Festival Report

Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra Festival 5
By Ken Waxman

Brawny and gritty, Glasgow, Scotland`s largest city has been a shipbuilding, trading and manufacturing powerhouse since the Industrial Revolution. At the same time the grey northern port has had a long-established aesthetic side, characterized by the often imitated Arts and Crafts movement designs and structures of Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928).

This blend of power and passion was reflected November 29 to December 1 as the city’s 24-member Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra (GIO) celebrated its 10th anniversary and 5th annual festival with performances at the city’s downtown Centre for Contemporary Art by the whole band and various subsets; other Scottish improvisers; and guests including inventive saxophonist Evan Parker, irrepressible vocalist Maggie Nicols and polymath George Lewis utilizing trombone and computer.

Like Mackintosh’s architecture, which took into account the city’s unique character, “Tractatus”, Lewis’ GIO showpiece, was composed to reflect the GIO’s talents. Flowing with a swing undercurrent, the sequences moved the narrative weight from section to section with equality, encompassing bright and sprightly pulls and strokes from the six-piece string section; drummer Stu Brown’s inventive hand patting; flutter-tongued vamps from trumpeter Robert Henderson; a steady piano ostinato from Gerry Rossi; plus Nicols and vocalist Nicola MacDonald yelping and gibbering. Guided, rather than conducted by Lewis, the polyphonic piece allowed audacious exposure of varying orchestral colors, creating excitement through contrast not discord.

Even more site-specific was GIO guitarist George Burt’s “Three Envelopes for E. M.”, an extended suite which placed in an orchestral setting the recitation of translated poems by Edwin Morgan (1920-2010), Glasgow’s former poet laureate, by actor Tam Dean Burn. Bald-headed Burn’s gesticulating interpretation of the poems in guttural Scots-Gaelic was given particular weight by repetitive tremolo chords from the massed band members. Angled plucks and wood slaps from Burt plus stop-time pressure from bassist Armin Sturm and near Aylverian cries from tenor saxophonist Graeme Wilson helped convey Morgan’s street-wise toughness, while passages that harmonized three basses and one cello with Emma Roche’s peeping flute work underscored a certain delicacy, even if the words were incomprehensible for non-Glaswegians.

Great fun for the audience and musicians, but less substantial musically was “Some I Know, Some I Don’t” another GIO-commission from Jim O’Rourke. A Fluxus-lite game piece, the concept involved each musician following the directions printed on each playing card he or she picked. Although episodes where Lewis cited haggis as his favorite food; MacDonald exited briefly and returned with drinks for herself, Burt and pedal-point-line-emphasizing guitarist Neil Davidson; or Nicols cunningly using a cell phone to converse from across the orchestral semi-circle with GIO artistic director/alto saxophonist Raymond MacDonald’s cell were charmingly quirky, those players who intensified the sonic qualities of the commands fared much better. Cellist Peter Nicolson for instance defiantly scratched his strings to curtail a faux jazzy interlude from the two guitarists; Brown sourced unusual pings from his segmented cymbal tower; a small horizontal board among the strings helped pull ukulele-like tones from Catriona MacKay’s harp; while Lewis improvised using only his slide detached from the rest of his horn.

When it came to smaller groupings, nothing could surpass a set by pianist Alex von Schlippenbach Trio. Besides the hard-handed pianist, apt contributions came from relaxed, prepossessing drummer Paul Lovens, and endlessly inventive saxophonist Parker, who also duetted memorably with Lewis’ computer and diffidently become part of the GIO reed section at other times. Forty years of playing together means that trio cohesion was almost immediate; within five minutes the pianist’s percussive chording and Monkish asides, the drummer’s cymbal clatter and subtle length-wise stick rubs and Parker’s circular-breathed seemed as inevitable as tides on the River Clyde that bisects Glasgow. Surprises were present nonetheless: von Schlippenbach’s progress sometimes included left-handed note chopping and stride piano allusions, while the tenor saxophonist’s flutter-tonguing could be as melodic as it was multiphonic.

That ad-hoc meetings can be as potent musically as the Schlippenbach Trio’s lengthy collaboration was also proven conclusively by some of the GIO’s duo and trio linkages as well as Nicols performance with Roche and bassist Una McGlone of The Rope & Duck Company. Roche’s staccato chirps or flat-line runs united disparate strategies as McGlone used two bull fiddles to catch up with Nicols’ unpredictable vocalese. Lying one bass on its side and distorting its tone with an electronic pickup, she smacked a mallet, a wire-brush or a triangle against the strings for distinctive textures; col legno pops and thick resonating stops. When she turned to accompanying the others with other upright bass strokes, Nicols became a show by herself. The vocalist’s split-second timing allowed her to slide from keening melancholy to Bedlam-like laughter instantaneously, using lyric soprano interjections and phrase and syllable mixing used to create rational-sounding tall tales that were more gibberish than Gaelic. If that wasn’t enough occasionally she kept the pace moving by creating her own version of the Highland fling, encompassing modern ballet-like steps and foot stomps.

Adding to the localized musical gestalt was a set by the newly formed 12-piece Shetland Improvisers Orchestra (SIO) which drove 400-plus miles to play at the festival. Hailing from a Scottish island so remote that the second language is Norn rather than Gaelic, the SIO’s music was closest to jazz as anything in the festival, especially when front-man Jeff Merrifield put aside his trumpet to produce some blood-curdling New Thing tenor saxophone screams, horn held aloft. Blending primitivist recorder timbres and hand-percussion interludes with low-key Bill Dixon-like orchestrations, electric fiddle sawing and soprano saxophone cries, the band later honored the late saxophonist Lol Coxhill with a melancholy slow-motion piece; touched on prog-rock and parceled out brief improvisations to matched duos from the ensemble.

Organized after a proselytizing visit by MacDonald and Burt a couple of months before the festival, the SIO could be the first of other improvising ensembles formed elsewhere in the country. If this happens, and the already innovative GOP keeps evolving at the same impressive pace as it has over the previous decade, Scotland may soon as be celebrated for its improvising musicians as much as for its ballad singers and distinctive bagpipers.

--For The New York City Jazz Record January 2013

January 6, 2013

Festival Report:

“Might I Suggest”
By Ken Waxman

With characteristic British understatement, saxophonist Evan Parker’s curated “Might I Suggest” (MIS) festival celebrated its second birthday in late January uniting German and British improvisers at the second-floor Vortex club, located in London’s moderately gentrified Dalston district. Quality of the performances during the six evenings testified not only to the worth of Parker’s recommendations but also to their scope. With funding from the Goethe Institute, the performances ranged from Kurt Weill songs performed by vocalist Norma Winstone’s trio to the electronic processing utilized by bassist Adam Linson’s Systems Quartet; and from the intense expression of guitarist John Russell’s expanded British-German unit to the balanced arrangements Bavarian-born, London resident Hans Koller crafted for his Fun House Living (FHL) nonet.

Koller was a triple-threat. His quartet, filled out by Canadian saxophonist François Theberge, bassist Percy Pursglove and veteran drummer Jeff Williams ran through a series of standards and Koller originals one evening; with steady Oli Hayhurst on bass and flashy Gene Calderazzo on drums, he backed German avant pioneer saxophonist Gerd Dudek, 73, two night later; and during the second set of his first gig premiered the seven-horn FHL with Pursglove this time on trumpet and himself on valve trombone. Enlivened by expressive work from contemporary UK heavy-hitters like saxophonist Julian Siegel and French hornist Jim Rattigan, FHL specialized in slowly building, steady-tempo themes played with conscientiously stacked horn timbres, featuring sharp interjections from Siegel’s tenor or soprano sax plus stirring capillary momentum from Pursglove and fellow trumpeter Robbie Robson.

Besides Koller, the most active MIS participants were German: drummer Paul Lovens and bass clarinetist Rudi Mahall. Lovens’ unique percussion set encompassing miniature hand-held gongs, wood blocks, a Chinese-motif decorated, cunningly wired, snare plus a mini-pancake tom, was not only heard to its best advantage in pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach’s trio with Parker; but also created ingenious beats to frame the chromatic tonal experimentation of guitarist Russell’s below-the-bridge plucks alongside juddering growls from Ute Voelker’s accordion, the narrowed split tones of Stefan Keune’s soprano or alto saxophones, plus resonate sweeps and measured pizzicato from Phil Wachsmann’s violin. Together for four decades, the Schlippenbach three’s variant of classic Free Jazz is now almost a mode onto itself, with Lovens’ clip-clops, cross-handed rim shots and hand-slapped cymbals plus the pianist’s high frequency pulses, Monkish asides and dynamic cadences framing Parker’s magisterial split tones and herculean displays of circular breathing.

Mahall and percussionist Paul Lytton were the acoustic components of the Systems Quartet, which otherwise featured Axel Dörner sourcing microtones from his slide trumpet while processing sounds through his laptop; and Linson’s percussively thumping or atonally bowing his bass in addition to using real-time electronics to process multiple variants of each of the quartet members’ timbres. While Lytton’s unmatched cymbal sizzles and shell side scraps plus Mahall’s staccato reed bites were most obvious, Linson’s electronic work multiplied the number of textures in a restrained fashion, so it was never certain whether Dörner’s singular Theremin-like pitches were self-created or synthesized or whether the spacey crackles that suddenly emanated from Mahall’s horn were aided by Linson’s manipulations.

There was no doubt about the source of Mahall’s stand-out playing a couple of nights later, when his acoustic horn prowess and offbeat humor were put to good use in a duo with pianist Aki Takase. With fare encompassing Forties film ditties, Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo”, Thelonious Monk’s “Pannonica” and original from both players – including “Trumpet for Beginners”, a hesitant, huffing-and-puffing line the reedist composed as an affectionate dig at the style of Dörner, his long-time associate – the pianist’s characteristic mixture of pounding Fats Waller-emulating stride plus angular Monk-like digressions came in handy when meeting the reedist’s idiomatic command of the curved instrument.

Monk’s repertoire was also celebrated on MIS’s concluding night by the Dudek/Koller quartet, playing appropriately related themes by John Coltrane, Tadd Dameron and other 20th Century heavy hitters. By conviction a Trane devotee, the German saxophonist was most effective when the quartet tackled less familiar material like Herbie Nichols’ “Step Tempest” and Ornette Coleman’s “Congeniality”. On the former Dudek’s spherical lines and stentorian flutter-tonguing reconfirmed the melody while the pianist’s slurred fingering and chromatic note exposure created theme variants. On “Congeniality” Dudek subtly changed the tempo once the head was stated, while Hayhurst and Calderazzo maintained the original line. Further on, the saxman’s lower-case, altissimo slurs evolved in stark contrast to Koller’s decorative note clusters and novel voicing atop the bassist’s and drummer’s rhythmic pull.

Similar reconfigurations were the stock-in-trade of vocalist Winstone’s emotive second set one night previously, accompanied by pianist Nikki Iles and reedist Mark Lockheart. Concentrating on Weill’s American-period songs, except for the inevitable “Mack the Knife”, the singer brought an adult wistfulness to melodies like “September Song”, “My Ship”, and “The Bilbao Song” – in the middle of which she cleverly interpolated the street-smart verse of “The Alabama Song”. Her renditions were helped immeasurably by outstanding lyrics provided by, among others, Maxwell Anderson and Ira Gershwin.

Those glorious German-American musical collaborations could be heard as a precursor to similar first-class German-British teamwork presented at the Vortex that week.

--For New York City Jazz Record March 2012

March 6, 2012

Rhapsody's 2011 Jazz Critics' Poll

Individual Ballot
From Ken Waxman

1) Your name and primary affiliation(s) (no more than two, please)

2) Ken Waxman

Jazz Word (www.jazzword.com )

3) Your choices for 2011's ten best new releases (albums released between Thanksgiving 2010 and Thanksgiving 2011, give or take), listed in descending order one-through-ten.

1. World Saxophone Quartet Yes We Can Jazzwerkstatt JW 098

2. Gerald Cleaver Uncle June Be It As I See It Fresh Sound New Talent FSNT-375

3. Hubbub Whobub Matchless MRCD 80

4. John Butcher & Gino Robair Apophenia Rastascan BRD 065

5. Daunik Lazro/Benjamin Duboc/Didier Lasserre Pourtant Les Cimes des Arbres Dark Tree DT 01

6. Marc Ducret Tower Vol. 2 Ayler Records AYLCD 119

7. Mural Live at the Rothko Chapel Rothko Chapel Publications No #

8. Connie Crothers/Bill Payne The Stone Set/Conversations New Artists NA 1044 CD

9. Schlippenbach Trio Bauhaus Dessau Intakt CD 183

10. Jamaaladeen Tacuma/Ornette Coleman For the Love of Ornette JazzWerkstatt JW 090

4) Your top-three reissues, again listed in descending order

1) FMP In Rückblick In Retrospect 1969-2010 FMP CD 137 - FMP CD 148

2) Steve Lacy School Days Emanem 5016

3) Sun Ra College Tour Vol. 1 The Complete Nothing Is… ESP Disk4060

5) Your choice for the year's best vocal album

There is none – 99% of so-called vocal jazz is no more than often superior pop music, if that.

6) Your choice for the year's best debut CD

Jaruzelski’s Dream-debut Jazz Gawronski Clean Feed CF 211CD

7) Your choice for the year’s best Latin jazz CD

Agustí Fernández & Joan Saura Vents psi 11.01

N.B.: Why is there a Latin-Jazz category if there isn’t a category for other hyphenated jazz music such as Klezmer-Jazz, Pop-Jazz, Classical-Jazz etc.? An exceptional so-called Latin-Jazz CD should be a good Jazz CD overall. Therefore I have chosen the best 2011 improvised CD played by two Latins – that is residents of Spain.

January 20, 2012

Alexander Von Schlippenbach/Manfred Schoof

Blue Hawk
Jazzwerkstatt JW 119

Jesse Stacken/Kirk Knuffke

Orange Was The Color

Steeplechase SCCD 31717

Participants in these brass-piano duos are at least four decades apart in age and from two different countries, but each configuration has conceived a personal approach to sound al, but in a fashion in this reductionist setting.

Two non-East Coasters transplanted to Brooklyn, pianist Jesse Stacken and cornetist Kirk Knuffke are part of the floating gestalt of the Apple’s young performers. Both have worked with a variety of tyro and veteran musicians including saxophonist Michael Blake, bassist Lisle Ellis and drummer Kenny Wollesen. In 2009 the duo released a CD recasting tunes by Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington, and Orange Was The Color does the same for 11 Charles Mingus compositions in a balladic configuration.

Born in Magdeburg in 1936 and in Berlin in 1938, respectively, trumpeter Manfred Schoof and pianist Alex von Schlippenbach with seminal bands such as Globe Unity and smaller units helped define European Free Jazz more than 15 years before the births of Stacken or Knuffke,. Over the years, singly and alone, the two have explored a variety of sounds in the company of other improvisers such as British saxophonist Evan Parker. Tellingly, although both are in their seventh decade, they have created a 15-track CD of mostly original material which not only is more formalist than their mid-1960s sound excursions, but could be a low-key counterpart to the contemporary Jazz they were playing before the Free Jazz breakthrough.

In context and comparison to the Stacken/Knuffke CD, Blue Hawk has a recital air about it. This may be a reflection of Schoof’s oft-expressed interest in New music. Certainly throughout, his trumpet tone is usually full, rounded and romantic – with or without capitalization – while von Schlippenbach’s piano styling is, in the main, methodical, moderato and chromatic. Noteworthy is the duo’s treatment of the set’s one standard, Vernon Duke’s “Autumn in New York”. Languidly built around panoramic arpeggios and patterning from the pianist and a flowery theme statement from the brassman, extended with shakes, it’s performed not that differently from the way that, say, trumpeter Clark Terry and pianist Hank Jones would have done it in the early 1960s.

Most of the remainder of the material appears to accept this autumnal conservatism as a given. Although an occasional bravado tongue flutter or squeaky triplet is heard from Schoof, his preferred mode of expressions is muted, physically or orally, either from trumpet or flugelhorn. Meanwhile the pianist’s chording and comping is on the quiescent side, even on his own “Twelve Tone Tales”. Among the few sound barrier-breakers is the adjustment made on von Schlippenbach’s “Adjustment”. Here the piano arpeggios are livelier; the composer’s touch harder and mixed with glissandi, while Schoof chirps as well as expressing himself in longer-lined intervals. Oddly, considering the pianist’s long infatuation with Monk’s oeuvre, the title – and final – tune is taken adagio and lacks most of its composer’s –Monk`s –angularity. Instead von Schlippenbach emphasis blues notes and Schoof expansive rubato.

Moving from a Blue Hawk to an Orange Dress, the American duo’s treatment of Charles Mingus compositions is equally restful, but with none of the hushed serenity that permeates the other disc. It may be that as a volatile character, Mingus’ pieces must reflect his churning intensity. But credit must be given to the two interpreters for creating a disc that while also recital-like and low-key doesn’t sacrifice drama. In a way the two are like a man executing gymnastic dance steps while calmly maintaining a crouching position.

Much of this can be attributed to the arrangements, where after the theme statement, often in unison, the two embark on different interpretations. Freed from comparison with Mingus brassmen, except maybe for Thad Jones who also played cornet and Ted Curson when he played pocket trumpet, Knuffke is free to go his own way, which can include mellow cadenzas as finales or penultimate theme variants; melodic pops and grace notes in unexpected places and triplet exaggerations when necessary. As for Stacken, if there are any echoes of Mingus’ pianists in his playing, they may relate to Horace Parlan and Jaki Byard, both of whom had a tendency to add gospel chording or ragtime-like asides in solos, something Stacken introduces with finesse here. Most of the time however, his playing seems to veer into unhurried rent-party-like expositions, encompassing pedal pressure, straight patterning and unhurried chording.

“Ecclusiastics” for instance is given an appropriately gospelish rendition, which when it threatens to become overbearing is lightened by the cornetist’s melody variant that pushes the pianist towards discursive polyphony. Knuffke’s slurs speed up the title tune with staccato coloration as the pianist adds high-intensity pressure. But the end result is homey as well as lively. Meanwhile “So Long Eric” balances stuttering blue notes from the cornet with regularized comping from the keyboard, following contrapuntal asides from both players, and evolves in perfect harmony. If Stacken’s multi-fingered but cohesively related chords seem to transcend Mingus’ vision – rightly or wrongly – then Knuffke’s citing of a familiar Bebop line keeps the proceedings grounded.

If there is a drawback to the session, it’s a matter of programming. With the limited tone blending available with only two instruments – as opposed to Mingus’ full-band arrangements – more care should have been taken to ensure that tunes of similar tempos were kept farther apart.

Now that Stacken and Knuffke have shown how well they can improvise on other composers’ material in this context, a duo disc of all originals would appear to be in order. As for Blue Hawk, Free Music followers of Von Schlippenbach and Schoof – as well as others – will probably be piqued to hear how they sound in a formalist situation.

--Ken Waxman

Track Listing: Orange: 1. Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love 2. East Coasting 3. Celia 4. Peggy's Blue Skylight 5. Moanin’ 6. Slippers 7. Orange Was The Color of Her Dress, Then Blue Silk 8. So Long Eric 9. Goodbye Pork Pie Hat 10. Ecclusiastics 11. Dizzy Moods

Personnel: Orange: Kirk Knuffke (cornet) and Jesse Stacken (piano)

Track Listing: Blue: 1. Duolog 2. Acht 3. Deforested 4. Twelve Tone Tales 5. Fast Winds 1 6. Adjustment 7. Fast Winds 2 8. Canto Dedicato 9. Pierrot's Morning Exercises 10. Fast Winds 3 11. Still Water 12. Autumn In New York 13. St. Catherine 14. Spread 15. Blue Hawk

Personnel: Blue: Manfred Schoof (trumpet and flugelhorn) and Alexander von Schlippenbach (piano)

October 20, 2011

FMP In Rückblick

In Retrospect 1969-2010
FMP CD 137 - FMP CD 148

Something in the Air: FMP`s 40th Anniversary

By Ken Waxman

Throughout jazz history, independent labels have typified sounds of the time. In the Swing era it was Commodore; Modern jazz was prominent on Blue Note and Prestige; and with Improvised Music, FMP is one of the longest lasting imprints. Celebrating its 40th anniversary, the Berlin-based label has given listeners a spectacular birthday present with FMP In Rückblick – In Retrospect 1969-2010,12 [!] CDs representing FMP’s past and future – the oldest from 1975, the newest, by American cellist Tristan Honsinger and German guitarist Olaf Rupp from 2010, half previously unissued – plus an LP-sized, 218-page book, lavishly illustrated with contemporary photographs, posters, album covers and a discography.

FMP’s musical scope was overwhelming. In this box, for instance, are discs by an early Pan-European ensemble, the Globe Unity Orchestra (GUO); solo sessions by Belgian pianist Fred Van Hove, German bassist Peter Kowald and others; outstanding combo dates including British saxophonist Evan Parker and Swiss pianist Irène Schweizer; and instances of minimalism from German string-player Hans Reichel and Austrian trombonist Radu Malfatti. Ferocious German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, who almost single-handedly formulated Free Music in Germany and helped create FMP, is represented on three CDs. No exercise in nostalgia, the book outlines in unsentimental details how the revolutionary climate of the late 1960s sustained the growth of tough, experimental, music modeled on American-influenced Free Jazz. FMP’s value was that by 1971 it was recording distinctively European Free Music, blending layers of contemporary notated and electro-acoustic music, Fluxus art ideas plus folk-based material onto the American base. Triumphs such as FMP’s documentation of American pianist Cecil Taylor and its wide dissemination of essential American, European and created-in-East-Germany discs are also noted.

Broadminded, FMP never asserted European musical superiority however. For example, Steve Lacy Solo 1975 & Quintett 1977 In Berlin CD 02 (FMP CD 138), is a reissue by Americans Lacy on soprano saxophone; alto saxophonist Steve Potts; bassist Kent Carter and drummer Oliver Johnson plus Swiss cellist Irène Aebi. The band’s super-fast harmonies plus the contrast between Potts staccato and linear style and Lacy’s bugle-like moderato blowing atop Carter and Johnson’s Freebop backbeat, demonstrate why the quintet was admired. Most of the CD consists of some of Lacy’s earliest solos, including The Duck. Characteristically that thrilling improvisation is built from a collection of kazoo-like reed bites, split-tone yelps, hissing and rasping growls and muffled mid-range retorts. Lacy defines free music.

Another way to mark the evolution of FMP and European Free Music is by following the thread from Schweizer/Carl/Moholo 1975/77 Messer und… CD 03 (FMP CD 139) to MANUELA+ Live In Berlin 1999 CD 10 (FMP CD 146). Almost 25 years later Rüdiger Carl’s mercurial and atonal saxophone squeals sprayed out in never-ending blasts alongside Louis Moholo’s paced drumming and Schweizer’s percussive pianism with a hint of Stride, has mutated into contradictory but equally aleatory inventions. Now Carl, in the company of Carlos Zingaro’s spiccato violin buzzes, Jin Hi Kim’s throbbing komungo strings, and Reichel’s thumping daxophone rhythms layer the interlude with distinctive colors from his new instruments of choice – light-toned clarinet and pumping accordion glissandi. Without lessening his commitment to improvised sounds the former leather-lunged saxman, now operates in a more placid area, as his quivering intonation toughens the other strings’ tremolo jetes while the daxophone’s strident whines provide comic relief.

Demarcation of a unique style – which suggested a different path than all-out Free Jazz characterized by discs such as Baden-Baden ’75 CD 01 (FMP CD 137), with five previously unissued performances by the 16-piece GUO providing plenty of space for genre-defining reed-splintering solos from Parker and Brötzmann; the soaring triplets of trumpeter Manfred Schoof; plus high-energy piano dynamics from GU leader Alexander von Schlippenbach – was germinated by another of this collection’s reissued CDs. In 1977, trombonist Malfatti’s and guitarist Stephan Wittwer’s UND? ... plus CD 06 (FMP CD 142) conclusively proved that interactive pointillism and polyphony as reductionist chamber improv was another option. Sometimes this strategy involves Wittwer’s kinetic rasgueado seemingly filling all the sonic space, before Malfatti’s puffs, mouthpiece osculation or leaking discordant tones move to the forefront. Despite this, connections are always linear with tracks like Cotpotok (still valid) exhibiting a broken octave coda of koto-like picks from the guitarist plus lower-case slurs and growls from the brass man.

Underlining the sparks he still generates and his importance to FMP, as player, designer and talent scout – the book’s first and final images are of Brötzmann in quartet formation and in frantic performance with Taylor. Similarly besides his GUO affiliation, two other CDs demonstrate the saxophonist’s prowess. Close Up/Die Like A Dog 1994 CD 08 (FMP CD 144), is a hitherto unreleased concert date with one of his most powerful formations: Japanese trumpeter and electronics manipulator Toshinori Kondo, Americans William Parker on bass and Hamid Drake on drums and tablas, plus Brötzmann playing saxophones, tarogato and clarinets; and Wolke in Hosen/Brötzmann Solo 1976 CD 05 (FMP CD 141), the reedist’s first solo disc. On it he shows the breath of his skills, from surprisingly mellow, yet atonally-tinged alto saxophone vibrations on Two Birds is a Feather to the elongated and contrasting contralto and altissimo obbligatos on Piece for Two Clarinets; to how he uses tuba-like blasts and slurs plus heavy flutter tonguing to turn Humpty Dumpty, a showcase for his bass sax, into a jaunty march. Characteristically Close Up demonstrates not only high-quality Free Music, but also other musical currents welcomed by FMP. On the 46-minute Close Up/Man, Kondo’s flutter tongued runs and plunger tones are further fragmented by electronic wave forms, while Drake’s rhythmic tabla pulses suggest World Music. Meantime Brötzmann progressively masticates and splinters dissident ostinatos from tenor saxophone or bass clarinet, using the nephritic friction for call-and-response with the trumpeter’s rubato strategies, and sometimes stopping for speedy spicatto friction from Parker, all backed by the percussionist’s ruffs and pops.

Brötzmann is still going strong 16 years later, as are many improvisers recorded by FMP from its beginning. Nonetheless, as Stretto CD 12 (FMP CD 148) demonstrates, new music still comes from the label. Spiced with aviary field recordings, the eight tracks blend the timbres from cellist Honsinger’s sardonic verbal humor, col legno smacks or enhanced legato quivers with Rupp’s chromatic frails plus spidery finger picking. With new generations to record, perhaps FMP can last for another 40 years.

-- For Whole Note Vol. 16 #7

April 8, 2011

G9 Gipfel

Berlin
Jazzwerkstatt JW 080

Taking advantage of the multiplicity of colors, as well as the flexibility available from nine balanced instruments, trombonist Gerhard Gschlössl demonstrates his skills as a composer and arranger with this significant CD. Providing nourishment from all orchestral food groups – brass, reeds and strings – the layered performances are lively and cohesive as well as offering ample solo space.

Besides the Stuttgart-born, Berlin based Gschlössl – who self-effacingly avoids the making the 10 compositions mere trombone showcases – the rest of the band is composed of many of the German capital’s most accomplished players who often work together in interlocking ensembles. For instance bass clarinetist Rudi Mahall, bassist Johannes Fink and drummer Christian Lillinger are members of Vierergupper Gschlössl with the trombonist. Mahall, trumpeter Axel Dörner and pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach make up Monk’s Casino. Guitarist John Schröder is in Der Rote Bereich with Mahall, while alto saxophonist Wanja Slavin’s band features Lillinger. Tenor saxophonist Tobias Delius leads his own bands and is part of Amsterdam’s ICP Orchestra.

On the evidence here, G9 Gipfel has no hesitation on unabashedly drawing upon the long-standing big band tradition. This is made most obvious on Gschlössl’s composition “Dem DT. Jazz”. Based around key the pianist’s key clipping plus double-tongued flutters and trills from Slavin and Delius, the piece reaches its zenith as Mahall’s biting contralto runs reach Eric Dolphy-like freneticism, an impression reinforced by the theme with its linkage to compositions like Charles Mingus’ “The Clown”. Need more evidence? Among the horn parts arrayed in circus-styled, stop-time harmonies and Fink’s slap bass on “Hartz 9”, there’s a point during Schröder’s fleet solo studded with delay and frails, that a semi-quote from “Night in Tunisia” is heard.

Nonetheless G9 Gipfel also maintains the trombonist’s Europeanized vision that in the past led to the creation of the Jazz Kollektiv Berlin. Duplication of American Jazz or American Jazz themes isn’t on the agenda. Instead full range is given to the ensembles own composers, with Gschlössl, represented by five tunes; Fink by two, including “Hartz 9”; Mahall with “Rumba Brutal” – which contrasts metronomic piano runs, rickety-tick drumming and Schröder’s super-fleet trebly fills and snaps; and two others from Dörner. “Aufsicht”, one of the trumpeter’s pieces, takes the form of a contrapuntal round where timbres are parceled out among careening piano chords, drum paradiddles, irregular sax vibrations, trombone slurs and trumpet blasts.

As a composer, Gschlössl manages to blend this-side-of-atonal Klangfarbenmelodies with first-class spunky swing whose emphasized patterns and contrasting themes excite both viscerally and cerebrally. “Television World” for instance climaxes with a cross-pulsed duet between the trombonist and Dörner, preceded by ornamental triplets from the trumpeter and followed by a sliding, singing and slurring Gschlössl solo. Strummed guitar interludes, riffing reeds, drums ruffs from Lillinger plus von Schlippenbach’s contrasting dynamics frame the brass work.

Dörner, who is usually acclaimed for his microtonal explorations, channel the spirit of early open-horned stylists like Roy Eldridge during the solo which ends “Ganztonleiter”, another Gschlössl line. This follows the trumpeter’s earlier use of growls and flutter-tonguing. Other features of this superior Swing-band styled swinger are the bright and speedy comments outlined by the other horn players behind Mahall’s snorts, reed-bites and chalumeau vibrations plus Slavin’s fleet recapping of the initial theme.

Leading a nonet that is actually a coalition of other band leaders means that large swaths of talent and experience were available for Gschlössl’s use here. But the achievement that is Berlin also confirms his talents as band leader, composer and soloist.

--Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. Trotz, Geil 2. Rumba Brutal 3. Ganztonleiter 4. Aufsicht 5. Dem DT. Jazz 6. Absicht 7. Television World 8. Das Thema 9. Drei 10. Hartz 9

Personnel: Axel Dörner (trumpet); Gerhard Gschlössl (trombone); Rudi Mahall (bass clarinet); Wanja Slavin (alto saxophone); Tobias Delius (tenor saxophone); Alexander von Schlippenbach (piano); John Schröder (guitar); Johannes Fink (bass) and Christian Lillinger (drums)

April 3, 2011

Schlippenbach Trio

Bauhaus Dessau
Intakt CD 183

Obviously comfortable in their own musical skins in an assemblage that has now been together longer than the Modern Jazz Quartet (MJQ), members of the Schlippenbach Trio are still very capable of finding fresh and innovative avenues of expression. This CD, recorded in a Walter Gropius-designed Bauhaus-style auditorium in Dessau, Germany, confirms this.

Perhaps the reason for the trio’s longevity – 40 years and counting – is that unlike the MJQ, it isn’t the members’ paramount means of expression. At the very least, with tenor saxophonist Evan Parker involved in his own trio and electro-acoustic ensemble; with pianist Alexander Von Schlippenbach with solo work and Monk’s Casino; and with drummer Paul Lovens often working with French bassist Joëlle Léandre and many others; they have plenty to occupy their off-time. Plus with the saxophonist in London, the pianist in Berlin and the drummer residing in Nickelsdorf, Austria they don’t even cross paths that often.

More seriously the band is fully committed to Free Improvisation. So when the three unite for a tour, not only do they have fresh perspectives, but also, unlike the MJQ – and despite von Schlippenbach’s name in the title – there’s no overbearing music director as John Lewis was with the MJQ.

That said from its first few notes here, the combo, which has been recording in this configuration since 1972, is as instantly identifiable as the MJQ was with exposure to Lewis’ piano touch and Milt Jackson’s vibe resonations. More understated beat-wise than the MJQ’s Connie Kay, Lovens uses wood blocks, small cymbals and drop cloths on drum tops to subdue and vary his rhythm. Von Schlippenbach is as capable as outputting kinetic note cascades as low frequency comping, depending on the music’s needs. Parker’s pressurized breaths, smears and balanced circular breathing create tones that can be linked to John Coltrane’s or Lester Young’s styles in originality and influence. Plus the absence of a bass player is a non-issue.

Make no mistake about it as well, and Europeanized as it may be, the Schlippenbach Trio definitely plays Free Jazz. This is especially notable in the later section of “Bauhaus 2” during the communication between the saxophonist and the pianist. As Parker’s melodic puffs turn to concentrated glissandi and mouth pops, Von Schlippenbach enhances his lines with single-note pulses – bringing to mind saxophonist Johnny Griffin’s partnership with pianist Thelonious Monk. Accompanying both with the restraint Frankie Dunlop or Shadow Wilson brought to Monk’s music, are drumstick-propelled cymbal scratches, press rolls and wood-block smacks from Lovens.

Developments, variations and interludes are even more prominent on the CD’s almost 41½-minute initial track. With the tempo gradually increasing and decelerating throughout, texture propelling is the result of contrasting dynamics, impelled by a combination of cymbal clatter and rounded ruffs from Lovens; von Schlippenbach’s rapid chord changes, two-handed pummeling and treble clef tinkling; plus Parker’s staccato tongue quivers and broken-octave overblowing. Formalist echoes of earlier Jazz peek through as well. While the saxman’s concentrated half-squeal, half reed bite may at points reference the New Thing; the piano player’s fortissimo chording sometimes begins to resemble Boogie Woogie or Stride. Eventually, after percussive key punching from von Schlippenbach and continuous undulating breaths from Parker, the saxophonist’s shaded reed yelps and bites coupled with the drummer’s rolls and segmented pulse move the piece to adagio from allegro. Ultimately the pianist’s hunting and pecking keyboard shading makes common caused with the others for a perfectly timed, triple-stopping finale.

Forty years of playing may mark a record for others. For the Schlippenbach Trio it’s merely a way to create more Free Music milestones.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. Bauhaus 1 2. Bauhaus 2 3. Bauhaus 3

Personnel: Evan Parker (tenor saxophone); Alexander Von Schlippenbach (piano) and Paul Lovens (drums)

February 2, 2011

Global Unity Arrives in Montreal

Suoni per il Popolo festival report
By Ken Waxman

A willingness to book profound improvisers ignored by the commercial pseudo-Jazz behemoth that takes places later in the summer is what sets Montreal’s annual Suoni per il Popolo (SPIP) apart from other local festivals. For its 10th anniversary in late June, SPIP scored a major coup with the Canadian premiere of the all-star Globe Unity Orchestra (GUO) on the second of a three-night event.

Not only was the entire 11-piece ensemble featured for two sold-out shows at La Sala Rosa, a former social club on, St. Laurent Boulevard, the city’s storied Main, but on the first and third nights, the smaller Casa Del Popolo club, on the opposite side of the street was packed as it played host to three GUO break-out ensembles. All in all, the GUO put on an exceptional performance that confirmed the elevated regard in which the group has been held since it was organized by German pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach in 1966. Notable as well were the two club sets on the final night by a trio made up of von Schlippenbach, German bass clarinetist Rudi Mahall and drummer Paul Lytton the subsequent night. However Casa Del Popolo performances by two differently constituted GUO ensembles the first night appeared more introductory than exemplary when, despite flashes of instrumental luminosity, an unconscionable raggedness seemed to permeate both sets.

In Montreal the GUO consisted of veteran Free Improvisers and notable younger players. Both von Schlippenbach and tenor saxophonist Gerd Dudek have been members from the beginning, while British tenor saxophonist Evan Parker and German drummer Paul Lovens joined in 1970. Experienced hands such as Lytton and German trombonist Johannes Bauer now tour with the band as well, while the remaining chairs are filled by younger European improvisers. They included French trumpeter/flugelhornist Jean-Luc Cappozzo plus a quartet of Germans, trumpeter Axel Dörner, trombonist Christof Thewes, alto saxophonist Henrik Walsdorff and Mahall.

Among the reeds it was Mahall who made the greatest impression. Gangly and energetic, his forceful improvising is often seconded by facial mugging, bandy-legged twisting and foot stomps. It’s as if the Tin Woodman was possessed by the spirit of James Brown. With the GUO, the bass clarinetist’s sometimes altissimo and often biting cries contrasted in broken octave cohesion with the more stolid improvisations from the tenor saxophonists. The soloist who most reflected the Jazz continuum, Dudek’s strained contrapuntal forays appeared to be heavily influenced by John Coltrane.

There were points in fact when Lytton’s and Lovens’ interaction reached such a boiling point of explosive cross beats when working with Dudek that the results resembled Trane’s final abstract work with Elvin Jones and Rashied Ali. Playing in tandem much of the time, the GUO percussionists also had moments of adroitness and finesse. Both rattle as often as they smack, use additional cymbals, wood blocks and other add-ons as part of their standard kit. They are as apt to hit the hi-hat and drum rims as the snare and bass drums.

Unique Solo Strategies

As the GUO’s unusually constituted rhythm section chugged along, soloists developed strategies to meld with it and with other horns. Leaving the drastic shifts from fortissimo to folkloric to Mahall, Parker’s contributions ranged from mid-range placidity, with divided timbres sensitively breathed, to snorts, honks, stutters, tongue slaps and key percussion. Even then, these advanced techniques such as Cappozzo’s rubato high notes or Lovens’ minute cymbal shrugs complemented others’ playing. Parker’s concentrated reed vibrations plus von Schlippenbach plucking and stopping the piano’s internal strings and Lovens’ response frequently created trio episodes in the midst of the large ensemble.

Cappozzo’s bear-sized hands often hid the panache of a prodigiously experienced brass man able to intimately maneuver either of his instruments. Although he took the first trumpet role at times, with fortissimo triplets rising out of a tutti, he was equally canny as a soloist. Holding his horn in one hand, he used the other as either a hand mute or for finger movements that pulled brass ripples from his bell without valve movement.

Meanwhile Dörner, who elsewhere confines himself to minimalist timbres, rarely showed that side. Instead his slide trumpet vamped alongside the other horns creating a skewed polyphony just this side of Dixieland. At one point he contrapuntally blasted grace notes alongside Mahall who responded with a nursery-rhyme variant. Another time Dörner cleanly articulated an expanded flourish, backed by a dual trombone obbligato. Bauer and Thewes had fun themselves, participating in the call-and-response runs and stepping forward for solos that ranged from chancy minimalist air expansion to hearty plunger blasts using cup or Harmon mutes. Bauer’s updated gutbucket smears were particularly effective.

Proving that the vocabulary of a large group doesn’t have to be limited by the past but can proffer intricately linked textures while leaving space for individualistic soloists, the GUO’s sounds that were both magisterial and lively.

Exquisite Essays in the Art of the Trio

Despite using a concert grand piano at the Sala Rosa, the intricacies of von Schlippenbach’s dynamic pulsing and inventive asides were often drowned by the massed exuberance of the GUO. A well-tuned upright gave him enough space the next night at the Casa Del Popolo however.

Over the course of two sets, the pianist, Mahall and Lytton interpreted mostly Thelonious Monk tunes their own way. The three added angularity to Monk’s already pointed melodies, gliding from one to the other without pause, highlighting links to earlier Jazz styles, while never negating Monk’s distinctiveness or their own.

Most notable was how core sounds were defined and presented in an unconventional group, with bass clarinet as the only horn and no bass player. Characteristically Mahall – like saxophonist Charlie Rouse with Monk – was von Schlippenbach’s chief foil. As comfortable in the chalumeau range as coloratura, Mahall’s highly rhythmic yet lyrical passages injected unselfconscious swing into his solos. Moreover his lines also revealed a mastery of stop-time runs. As he rappelled from the highest to the lowest pitches of his instrument at points he appeared at points to be playing call-and-response with himself. His portamento trills and stretched chords deflated to segregated puffs and split tones and contrasted nicely with to von Schlipplenbach’s dynamic range which encompassed hunt-and-peck percussiveness and supple extended glissandi.

Extended with wire brushes, knitting needles, wood blocks and unattached cymbals, Lytton’s kit provided the perfect back-up. Self-assured, he contributed a drum solo with woodblock thumps, clatter bump and clip-clops when the pianist segued into “Played Twice” – taken more staccato and much more joyously than Monk did. Elsewhere whapped cymbals and constant hi-hat shakes and pops buttressed the bass clarinetist’s harsh fortissimo growls, extended split tones and flutter tonguing.

Here as elsewhere, the pianist’s metronomic note clusters dissolved into concentrated slaps and cross-handed pumps. At the same time von Schlipplenbach often extended the melodies with novel techniques. These encompassed such tricks as: modified ragtime-styling, allowing Lytton to pop his snares and pumps his bass drum; arpeggio-laden spidery cadences that introduced ever-widening split tones quacks, and altissimo peeps from Mahall; and kinetic energy that made it sound as if he were replicating a piano roll. At points using knitting needles to provide a contrasting pattern or daintily rubbings his drum tops with his palms, Lytton’s most capricious percussion use came as the pianist segued into “Just a Gigolo”, which Monk also favored. Until Mahall completely obliterated the theme with chalumeau brays, the drummer used triangle pings and airborne ratcheting plus soft mallets on his floor tom to dislocate the time sense. Von Schlipplenbach’s abrupt introduction of a secondary, mid-tempo Monk line, directed the improvisation back to moderato as effectively as Mahall’s unexpected marshalling of a rolling blues line into the trio’s encore number lead to the reedist trading fours with the percussionist – and a satisfying conclusion to the evening.

Two times Four Musicians isn’t always Two Quartets

If only the first night’s sounds had been as dazzling as those on the other two. While improvised music thrives on spontaneity, neither ad-hoc quartet set at the Casa added up to more than the sum of its parts. Chances to contrast the styles of two sets of major innovators playing the same instrument – Dörner and Cappozzo plus Parker and Dudek – were available, although the same situation existed the second night with the entire GUO.

When it came to Parker/Dudek, what were most instructive were the strategies employed when the two saxophonists plus Dörner and trombonist Thewes weren’t involved in broken-octave harmonies. On their own, both saxophonists exhibited equal episodes of reed bites plus tongue slaps rather than melodiousness. On the other hand, the trombonist, with gnarly slurring and timbral spikiness, and the slide-trumpeter, with pointillist puffs and mangled note patterns, followed completely antithetical tactics.

During the other quartet set earlier in the evening, Cappozzo demonstrated his complete control of the horn, creating tongue stops and flat-line air with the same facility with which mellow slurs were isolated and produced from the side of his mouth. Bauer’s trombone work involved capillary quacks and disconnected mumbles forced through his bell, meeting Walsdorff’s split tones. Together the players provided irrefutable evidence of the brass background of all three horns. Sounding like a marching band gone berserk, this identity was confirmed while Lovens rhythmically slapped his unattached cymbals. When he wasn’t doing that, the percussionist countered the gurgles, brays, sputters and tongue flutters of the horns in varied fashion. Rarely keeping a constant beat, he instead divided his rhythms, devoting as much time to slapping his hi-hat with a drumstick or maneuvering a cloth and unattached cymbals on and off drum tops as he did pounding a backbeat.

While the sounds on this evening weren’t as spectacular as the ones heard on subsequent nights, that so many major European improvised stylists could be observed close-up made every one of these SPIP concerts essential listening. As the city’s other so-called Jazz festival increasingly anchors itself to programming irrelevant pop-styled music, SPIP becomes Montreal’s only essential summer festival for adventurous music.

July 23, 2010

Berlin’s European Jazz Jamboree Offers a Unique Take on American-based Jazz

By Ken Waxman

Like one of those novels of speculative fiction that posit a scenario in which the South wins the American Civil War; or perhaps like a variant of Superman Comic’s Bizzaro planet where everything is the reverse of earth, 2009’s European Jazz Jamboree (EEJ) offered an alternate view of jazz history. Here the music was essentially in the tradition, but, in the main, interpreted by Europeans rather than Americans.

This led to some spectacular performances taking place during the series of concerts in selected Berlin venues during mid-September. But as Superman found when he visited the Bizarro world, altered history can sometimes be disconcerting. Similarly some of the EJJ combinations failed to live up to their expected promise(s). In a further Bizarro-like irony, some of the fest’s best sounds came from aggregations whose music had very little to do with the EJJ’s stated theme.

Arguably the most profound exercise in extrasensory perception and creation involved two Swiss: saxophonist Urs Leimgruber and pianist Jacques Demierre, plus American-in France bassist Barre Phillips. Presented at an Institute Français concert on Kurfürstenamm, the trio music was as abstract as it was breath-taking. Also notable on the EJJ’s first evening was a foyer set at the Kino Babylon, in the city’s Mitte area, which matched reedist Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky – one of the founders of East German Free Jazz – with youngish drummer Michael Griener in a duo called The Salmon.

Griener also drummed in the Workshop Band of Petrowsky’s long-time associate, pianist Ulrich Gumpert, which in an auditorium concert at the Kino, successfully recast the work of one of the pianist’s mentors, American bassist Charles Mingus. Consisting in the main of classic Mingus compositions, the program allowed members of Gumpert’s eight-piece aggregation to add distinctive sonic flourishes while expanding the bassist’s familiar lines.

Contrasting Views of Charles Mingus’ Works

With tunes such as “Boogie Stop Shuffle” anchored by subterranean rumbles from Ben Abarbanel-Wolff’s baritone saxophone, these low pitches set the pace more so than the piano’s chromatic chording or the in-the-pocket rhythms from Griener and bassist Jan Roder, who plays more freely in other circumstances. While the arrangements of classics such as “Good bye Pork Pie Hat” and “Fables of Faubus” took full advantage of the harmonies and counterpoint available from three saxophones – Christian Weidner and Henrik Walsdorff were the others – the outstanding individual soloist was trombonist Christof Thewes. He was equally impressive constructing sophisticated Lawrence Brown-style obbligatos or letting loose with plunger-pressured, near-gutbucket growls.

The performance coalesced into high intensity on the final number with churning rhythmic power encompassing Roder’s thumping bass, Griener’s brush-propelled pulses and the pianist molding single note clusters into portamento runs and pseudo honky-tonk clanking. Following an episode of pumping and popping horn vamps, the rhythm section members traded fours then twos, with Roder scraping his instrument’s wood and Griener smacking his drum tops bare-handed. As the climax exploding every which way beneath a triplet-laden solo from trumpeter Martin Klingeberg, the group was nudged back into straight time by churning piano chords.

Using unusual quartet voicing that united tenor saxophone (Daniel Erdmann), alto saxophone, clarinet and alto clarinet (Michael Thieke), bass (Johannes Fink) and drums (Heinrich Köbberling), the band Dok Wallach, set up in the Kino lobby the next night, with its distinct version of Mingus material that had been composed earlier or later than the tunes tackled by the Workshop Band.

Running one piece into another almost without pause – a strategy also used with varying success at other points by Monk’s Casino and Silke Eberhard/Aki Takase’s Ornette Coleman Anthology duo – the four managed to suggest Mingus’ links not only to advanced mainstream jazz, but to the R&B and Latin traditions that nurtured it. Done this way, the tunes also pinpointed how the bassist’s advanced voicing foreshadowed Free Jazz, which would continue to draw on Mingus’ musical evolution.

Tunes such as “Hobo Ho” and “Weird Nightmare” benefited from Erdmann’s heavily breathed tongue stops and honks on the one hand, and Thieke’s running changes with dissonant and atonal cries on alto clarinet on the other. Some of the most interesting counterpoint appeared when Thieke and Fink adopted a contrapuntal Eric Dolphy vs Mingus dialogue with the other two laying out. Spicatto, Fink whipped tautly pinched strings with his bow, as the alto clarinetist blew undifferentiated air, warbled and tongue-stopped. Later Köbberling would clobber his snares and toms to match sustaining timbres from Fink’s strings, while Erdmann moved to strident bird calls and resounding tongue-slaps to maintain the proper solemnity when duetting with Thieke. Throughout the set there were examples of intuitive call-and-response patterns developed into thematic reed interface, as well as sharp rubato passages that bounced among the four as melodies and improvisations were conflated into generic unity.

Focus on Ornette and Dolphy

Eliminating expected rhythm section incursions, Swiss alto saxophonist Eberhard’s Potsa Lotsa, had saluted Mingus’ favorite saxophonist – Dolphy – in the same location the day previously using only horns – her own alto saxophone, Patrick Braun’s tenor saxophone, Nikolaus Neuser’s trumpet and Gerhard Gschlössl’s trombone. Rather than being limited by the instrumentation, this layered polyphony added new tinctures to Dolphy’s best-known music, which sadly had been created in less than half a decade.

The compositions were re-harmonized canon-like with trumpet grace notes at the top and Braun’s deeper sax tones providing the ostinato glue holding together the undulating improvisations. Distinctive touches included Gschlössl adding downcast moans to a reading of “Out to Lunch”, which otherwise bounced along on rubber-mute fanning from the brass; and blustery vibrations from the saxophones in broken octaves, as they worked through pieces from Dolphy’s storied Five Spot-recorded LPs.

Re-interpreting another’s material to make it your own was also demonstrated during two sold out sets later in the week at Charlottenburg’s Jazzwerkstatt + Klassik Shop and Café by the Eberhard/Takase duo. Playing alto saxophone and clarinet, the reedist now takes more liberties with the Coleman material than she did in the past. So does the pianist, whose advantage is that Coleman rarely played with keyboards. At the club, Takase’s hard-driving bounces, bustles and bangs both on the internal strings and the key themselves – not to mention her pointed and clever techniques – a appended a sense of surprise to the idiosyncratic compositions. Perhaps relieved to share leadership chores, Takase’s improvising was more relaxed and better focused than what she offered the night before with her Fats Waller-tribute combo.

Essentially, Coleman tunes such as “Blues Connection” and “The Face of the Bass”, which already reference tonality, were wedded to an accompaniment that highlighted stride’s unison arpeggios and the double pumps and moderato, bluesy chording. Feeding the saxophonist kinetic runs and walking bass lines, Eberhard in turn became liberated enough in many instances to expose glossolalia and hardened flutter-tonguing. For instance, pieces like “Una Muy Bonita” and “Beauty is a Rare Thing” provided a study in contrasts. The later joined behind-the-beat boogie-woogie-like runs with saxophone triple-tonguing; while the former mixed Eberhard’s altissimo cries and note-bending with Takase humming in time with her playing as single notes ranged all over the keyboard. At points Takase even smashed the keys with sharpened elbows. While there was a curiously unfinished quality to some numbers – as if the two had yet to agree on a definitive performance strategy – interpolations of other Coleman lines and sympathetic double counterpoint during both sets – plus two encores – confirmed the duo’s future.

The night’s most unusual timbres were fished from the strings during one tune when Takase manipulated a wire through the piano’s wound internal set. Meanwhile Eberhard’s only bow to New music invention was a single clarinet cadence respired onto the piano strings. As individual as her saxophone playing, this woodwind brought out more legato soloing from Eberhard. Moderato and trilling in execution, she evidently reserved tone-splitting, peeping and pressured vibratos for the saxophone.

Rudi Mahall meets Fats and Monk

One person very familiar with extended technique such as those while utilizing the properties of a legit woodwind is bass clarinetist Rudi Mahall. His straightforward and joyous inventiveness was the most satisfying – and purely musical – portion of the Fats Waller program the night before. More naturalistic, his improvising smarts two nights previously as part of Monk’s Casino locked in with the game plan developed by trumpeter Axel Dörner, drummer Uli Jennessen, pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach and bassist Roder to restructure Monk’s over-familiar oeuvre so that the sonic edifice could be appreciated on its own. Both shows took place in the Kino’s auditorium.

Role-playing appeared to dominate Takase’s Waller project, with drummer Paul Lovens channeling Baby Dodds two-beat rhythms; trombonist Nils Wogram’s wah-wah wails wavering between the styles of Kid Ory and Tricky Sam Nanton; and Takase wedding the sophistication of Duke Ellington’s touch to Waller’s boisterous pounding. American banjoist/guitarist/singer Eugene Chadbourne’s shtick is an acquired taste, and while his girth is now approaching that of Waller’s, his humor – like some of Takese’s keyboard interpolations – occasionally seemed no more than monochrome reflections of Waller’s multi-colored performance and personality. The overall impression given by Chadbourne’s vocalizing was that he couldn’t decide whether to treat the songs – which Waller himself often burlesqued – as parodies or to sing them straight. It was the same with Takase’s soloing. Given her head, as on “Honeysuckle Rose”, she constructed a fantasia with cross-handed jumps, chromatic chording and staccato, forte rebounds. But by exposing this blindingly swift technique and expanded range, she almost reduced the Waller tribute to a series of well-remembered heads without extension.

That’s why the work of Mahall – who played Gene “Honeybear” Sedric to Takese’s Waller – was so refreshing. Someone who is not averse to spicing up his solos with a bit of Charleston-like leg wobbling or Elvis-like hip-shaking, he’s never anyone else than his own man whether the musical subject at hand is Waller, Monk or spiky Free Jazz originals. Like Waller in his prime, Mahall always looks like he’s having fun at the same time as he continues to output superior improvisations. His stance could be seen as a more profound celebration of the tradition characterized by the EEJ than Chadbourne suddenly donning a blonde wig, and mimicking Marilyn Monroe or Bob Dylan while he sang. Another question was why the entire combo felt nostalgia like “Way Down South Where the Blues Were Born”, “I Like Oysters” and “Just a Gigolo” had to be played more-or-less straight.

Pick Your Favorite Monk Number

Monk himself recorded “Just a Gigolo”. But luckily von Schlippenbach, whose pianistic approach suggests gravitas rather than gaiety, eschewed that particular number with Monk’s Casino. Instead, like Eberhard/Takase with the Coleman tunes, this quintet’s increased familiarity with the material, through microscopic examination of it, meant that no whiff of imitation hung in the air.

Although the quintet still appears to be cramming an overwhelming number of Monkish heads into its performance, this sprightly flip-through-the-pages-of-the-fakebook approach allows for interpolations of other tunes and motifs as the set unrolls – just the way Monk would have done it. While von Schlippenbach may have been playing some of these tunes for 50 years, he never attempted to imitate Monk’s style either. With an expansive reach, and a tendency for double-gaited piano cadences, glissandi, key clips and kinetic waterfalls of notes, von Schlippenbach utilized the entire keyboard; Monk concentrated on a few select phrases and particular note clusters.

Meanwhile, Dörner played in an understated, Miles Davis-like fashion at selected spots and elsewhere wailed plunger-expanded blues lines. A master of minimalist brass exploration in other situations, Dörner subtly united every peep and cluck so that they eventually combined and mated with Mahall’s preference for broader-based, irregularly vibrated thrills. As for the bass clarinetist, he was his quirky self; at one juncture it sounded as if he was playing “Lady Be Good” apropos nothing. Another time Mahall’s diaphanous timbres contrasted tellingly with the double bassist’s scrubs and swipes.

Drummer Jennessen, following the Monkish cannon, confined himself for the most part to time-keeping with pops, rebounds, rolls and flams. However Roder’s rock-solid plucking was the locus of the band’s one vaudevillian trope, as one band member after another deserted the stage during his solo. Following some raucous backstage vamping from the horns, the others returned, with tremolo note-burbling from the trumpeter and sibilant tongue-stops from Mahall.

More Monk, some Steve Lacy and the Duke

Other homages expressed during the week came from American pianist Dave Burrell’s solo salute to Monk and Duke Ellington and Celebration Wayne Shorter by a quintet featuring saxophonist Wolfgang Schmidtke, both at the Kino auditorium; plus Swiss soprano saxophonist Jürg Wickihalder’s solo homage to Steve Lacy at the Instiute Français. Professionally played, Schmidtke’s by-the-book sounds ranged from Hard Bop to Free Bop, but never seemed to inhabit this subject’s music the way other performers in the EJJ did with their choices. Making his Berlin debut, Wickihalder celebrated not only Lacy, but the late saxophonist’s mentors Ellington and Monk. Combining half-echoed glissandi, lyrical asides, mountainous piles of splayed notes and reverberating duck quacks, Wickihalder managed to touch on Lacy’s many musical identities. Taking the improvisations one step further, at junctures Wickihalder up-ended his horn, blew into the saxophone bell, and rasped timbres by applying the reed to the side of his mouth. Viewing his expression cumulatively, with this showcase Wickihalder confirmed that he should be carefully followed musically in the future.

A veteran Free Jazzman first prominent in the 1960s, Burrell, sporty in peaked cap and leather coat, ran through an understated series of tunes which expressed the links between Monk and Ellington with side excursions into the compositions of James P. Johnson, an admitted influence on both. Moving among rags, stride piano, a bluesy “Blue Monk” and a hyper-sophisticated “Prelude to a Kiss”, Burrell managed at various time to suggest parlor piano noodling, supper club accompaniment and formal grand piano recitals. Segueing from one tune to another, he would sometimes alter a familiar theme with a walking bass undertow, rag a melody unexpectedly or conversely inject a flourish of lyrical prettiness into otherwise primeval interpretations.

Inevitably it seemed, Burrell touched on the neo-con’s rallying cry, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got that Swing”, but the only official bow to the Swing Era was clarinetist Rolf Kühn’s second set at the Kino auditorium. That was when he and the NDR Big Band, conducted by Jörg Achim Keller, saluted Benny Goodman’s 100th Birthday.

Age is no Impediment to Good Jazz

Old enough at 80 to have actually played with Goodman during his American sojourn in the 1950s and 1960s, the Leipzig-born Kühn gamely ran through an expected set of Swing classics. Notable was a three-clarinet arrangement of “Just Friends” and a point when guitarist Ronny Graupe, from Kühn’s Tri-O, was added to the band to limn the guitar part of some Goodman-associated tunes. Nonetheless, Graupe ended up approximating Wes Montgomery’s poppier big band efforts rather than Charlie Christian’s work with Goodman. A final “Swing Swing Swing” featuring both Keller and Tri-O’s Christian Lillinger on drums was rhythmically exciting, but ultimately exhausting.

Someone who has continues to explore new musical areas even as he ages; Kühn appeared to enjoy the interaction in his initial EJJ appearance that night, playing with his Tri-O sideman, each slightly more than one-quarter his age. An additional guest was his baby brother Joachim Kühn, 65, who added his own variation of hard single notes and romantic flourishes to the music. Considering that reedist Kühn’s angled twittering melded impressively with Graupe’s flashing guitar lines, clanking bass licks from Fink –who also played in Dok Wallach – and Lillinger’s stacked drum beats, there were points at which the pianism seems superfluous. Visually striking with his leonine head of hair, the blurred fingering Joachim Kühn exhibited often translated into dynamic chord layering and pumping pedal portamento. Yet it seemed divorced from how the rest of the players stuck to connective moderato lines.

The situation was further complicated when trumpeter Matthias Schriefl – complete with a Beatle bob and wide trousers imprinted with a spider-web motif – joined the combo. Initially playing muted trumpet, he harmonically complemented Kühn’s clarinet. Passing chords and backwards moving vamps from the rhythm section distinguished the sextet’s finale. But while Rolf Kühn’s feather light vamps extended the interlude, Schriefl gathered all his strength to fire off triplet-laden refrains.

Too Many Ideas for A Segmented Orchestration

Trying to push too many ideas into a foreshortened concept – plus the showiness of another trumpeter’s playing – was what ultimately weakened the performance of The Earth is A Drum by Jürgen Scheele and the Independent Jazz Orchestra. This was advertised as a suite dedicated to the memory of pocket trumpeter and pioneering American World musician Don Cherry.

Positioned at the Kino auditorium to be a festival highlight, Scheele’s composition bristled with concepts. Unfortunately, while combing the contributions of a mainstream jazz big band, a string quartet, additional Third World percussion via drummer Dudu Tucci and two star soloists – British tenor saxophonist Alan Skidmore and Danish trumpeter Jens Winther – may have seemed visionary years ago, this type of cross-cultural mixing has become commonplace, even clichéd.

For a start, many of the suite’s parts played seemed singularly undigested. The standard big-band arrangements swung, but swung towards bombast, complete with screaming brass triplets, in a way that could be honoring Stan Kenton’s so-called Progressive Jazz more so than Cherry organic compositions. This impression was further reinforced when Tucci turned from triangle-bashing, guiro scraping, maracas shaking and triangle pinging to pound Latin rhythms from his conga drums. More distressingly, the strings brought mostly 19th Century romantic tonalities to the show, complete with mournful cello sounds and unheard pizzicato plucks. If the first violinist’s weeping arco solo was thought of as original as well as technically perfect, someone was ignorant of the advances in string writing brought to jazz language by many Europeans during the past couple of decades. At points it also sounded as if there was a vocalized or pre-recorded ostinato vibrating the “Om” phrase in the background. In the 21st Century this brought back uncomfortable memories of Flower Power.

As for the soloists, Skidmore was impressive in spots when given enough space to push a style influenced by mid-period John Coltrane into more elastic Free playing. Probably the concert’s highpoint came when he was able to open up emotionally into a reed-biting frenzy which also goosed the drummers to work harder. The lingering impression left was of Skidmore exposing longer and longer note patterns, while the big band members riffed contrapuntally, collectively and almost wildly behind him.

Winther was another matter. Dressed in a shocking red smoking jacket and silk trousers and sporting a hairstyle that made him resemble the male half of Abba, the subdued timbres and low-key whimpers from his often muted trumpet suggested Miles Davis of the 1960s and 1970s rather than Cherry. Winther is a respected composer and veteran of aggregations such as the Danish Radio Big Band, German Radio big bands such as NDR, WDR and SDR plus the Århus Symphony Orchestra. But his unruffled, highly technical professionalism was the antithesis of the instinctive music Cherry helped create, first with Ornette Coleman in the United States, then on his own in Europe.

Play That Funky Music White Boy

Another ensemble which stuck out like a sore thumb in a gathering full of snapping fingers was American pianist Uri Caine’s Bedrock Trio plus vocalist Barbara Walker. This was the concluding act at the Kino auditorium, two nights before the Independent Jazz Orchestra had the same spot on the bill.

Combining thumbs and fingers, the operative body part during Caine’s set was hand-clapping. Playing piano, electric piano and Nord for additional electronic beats, and backed by flanged electric bass runs from Tim Lefebvre and the stolid back beat from drummer Zach Danziger’s over-sized kit, affable Caine appeared to be revisiting his Philadelphia youth. That was a time where the sweet soul sounds of Gamble & Huff reined supreme and where sidemen for the duo’s Philly International label played nightclub gigs with jazzers like Caine. This impression was further cemented by the vocals of Walker, an R&B belter and friend of the pianist’s from Philadelphia.

Appearing in Berlin for the first time, Walker’s impressive diction and light voice touched on scat but concentrated on gospel-tinged laments of lost love. Handclapping and wandering around the stage, Walker frequently insisted that she wanted to “testify”. With her phrasing and powerful range the singer meshed well with Caine’s extended staccato and agitato runs, the bassist’s heavy thumb pops and the drummer’s thumping. Anything but portentous, Walker came across impressively as an old school R&B stylist. But her performance was somewhat jarring in the context of a European Jazz Jamboree.

Staccato in his solos on either keyboard, Caine’s pulsating glissandi, dazzling fingering and high-frequency runs were notable as commentaries on the soul-jazz tradition; as were Lefebvre’s sliding runs. The set confirmed that the pianist refuses to be pigeonholed into any one role. Perhaps though, as someone who has saluted Wagner, Mozart, Tin Pan Alley and Herbie Hancock with equal seriousness, in this context, Caine may have been better off exposing a project that was closer to either of the first two letters of EJJ than the last.

Profound Art of the Duo

Tellingly though, some of the festival’s most profound improvising came from two small groups divorced from any attempts at homage. Ironically, both also featured musicians – Leimgruber-Demierre-Phillips’ bassist Barre Phillips (born 1934) and The Salmon’s reedist Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky (born 1933) – who are literally old enough to have heard much jazz history first hand.

However, neither had any desire to re-create this history, at least as a salute to any existing style. Secure in his identity, Petrowsky played both alto saxophone and clarinet as he worked out new strategies for the sort of Free Jazz that has been his raison d’être since the 1960s. That night in the Kino’s foyer he spat out multiphonics, triple-tongued, pitch-slid, cried, gasped and trilled. For his part, drummer Griener slid items such as a cow bell, a wood block, a vintage knife and a metal comb on and off his drum tops to amplify his contribution, while both detuning and spanking the metrical melody.

Mid-way through the set, playing alto saxophone in tenor register, Petrowsky spluttered out what was essentially a low-pitched blues line, as the drummer backed him with nerve beats, rim shots and tick-tock rhythms. Introducing speaking-in-tongues glossolalia – a variant of which singer Walker may have heard in her home town – the saxophonist also mixed Be-Bop references along with flutter tonguing. Fatter and wilder, his tone remained supple and metrically free – though connectively parallel to the drummer’s ruffs and pops – no matter how long he soloed. Another surprise was his individualized phrasing on clarinet. With a lazy tone replete with wooly, mid-range slips like a more formal Jimmy Giuffre, his textures consisted of chest tone and single breaths. He methodically built up clusters from tiny dabs then broke the results down again.

One Perfect Trio Interaction

Petrowsky’s soloing may have breached the limits of reed experimentation, but Leimgruber’s provided a graduate level aural essay on tenor and soprano saxophone inventiveness. Fortuitously his associates – Phillips and pianist Demierre –, whose collective performance followed Wickihalder solo set at the Institute Français, were as dexterous and inventive using their instruments as he was drawing unexpected textures from his.

Accelerating from a sparse, minimal exposition of small gestures such as the bassist lightly bouncing his bow on one string, solitary notes squeezed from the saxophone, and the pianist, forearm resting on the keys, extracting singular note patterns, the group improvisation unfolded in stages until it commanded full audience attention.

Gently vibrating the soprano saxophone, Leimgruber’s split tones seemed to resonate back inside his horn. Blowing thin columns of air, he altered his embouchure to produce different tones as Phillips rasped his bass strings and Demierre jabbed at the piano keys. Eventually the pianist’s low-frequency and low-pitched clicks thickened into broader runs as Leimgruber switched to tenor, concurrently disassembling it into components, which he strummed and shook at will. Unfastening the gooseneck from the body tube he forced staccato phrases through it, ratcheted the saxophone’s curved neck against the instrument’s bow and bell, ultimately producing harsh, almost static timbres.

As the tempo picked up, Phillips turned to sul ponticello squeaks and Demierre to strummed cadenzas, as reed textures bounced between police-whistle squeaks and basso-profundo rumbles expressed in honks, hawks, spits and tongue flutters. Suddenly the intensity that had been building up over the past few minutes was palpable and almost incendiary, as the three reached a crescendo of pounding piano chords, scrubbed bass lines plus serrated split tones and cackles from the saxophonist.

Equivalent tension-release was exhibited and experienced in the trio’s subsequent improvisation with Demierre more prominent, pushing kinetic patterns from the foot petals and slashing harmonies from the piano’s inner harp.

When the set was over, audience members concluded that they had witnessed a significant expression of no-holds-barred improvisation. This is a judgment that could also be applied to most of the EJJ’s notable performances.

Only in its second year, it’s apparent that the Jamboree is on its way to become an important addition to the musical calendar of Germany’s capital city. With a few nips and tucks, 2010’s edition could solidify the reputation for quality improvisation that was fortified with this year’s program.

November 16, 2009

Alexander Von Schlippenbach

Friulian Sketches
psi 08.07

TOOT

Two

Another Timbre At14

Jan Roder

Double Bass

Jazzwerkstatt JW 037

Aki Takase & The Good Boys

Live at Willisau Jazz Festival

Jazz Werkstatt JW 049

Extended Play: Alexander Von Schlippenbach and his band mates

By Ken Waxman

One European jazz pacesetter since the late 1960s, German pianist Alexander Von Schlippenbach’s groups showcase different aspects of his broad interests. Together for over 35 years, his trio with saxophonist Evan Parker and drummer Paul Lovens features improvisers attuned to each other’s thinking. Predating that, The Globe Unity Orchestra herds outstanding Continental soloists into cooperative big band arrangements. His Monk’s Casino quintet – filled out by German players about 25 years younger than Schlippenbach, 71 – offers a unique take on Thelonious Monk’s oeuvre. Its members also score on individual projects, like these CDs.

Able to display the quirky kernel of Monk’s moods elsewhere, on

Friulian Sketches psi 08.07, Von Schlippenbach personalizes jazz chamber music, seconded by Amerian cellist Tristan Honsinger and Italian clarinetist Daniele D’Agaro, The 20 inventions are airy and pleasant, and never do the bel canto flourishes trump innate creativity. For example on “Capriccio” skewed Monkian tropes give way to broken-octave chording and strummed cadenzas from the pianist – both formalist and funky. In contrast the cellist’s tremolo squeaks open up into multi-string exhibitionism, while D’Agaro’s reed quivers with lyrical currents.

Moderato throughout, tunes are frequently jolted by the clarinetist’s high-pitched glissandi or liquid portamento. Take “Antifonia” where D’Agaro’s tones are matched by the pianist’s organic patterning plus a stop-time interlude from Honsinger. Altering their instruments’ tessitura as they play, the three keep the restrained sounds from becoming simplistic by including rhythmic plunks from cello strings and key fanning from the piano.

Simplicity doesn’t enter the equation on TOOT’s Two Another Timbre At14. Here the Bebop chops trumpeter Axel Dörner exhibits in Monk’s Casino are transmogrified into disembodied brass sound pulses, the better to meld with the quivering wave forms and undercurrents from Thomas Lehn’s synthesizer and the cries, retches and mumbles which make up the unconventional oralization of British vocalist Phil Minton.

Minton’s style of anti-singing, which encompasses duck quacks, yodeling, basso growls and strangled yelps, reduces vocal expression to its most basic. So does the trumpeter, whose expression mostly consists of flat-line air forced through the horn’s body tube, reductionist breaths and circumscribed grace notes. Abstract on their own, Lehn’s sound envelopes hold the improvisations together with pulsating signals and electric-piano-like sprinkles.

Evolving chromatically or contrapuntally, Toot’s soundworld is pointillist, but not cynosure. Despite Minton’s strident throat extensions, his gibberish sprouting is put into context when mated with the others’ outpourings. Purring timbres and ring modulator-like whooshes from the synthesizer create a connective undercurrent, while Dörner’s excursions into muted grace notes confirm the in-the-moment status of the improvisations.

Even more instantaneous is Aki and The Good Boys’ Live at Willisau Jazz Festival Jazz Werkstatt JW 049. One “good boy” prominent on this CD by Aki Takase – the Japanese-born, Berlin-based pianist – is bass clarinetist Rudi Mahall, who shares the front line in Monk’s Casino with Dörner. Serendipitously enough, Takase is Von Schlippenbach’s wife. Looser than the other CDs’ programs, Live cannily subvert American jazz and German folksongs. Takase’s compositions are harmonically and melodically sophisticated. They also have sufficient space for her keyboard forays ranging from high-frequency tinkling, to metronomic pulsing. Added are flutter-tongued, altissimo and vamping exchanges between Mahall and Amsterdam-based reedist Tobias Delius. Scattered among the tunes are four Mahall-composed miniatures which lighten the mood and extend the color palate. “Dreimal Durch” for instance, conflates an uneven pulse, spidery piano arpeggios and unison horn trills.

The bass clarinetist’s reed bites, spetrofluctuation and tongue slaps help define Takase compositions such as “Todays Ulysses” which also showcases her metronomic patterning and contrasting dynamics. Here, Mahall scooping concentric notes from his horn’s bottom causes Delius to unleash responsive honks and slurs.

In contrast to these exercises in group interaction, bassist Jan Roder – whose solid rhythm is the rock on which Monk’s Casino rests – goes it alone on Double Bass Jazzwerkstatt 037, unveiling multiple strategies as his modulated plucks alternate with metronomic inventions plus abrasive bow scratches. “Naŭ” captures slaps, pulls and thumps. “Ses” deals with staccato, strident and subterranean double-stopping – one texture resembles pooch barks, another is airily melodic. Then there’s “Kvar”, which uses crumpled paper placed among the strings to create rattling noises that upticks to sul ponticello creaks. The piece concludes with adagio note clusters executed with guitar-like facility.

Each musician excels as a stylist on his own. Toronto can experience them together as Monk’s Casino at the Church of the Reeder as [art of the TD Canada Trust Jazz Festival on June 26.

-- For Whole Note Vol. 14 #9

June 1, 2009

Aki Takase & The Good Boys

Live at Willisau Jazz Festival
Jazz Werkstatt JW 049

Alexander Von Schlippenbach

Friulian Sketches

psi 08.07

TOOT

Two

Another Timbre At14

Jan Roder

Double Bass

Jazzwerkstatt JW 037

Extended Play: Alexander Von Schlippenbach and his band mates

By Ken Waxman

One European jazz pacesetter since the late 1960s, German pianist Alexander Von Schlippenbach’s groups showcase different aspects of his broad interests. Together for over 35 years, his trio with saxophonist Evan Parker and drummer Paul Lovens features improvisers attuned to each other’s thinking. Predating that, The Globe Unity Orchestra herds outstanding Continental soloists into cooperative big band arrangements. His Monk’s Casino quintet – filled out by German players about 25 years younger than Schlippenbach, 71 – offers a unique take on Thelonious Monk’s oeuvre. Its members also score on individual projects, like these CDs.

Able to display the quirky kernel of Monk’s moods elsewhere, on

Friulian Sketches psi 08.07, Von Schlippenbach personalizes jazz chamber music, seconded by Amerian cellist Tristan Honsinger and Italian clarinetist Daniele D’Agaro, The 20 inventions are airy and pleasant, and never do the bel canto flourishes trump innate creativity. For example on “Capriccio” skewed Monkian tropes give way to broken-octave chording and strummed cadenzas from the pianist – both formalist and funky. In contrast the cellist’s tremolo squeaks open up into multi-string exhibitionism, while D’Agaro’s reed quivers with lyrical currents.

Moderato throughout, tunes are frequently jolted by the clarinetist’s high-pitched glissandi or liquid portamento. Take “Antifonia” where D’Agaro’s tones are matched by the pianist’s organic patterning plus a stop-time interlude from Honsinger. Altering their instruments’ tessitura as they play, the three keep the restrained sounds from becoming simplistic by including rhythmic plunks from cello strings and key fanning from the piano.

Simplicity doesn’t enter the equation on TOOT’s Two Another Timbre At14. Here the Bebop chops trumpeter Axel Dörner exhibits in Monk’s Casino are transmogrified into disembodied brass sound pulses, the better to meld with the quivering wave forms and undercurrents from Thomas Lehn’s synthesizer and the cries, retches and mumbles which make up the unconventional oralization of British vocalist Phil Minton.

Minton’s style of anti-singing, which encompasses duck quacks, yodeling, basso growls and strangled yelps, reduces vocal expression to its most basic. So does the trumpeter, whose expression mostly consists of flat-line air forced through the horn’s body tube, reductionist breaths and circumscribed grace notes. Abstract on their own, Lehn’s sound envelopes hold the improvisations together with pulsating signals and electric-piano-like sprinkles.

Evolving chromatically or contrapuntally, Toot’s soundworld is pointillist, but not cynosure. Despite Minton’s strident throat extensions, his gibberish sprouting is put into context when mated with the others’ outpourings. Purring timbres and ring modulator-like whooshes from the synthesizer create a connective undercurrent, while Dörner’s excursions into muted grace notes confirm the in-the-moment status of the improvisations.

Even more instantaneous is Aki and The Good Boys’ Live at Willisau Jazz Festival Jazz Werkstatt JW 049. One “good boy” prominent on this CD by Aki Takase – the Japanese-born, Berlin-based pianist – is bass clarinetist Rudi Mahall, who shares the front line in Monk’s Casino with Dörner. Serendipitously enough, Takase is Von Schlippenbach’s wife. Looser than the other CDs’ programs, Live cannily subvert American jazz and German folksongs. Takase’s compositions are harmonically and melodically sophisticated. They also have sufficient space for her keyboard forays ranging from high-frequency tinkling, to metronomic pulsing. Added are flutter-tongued, altissimo and vamping exchanges between Mahall and Amsterdam-based reedist Tobias Delius. Scattered among the tunes are four Mahall-composed miniatures which lighten the mood and extend the color palate. “Dreimal Durch” for instance, conflates an uneven pulse, spidery piano arpeggios and unison horn trills.

The bass clarinetist’s reed bites, spetrofluctuation and tongue slaps help define Takase compositions such as “Todays Ulysses” which also showcases her metronomic patterning and contrasting dynamics. Here, Mahall scooping concentric notes from his horn’s bottom causes Delius to unleash responsive honks and slurs.

In contrast to these exercises in group interaction, bassist Jan Roder – whose solid rhythm is the rock on which Monk’s Casino rests – goes it alone on Double Bass Jazzwerkstatt 037, unveiling multiple strategies as his modulated plucks alternate with metronomic inventions plus abrasive bow scratches. “Naŭ” captures slaps, pulls and thumps. “Ses” deals with staccato, strident and subterranean double-stopping – one texture resembles pooch barks, another is airily melodic. Then there’s “Kvar”, which uses crumpled paper placed among the strings to create rattling noises that upticks to sul ponticello creaks. The piece concludes with adagio note clusters executed with guitar-like facility.

Each musician excels as a stylist on his own. Toronto can experience them together as Monk’s Casino at the Church of the Reeder as [art of the TD Canada Trust Jazz Festival on June 26.

-- For Whole Note Vol. 14 #9

June 1, 2009

Jan Roder

Double Bass
Jazzwerkstatt JW 037

Aki Takase & The Good Boys

Live at Willisau Jazz Festival

Jazz Werkstatt JW 049

Alexander Von Schlippenbach

Friulian Sketches

psi 08.07

TOOT

Two

Another Timbre At14

Extended Play: Alexander Von Schlippenbach and his band mates

By Ken Waxman

One European jazz pacesetter since the late 1960s, German pianist Alexander Von Schlippenbach’s groups showcase different aspects of his broad interests. Together for over 35 years, his trio with saxophonist Evan Parker and drummer Paul Lovens features improvisers attuned to each other’s thinking. Predating that, The Globe Unity Orchestra herds outstanding Continental soloists into cooperative big band arrangements. His Monk’s Casino quintet – filled out by German players about 25 years younger than Schlippenbach, 71 – offers a unique take on Thelonious Monk’s oeuvre. Its members also score on individual projects, like these CDs.

Able to display the quirky kernel of Monk’s moods elsewhere, on

Friulian Sketches psi 08.07, Von Schlippenbach personalizes jazz chamber music, seconded by Amerian cellist Tristan Honsinger and Italian clarinetist Daniele D’Agaro, The 20 inventions are airy and pleasant, and never do the bel canto flourishes trump innate creativity. For example on “Capriccio” skewed Monkian tropes give way to broken-octave chording and strummed cadenzas from the pianist – both formalist and funky. In contrast the cellist’s tremolo squeaks open up into multi-string exhibitionism, while D’Agaro’s reed quivers with lyrical currents.

Moderato throughout, tunes are frequently jolted by the clarinetist’s high-pitched glissandi or liquid portamento. Take “Antifonia” where D’Agaro’s tones are matched by the pianist’s organic patterning plus a stop-time interlude from Honsinger. Altering their instruments’ tessitura as they play, the three keep the restrained sounds from becoming simplistic by including rhythmic plunks from cello strings and key fanning from the piano.

Simplicity doesn’t enter the equation on TOOT’s Two Another Timbre At14. Here the Bebop chops trumpeter Axel Dörner exhibits in Monk’s Casino are transmogrified into disembodied brass sound pulses, the better to meld with the quivering wave forms and undercurrents from Thomas Lehn’s synthesizer and the cries, retches and mumbles which make up the unconventional oralization of British vocalist Phil Minton.

Minton’s style of anti-singing, which encompasses duck quacks, yodeling, basso growls and strangled yelps, reduces vocal expression to its most basic. So does the trumpeter, whose expression mostly consists of flat-line air forced through the horn’s body tube, reductionist breaths and circumscribed grace notes. Abstract on their own, Lehn’s sound envelopes hold the improvisations together with pulsating signals and electric-piano-like sprinkles.

Evolving chromatically or contrapuntally, Toot’s soundworld is pointillist, but not cynosure. Despite Minton’s strident throat extensions, his gibberish sprouting is put into context when mated with the others’ outpourings. Purring timbres and ring modulator-like whooshes from the synthesizer create a connective undercurrent, while Dörner’s excursions into muted grace notes confirm the in-the-moment status of the improvisations.

Even more instantaneous is Aki and The Good Boys’ Live at Willisau Jazz Festival Jazz Werkstatt JW 049. One “good boy” prominent on this CD by Aki Takase – the Japanese-born, Berlin-based pianist – is bass clarinetist Rudi Mahall, who shares the front line in Monk’s Casino with Dörner. Serendipitously enough, Takase is Von Schlippenbach’s wife. Looser than the other CDs’ programs, Live cannily subvert American jazz and German folksongs. Takase’s compositions are harmonically and melodically sophisticated. They also have sufficient space for her keyboard forays ranging from high-frequency tinkling, to metronomic pulsing. Added are flutter-tongued, altissimo and vamping exchanges between Mahall and Amsterdam-based reedist Tobias Delius. Scattered among the tunes are four Mahall-composed miniatures which lighten the mood and extend the color palate. “Dreimal Durch” for instance, conflates an uneven pulse, spidery piano arpeggios and unison horn trills.

The bass clarinetist’s reed bites, spetrofluctuation and tongue slaps help define Takase compositions such as “Todays Ulysses” which also showcases her metronomic patterning and contrasting dynamics. Here, Mahall scooping concentric notes from his horn’s bottom causes Delius to unleash responsive honks and slurs.

In contrast to these exercises in group interaction, bassist Jan Roder – whose solid rhythm is the rock on which Monk’s Casino rests – goes it alone on Double Bass Jazzwerkstatt 037, unveiling multiple strategies as his modulated plucks alternate with metronomic inventions plus abrasive bow scratches. “Naŭ” captures slaps, pulls and thumps. “Ses” deals with staccato, strident and subterranean double-stopping – one texture resembles pooch barks, another is airily melodic. Then there’s “Kvar”, which uses crumpled paper placed among the strings to create rattling noises that upticks to sul ponticello creaks. The piece concludes with adagio note clusters executed with guitar-like facility.

Each musician excels as a stylist on his own. Toronto can experience them together as Monk’s Casino at the Church of the Reeder as [art of the TD Canada Trust Jazz Festival on June 26.

-- For Whole Note Vol. 14 #9

June 1, 2009

TOOT

Two
Another Timbre At14

Jan Roder

Double Bass

Jazzwerkstatt JW 037

Aki Takase & The Good Boys

Live at Willisau Jazz Festival

Jazz Werkstatt JW 049

Alexander Von Schlippenbach

Friulian Sketches

psi 08.07

Extended Play: Alexander Von Schlippenbach and his band mates

By Ken Waxman

One European jazz pacesetter since the late 1960s, German pianist Alexander Von Schlippenbach’s groups showcase different aspects of his broad interests. Together for over 35 years, his trio with saxophonist Evan Parker and drummer Paul Lovens features improvisers attuned to each other’s thinking. Predating that, The Globe Unity Orchestra herds outstanding Continental soloists into cooperative big band arrangements. His Monk’s Casino quintet – filled out by German players about 25 years younger than Schlippenbach, 71 – offers a unique take on Thelonious Monk’s oeuvre. Its members also score on individual projects, like these CDs.

Able to display the quirky kernel of Monk’s moods elsewhere, on

Friulian Sketches psi 08.07, Von Schlippenbach personalizes jazz chamber music, seconded by Amerian cellist Tristan Honsinger and Italian clarinetist Daniele D’Agaro, The 20 inventions are airy and pleasant, and never do the bel canto flourishes trump innate creativity. For example on “Capriccio” skewed Monkian tropes give way to broken-octave chording and strummed cadenzas from the pianist – both formalist and funky. In contrast the cellist’s tremolo squeaks open up into multi-string exhibitionism, while D’Agaro’s reed quivers with lyrical currents.

Moderato throughout, tunes are frequently jolted by the clarinetist’s high-pitched glissandi or liquid portamento. Take “Antifonia” where D’Agaro’s tones are matched by the pianist’s organic patterning plus a stop-time interlude from Honsinger. Altering their instruments’ tessitura as they play, the three keep the restrained sounds from becoming simplistic by including rhythmic plunks from cello strings and key fanning from the piano.

Simplicity doesn’t enter the equation on TOOT’s Two Another Timbre At14. Here the Bebop chops trumpeter Axel Dörner exhibits in Monk’s Casino are transmogrified into disembodied brass sound pulses, the better to meld with the quivering wave forms and undercurrents from Thomas Lehn’s synthesizer and the cries, retches and mumbles which make up the unconventional oralization of British vocalist Phil Minton.

Minton’s style of anti-singing, which encompasses duck quacks, yodeling, basso growls and strangled yelps, reduces vocal expression to its most basic. So does the trumpeter, whose expression mostly consists of flat-line air forced through the horn’s body tube, reductionist breaths and circumscribed grace notes. Abstract on their own, Lehn’s sound envelopes hold the improvisations together with pulsating signals and electric-piano-like sprinkles.

Evolving chromatically or contrapuntally, Toot’s soundworld is pointillist, but not cynosure. Despite Minton’s strident throat extensions, his gibberish sprouting is put into context when mated with the others’ outpourings. Purring timbres and ring modulator-like whooshes from the synthesizer create a connective undercurrent, while Dörner’s excursions into muted grace notes confirm the in-the-moment status of the improvisations.

Even more instantaneous is Aki and The Good Boys’ Live at Willisau Jazz Festival Jazz Werkstatt JW 049. One “good boy” prominent on this CD by Aki Takase – the Japanese-born, Berlin-based pianist – is bass clarinetist Rudi Mahall, who shares the front line in Monk’s Casino with Dörner. Serendipitously enough, Takase is Von Schlippenbach’s wife. Looser than the other CDs’ programs, Live cannily subvert American jazz and German folksongs. Takase’s compositions are harmonically and melodically sophisticated. They also have sufficient space for her keyboard forays ranging from high-frequency tinkling, to metronomic pulsing. Added are flutter-tongued, altissimo and vamping exchanges between Mahall and Amsterdam-based reedist Tobias Delius. Scattered among the tunes are four Mahall-composed miniatures which lighten the mood and extend the color palate. “Dreimal Durch” for instance, conflates an uneven pulse, spidery piano arpeggios and unison horn trills.

The bass clarinetist’s reed bites, spetrofluctuation and tongue slaps help define Takase compositions such as “Todays Ulysses” which also showcases her metronomic patterning and contrasting dynamics. Here, Mahall scooping concentric notes from his horn’s bottom causes Delius to unleash responsive honks and slurs.

In contrast to these exercises in group interaction, bassist Jan Roder – whose solid rhythm is the rock on which Monk’s Casino rests – goes it alone on Double Bass Jazzwerkstatt 037, unveiling multiple strategies as his modulated plucks alternate with metronomic inventions plus abrasive bow scratches. “Naŭ” captures slaps, pulls and thumps. “Ses” deals with staccato, strident and subterranean double-stopping – one texture resembles pooch barks, another is airily melodic. Then there’s “Kvar”, which uses crumpled paper placed among the strings to create rattling noises that upticks to sul ponticello creaks. The piece concludes with adagio note clusters executed with guitar-like facility.

Each musician excels as a stylist on his own. Toronto can experience them together as Monk’s Casino at the Church of the Reeder as [art of the TD Canada Trust Jazz Festival on June 26.

-- For Whole Note Vol. 14 #9

June 1, 2009

Jazz Brugge

Brugge, Belgium
October 2-October 5, 2008

Pianist Alexander Von Schlippenbach’s German quartet rolled through a set of Thelonious Monk compositions; Sardinians, saxophonist Sandro Satta and keyboardist Antonello Salis liberally quoted Charles Mingus lines during their incendiary set; Berlin-based pianist Aki Takase and saxophonist Silke Eberhard recast Ornette Coleman’s tunes; and the French Trio de Clarinettes ended its set with harmonies reminiscent of Duke Ellington’s writing for his reed section.

All these sounds and many more were highlighted during the fourth edition of Jazz Brugge, which takes place every second year in this tourist-favored Belgium city, about 88 kilometres from Brussels. But sonic homage and musical interpolations were only notable when part of a broader interpretation of improvised music. Other players in this four-day festival came from Italy, Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Hungary, Poland and Belgium. With strains of rock, New music and folklore informing the jazz presented at the festival’s three sonically impressive venues, music at the most notable concerts was completely unique or added to the tradition. The less-than-memorable sets were mired in past achievements or unworkable formulae

Aided by its intimate surroundings, noon-time concerts in the Groening Museum were a model of realized inspiration. Satta and Salis’ duo was particularly remarkable, especially when Salis attacked the piano keys and strings, partially answering the question: What would Cecil Taylor sound like if he was Sardinian?

Salis was no more Taylor, then Satta was Taylor’s saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, but this longstanding partnership created an individual sound. Conveyed on waves of pedal-pressure and low-slung glissandi from the pianist and the saxophonist’s open tone, which melded the delicacy of Paul Desmond and Earl Bostic’s wide vibrato with the split tones, altissimo squeaks and key slaps associated with Free Jazz, selections were as dense as they were lyrical. Salis’ piano produced minuet-reminiscent arpeggios as well as staccato honky-tonk striding. With Satta often cunningly manipulating blues nuances, both abstracted further timbres from their island heritage. Stretching the accordion bellows or hammering at its keypad, Salis foot-stamped and vocalized pseudo-Mediterranean shanties to emphasize further individuality.

Sicilian percussionist Francesco Branciamore showcased his version of tradition- extension a two days later with trombonist and tubaist Giancarlo Schiaffini and France’s Jean-Luc Cappozzo on trumpet and flugelhorn. Cappozzo, whose capabilities range from producing Gabriel-like triplets to breathing hand-muted mellow lines, worked in unison or contrapuntally with Schiaffini. Meantime the low-brass playing Roman moved beyond pedal-point accompaniment to unleash with the same facility, tailgate trombone braying gurgling, vocalized tuba lowing and shrill mouthpiece-only tootles. Branciamore advanced rhythm with wet finger tips slid across drum tops, hand-stopped cymbals, and wrapped up the performance with a Second Line-like backbeat. But that was after the percussionist shifted to the vibraharp for a four-mallet display of repetitive boppish beats, cushioned by Schiaffini’s feather-light tuba blares.

The reeds missing from this performance were present in earlier museum concerts from France’s Le Trio de Clarinettes and the duo of France’s Louis Sclavis on clarinets and soprano saxophone and Italian Francesco Bearzatti on tenor saxophone and clarinet.

Between them, Sylvain Kassap, Armand Angster and Jean-Marc Foltz played clarinets, bass clarinets and contrabass clarinets, frequently in triple counterpoint, other times with one producing a slurping ostinato as the others decorated his lines in lower-case accompaniment. Using circular breathing Foltz, for instance, created dual counter tones with himself. Meanwhile Kassap turned coughing and wheezing into his bass clarinet into shimmering echoes separated by chromatic honks. By the finale, the three moved from key-tapping and microtonal inferences to a replication – lead by Angster’s bass clarinet – of the sort of trio harmonies Ellington favored.

Similarly expressive, Bearzatti and Sclavis maintained a rhythmic cohesiveness as they introduced any number of ornamentations, running from jerky spittle-encrusted vibrations to blaring flutter-tonguing. On soprano saxophone Sclavis favored a flashy Sidney Bechet-style lyricism, while Bearzatti’s clarinet solos included jazzy, mid-range glissandi. Most impressive was a duet which joined shaky mouthpiece quacks as if from a chanter and basso pedal-point drones as if from bellows, to suggest insistent bagpipe-like undulations.

The duo’s performance was better realized than that of Sclavis’ Big Slam Napoli in the Concertgebouw, which matched the two reedists with a rhythm section and rapper Dgiz, who, despite hip-hopping from one side of the stage to the other, easily confirmed that rap-jazz admixtures are best left to performers from North America.

Similarly, French bassist Henri Texier’s sextet, while pumped full of Jazz Messengers-like energy resulting from a front line of trombone, baritone and alto saxophone, mired itself in crunching funk. Relatively faceless in execution, except for the profoundly resonating solos of the leader, the presentation lost its mooring when the band’s drummer was given free rein to unleash the sort of showy pounding firmly moored in Hard Rock.

Branciamore’s percussion facility was more germane to improvised music as were the work of three drummers associated with both bands involving British bassist Barry Guy. Swede Raymond Strid and Briton Paul Lytton guided the 10-piece Barry Guy New Orchestra (BGNO) without beat bluster, while earlier in the evening in the Concertgebouw’s Kamermuziekzaal, Spaniard Ramón López unveiled a similar low-key strategy playing with Agusti Fernández, BGNO’s Barcelona-based pianist, and Guy. Turning the classic jazz piano trio on its head, López’s Iberian rhythms, often expressed with vibrated bells, a sound tree, a triangle and ratchets, defined the tunes. Meanwhile Guy used a short stick plus his bow to hew unexpected stressed chords from his strings as well as plucking animated arpeggios. With Catalan-styled voicing periodically demanding he stretch crab-like across the keys, Fernández outlined clipped and insistent chording to steer the pieces astride the jazz tradition.

Filled out with a EU impov whose’s who – baritone saxophonist Mats Gustafsson and tubaist Per Åke Holmlander from Sweden, German trombonist Johannes Bauer, British saxophonist Evan Parker, Swiss clarinetist Hans Koch and one American – trumpeter Herb Robertson – the BGNO was an object lesson in showcasing individual improvisations within a notated score. Conducting as he played, Guy sometimes directed the reed and horn sections to cross pollinate each other’s cumulative vamps in canon fashion. Then it was his own forceful string twangs, Fernández’s targeted slides and pumps plus vibrating cymbal color and unexpected tutti crescendos that provided the performance’s bonding musical glue.

Interjecting individual theme variations were, among others, Parker’s flutter tonguing and chirping tenor saxophone, Koch’s wispy scene-setting bass clarinet puffs and blistering triplets from Robertson. Throbbing on top of a configuration of bass clarinet, tuba and baritone saxophone, the piece reached its climax following diminishing drum beats and hunting-horn-like yodels from the trombone. Heraldic trumpet tattoos and low-pitched piano lines signaled tension release and conclusion.

One reason the BGNO performance was satisfying was because players created variations on a previously recorded Guy orchestration. Mutating familiarized themes in another fashion was less notably expressed by Von Schlippenbach’s Monk’s Casino band and Takase and Eberhard’s Ornette Coleman Anthology set. Although bass clarinetist Rudi Mahall fused exuberant altissimo and split tone playing with the ability to duck walk across the stage; and trumpeter Axel Dörner fused triplest and a blues tonality in his solos impresssiverly, overall the Von Schlippenbach four crammed too many 78-rpm-length Monk themes into the set that would have lost focus if not for the powerful walking bass of Jan Roder. Similarly the Takase/Eberhard duo substituted Coleman’s innate quirkiness for readings that straightjacketed the alto man’s tunes into standard head-variation-solo-recap formula. It felt as if the two bands presented the Classic Comics or Reader’s Digest version of advanced jazz.

All and all though, Jazz Brugge’s pluses overwhelmed its minuses, setting up high expectations for 2010’s fest.

-- Ken Waxman

-- MusicWorks Issue #103

March 28, 2009

Alexander Von Schlippenbach-Globe Unity Orchestra

Globe Unity - 40 Years
Intakt CD 133

Schlippenbach Trio

Gold Is Where You Find It

Intakt CD 143

More than 70 years old, pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach is one more proof of Steve Lacy’s adage that “free jazz keeps you young”. A professional musician since 1962, Berlin-based Schlippenbach has maintained his level of creativity in various contexts, most prominently in the trans-European Globe Unity Orchestra (GUO) and his trio with saxophonist Evan Parker and drummer Paul Lovens.

Consistency may be another attribute of quality as well as metaphoric youthfulness, since these CDs – one celebrating the GUO’s 40th birthday and the other recorded in the year of the Schlippenbach Trio (ST)’s 35th anniversary – confirm that the pianist and his associates are still on top of their game(s).

Taking them one by one, death and disagreements have taken their toll on the GUO’s personnel, but the 15-piece aggregation – sans bass player like the ST – holds to the high standards set by its predecessors. Mixing older compositions with newer pieces, such as the pianist-composed title track, solo space is given to every band member, who range from GU veterans such as trumpeter Kenny Wheeler and multi-reedist Gerd Dudek to newbies such as American trombonist Jeb Bishop and French trumpeter/flugelhornist Jean-Luc Capozzo.

Some of tracks are practically bagatelles, with the real meat in the more lengthy explorations. Still there is period charm in the rhythmic punctuation, complete with screaming high-note trumpet lines – likely from Capozzo – that enliven “Bavarian Calypso”’s cacophonous polyphony. Plus “Nodago”, a reflective showcase for Wheeler, who composed it, proves that the old Woody Herman-Stan Kenton-style big band backing can be legit. Nonetheless, the late British trombonist Paul Rutherford manages to counter nostalgia here with a burbling multiphonic solo that contrasts contralto and basso tones.

A close cousin to the calypso is Steve Lacy’s “The Dumps”. Thelonious Monk-like in its interpretation it features oomph-pah-pah brass, slithering reed timbres and high-frequency rolling chording from Schlippenbach. Here Dudek expels a continuously breathed circular soprano saxophone solo with more grit than Parker brings to similar outputs. Bishop’s slippery slide positions and tongued pressure layer the backing along with Capozzo’s mouse squeaks and behind-the-beat grace notes, which are given further impetus by Lovens’ cymbal spanks and rim shots. In contrast, Dörner’s concluding knitted capillary tones appear to leech sound as much from metal stress and throat scraping as from what is pushed through the bell.

Another showcase, Wilem Breuker’s “Out of Burtons Songbooks”, from 1973, makes obvious the GU’s early style-spanning. The processional piano introduction could have been lifted from a chamber recital, while Schlippenbach’s subsequent exchanges with Dudek outline the sort of interdependent dissonance that seems a lot closer to Joe Henderson’s and Herbie Hancock’s work for Blue Note, then contemporary European experimentation. In-the-moment interface is thus left to Bishop and bass clarinetist Rudi Mahall’s whack-a-mole-like duet, where smears, vibratos and trills in all registers are immediately answered and intensified.

Still the GU’s 21st Century identity is made clearest on the pianist’s title composition. Fabricating the piece from drum pops, brass plunger tones, slurred reed chirps, zig-zag trumpeting and irregular triplets from the piano, serendipitously its resolution involves members of the ST. Schlippenbach is appropriately staccato and cross-handed in his playing; Lovens wallops cracks, drags and crashes his percussion; while Parker unleashes hummingbird-swift sliding, slurping and triple tonguing. Trombonist George Lewis’ side-to-side slurs and doubled tongue flutters extend the line still further.

Gold Is Where You Find It’s title tune provides an equivalently definitive description of the 21st Century ST. Coupled with the subsequent “K. SP”, it exposes the trio strategy of tick-tock wooden drags and positioned licks plus cymbal pops from Lovens; echoing strummed piano chords plus bowed, twanged and stopped prepared piano strings from Schlippenbach; and squeezed irregular note clusters and unstated squeaks and breaths form Parker.

Like the GU, the trio improvisations obliquely refer to antecedents as well as the future. For instance, there’s a section on “Three in One”, when Schlippenbach’s key-clipping is so obviously Monk-like – the American pianist is an admitted influence – that Parker’s continuously uncoiling chirps and split-tone asides start to resemble the tenor saxophone styling of Johnny Griffin. Meanwhile the pianist circles through a variety of chord and cluster coloration as cascading high-energy feints and fills share space with wriggling note clusters and off-handed patterns.

“Cloudburst” – not the Lambert-Hendricks & Ross vocal showcase – in instead a moody nocturne where circumspect tenor saxophone timbres meet rebounds, pops and temperate cymbal lacerations, with the tune accelerating in andante increments, until it climaxes in kinetic cadenzas from Schlippenbach as well as tough saxophone cadences from Parker.

Finally there’s “Z.D.W.A.”, the impressive group improvisation that begins this recital. Balanced on Lovens’ distinctive locution of rolls and rebounds plus irregular cymbal shattering, the pianist expresses himself in different styles and tempos. Moving from dreamy romanticism to rolling stride in his solos, bass pedal pressure and chord clusters gradually give way to playful double-timing. Similarly Parker’s tongue-slapping and tone-scraping attain his characteristic line-and-pattern extensions before downshifting with the others to cumulative silence.

Extrapolating Parker’s composition title “Three in One”, the Schlippenbach Trio has maintained its power over many years by sympathetically amalgamating each other’s skills. What’s more, even with a constantly shifting cast, the Globe Unity has performed a similar task. Perhaps then it’s this organizational flair, along with his choice of compositions, and situations that welcome new ideas, which accounts for the pianist’s musical youthfulness.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: Globe: 1. Globe Unity forty years 2. Out of Burtons Songbooks 3.Bavarian Calypso 4. Nodago 5. The Dumps 6. The Forge

Personnel: Globe: Axel Dörner (trumpet); Jean-Luc Capozzo, Manfred Schoof and Kenny Wheeler (trumpet and flugelhorn); George Lewis, Paul Rutherford, Johannes Bauer and Jeb Bishop (trombone); Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky (clarinet, alto saxophone and flute); Evan Parker (soprano and tenor saxophones); Gerd Dudek (soprano and tenor saxophones, clarinet and flute); Rudi Mahall (bass clarinet); Alexander von Schlippenbach (piano) and Paul Lovens and Paul Lytton (drums).

Track Listing: Gold: 1. Z.D.W.A. 2. Slightly Flapping 3. Amorpha 4.Gold is Where you Find it 5. K. SP 6. Monkey’s Fist 7. Lekko 8.Cloudburst 9. Three in One 10. The Bells of St. K.

Personnel: Gold: Evan Parker (tenor saxophone); Alexander von Schlippenbach (piano) and Paul Lovens (drums).

November 25, 2008

Peter Brötzmann

Alarm
Atavistic ALP257CD

Brötzmann/Mangelsdorff/Sommer
Pica Pica
Atavistic ALP258CD

Two more valuable CD reissues of Wuppertal, Germany-based saxophonist Peter Brötzmann’s work for FMP in the 1980s once again show his versatility. One disk offers proof positive that the hard-driving reedist can easily hold up his side in an all-star trio configuration, while the other shows how he helps spark aural fireworks in a nonet situation.

Ironically the aptly-named Alarm almost ended up being more than a fanciful “blast from the past”. This Hamburg radio gig with a multi-national cast of nine Free Jazzers had to be interrupted after the 40 odd minutes captured on the disc were recorded because a phoned-in bomb threat meant that the audience, technicians and musicians had to quickly evacuate the hall.

Lacking the extra-musical drama of the other date, Pica Pica is just as incendiary, with Brötzmann playing tenor, baritone and alto saxophones and tarogato as one part of a little-recorded trio. His front-line partner is veteran trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff, then in the most experimental phase of his long career, but the real surprise is the presence of Günter “Baby” Sommer on traps set and horn. Like Han Bennink of the Netherlands –

Brotz’s usual percussion partner – Sommer is an all-around drum master. Unlike Bennink, he resides in East Berlin, on the other side of the then-existing wall, so he was just starting to interact with non-East Block players.

You couldn’t tell that from this session. Sommer’s tambourine shuddering cymbal raps, intense cross sticking and triplet flams and rattles add heaving tension to the tunes, which take on new dimensions when he releases the beat. As the trombonist and reedist bluster away on two long improvisations and the short title track, Sommer contributes blunt polyrhythms, using sticks, brushes, palms and fists to provide vivid brush strokes of aural color. The jokey and jittery “Pica, Pica” makes the greatest use of the drummer’s faux parade-drill timing. But his harsh ruffs and bulldozer-like press rolls are in evidence throughout.

Rotating among his horns like a mini-reed section Brötzmann spins from steady air raid siren glossolalia on alto to inchoate, near bagpipe-like timbres on tarogato and slurry and smeary reed undulations on baritone. His characteristic stratospheric glottal punctuation is often evident, as are his mouse-squeaking altissimo tones. Once, when he seems to be soloing on two different horns, it becomes apparent that the secondary timbres are from Sommer’s horn.

Articulating chromatic grace notes and whinnying plunger tones, Mangelsdorff’s triple-tongued slurs make common cause with the saxophonist’s staccato phrasing. Often accompanying as well as soloing, his pedal-point lilt sneaks in a common Bop riff at the end of “Wie Du Mir, So Ich Dir Noch Lange Nicht” to keep the proceedings on track as the piece downshifts to muted harmony.

Triple the brass, reed and rhythm on Pica Pica, and you approximate the cacophonous polyphony that arises during Alarm’s extended title track. Surprise at this explosion is a moot – but definitely not a mute – point when you consider the other players. The rhythm section is made up of German Free Jazz big band leader Alexander von Schlippenbach on piano plus two European-domiciled South African expatriates, bassist Harry Miller and drummer Louis Moholo. Brass was Japanese trumpeter Toshinori Kondo – who would reunite with Brötz for the Die Like A Dog band in the 1990s – and two trombonists: modern gutbucket stylist, East German Johannes Bauer, and British trombonist Alan Tomlinson, who was also a member of the London Jazz Composers Orchestra.

Joining Brötzmann on reeds is Willem Breuker from the Netherlands, then (1981) closer to his Free Jazz roots than his later composerly stance; plus American tenor saxophonist Frank Wright, a first generation New Thinger then part of the burgeoning Yank jazzmen-in-Europe-Diaspora.

Driven by the dense and unyielding rhythm section – that in Miller’s case also encompasses shuffle-bowing tremolo and stretched sul ponticello jetes – the massed band exposes the robust theme, variations of which are utilized by the horn section as linking motifs that connect the solos. And what solos they are.

Von Schlippenbach is at his most manic, turning high-intensity pummeling into a metronomic fantasia of exaggerated note clusters and patterns. Kondo contributes half-valve squeezes and brassy slurs, while the stop-time dual trombone theatrics include guttural, spittle-encrusted blasts and metal-scraping concussive expansion.

Not that the reedists are outdone. Except for an off-kilter, a capella raggedy march – is it a mess call or a mail call? – the majority of the saxophone timbres undulate almost physically. Parlando and flutter tonguing, each of three saxmen at times gets involved in double counterpoint with an individual brass player until hyper-fast piano motifs push the tune forward. Slip-sliding, roller-coaster-like coils and twists are expressed by both horn families, as are snorting, basement-level expositions and shrill altissimo timbres. Eventually the high-level pan-tonality gives way to conclusive slurs.

While it’s difficult to isolate individual soloist, there’s no doubt that it’s Wright who sings the jivey lyrics to his own brief “Jerry Sacem”. A rhythmic blues, the undemanding melody and Moholo’s backbeat easily speed the audience outside the studio without anyone being panicked about the purported bomb threat.

Luckily this part of the concert was preserved. It, along with the other CD fills in some gaps in European Free Jazz history. But both are exhilarating listening as well.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: Alarm: 1. Alarm Part 1 2. Alarm Part 2 3. Jerry Sacem

Personnel: Alarm: Toshinori Kondo (trumpet); Johannes Bauer and Alan Tomlinson (trombones); Willem Breuker (alto and tenor saxophones); Peter Brötzmann (tenor and alto saxophone); Frank Wright (tenor saxophone); Alexander von Schlippenbach (piano); Harry Miller (bass) and Louis Moholo (drums)

Track Listing: Pica: 1. Instant Tears 2. Wie Du Mir, So Ich Dir Noch Lange Nicht 3. Pica, Pica

Personnel: Pica: Albert Mangelsdorff (trombones); Peter Brötzmann (tenor, baritone and alto saxophones and tarogato) and Günter “Baby” Sommer (drums and horn)

November 14, 2006

QUARTET NOIR

Lugano
Victo cd 096

SCHLIPPENBACH/DUNMALL/ROGERS/BIANCO Vesuvius
SLAMCD 262

Serendipitously recorded eight days apart, these mixed Euro-American quartet CDs with similar instrumentation couldn’t be more different – and that statement encompasses a lot more than personnel or geography.

Matching one of the founders of German Free Jazz with three younger, London-based improvisers is VESUVIUS, an all-out recording session firmly in the Energy Music genre. LUGANO, which is described as “a suite in three movements”, is as much minimalism as Free Improv, with the three Europeans and one American consolidating a series of understated timbres and waveforms into a collection of tones. Amazingly – or perhaps not – both CDs reach the goal of positive music making, though admittedly LUGANO’s are more micro.

Quartet Noir’s partnership goes back at least to 1998, though French bassist Joëlle Léandre, Swiss drummer Fritz Hauser and his countryman, tenor and soprano saxophonist Urs Leimgruber earlier played together in a trio formation. Léandre has also partnered American pianist Marilyn Crispell in other circumstances. LUGANO germinates slowly as if it was a blossom slowly unfolding.

Speed up the camera work, like a Walt Disney nature film showing flowers blooming in seconds, and simultaneously crank up the volume, and you replicate the other CD. A first-time recording in this configuration, it hooks up British tenor saxophonist Paul Dunmall and bassist Paul Rogers – two-quarters of the Mujician band – with German pianist Alexander Von Schlippenbach, whose usual reed partner is Evan Parker. Extra man is New York-born, London-based drummer Tony Bianco. Considering Bianco is probably the only percussionist to have backed blues-rocker Edgar Winter, rock’n’roller Chuck Berry and pianist Keith Tippett – Mujician’s leader – he’s obvious up for anything.

And up he has to be in this fast company. The four hit the ground running – like Israeli commandos during the Entebbe raid – and don’t let up during the two, more-than- 29 minutes and almost-35 minute, selections that make up VESUVIUS.

From the beginning Von Schlippenbach kinetically chords cadenzas on the piano keys plus stretching and scraping the internal mechanism, as Dunmall honks, smears, slurs and spits glottal timbres. As the saxman continuously outputs altissimo trills and honks plus tart split tones, Rogers involves himself with patterned strums and their echoes, as well as harmonic finger-picking, done a cappella. Midway through the first piece the pianist’s cascading pedal-propelled fills are backed by cymbal slaps and layered flams and ruffs from the drummer

On both tracks Dunmall stretches and varies the tempos as the backing from Rogers – with whom he sometimes plays in duo – moves from strumming and bridge rattling to rubber-band like plucks. Once Von Schlippenbach sets up a combination of external organic melody and scraping and stopping of the internal string nodes, the staccato movement brings forth irregular arco pulsing from the bassist and a splayed vibrato from the saxman. Although the pianist is interconnecting chords and notes like a metronome, he’s knowledgeable enough about keyboard dynamics that each note is outlined and voiced properly no matter how quickly he plays. By the final variation of the second tune, as Rogers’ bass notes rise from cross-sticking fury caused by the pressure on Bianco’s kit, they form a level ostinato on which Dunmall’s flutter-tongued and pitch-vibrated improvisations meet up with the adagio ricochets from the piano’s stopped internal strings and outward tremolo notes.

Evolving with as many silences and pregnant pauses as notes, LUGANO’s first section may be almost 32 minutes long, but it’s likely that the band on VESUVIUS sounds as many notes in five minutes of either of its improvisations as Quartet Noir does on this, the CD’s lengthiest track. Throughout the Noir four seem to rely on timbres that are sensed as much as heard.

The overriding sonic at the beginning is a splintered whistle from Leimgruber’s reed that connects organically with sul ponticello and skittering bass movements and agitato drum rumbles, rim shots and bounces. With the sideband signals vibrating as much as the expressed textures, the track nearly concludes before a recognizable reed arpeggio is heard. Although Crispell strums the odd chord, her contribution is so low frequency as to seem unvoiced.

Throughout, the four sometimes reconfigure themselves into two duos – drums and piano plus sax and bass – until Part III. Finally the scrapes and stops on cymbal tops and cascading piano glissandi that have infrequently appeared before, transform from disconnected tones into melody. Nut-cracker-like pops from the drummer and Madwoman-like, speaking-in-tongues from Léandre suddenly solidify. As the bassist harmonizes in a cracked bel-canto voice along with louder, serpentine split tones from Leimgruber, Hauser spatters beats from his cymbals and Crispell contributes chordal excursions externally and from inside strings that sound as if they’re propelling cymbals placed on top of them. Then everything fades away.

Within a little more than one week in October 2004 two methods of modern quartet improv were exposed on these discs. Each is equally valid.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: Vesuvius: 1. Salamander 2. Leviathan

Personnel: Vesuvius: Paul Dunmall (tenor saxophone); Alexander Von Schlippenbach (piano); Paul Rogers (7-string A.L.L. bass); Tony Bianco (drums)

Track Listing: Lugano: 1. Lugano (suite en 3 movements)

Personnel: Lugano: Urs Leimgruber (tenor and soprano saxophones); Marilyn Crispell, (piano); Joëlle Léandre (bass); Fritz Hauser (drums)

May 29, 2006

SCHLIPPENBACH TRIO

Compression: Live at Total Music Meeting 2002
a|l|l 011

EVAN PARKER/MARK SANDERS/JOHN COXON/ASHLEY WALES
Trio with Interludes
Treader trd002

Free Music’s paramount concern is in constantly making it new. Incongruously, though, this freshness as often results from the faith improvisers have in the abilities of longtime collaborators as from musicians experimenting with new players and novel instruments.

COMPRRESSION and TRIO WITH INTERLUDES aptly demonstrate these opposing stratagems in discs featuring veteran BritImproviser Evan Parker. The first is yet another masterful performance by Parker on soprano and tenor saxophones and the two German musicians who have made up this trio since the early1970s: pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach and Paul Lovens on selected drums and cymbals.

The other matches Parker and British percussionist Mark Sanders, with whom he has recorded in other circumstances, with John Coxon on Roland MKS 80, grand piano, harpsichord, National Trojan guitar and riveted tambour. Coxon and Ashley Wales make up the electronic remix duo Spring Heel Jack, which has put together some cut’n’paste sessions for Parker and other British and American improvisers in the past. Yet this sound investigation has Coxon and his somewhat idiosyncratic instruments joined with the other two to make up an improvising trio on seven tracks. Six intermingled interludes sound as if Coxon plus Wales on piano, bass drum, riveted tambour and flannel (sic) are performing their version of studio improv without imput from the other two.

Despite the 12 notated cues, COMPRRESSION is one continuous performance from the 2002’s Total Music Meeting in Berlin and shows what can be accomplished when the improvisers involved know each other’s every move. Parker, von Schlippenbach and Lovens collectively do what they do best, and like, say, a Modern Jazz Quartet performance – although a lot less formal – you simply add another chapter to the volume that has been their collective legacy since the 1970s.

Passing what in conventional music would be the lead role between the saxophonist and the pianist, Parker on tenor saxophone slashes through the polyphonic barrier with snarky hard blowing and split tones, molding themes and variations as he sees fit. Double-tonguing, it often seems as if two separate reed lines are being developed and harmonized, a technique he carries over to the soprano, though the smaller horn also encourages breathtaking circular breathing, shading every note as the swerving long-lined smears and arpeggios permeate von Schlippenbach’s and Lovens' vibrant contributions.

More melodic than he has been in the past, the pianist varies his touch from feather-light to anvil-hard at different points. Sometimes he comes up with recital-fashion low-frequency chording, other times his contrasting dynamics are such that he appears to be finding the sort of hyperkinetic contrasting dynamics that characterized many early Free Jazz keyboardists.

Improvising in broken octaves and polyharmonically hasn’t altered von Schlippenbach’s links to the tradition, however. If his cadences seem to arise from a prepared piano at points, his note clusters also take on the pulses of raggy Stride other places – his admitted influence Thelonious Monk was a Stride man himself. Logical internal swing is always present, and there’s a point right near the top where for a brief moment it sounds as if he’s quoting from “Just a Gigolo”, coincidentally a tune Monk recorded as a solo feature.

Content to bell-ring and cymbal-resonate for propulsion, most of the drummer’s accompaniment centres on timed clatters and thumps. There’s also a point where it appears that Parker’s narrowness of tone has thinned to such an extent that it’s been reduced to pennywhistle-like shrills. But considering Lovens’ singing saw can produce similar timbres, very likely the carpenter’s tool made an unexpected stage appearance. As that pitch enters the sound field the result is sort of reductionist polyharmony. Whether voiced that way or with frantic polyphony, the end result impresses both the audience and the listener.

Equally impressive is the work on TRIO WITH INTERLUDES, though, to be honest, most of the interludes that clock in around the one minute mark could have been excised. With one exception, they’re reminiscent of commercial breaks on television dramas, interludes which display Coxon’s and Wales’ prowess with legato grand piano chording, sluiced electronic intervals or scraped steel guitar whines, but which are vestigial to many tunes’ plot lines.

Far more germane is how Parker’s protracted circular breathing and harsh vocalized slurs, a well as Sanders’ wriggling cymbal licks and drum rolls are combined with live and processed oscillations for novel and imaginative textures. At points the cross-modulation and filter resonance causes Coxon’s analogue synthesizer to produce irregular, mosquito-buzzing timbres on its own. More commonly, sluicing or slurred reed tones match up with resonating plucks from the electrified harpsichord or float upon clouds of organ-setting resonances.

Another strategy is when low-frequency, mechanized wave forms are replaced by squirming calliope-patterning from the keys – the better to mix with light snaps and back-of-brush taps from the drummer and in counterpoint with lips smacks and cheeky thwacks from the reedist. Some of the foghorn slurs heard may be Parker in the flesh, yet others are electronic interface, reflecting back his already-created saxophone lines into the mix.

While glottal punctuation, irregular body tube vibrations and tongue slaps can alternately collide with or maneuver through cymbal clacking and irregular ruffs from Sanders as well as the careening caffeinated runs from and fluttering waves of Game boy-like clamor from Coxon, congruence puts the tones to better use.

On one, more-than-8½-minute track, the contrapuntal qualities are brought into highest relief. Sideboard distortions are patched with keyboard arpeggios so that the resulting warm bubbling tones meet head on with rappelling overblowing that produces skittering growls. When the drummer’s off-handed cymbal thwacks are added, the layering adds up to perfect cohesion regardless of its electronic or acoustic qualities.

Previously Parker’s electro-acoustic adventures have taken place in larger group contexts, but the seven trio improvisations here prove he can work in diminutive fashion as well. Furthermore, the dozen tracks of COMPRRESSION demonstrate that his acoustic interface hasn’t suffered either.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing Compression: 1. Yes Bishop... yes, yes! 2. Variations on G 3. All the Things You Are (Paraphrase dvs/pi) 4. Tantrum 5. Ayre 6. Bang In... 7. Bird of the Year 8. Compression 9. Glow 10. Singles 11. Insistence 12. It had to be

Personnel Compression: Evan Parker (soprano and tenor saxophone); Alexander von Schlippenbach (piano); Paul Lovens (selected drums and cymbals)

Recorded live at Total Music Meeting 2002

Track Listing: Interludes: 1. 4.14 2. 1.03 3. 7.42 4. 1.13 5. 8.33 6. 1.30 7. 7.02 8. .41 9. 7.53 10. 04.50 11. 2.48 12. 1.10 13. 3.22

Personnel: Interludes: Evan Parker (tenor saxophone); John Coxon (Roland MKS 80, grand piano, harpsichord, National Trojan guitar, riveted tambour); Ashley Wales (piano, bass drum, riveted tambour, flannel) and Mark Sanders (drums and percussion)

and percussion)

September 26, 2005

Northern Sun, Southern Moon, Europe’s Reinvention of Jazz

By Mike Heffley
Yale University Press

By Ken Waxman
July 23, 2005

Gifted with an imaginative thesis – the migration of innovative free music from the African-American community of the United States and its adoption and mutation by Europeans – Mike Heffley’s book encompasses interviews, analysis, musicology and philosophical concepts. Unfortunately, the academic emphasis makes some of it a hard slog for the lay reader. Often non-linear, as benefits a book on Free Jazz, the narrative is so discursive at points that it resembles those John Coltrane solos where the variations so outdistanced the theme as to almost make the head an afterthought.

Heffley, who has a PhD in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University, has over the past quarter-century worked as a writer and editor – his previous (1996) book was The Music of Anthony Braxton – as an educator, teaching both music and creative writing, and as an improvising trombonist, most prominently with Braxton.

Northern Sun, Southern Moon is the first comprehensive English language study of what Heffley terms Euro Jazz’s Emanzipation; the period after 1960s when local jazz musicians went beyond the previously paramount American influence to shake off centuries of Western music conventions and create unique sounds. As French, bassist Didier Levallet says: “With the advent of free jazz the breakdown of forms believed to be eternal opened the door to all possibilities … the lesson the ‘new music’ taught us was to finally become ourselves”. Taking his cues from psychiatry and sociology as well as musicology, Heffley describes the change as empowerment or more theatrically “kill the fathers”.

Although the book’s subtitle is Europe’s Reinvention of Jazz, the author’s attention is more focused. While he devotes some space to innovations in the rest of Europe, including the former Eastern Bloc, his concentration is on Germany, both its western, and – most definitely before the fall of the Berlin Wall – its eastern section. Described by some as a Utopia of Free Jazz, Germany was where entire Outside Music festivals flourished while even individual concerts were sparsely attended elsewhere in Europe.

A series of socio-political considerations were responsible for this situation, explains Heffley, who intertwines the growth of the seminal Free Jazz label FMP plus mini-portraits of about a dozen or so pioneering Free Jazzers to make his point. According to his thesis – which is buttressed or diverted by secondary information, so frequently do multiple footnotes decorate these pages – Germany, at least since J.S. Bach, has been the centre of Europe, and thus of contemporary serious music.

Brushing off the assertion that one Free Jazz centre, Germany’s Ruhr Valley region, was with its agricultural economy and peasant population “something like the American South”, he’s on firmer ground when he points out that African-American saxophone and brass traditions that fed directly to jazz – and gave German musicians a base against which to rebel – itself grew out of the brass bands prominent in the U.S. before the beginning of the 20th century. Fascinatingly, the loudest and most accomplished players then were of German origin, he states.

After the Second World War, when Nazi xenophobia tainted previously glorified Teutonic music associations, the German tradition of self-criticism dating back to Goethe found an outlet in improvised sounds. Simultaneously a strain of anti-Americanism, which reached a pitch in the 1968 leftist student uprising throughout the continent, and especially in Germany, solidified this focus on distinctive Free Jazz.

These manifestations took different forms, as his profiles attest. German trombone master Albert Mangelsdorff, for instance, started off as a mainstreamer, and after a free flirtation, has returned to his roots. Pianist Joachim Kühn, whose church musician associated upbringing in Leipzig historically links him to Bach, mixes a strain of romanticism into his work – an outgrowth of a long residency in France. His earliest recorded work bordered on free form and he is the only pianist to have recorded in duo with Free Jazz avatar saxophonist Ornette Coleman. But – and Heffley’s linkages between Bach and Coleman gives weight to this – it’s likely the Texas saxophonist valued Kühn for his non-Free Jazz conception. Certainly most of his other work has bounced among modern New music, jazz-rock and contemporary jazz with so-called classical inferences. Interestingly enough, both Mangelsdorff and Kühn achieved American fame long before any of the others profiled here.

More generic to the tome are the careers of saxophonist Peter Brötzmann and pianist/band leader Alexander von Schlippenbach, who are among the founding fathers of West German Free Jazz. Schlippenbach, like vibist/reedist Günter Hampel, who also figures in the tale, was one of the German hard boppers converted to free sounds in the 1960s; and who has stayed true to them ever since. Spiritual and philosophical, his Globe Unity Orchestra, which has existed on-and-off for three decades, was a non-hierarchical, collective big band dedicated to the universality of Free Music, matching organized arrangements with the talents of Europe’s top improvisers.

With influences ranging from pan-Germanism and other ethnic sounds, contemporary classical echoes and standard jazz – as a pianist Schlippenbach was impressed by Oscar Peterson as well as Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor – the band’s performances and records were as often frustrating as triumphant. Mostly now the pianist concentrates on trio work with British saxophonist Evan Parker among others.

Referring to Brötzmann, Parker has said “… the music [is an] expression of a way of life. On-stage, off-stage, it’s all one thing: an intensity of experience which has to be communicated. Peter embodies that...”

If anyone symbolically couples what the author calls “the barbaric spirit of the Northern forests” that flourished in German pre-history with the unbridled freedom of avant jazz, than it’s the Wuppertal-based saxophonist. Growing up in what was then a small town removed from the action, Brötzmann’s involvement in leftist politics and the Fluxus art movement helped him evolve “a sound so big and dirty that one note implied within it all the notes in the octave”. His first LPs, Machine Gun and For Adolphe Sax, defined his – and many other Continental improvisers’ – go-for-broke, try-anything aesthetic, which in a multitude of settings from solo to big band with fellow international players, he’s maintained until today.

The heart and most fascinating part of the book however, is shaped around telling the back-story of the members of East Berlin’s Zentral Quartet: pianist Ulrich Gumpert, self-described Saxon drummer Gunter “Baby” Sommer, saxophonist Ernst-Ludwig Petrovsky and trombonist Konrad Bauer, who started as a rock singer with a large youth audience which, incredibly, he brought along with him to free music.

Facing a pseudo-Stalinist culture that supported so-called socialist realism like sanctioned Gebraunchmusik or “useful music” over free expression, their situation was much different than that of Free Jazzers in prosperous West Germany. Paradoxically this led to government support as often a repression, since jazz was as often seen as reflecting a cry against racism and decadence, with its Nazi era echoes. Fittingly, Heffley explores the pre-free roots of East German jazz in comprehensive details, mentioning almost-forgotten gigs, LPs, band leaders, art, literary and threatre influences and visionary soloists.

“East Germans were not only less worried about being seen as imitators of Americans, they were also less guilt-ridden about their own German history,” he writes. When translated into free music, this added a Teutonic strain – a variation of East German blues – “Afro-Slavic soulmating” plus a use of old Germanic hymns as a basis for improvisation – that had been ignored and self-suppressed by West Germans. With visits by Western players and East-West collaborations more common, regular concerts broadcast on the state-supported radio networks and series of East German LPs on FMP available, East German musicians’ profiles rose. Acclaim and steady work, first in Eastern Bloc countries, then West Germany and the rest of Europe eventually appeared.

Although theoretical Gumpert states “for me there is no such thing as GDR [German Democratic Republic i.e. East Germany] jazz” the situation for free jazzers in the GDR changed with unification. With Western commerce in all its manifestations replacing state support, Gumpert and Petrovsky, the later of whom said ironically before the fall of the Berlin wall that jazz musicians “didn’t have enough problems”, are now often mere jobbing musicians, the later concertizing with his pop-jazz-gospel singing wife. Sommer has a teaching position and often tours, whereas Bauer is a festival fixture throughout Europe and North America.

“It does seem clear that Petrovsky and Gumpert enjoyed relatively more fulfillment than frustration of their gifts in the GDR, that Sommer and Bauer were more chafers at the bit, and that the latter are having an easier time of it now that the bit is removed”, Heffley notes.

Leaving aside this important reportage and analysis, the rest of Northern Sun, Southern Moon, links to earlier sections and becomes progressively more theoretical and academic. Seemingly intent on wrapping every musical current into the volume, Heffley uses German bassist Peter Kowald’s many international musical alliances as the lead-in to a necessarily cursory discussion of non-Western improv and its links to earlier Western music. “It seemed to me that the more people try to make something that is new to them, the further back they go into the depths of time, to the old, in their own sphere”, he writes. This theory however, sounds like it could be the basis for an entire other volume of work.

Like Petrovsky and Gumpert in their milieu, it appears that the author has “relatively more fulfillment than frustration of [his] gifts” when writing about the GDR than the twists and turns of Free Jazz as part of the global commercial music business.

Additionally a thickset of charts, graphs and tables begins haunting the pages around this time. Earlier on, and in these sections, his discursive detours into historical, social, political and cultural contexts of the music slows down the narrative, and as the chapters unroll the non-specialist begins to feel guilty for not possessing a thorough knowledge of the theories of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin among many others. Especially in the expository, rather than the descriptive sections, Heffley sometimes falls prey to cumbersome overwriting. For instance, one obtruding run-on sentence is 138 words [!] in length. Furthermore words like “hetarchy”, “individuation” and “liberatory” aren’t in most persons’ vocabularies. Conversely, although at times they distract from the narrative, Heffley’s minute analysis of important Free Jazz sessions adds to the significance of this volume.

At his best – when dealing with German free music – Heffley has produced a ground-breaking and insightful volume. Non-specialists may wish however, that there wasn’t so much rococo decoration around its solid core.

July 25, 2005

EVAN PARKER TRIO & PETER BRÖTZMANN TRIO

The Bishop’s Move
VICTO cd 093

A extraordinary face off between veteran improv titans or as they prefer to say at the Victoriaville festival, un première mondiale, this meeting combines British saxophonist Evan Parker’s touring group with German reedist Peter Brötzmann’s Northern American band. More of a rapprochement than a battle royal, the 73½-minute session, recorded live at Quebec’s Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville in 2003 categorically accentuates the similarities rather than the differences between the two improv power trios.

Could it be otherwise? Although Parker is famous for highly technical extended reed techniques like everlasting circular breathing, and Brötzmann is portrayed as the emotional, heart-on-his-sleeve Free Jazzer, they’ve collaborated at various times since the late 1960s. Parker, for instance, is on the German saxophonist’ seminal MACHINE GUN session in 1968. Brötzmann’s association with German pianist Alexander Von Schlippenbach, here officially as part of the Parker band, goes back even further and is more intense, since the two were initial members of the Globe Unity Orchestra. Parker recorded with New York bassist William Parker of Brötzmann’s trio in pianist Cecil Taylor European Orchestra in 1988. Only percussionists Paul Lytton, a Belgium-dwelling-Briton, and Hamid Drake of Chicago don’t have an extended history of playing with members of the other bands or each other. But considering both are among the most prominent on-call drummer in the global improv scene, connections have long been made.

That said, while “The Bishop’s Move” is a notable piece of high-intensity improv, there are only patches of interaction between members of the different trios, let alone among all six musicians at once. Customarily one threesome plays alone, followed by another triad grouping. Most of the time its Von Schlippenbach’s characteristic solos cum accompaniment that bridge the gap between both bands, especially when reed extravagance is highlighted.

Both woodwind players widen the playing field with distinctive slurs and snorts, after the initial Brötzmann renal explosion commences the onslaught. Shortly after the primary statement though, Parker’s trio takes centrestage. Mixing the saxman’s slurring, quacking counter tones and irregular vibrations with the pianist’s contrasting keyboard dynamics and high intensity fantasia of splayed notes, the section turns on Lytton’s pinpointed shattering clatter. Shadowing Parker -- his playing partner of 30-odd years -- the drummer uses cymbal snaps and snare rumbles to modulate the saxophonist’s timbres from elongated, repetitive snarls to the whorls and sprints of circular breathing.

Unexpectedly the pianist’s low frequency tremolos and descending runs not only reinforces a less programmed approach from Parker, but also help orchestrate a Free Jazz, rather than Free Music orientation. With the reedist pitch-vibrating and tongue-stopping, the three display triple counterpoint, each expressing complementary but very separate lines.

Von Schlippenbach’s resounding recoils from the piano innards test the instrument’s balanced tension and abrasively signal Brötzmann’s entry, first with a broken counter line to Parker, then almost immediately, with screaming altissimo and extenuated smeary honks. Power chording from the pianist also overcomes the faint thump of Parker’s bass, until Drake’s ratcheting snares and the pop of hollow percussion moves the sound into the other trio’s corner. Abrasively stroking his hourglass-shaped djembe and other surfaces with sandpaper-like swipes, Drake’s interlude, coupled with an interjection of metronomic arpeggios from the pianist, sets up the German reedist’s utilization of the tarogato for oddly accented, serpentine lines. Added to this is constant ascending pressure points from the bassist.

After Brötzmann’s distinctive choked screams and triple-tongued action finally brings out a split-second of screaming flattement from Parker’s sax, the German-American trio reconfigures itself. Drake’s African-oriented cavernous djembe reverberations serve as the perfect counterweight to the mellow, European-oriented chirrups Brötzmann produces from his clarinet. True to his reputation however, the German reedist is soon exploring the register above coloratura, making incursions to nephritic territory. When he quiets down though, hearty, iron-fingered pizzicato plucking is evident along with restrained portamento color.

Climax is reached as both saxophonists display their idiosyncratic tenor tones, the German snorting and the Briton flutter-tonguing. On top of the bassist’s shuffle spiccato and Drake’s cross sticking, they draw closer together, ejaculating screaming overtones that wouldn’t have been out of place in the militant days of 1968. Egged on by

dynamic patterns from Von Schlippenbach, the two echo one another’s note-placement in the instant composition’s penultimate minutes, with the finale a cross patterning of the pianist’s cadenzas and restrained breaths from the saxophones that fade to dead silence.

Subsequent tumultuous applause characterizes how exciting the ride has been, with only crotchety reviewers eager for more distinct trio interaction.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. The Bishop’s Move

Personnel: Evan Parker (soprano and tenor saxophones); Peter Brötzmann (tenor saxophone, tarogato, a-clarinet); Alexander Von Schlippenbach (piano); William Parker (bass); Paul Lytton (drums and percussion); Hamid Drake (drums, djembe and percussion)

March 28, 2005

PARKER/SCHLIPPENBACH/LYTTON

America 2003
psi 04.06/7

Free Music pioneers -- reedist Evan Parker, pianist Alexander Von Schlippenbach and percussionist Paul Lytton -- would never think of making an “in the tradition” record. Yet this two-CD souvenir of the trio’s 2003 American tour can be heard as the band’s “jazz” record.

Not that anyone plays “Satin Doll” or “Hothouse” or lays down proper bebop riffs. It’s just that within the parameters of individual expression that the three have developed over the years, you can hear echoes of honking R&B saxmen from Parker and boogie-woogie bluescians from Schlippenbach.

An accidental adjustment when Parker and Lytton’s longtime partner, bassist Barry Guy, couldn’t make the tour, the trio fuses two-thirds of that band with two-thirds of the Parker/Schlippenbach group, usually filled out by drummer Paul Lovens. The unexpected results, recorded in New Orleans and Seattle, appear to have produced novel variations. Not only are there trio bits and designated solo spots from the pianist and saxophonist, but there are also sections where the focus is on a Parker-Lytton duo or a Schlippenbach-Lytton duet.

Exposing modern-primitivism, a tune like “To avoid monotony” features low- intensity piano arpeggios that suggest a modern Jimmy Yancy, while the saxist’s jagged snorts and echoing, raw phrases could come from Buddy Tate, early in his career in the Southwest. Lytton’s heavy wooden sticks then add a low rumble from the drum skins.

Solo, Schlippenbach creates a sidelong, rippling effect, along with piano patterns that only graze bebop through affiliation with the individualistic approach of Thelonious Monk, one of the form’s originators. “This blowing of trumpets confused them” finds the recurrent Monkish cast particularly notable, after the pianist begins the piece moving from dark, internal registers to mock, child-like chording exercises. Light-toned swirling cadenzas, backed by the flams and rebounds of Lytton’s snares turn to quicker and quicker chords after Parker enters three-quarters of the way through with a keening soprano line that sounds vaguely Middle Eastern. Eventually it supersedes both the drummer’s rumbles and crashes and the pianist’s note patterning.

More instructively, “No one wanted to be an artist but every man wanted to be paid for his labours” suggests McCoy Tyner’s work with John Coltrane, as Parker’s more straightforward, leaping reed line leavened with smeary overblowing meets up with modal, high-intensity chording from Schlippenbach. Fleet-fingered, and with reflective voicings, the pianist piles arpeggios onto arpeggios and follows cadenzas with cadenzas.

Making the sound even more contemporary, internal preparations distinguish the pianist’s playing from his jazz forefathers on “Perhaps this was his chance”. On this tune especially, the allusions to aluminum pie plates vibrating on the piano strings melds with Parker’s spectral reed whistling and distant squeaks. As the reedist extends his circular breathing on soprano sax, the combination of his timbres and the metallic crashes from piano innards almost bounce off the venue’s walls.

That’s one thing Lytton’s sensitive accompaniment doesn’t do. Alternating contrasting pressure and dynamics, his percussion positioning ranges from tiny, timed links from slapping single bells or hollow wood blocks to the focused rattles, smacks and pops of so-called modern jazz drumming.

Circular breathing that produces one lyrical tone then a harsher, obtuse overtone from Parker, plus churning cadenzas and accelerating chord connections from Schlippenbach aside, another reason AMERICA 2003 is so interesting is the even more novel techniques the veterans introduce.

“I had a friend among the angels” demonstrates this aptly as over a semi-martial beat from Lytton and Schlippenbach’s vibrating preparations, Parker’s slurs and flutter tonguing skirts past screech mode. Besides tongue slaps his elongated output soon become almost trumpet-like -- muted with near plunger tones.

Jazz, boogie woogie, atonality, free music, whatever… In this configuration Parker, Schlippenbach and Lytton build an unanticipated novel sound from the sum of their techniques, backgrounds and future ideas.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. CD1: 1. Rejoicing in their hearts over the journey 2. Ask to be taken on as a trumpeter 3. This blowing of trumpets confused them 4. What memories of the past were recalled! 5. Perhaps this was his chance 6. To avoid monotony CD2: 1. No one wanted to be an artist but every man wanted to be paid for his labours 2. The breath of coldness 3. Are you strong enough for heavy work? 4. I had a friend among the angels 5. Down with all those who do not believe in us

Personnel: Evan Parker (soprano and tenor saxophones), Alexander Von Schlippenbach (piano); Paul Lytton (percussion)

January 31, 2005

Carlos Bechegas/Peter Kowald

Open Secrets: A Suite in 13 Parts
Forward

Carlos Bechegas/Alexander Von Schlippenbach
Open Speech
Forward.Rec

By Ken Waxman

September 27, 2004

Going mano à mano with two of the founder of European Free Music -- German division -- is no challenge for the faint-hearted, especially when your opposite number is packing a double bass or a grand piano respectively, and your only weapons are a couple of small metallic flutes.

But Lisbon-based Carlos Bechegas has the talent and technique to hold his own in these situations. Listening to these duo dates, recorded four years apart, you hear how his playing has evolved still further since the first meeting. The output is more confident and his delivery more relaxed, yet building on the high standard he already set.

On the 13-part suite that makes up 1999’s Open Secrets, Bechegas’ partner is the late bassist Peter Kowald (1944-2002). On the five cuts on Open Speech -- recorded in 2003 -- it’s pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, who knows a thing or two about wind instruments, having worked in trio formation with saxist Evan Parker for more than 30 years.

On the 2003 session, Bechegas uses vertically blown physicality and a staccato attack to give his playing a rough, buzzy quality as well as soaring, skittering aviary timbres. Using all his keyboard resources, Schlippenbach responds in kind.

“Speech II”, for instance, begins with the pianist exploring a dark, left-handed dynamic of broken octaves as the flautist sluices down the scale with an airy touch and flies in double-tongued circles around piano cadenzas. This spherical theme is echoed by Schlippenbach with dramatic, vibrating accents. On his own, Bechegas, shrills flutter- tongued double counterpoint, then, a cappella, wheezes out drones from the mouthpiece. For a finale, the pianist pummels clusters of heavier accented notes, while a sly Stride reference give them extra vibrations.

With Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s re-imagining of the flute one aspect of Bechegas’ vocabulary, Schlippenbach uses piercing staccato lines filled with skittering vocalizing and emotion to reveal his influences as well. A long-time Monk fancier, on “Speech V”, Schlippenbach’s full-force ringing pressure and repetitive cadenzas bring the older American pianist’s style into focus. That’s in advance of a climax that features the reedist scatting wordlessly between flute breaths and the keyboardist outputting prestissimo.

Choruses of throaty, grumbling mouth sounds, glottal stops, buzzing Bronx cheers plus aviary twitters and whistles -- not to mention rhythmic foot stamping -- are a part of Bechegas’ novel presentation. Elsewhere, though, he proves he can caress mellow whole tones as easily as succinct sharp breaths.

Schlippenbach’s on-and-off introduction of foreign objects onto his strings alternately produces harpsichord echoes or the rattle and clank that would result if an aluminum pie plate was thrown along the bottom board. This shows that he appreciate the Portuguese challenger’s style.

So plainly did Kowald, for the veteran bassist exhibits a whole bag full of extended tricks and techniques in his meeting with the flautist.

This is most obvious on Parts 9 through 11, as the bassist suddenly unleashes his characteristic vocal drones, expelling a windstorm of sonorous syllables from deep within his chest. When Kowald’s guttural tones mix with Bechegas’ high-pitched verbal squeals the effect can be likened to the soundtrack for a gory, ghost-ridden Japanese horror flick.

Polyphonic, modulated bass flute harmonies as well as leaping, tones from a higher-pitched metal woodwind are the reedist’s response to this vocalizing, not to mention Kowald’s creation of sul ponticello and sul tasto tremolo timbres.

Throughout, there are as many jaw-loosening technique exhibitions from each man as on the other CD. Bechegas, for one, manages to produce split tones that divide airy embellishments of acute whistles from buzzing low-toned vibrations. Other times he literally giggles through the metal mouthpiece.

Meanwhile, when he’s not intoning basso drones like a demented and defrocked priest, Kowald is ranging over the bass strings, neck, front and practically on the pegs. He uses shuffle bowing and spiccato as much as flat-picked strums. Other times the flautist’s relaxed respiration is met with concentrated string jerks and giant sweeps that suggest an aural cartoon of Hurricane Ivan’s destructive activity.

Still Open Secrets is a lesser effort compared to Open Speech. For a start, the 13 segments mean that duo’s work is dissipated into smaller, less germane segments than in the piano/flute duet. Secondly, four years earlier, Bechegas -- who also dabbles in multimedia and has since concertized with British guitarist Derek Bailey and American bassist William Parker among others -- appears to be less sure of himself. Some of his playing seems a bit frantic as if it was essential to exhibit every one of his unique techniques every time he solos.

Nevertheless both these CDs prove that Bechegas is another Portuguese innovator whose name should be added to the growing list of Iberians populating the ranks of world-class improvisers. Investigate either of these CDs -- especially Open Speech -- and open yourself up to a new flute voice.

September 27, 2004

GIANLUIGI TROVESI OTTETTO

Fugace
ECM 1827

GLOBE UNITY ORCHESTRA
Globe Unity 2002
Intakt CD 086

One potential horror comedians are always joking about is a world where the transportation schedules would be set by the Italians and the restaurants run by the British and Germans.

As humorous as this may sound as a situation, these CDs by mid-sized (eight- and nine-piece) bands shows that remarkable sounds can still result if countrymen act antithetically to their clichéd national characteristics.

FUGACE finds eight legendarily anarchistic Italians settling down for 16 short, arranged improvisations that touch on a variety of genres. Conversely, GLOBE UNITY 2002 features nine supposedly restrained Britons and Germans creating almost 74 minutes of some of the most cacophonous hullabaloo since John Coltrane and 10 other improvisers recorded ASCENSION in 1965.

As a matter of fact, Globe Unity, (the band) has always been in the tradition of all-out passionate expression that characterized 1960s aggregations like the Jazz Composers Orchestra, with the added fillip of being international. Over the years since the band’s first LP in 1966, membership has swollen to a high of 19, with American, Italian, Dutch and Polish musicians included, until it officially disbanded in 1986.

This one-time, live concert reunion 15 years later finds most of the longtime Globers on hand and confirms that the spirit and excitement the band engendered in its lifetime still exists. As well, 30 years on, a serene quantity has crept into some of the playing.

Leader Alexander von Schlippenbach, for instance, may begin the proceedings with intense, emotional, Romantic arpeggios, but during the course of the one long piece here he’ll relax into almost conventional jazz club comping and fills. Then when it comes time for his extended solo, his playing seems more bop-like and connected than the style of his first influence, Thelonious Monk. He uses careful voicing and portamento to glide across the keyboard. Building up tension in the Free Jazz sense with serpentine chords and echoing vibrations, his swiftness can resemble that of a player piano. Yet his unaccompanied coda is near pastoral, well modulated and definitely two-handed.

Trumpeter and, flugelhornist Manfred Schoof, who started off as a German version of a so-called Progressive jazzman, reverts to form in his solo spots. At one point he reveals long-lined patterned and focused grace notes that evolve to note-perfect brassy triplets, at another builds up mellow flugelhorn filigree, which when combined with the backing orchestral figures recall MILES AHEAD.

Others have intensified the way they first played 30 years ago. Evan Parker offers a five-minute plus exhibition of louder and softer circular breathing from his soprano sax, that appears to have an unmistakable bagpipe echo. Meantime fellow Briton, trombonist Paul Rutherford, growls and mumbles and rants within his trombone bell, with his snorts and Bronx cheers finally calling forth dampening metallic rim shot action and cymbal crashes from the dual percussionists. His direct musical descendent, German trombonist Johannes Bauer, also exhibits some double-tongued slurs backed with only piano accompaniment.

Dissonance, in all its ear-wrenching glory still inhabits the playing of the two remaining horn men though: Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky on alto saxophone, clarinet and flute and Peter Brötzmann on tenor saxophone, tarogato and clarinet. One reedist -- though likely not Parker -- ejaculates some split-tone altissimo squeaks near the beginning of the extended piece, the likes of which haven’t been heard since the heyday of Giuseppi Logan. Much later, peeping tarogato timbres meet up with woody bass clarinet tones, arching from dog-whistle to bird trilling territory.

Then there’s a point just past midway where the “Ascension”-style total band hubbub slackens to expose a protracted series of screeches and multiphonic blasts from the tenormen. The yells and applause from the audience makes it appear that for it, this was the highpoint equivalent of Paul Gonsalves’ protracted solo on Duke Ellington’s “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blues” at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival.

As all this is going on, the proper tempo for clangorous explosions and feather light interludes is provided by the Pauline duo on percussion -- England’s Paul Lytton and Germany’s Paul Lovens.

Trovesi’s Ottetto features two drummers as well, but that’s about the only symmetry between the two sessions. Old enough -- he was born in 1944 near Bergamo -- to be part of the Globe Unity generation, multi-reedist Trovesi mixed his jazz with studio work earlier in his career. Part of the first generation of Southern European musicians to assert themselves internationally, Trovesi is known for his folklore-tinged work with trumpeter Pino Minafra, and membership in the all-star Italian Instabile Orchestra, which also includes ex-Globe Unity trumpeter Enrico Rava.

Like his other octet sessions though, FUGACE resides in a space of its own, where traditional Italian operatic drama coexists with improvisation, and where the references include veteran local comic Totò as well as Louis Armstrong. Thus on the three-part “Totò nei Caraibi”, as the pizzicato plucking of the three string players suggests a cartoon cat sneaking across the horizon, other sounds form the band reference a funeral march and echo calypsos.

In the same way, “Ramble” begins with a note-perfect Dixieland emulation with the drummers exercising their kits with ratamacues and a clip-clop rhythm like duple Baby Dodds, as Trovesi on clarinet makes like Baby’s older brother -- and Armstrong associate -- Johnny. But trumpeter Massimo Greco reaches for augmented notes too modern for Satchmo, the clarinet is soon trilling in a modernistic folk style reminiscent of Jimmy Giuffre, and you’d never hear Marco Remondini’s arco cello slices anywhere in Trad Jazz. Blasts from trombonist Beppe Caruso, who leads his own fine brass band, form a countermelody that doubles and triples the tempo until the end.

In contrast to the Globe Unity veterans, the reedist’s is a younger band, made up in the main of musicians who have played with him for about a decade. With Remondini and percussionist Fluvio Maras adding electronics to the mix the Trovesi Eight proffers some unique textures, including a series of linking interludes that sound as if they were created on an electrified harpsichord that snuck in from a Yardbirds session. Thus while Trovesi may sometimes echo Benny Goodman and the unison string section get a bit overwrought in the 1,001 strings tradition, plenty of other slants arise as well.

“Blues and West” for instance, starts off with enough reverb from the electronica and electric bass slaps plus monochromic drumming to make it sound like a rock band has invaded the studio. In between riffing horns, Trovesi on alto creates some cosmic bop-inflected squeals and Greco plays a soaring, slurred trumpet line. “Canto di lavoro” goes in the opposite direction. It starts off with an Armstrong-like trumpet cadenza, introduces chalumeau clarinet trills and finishes with a sound that ping-pongs from outer-space whistles from the electronics, and someone, somehow -- perhaps the top strings of the electric bass -- producing a quivering Jimi Hendrix-like electric guitar distortion.

Massed horn riffs often appear to be half banda and half James Brown’s horn section, Trovesi’s split tone can often take on a distinctive Arabic inflection and the dual backbeat, if from hand drums, can be as much Savannah as Sardinia.

Improvised music has become such an all-encompassing category that a group can perform in a variety of ways to produce outstanding music, despite national clichés. Globe Unity and the Ottetto demonstrate two excellent versions of these methods.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: Fugace: 1. As strange as a ballad 2. Sogno d’Orfeo African Triptych: 3. Wide Lake 4. Scarlet Dunes 5. Western Dream 6. Canto di lavoro 7. Clumsy dancing of the fat bird 8. Siparietto I 9. Blues and West 10. Siparietto II 11. Il Domatore 12. Ramble 13. Siparietto III 14. Fugace 15. Siparietto IV 16. Totò nei Caraibi

Personnel: Fugace: Massimo Greco (trumpet, electronics); Beppe Caruso (trombone); Gianluigi Trovesi (alto saxophone, piccolo, alto clarinets); Marco Remondini (cello, electronic); Roberto Bonati (bass); Marco Micheli (bass, electric bass); Fluvio Maras (percussion, electronics); Vittorio Marinoni (drums)

Track Listing: Globe: 1. Globe Unity 2002

Personnel: Globe: Manfred Schoof (trumpet, flugelhorn); Paul Rutherford and Johannes Bauer (trombones); Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky (alto saxophone, clarinet, flute); Peter Brötzmann (tenor saxophone, tarogato, clarinet); Evan Parker (soprano and tenor saxophones); Alexander von Schlippenbach (piano); Paul Lovens and Paul Lytton (drums)

December 1, 2003

ALEXANDER VON SCHLIPPENBACH TRIO

Pakistani Pomade
Atavistic Unheard Music Series UMS/ALP240CD

Asked at one point in the mid-1980s to name his favorite trio disc, British saxophonist Evan Parker cited this 1972 session with Germans, pianist Alexander Von Schlippenbach and drummer Paul Lovens, initially recorded for FMP.

That’s not surprising. For at a time when most of the attention on the American jazz scene was focused on the few moments of pure improvisation that showed up in the earliest incarnations of fusion bands like Weather Report and Return to Forever, this disc shows Europeans expanding the improv tradition in their own way.

This reissue adds four additional tracks to the original LP, which, while bringing the time up to proper CD length, merely sound like studio sketches for the previously released compositions. The two eye-openers 30 years ago --and which remain so today -- are the title track and the 10-minute “Moonbeef”.

“Pakistani Pomade” (the composition), involves a high-intensity, cyclical piano part which finds Von Schlippenbach’s alternating his earlier, near-boppish Thelonious Monk-like style with swift Cecil Taylor-influenced feints and runs. Parker contributes bird-like chirps and split tones that turn to out-and-out croaking and squealing as the tune evolves, while Lovens concentrates on his cymbal work and a tambourine rattle.

Trilling long lines and squeals characterize Parker’s work on “Moonbeef”, but the renal squeaks, wiggling lines and rolling spit tones hadn’t yet consolidated into the characteristic circular breathing that define much of his playing today. Instead he seems more intent on eviscerating his horns from the inside, a quality also more related to the playing of his New Thing antecedents than he would exhibit today. The pianist on the other hand, still resembles a restrained CT, definitely two-handed, with one steamrolling over the keys as the other pounds out syncopated chords one after another. Lovens varies his attack as they go along, at one point creating half-tone rolls, elsewhere producing metallic clicks from his cymbals and other times sounding conga-drum rhythms. The last happens in the penultimate moments of the tune, when Von Schlippenbach constructs a fantasia of tremolos and glissandos, including what sounds like a foray onto the strings themselves.

At other times Parker outputs tiny squeaks from within his horn as well as creating accented split tones that almost sound like what fellow Brit reedist John Butcher plays today. Still in the experimental stage, his breathing exercises are of a shorter duration, higher pitched and with a much thinner tone than they now exhibit. He does display a few altissimo squeaks that sound like retching or infant cries, however. The overall effect is distinctive, but definitely retro in this context.

Lovens is perspicacious, sometimes extending 1960s stridency with the rub of abrasive material against drum kit parts, but more likely to make his point with the subtle ping of brushes against his cymbals.

As for the pianist, cadenzas and strumming piano chords are on show, often played allegro, so that the drummer must scramble to keep up with him. Yet, especially in the instructive previously unreleased tracks, his playing sounds more quote, traditional, unquote, than he probably wanted to exhibit in those proto-revolutionary times.

On the second-to-last and final pieces for instance, he’s involved with repetition and a high-intensity rubato attack featuring plenty of vibrating overtones. Here the Monk influence is particularly strong, with echoes of the American’s fondness for stride piano and blues changes creeping into his solo. A Charlie Rouse-style balladic aside from Parker and a bounce cadence from the drums really puts things into Monk-orbit. Perhaps it’s these jazz-styled sounds that convinced the players that this track and the three other newly discovered ones shouldn’t be released in 1972.

No matter, appended to the original PAKISANI POMADE, the four provide instructive fodder for musicologists and followers of any of the three musicians. And, as Parker himself indicated, on its own, the original disc remains a wholly satisfying landmark of free improv.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. Sun-Luck Night Rain 2. Butaki Sisters 3. A Little Yellow (including Two seconds Monk) 4. Ein Husten für Karl Valentin 5. Pakistani Pomade 6. Von “G” Ab 403-418 7. Moonbeef 8. Kleine Nülle, Evergreen 9. Pakistani alternate #1 10. Pakistani alternate #2 11. Pakistani alternate #3 4. Pakistani alternate #4

Personnel: Evan Parker (soprano and tenor saxophones); Alexander Von Schlippenbach (piano); Paul Lovens (drums)

August 18, 2003

MANFRED SCHOOF

European Echoes
Atavistic Unheard Music UMS/ALP 232CD

ALEXANDER VON SCHLIPPENBACH
The Living Music
Atavistic Unheard Music UMS/ALP 231CD

Multi-reedman Peter Brötzmann always insists that when pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach and trumpeter Manfred Schoof first heard his pioneering free jazz band in the mid-1960s “they just laughed their asses off. At that time they played the Horace Silver-style thing”. But, by the end of the decade as Brötzmann widened his circle to include other experimenters like Dutch drummer Han Bennink and worked with American jazzers like trumpeter Don Cherry and soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, his fellow Germans began to come around as well.

They began to come around to such an extent that by 1969 Schlippenbach and Schoof were recording the outside session showcased on these discs, both of which featured international casts, definitely including Brötzmann and Bennink. Since that time the pianist has maintained his free jazz affiliation, most notably in a long-running trio with British saxophonist Evan Parker, who is also on EUROPEAN ECHOES. The trumpeter, on the other hand, sticks more to a mainstream style, when he isn’t writing and playing contemporary classical music.

Recorded first THE LIVING MUSIC was an indirect nod to Julian Beck’s experimental Living Theater group that had recently set up shop in Europe. It was also a smaller-sized version of Schlippenbach’s on-again-off-again-massive Globe Unity Orchestra (GUO), with British trombonist Paul Rutherford and Bennink joining the five Germans players.

In a way it’s those two, as well as Brötzmann, who are most impressive on this session. The trombonist who had already worked with London’s Spontaneous Music Ensemble and GUO and would go on to play throughout Europe, is credited with the invention of trombone multiphonics. Here his avant-gutbucket tone intertwines among the other instruments, stylistically neighing in his way like Tricky Sam Nanton did with Duke Ellington’s band. Using what sound like a regular kit expanded with a marimba, a thumb piano, a massive Oriental gong and who knows what else, Bennink has more percussion on hand than Ellington’s flashy Sony Greer ever had.

Like Greer, he uses it judiciously, however, smashing, banging and thumping enough to bring the discordant darker toned instruments together. At times, though, when the pianist attacks the keyboard with particular ferocity, Bennink become even more bellicose, becoming Sunny Murray to Schlippenbach’s Cecil Taylor.

However, since he began playing professionally almost at the same time as CT, Schlippenbach is more a Thelonious Monk man. As a matter of fact, his introductory solo on “Tower” has a pianistic conception that’s definitely Monk-like. Furthermore, despite Brötz’s overblowing -- no Charlie Rouse he -- and Bennink’s relentless pounding, the pianist’s nearly 11½-minute composition sounds like one of the tunes recorded by those mid-sized Monk ensembles.

Schlippenbach’s cadences and arpeggios are less adventurous elsewhere, especially when Schoof, on cornet, takes the lead. Influenced at that time as much by Ted Curson and other freeboppers as Cherry, the brassman’s “Wave” suggests The Jazz Messengers playing Ornette Coleman. Vying with swinging, foreground percussion, Schoof’s solo is all flourishes, fanfares and note building, facing counterpoint from the saxophone section and Rutherford’s smeared lines. Elsewhere, the British brassman combines with Bennink for exercises in free march time and otherwise -- perhaps aided by Niebergall’s little-heard bass trombone -- stacks up against the buzzing saxophones and relentless percussion with elongated tones that sometimes sound like the braying of animals.

Throughout, Brötzmann is a holy terror, pumping out notes as if from a machine gun and asserting himself more than anyone else. On one occasion he explodes into a cappella multiphonics, then works his way down his horn, tossing out variations on the theme as he goes along. Although as part of the Schoof Quintet and later on with his own band and work with Lacy, Luxembourg-resident Michel Pilz would be quite well known, he’s oddly reticent here. Only on the cornettist’s Stan-Kenton-meets-Don-Cherry arrangement of “Past Time” do his tart clarinet tone make any impression.

On the other hand, nearly every one of the 16 musicians present gets some solo space on EUROPEAN ECHOES, another of Atavistic’s FMP Archive Edition, recorded two months after Schlippenbach’s CD under Schoof nominal leadership.

It seems nominal because a soon a the fist drum beats echo through the studio, by means of the dual percussion of Bennink and Swiss drummer Pierre Favre, it’s obvious that this almost 32-minute composition is going to be some wild ride. Appropriately named, the disc features all the player on the first CD save Pilz plus Parker and German tenorist Gerd Dudek on saxophones; Italian Enrico Rava and Dane Hugh Steinmetz on trumpets; Fred Van Hove from Belgium and Irène Schweizer from Switzerland on pianos; British guitarist Derek Bailey and bassists Peter Kowald from Germany and Arjen Gorter from Holland.

With the examples of controlled chaos that other large ensembles like New York’s The Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, GUO and Brötzmann’s “Machine-Gun” band already created, this disc is most valuable providing aural views of important EuroImprovisers early in their career. Diffident Bailey, for instance, creates some wild, almost rock-oriented electric picking here with such vigor that it overwhelms the dual drummers. A far cry from his present persona as a balladeer, Rava produces some brassy, Don Ayler-like shakes. Meanwhile the triple keyboardists seem to be reconstituted as Cecil Taylor triplets, although during the course of the piece, one -- likely Schweizer -- offers up some inside piano harp glisses, along the lines for which she would later be better known.

Another small big band session that may have been on everyone’s mind at the time was John Coltrane’s less-than-five-years-old ASCENSION. Facing off against one another with cymbals and snares, flams, press rolls and march beats, Favre and Bennink are no Rich vs. Roach but suggest Elvin Jones times two. Additionally, some of the piano chording relates more to McCoy Tyner’s work with Trane than Taylor’s. All three trumpeters appear to be trying to see who can squeal the highest in bugle range as the theme is elaborated, though the plucked bass parts -- when they surface from the din -- may be more advanced than what Art Davis and Jimmy Garrison played on ADSCENSION. Dudek, Parker Brötzmann too generate enough screaming split tones to match Trane’s, Archie Shepp’s and Pharoah Sanders’ multiphonics on ASCENSION, often spitting out several bent notes simultaneously. Finally, as musical shards explode all over like bombs at an anarchist rally, the massed ferment builds to a combative crescendo, ending with the sustained single cymbal echo.

Too young or distanced to have experienced the excitement of 1960s’ Free Jazz? These two discs are the next best thing to being there.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: European: 1. European Echoes Part 1 2. European Echoes Part 2

Personnel: European: Manfred Schoof, Enrico Rava, Hugh Steinmetz (trumpets); Paul Rutherford (trombone); Peter Brötzmann, Gerd Dudek (tenor saxophones); Evan Parker (soprano and tenor saxophone); Alexander Von Schlippenbach; Fred Van Hove, Irène Schweizer (pianos); Derek Bailey (guitar); Peter Kowald, Arjen Gorter (basses); Buschi Niebergall (bass and bass trombone); Han Bennink, Pierre Favre (drums)

Track Listing: Living: 1. The living music 2. Into the Staggerin 3. Wave 4. Tower 5. Lollopalooza 6. Past time

Personnel: Living; Manfred Schoof (cornet and flugelhorn); Paul Rutherford (trombone); Peter Brötzmann (tenor and baritone saxophones); Michel Pilz (bass clarinet and baritone saxophone); Alexander von Schlippenbach (piano and percussion); J.B. Niebergall (bass and bass trombone); Han Bennink (drums and percussion)

December 16, 2002

GLOBE UNITY ORCHESTRA

Globe Unity ’67 & ‘70
Atavistic Unheard Music UMS/ALP 223 CD

Souvenirs of a time when “globe unity” meant more than the convergence of commercial or military interests, this CD of never-before-released tracks feature a small army of Euro improvisers luxuriating in the freedom promulgated by John Coltrane’s ASCENSION and The Jazz Composer’s Orchestra.

Formed in late 1966, following a Berlin Jazz Festival commission for founder/pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, the Globe Unity Orchestra (GUO) evolved over the years from this wild-and-wooly Energy ensemble to one that joined other European large groups in a concern for compositions. Besides, many might find that these two pieces, initially taped for German radio, more exciting than what came from the band afterwards.

The more than 34-minute, 1967 performance, for instance, finds the less than a year old, 19-piece GUO taking full advantage of the era’s heady musical freedom. Roaring up and down the score is a literal who’s who of (in-the-main) German free jazzers, some of whom like saxophonist Peter Brötzmann -- here playing alto of all things -- bassist Peter Kowald and vibist Karl Berger (as an organizer/teacher) went on to greater and more varied expression. Some like reedman Willem Breuker, trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff and brassman Manfred Schoof turned to more conventional playing. A few musicians have since died and others have been lost in the mists of time.

In a composition made up of many climaxes, ending on an extended Wagnerian flourish, and which practically knocks over the listener with its sheer power, von Schlippenbach seems to be the leader only by osmosis. It’s pretty much every man for himself, spurred and taunted by a massed rhythm section of three percussionists, two bassists, a vibist, a tubaist and the pianist smashing a gong when the spirit moves him.

Especially impressive are Schoof soaring into the ozone layer with his cornet and high D trumpet, and Breuker puffing out some deep-dish baritone saxophone blats. Halfway through as well, Gunter Hampel’s flute and Willy Lietzmann’s tuba join for a minuet that suggests a rhinoceros sashaying with a crow. Additionally, the pianist sounds best two thirds of the way through, when he unleashes some space boogie-woogie, rather than at other places where he still seems in thrall to Cecil Taylor.

However with such a large aggregation and so many short solo peeping out of the dense musical mass, at times it’s hard to ascribe proper praise where it’s due. Is it Gerd Dudek or Heinz Sauer who takes the hairy-chested, Coltranesque tenor saxophone solo at the beginning; and does Hampel or Kris Wanders contribute bass clarinet bottom elsewhere? With everyone trying to contribute his two marks worth, identification become difficult.

Three years later, with the band members’ hair and beards grown even longer and wilder, the Germans are joined by Czech, Polish, French, Dutch and a whole contingent of British musicians -- most prominently saxophonist Evan Parker, guitarist Derek Bailey and drummer Han Bennink. With the section swelled by U.K. trombonists Malcolm Griffiths and Paul Rutherford, the almost 18-minute piece is more brassy and thanks to Dutchman Bennink and his German opposite number Paul Lovens, more percussive. Interestingly enough, though, except for some minor guitar feedback at the top and a small circuit of protracted saxophone excavating in the middle -- which could come from any one of the five saxophonists -- neither Bailey nor Parker seems to showcase any part of what would soon become an instantly identifiable persona. Instead the -- at times -- nine brasses assert themselves more than the other instruments.

Cleaner than many live recordings, but not sonically perfect, the disc boosts the GUO’s slim discography and offers a fresh and memorable look at the band in its formative, most experimental, years.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. Globe Unity ’67 2. Globe Unity ‘70

Personnel: ’67: Manfred Schoof (cornet, high D trumpet); Jürg Grau, Claude Deron (trumpet); Jiggs Wigham, Albert Mangelsdorff (trombone); Willy Lietzmann (tuba); Gunter Hampel (bass clarinet, flute); Peter Brötzmann (alto saxophone); Kris

Wanders (alto saxophone, bass clarinet); Gerd Dudek, tenor and soprano saxophones, clarinet); Heinz Sauer (tenor and soprano saxophones); Willem Breuker baritone saxophone, clarinet); Alexander von Schlippenbach (piano, bells, gong, tam-tam); Karlhanns Berger (vibraphone); Buschi Niebergall, Peter Kowald (bass); Jacki Liebezeit, drums, tympani); Mani Neumeier, Sven-Åke Johansson (drums)

Personnel: ’70: Kenny Wheeler (trumpet, flugelhorn); Schoof (trumpet, flugelhorn, high D trumpet); Tomas Stanko, Bernard Vitet (trumpet); Malcolm Griffiths, Mangelsdorff, (trombone); Paul Rutherford (trombone, tenor horn); Niebergall (bass trombone, bass); Evan Parker (soprano and tenor saxophones); Michel Pilz (flute, bass clarinet, soprano saxophone); Dudek, tenor and soprano saxophones, flute); Sauer (alto, tenor and soprano saxophones); Brötzmann, tenor and baritone saxophones); von Schlippenbach (piano, percussion); Derek Bailey (guitar); Kowald (bass, tuba); Arjen Gorter (bass, electric bass); Paul Lovens (drums, percussion); Han Bennink, drums, shellhorn, dhung, gachi)

December 3, 2001

SCHLIPPENBACH QUARTET

Hunting The Snake
Atavistic/Unheard Music Series UMS/ALP 213 CD

One of the longest lasting of Euroimprov groups -- since 1972 -- the trio of Parker/Schlippenbach/Lovens was also unique because, until the 1990s, it recorded so infrequently.

But that's understandable as well. German pianist Schlippenbach was busy with first the Globe Unity Orchestra and then the Berlin Contemporary Jazz Orchestra; German drummer Lovens was sideman of choice for everyone from Cecil Taylor to Eugene Chadbourne; and Englishman Parker -- citizen of the world -- was behind the microphone with everyone from a Tuvan throat singer to Italian improvisers.

Consequently, a more than 77-minute session recorded early in their career together (1975) is like discovering buried treasure. That it was one of the few times the three performed as a quartet -- with the addition of pioneering German free bassist Kowald makes it more precious.

Impeccably recorded by Radio Bremen, the CD shows that even at this juncture the trio members had developed a penetrating congruence, with Lovens, especially, was emphasizing his cymbals' many properties. More to the point, on this disc, Kowald fits in like a ball in a socket. Notably, though, when there's no piano sound, the other three resemble a version of Parker's other famous trio with bassist Barry Guy and drummer Paul Lytton.

Looking back from a 2000 perspective, it's surprising to realize just how "jazzy" -- compared to so-called "free" -- the band was. There are points, such as on "Moonbeef", where Schlippenbach's solos are mainstream enough to fit into any progressive piano trio.

Endless circular breathing wasn't yet perfected by Parker at this time either. So, while he experimented with it, as on the title tune here, he was as likely to use cries, reverberation, double stops, whistles, variations and interjections as respiratory exercises to tell his story. Backdrop was provided by cymbal crackles, piano wipes and bass note shaping.

Much more than history, HUNTING is a first class sonic adventure and one that definitely deserves to be heard.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. Glen Fleshie 2. Moonbeef 3. Hunting The Snake 4. Wenn Wir Kehlkopfspieler Uns Unterhalten

Personnel: Evan Parker (soprano and tenor saxophones); Alex Von Schlippenbach (piano); Peter Kowald (bass); Paul Lovens (drums, selected drums and cymbals)

October 4, 2000