You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'reviews' category.
Marty Ehrlich Rites Quartet - Things Have Got To Change (CF 150)
Entre las últimas referencias publicadas por Clean Feed destaca Things Have Got To Change. Son tres sus protagonistas principales. El primero es el saxofonista Marty Ehrlich, titular de la formación, magnífico instrumentista y autor de la mayoría de las composiciones. El segundo es el chelista Erik Friedlander que se encuentra en un momento especialmente brillante en los últimos tiempos, un hecho que corrobora con esta grabación: su participación en piezas como “Rites Rhythms”, tomando un papel preponderante como solista, avalan esta afirmación. El tercer implicado es el saxofonista y compositor Julius Hemphill. Ehrlich recupera tres de sus composiciones. Dos de ellas (“Dung” y “Slices of Light”) ya las había abordado en un proyecto anterior con este mismo cuarteto en directo, mientras que la tercera (la mítica y complicadamente sencilla “Dogon A.D.”) se transforma en uno de los puntos álgidos del CD. http://www.tomajazz.com/bun/2009/11/marty-ehrlich-rites-quartet-things-have.html
Harris Eisenstadt – Canada Day (CF 157)
Canada Day del batería y compositor canadiense Harris Eisenstadt es una pequeña joya, además de una broma. Grabada en quinteto, entre sus componentes incluye a figuras que aunque no sean muy conocidas a nivel popular en este momento, tienen ante sí un futuro brillante, como el trompetista Nate Wooley (uno de los más interesantes de la actualidad entre los más jóvenes con permiso de Taylor Ho Bynum), el saxofonista Matt Bauder o el bajista Eivind Opsvik. La música trabaja en ese punto de difícil equilibrio que es compaginar las composiciones y el trabajo del grupo, con el trabajo y las improvisaciones individuales. Otro factor muy importante es su equilibrio en cuanto a su duración: las ocho piezas duran en torno a los 7 minutos, perfectos para dejar trabajar al quintento y para que el oyente quede con ganas de más. http://www.tomajazz.com/bun/2009/11/harris-einsenstadt-canadian-day.html
WHO TRIO – Less Is More (CF 135)
WHO stands for Wintsch (Michel, piano), Hemingway (Gerry, drums and percussion) and Oester (Bänz, bass). Active for over ten years under this embodiment, these artists are as distant from an ordinarily stale jazz trio as an exhausted reviewer could wish for. For starters, we find no surplus of swing in Less Is More, which makes me extremely intrigued. There’s much else to explore, though, and the musicians are not shy in attempting different routes, all leading to a single result: the expression of simple rhythmic and melodic concepts through a superior level of restrained interplay.
Either walking across intense abstraction (the impressive opening track “Inside The Glade” is, purely and simply, a masterpiece of concerned waiting and unsettled thoughts) or examining the details of metrical interlocking almost to the point of ritualism (“The Pump”, “The Eastern Corner”), WHO always manage to look unique even by maintaining the instrumental gradations virtually untouched. “Wedding Suite” may appear as a straightforward song yet it is full of dissonance – of the digestible kind – especially remarked by the ever-interesting, outside-the-canon figurations played by Wintsch, whose style is reserved and intelligently comprehensible at once, altered melodies and harmonic cleverness bathed in inspired suggestion. Banz sounds prosperous or emaciated depending on the context, the focus remaining on the sensible aspects of structural stability. Hemingway offers a great proof of sensitive drumming throughout, the subtlety of his percussive interventions during the most rarefied sections a lesson of self-discipline that many bangers should learn.
Don’t be fooled into thinking about ECM or similar comparisons: despite a graceful confidence and the total mastery of the tools at their disposal, these men’s music is a refined blend of sensitiveness and, at times, visionary drive that does not need the support of a church’s reverberation to affirm its durability in the listener’s memory.
Weightless – A Brush with Dignity (CF 154)
Weightless, A Free Quartet in a New Recording
Of all the instruments to play, the piano is one that poses particular challenges. You sit down to it and all the notes are available to you simultaneously. You only have ten fingers, plus your arms for clusters if you play like Don Pullen (or Henry Cowell), so choice becomes critical. The moment you push down the keys the piano immediately gives out with a sound, one group of sounds really, that has to do with that particular piano and its characteristics. To get “your” sound takes many years, if you ever get there.
A child when first fooling around with the instrument can immediately and un-selfconsciously pull off a bad Cecil Taylor imitation. Tinkle-slam-chop-blur. Again to get any good at going at it in this way takes considerable time and practice. To go beyond that second level, to be a truly individual stylist in this mode is even more difficult.
This brings me to the CD at hand today. It’s by a group called Weightless and the CD is entitled A Brush with Dignity (Clean Feed). Weightless consists of Alberto Braida on piano, John Butcher on tenor and soprano, John Edwards on double bass and Fabrizio Spera on drums.
Weightless engages in carefully executed sorts of free improvisations that owe something to new concert music though there is a strong foundation in the “jazz” orientation, whatever that means anymore.
Braida’s playing reminds us of what it takes to get a personal sound and a kind of free playing that goes leagues beyond the “kid-slamming-at-the-piano” fundamentals. He picks his way painstakingly through the possibilities. . . a cluster here, a phrase there, an overall attempt not to be automatic or banal and an avoidance of any overt key center. He has tangible success in the “what” category; the “how” category (the personal sound) is not fully present, at least on this recording according to my own take on it. That is not a problem to the music in any sense. Because also to consider is that Braida succeeds in interjecting himself into a set of collective ensemble improvisations, and in that context he is not supposed to stand out but to meld together with the others.
The four players as an organic whole succeed in creating group structures that are not uninteresting. Butcher’s tenor steps out alone on occasion, not to blaze with incandescent speakings of the tongues, but with more considered note making. That is true of the group at large as well.
I would not go so far as to say that Weightless has achieved total individuality as yet. That may come. What they have done here is created an hour of interesting free music. This is not a high-energy, high density slam-dunk sort of freakout. It’s a bit more thoughtful. Those who like the quieter areas of free music and sensitive group interplay will find it pleasing. http://gapplegatemusicreview.blogspot.com/
The Samuel Blaser Quartet – Pieces of Old Sky (CF 151)
This is what free jazz ought to sound like. While there’s definitely plenty of composition here, there’s also an extraordinary amount of listening and the smart, thoughtful playing that good musicians do when they’re all tuned into each other. Trombonist Samuel Blaser leads the crew and gets extra props for putting this particular unit together. This is one of those albums that the drummer absolutely owns: Tyshawn Sorey rumbles underneath, methodically like a subway (by turns a steady local train, a work train inching by or an occasional express roaring along) as guitarist Todd Neufeld and bassist Thomas Morgan add shade and color in a stunning display of minimalist precision. No wasted notes here!
Blaser gets the over seventeen-minute title track to work off a stately, thoughtful five-note riff punctuated by stillness and deftly placed accents by Neufeld and Morgan. As with the rest of the tracks here, there’s more following and echoing than there is actual interplay, the musicians taking turns building off a minute, intricate phrase, almost a contest where the winner is he who can say the most with the least. Which with generally quiet music is an admirable goal. On this song, guitar and then bass maintain suspense two steps behind the beat, which at a lento crawl is a lot harder than it sounds. Blaser’s unexpectedly triumphant windup to the song actually adds an undercurrent of unease (that device will recur later to rousing effect).
The second cut, Red Hook scurries without actually scurrying – Blaser’s trombone runs it alone as the rhythm section stays terse and deliberate with vivid washes of sound from Neufeld’s guitar. They follow it with the pensive, plaintive Choral I (which they return to as a concluding theme), and then the aptly titled Mystical Circle, Blaser remaining defiantly casual, even out-of-focus throughout a series of methodical descending progressions. The dark, murky, minor-key Mandala is nothing short of phantasmagorical; by contrast, Speed Game is tongue-in-cheek, more a series of relays than any kind of sprint. This quiet, deft display of talent is nothing short of a stealth contender for one of the best jazz albums of 2009. http://lucidculture.wordpress.com
Pinton / Kullhammar / Zetterberg / Nordeson – Chant (CF 156)
***½
Recorded live in Coimbra, Portugal, this Swedish quartet and the enthusiastic audience do exactly what you would expect: play music and have fun. The four musicians have played together before in one or the other constellation. Alberto Pinton plays baritone saxophone, Jonas Kullhammar tenor, Torbjörn Zetterberg bass and Kjell Nordeson drums and vibes. As Zetterberg writes in the liner notes “This band is half of my own octet, half of Jonas’s quartet, half of Kjell and Jonas’s quartet “Nacka Forum” and more than half of Alberto’s quintet”, so there is no big surprise that there is a perfect fit, even if Clean Feed boss Pedro Costa asked them to perform together. The band does not break any new ground. Even if the music is largely improvised, themes and rhythms are part of the agreed musical concepts. But they play well, and what is more, with lots of intensity, interaction and enthusiasm, really enjoying themselves … and the audience, whether they play uptempo or downtempo, jazzy or bluesy, 60s or 00s, dark or light-footed. Fun.
http://freejazz-stef.blogspot.com/
WHO Trio – Less is More (CF 135)
The name of the Who Trio, while it clearly is made up of the band members’ initials, also seems to imply the group sound. This is not the Gerry Hemingway trio, or the Michel Wintsch trio. So even though this little collective might appear to be just another piano trio, The Who Trio is actually an extremely sensitive threesome playing mostly group improvisations. They are hearing one another and responding, intuiting directions and evolving the group’s music together. Wintsch has a very light hand on the piano, favoring few notes and slowly appregiated chords, but he has a strong single note melodic sense. What an impressive range of technique and color bassist Banz Oester brings to the trio, and always in the service of the music and the group sound. And of course Hemingway’s ability to “lift the bandstand” is well known. So “Less is More” is a sensitive recording by an amazing trio, and it leaves me wishing all collective improvisation could be this rich and coherent.
©Cadence Magazine 2009 www.cadencebuilding.com
Paul Dunmall Sun Quartet – Ancient and Future Airs (CF 138 )
Denman Maroney Quintet – Udentity (CF 137)
Dunmall’s visit to New York’s The Living Theater (1) finds him in a slightly unfamiliar setting given his recent work on Slam. With a trio of longtime associates, this Vision Festival set finds him in a more reflective mood alongside Malaby, whose blend of melancholy and fire has become ever more singular of late (not least in his work in Helias’ Open Loose trio). Norton’s vibes are absolutely central to the textural range of these long pieces. While “Ancient Airs” opens rather slowly, the race is on after a while, with contrapuntalism firing up the engine. Dunmall and Malaby make for a wonderfully contrastive tenor tandem, fierce in the right measure without resorting to mere burning. I reckon it’s hard not to wail once Norton hits the traps and gets things churning with Helias, but this music never loses its focus and there’s always something lyrical happening. As ever, I find it quite an exhilarating experience when Dunmall rocks the pipes, but he does so quite judiciously. After the piece plateaus, it sounds as if the band is cycling through some refracted version of Coltrane’s “One Up One Down,” audible especially with Malaby’s vertiginous solo at about the 35-minute mark. Helias’ sweet bass solo is pleasantly modal after the fury preceding it, and it cues up a somewhat (yes) airy ending. The second improvisation, at a mere 10 minutes, is a tad bitty and doesn’t really get going anywhere. But this one’s a keeper nonetheless.
Having long been a fan of Denman Maroney’s unique sound world—his “hyperpiano” is the most radically prepared innenklavier imaginable—I confess that it’s really only with this recording (2) that I realized how rhythmically acute a musician he is. His bowls, and buzzing devices, and blocks have created a richly tex-tured idiomatic extension of the piano, but these nuanced, percolating compositions are bouncing inventions that recall some fusion of Rothenberg’s Double Band, John Hollenbeck’s Claudia Quintet, and Mark Dresser’s Force Green band from the 1990s (of which Maroney was a key member). This high praise is emphatically deserved. Beyond this general appraisal (and really, just go get this one), I have to give it up for the engine room specifically. Radding and the superb Sarin are so good, with power and grace combining almost imperceptibly, that you could risk overlooking everything else as you simply concentrate on their playing. But then there’s the exceptional contrast between the clarion lines Ballou reels out, and
Rothenberg’s intense playing, with horns as rhythmic generators fueled by circular breathing, overblowing, and more. And the tunes are pretty fabulous too, with the post Bop line on “II” sounding almost like a late 1960s Ornette tune. The loping pulse of “III” is a perfect context ready to be agitated by the heady sound of scraped metal, a continual staggering which eventuates in a stunningly inventive “piano trio” improvisation. Absolutely killer alien tones! There are soft percussive thwacks and layered tempi from the horns on “IV” and a post-Dave Burrell mutated stride thing that opens up “V.” The disc eventually loops back to the feel of beautifully fractured post Bop on “VII,” with a brilliant piano trio section again. A fantastic disc, and a strong candidate to show up on my year-end list.
©Cadence Magazine 2009 www.cadencebuilding.com
Nobuyasu Furuya Trio – Bendowa (CF 158)
The Tenor Sax, Bass Clarinet and Flute of Nobuyasu Furuya
You can depend upon Clean Feed Records consistently to come up with interesting releases in the advanced free improv jazz genre. That doesn’t mean you’ve heard of everybody on the label. That’s a good thing because it means they are offering up some fresh faces to the international scene and that’s how growth happens in music. One of the ways, at least.
Nobuyasu Furuya. There’s a new name to me. He is a Japanese expat residing in Portugal. He’s studied Ottoman classical music. He plays vibrantly. There’s his new album Bendowa (Clean Feed). It’s a trio affair with Hernani Faustino on bass and Gabriel Ferrandini on drums. They do a fine job.
Nobuyasu has a good sense of linear drama and absolute control over his sound. Some people say he sounds like Archie Shepp on tenor. Well, there IS that sort of near-speech inflection he sometimes evokes. But there’s a little Ayler there too. Maybe some Dolphy as well. On flute he has a shakuhachi like purity. His bass clarinet is snaky. To me though, it’s his dramatic sense of space, of sound and silence, of color and darkness that stands out. The phrasing lengths, the pauses and the trajectory of his drive show a great sensibility.
There is plenty of good music on Bendowa. It tends more towards the exploratory than the frantic. But there is plenty of energy to be had as well. Here is a player to watch. Or rather to listen to. This CD will give improv enthusiasts a good adventure. I would say to you “go get it” if you are looking for a different sort of free player.
http://gapplegatemusicreview.blogspot.com/
