The Free Jazz Collective

Reza Askari Roar Quintet - xAYb v8v dYAx (Boomslang, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Reza Askari is a German (son of an Iranian-born father and a German mother), Cologne-based double bass player, composer, and educator (he is a professor of jazz bass at the University of Music Wuerzburg). His main band is the Roar trio - with clarinet and tenor sax player Stefan Karl Schmid and drummer Fabian Arend, augmented by vibes player Christopher Dell (who is also an educator who teaches architecture, urban design, and planning) in its last two albums - the self-titled album (QFTF, 2022) and Zen World Cables (Boomslang, 2024). The fifth album of Roar has a cryptic title, xAYb v8v dYAx, and the trio hosts Dell and Canadian trumpeter Lina Allemano (who splits her time between Toronto and Berlin). The album was recorded at Deutschlandfunk Kammermusiksaal in Cologne in April 2026.

Askari was mentored by German double bass players Dieter Manderscheid and Sebastian Gramss, but has played with other innovative double bass players like Barre Philips and Mark Dresser, and is well-versed in the free jazz legacy. But Askari sees the acoustic, unamplified Roar quintet as an improvising modern jazz band that adapts the logic of extreme metal bands with their asymmetrical or symmetrical cycles, collapsing forms, obsessive repetition, abrupt ruptures, and overwhelming physical force. He mentions metal bands like Meshuggah, Car Bomb, the Melvins, and the Dillinger Escape Plan that have a distinct architectural and emotional language that he wanted to transform into a detailed improvisational context.

xAYb v8v dYAx distills the powerful, physical, and constantly shapeshifting rhythmic patterns of metal bands into layered, more nuanced, and spacious yet still restless patterns. Askari, Dell, and Arend sketch complex, polyrhythmic architectures of a modern jazz trio or a chamber music ensemble, while they keep trading leading roles, often reaching surprising reductionist or atonal territories. Schmid and especially Allemano act as free agents who can add disruptive, sometimes even abrasive touches, and they always do so, but thoughtfully and poetically. Allemano’s economic interventions always charge the music with intense, emotional impact. This tension stimulates and enriches the unpredictable, often fragmented rhythmic dynamics of this quintet.

The Roar quintet does not seek to replicate the massive polyrhythmic patterns of Meshuggah or other metal bands, but captures the nervous, punkish rhythmic spirit of such bands. This quintet refuses to subscribe to the common, familiar order and instead challenges itself with shifting contrasts and structural chaos, always questioning, negotiating, negating, and reassembling Askari’s compositions. The code-like, palindromic titles of most pieces intensify that feeling. The outcome is thought-provoking, epic, and makes you return to the album again and again, not to decipher the cryptic titles, but to enjoy its free spirit.

xAYb v8v dYAx by Reza Askari

Flo Stoffner - Bijou (Relative Pitch, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Martin Schray

Bijou is a French noun meaning “gem”, “treasure”, or “jewel”. It’s often used in a formal or figurative sense to describe something particularly beautiful, precious, or valuable, similar to the term “gem” when referring to a beautiful house or object. And it’s the title of Flo Stoffner’s new solo album - his first since Norman (Veto Records, 2014). However, it differs significantly from his earlier recordings.

Stoffner has been an integral part of the European free jazz scene for many years. As a guitarist, he ranks among the best in his field alongside Fred Frith, Olaf Rupp, and Noël Akchoté. No wonder - when John Butcher and Paul Lovens choose you as a collaborator it certainly counts as a mark of distinction.

After many duo and trio releases, Bijou highlights Stoffner’s unique style as if he were freed from the constraints of having to communicate with others. “This time, I made short recordings here and there over the course of several months. I deliberately wanted to immerse myself in this process over a longer period of time. For me, it was really all about the process itself, since I learned and discovered so much through this engagement with myself and the instrument. I also wanted to make the very quiet playing styles audible - the ones that are hard to hear when other musicians are playing along”, Stoffner emphasizes. Therefore, Bijou is more purist than the solo albums before, on which he used effects more frequently. On the one hand, it becomes clear that his technique is shaped by the British school, especially Derek Bailey and John Russell; on the other hand, his sound has clearly emancipated itself from his role models. Flageolets are at the center of his style, he contrasts them with hard, individually struck notes. The result is a very open sound, as if a wild ECM album was being played in a DIY style by a post-punk guitarist (e.g., Durutti Column’s Vini Reilly). You won’t find any ethereal lightness here, it’s more like being Nero in the first Matrix movie, dodging the ricochets, which come flying at you not in slow motion, but in real time. The whole thing sounds like a hailstorm descending on an abandoned Tibetan monastery where the chimes have been left behind. This becomes particularly clear in the album’s final track, “Bijou 6.” Amid all the roughness and harshness, a stark beauty flashes through consistently, so that despite its jarring contrasts in high and low flageolets, the piece is reminiscent of ambient music. But even though Stoffner seems to play with a greater sense of freedom, he still feels that it was a major challenge to play without a partner because it was sometimes difficult to get to the point. But don’t worry - on this wonderful gem, he has succeeded without exception.

Bijou is available on CD and as a download.

bijou by Florian Stoffner

Toc + Jean-Luc Guionnet - Quelques idées d’un vert incolore dorment furieusement (Tour de Bras, 2026) *****

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Richard Blute

“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”

-A sentence proposed by Noam Chomsky that he claimed was grammatically correct, but meaningless.

In 2015, I attended a concert of the band Kaze in a downtown Ottawa nightclub. Between sets, the musicians were selling CDs, surrounded by a crowd of fans. I picked out a few CDs and was still hunting around when I saw one I didn’t recognize. The print on the back was tiny, the room was dark and I didn’t have my reading glasses. But I figured I’d try my luck and purchased it without even knowing who was on the CD. It was TOC’s album Haircut and it became one of my favorite albums of 2015, and I’ve been an enormous fan of TOC ever since.

TOC consists of Peter Orins on drums, Ivann Cruz on guitar, and Jérémie Ternoy on keyboards. (Peter is also the drummer for Kaze.). On Haircut, TOC creates complex rhythms that are a delight to listen to, with Cruz in particular treating his guitar like a percussion instrument. The rhythms have an almost hypnotic effect which I found fascinating.

I very much liked the idea of adding a saxophone to TOC. They had previously collaborated with Dave Rempis on Closed For Safety Reasons, and that was a terrific album. On this album, Jean-Luc Guionnet proved to be an excellent choice for collaboration. FJC readers will recognize Guionnet from multiple reviews, including a 5 star review for his duo with Will Guthrie, his more recent album with Diatribes, as well as his work with the band The Ames Room.

This album consists of a single 33 minute track, and the band is more than capable of sustaining the listener’s attention throughout the piece. It begins subtly with TOC playing some textural percussive sounds inviting Guionnet to join them. As the rhythms build in complexity, Guionnet’s playing builds in urgency. He plays beautiful serpentine lines, but occasionally sounds like he’s calling out to the others as he plays a single screeching note. As the piece proceeds, Guionnet’s overblowing ratchets up the tension and TOC responds with their own intensity. The last 8 or 9 minutes of this album are pure, thundering bliss.

This is my album of the year so far.

Quelques idées d’un vert incolore dorment furieusement by Toc + Jean-Luc Guionnet

Fie Schouten, Vincent Courtois, Sofia Borges, Pierre Baux - Open Space (Relative Pitch, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Hrayr Attarian

French writer and filmmaker Georges Perec was known for using wordplay to explore identity, loss, and grief. His 1974 book Espèces d'espaces is equal parts essay and prose poetry, exploring the concept of space from an individual bed to the universe. It also serves as an inspiration for one of the most intriguing albums of 2026, Open Space.

On it, veteran French actor Pierre Baux eloquently recites Perec’s writing, and a trio spontaneously creates music inspired by it.

The album opens with “SPACE”. French cellist Vincent Courtois plays muscular refrains, off of which Dutch clarinetist Fie Schouten bounces her plaintive lines. Portuguese drummer Sofia Borges provides the percolating cadence that drives the haunting melody, which not only echoes the essay's words but also goes beyond them. Thus it forms a lyrical fusion of two forms of expression

A cinematic ambiance permeates the entire recording. For instance, on “The Bed and The Room” Courtois and Schouten engage in a tense duet that shows influences of Western classical music. Borges’ crashing cymbals, chiming bells, and rustling brushes add to the mysticism.

The three musicians demonstrate sublime camaraderie, with the focus primarily on the collective performance rather than individual solos. On the poignant absurdist “The Country-Borders”, in response to Baux’s emotive monologue, Schouten lets loose fiery, urgent wails while Courtois bows out crystalline and angular phrases with passion. Borges’ thunderous polyrhythms underscore her bandmates' improvisation and the anti-war message of Perec’s poem. Meanwhile, on “The Letter” the serene ensemble sound is laced with melancholy. Borges contributes soft, jingling percussion that dramatically punctuates Schouten’s languid, undulating clarinet and Courtois’ darkly smoldering cello.

This collaborative record perfectly marries provocative poetry with equally stimulating musical extemporizations. Its singularity, though, goes beyond its structure. Each of the performers brings their idiosyncratic styles and seamlessly overlaps them for a multilayered work that is moving and memorable. Open Space makes for a rewarding listening experience even for those who may not know French.

Open Space by Fie Schouten, Vincent Courtois, Sofia Borges, Pierre Baux

The Black Nothing & Anders Filipsen - Midt i en Fremtid (Ilk Music, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Eyal Hareuveni

Anyone who has experienced someone close, and especially a young one, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, would be familiar with the existential and emotional rollercoaster that awaits all around those ill ones, along with the grief-filled, compassionate yet helpless years to come.

Danish keyboard player and composer Anders Filipsen, the leader of the local experimental, electroacoustic ensemble The Black Nothing, experienced Alzheimer’s disease when his father was diagnosed four years ago. He composed a ten-part suite, Midt i en Fremtid (In the Middle of a Future), about the time he spent with his father, which composed passages, free improvisation, and graphic scores. He says: “This album is the sound of a time when what once was ceased to be, and something new emerged. It is a loving song to the moments we share now – in the midst of all that has disappeared”.

The different parts of the suite function as tableaux of moments marked by gradual decline, filled with silence, relating to the inevitable time when the ill ones can not share their thoughts anymore, repetition, and intensity- a landscape where presence and memory meet in sound. The ten musicians - vocalist Qarin Wikström (who sings in Danish, but the lyrics were translated to English), trumpeter Emil Jensen, clarinetists Carolyn Goodwyn and Jeppe Højgaard (who also plays the flute), cellist Soma Allpas, double bass player and cellist Nils Bo Davidsen, electronics player Mads Emil Nielsen, percussionist Victor Dybbroe, drummer Bjørn Heebøl, and Filipsen on synths - use their idiosyncratic voices to create a unified expression in which individual playing and collective sound merge.

The introspective, reflective, and chamber spirit of this suite emphasizes the vulnerability and the often helpless feelings of attending to those suffering from Alzheimer's when “everything that’s known is gone”, as Wikström sings in the opening piece, “Synker og Stirrerr (Sinking and Staring). “Nelly” captures Filipsen’s father's last memory and gently addresses the realization that when time, with its many memories and experiences, loses its meaning, and all that is left is the present.

The power of this thoughtful, insightful suite lies in its emotional restraint, best expressed by Wikström’s fragile voice, and its kaleidoscopic individual colors, suggesting a nuanced yet abruptly shifting, unstable, and not always comprehensible new reality, faithfully representing life with Alzheimer’s disease. But Filipsen orchestrates this suite not as an expression of melancholy and loss, but as a statement of compassion and love to the most closed ones, and the opportunity to let them go, embraced by their dear ones. Or as he wrote in “I stilhed findes ord (In Silence There Are Words): “...Room for honesty, peculiarity, and unbearable sorrow / Come take my hand”.

Midt i en Fremtid by The Black Nothing & Anders Filipsen

Take a ride with Helicopter ... live at the Loft

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Today's Sunday Video is from the power trio Helicopter, which looks to be 2/3 of Free Jazz Blog favorite Gorilla Mask with Simon Camatta in the drum seat. "Brighton" from Camatta is a taut, fist-pumping number that should help get your day started right!

Recorded live at Loft, Cologne Germany, February 23rd 2026 Peter Van Huffel - alto saxophone Roland Fidezius - e-bass Simon Camatta

Ensembles with electronics: rewiring the imagination

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Stuart Broomer

These are recent and distinguished bands united by the extent to which they’re refined, defined and expanded by electronics, harbingers not of the future but of the immediate present, multiplying and expanding through degrees of transformation, each a legitimate heir to the kinds of informed complexity pioneered by musical outsiders like John Benson Brooks and Sun Ra and literary outsiders like Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs.

Alexander Hawkins -- No Nation but Imagination (Intakt, 2026)

Pianist/composer Alexander Hawkins has already covered a broad musical spectrum in his career, from Togetherness Music for Sixteen Musicians featuring Evan Parker to Carnival Celestial, his brilliant reinvention of the piano trio with bassist Neil Charles and drummer Stephen Davis. No Nation but Imagination may be his most striking work yet, with a trans-Atlantic quintet that links Chicago-resident flutist Nicole Mitchell and drummer Hamid Drake with British musicians Rhodri Davies, here playing harp and electronics, and turntablist/sound artist Matthew Wright. That’s not a predictable combination, and it immediately lives up to that promise of the unlikely: it’s music that can find a groove, but it’s a groove that hasn’t exactly happened before, suggestive in some ways of the unpredictable musical culture of Intakt label-mates Elias Stemeseder and Christian Lillinger and their Umbra series of recordings.

Liner note author Peter Margasak has traced the project’s complex lineage and associations, beginning with Hawkins’ enthusiasm for the Mandingo Griot Society, a band that Drake played in in the 1970s with Gambian kora master Foday Musa Suso. Mitchell has played with a kora master more recently, the Malian Ballaké Sissoko. Those associations with the harp-like kora triggered the inclusion of harpist Rhodri Davies, who has also worked extensively with electronics, also the arena of Matthew Wright. The resultant ensemble bears a certain resemblance to Wright and Evan Parker’s Trance Map in its integration of acoustic and electronic instruments and processing, the result here a mix of live and studio recordings with further processing.

It’s music that has covered tremendous ground just coming into being, and it’s fascinating how the most exotic of technological procedures admit of a certain alien prettiness, a provocative banality, evident here from the opening “Solo Way Far Gone”: mysterious electronic piano tinkling, at once bearer and judge of the merely pretty, is here elevated by degrees of mystery and alien artifice. The first real group track, “Resolution Each and Every,” suggests that some 1950s exotica by Martin Denny (e.g., “Quiet Village”) has been recovered by some distant and unknown civilization (perhaps Kurt Vonnegut’s refined Tralfamadorians), then altered, expanded and broadcast back to earth, with Mitchell’s flute assuming multiple identities amidst the complex percussion and a certain general wobbling of harp and synthesizer, with the music stretching far beyond the merely exotic. So too does “Mirror No Border”, which bristles with Hawkins’ percussive piano flurries and Mitchell’s alternately piping and soaring lines.

The more extended pieces create increasingly complex spaces. “Lullaby Much Further” combines near silence with a dauntingly mysterious collection of sounds and a complex web of connections, while “Hocket Fierce Peaceful” achieves the contradictory character of its title by setting a flute of almost unearthly tranquility amidst a maze of abstract and decorative electronic keyboards.

No Nation but Imagination by ALEXANDER HAWKINS with Rhodri Davies, Hamid Drake, Nicole Mitchell, Matthew Wright

Sofia Borges - Rieko Okuda - Peter Van Huffel -- Lagrangian Points (4daRecord, 2026)

Equally mixed in its combinations of the acoustic and the electronic, Lagrangian Points differs significantly in being a documentary recording of a live performance from Berlin’s Morphine Raum, all the electronic processing going on simultaneously with the acoustic. Sofia Borges plays drums. percussion and electronics; Rieko Okuda, piano, keyboards and electronics; Peter Van Huffel alto and baritone saxophones and electronics.

According to the liner note “ Lagrangian Points are zones of delicate balance where forces align and bodies can remain suspended. In that sense, the trio forms a system of its own: each voice holds and is held by the others, maintaining a moving equilibrium, with enough space left open for the imagination to drift beyond its edges.” That particularly double identity is linked to the presence of electronics employed by each trio member, to the extent that instrumental identities can blur into one another.

The opening “Ghost Currents” initially seems to emphasize Okuda’s electronic keyboards and Borges’ percussion, but within moments the music’s distinctive complexity is apparent, many of the sounds traceable to their acoustic origins, but nonetheless operating in a transformative state, the three elaborating waves of sound that might suggest a wholly electronic extension of an improvising ensemble akin to Cecil Taylor’s trio with Andrew Cyrille and Jimmy Lyons.

“Parallax” introduces a subtle world of discreet electronic distortions, near-invocations of piano strings and metallic percussion all of these combining to suggest alien transmissions from space as well as a distinctly human music. Just as Alexander Hawkins’ electronic webs on No Nation But Imagination can make Nicole Mitchell’s flute seem alien, Van Huffel’s alto here might be purely acoustic at times, yet his aptitude for abstraction is such that his alto suggests something quite different, almost a harmonica, its voice swimming in an electronic maze, until electronic alterations to the saxophone draw it wholly into an intermediate zone floating between the acoustic and the electronic.

With the final track, “Hypnopompia”, Van Huffel’s saxophone initially provides an acoustic line in an alien soundscape, but as the surrounding sound grows increasingly menacing (there is a suggestion of hybrid alien predators), his sound gradually mutates, becoming closer and closer to the world that surrounds him, achieved with a brilliant combination of acoustic and electronic techniques. As Van Huffel moves further towards the electronic, Borges briefly inhabits the acoustic role, but the ultimate group movement will be almost wholly electronic.

These two remarkable recordings together articulate a new terrain, reflective of an increasingly mediated world, one in which the likelihood of deception conditions interpretation, one in which art and its appreciation might increasingly stretch both creative and interpretive acts toward surveillance.

Langrangian Points by Peter Van Huffel, Rieko Okuda, Sofia Borges

Abdelnour/Loriot/Meier/Niggenkemper – Et il y aura… (Veto Records, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Fotis Nikolakopoulos

The music made by this quartet possesses agility and versatility at the same time. They move quite easily from organized sounds to more improvised territories, while at the same time the sounds they produce seem fluid like modern composition and edgy as any good improvised, but jazz based, recording. Veto records has done it again, producing extraordinary music that defies boundaries.

Christine Abdelnour plays alto saxophone with long notes and phrases, Frantz Loriot utilizes his viola in many ways, David Meier reserves his bass drum (and some objects) for rhythmic reasons and not, while Pascal Niggenkemper is always a chameleon with his double bass.

The quartet is not in a hurry, takes it’s time to build, like a slow sculpture procession, the sounds and the atmosphere in both tracks of the cd that plays nearly for an hour. Improvising is a way, a path that allows many ways for the players. Here, all four of them choose to follow a path and follow four different trajectories, in parallel, but play in unison at the same time. I could comment that their music derives from the European avant-garde, a term I do not like because it has so elitism within it. But there are times that it is a proclamation of new ideas and of the willingness to explore sonically.

This is the case here with this cryptically titled CD. Both long tracks are open fields of audio explorations that don’t want to be labeled as anything. Only good, adventurous music that cannot be tagged. One of the best for 2026 so far.

Listen here:
Et il y aura… by Abdelnour / Loriot / Meier / Niggenkemper

@fot.isn

[AHMED] - Play Monk (Otoroku, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Ferruccio Martinotti

It was only a matter of time. In the cosmology of our music, one thing was certain: the orbits of Thelonious Monk and [Ahmed] were destined to overlap, after having crossed in the name of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, Monk's bassist in the late 1950s quartet, heard on 1958's Thelonious in Action and Misterioso, as well as on the album with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall unearthed in 2005. Pat Thomas (piano), Seymour Wright (alto sax), Joel Grip (double bass), and Antonin Gerbal (drums) "make music about (Note: bear in mind this "about" because is the key to almost everything) Ahmed Abdul-Malik, they excavate, re-inhabit, and use a-new the now overlooked documents and fragmentary plans of his mid-20th-century synthetic vision to produce a new jazz imagination for the 21st century.

[Ahmed] and Abdul share a critical engagement with time, specifically in challenging its linear trajectory and offering sites and modes of synthesis and rupture instead. In their music, fragments of time are scattered and re-arranged in the present". So says the band's official statement, which theoretically should explain everything. Theoretically. Malik (1927-1993), son of Caribbean immigrants, was a NYC bassist, oudist, composer, educator and philosopher, he played with Art Blakey, Earl Hines and Randy Weston and his albums Sahara (1958) and East Meets West (1960) fused aspects of Arabic and East African musics and thought, his committed long-term relationship with Sufi Islam and then-modern jazz and thinking, in revolutionary and vital way. But, as well as honoring these traditions, Malik's straddling, synthetic and inclusive vision is one of the great projects of imagination in jazz. He mixed sounds and ethics, meanings and beliefs in open, experimental ways, without any dogma and this became the true north for [Ahmed]: to visit and re-think his compositions and the process potential in them. This is why we emphasized the adverb "about": neither covers, nor lab experiments in cold musical eugenics; neither free jazz, nor classic (even two super skilled listeners and reviewers like Lee and Fotis, in past reviews, scratched their heads between amazement and ecstasy) but a hypnotic Black Monolith that has cast an enigmatic and fascinating shadow for some years, writing a new chapter destined to remain in the Annals of Music.

From the very first time we heard them, the immediate reference for us, rather than the music, was the cubist painting, in which we found all the elements expressed by [Ahmed] and vice versa: the break with traditional perspective; the geometric decomposition; the simultaneity of views; the reduced color palette and the use of collage. Art must not portray reality but interpret it, like a cognitive tool, as per cubists’ First Commandment, and Pat Thomas & co. are exactly abiding by that. After 6 albums, (all excellent but “Giant Beauty” and “[Sama’a] (Audition)” are two real, unmissable, t-rex carnivorous records) and a 7-inch, here finally, after having engaged with Monk’s standards in various individual or collective ways, the hesitation is broken and [Ahmed] “Play Monk”: when a title says it all. In 2 CDs recorded in March 2025 at Fish Factory Studios (the same “Sama’a” recording sessions), with a cover photo of the legendary pianist at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, portrayed by the lens of Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter that alone is worth the purchase of the album, 6 standards (“Bye-Ya/Epistrophy,” “Friday Thirteenth,” “Round Midnight,” “Epistrophy,” “Evidence,” “Oskar T.)” are atomized in the particle accelerator, “transforming each composition into a shifting quantum time artifact. The melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and spatial gestures of each piece become complex vernacular forms, creating a dialogue in time and a (red)shifting lens through which to view our material present. Into the fissures of Monk’s form, [Ahmed] pour their own play, colliding and dancing with Duke Ellington, Cecil Taylor, Caribbean diasporic music, European improvisation, and Jah Shaka in their pursuit of future music,” to borrow Otoroku’s notes. Too much? If you trust just a little bit in your humble writer: NOT.AT.ALL. As usual, they set out and ride pedal to metal, no self-indulgence or self-referential (or falsely free-form) rotating solos, but a “wall of sound” that Phil Spector would have liked to produce, where more than playing the notes, they use them and the ideas in and about them, as a vehicle for their unique imagination, moving from what they know into new uncharted, creative lands.

It’s too easy to predict that this album will take no prisoners in our end-of-year Top Tens, but it’s even really hard to imagine what other albums will live up to it. We’d like to close with the words of the great Luke Stewart, certainly much more titled than us, in expressing a reflection on Abdul-Malik and [Amed]: “The journey of self-discovery, communing with the eternal sound. A musician steeped in multiple worlds; oceans apart yet closely connected in ancestral memory. Musicians such Abdul-Malik were able to experience the global community of sound warriors, drawing inspiration from ancient cultures to support personal investigation. The connection was made clear, the music of Africa would certainly influence the African in America despite the atrocities of the Middle Passage, chattel slavery and continued racist violence that sought to sever any connection to the continent. The beauty of Malik’s investigation is this original fusion of new music (Jazz) of the African in America with ancient music of Africa. It is a shining example of collaboration in culture, where the music is allowed to shine for itself. This is the inspiration that is being tapped, being explored in this collaboration where rhythm is the basis for the sound. Just like Malik, [Ahmed] allow the spirit of the collective push the sound as the music develops into exalted chaos. Joy Be Upon Us!”I

Play Monk by أحمد [Ahmed]

Ballister + Luke Stewart - Clocking the Wheel (Aerophonic Records, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Martin Schray

When their latest album Smash and Grab came out, I cheekily claimed Ballister might be the best band in the world. I still stand by that statement, and what could be more fitting for Dave Rempis and his Aerophonic label than to celebrate their 50th physical release with a new recording by that outfit? The only question that came up beforehand possibly was what to do to make it special? The answer was relatively simple: You bring in a real powerhouse to give the whole thing even more momentum. And what could be more natural than inviting a bassist for that? Luke Stewart (of Irreversible Entanglements fame) was practically the obvious choice. However, that also means that the expectations for a recording like this are incredibly high.

For Clocking the WheelBallister could have done what we all love them for: simply mixing up their famous cocktail of high energy music, speed metal, free jazz, and brutalistic power, slap it right in our faces, and everyone would have been happy. And of course they do deliver this mix - but they also present another side. Especially in the first part of this double CD, “Carpet Joint,” Dave Rempis (as always on different saxes) and Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello) trade off so effortlessly for three minutes that you’d think you were at a chamber concert. What is more, they leave room for solos, for example for percussionist Paal Nilssen-Love, who presents rhythms with a Latin American flavor, laying the groundwork for two ballad-like interludes - something we’re not used to hearing too often from the band. However, you immediately find yourself wishing they would do that every now and then. The icing on the cake is an almost Evan-Parker-esque solo by Rempis and a one-minute nod by the band to themselves, to one of their catchiest riffs (if such a thing even exists in this kind of music). In this piece, which the band performs as a trio, we are once again reminded of what makes Ballister so unique: it’s the combination of these very different styles and sounds, the way the dynamics flow into one another, that they so effortlessly blend into a cohesive whole.

Finally, Luke Stewart joins in on “Sauce for the Goose,” the second track that makes up the entirety of the second CD, and you’re faced with a changed band. For bassists, it’s not easy to keep up with Ballister - with the trio’s force, its radicalism, its rawness, its unvarnished authenticity. The band could literally run you over. But Stewart immediately immerses himself in Ballister’s sound, locking in with Nilssen-Love’s drumming to catapult the higher voices of the cello and saxophone forward. His driving energy is like a tightly stretched rubber band - elastic, yielding, flexible, but always with enough tensile strength to bounce back like a trampoline, as the liner notes put it. And Stewart is also given plenty of space to make his mark, whether in duo or solo passages.

All in all “Sauce for the Goose” shows that there is still a lot of potential with the Ballister project. Stewart’s presence draws even more energy out of the other three members, giving rise to new sound combinations (the use of electronics shines through here and there and Dave Rempis, in particular, is almost reinventing himself) and dynamics. After twelve albums, Ballister is far from running out of ideas; the band still has plenty in store. For me, they’re still the best band in the world - at least when it comes to freely improvised music.

Clocking the Wheelis available as a double CD and as a download. You can listen to “Sauce for the Goose“ on the Aerophonic bandcamp site, where you can also order the album:

Clocking The Wheel by Ballister + Luke Stewart

Victor Vieira-Branco’s Bark Culture - The Giant is Awkward (Temperphantom, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Brian Earley

The most adventurous music offers an exchange with its listeners. Dedicate time and attention to its often unpredictable operations, and receive a return. For me, when I listen to The Giant is Awkward, the latest release from Victor Vieira-Branco’s trio Bark Culture, the return is as immediate as it is sustained. A feeling of something like exhilaration in the moment, of following master improvisers on their way to a circuitous but directing truth.

Victor Vieira-Branco is a vibraphonist and composer who grew up in Brazil, but spends most of his time these days in Philadelphia, that is when he is not touring with Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra or Chad Taylor’s Quintet, which played Big Ears this March. With The Giant, his trio Bark Culture has its second release, the maiden voyage being the acclaimed Warm Wisdom from 2024, and is rounded out by bassist John Moran and drummer Joey Sullivan.

Together, the trio makes music that is angular, surprising, and almost always just off center. The opening track, “Palace,” is a representative example of this. After a slanted theme marked by what sounds like finger pounding by vibes and piano, the music descends into a deep madness with Sullivan and Moran following no particular time or engaging in any semblance of functional harmony. But after several minutes of gleefully wild chaos, the band unifies again, rights itself, and collectively enters a second set of thematic material before leaping into yet one more wall of noise.

I should pause to state that this release is made particularly special by the presence of guest pianist Sam Yulsman. Yulsman is one of the engines behind the supreme madness one finds on this album, as he smashes and mashes and slams his piano keys in the sections I find to be most adventurous, most dissonant and wild. He even contributed a composition, the second song “Farce,” which, with its asymmetrical thematic unison of vibes and piano leading into surrounded moments of unhinged sonic rantings, is right at home on The Giant is Awkward.

Vieira-Branco is composer of all of the other works here. While his compositions are lovely, the interplay of the musicians is what makes this album move from coherent to something really special. Drummer Joey Sullivan seems to me to have a particularly strong musical relationship with Vieira-Branco, and the two are as likely to play their respective percussion instruments with mathematical precision as they are to respond spontaneously to sudden snare rolls, cymbal crashes, or introverted vibraphone bowing.

And all of this is not to suggest Victor V-B’s compositions are not at times stunningly beautiful. Listen, for example, to the penultimate work on the record, “Panic.” The piece is quiet, introspective, full of tenderness and empathy and, in communicating as much, is not at all what I expect when I think of the word panic. The song seems almost guru-like in this way as it flows in and out of time and traditional harmonies to moments of collective improvisation. Panic is a navigable state here, as marked by beauty as it is by its unexpected torsions, but always as composed and improvised as the day itself.

The Giant is Awkward is one of the standout releases of this year for me. Its depth of feeling and spontaneously combustible surprises find themselves one minute collectedly astute, and beard grabbing lunatic raving the next. For all of this work’s intelligence and its musicians technical virtuosity, there is never a moment where I feel the energy is not in service of art or the music itself. And this is the adventure Bark Culture has offered to its potential listeners with this album: follow them with attention and effort, and deep pleasure manifests along the path with wisps of transformation sailing in its sonic wilderness.

The Giant is Awkward can be found here.

The Giant is Awkward by Victor Vieira-Branco's Bark Culture

Revisit the Serious Series

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Back in December, we covered the Serious Series, a concert series in Berlin that showcases a mix of both local and international free music improvisors.

The entire series is available online from the venue where the series took place last year, the Exploratorium, in Berlin's Kreuzberg district. Below is a video from day one, where we begin the show with series organizers saxophonist Anna Kaluza and bassist Jan Roder, then followed by pianist Marina Džukljev, bassist Christian Weber and drummer Michael Griener. The night wraps up with saxophonists Evan Parker and Peter van Bergen in an effortless duo:

More info here.

Irarrázabal Together

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Dan Sorrells

Two recent releases showcase the versatility and physicality of Chilean double-bassist Amanda Irarrázabal as she improvises with very different partners.

**Amanda Irarrázabal - Imprimiendo (Relative Pitch, 2026)**

Imprimiendo is a series of "duets" in which one of the partners remains indifferent and unresponsive—or at least, doesn't respond in the manner you might expect. Amanda Irarrázabal plays her bass along with recordings of churning offset printers made at two printing houses in Santiago, Chile. Improvising along with workaday, nonhuman things calls to mind Günter Christmann and others playing with vacuum cleaners and coffee makers on albums like The Sublime and the Profane. In the liner notes to that release,Elke Schipper suggests that improvising with such sounds—the "profane acoustic environment"—is an act of sublimation. There's an ambiguity here I'm happy to leave unresolved. Are the profane sounds vaulted into the realm of art by being deemed worthy material with which to engage? Or, by "internalizing" these sounds as "emotional and imaginary substance," is it the artist's ability to find self-expression that's being elevated? Are these printing presses mere stimulus, or do they partake in the sublime when joined up with Irarrázabal?

There's a soothing familiarity to the structured sound of the printers: like a sheet of graph paper passing through the drums, it provides an orienting temporal grid. But this structure also marks out the comfortable zone from which Irarrázabal quickly departs. On "Panfletos" she enters tentatively, then assertively, syncopated and dancing around the hiss-click of the presses before moving into feathery bowed overtones. These harmonic explorations of friction and bass push through the obvious rhythmic nature of the presses and draw out the richness in their noise. Still, the printing presses are rhythm. It's interesting to hear the subdivisions buried within their repetitive work. These layers are especially apparent on tracks like "Illustraciones," and as Irarrázabal plays more fervently, the presses seem to respond, her rough texture and volume masking more subtle rhythmic elements while intensifying others. In turn, something about the regularity of the presses amplifies the momentum of her improvisations, like the feeling of speed conveyed by trees as they whip by a traveler's window. This phenomenon repeats itself again and again throughout listening to Imprimiendo : the illusion of change in unchanging elements, driven by Irarrázabal's impassioned performance.

It's not clear to what extent Irarrázabal may have arranged some of the field recordings into collages before entering the studio. Some dramatic interest is created by letting them fade in or out, reappear later, varying their volume. On "Copuchas, entrevistas y más," I had not registered that the hypnotic press had largely dropped out of audibility until it suddenly came roaring back, Irarrázabal drawing jaggedly across the strings. The album ends with Irarrázabal unaccompanied: "En blanco." With its pulsing dynamics and cadent bowing, it's anything but.

Imprimiendo by Amanda Irarrázabal

**Phillip Greenlief & Amanda Irarrázabal - La Verdad Es La Verdad (Mother Brain Records, 2026)**

Moving from Imprimiendoto La Verdad Es La Verdad—duo recordings Irarrázabal made with Phillip Greenlief following a 2023 tour in Chile—it's hard not to think of the album that launched Relative Pitch 15 years ago: Greenlief's duo with Joëlle Léandre, That Overt Desire of Object . Here, as there, Greenlief plays at his usual supernatural caliber, mostly delivered with his breathily fluent tenor tone. He's one of the more remarkable and adept reedmen to come out of West Coast creative music (though nowadays, to my great delight and benefit, he's a fellow Mainer). And, like Léandre, Irarrázabal is a white-hot fusion of voice and arco mastery who obliterates any mistaking of body and sound, creator and creation, as being separate or separable.

Opener "Insomnia at the Zoo" is as restless as its title implies. If it doesn't quite come to crescendo, it arrives at a simmering catharsis, a valve releasing just enough pressure to keep the volatility at the pleasing edge of danger. When speaking about duets, it's easy to treat the music like a conversation, especially music with a strong contrapuntal give-and-take. There's a little of that kind of playing here on tracks like "Riverbeds" (what a metaphor: a broad contour guiding rivulets of water, but with paths not quite predictable). For me, Greenlief and Irarrázabal are doing something more like dance, an elemental synchrony of two bodies attending to their shared sense of movement. There's such focus and physicality in the music—just hear the energy being matched in dynamics and register and density throughout a piece like "Collapse"—that it's often nothing like the operation of reason or speech. Theirs is a bodily listening that goes past brain, straight into limb and throat and back out as sound. On the nocturnal "Later on with Constellations," clarinet and voice wend a rising and falling course together—all the way to an altissimo climax—Irarrázabal's bass a whispering countercurrent beneath. As I listen to their listening, I never hear either player deciding what they'll now "say" in response; instead, they work out the answer to "what's our next move?"

The track titled "Cave Paintings" reminded me of the famous prehistoric paintings in Lascaux. In "The Birth of Art," Blanchot wrote "yet by its nearness and all that renders it immediately readable to us," the work in the caves remains "mysterious as art but not an art of mystery nor of distance." This description transcends Lascaux and feels also like "the truth" of La Verdad: that for all the nearness of these gripping improvisations, for all that feels viscerally "readable" in them, there's a mystery at their center which isn't their end but is instead a ceaseless beginning, igniting our fascination—musician and listener alike.

la verdad es la verdad by Phillip Greenlief & Amanda Irarrazabal

Hound Dog Taylor's Hand and Joe Paradiso - The Structure and Dynamics Of Disordered Systems (self, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Ferruccio Martinotti

What could an old Mississippi bluesman, a Seattle free band and an MIT scholar possibly have in common? Don't worry, music maps the dots and we'll connect them. As one of the legendary figures of American blues, Theodore Roosevelt "Hound Dog" Taylor was an extraordinary guitarist, interpreter of a stripped-down, rocked-out, hypnotic, emotionally powerful, and wildly energizing sound. His left hand had six fingers, a congenital anatomical trait known as polydactyly, which inspired (don't ask us why…) a sonic wild bunch from the beautiful Northwest. Hound Dog Taylor's Hand (HDTH) formed in Seattle in 2010 with Jeffery Taylor, guitars, percussion; John Seman, double bass, piano, percussion; Mark Ostrowski, drums, piano, percussion; Greg Kelley, trumpet; and Joe Paradiso, custom-designed modular synthesizer. They have performed with the likes of Eugene Chadbourne, Acid Mothers Temple, Jooklo Duo, Lori Goldston, Sir Richard Bishop, Lee Ranaldo, Kinski, Chris Corsano, James Brandon Lewis and Mike Watt: all solid swimmers in our cups of tea. John Seman is a truly interesting, larger-than-life cat. With an academic background at the Oberlin Conservatory and the University of Maryland as an ethnomusician, he joins forces with Mark Ostrowski, ingesting every drinkable musical beverage: Zappa, Black Sabbath, free jazz, Mingus, Stravinsky, Motorhead and more. As a festival organizer, John leaves no stone unturned in the musical field. Together with Mark, modeled on the AACM, he founded The Monktail Creative Music Concern, a collective of composers, musicians and artists based in Seattle, “who thrive on the atypical and demanding; the real weirdo stuff.” Could we ever remain indifferent to a mission statement like that? No kidding. And here we are, the scholar. Joe Paradiso is the other partner in crime, a guy who to define smart is a euphemism. To understand who we are talking about it is more than enough to read the official bio infos. Joe is Professor of Media, Arts and Sciences at MIT, where he directs the Responsive Environments group and serves as the Media Lab's Academic Head. He is a pioneer in the development of the Internet of Things and renowned for work in wearable sensing, energy harvesting technology, electronic music systems and controllers. His current research explores how sensor networks and AI augment and mediate human experience, interaction and perception, encompassing wireless sensing systems, wearable and body sensor networks, ubiquitous/pervasive computing, human-computer interfaces, space-based systems, sensate materials, digital twins in virtual worlds and interactive music/media. And the music? you are certainly wondering. A teenage interest in prog rock switched him to synthesizers, and after moving to Zurich in the mid-70s to study at ETH, Paradiso built his own very epic modular synth from scratch: “I was obsessed with building modules, by the end of my stay I had built over 70 of them”. Photos of his creation are readily available on the web, and we highly recommend you to take a look to see what kind of Leviathan we’re talking about. The paths of the Professor and the Hand cross on this album, the group’s seventh, if memory serves: 38 minutes of turbo charged, free-form intensity, declined in a single suite that envelops us like a Texas Twister. “Reverence for the roots of improvised music meets an unbridled passion to push boundaries, making for a propulsive and unpredictable sound.” “A cosmic soundtrack from an alien film noir playing in a half-remembered dream,” the press releases tell us, and we do trust them, because: 1) they say so; 2) we're addicted to press office definitions, and 3) listening carefully to the record confirms the image's correct focus. For those who have never seen an alien film noir playing in a half-remembered dream, we can say that, as reference points, some of Gustafsson’s Hydros projects, Keiji Haino's sonic spirals and, above all, Sonic Youth’s extraordinary (and criminally underrated) works with icp, the Ex, Merzbow, and their double-CD reinterpretations of Cage, Cardew, Kosugi, Maciunas, Oliveros, Ono, Reich, Slonimski, Tenney, and Wolff, came to mind. We’d dare to add the mighty Hawkind as well. The six fingered hand is definitely worth a listen: the surest of the things.

The Structure And Dynamics Of Disordered Systems by Hound Dog Taylor’s Hand and Joe Paradiso

Satoko Fujii + Myra Melford - Katarahi (RogueArt, 2026) *****

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Paul Acquaro

This review should not be confused for a scientific study, regardless of how convincing it sounds, after all, it lacks all sorts of the necessary quality criteria for a scientific work. It's not really objective, it has questionable reliability and only I can vouch for its validity, but my results suggest that repeated listening to Katarahi, the duo recording from Satoko Fuji and Myra Melford, makes one a better person. The findings, I think, are very strong, I'd say, they are basically unassailable. When listening, one's thoughts become clearer, empathy increases, and creativity soars. A wonder for sure.

Myra Melford and Satoko Fujii have been acquaintances since meeting in the 1990s while Fujii was studying with Paul Bley. Over the following years, the two pianists have met and played many times, though they have released just one recording together, Under the Water (Libra) in 2007, which may seem unusual for two such highly prolific musicians. Fortunately, an appearance in 2024 at the Leibnitz Jazzfestival in Austria, captured the two in a dynamic performance that intertwined composition and improvisation in a seamless, living dialog.

Katarahi, which in Japanese is a word meaning a heart-to-heart conversation between friends, lives up to its name. Professional musicianship collides with a palpable personal affinity as the two create a work that captures myriad moments of unbridled joy as well as contemplative introspection.

Opening track, 'Interlude 1', begins with a terse and tense repetitive figure on one piano, the other replies with light tinkling plucks from inside the instrument's soundboard, which then moves slowly outwards, becoming a pensive, slightly dissonant melody. It's expectant and barely resolves before crumbling into 'Signpost', at first equally reserved, but with a slight hint of serious playfulness.

Towards the middle of the recording, on 'Chalk', the approach changes. Lush chords lead to a dramatic flourishing melody. The notes stream effortlessly, building excitement and tension before a quick resolution and drop into the start of 'Kaiwa', a sharply syncopated piece with some hard edges and percussive foundations. This leads to even more intensity and shared focus in the penultimate 'IV' and finally 'From Sometime.' During these final two pieces, the intensity mounts with sudden arpeggiated bursts and explosive tonal clusters, until the sudden end, received with enthusiastic applause.

From track to track, the music is fluid, logically connected, but easy to get lost in. Elements of classical mix with free improvisation, some moments congeal while others deflect off each other. It does not matter where one jumps in to the recording, it can be equally rewarding to listen start to finish, as is to randomly choose a track. Regardless, one is instantly exposed to effects of the music, and the sympathetic and intuitive music making is infectious.

The study conducted here on Katarahi has involved very intense close listening as well as very distracted listening methods. While controlling for nothing by volume, I've listened while chopping onions as well as grading papers. One of which made me cry, and during the other, I felt incredibly productive. In conclusion, this release is completely appropriate listening for wherever you are and whatever your are doing, no matter, you're going to do it better. Katarahi is simply a fantastic album.

Myra Melford also speaks with David Cristol about Katarahi and much more in their interview here.

KATARAHI by MYRA MELFORD - SATOKO FUJII

Lazro Léandre Lovens- For Baritone Sax, Double Bass & Drumset (Relative Pitch, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Martin Schray

In Bernd Schoch’s documentary “But The Word Dog Doesn’t Bark“ about the Schlippenbach Trio, Evan Parker is asked in the bonus material whether it’s possible to play “wrong” in free jazz. In the conventional sense, Parker says, that’s not possible, but that’s not the point. One might miss an opportunity to contribute something to the improvisation, which is worse - because the moment would be gone forever. In For Baritone Sax, Double Bass & Drumset , there are no such lost moments. Here, everything fits perfectly.

There are several examples on this album where you can hear the incredible timing of three masters of European improv - baritone saxophonist Daunik Lazro, bassist Joëlle Léandre, and drummer Paul Lovens. First on the opener “Temps du Corps 1”, which Lazro and Lovens begin tenderly before the saxophone roughens the tone and gives Léandre the opportunity to join in with her arco bass. Or that moment at the 5-minute mark when the musicians seem to be waiting for the perfect moment to kick things off, which Léandre then conjures up with just a few notes, and Lovens brilliantly picks up the pace before they really let loose. Then there’s another example on “Temps du Corps 3“, when Lazro plays Coltrane-ish lines before he and Léandre drop out and leave the field for Lovens, who concentrates on his toms, which lends the improvisation a dark and gloomy quality; after a very short while the three of them really pick up the pace, increase the intensity (it’s mainly Léandre who pushes her instrument to its limits) and bring the improvisation back to the beginning picking up the ballad-like mood again.

In the end, all of this comes together and is taken to the extreme: the final piece even swings here and there, with heart-wrenching, wailing saxophone notes serving as a counterpoint. Finally, it’s taken to the brink of collapse, before exploding at the very end, creating an atmosphere of extreme musical intensity that oscillates between chamber music and free jazz.

All in all, it’s the somnambulistically confident shifts between harsh and lyrical, dense and open, or accelerated and calmer passages, which create the most exciting dynamics.

It’s certainly helpful that the three were able to draw on decades of individual and collaborative experience within the global improvised music scene on this session. For Baritone Sax, Double Bass & Drumsetis a celebration of timbre, texture, sound and communication. Most of the fascination of this outstanding album comes from Lazro’s rich, expressive saxophone language, which is charmed by Léandre’s guttural yet elegant bass lines and Lovens’ subtle and inventive percussive cornucopia.

For Baritone Sax, Double Bass & Drumsetis available as a CD and as a download. You can listen to it and buy it on the Relative Pitch Bandcamp site:

For Baritone Sax, Double Bass and Drumset by Lazro Leandre Lovens

Stein/Smith/Shead – Five Nights in the Midwest (balance point acoustics, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Brian Earley

Asking listeners to pay attention to an entire tour’s worth of music is asking a great deal. But, friends, because you are here you also already know one of the most powerful, even liberating, experiences to be had is patiently, closely listening to sound as it develops, increases or slows in pace, adjusts voicings, and surprises.

Well, Jason Stein (bass clarinet), Damon Smith (bass) and Adam Shead (drums) have not quite given us an entire tour of music, but they come pretty damn close. Five Nights in the Midwest is a three-CD set that preserves, well–five nights of music from a recent tour in December of 2025. Each recording presents one entire live musical take with no editing. Stops include The Sugar Maple in Milwaukee, State Street Pub in Indianapolis, three tracks from The Spot Tavern in Lafayette, Indiana (more on that in a second), Dissonant Works in St. Louis, and Reverberation Records in Bloomington, Illinois.

The project is ambitious and it really pays off for those who pay attention. I have spent the past weekend immersed in this music, listening to it over and over, and the experience reminds me of what happens at an extended festival. Excitement and novelty quickly give way to attention fatigue, but the music is just so constantly good, so impressive and powerful, that fatigue yields again and again to something like spiritual enthusiasm and awakening.

I cannot possibly discuss each track or set in detail here, there is just way too much music, but here is what stands out to me as important.

First, this is music that is not written out. Three people gather and entirely improvise sound into being for twenty minutes. Or thirty minutes (the longest piece runs 29.26). And, like so much I admire about the world we live in, here is an example of humanity at its best. No really. Night four was captured on film and is available on YouTube by Thom Null. Thom writes this with his video: “Sorry that it has taken me half a year to begin posting these long cell phone videos, but the incessant international holocaust has really had me operating at the lower level of Maslow's triangle, so to speak. Namaste!” Yep. Sounds about right. There is a lot of shit out there, and the vast, vast majority of us know this and have long been aware that thousands of deaths, and likely many more in the future, are happening so a very few people can benefit.

It wears us down. It fatigues, but it does not prevail.

Stein, Smith, and Shead embody this by acting together for mutual benefit. All three possess shockingly immense amounts of virtuosity on their respective instruments, but this hardly matters to them if these earned gifts are not in the service of beauty and art. Listeners, then, benefit by learning again that the effort of listening, and effort at all, is part of what makes us human (inhuman AI Data Centers don’t just remove the effort-they remove the searching that makes life meaningful, oh and about five million gallons of water each day).

The three musicians focus on giving us one uncut performance from each night of the tour. However, The Spot Tavern in Lafayette is the exception, and this recording preserves three consecutive tracks, titled “set 1,” “set 2a,” and “set 2b” from this location. Close listening reveals why. To my ears, the music here is wonderfully varied, much more so than on the rest of the album. “set 1” functions as many of the pieces do: almost immediate high energy playing by all three. OK, this song takes about 1:30 to reach full energy, but check out almost any other track (say, the State Street Pub set, which is hot right out of the gate and remains that way for nearly twenty minutes).

All three musicians share in the credit for this level of stamina. Each individual’s gifts inspire and propel their bandmates forward. Shead’s drumming, for instance, reminds me of Milford Graves. I know, I know, this is a bold comparison. But Shead’s polyrhythmic dexterity sometimes makes me think he must have eight arms, and the professor is the one of the few other drummers that elicit this response in me.

“Set 2b” from the Spot, on the other hand, proceeds much more like a ballad. The shortest work on the entire album, Stein plays with a breathy introspection. Smith bows atonal angles, but always with tenderness. Shead remains on the smaller cymbals and plays quietly ringing bells much of the time.

The trio clearly was pleased with the results from the Spot Tavern. In fact, they have recorded there before for 2023’s Hum (Irritable Mystic Records).

I think maybe my favorite piece on the entire album comes from the final night, recorded at Reverberation Records. By this point the group has developed a sixth-sense, ESP-like communication system with each other, and they effortlessly build fires to wash them out extemporaneously and quickly ignite them again. On this piece, as on so many of the others, only Smith will lay out. His reasons are likely pragmatic: he has to grab his bow, or a drum stick, or a set of chains (!?) to play the bass. But in this practical restraint Shead often soars over temple wood blocks and slams his dented cymbal while Stein climbs, descends, growls, or sometimes crackles from his lips until Smith reenters, often bowing at a pitch and frequency that sound like he is opening the maws of hell itself. For an example of this, check out the 20.00 minute mark on this final tune.

Someone, likely Shead, screams at about 20.50, the music has worked its way into such a frenzy. And, as the flames cool to embers and the music dies into silence, I find myself feeling lighter than before, like some great weight has been taken from me, some demon exorcized. And here is the gift these three musicians have given us: freedom, shared meaning making, a blessing built from mutual collaboration.

Five Nights in the Midwest can be heard here:

Five Nights in the Midwest by Stein/Smith/Shead

An interview with Myra Melford

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Photo by Gil Corre

By David Cristol

The US pianist and composer is busier than ever. New albums, a freshly launched Bandcamp label, teaching in Berkeley, writing for large ensembles in Europe, new bands to tour and record with : Myra Melford is in control and on a roll. During a stopover between Paris and Italy, The Evanston-born artist talked to David Cristol on a sunny June morning in the South of France.

– Can we start with your new piano duo release with Satoko Fujii, かたらひ (Katarahi)on RogueArt ? You previously collaborated on Under the Water [Libra Records, 2009] . How did the connection come about and how do you go about playing together ?

Myra Melford [MM] – Satoko and I met in 1994. I was playing a solo concert at a little club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called Club Passim. After the concert, I discovered that Paul Bley was there, and he had brought Satoko with him. She was a student or ex-student of his. So it was Paul Bley who introduced us. But she was in Boston and I was in New York, so we didn't see each other much, but stayed aware of what the other was doing. After I moved to Berkeley in 2004, she came to the Bay Area and we arranged to do a two-piano concert at the Maybeck House in Berkeley. That was our first meeting at the piano. That happened around 2007 and the record came out a couple years later. It was completely improvised. We didn't talk about anything, just played. And learned a lot from that experience. Over the years, I played some concerts with her in Japan, we played in San Francisco in 2015, and started getting concert invitations in Europe. We thought, instead of playing completely free, let's each bring compositions that allow for a lot of improvisation, but where we have some common focus and we can plan a little bit so that there's variety in what we're doing, so that it’s not so dense all the time. By having a roadmap or idea about what an improvisation might be about, we could create more space and feature one or the other, understand a little bit more how to go about it. We played in Europe maybe once every couple of years. And then got this opportunity to play at the Leibnitz Jazz Festival. That was supposed to happen during the pandemic, but it got postponed and only actually happened in the fall of 2024.

– And that’s the new recording?

MM -Yes. It was recorded by Österreichischer Rundfunk, the Austrian radio. They did a really great job, and it was in the back of our minds that we would consider it for a live record. But it wasn't until we heard the recording and were happy with its quality and with our playing that we decided we wanted to release it. Our playing is complementary and compatible. We each have a different way of playing, and a different way of composing. But when we get together, I think on this new record especially, sometimes you can't tell who's playing, even though we're on different channels. We also switch pianos in the middle of the concert, which makes it even more confusing. I like the idea that we're creating one sound together rather than being these two separate pianists who must be identifiable.

– There aren't many live recordings in your discography.

MM –I like live recordings, but haven’t released many. An early one was Alive in the House of Saints [Hat ART, 1993] . And then, 12 from 25 with the Blu-ray documentary [Firehouse 12, 2018] , from my 2015 retrospective at The Stone. It's nice when you get a good recording and you don't feel like you have to edit it too much. For the duo we only had to take out a few coughs, nothing major.

Myra Melford Trio at The Stone, NYC 2015 - credit Gil Corre

DC – Did you have in mind references to previous duos on the instrument ?

MM –I can only speak for myself : it was kind of completely new. I was familiar with the recording of Cecil Taylor and Mary Lou Williams and also with Marian McPartland's show and all the piano duos that happened there. But really it was something new to discover, and not something I had thought about for a long time.

– Do you often record your concerts ? Are there live recordings in your archive that you might release at some point ?

MM –I used to record a lot of my gigs on my phone or some small device like that, but I don't do that anymore. The idea was mainly to be able to listen to how some new music I’d written was working. Most of the concerts that I play now are recorded, if not by someone I know in the audience, then by a professional engineer. If it's being recorded, I always ask for a copy. There are several things that might potentially come out. I'm just starting a Bandcamp label. First I'm releasing my back catalog for which the rights have come back to me and which are no longer available or which the record labels are no longer selling. They've let them go out of print in some cases. The idea is that eventually I'll start to release some live concerts.

– How about the third Fire and Water Quintet [with Ingrid Laubrock, Mary Halvorson, Tomeka Reid and Lesley Mok] album that will come out on RogueArt ? Will it be a suite like the previous ones, to be listened to in one sitting ?

MM –This one is different. It's a set of pieces that in my opinion all fit together, but I didn't have an order to start with, as I did with the previous records. I wrote it as individual pieces. I like the order that we chose as a sequence, but it's not necessary to listen to the full thing at once.

– How did your writing for this group evolve over the years?

MM –It mostly evolved from the first record to the second record. For the second record, I was deliberately writing for the people in the band, thinking about how I wanted to feature each of them. On the third record, it's like I had absorbed or internalized a lot of their playing and approach. While I was writing the music, I was again thinking about who I would like to feature and how, but it was more open-ended than on Hear the Light Singing where each piece was going to feature a different person. This time it was more about breaking things down into duos and trios. I have been continuing to use some of my earlier approaches and strategies but also trying to develop some new concepts in terms of counterpoint and working with different cells of ideas.

Fire and Water Quintet (Jazz em agosto, 2023). Photo Vera Marmelo

– You have a new trio with two members of the quintet. Did the trio idea arose from composing for the quintet?

MM –Not exactly, although the writing is similar and the trio plays some of the same music. I wrote some music for the trio that I ended up expanding for the quintet, and this is the first recording of it. In other cases, I imagined some departures from how I work with the quintet. Part of it was purely practical. It's pretty hard to tour with a quintet all the time. It's expensive, people are busy. I wanted to have a smaller unit that could be a continuation of the ideas that I've been exploring with Fire and Water. So, inviting Ingrid Laubrock and Lesley Mok made great sense. We've done several concerts together and are starting to work on some music for a recording. The band is called SOX 2. It's a a biomedical term that comes from generative gene therapy. It's something about how genes can regenerate. The person who wrote the liner notes for the quintet record explains it very clearly.

– Your all-female quintet is not only women, it's women from different origins, backgrounds, generations. Was that in your mind when forming the band?

MM –That's right. But that’s in the back of my mind. In the forefront of my mind are musical personalities. How does someone play? What's their sound? How do they approach improvisation? Can I imagine them performing my music? That is always the first concern. The second thing is my liking to have, as was already the case with Snowy Egret, different generations and backgrounds involved in the band. The quintet is a continuation of that idea. It's important for audiences to not only see a band of fantastic women players, but also that we are able to get together and make something together, even though we come from different backgrounds.

– How did you hear about each of them? Did you see them live at festivals or listen to their albums?

MM –Both. I had played with Mary and with Tomeka already, mostly through working with Nicole Mitchell. Ingrid came to see me very early after I moved to California. She was interested in some of the things I learned from Henry Threadgill and which I in turn shared with her. I followed what all of them were doing. Originally it was Susie Ibarra in the quintet. She's on the first album. Mary was playing in Tomeka's quartet. Mary and Ingrid had played with Kris Davis, and I was aware of what everybody was doing. These were all people I'd like to play with, and wondering what would happen if we all got together and played ? It went very well, and that's when I decided to turn it into a band. Our very first gig was part of my second Stone residency in 2019. In addition to doing several nights of current bands that I was either part of or leading, I decided to do one night of free improvisation. And I asked this group of people to do it with me. At the time I was starting to work on some new compositions. For the evening I ended up creating a roadmap of different duos and trios with some notated material, text scores, this kind of thing. It was quite open, but there was a little bit of the material that I then incorporated on For the Love of Fire and Water . After that show, I fleshed out the compositions and turned them into a suite that we could record.

– Like you, they're fluent in both composition and improvisation, active in both fields.

MM –For me it's more about blurring those fields, blurring the boundaries. But yes. Let me tell you about Lesley. I had written a second set of music that became the Hear the Light Singing recording. And we did a tour of that. We were going to do some more gigs and a recording, but unfortunately, Susie Ibarra wasn't available to do the tour with us. I started to look for a drummer that could learn the music with us and make the recording. I asked a couple of friends who they’d recommend and Lesley’s name came up. I called the other members and they were super into it. We got together and they played great right from the start. It's wonderful having them in the band, totally great.

– When you start a group, do you think, let’s do this one thing and then we'll see what happens? You sometimes have two recordings with a group, but three, like with Fire and Water, is pretty rare.

MM –That's right. Usually two records is about as far as I go with a band. And that's spread out over a few years. It comes both out of necessity or practicalities and because I wish to renew the writing and playing. I mean, if offered the opportunity to do a new tour, I want to have some new music ready and bring it out there. But in that case it's also that this band is really special and there seems to be room for expansion, like I could maybe develop music that would take us into some new territory. That’s what I am hoping to do. We're playing in Ottawa next month and going to do a tour in Europe in October, so maybe it’ll continue.

– When did you start using guitar?

MM –I have been playing with guitar for quite a long time if you go back to be the band Be Bread with Brandon Ross. That was more or less a quartet that had either Cuong Vu on trumpet and electronics or Brandon Ross on guitar, banjo and electric guitar. I like the combination of piano and guitar. In some ways, the inspiration for that came from doing a project of Henry Threadgill's, where I performed with guitar quartets, of which Brandon was part of. We did a couple pieces. One was « Over the River Club » from Song Out of My Trees [Black Saint, 1994] and the other was « Noisy Flowers » from Makin’ a Move [Columbia, 1995]. I like that sound. And it's about particular players. I worked with Brandon for quite a while, and when I put Snowy Egret together, I invited Liberty Ellman on guitar. Both of them had played with Threadgill. Mary has this big personality on guitar, effects and a very different sound to Liberty. Now they play great together in Ches Smith’s Clone Row. I wanted to keep working with guitar and I wanted to work with Mary. She has a very distinctive sound. I had done a project called Happy Whistlings around 2008, which was with Mary, Taylor Ho Bynum, Matana Roberts, Stomu Takeishi. It was music for the [writer, journalist] Eduardo Galeano project, Language of Dreams , that was eventually recorded by Snowy Egret. Mary played in one of the early iterations of it, and I loved playing with her. I knew I wanted to get back to having her play my music at some point. So this was the perfect opportunity. All the people I work with have their own creative expression which is original and strong, yet they always serve the compositions.

– You always pick the best bass players – Mark Dresser, Michael Formanek, Nick Dunston, Joëlle Léandre…

MM –Gosh, I'm so lucky to play with so many great bass players. Everybody's got a particular feel for time and comping and soloing and how they express rhythm. I'm looking for people who are complimentary to how I like to play the piano and the kind of music I'm writing. I'm fortunate that all these great bass players have been willing to play with me.

– You just toured again with the Tiger Trio [with Joëlle Léandre and Nicole Mitchell] . How did that go?

MM –It was great, we always have a good time when we get together. We hadn't played in about three years. We have two albums out. Or three if you include the one that's a live recording in Joëlle's Lifetime Rebel box set. We don't get to play often enough, but whenever we do, it's really fun. We're all coming from very different places in a way, but when we get together, something special happens. It is all improvised, we don't bring any compositions.

– The most recurring format in your discography is the trio. Is it your favorite?

MM –Well, I would say the quintet is my favorite. It's just a little harder to work with a quintet, to tour, organize schedules, have enough money to pay everybody. So I would say those are my two favorite formats, although I like duos, quartets and solo as well. With a trio, you have everything you need. You've got three different voices, so that not everybody has to play all the time, or you can change the roles fluidly from background to foreground, accompanying or being featured. And I like to do it with all kinds of instrumentations, from Equal Interest with violin and woodwinds [Leroy Jenkins and Joseph Jarman] to this new SOX 2 trio with Lesley and Ingrid, and the classic piano, bass, and drums association, like Splash, Trio M or my early trio. They're all fun and different, but it's easier to work with three people, you don't have a lot of parts to organize. It's less complex in some ways, but it doesn't have to be because everybody is capable of playing either very simply or playing a lot – like with Splash.

– Can you tell us about that trio [with Michael Formanek on bass & Ches Smith on drums and vibraphone] ? You put out a recording last year on Intakt, and took it on tour.

MM –As I was saying, composing for a trio, I have less parts available, right? You can only have three things going on at once. What's new for me about this trio is that Ches also plays vibes, so I have a second melodic instrument that can either play with the bass or with the piano while somebody else takes a different role. I love the combination of piano and vibes together. With musical personalities that bring something unique to my music, if I record something with Splash and then record the same tune with the quintet, it is performed completely differently. I can arrange some of the same material for quintet or trio. I wrote some interludes for Splash, and then adapted those to the quintet and they sound completely different. « Chalk », for instance, is a piece that can be played by various instrumentations and personalities, it's coming out different every time yet retains the essence of the composition. I do « Chalk » with Splash, with the quintet and also with Satoko.

– You don't have many solo recordings. Your solo piano set at the 2024 Novara Jazz festival was stunning.

MM –Just one, Life Carries Me This Way [Firehouse 12, 2013, reissued as a double LP in 2017] . Which is a studio recording. And I agree the live concert in Italy was strong. I just played another solo in Mantua, that also went very well. They recorded it. Maybe that would be something to consider for release on my label.

– You have been inspired by the works of painter Cy Twombly for some time.

MM –In the mid-90s, I wrote « Drawing in the Dark » for my band Same River Twice. That composition was inspired by Twombly. I had just gone to see a retrospective of Twombly's work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. That's what started the whole thing. I wasn’t aware of his art before, and remember feeling a strong affinity with the energy and gesture and the way his work looked in this gallery when I walked into it. In the back of my mind, I thought, that looks like how I play the piano. So that's what I've been doing for the last five years. It's a project that's being supported by the University of California, and was originally meant to be an evening-long performance comprised of several ensembles, Snowy Egret, Fire and Water and maybe Tiger Trio or MZM [Melford’s trio with Zeena Parkins and Miya Masaoka] , small group things that would culminate in one big improvised orchestra piece. Because of COVID, I wasn't able to make that happen. So I started thinking of it as installments, starting with Fire and Water’s For the love of Fire and Water , and then Hear the Light Singing, and then Splash, and then the upcoming Quintet record, titled Sure Grand Out, and finally an installation in which I will perform a solo piece. The title was inspired by a book, of, not exactly poetry – or maybe it is poetry. Someone had deconstructed a diary from a long time ago that she had found in the Midwest of the United States. Diary entries had be written every day, but the woman who then deconstructed it only took a few words out of it. One line was « a good rain, flowers come fast, sure grand out ». Those are titles I thought kind of worked within my relationship with Twombly's work. I am going back to Italy to work on the final installment of the Twombly project. I'm collaborating with two artists from Chicago, photographer and visual artist and videographer Sandra Binion, and Lou Malozzi, an experimental sound artist. We're creating an installation of our reflections and responses to Twombly's work. This will be the final chapter, and then, I think it's time to move on to something new.

– You have a taste for enigmatic song and album titles. How do you choose them?

MM –I usually find titles after the pieces of music are composed. I keep a list of possible titles around subjects or areas that I'm interested in, and had a number of titles related to Twombly, from writings I've read about him and his work. And I certainly get ideas from poetry and literature. And then some of the new music that I've written in the last year was inspired by the idea of regenerative gene therapy, and regeneration in general, like how the heck are we going to start to really address the climate issues. I talk with my students a lot. I teach at the university of California where the students are studying every subject you can imagine. Many great musicians who play in my ensembles or study with me are pre-med or going to become engineers or astrophysicists. I was talking with one of my pre-med students about this idea of regenerative gene therapy and she was the one who suggested where to look and what to read.

– Teaching, playing, composing, touring, traveling – what is the thing you enjoy the most ?

MM –I'm going to say that without making music, none of the rest makes sense. Performing and composing are central to everything. What's been great for me about being a professor at UC Berkeley is that my students and colleagues are very inspiring and it's been a really good synergistic experience that informs my music. I go out and perform my music in the world and have something that I feel good about sharing with my students when I come back. So, for the most part, it works as a whole. It's a bit tiring sometimes to try to juggle all these things. But on the other hand, if I didn't go out and perform new music, I don't think I'd have the inspiration to teach. So I have to do it all.

– What about the [Canadian clarinet player] François Houle Quintet you’re a member of, and uses graphic scores or at least color indications ?

MM –We use both. It started as a trio with me, Joëlle and François. We played at Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal a few years ago, we had scores and some notated material. And then the group expanded to include Gordon Grdina and Gerry Hemingway and it became more like text scores where François would give us indications, colors to look at and ideas. That's what we did in Novara. Last spring we did a few gigs in Canada. And we're going to perform in Guelph in September. François would like to record it. He did one recording that I couldn't make, with Alexander Hawkins and Joëlle. The next thing is to record in the configuration that we'll be playing in Guelph.

– If you had an unlimited budget to work on some specific project, what would you like to achieve that you haven't already?

MM –That's a good question. I guess I just want to be able to keep doing what I'm doing. I have some concerts coming up in the fall with Splash. Now that Michael Formanek lives in Lisbon, I have to bring him to the US twice, maybe three times. The only reason I would like not to worry about money is so I can keep doing what I'm doing. And, as the next idea comes in, have funding for it, as it’s the hardest thing to manage. I've been fortunate to get some very nice funding over the years, but it doesn't last forever and I'm again in the situation where there are so many things I want to do and I just don't know where the money's going to come from yet.

– You got some awards and grants in recent years.

MM –One was from the Doris Duke Foundation. I got that and the Albert Award and the Guggenheim. Those prizes have enabled me to do everything I've done the last few years.

Now that I'm getting to the culmination of the Cy Twombly project, I'm starting to think about writing for larger ensembles. I've got two commissions for next year. One is for the Kitchen Orchestra in Stavanger in Norway, and the other is for an ensemble called Studio Dan in Vienna. Ingrid has been writing for them. I'm writing a piece that I can do variations of with each of those bands next May and June. And I'm co-composing a piece for improvising pianist and orchestra with a colleague from UC Berkeley named Carmine Cella, which we will premiere next year as well. So I've got lots to do. I'm kind of allowing these things to happen, as seeds, to see what might come next.

Arles, 2019. Photo by Gil Corre

– Do you enjoy writing for larger ensembles?

MM –I do. I haven't done a lot of it, so I'm looking forward to it and figuring out how I want to do it, rather than following someone else's model necessarily.

DC – You worked with Wynton Marsalis and a big band.

MM –Yes, that was a traditional big band. They call it the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. We played one of my compositions. That was fun, I have to say. I didn't know what to expect when I went into it, because I come from another, freer school, so to speak. But I felt welcome. I loved all the guys and Ted Nash did a great arrangement of my piece, which I performed with them.

– Do you listen to a lot of music?

MM –Mostly trying to listen to the new stuff that's coming out, from people I play with. And I don't do a very good job of keeping up with it. Soon as I see something new coming from someone I know, I go check it out. And if it's something that really inspires me, I'll go back and listen to it a lot. Other times I might not get back to it. I'm not going back to older music much these days.

– How about listening to your own recordings?

MM –I don't like to do that, but if I have to, for a project or something, I will. But I can’t say I enjoy it. It's partly because I hear things that I know what I was going for and didn't quite achieve. But you know, I feel good about the music I've done overall.

– You often are your own producer. How does the relationship with the record labels happen?

MM –It's different with each label. I’ve learned that it's important to retain control over my own work, and as much as possible own the rights to it. I've been fortunate that there have been labels that have wanted to put out my music, and we've been able to talk about which project or projects might make the most sense. I think it's good to not be only with one label these days. It's a difficult time for labels and a difficult time for musicians. And it's nice to be able to share your music to different audiences and on different platforms. Just having opportunities to get my music out there is the most important thing.

– There was a point when you didn't release a lot of records. Now it might seem as you have accelerated a bit.

MM –It’s true. I have more projects now. Some of those are collectives, like Trio M or Lux Quartet. I have the Quintet and two different trios that are part of the same constellation, so to speak. And I don't know if it's getting older and feeling like, I want to make sure I accomplish these things and get them out in the world, or just that there are more opportunities to release things since I’m doing more things.

– You’ve played with drummer Allison Miller for a number of years, and were a member of her band Boom Tic Boom.

MM –I’m not in that anymore. We did some concerts with the original band last fall, but I think Allison's moved on with Boom Tic Boom. Instead, we're co-leading the Lux Quartet.Allison made a number of really nice records that I got to play on. I like the first one called Live in Willisau [Foxhaven Records, 2012], and the most recent one, Glitter Wolf [Royal Potato Family, 2019] on which I also play harmonium. She has a new band that she's still calling Boom Tic Boom but it’s a completely different line-up.

– What else have you been involved in recently?

MM –I've been playing with some musicians in the Bay Area. I was invited to collaborate on a project, as a performer, called Insect Life, which is Ben Goldberg on clarinets, Ben Davis on cello, Raffi Garabedian on tenor and Danny Lubin-Laden on trombone. They invited Hamir Atwal and me to play with them. There should be a recording of that coming out next year, maybe on Ben's label [BAG Production Records]. And I've been playing in a trio with Ben Goldberg and one of my students, Matt Muntz, a fantastic bass player. Matt is getting his PhD in composition at UC Berkeley and he, Ben and I have a trio that we're going to record next fall. Ben Goldberg, cellist Ben Davis and I have a new trio project that we're going to try and record as well. I love playing with Ben [a collaboration that harks back to duo performances in the US and Europe from 2012 onward, the album Dialogue and Myra being part of Goldberg’s Orphic Machine project in 2015].

Myra Melford & Ben Goldberg in 2013. Photo by Jean-François Laberine

Addendum...

- Which are your three favorites among your own albums, the most artistically successful in your opinion?

MM - This is a tough one. I'll say :

Snowy Egret - The Other Side of Air (Firehouse 12, 2018)

Fire and Water Quintet - Hear the Light Singing (Rogueart, 2023)

Myra Melford Splash (Intakt, 2025)

- Could you recommend three albums from other artists that you currently enjoy?

MM -

Ches Smith - Clone Row (Otherly Love, 2025)

John Carter - Fields (Gramavision, 1988)

Anna Webber and Matt Mitchell - Capacious Aeration (Tzadik, 2023)

I haven't checked out Mary's new album with Ambrose Akinmusire yet - looking forward to that!

Current and upcoming releases:

Myra Melford « Splash » (Intakt, 2025)
Myra Melford/Satoko Fujii « かたらひ (Katarahi) » (RogueArt, 2026)
Ben Goldberg/Myra Melford/Danny Lubin-Laden « Trouble Trouble » (BAG, August 2026)
Fire and Water Quintet « Sure Grand Out » (RogueArt, September 2026
Find out more here: https://myramelford.bandcamp.com/
Myra Melford on RogueArt: https://roguart.com/artist/myra-melford/160
Revisit an interview with Myra Melford on the Free Jazz Blog in 2022.

Teiku - Klang (Ginko Records, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Sammy Stein

Teiku comprises pianist Josh Harlow, percussionist Jonathan Barahal Taylor, double bassist Jaribu Shahid, and, newly adopted into the ensemble, bass clarinettist Jason Stein. Their sophomore release on Gingko Records is Klang, a meditation on focus and intention. It follows ‘Teiku’ (577 records, 2024) – a release that built on the foundations of the music of their Jewish-Ukrainian ancestors that they grew up with.

Teiku was founded by Chicago pianist Harlow and percussionist Barahal to interpret their respective families’ unique Passover melodies as conduits for spontaneous musical expression. On Klang, Teiku expands on the meditative themes of ‘Teiku,’( 577 records 2024), which was a meditation on their shared history and a tribute to the aurally transmitted ancestral melodies that they grew up singing. Klang expands on these themes and takes its source from historical music, but also rare manuscripts, voice recordings, and chants. All the elements imbued in this album stem from influences on the lives of the musicians, so the music feels personal and intimate, yet not to share it would seem a selfish act because the music is exceptional.

Five of the six tracks represent the same Passover song/liturgical text, Ki Le Naeh (For Him It Is Fitting), but each, due to regional and family variations, is a distinct, unique melody. Far from the standardised versions prevalent today, the ancient melodies are transfigured, deconstructed, and reframed, but their essence, of respect, collective power, and remembrance, remains.

Stein comments, "Improvisational music has always been squarely in the tradition of expressing the essential right of all people to be free. It’s a great pleasure and opportunity to be a part of Teiku’s musical expression and alignment with this sense of freedom from oppression as it applies to the present moment in the world. It was a great pleasure to work with Josh, Jon, and Jaribu. I love the collective and open feeling everyone brings to the music and to the process of interpreting this traditional and deeply spiritual music."

Understanding the recording requires attentive listening if you are to comprehend how vocal sounds, musical exploration, references to free expression, and detail come together to create a recording that is both communicative and profound. Every time the oral traditions are imagined and re-imagined, subtle changes happen, and with Klang Teiku adds their own voice to this lineage. You can hear strong references to Jewish traditional music, with the associated rhythms, chordal changes, and beautiful harmonics that lend themselves to the musical interpretation of emotive, lyrical music. Yet, although the interpretation is of historical music, Teiku treats it as living, evolving material, adapted to modern trends of exploration, divergence, and freedom of playing. The listener needs to know nothing of the influences that helped create it, because the music is complete in itself, while the tracks feel distinct, yet connected.

Barahal’s drumming adds beautiful touches to the patterns and dance-like themes of some of the tracks. There is a step-like motion to his rhythms that can’t be ignored. His vibraphone playing creates intimate moments through delicate phrasing and harmonic subtlety. Harlow builds a harmonic foundation and rich textural atmosphere on both piano and electronics, and his use of silence is deliberate, creating space for other instruments and configurations to be heard. Stein knows when to support or solo, and his innate sense of dynamics means there is movement to the music, carried in some places by his interpretation and how he builds and relaxes the intensity. Jaribu Shahid’s bass lends its voice to poignant moments and also offers structural support in many areas, and the same can be said of Harlow’s input. The sense of musicians playing in harmony is strong in Teiku, and a sense of reverence in this music that is inexplicable. It is as if each track is taken and delivered with sincerity and respect, while at the same time allowing the individuality of the players to be heard and felt. While Teiku is a quartet, the unannounced, yet constantly present fifth member is the historical music that is an essential collaborator with a modern jazz style of playing.

Barahal and Harlow comment, “The process of reframing our ancestral melodies to make this music reminds us to keep searching and imagining. As Jews, we embrace our spiritual and cultural heritage of care and community, of rituals and questions. We reject all forms of violence that have become associated with that heritage by genocidal nationalists. To that end, we dedicate this set of music to the Palestinian people and all suffering people. Thank you to our families, our mentors, and our friends, who continue to teach us the way forward in a fractured world.”

The first track, ‘Ki Le Noeh (Krumholz melody),’ is deeply traditional, with modern inputs. Krumholz means twisted, contorted, and the melody is repeated, varied, and tested in different ways throughout the track. Stein's bass clarinet lends expressive tones and melodies, while the insistent drums and the full-voiced bass line add depth and cohesion. The piano, when it emerges from the background, is gloriously uplifting, particularly when it is duelling with the bass clarinet. What is great about the track is how the traditional melodic patterns are underpinned by explorative free styling from all four members of Teiku.

‘Ki Lo Laeh (Fendrick Melody)’ is other-worldly and reverent, with gentle vocal recordings from Sue Fendrick; there are some wonderfully warped tones that add to the ethereal nature of the music. It feels oddly like a prayer, in its delivery and comparatively tentative nature, particularly the final phrases.

In ‘Khasul Seydur Peysakh (Chasman Melody)’ there are melodic lines from Stein’s bass clarinet, toned with supportive bass and percussion, and a piano that underpins everything, seemingly in a melodic thought of its own for much of the time, but one that reflects the rest of the ensemble. Stein excels in his free, explorative expression, while the track swells and ebbs, creating waves of change. Shahid’s solo evolves into an expressive solo punctuated by percussive elements and eventually accompanied by the ensemble, with Stein's melody leading into a brief dance rhythm and an ensemble finish.

‘Ki Le Noeh (Shlita Melody)’ is at the beating heart of this album, and as the translated honorific of the title might suggest, is an homage to many rhythms of Jewish music, but afforded the Teiku treatment and given a modern free jazz twist. The bass ukulele adds sonorous undertones, while Stein’s bass clarinet positively dances its way across patterns, changes, and rhythmic explorations. The final minute is explosive and somehow cathartic in its energy expenditure.

On ‘Ki Le Noeh (Gerster Melody)’ there is the gentle start of the vibraphone solo, into which the ensemble drops, the clarinet rendering an equally gentle line. The track has essences of modern jazz along with the traditional music, and the bass solo is beautiful. The closing track, ‘Odir Bimlikhe (Lunski Melody) is a free-played improvisation paired with elements of traditional-sounding melody lines. It is standout, with the ensemble creating a dynamic, energetic track filled with the emotional input of all that has gone before.

The album is outstanding in many areas. Teiku is apt as a name for this ensemble of musicians because it has several meanings. In Japanese, it means to keep doing or continue, while in Aramaic, it is a derivation of the word meaning ‘the question stands,’ and the ensemble feels as if they have addressed several questions, explored some of the answers, but in the end, the question remains, and it is this. How do we relate historic, traditional music to modern styles of playing and freely improvised expression? Teiku tried to find at least part of the answer.

Klang by Teiku

Lance Austin Olsen and Jamie Drouin – a field far beyond form and emptiness (Infrequency, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Nick Ostrum

A field far beyond form and emptinessis a return to form. It is Lance Austin Olsen and Jamie Drouin’s first musical collaboration in six years, following a period marked mostly visual arts projects, some joint work on comic books, and an extended bout with Covid. And as with previous recordings, it features Drouin and Olsen on a range of instruments acoustic - dulcimer, cello, piano, children’s and trainer guitars, objects – and not – radio, laptop, amplifiers. Likewise, as with their previous collaboration, this one focuses on unconventional techniques coupled with a lot of frictive and crumbly percussions and Drouin’s electronic manipulations.

The result is a noirish soundtrack to the equally dark and perplexing comics they released a few years ago. Sounds are ephemeral and together evoke a disjointed assemblage of incidental and environmental sounds from a radio play. Woody clicks spatter across one ear. Dramatic tinny dulcimer chords and a lone piano key pock the other. Then silence, and hums, and a quick tumble of acousmatic clatter. One can only imagine what, if anything, is lurking behind it all, the creaks of a settling house, a clumsy cat, or some more ominous disturbance gathering. Breaking the acousmatic spell, a news reporter intervenes at 21:, announcing “The shortages have been fueled by US sanctions.” An extended hum follows, which opens into a period of silence, then a busy minute-long stretch of rummaging.

Silent intervals fill much of the space, serving not only as markers of subtle change but also curious spaces of musical sound in the Cagean sense. They also give the listener time to process and wonder before the next brief flutter of activity. In sense, the core of a fieldmay very well be these loose agglomerations of sounds and the silence, the connective tissue holding it all together. However, one could also flip that equation, as the sound elements are imposed and intrude upon the underlying silent base, which could be the titular field that transcends shape and order but is also pregnant with possibilities. Whichever way one may consider the album – as sounds on silence or intervallic silence amidst sound - the listener is left to wonder what all this space and abstraction is about. It is something unpleasant, for sure. It also says something about the uncertainty of today, as the sanctions report, just one of two spoken insertions, hints. If anything, that contemporary ambiguity and precarity can be a menacing and lonely place, albeit with the dialectical potential for calm and beauty.

a field far beyond form and emptinessis available as a download from Bandcamp:

a field far beyond form and emptiness by jamie drouin | lance austin olsen

Caroline Kraabel / Pat Thomas / John Edwards / Steve Noble - Transgressive Coastlines (Shrike Records, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Richard Blute

I was happy to see saxophonist Caroline Kraabel reviewed in Stef’s recent article “female artists and solo horn performances”, as I had been spending a great deal of time listening to Transgressive Coastlines. I’ll admit I bought it because of her bandmates. The trio of Pat Thomas on piano, Steve Noble on drums and John Edwards on bass struck me as an unstoppable combo, and it was a pleasure to discover that Kraabel more than holds her own in this distinguished company.

Pat Thomas is a member of the great band [Ahmed], who put on one of the most astonishing shows I’ve ever seen at Big Ears 2025, and also appeared on The Locals Play The Music Of Anthony Braxton, the album where Braxton gets the funky treatment. Noble and Edwards have worked together on countless albums, providing the backbone for any number of the most important albums in free jazz. Check out their work with Peter Brötzmann and Jason Adasiewicz on Mental Shakes or that quartet’s live album, called simply The Quartet. It’s Brötzmann’s final show.

Caroline Kraabel is a saxophonist, conductor, composer and improviser. She’s performed with an extraordinary number of great musicians, including her bandmates here, Charlotte Hug, Maggie Nichols, Louis Moholo, Susan Alcorn, and on and on. She also “founded a large improvising group made up of all sorts of trans-masc, trans-fem, nonbinary, and women improvisers…. they have been exploring improvisation and difference in monthly labs and regular performances”. I would love to have heard her “solo saxophone improvisations while walking in London and elsewhere with her infant child/ren in their pushchair.” [Both quotes are from her website.]

The opener Dark Rainbow begins as a masterclass in how to gradually build up tension. Edwards is scraping his strings, inviting his bandmates to join him. Thomas plays just a few notes, seemingly always at the right moment. Noble and Kraabel are also lightly responding. But they build up the sound quickly and before long Kraabel is playing longer flowing lines with occasional shrieks as punctuation. I’m always impressed with Edwards in the way he switches so smoothly from bowing to plucking in response to his bandmates. The intensity of all four musicians increases sharply, they’re communicating deeply, with lots of stops and starts and changes in tempo. As in all the best free improvisation, we feel as if we’re listening in on a profound conversation. The whole album is full of subtle moments of peace and eruptions of intensity. Each of the musicians are happy to take the lead or take a step back as the collective wishes.

I really enjoy Kraabel’s playing throughout this album. While I clearly hear Evan Parker in her style, I also hear something unique in her use of the high extremes of instrument and in her use of breath sounds. She seems to be talking into her sax at several points.

This is a year-end list contender for me. I’ll be diving into Kraabel’s Bandcamp page as soon as I finish this review.

Transgressive Coastlines by Caroline Kraabel / Pat Thomas / John Edwards / Steve Noble

Some AACM on Record (Part 1)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Gary Chapin

The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) was one of the most fertile creative organizations … ever … (yes, I said “ever”), serving as apprenticeship for swarms of indispensable players. Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrahms, Lester Bowie, Wadada Leo Smith, and a ton others formed and emerged from the AACM. In any discussion of post-Coltrane jazz, improvisation, avant garde, experimentation, and black identity in music, you will hear of the members of the AACM. They created the standards and then exceeded them.

Sixty years later, the organization continues apace, perhaps a more conventional non-profit, but still the hotbed of iconically iconoclastic innovation that it has always been. Bandcamp recently ran a piece featuring the AACM artists featured on that site , and it was indeed great! Every disc on there was worthy of the attention, but they were almost all re-releases or resurrections of work by the masters back in the day.

We decided to look at some current releases either by AACM members or featuring them. Like the recently reviewed dance! skip! hop! by AACMer Tomeka Reid (reviewed here), these are filled with life, worthy of attention, and driven by AACM values.

Yowzers - Ben Lamar Gay (International Anthem, 2025)

Yowzers opens with an old old feeling church-ish song (reminded me of “I got a Bible I can read”), laying in some solid ground and then going into a creatively abundant set of compositions that lean into small percussion, chants and songs, electronics, and the post-bop jazz fractured rhythms that I love so much.

The main band is Ben LaMar Gay - cornet, voice, synth, bells, diddley bow, percussion, programming, manipulations; Tommaso Moretti - drums, percussion, voice; Davis - tuba, piano, bells, voice; Will Faber - guitar, ngoni, bells, voice. With a few “also featured” joining with their voices and Rob Frye on flute and bass clarinet. It’s an unusual ensemble but feels entirely organic — one section leads to the next with the inevitability of a great story.

Yowzers by Ben LaMar Gay

Emma Dayhuff, Kahil El’Zabar, Dee Alexander, Isaiah Collier - Innovations and Lineage: The Chicago Project (Division 81 Records, 2025)

Innovations and Lineage: The Chicago Project (featuring Emma Dayhuff, Kahil El’Zabar, Dee Alexander, and Isaiah Collier) plumbs similar depths but spends much more time in the dirty, mumbling groove that immediately brings to mind Kahil El’Zabar. This project builds more on traditional percussion (tambourines, gourds, thumb piano) than on Art Ensemblish “small instruments” and its reliance on a careening 6/8 feel for so much of the time is addictive. You can feel the after-rhythm when the song ends. Alexander and El’Zabar sing and vocalize their bluesy moans and shouts. Emma Duff’s bass is relentless — the MVP of the record. Isaiah Collier’s tenor is bar sax and post-Monk — I hear some Charlie Rouse.

In the end it’s meditatively rhythmic, driving and energetic. So in the pocket and joyful that you become the journey.

Innovations & Lineage - The Chicago Project by Dr. Emma Dayhuff

Paula Rae Gibson and Alex Bonney - In Another World We Will Live For Ever (33Xtreme Records/33 Jazz Records, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Sammy Stein

When Paula Rae Gibson contacted me to ask if I would review her new album, she described it simply yet profoundly as ‘an ode to friendship.’ Her best friend had died the year before, and, as she explained, “the least I could do was try to articulate what she meant to me, as a way to heal and a way to stay close to her.”

Few artists possess the imagination and musical instinct required to translate grief into something tangible, but Rae Gibson does exactly that here. This album is steeped in loss, love, and longing, yet reaches far beyond. It becomes, ultimately, a path toward hope, reminding us that beauty and sorrow are often inseparable. That such beauty can result from loss must be a sign of hope and a vehicle towards acceptance and light that we all crave at times.

The album’s origins are as intimate as the music. A small Japanese publisher released a limited edition collection of photographs Rae Gibson had taken of her friend, and while collaborating with trumpet and cornet player, producer, and live electronic musician Alex Bonney on a soundtrack incorporating her friend’s voice messages, the project gradually ‘came to life,’ as Rae Gibson described the experience.

The music moves through emotional and sonic spaces that feel almost suspended between worlds. Bonney’s visionary electronics don’t just accompany Rae Gibson’s vocals; they deepen and amplify them, creating an atmosphere that feels immersive, spectral, and oddly transcendent, as if the listener is afforded fleeting glimpses into another, almost tangible dimension.

The eerie opener, ‘Alive’ is atmospheric and backed by electronic fuzziness that perfectly depicts the sense of otherworldliness that loss can blanket us in. There is a keening keyboard that carries throughout the number, and layers of electronic haze drift beneath whispered words like a prayer, and distant church bells that toll like a summons but also set an undertone of reverence. The sense of emotional dislocation is carried into ‘The Gloves That You Gave Me,’ which sums up the strange power objects acquire after loss. Everyday items become saturated with memory, carrying traces of those who once touched them. The whirring background rhythms feel like a whirlpool, the undertow dragging us towards a darker place. The organ-like background and the gentle, mesmeric vocals of Rae Gibson, punctuated by occasional birdsong, evoke a deep sense of absence. The words ‘everything feels broken’ and ‘nothing will ever be the same, only rain feels right, right now, only tears feel right, right now’ perfectly sum up loss and cut to the heart of bereavement with devastating simplicity.

‘Dreamt of You’ is a beautiful summation of how we dream of those who have gone, and how our imagination fills in the gaps, using phrases they used to say. Offering herself comfort, the singer tells of dreaming of a lost one and how they tell her they are fine – comforting and yet disturbing, as the music adds touches of menace and uncertainty to the snippets of conversation, which the intellect tells us cannot be real, but is redolent of the collective brainstorm our minds flood us with when we have lost. Tender, unsettling, and painfully human.

‘Wait For Me Wait’ is heartfelt in its sincerity. Pitched against relentless rhythmic repetitions, the vocals sing their plea but also accept that it cannot be different. The words speak of talking forever, that there is so much more to say, and a wish for just a little more time. ‘Funny Confessions’ is about sunshine, joy, and how the presence of someone can change things, and the lingering instinct to wonder what someone might say if they were still with you.

‘Lean On’ is an investigative journey into the feelings of leaning on the love for someone, sharing their fire, dancing, and celebrating who they were with the world, while ‘Very Alone,’ is the album’s emotional centrepiece, a number that will resonate with anyone who has experienced deep loss. The lyrics, ‘checking in with you, checking in with me,’ capture the strange ongoing dialogue we maintain with people we have lost, while the line ‘I’ve got to learn to do this alone’ lands with heartbreaking honesty, demonstrating the reluctant acceptance our minds understand we must come to.

This album could have turned into something of an introspective journey, but, while the essence of the album is loss, there is also music that continually reaches outward, and this carries the listener beyond the subject. There is warmth and connection. The album is uplifting, a testament to music’s ability to hold pain, transform it, and return to us a gift. The journey toward the light of how music can carry us, heal us, keep us close to those we have temporarily lost, and offer a vehicle for emotions that no other art form can do.

Columbia Icefield - A Silence Opens (Out of Your Head, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Eyal Hareuveni

A Silence Opens is the third, and unfortunately, the last album of the Columbia Icefield, the quartet that trumpeter Nate Wooley founded, and featuring pedal steel master Susan Alcorn, guitarist-vocalist Ava Mandoza, and drummer Ryan Sawyer. A Silence Opens is informed by the death of close ones and the endless grief their death entails, and began as a tribute to the trumpeter Ron Miles (who passed away in March 2022), Wooley's mentor and someone he looked up to as an older brother, credited for saving Wooley’s life and making him a better person, expanded to a memorial album for Alcorn, whose idiosyncratic sound distinguished the quartet’s sound, who passed away in January 2025, while Columbia Icefield completed the album.

Wooley writes: “Death is a lack with weight. At the moment that you realize that someone you love is irrecoverably gone, a small tear in your life opens up. As days go by, the sliver of grief grows, becoming a rift, a gap, a gulley, a canyon. At the point that you feel lost in the immensity of space where that person used to be, the expansion stops; the hole—the vast and airy part of your life that used to be occupied by that person—becomes solid. Maybe it decreases in size, but more likely, your memories grow to occupy its space”.

Wooley decided to transform the “pressure with sadness” and fill the silence and the vacuum that death brings with new sounds and new voices, creating a deeply emotional and life-affirming musical statement. The album includes three Miles’ pieces, and Alcorn’s favorite protest song - Chilean singer-songwriter Víctor Jara’s “El Derecho De Vivir En Paz” (The Right to Live in Peace, the song that closes Alcorn’s Canto album, Relative Pitch, 2023). The third, unrehearsed interpretation of this song featured a choir of Alcorn’s friends - Mary Halvorson, Ingrid Laubrock, Wendy Eisenberg, gabby fluke-mogul, Laura Ortman, Patrick Holmes, with Wooley, Mandoza, and Sawyer. “We just felt the joy—in saying thank you, we love you, and goodbye—that Susan would have taken in seeing friends and bandmates all lined up, eyes closed, following the lines of a melody she felt in her heart”, Wooley says.

A Silence Opens immediately occupies your full attention with its powerful emotional urgency, faithfully capturing the complex musical essence and personas of Miles and Alcorn. It is structured as a mournful suite or ritual that celebrates the lives and the gift of knowing Miles and Alcorn. It begins with Wooley’s vulnerable whistling solo, the melody of “El Derecho De Vivir En Paz”, followed by Miles’ ballad “Howard Beach” (from My Cruel Heart, Gramavision, 1996), with Mendoza contrasting and pushing Wooley’s touching and soulful playing into aggressive storms; then Mendoza, who almost cries as she recites “El Derecho”; Miles’ dramatic “Darken My Door” (from I Am a Man, Yellowbird, 2017); the choir who “El Derecho” in a waythat makes you want to join their singing; Wooley’s poetic centerpiece, “We Say Goodbye Twice/Wildwood Flower”, that distills the musical and emotional core of this inspiring, heartfelt album with Alcorn’s arresting playing; the quartet offering a joyful interpertation of “El Derecho””; an intense and urgent, distortion-heavy and propulsive version of Miles “You Taste” (from Woman’s Day, Gramavision, 1997); and concluding with Wooley’s solo trumpet of “El Derecho”, simultaneously singing and crying this song, and then whistles it, marking a final acceptance of the passed one, and also as a requiem for Columbia Icefield itself, until it disappears in silence.

Columbia Icefield was in many ways a kind of musical family, and it sounds like a close-knit musical organism. It was one of those few, rare bands that keep expanding its musical universe with every new album, a band that you cherish all its albums, a band that is larger than its parts. “May we always bear the weight of these losses as a gift of presence and memory,” Wooley concluded.

A Silence Opens by Columbia Icefield

The Utopia of Better Processes: An Interview with Christian Lillinger

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Photo by Nino Halm

By Ljubisa Tosic*

Anyone lucky enough to have seen Christian Lillinger's project Open Form for Society live in 2019 at Donaueschingen or at the Jazzfest Berlin will easily understand why he calls it a "sound organ." After years on hiatus, the drummer is now reviving this deeply resonant project.

When one confronts Christian Lillinger with prominent colleagues' names, intending to find out how lasting his encounters with figures such as Rolf Kühn, Joachim Kühn, David Liebman, Alexander von Schlippenbach, or John Tchicai may have been, he responds with a staccato stream of additional names that have inscribed themselves into his musical biography:

Tamara Stefanovich, Mat Maneri, Craig Taborn, Joe Lovano, Christopher Dell, Peter Brötzmann, Beat Furrer, Peter Evans, Sofia Jernberg, John Schröder, Bob Degen, Lotte Anker, Barre Phillips, Evan Parker, Wadada Leo Smith, William Parker, Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky, and many others...

Of course. When it comes to lasting influence, says Lillinger, "It's a difficult matter." To speak only about 0.1 percent of those influences would be unfair.

On the other hand, there were naturally his own decisions and major life steps that were connected to certain individuals. Lillinger speaks first of the decision "to start playing drums at all," and then of "having the opportunity, at sixteen, coming from a village, to study and pursue a professional path."

Here the support of Günther "Baby" Sommer, a towering figure of free jazz, was essential. "Another decisive moment was getting to know Joachim Kühn, who encouraged me to manifest my own music." From this ultimately emerged Christian Lillinger's Grund, an ensemble known for its distinctive dynamic forms of interplay.

If we continue digging deeper, Lillinger agrees that his search for a controlled freedom and openness in music-making is connected to personally perceived limitations- such as the traditional role of the drummer in jazz- as well as to his own biographical experiences:

My outlook was shaped by independence from a very early age. At the same time, I believe the classical role of the jazz drummer should be one of further development and expansion. Tradition is a constantly evolving form while preserving its roots.

For him, tradition also means, "being able to articulate oneself freely on one's instrument and develop one's own language." No surprise, then, that Lillinger regards jazz itself "as an art music" that demands alertness and continuous development.

Only in this way, he argues, can one do justice to the legacy of great innovators and carry their heritage forward through one's own artistic stance. "Everything else is dead music to me- music that merely fulfills a certain mood or expectation and thereby loses its timelessness. That interests me very little..."

Listening to Lillinger's music, it quickly becomes apparent that here is someone who hovers powerfully above stylistic boundaries. It is therefore tempting to throw a few more names and concepts at him to discover if he is influenced by contemporary classical music. Perhaps the aleatoric methods of John Cage or the open-form concepts of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Earle Brown play a role.

Open Form for Society group shot. Photo by Nadja Hoehfeld.

Perhaps the great sonic precision known from works by Pierre Boulez is also essential, particularly for the current and second recording by his ensemble Open Form For Society (OFFS). "Aleatoricism plays no role whatsoever in OFFS," says Lillinger. "My music is very concretely composed and written down in conventional notation."

Nevertheless, influences from contemporary classical music are numerous. He describes them with terms such as "serial" and "microtonal." His musical thinking also revolves around traditions such as spectralism, New Complexity, and concepts of micro-time and irrational time. These are, he says, "important procedural and inspirational sources."

Someone who formulates his ideas so consciously can perhaps summarize his aesthetic position in something approaching a manifesto:

It is a "new new" chamber music that incorporates space into its actions just as much as what is prescribed and written. The placement and interpretation of the notes are always in dialogue with spatiality. The performers create the space; within this space they navigate themselves. I am opposed to genre labels, so I would rather speak of "post-genre" and of "composer-performers," because everyone involved bears responsibility for shaping and further developing the material. It is a music that operates in a certain scientific manner and thereby continuously discovers new paths.

Immersing oneself in the recording Open Form for Society II (Plaist), one feels as though embarking on a journey through an enchanted sonic garden that gathers collective musical reflexes and conveys an atmosphere of highly energized, controlled freedom.

At times there are slowed-down events reminiscent of musical stalactite caves, as in "Aufgefächert." Elsewhere pulsating sound structures emerge, creating an almost nervous sonic world. Abstract piano figures and energetically charged sound spaces continually return, while density is omnipresent within this sounding architecture.

"Vector" and "Ocker" recall an originally abstracted and further-developed bebop aesthetic, yet with their own freely treated thematic material and repetitive patterns. Introspective and expressive structures form the poles of this musical universe.

How does such a world, constantly shifting between these poles, come into being? Does the personnel come first, or the composition?

It is a very heterogeneous process, one that I wanted to pursue as naturally as possible. Initially there was the vision of assembling a larger ensemble with a strongly percussive sonic language that reflects my way of seeing and realizing structure. Here the sound of Boulez's Sur Incises was an important inspiration.

At the same time, his work with nearly all of the musicians involved in various ensembles was another important factor.

Whether Dell Lillinger Westergaard [DLW], Stemeseder-Lillinger, the collaborations with Petter Eldh and Kaja Draksler, with Robert Landfermann, or with Anna D'Errico through my work with Klangforum Wien- all of this was formative and gave me a clear idea of how and what I can write and hear.

It is fitting that Lillinger mentions Boulez's Sur Incises. With its instrumentation of three pianos, three harps, and three percussionists, it is a sonic laboratory, an organized form of energy that Lillinger has expanded upon. Alongside himself on drums and electronics are Kaja Draksler (upright piano), Elias Stemeseder (spinet and synthesizer), Georg Vogel (electric clavinet), Anna D'Errico and Cory Smythe (piano), bassists Robert Landfermann, Jonas Westergaard, and Petter Eldh, and Christopher Dell on vibraphone.

The process of selecting collaborators was equally heterogeneous:

The criteria emerged from previous work with all participants in different projects. For me, this ensemble is the perfect way to connect and transcend the worlds of classical music and modernity. Some musicians are primarily responsible for the text, others for further developments regarding sound. My musical utopia requires excellent preparation: precise reading, abstraction, further writing, and transcendence. In this ensemble I consciously distribute that responsibility.

Transcendence, he says, is less a concept than "a result of working with the material itself. We combine influences from contemporary classical music, the avant-garde, and modern beat culture, creating a common point of fusion. Everyone involved must be capable of developing their own further plan based on what is written."

What may sound free is nevertheless clearly prescribed in many respects and directions, including highly detailed polyphonic notation and rhythmic structures:

[This project] has very little to do with conventional notions of freedom and openness. Freedom begins with the possibilities of variation and dynamics. Through repetition and the slow variation within those repetitions, an individual space emerges. Everything conditions everything else and appears as a shared whole: a meta-instrument, a sonic organism.

Working with the same colleagues over a long period can, of course, lead to a comfortable routine. One knows what the other person will do, adapts accordingly, and clichés may emerge.

Lillinger sees it differently. "I don't see that danger. Because I work with the same musicians over a long period, a genuine awareness develops of what the next stages might be." Intensive work and insight make it possible "to take those next steps. With consistent and continuous work, neither boredom nor routine arise."

A convincing explanation.

This leaves the title Open Form for Society, which seems to suggest a close connection between music and social thought. "The collective negotiation of the music I initiate serves as the foundation and basis for negotiation."

Does this also concern ideas of an open, liberal society, or democracy?

The latter, absolutely! It concerns the utopia of a continually improving social process sustained through negotiation and the collective discovery of solutions. However, I must say that this project is more a sound that accompanies and encourages open processes than one that fully embodies them. Because I am the composer and initiator, it ultimately belongs more to a closed, albeit flexible, structure.

For the openness of jazz, it is far too fixed and strict; for classical music, however, it remains too open. "It therefore exists between these often rigid and ultimately inadequate categories and hopefully inspires further thinking about these social limitations. The point is this: Never stop communicating and working. Never stop thinking!"

This is Lillinger's ambitious approach. One that could also help people outside music avoid more than a few traps of cliché and convention.

*Interview originally published in Jazz Podium, translated from German.