—he who has been aptly dubbed “a poet of the contrabass.” More about Kirk Knuffke’s work (which I literally cannot get enough of) can be found here. Details of the prolific works of Fred Longberg-Holm can be found here and his discography.

“r. henri” is the next song, a Bisio composition, and Knuffke leads with crystal clear notes of pure melancholy. Bass and cello soon join with arco accompaniment that aches beautifully. Lonberg-Holm offers the raw pangs of hair on metal, and Bisio bows with pathos. This tune stirs deep emotion. The latter half carries a similar mood, but slightly more kinetic, a longing for something to be born from the pain, somehow. Cello and bass duet exquisitely for much of the song, with Knuffke expressing just as much with silence as he does with sound.

“Both Keys Belong to You” is the longest track, and it sounds like it’s telling a story. Much of the first part features Bisio plucking fast and wild, with cornet and cello blending phrases, suggesting a close conversation about an impassioned topic of the listener’s conjecture. Bisio picks up his bow in the middle part, to mesmerizing effect. After Knuffke emits a somber call, bass and cello bow sirens from their strings, and the cornet pushes the sense of alarm higher. The last part of the song features some briskly burning blue fire stoked by bass and cornet. The sonic narrative told by these artists is fascinating.

Each song on The Art Spirit is richly inventive and evocative. “Things Hum” is a bluesy Bisio composition: a sly melody from the cello seems to dart in the dark alleyways of Bisio’s low register vamp, when Knuffke steps out from the shadows, the metallic rattle of his mute curling in the air like cigarette smoke. “Like Your Work As Much As” journeys from toe-tapping straight-ahead swing, through effects-laden molten lava, to a charming syncopated beat with Knuffke blowing streaming sparks through his cornet.

Even with such diverse musical invention, I found this to be a wonderfully balanced album. It certainly captures Robert Henri’s words in The Art Spirit (pg. 4), “We are not here to do what has already been done.”

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