The Free Jazz Collective

Gustavo Coritñas - The Drum Also Sings (Desafio Candente Records, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Chicago-based drummer and composer Gustavo Coritñas is a restless experimenter. His music often includes Latin American folk influences, sociopolitical awareness, and thrilling spontaneity. On The Drum Also Sings, Cortiñas joins forces with two other unique and stylistically very different drummers, Dave King and Isaiah Spencer, to explore the drum kit's lyricism.

For instance, the three-part group improvisation, “Dialogue with the Ancestors” features a definite spirituality. Its chant-like refrains and fiery yet haunting rhythms build an exalted homage to the gods of the past and the primal world itself. Here too, the contrasting styles of the three drummers add another captivating dimension to the piece. King’s exuberant percussion with touches of whimsy, heard on the right, complements Spencer’s darkly hued thundering beats on the left. While Cortiñas, in between his bandmates, adds a contemplative, almost meditative aspect to the collective drumming. Despite the individuality of each musician, the result is delightfully cohesive, stimulating yet never jarring.

The theme of transcendent mysticism runs through the entire album. On “Etinel skotol t'ixt'unel” Mayan spoken word artist Angelina Suyul recites her own poem in her ancestral tongue. A paen to the eternal and the integration of humanity within the universe, Suyul’s performance moves with the hypnotic cadence of her words. Their meaning is almost instinctively understood even before reading the Spanish and English translations.

Chilean vocalist La Paula Herrera delivers Cortiñas’ song “Tu Resiliencia Es Resistencia” with emotional resonance. Her sublime artistry and eloquence amplify the hopefulness and the poignancy of the lyrics. Meanwhile, the intimacy of her voice and the fluidity of her singing enchant and mesmerize.

On “Añay Pachamama” Argentinian musician Maryta de Humahuaca interprets her compatriot, María Farfán Caparros’ ode in the Quechua language. The track glorifies the natural world in a pantheistic tone. The title translates to “Gratitude Mother Earth”, and de Humahuaca imbues it with an appropriate balance of the sacred and the primal. It is simultaneously a joyous and somber religious ceremony.

This conceptual framework continues with vocalist and clarinetist Anget Bat Dawid, who transforms “Psalm 23” into a powerful, impassioned plea. Her thrillingly dissonant clarinet and her bluesy shouts make this biblical verse into a life-affirming protest anthem. It also serves as the perfect conclusion for this intriguing and provocative work.

On the surface, a recording made up primarily of drumming, with little other instrumentation, may sound daunting. Coritñas, however, has made it evocative enough to entrance his audience. Far from mainstream, The Drum Also Sings stirs open-minded listeners to their core.

The Drum Also Sings by Gustavo Cortiñas

Summer Bummer 2026

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

By Paul Acquaro

For a few years, I have had this funny vision of Antwerp’s Summer Bummer festival taking place on a beach near a body of water. I had sunshine, seagull calls and good vibes in this fantasy. In reality, the venue, a rock club called Trix, is located on a busy road amongst high-rise apartment buildings just outside of downtown Antwerp. So, no seagulls, no beach and even the sun was being fickle. It troubled me, what could be the source for this misconception? The only part I had right was the ‘good vibes’. From the moment the first band started up in the darkened main hall on Friday afternoon to the closing tones of a bass-clarinet and electronics show on the intimate cafe stage late Saturday night, there was always something to hear, records to dig, people to talk shop with, and art to make — hardly leaving time to lament the waning days of the summer.

Within the compact time-frame, starting late afternoon and ending around midnight on Friday and Saturday, festival organizers Koen Vandenhout and Christel Kumpen ran a tight program. Concerts were lined-up one after the other with a short break built-in to give the 200+ audience a chance to eat some dinner without developing FOMO. Plus, the sets ping-ponged from the main hall side to the cafe side, so there was always a chance to hit the bar if desired. Between the two halls, merch tables were arranged on all sides, making it dangerous to the wallet to traverse the venue. Parent organization of the festival Sound in Motion’s own Dropa-Disc label was present, as well as a record dealer with a selection of rare taste and local radio station Radio Centraal. If one purchased a t-shirt, or happened to have an extra one on hand, he or she (more likely than not: he) could head into the screen printing workshop and make their own with a festival design. Additionally, set in an adjacent room, musicians Cath Roberts and Tullis Rennie invited festival goers to record and manipulate sounds in a laboratory of their own design. When the weather was cooperative, one could visit the courtyard to procure some homemade food.

Alexander von Schlippenbach and Paal Nilssen-Love

The Sound In Motion website has the tagline, “Adventurous Music and Things”, and since we have got the things part out of the way, let us talk adventurous music. Not just a free-jazz festival, Summer Bummer’s scope this year included several avant-noise and electronics acts along with some of the most exciting musicians working (primarily) in Europe today. There was something for everyone, for example the ear-bleedingly loud Integral, a quartet comprised of Julien Desprez (guitar), Claire Gapenne (electronics and vocals), Christine Abelnour (sax) and Lukas Koenig (drums) that went from beguiling to battering, to the opening act, Kabas Sun Dogs, a Belgian band who had invited Canadian saxophonist Karen Ng and guitarist Jonathan Horne for a slowly unfolding exploration of both understatement and spirited groove.

Rodrigo Amado, Joelle Leandre and Gerald Cleaver

Highlights festooned the program, including a first time duo of drummer Paal Nilssen-Love and the legendary pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach as well as new trio formed by Rodrigo Amado with bassist Joelle Leandre and drummer Gerald Cleaver. In the duo’s extended set, Schlippenbach performed a chain of melodic ideas and Thelonius Monk song snippets that Nilssen-Love challenged with closely attuned force and precision. After a cautious opening, the trio of Amado, Leandre and Cleaver edged their way into the set, gathering momentum to the findcommon ground, letting Amado release his powerful tenor, Leandre impress with speed and expressiveness, and Cleaver move seamlessly between texture and forceful pulse.

Daughter, Daughter

The formidable quartet of Daughter, Daughter, comprised of Camila Nebbia and Amalie Dahl (saxophones), Elizabeth Coudoux (cello) and Sun Mi Hong (drums), performed a blend of composition and free-jazz improvisation showcasing both individual contributions as well as whole group interactions. The Berlin formation Das B, featuring Mazen Kerbaj (trumpet), Magda Mayas (piano), Tony Buck (drums) and Mike Majkowski (bass) was given the designation as a “super group“ in the program and their set did not refute this. Ostensibly deconstructing John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, the quartet engaged in an exploratory and expansive sound collage complete with a trumpet played via surgical tubing and prepared piano that made the acoustic sound electric. Arguably one of the strongest shows of the festival.

Das B

Additionally, percussionist and singer Maria Portugal presented her EROSÃO Septet (Lotte Anker and Angelika Niescier on saxes, Matthias Müller and Moritz Wesp on trombones, Carl Ludwig Hübsch on tuba and Reza Askari on bass), which performed a set of mid-tempo songs, both self-penned and from Brazilian composers, laced with some spicy improvisations. The next day, Portugal appeared in an exceptional duo with pianist Marta Warelis. As opposed to the septet, in which the music was a presented in more traditional structures, the songs themselves were de-composed and integrated organically with the ideas flowing from the pianist whose gentle and spacious playing grew progressively more ferocious.

Marta Warelis and Maria Portugal

Rounding out the program were two bass clarinet focused sets and several quite noisy ones. Representing the louder side, in addition to the aforementioned Integral, were New Best Friends (featuring Ng and Horne along with bassist Aaron Lumley and drummer Nasim L-P Navarro), the duo of Laurentiu Cotac and Diana Miron, and Mopcut with Desprez, Koenig and electronicist/vocalist Audrey Chen. Of these three, New Best Friends balanced their clamorous impulses best with a flowing set of improvisations. Bookending the festival were two bass clarinet sets. On the first day, John McCowen explored the extended tonalities of the acoustic contra-bass clarinet, exploiting the instrument’s multiphonic capabilities. Closing the festival, Hanna De Backer, in collaboration with the electronics of Yves De Mey, extended her instrument’s sonic possibilities to the outer realms.

Overall, a musically adventurous and enjoyable festival, and although quite satisfied, I was still bothered by one thing: my imaginary festival on a beach. So, after some detective work, I believe I finally pinpointed the source of my whimsical misconception. In 2019, Rodrigo Amado's The Attic released the album Summer Bummer, recorded at the festival in 2018 and whose cover is an image of three cut-out figures sitting on a beach under a cloudless blue sky, looking out at the ocean. I didn’t know I was so impressionable!

Ava Mendoza - Alive Alone, Alive Together (Burning Ambulance Music, 2026)

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

By Ferruccio Martinotti

Guitar in jazz. A strange beast, with which we had some issues coming to terms for a long time. In "traditional" jazz (with all the limitations of that adjective, but you get it), it passed us by almost unnoticed. Sure, Django Reinhardt, Wes Montgomery, Charlie Christian et al: legends to whom we bow, but, to be honest, they slipped away without leaving any deep or meaningful trace. We’re sorry, respectfully sorry: our fault. Far more interesting is the contribution of guitars in Miles' electric turn, while the super virtuoso sounds of the likes of Pat Metheny or John Scofield left us emotionally inert. As soon as the instrument becomes edgy and menacing, it begins to win us over, Sonny Sharrock, James Blood Ulmer first, then Arto Lindsay, Thurston Moore, Jim O'Rourke, Bill Orcutt, Keiji Haino are the names. The sharper, the better. In our own actual Valhalla, that sees Derek Bailey as the Supreme Odin, recently entered (becoming a sick obsession) Masayuki Takayanagi, a guilty belated epiphany of ours, and guitars as improper weapons take us with the guard down, unable to offer any resistance.

The current free/improv scene is quite a golden vein, offering guitars for every taste, just head over to the dedicated section of our forum and you could dig in a six-string bonanza until your hands bleed. With Ava Mendoza, whatever the line-up on the field (alone, collaborations, groups), the turntable spins by itself and the moment to quit declaring our boundless love for her, as we did in previous reviews, is still far away. The reason? Very simple: it could be in disguise of country, metal or noise but she's got THE blues. We're obviously talking about the dirty, kind-of-black, hooch-flavored one that inhabits the rosters of Fat Possum and In The Red Records, the spleen of Jeffrey Lee Pierce, the fury of Nick Cave's, pre-Gucci loafers, Birthday Party, the desperation of Alan Vega's solo albums or the hyper saturated textures of Mick Collins’ bands. Did you say Attitude? Ava not only has it, but she proved, with the astonishing Mama Killa project, to be able to cross the Shadow Line, to venture into the Heart of Darkness, coming back to tell all about it. Natural. Gifted.

The new album, recorded live in Antwerp, Madison, Chicago and Firenze, features the Brooklyn-based musician reinterpreting seven songs from her "New Spell" and "Circular Train" records, along with a new composition, "Mama Cocha”. The recipe is the one we know and love: fuzz, harmonic progressions, solos and distortions are the facets of a virtuosic prism that's never self-referential or an end in itself, but always in service of the Ultimate Ideal: the Blues. The "togetherness" side of the work sees Ava joined by Maestro Hamid Drake, adding his sparse yet extraordinary polyrhythms on four tracks, demonstrating once more, that, as Voltaire said, "les grands esprits se rencontrent." Another solid hit from Phil Freeman's label, whose production portfolio is beginning to take on a truly interesting and relevant profile: long may the Ambulance burn.

Alive Alone, Alive Together by Ava Mendoza

Angles 4 and Martin Küchen - Liner Notes

noreply@blogger.com (Stef Gijssels) — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 04:00:00 +0000

These are liner notes by Stef Gijssels for two recent albums by Swedish saxophonist and composer Martin Küchen, first with Angles 4, second for his solo album.

Angles 4 - (Relative Pitch, 2026)

Listening to Angles 4 here and now, in 2026, feels like a warm homecoming. The album is filled with the grand themes that have resonated throughout the various ensembles over the years, from the Martin Küchen Trio and Angles 6 to Angles 9 and All Included. The quartet knows this material by heart, having performed these compositions for decades. I would almost call them their personal standards: they sound deeply familiar, yet they retain the same power and vigour as they must have had at their very first performances—perhaps now with even greater maturity, intensity and fierceness.

The smaller quartet format gives the musicians more room to explore, express and expand, particularly across the relatively long tracks, most of which run for seven or eight minutes. There is a sense of space in the arrangements, but never a loss of urgency.

The music digs deep into the history of jazz, drawing on the spirit of Mingus and Coltrane, while at times reaching even further back into the history of sound itself—and into the collective emotions of people living through dire times: war, oppression and other horrors. Here, music becomes both a source of comfort and a force of liberation.

Whatever the size of the ensemble, this music remains as infectious as ever.

Listen and download from Bandcamp

Martin Küchen - Chase The Demons Out (Thanatosis, 2026)

Brutal sounds. Heart-rending, bleak. Gut-wrenching and abrasive. Sorrowful, dark, mournful, ominous. One musician generating a torrent of expression through three instruments played at once: sopranino saxophone, two horizontal hand drums, along with cymbals, metal plates, and bowls.

We know Martin Küchen from his work with the Angles ensemble—music that unfolds in epic arcs, sweeping themes that speak to a collective emotional space. This is the opposite. Here the music is stripped down to brutal poetry: visceral, concise, unadorned. Short, explosive statements. Limited means used to build intense dramatic pressure. Küchen’s anger at the state of the world is well known, and here it finds direct form in pounding drums and the wailing saxophone. Sound bursts collide and fracture, channeling raw fury.

The opening track, “Chase The Demons Out,” reflects a world drifting toward totalitarianism. Its title echoes a phrase from 1970s Chinese state media calling to “sweep away all demons”—to eliminate those who think differently. The theme feels disturbingly current as war again ravages the Middle East, where rockets, aircraft, and attack drones serve the ambitions of those in power.

The second piece, “Mach kein Krach” (“stop making noise”), recalls Küchen’s father telling him to quiet down as a child—something his son clearly had no intention of doing. The message is the opposite of silence: make your voice heard. Refuse passivity. Rebel, resist, speak up. Make noise.

The third piece, “Mit Ach und Krach,” uses a German expression describing something achieved with great difficulty—through blood, sweat, and tears. Speaking out and resisting the present state of affairs demands exactly that kind of effort.

Taken together, the three brief pieces form a suite: anger at the world, inner rebellion, and the search for the energy to act.

Every saxophone cry, every drum strike carries elemental emotion—horror, pain, rejection, fear—pushed forward by outrage, anger, disgust, and indignation. These forces build toward movement: to resist, to act, to stand together. It will take effort. It will take blood, sweat, and tears.

Once again, Küchen shows his artistic clarity. The music is raw, brutal, uncompromising—and authentic.
The world needs this."

Listen and download from Bandcamp

Cecil Taylor Unit- Live at the Kimo Theater Albuquerque 1979 (Black Editions Archive, 2026) *****

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

By Stuart Broomer

There’s nothing so startling as the appearance of a vintage concert tape, in this case some 47 years old, that might illumine your view of a musician’s oeuvre, even a slight shift in focus counting for much. Such is the case with the release of Cecil Taylor’s performance from a New Mexico concert in 1979. Part of the concert was lost, but on the evidence heard here, Taylor was at the helm of one of the finest groups he would ever lead, a relatively unusual quintet that consisted of alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons (with Andrew Cyrille, one of Taylor’s greatest collaborators), drummer Jerome Cooper and two string players, the violinist Ramsay Ameen and Alan Silva, here playing cello as well as his usual bass.

Among extant releases, the two-LP set bears some resemblance, at least in personnel, to It Is in the Brewing Luminous, recorded in 1980 at New York’s Fat Tuesday’s, which had the additional inclusion of drummer Sunny Murray in the band and Alan Silva playing bass, exclusively. His cello playing here is an essential element, especially for the way in which it combines with Ameen’s violin. In a sense, the Albuquerque quintet is a larger band than the New York sextet, in terms of what the opening up of the soundscape makes possible.

Perhaps the most notable thing about the Albuquerque recording is the level of subtle and evolving detail achieved by the quintet and its capture in the extraordinary recording job done by Mike Wolff, who was regularly responsible for recording the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra. The University of New Mexico’s Steinway was also borrowed for the performance, giving Taylor a piano appropriate to his special energies. The unusual clarity with which Ameen is heard here gives the performance some of its special significance, particularly in the way that his contribution combines with Silva’s cello in a virtual string section. Jerome Cooper, too, is less polyrhythmic, less aggressive than his predecessor, Andrew Cyrille, who had been the perfect complement in the trio with Taylor and Lyons.

What is highlighted here is the omni-directionality of Taylor’s music, from his thorough absorption of Western “classical” music as well as the jazz tradition and the general legacy of African music in America. Here those elements are present both individually and in Taylor’s special syntheses, those combined and foregrounded strings every bit as African as they are European.

Side C is given over to one of Taylor’s trance rituals, a summoning of spirits -- equivalent perhaps to speaking in tongues -- inspired and unknowable language accompanied by incidental phrases from the instruments, random sounds and Taylor’s piano musings, now enacted directly on the instrument’s strings, all an essential component of the complexity and mystery of Taylor’s far-reaching art.

The music that continues on side D is particularly spacious, opening up with Cooper’s spare percussion and the lyrical motifs of Ameen, Lyons and Taylor, evolving and flowering, still spacious yet dense with high speed content – some of Taylor’s most brilliant moments on record, the other instruments lifted skyward, until it concludes with Taylor’s gravelly equivalent of speaking in tongues, the very practice akin to the untranslatability of Taylor’s complex, contrapuntal, poly-vocal band music and the extrapolating lines and abstract organizing figures with which he guides the music from his piano keyboard.

Live at the KiMo Theater is a special event, reasserting an especially creative and relatively neglected period in Taylor’s career.

Live at the KiMo Theater will be released on October 16th, but you can listen to a track and pre-order now.

Live at the KiMo Theater Albuquerque 1979 by Cecil Taylor Unit

B:A:N:S Band (Sophie Agnel/John Butcher/Pascal Niggenkemper/Ståle Liavik Solberg) - foams & mesh (Fundacja Słuchaj, 2026)

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

By Martin Schray

Of the many things that make albums featuring John Butcher unique, I believe the most outstanding characteristic is not that he likes to play at unusual venues (caves, water reservoirs, oil tanks…), but rather the fact that every ensemble he plays with is so diverse and incomparable that it allows the listener to hear many different facets of his playing. In an interview with Brad Rose, Butcher said that when improvising, he likes to hear the musician behind the instrument, though it’s not important to him to hear the musicians putting themselves in the spotlight - on the contrary, he tends to seek subtlety. In general, he looks for musicians who have already developed a personal musical style and their own way of playing - something that truly feels like their own. It is therefore almost inevitable that the various ensembles he selects based on these criteria will possess a unique dynamic and sonic world.

One of last year’s best albums was RARE, John Butcher’s duo with French pianist Sophie Agnel, with whom he had been playing quite frequently over the last few years. I especially liked their improvisational rigor and the relaxed, varied, and aleatoric moments. On RARE, I considered the pauses in the music to be the central element; on foams & mesh, it’s different, mainly due to Pascal Niggenkemper (bass) and Ståle Liavik Solberg (drums), because the two of them fill those gaps. Solberg, with whom Butcher has played since 2015 in many kinds of combinations, permeates the improvisation with his bone-dry and at times almost esoteric style, for example when he uses extended materials (especially in the quiet passages of the first track). This is complemented by Agnel’s trills, which she plays from inside the piano. Butcher contributes very delicate bird calls here, while Niggenkemper subtly saws at the very low strings of his bass. It feels as though one is listening to the goings-on in the courtyard of a Tibetan monastery. This can be heard around the 20-mark of the first, significantly longer improvisation on foam & mesh. Such passages contrast with highly expressive moments, in which the rhythm section performs in a demanding and driving manner, but Butcher remains unflappable and employs his entire repertoire - guttural sounds, chirps, tremolos, circular breathing, serial/repetitive patterns, etc. - with casual ease. Only at the end of the track Agnel’s clusters and crescendos, Niggenkemper’s alienated drones and Solberg’s accentuated interceptions tempt him into vibrato-heavy phrases.

The album was recorded at the artacts festival in St. Johann/Austria in 2024 and in the first part of the encore the musicians showcase extended playing techniques, with Niggenkemper and Agnel holding the improvisation together by a somber drone. Then the bass and piano shift imperceptibly into their normal registers, and the piece grows denser, builds in intensity, becoming louder and more concentrated - like a tornado - before dissolving perfectly.

foam & mesh is an extraordinary album, the band is a superb match. They have played only three concerts so far and I think I’m not the only one who hopes that there will be more to come.

foam & mesh is available as a CD and as a download.

You can buy and listen to the album on the label’s website: https://sluchaj.bandcamp.com/album/foam-mesh

foam & mesh by B:A:N:S BAND: Sophie Agnel / John Butcher / Pascal Niggenkemper / Ståle Liavik Solberg

Laurie Anderson with SexMob - Let X=X (Live) (Nonesuch Records, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Richard Blute

“When you meet a man who is broken, pick him up and carry him. When you meet a woman who’s broken, put her all into your arms. Cause we don’t know where we come from … we don’t know where we are.”

-Laurie Anderson

Back in college in the early 80’s, my musical tastes careened wildly between the unchecked rage of Dead Kennedys and Black Flag and the deep melancholy of The Cure and Joy Division. (There was an occasional detour to the land of the Talking Heads.) Then my friends and I discovered Laurie Anderson’s Big Science . And everything changed. I think I was the one that found it and that was only because there was a song called Let X=X, which appealed to my math brain. Our first reaction was bewilderment. “What?? She no longer loves the color of my sweaters??!!? Huh??” But we quickly realized this was something new that we needed to absorb. It showed us that we could respond to all the grotesque absurdity of the world with something other than anger or sadness, that it could be met with surrealism and a sense of humor and that we could retain our humanity.

We thought about some of the lyrics. On the title track, there’s a lyric:

“I think we should put some mountains here.

Otherwise what are the characters going to fall off of?”

The song is all about how the oligarchs and huge corporations are reshaping the world to their will. They’re building shopping malls and freeways and new sports centres and drive-in banks. They’re reshaping everything for their own self-aggrandisement to the extent that we’re no more than characters in their play, and they even get to decide how we die. We realized this was the same sentiment that Jello Biafra was expressing in so many Dead Kennedys lyrics, just from an entirely different approach.

The music was unlike anything we had ever heard before, full of violins, saxophones, marimbas and organs. And was that a wolf? It was beautiful and then jarring at a moment’s notice. Laurie’s voice could sound quite soothing or, when she uses voice processing, terrifying.

A few years later, I discovered jazz, especially free jazz and it became an obsession which has lasted to this day. It eventually led me to The Free Jazz Collective. So when I discovered that Laurie was releasing a live album with a jazz band and an excellent one at that, I was extremely excited. The band is Sexmob, consisting of Steven Bernstein and Briggan Krauss on brass, Kenny Wollesen on drums, Douglas Wieselman on winds and guitar, and Tony Scherr on bass. They have an extensive discography which is well worth checking out. They like covering pop songs, and giving them an avant-garde jazz twist. I especially love Kenny Wolleson who I’ve seen perform many times, frequently in John Zorn projects.

The album, called Let X=X (Live), is full of the classics that every Laurie Anderson fan knows note for note and lyric for lyric, From The Air, O Superman, Let X=X, It Tango, Gravity’s Angel, Only An Expert , and on and on. But there’s new music to be found here as well. Church of Panic begins with a commentary on sadness and suicide and then turns on a dime and is funky as hell. There are lovely instrumental pieces like Looking At The Mo on. There’s an extremely funny (and at the same time sad) audience participation moment on Teachers which I won’t spoil. Junior Dad , from Lou Reed’s collaboration with Metallica, features Reed’s vocals with beautiful violin from Laurie.

There is quite a bit of sadness on this album at the state of the world and at all of the personal loss so many have suffered lately, but there is also an ember of hope to be found. It’s a hope that humanity might someday soon rediscover its compassion and decency.

It’s a sky-blue sky.

Let X=X (Live) by Laurie Anderson

Jazzwerkstatt Peitz 2026: A New Day on the Karpfenteich

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

By Paul Acquaro

August 14 - 16, 2026, Peitz, Germany

Up a creaky set of wooden stairs to the lofts of the 1810 Huettenwerk of the historic Ironworks and Fishery Museum of Peitz, an imposing building full of old heavy tools for the iron foundry and fishing works in the surrounding carp ponds, is an exhibition on Free Jazz in the German Democratic Republic (former East Germany). It’s a traveling show, having accompanied Jazzwerkstatt concerts and festivals over the years. The first time I encountered it, at a Globe Unity Orchestra concert in Potsdam in 2014, it prompted me to dig for all of the Amiga Jazz records that I could find, leading to likely the most complete collection of East German jazz in New Jersey.

Every year for the past ten years or so that I’ve been to the festival, I find myself drawn to the exhibition, like a pilgrim to worship. Each station of the exhibit offers a glimpse into this well documented but still mythical past, with a final station showcasing the Peitz Festival. Created in 1973 by two young free-thinking music fans, Uli Blobel and Peter “Jimi” Metag, both from the small East German town of Peitz, the festival drew other like minded youth to hear both East German musicians like Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky and Conny Bauer as well as West German musicians like Alexander von Schlippenbach and other musicians from the other side of the Iron Curtain such as Barry Guy and Wadada Leo Smith.

The names are many and the history can be read in the “Woodstock am Karpfenteich’ books as well as experienced here, and the story is a good one. Lasting until shut down by the government in 1982 and restarted by Blobel in 2011 under much different conditions, the Jazzwerkstatt Peitz festival of 2026 still draws some of those who trekked by train and Trabi to the original, but is also working to draw in a new audience whose connection to the past is being built by heading to upper floors via creaky wooden stairs.

Starting in 2024, Marie Blobel, the daughter of Uli Blobel, took over. Some of the changes Marie Blobel made included moving the festival from the center of Peitz to the grounds of the fishing museum amidst the carp ponds and injecting a festive flair into the weekend long event. With a packed schedule of concerts and a two kilometer hike to the Doener restaurant, festival goers are oriented to the wurst stand, the home cooked vegetarian dishes at the beer tent and the biergarten around the corner. Kids have the chance to make their own music with an imaginative looping station and everyone can climb aboard the “Karpfenbummler,” an electric miniature train that will take you in style from the festival to town to the train station. Coming into its own it the new form, Jazzwerkstatt Peitz was awarded the Deutsche Jazzpreis this past year.

Gebhard Ullman’s Hemisphere 4 PLUS (biergarten stage)

The concerts began on Friday evening with the folk-meets-modern-jazz sounds of Trio Ivoire. In the trio's music, Hans Lüdemann’s piano and electronics and Christian Thomé's percussion and electronics are met with the organic tones of Aly Keïta’s balafon, an African instrument described as a “a gourd-resonated xylophone.” The music is upbeat and highly syncopated and thus quickly had some of the at-capacity audience on their feet swaying to their rhythms. As soon as the set ended, the audience began shuffling off, around the museum and cycler hostel (the Gurkenradweg - yes, the Pickle Bikepath - passes by the festival grounds), to a biergarten, where a stage has been set up under a lush copse of trees. Woodwindist Gebhard Ullman’s newest formation, Hemisphere 4 PLUS, featuring a mix of his current electric and acoustic groups, began with a chamber-jazz like combination of Anna Viechtl’s harp and Taiko Saito’s vibraphone. Disrupted by a crash of percussion, the group tumbled into a pulsating groove. Describing the music as “sculptures,” Ullmann led the group through an alluring mix of the delicate (add Silke Lange accordion to the chamber jazz components), hard-hitting (with Eric Schaefer on drums and Oliver Potratz on bass) and other-worldly (Liz Kosack’s keyboard and synthesizer).

OM (main stage)

A short shuffle back to the main stage where OM, the legendary avant-jazz-rock group, were ready to go. The original group members, saxophonist Urs Leimgruber, guitarist Christy Doran and bassist Bobby Burri were joined by drummer’s Gerry Hemingway and Tony Buck who have replaced the late Fredy Studer, as they did on the recent Intakt release Suedpol. After a short freely improvised intro from Leimgruber, a blast of rock energy from Doran gave root to a swirling squall of tones and the music slowly evolved into a groove led by the two percussionists. Moments of electric Miles colored the rich panoply of sound which ranged from deeply experimental to outright rock. An excellent set.

Closing out the main stage for the evening was the quartet Selvhenter from Copenhagen. Saxophonist Sonja LaBianca and trombonist Maria Bertel and drummers Anja Jacobsen and Jaleh Negari crafted a dark, throbbing techno-jazz designed to get festival goers on their feet. It was quite late by the time the quartet’s final notes faded, but the show wasn’t over … yet, as drummer Willi Kellers and organizer Wolfgang ‘Assi’ Gloede were hosting a jam session in the cozy workshop building behind the main stage. Amongst painted fish sculptures and some serious looking tools, saxophonist Lotte Anker, keyboardist Liz Kosack and bassist Reza Askari joined Kellers in free-jazz improvisation that began with electronic percolations and slowly crescendoing notes that eventually balled into an exciting and thorny tumbleweed of sound. Following the opener, Gloede curated combinations of professional and hobbyist musicians who improvised into the wee hours.

Wanja Slavin (sitting far right) (church)

Saturday’s full schedule began in the town church where saxophonist and festival Improviser-in-Residence Wanja Slavin, last year’s winner of the Brandenburg Jazzpreis - an award developed by Jazzwerkstatt and the state of Brandenburg - debuted a new composition with a band comprised of Peter Evans on trumpet, Leonard Huhn on bass clarinet, Almut Kühne with vocals and Kaja Draksler on piano. The rich 45-minute piece moved seamlessly between moods and approaches as darker moments were balanced by more hopeful passages. Repetitive arpeggios and prominent electronics formed a consistent tonal base accentuated by the dissonant church organ and several outstanding solos.

A short while later back at the festival grounds, percussionist and singer Mariá Portugal’s EROSÃO septet took the stage in the rapidly heating up early afternoon. The music began with a brass fanfare as the group walked-on the stage and transitioned to Portugal singing over polyrhythmic accompaniment. Concentrated on a repertoire of songs that drew heavily on her Brazilian background, Portugal’s vocals took center stage, while the high-powered group of saxophonists Lotte Anker and Angelika Niescier, trombonists Matthias Müller and Moritz Wesp, tubist Carl Ludwig Hübsch and bassist Reza Askari provided solid support. Afterwards in the Huettenwerk building, the duo of Mohammad Mostafa Heydarian and Valentin Portron, performing on the traditional Iranian tanbur and bendir - a stringed instrument and hand drum - continued the expansion of the festival’s musical purview.

Impro-Concert: Tony Buck, Matthias Mueller, Taito Saito (workshop)

Two improvisation sessions, tucked away in the workshop building, injected a bit of the unexpected into the afternoon. The first introduced the British woodwindist Tamar Osborn with the American bassist Nick Dunston and drummer Gerry Hemingway. This first meeting proved fruitful. Clicking quickly, Osborn leaned into the deeper registers of her baritone sax, while Hemingway contributed a lithe, but full, pulse and Dunston provided a melodically swinging bridge between the two. The later improvisation session joined three Berlin based improvisors who have been in each other’s orbits but never played together before. Vibraphonist Taiko Saito, trombonist Matthias Müller and drummer Tony Buck played a set ranging from contemplative to combustive.

Aki Takase, Robert Landfermann, Christian Lillinger. (c) Cristina Marx/Photomusix

The mid-afternoon offered both unforgiving sun and an excellent set from pianist Aki Takase who was performing her upbeat, complex, and often humor-laced music with drummer Christian Lillinger and bassist Robert Landfermann on the main stage. The trio’s music is impressive, Lillinger, with his agitated, driving approach is a perfect rhythmic partner for Takase’s own intensity, and Landfermann’s rhythmic and melodic playing adds a nicely fitting layer. Nearing the end of the set, a dramatic moment ensured when Takase suddenly collapsed from the heat. Fortunately, it was reported that the pianist was already on the move to the next concert in Austria that evening.

Darius Jones & Otomo Yoshihide Quartet. (c) Cristina Marx/Photomusix

A little later the shows were back in the biergarten, where the trees provided some relief from the 100 degree heat, and the Czech quartet Edemit added a jolt of avant-rock to the day while Neiscer and Portugal picked up in a duo form the earlier set. As the day began to cool, the action moved back on the main stage where Darius Jones and Otomo Yoshihide (alto saxophone and guitar, respectively) augmented by bassist Nick Dunston and drummers Gerald Cleaver and Yasuhiro Yoshigaki provided an electric set. Following a rousing Coltrane-like introduction, the rhythm section gave Jones a rumbling foundation for his soaring melody to which Yoshihide responded with a feedback-laden solo, pushing the music to an early peak. The music ebbed and flowed, from dark atmospheric wanderings to high-energy free-jazz explosions over pulsating rhythms. Afterwards, the UK-based Ill Considered featuring Tamar Osborn (Idris Rahman on saxophone, Liran Donin on bass, Emre Ramazanoglu on drums and Osborn with various woodwinds) closed out the night with a set heavy on beats and Middle Eastern-tinged scales. The set ended with about half the remaining audience dancing in front of the stage.

Perhaps in normal times, it would have been a disappointment but after the previous day’s oven-like disposition, the cool, rain-soaked grey morning greeting festival goers on Sunday was welcome. A church service in the Huettenwerk started the day for the faithful while out on the festival yard, the others were huddling under the drink stand tents sipping coffee while the bratwurst man started up his grill.

First musical act, Richard Koch’s Ray of Light was the only one to be seen under the steadily raining sky. They began with the trumpeter playing a regal anthem and launching into a cheery, melodic tune filled with the folkish sounds of Fabiana Striffler’s violin and Valentin Butt’s accordion along with the rhythm support of Andreas Lang’s bass and Nora Thiele’s frame drums. The “gute laune” (good mood) music with its blend of up-tempo jazz, classical and folk elements provided a lighthearted start to another long day of music. Their timing was perfect too, as Ray of Light reached the end of their set, the first beams of sun reached the festival grounds.

Have You Ever Been Experienced. (c) Cristina Marx/Photomusix

The opening set was followed by Brandenburg Jazzpreis. Prize winner, guitarist Andreas Willers, who was to present his Hendrix inspired group Have You Ever Been Experienced, featuring a top-notch group of Berlin based musicians: Amy Green on vocals, Rieko Okuda on piano, Jan Roder on bass and Christian Marien on drums, was unfortunately too ill to attend. Despite this, the group, still gave a rousing performance, taking well-worn Hendrix themes and spinning them anew. Okuda took over the guitar solos with a distorted synthesizer, while Roder and Marien made sure the foundations were securely fortified. Most revelatory were Green’s vocals, which retained enough of the melody for song-recognition and enough improvisational liberty to free them from nostalgic interpretation -- for example, an updated interpretation of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl set to a free-jazz take of ‘If 6 was 9.’

The final two sets of the festival moved back into town to the church. The first was the Polish duo of vocalist Maniucha Bikont and bassist Ksawery Wójciński performing a set of haunting folksongs. Discovered through Bikont’s musicology research, the songs came from a disappearing tribe in the Ukraine, with themes that touched on the universal: suffering, responsibility and expecting better manners from the dead. Performed solely with voice and bass, the music filled the church mesmerizingly.

Konradism. (c) Cristina Marx/Photomusix

The closing set to the festival may have also been one of the most anticipated. Connecting the festival’s eras, trombonist and archetype of the original Peitz festival and East German free-jazz in general, trombonist Conny Bauer presented the large group Konradisms with an extended composition of “chamber big-band” that mixed generous improvisation and dramatic riffs. Joining Bauer was a cross section of a younger generation of German-based musicians: Nils Wogram on trombone, Maxine Troglauer also on bass trombone, Gerhard Gschlössl on tuba, Claudio Puntin on bass clarinet, Maria Reich on violin, Emily Wittbrodt on cello, Matthias Bauer on bass, Dag Magnus Narvesen on drums and Rieko Okuda on piano. Often breaking into small combos - trombone and piano, tuba and violin - the solos would grow intense and eventually congeal around common themes. A stand out was Puntin whose bass clarinet playing ranged from the sound of a flute to deep, woody resonance.

After an intense two and half days of music, the two last concerts were a satisfying and full-circle-moment ending to the festival. Overall, one could sense a tilt towards the new - nights that ended with experimental but danceable music, a series of risky but successful workshop concerts with musicians meeting for the first time, an infusion of world-music elements, and a loosening, but not denying, deference to the past, showing a way forward.

More about the Peitz festival:

Review of the 50th Anniversary Peitz Festival
Review of the Jazzwerkstatt Peitz Boxset
Jazzwerkstatt Peitz website.

Henry Threadgill / Vijay Iyer / Dafnis Prieto - Fifteen (Nonesuch, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Martin Schray

Of course, this trio is a supergroup, like so many of pianist Vijay Iyer’s latest ensembles.

Percussionist Dafnis Prieto may be less well-known, but the now 82-year-old saxophonist and flutist Henry Threadgill is all the more so. Despite his age, he has been more productive and acclaimed than ever. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his most important work of the past 15 years, In for a Penny, In for a Pound (Zooid; 2015). It’s possibly the most consistent realization of Threadgill’s compositional system, in which he works with predetermined interval sequences that provide the musicians with a harmonic and melodic framework within which they are also expected to improvise - that is, improvisation itself becomes part of a highly complex composition. What’s fascinating about this is that the music initially seems almost chaotic, but is in fact organized with extraordinary precision. As intellectually fascinating as this music is on the one hand, it has also faced criticism on the other hand, that the whole thing is too contrived and too lifeless, too close to new classical avant-garde music. That kind of criticism can certainly not applied to “Fifteen”.

The album title refers to the number of years that have passed since this trio first came together at a benefit event for the New York Jazz Gallery. Here, all three compose and improvise; recurring melodic patterns are readily - even eagerly - embraced, bringing the music closer to mainstream jazz than to free jazz. This is primarily due to Dafnis Prieto’s Cuban influences and his light, elastic groove, which remains free and almost impossible to count. This is perhaps most clearly evident in “I Want a Map”, which comes across more like a rock song, with Threadgill’s saxophone initially taking up the melody, which is developed by the piano and built up relatively straightforwardly by the drums to a crescendo. Rarely has Threadgill sounded so accessible; he uses a fair amount of growl, and his clear sound from the Air years is barely recognizable. But he wouldn’t be Henry Threadgill if he didn’t gradually incorporate small atonal elements and offbeat shifts that disrupt the piece’s static structure.

Things get significantly wilder on “Fire City“, then. Prieto plays less to the beat. Here, he actually acts more like a free jazz drummer. Iyer, too, plays fewer tonal harmonies, and Threadgill’s sound is indeed clearer and more abstract on this track. The piece is denser, less airy than others on the album, but perhaps that’s precisely what makes it the most exciting, as it gallops off in different directions several times without ever losing its way.

The most unusual track is the album’s finale, “On the Way”. Here, the different compositional and improvisational logics stand in direct contrast to one another: Henry Threadgill’s carefully balanced vocabulary meets the rhythmic power and temporal sophistication of Iyer and Prieto, opening up spaces for dense ensemble polyrhythms and incisive solo passages. At times, you can literally tap your foot along - you almost feel like dancing. Who would ever have expected that from an album featuring Henry Threadgill?

This is definitely one of the albums that will appear on many year-end charts.

Fifteen is available on vinyl, as a CD and as a download. You can listen to it and buy it on Vijay Iyer’s bandcamp site:

Fifteen by Henry Threadgill, Vijay Iyer, Dafnis Prieto

Harri Sjöström and Guilherme Rodrigues - Treasures Within

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

On Sundays, we like to take the opportunity to share something aside from an album review, like interviews we've conducted or videos that we have found and enjoyed, and sometimes, something entirely different, like liner notes. The following notes, written by Paul Acquaro, accompany the adventurous duo release Treasures Within by Harri Sjöström and Guilherme Rodrigues.

This album is the second document of the duo following The Treasures Are. The Treasures Within is comprised of three encounters in the studio and live starting in 2019 at Munich's Artoxin Gallery followed by the Berlin locations Toolbox Gallery in 2021 and Berlin Room in 2022.

By Paul Acquaro

What makes musical chemistry? What is it that make some combinations simply work? While there are many examples like Paul and John, Bennink and Brotzmann, and Parker and Drake to draw on, it also seems that saxophonist Harri Sjöström and cellist Guilherme Rodrigues have some insights into this phenomenon as well.

Here, it begins with creaky bow strokes on the cello to which squeaky tones from a soprano saxophone are carefully inserted. It lasts only a minute before a reset, the next track and a new route chosen, but in those previous few seconds one could hear a lot about a musical relationship. There is no hesitancy, no time needed to discuss and calibrate, it is a meeting of mutually sympathetic musical minds. Rodrigues explains, "for me the way Harri approaches the saxophone gets pretty close, imagination wise, to my imaginarium. And because of that, we play well together intuitively."

The next track begins with a rather classical sounding approach and then quickly becomes an intertwining of melodic strands that are in some ways hard to differentiate, but thrive on an inherent contrast. Rodrigues continues, "both instruments have colors that naturally match and therefore, taken together, the result of our music becomes treasured!"

Indeed, by the time we are at track 3, which happens quickly with these miniatures, the melodic ideas have taken a different turn. Sjöström is bouncing around a delicate melodic idea while Rodrigues provides textural accents. Suddenly, we are at track 4 and now the cello is responsible for the melodic twists while the saxophone finds the perfect points to interject.

Sjöström also gives some hints as to why this pairing works so well, "I think we both share a strong melodic instinct, even within freely improvised music. There is a constant dialogue between us, and I always feel Guilherme is incredibly alert to every subtle change in the music."

So, what is it about these subtle changes that are so powerful? Well, for one, the conversation is always diverting course. Like on track 5, which suddenly turns inwards, darker hues and longer tones fill the space. Sjöström simply says, "we also enjoy strong contrasts and often abrupt changes and aren't afraid to move between intimacy and intensity."

< Please see Bandcamp to read the rest of the notes and listen to the music >

Greg Kelley and Yoona Kim - Distractions for Trumpet and Ajaeng (Relative Pitch, 2026)

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

By Brian Earley

The “distractions” of Greg Kelley’s trumpet and Yoona Kim’s ajaeng on this new album for Relative Pitch are hardly simple diversions for the listener, as one often thinks about the term. Actually, I find the music on this lovely duet recording to be at various times quieting, disruptive, disturbing, and even a challenge. Listeners familiar with Greg Kelley’s recorded output will not be shocked by what they hear, and at times this album reminds me a great deal of the trumpet player’s provocative, whisper-improvising duo Nmperign. Actually, the other half of that duo, Bhob Rainey, mixed and mastered Distractions.

Kelley performs wonderfully and utilizes a reticence that nearly always prevents him from easily erupting into high energy bursts. His patience and discipline are admirable. The unexplored story here, however, is ajaeng player Yoona Kim. I was not familiar with Kim’s instrument of choice, and this reality is part of what first drew me to this recording. An ajaeng is a Korean zither-like instrument–think a bendier, more temperamental cello laid on its back. It can be plucked, but is often bowed with a stick or a more standard Western bow of horsehair.

Kim is a polymath of musical styles and performs at least seven distinct genres, according to her website. Free improvisation and jazz are two of these, as are contemporary and traditional Korean music. The others are more surprising: Delta Blues, Klezmer, and Appalachian Old-Time Music. Despite an extensive set of online live performances, Kim is still relatively young and has only three recordings as a leader to her name. Distractions is one of these, and the other two, Deltat Dokkaebi and Modern Gagok, are all but impossible to find. A strong outing with pianist Anthony Coleman can be viewed here . This dazzling performance has a mere 25 views and 2 likes as of this writing. Free Jazz Blog readers, you know what to do.

With all this being said, Yoona Kim is particularly challenging to define, though she has performed in some of the revered free jazz spaces (The Stone, for a week-long residence in July of 2026) and studied or played with many names readers of the FJC are quite familiar with: Tom Rainey, Chris Corsano, Joe Morris, and Linda May Han Oh. And of course, Greg Kelley.

Distractions for Trumpet and Ajaeng is a wonderful album, full of quiet restraint and unsettling surprises. While the opening track, “Display,” starts with insistent blowing and bending, the first minute and a half is about as busy as the album gets. Kim bows and pulls the strings of her ajaeng while Greg Kelley flutters a raspy, metallic horn down into registers so low and frequencies so wobbly I had to stop the music to see if something was wrong with my speakers.

The aesthetic largely, however, is quiet. To be more precise, silence that alternates with tiny eruptions of activity. Listen to the second track, the lovely “Dispute,” for this as Yoona Kim rips and bows urgently just before the one minute mark, at which point the recording falls into total silence. When the musicians return, Greg Kelley is more active and works his way into an exploration of one wavering note. This interplay builds as the two play an eerie high-harmony fit for hungry ghosts that largely bends and vibrates as it squeals and scrapes.

While the dynamics never really reach the loudest of volumes, all of this silence makes certain mid-level insertions of noise jarring. For example, on my favorite piece on the album, the closer “Disappear,” Kelley forces air through his horn with such subtle power, and balances a series of soft notes so sinister, that my dog ran out of the room when I first played it.

This, of course, is the power of understatement, and the album as a whole serves as a wonderful reminder that so often in music, as in our day-to-day laboring, what produces joy or excitement, as well as heaviness, sorrow, or surprise is how the moments fall together. Distractions is a delight of quiet echoes and disquieting interruptions that is well worth the listen.

Distractions for Trumpet & Ajaeng by Greg Kelley and Yoona Kim

FRIENDS & NEIGHBORS VOL. 1-3 (We Jazz Records, 2026)

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

By Ferruccio Martinotti

From Finland with love. A couple of glasses of kossu, a book of Arto Paasilinna, a record of the hardcore punk legends Kaaos, and then a movie (Calamari Union, yes) of Aki Kaurismaki, our true Homeric hero, have always been more than enough to attest to our fascination with that wonderful country. But there's more: a record label that, with the icastic name "We Jazz," helps illuminate our music like a sonic aurora borealis. The operational branches are “We Jazz Records”, established in 2016 to present "cutting-edge music on the jazz continuum in various formats, with vinyl being the primary format," and its younger sibling, “Other Power,” "a platform of all great music that doesn't logically fall under the scope of We Jazz." Both labels are curated and designed by Matti Nives. Should it be not enough satisfactory, then know that a quarterly magazine (actually a real glossy volume with color photographs) guarantees you the best editorial coverage of jazz/free/impro music available out there. For those not yet familiar with Helsinki’s alleys, we'd like to map the area with three, red marked, albums from the catalog: Mike Reed, "The Separatist Party"; Cosmic Ear, "Traces"; and Pat Thomas & XT, "Strata, Act." Completely different records with an enormous musical profile as a common factor, they represent an artistic asset value able to guarantee immortality to any label.

We Jazz's new initiative includes the digital release of 5 tracks per month by bands not part of its roster, for the benefit of Bandcamp subscribers, and the kick-off is provided by this compilation which, with volumes 1-3, covers the period from January through March. We are dealing with such a cornucopia of music that it's worth a quick overview of all the musicians involved. UUSI AIKA (Sammaltuka). Strings, harp, wind instruments, drive the listener towards Finnish woodland mythology, Indian raga-inspired colors and Asian minimalism. HENRIETTE EILERTSEN TRIO (Fly Ikaros). Flautist's new band delivers a captivating composition with balanced interactions that at the same time manages to be intimate and almost limitlessly expansive. LAU NAU (Kosmospyorat). Synth drones mesh with the sound of a living garden, bees buzzing along beneath singing birds while simple chords carry dreams on oscillating waves. FELIX ALEXANDER LYBECK (Slapat Allting Hem). The magic of a Nordic forest, strange, weird folk notes intertwined with indie intimacy, creating music that feels both grounded and unearthly. JYVASKYLA WORKSHOP BAND 1970 (Nadaswaram). A previously unissued post-bop gem, this concert captures a set of groovy, adventurous and exotic compositions that firmly placed Finland on the global jazz map. LINNEA TALP (She came out of the white fog). The pipe organ is pushed in an unusual manner that allows the instrument's character to be revealed, gently, patiently, as though being teased out of hiding. ALAN BRAUFMAN (Angels). Alto sax and flute, among the actors of the 70s "loft" scene in New York, he returns after a long hiatus to lead an all star team (Patricia Brennan, Luke Stewart and Chad Taylor) between post-bop and oriental influences. FYSIIKKA & KEMIA (Luontokokemuksia). “Rural psych-jazz improvisations by Finnish bastard sons of Arbete & Fritid". Or, free music beyond the threshold where Swedish prog and Finnish weirdness collide. PIETU ARVOLA (Kummallinen ilmestys). Experimental tools like the daxophone and a dual looper called Coquantus are used to process textures combined with modular synths. MARK HARWOOD (The Course of a Year). Australian born, Berlin based, he runs a platform that works at the intersection of experimental music, performance, literature and visual art. GARD NILSSEN ACOUSTIC UNITY (Acoustic Unity). The sound of the sublime trio wrapped in the brutalist architecture and the magnetic audience of Barbican Centre, London 2018, delivers sheer, top notch, jazz aesthetic. HATKA (Peace Piece). Free, electro-acoustic textures and raw impro for an intense and playful outcome by a Transatlantic ensemble of three seasoned improvisers. KADI VIJA (Hands). A vocal instrumentalist who treats the human voice as a horn or a rhythm machine, here accompanied by piano, synth, vibraphone and percussions. PHARDAH (Village of Skulls). Featuring veterans of the Finnish experimental music and free jazz scene, along with a younger generation drummer, to unleash a vigorous bass riff, eventually accelerating into a wild collective gallop.

If you're looking for a way (one of a zillion…) to epitomize in 1 hour what “Free” in music means, this compilation could be the perfect spot to pitch your tent. For our part, we already put in the collimator Vol. 2, sure thing.

Check it out on Bandcamp.

SML - Spontaneous Music Live (International Anthem, 2026)

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

By Martin Schray

A few years ago, the International Anthem label was pretty much the hottest shit in the improvised music genre. Irreversible Entanglements, the late Jaimie Branch, Ben LaMar Gay, Angel Bat Dawid, Makaya McCraven, Jeff Parker, Damon Locks - they had them all. Lately, though, the focus seemed to have shifted more towards world music and alternative stuff. That’s where SML’s new album comes in at just the right time to set the record straight a bit.

SML is an International Anthem in-house supergroup consisting of Josh Johnson (saxophones), Gregory Uhlmann (guitar), Jeremiah Chiu (synthesizer, electronics), Anna Butterss (bass) and Booker Stardrum (drums), which has released two studio albums to date - Small Medium Large (2024) (which could also be read as a moniker for SML) and How You Been (2025). The hallmarks of their music can already be found on these two albums: repetitive structures, subtle shifts in the architecture of the pieces, and an affinity for deliberate monotony and world music. However, the term “studio album” isn’t entirely accurate, since How You Been, for example, consists of performances from the Empty Bottle in Chicago, the Tractor Tavern in Seattle, and the Zebulon in Los Angeles, which were condensed into three- and four-minute highlights. What might sound somewhat dismissive here are, in fact, moments of immense concentration and intensity, distilled from a continuous stream of consciousness and an almost magical band chemistry. The reason is simple: SML are a live band. And the references to their musical influences are obvious: 1970s Miles Davis, the Sun Ra Arkestra, Neu!, King Crimson and Can.

You can really feel this in the way the band tries to make the pull of their music physically palpable during live performances. They create a form of ecstatic minimalism by stretching individual motifs to the point of trance. Spontaneous Music Livewas once again recorded in front of a live audience at Zebulon in Los Angeles. What sets it apart from its predecessors is the immediacy of the recording and the near-total absence of post-production. The album consists of two long tracks, each over twenty minutes in length, and demonstrates what SML is capable of when their music isn’t forced into the confines of a standard song length. The result of these session-style improvisations reveals great discipline, dynamics, and a distinct artistic vision. Take “Roundabouts (Live)”, for example, the B-side of the LP. It starts with a delicate saxophone melody, metronome-like drumming and a concise synthesizer riff, which eventually spiral completely out of control. What Spontaneous Music Livesucceeds in doing - unlike its two predecessor albums - is to bring the psychedelic nature of the music into sharp focus.

It’s easy to imagine the band playing at the big festivals of the late 1960s - the hippies would have loved their style and sound. Actually, it’s music to “turn on, tune in, and drop out“, except that you don’t need drugs to enjoy it - the music itself is the drug. SML are trippy in the best possible way.

Spontaneous Music Live is available on vinyl, cassette and as a download.

You can listen to it and buy it here:

Spontaneous Music Live by SML

Pascal Niggenkemper, Sakina Adbou, Liz Kosack, Gerald Cleaver - The Ocean Within Us (Subran, 2026)

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

By Stuart Broomer

In recent years, bassist/composer Pascal Niggenkemper’s music has been increasingly preoccupied with issues of global survival, from the project 'le 7ème continent', named for the vast expanse of garbage assembling in the Pacific Ocean, to the recent Tuvalu, an expansive suite dedicated to the coming erasure by the sea of a Pacific island. The interest in the environment is an expanding concern in Niggenkemper’s work, but it has been evident since the early years of his career. His first release as a band leader, with a trio completed by Simon Nabatov and Gerald Cleaver, was entitled Upcoming Hurricane, with each collective improvisation named for an aspect of the wind. Those concerns for the state of the environment aren’t simply tacked on to his work: they’re occasions for purposeful reflection and fuel a creative drive to make his messages genuinely impactful.

The Ocean Within Usis genuinely alive with both creative invention and a sense of urgency. Beyond their instruments – Niggenkemper’s bass,

voice and motors; Sakina Abdou’s tenor saxophone and recorder; Liz Kosack’s keys; and Gerald Cleaver’s drums and electronics – each musician’s voice is wholly engaged, whether it’s as singer, speaker or subject for electronic transformation. Everything from Abdou’s raw-edged tenor to Cleaver’s extensive electronic arsenal contributes to the effect here, to the point that the bubbling electronics and muffled, echoing voices can suggest that we are already immersed.

While several brief tracks contribute to the cumulative effect, it’s the longer, generally looser works – “diatomées”, “mami wata” (a near relative of calypso) and “lungs of the world” (distant hiphop), each around ten minutes, each sometimes layering multiple genres, calling up compound moods and responses – that most strongly evoke a nagging awareness of our complex relationships to multiple cultures, environments, terrains, economies and seas. Thanks, Pascal, for reminding us, and with such palatable music.

Tellingly, one cannot separate the subject from the effect, testimony to Niggenkemper’s art and the multiple contributions of his stellar partners here. Essential listening and subject of reflection.

the ocean within us by Pascal Niggenkemper, Sakina Adbou, Liz Kosack, Gerald Cleaver

Leo Genovese / Takashi Sugawa / Alfred Vogel - Unleashed (Boomslang, 2026)

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

By Eyal Hareuveni

In April 2025, Argentinian, Brooklyn-based pianist Leo Genovese just finished a concert with The Mars Volta at Madison Square Garden and had ninety free minutes before the tour bus would move on. He called his friends - Japanese, Tokyo-based double bass player (and cellist) Takeshi Sugawa, one of the busiest musicians in the Japanese scene, leader of his Banksia trio, who hosted Genovese in his debut album as bandleader (Outgrowing, 2018, with drummer Tom Rainey), who was in New York as part of the Satoko Fujii Tokyo Trio North American tour, and Austrian drummer Alfred Vogel, of How Noisy Are the Rooms? And Vanish trios, the founder of Boomslang Records and the Bezau Beatz festival, who was visiting New York and had previously recorded with Genovese (Eyes to the Sun, Boomslang, 2024, with fellow Argentinian sax player Camila Nebbia).

Sugawa and Vogel did not know each other, and the ad hoc trio met for dinner in a small restaurant and immediately felt the need to play together. Genovese, Sugawa, and Vogel promised each other that they had to repeat this experience. It did not take long. In May 2025, Genovese played in Berlin with Esperanza Spalding, Sugawa was touring in Europe, and Vogel booked the Bonello Studio in Berlin for an all-night, free-improvised recording session that produced Unleashed.

The music is quite spacious and understated, sketching its movement with delicate, skeletal strokes, without a plan and with no aim of reaching cohesive structures or grooves, as if asking the listener to be an active part of its creation and imagine where it can land. Genovese, Sugawa, and Vogel are attuned to every sound and gesture, as each one opens more sonic threads, but without attaching themselves to any of them. Melodic veins rise and dissolve organically, but the deep listening, deeply poetic, spontaneous, primal, and collective, egalitarian process is the essence of this trio. The trio distills its dynamics on the poetic, 13-minute “A World of One Colour”. Letting go and just being in the moment when everything opens, or, as Sugawa puts it, “A spirit that wanders, that lives across times and places.”

Hopefully, Genovese, Sugawa, and Vogel would find time in their busy schedules to take this trio on the road, letting it blossom even more on a tight tour.

UNLEASHED by Leo Genovese, Takashi Sugawa, Alfred Vogel

I Use the Music to Use Me: The Visual Improvisation of M P Landis

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

By Dan Sorrells

Left: P+D 02 01 02 (2024); Right: M P Landis & Michael Sarin, May 18, 2024 at L/A Arts, Lewiston, ME

Adjacent to a drumkit, two large boards hang above a stage clad in drop cloth. A third lies flat on a small table surrounded by paint bottles and upturned pot lids that will become ad hoc palettes. Each board is covered in paper and divided into grids by white painter's tape: the small board into nine squares and the larger two into twelve. It's the end of June 2026 at the Apohadion Theater in Portland, Maine. Just ahead, the fifth meeting of painter M P Landis and drummer Michael Sarin in a collaboration they've come to call, concisely, Paint & Drums.

Fans of creative music may recognize Landis's paintings from the album covers of artists like Flow Trio , [ism] , and Sabir Mateen . His work is part of an estuary somewhere far downstream of the Abstract Expressionists: gestures that range from child-like markings to purposive strokes that convey the whole body's movement; textured clots and layers of color; obscure figures and shapes that could be letters or symbols but offer a mute refusal. But Landis will say he feels less affinity with other visual artists than he does with musicians.

Indeed, what stands out about Landis's work is how deeply committed his methods are to the same reactive, exuberant ethos that drives the free improvisers. Music—especially jazz and improvised music—has long been part of Landis's work, both in the studio and in a live setting. In a 2006 conversation with the writer Fred Schmalz, he described arriving at a point in the 1990s where he began using music "as a jumping off point to get beyond my ideas and find a way of working that transcends technique and becomes more emotional and dance-like."

Joe Maneri/Mat Maneri/Randy Peterson #1 - #4 (2001). Created live at the 2001 Vision Festival, NYC

His career in the decades since validates Mike Heffley's musing in Northern Sun, Southern Moon. "If one were a painter," Heffley wrote, free improvisation "is music that might be the most fruitful aid and stimulus to the process. It encourages one to get physical with one's tools and media, to delight in them as ends in themselves, whatever means they might develop into therefrom." Talking with Schmalz, Landis describes exactly that:

"I feel almost like the music uses me or, I guess I use the music to use me. There is a certain surrendering to what I am listening to which helps me jump right into physically moving; making marks, grabbing paint, etc. It overcomes the endless problems of decision and throws me right into the act of creating."

Some of Landis's paintings bear titles that pay tribute to the music he was listening to as he painted. But music's influence is more deeply seated.

Top: David S. Ware: Onecept triptych (mp13.01, mp13.02, mp13.03) (2013)
Bottom Left: PIANO SKY (JOE MANERI) (2003); Bottom Right: lp13.06 (derek bailey) (2013)

Landis moved from painting on street corners and in the audience at concerts to frequently painting on stage in collaboration with musicians, dancers, and other visual artists in the vibrant Brooklyn arts scene. He remains a prolific collaborator. The live performances of that period culminated in a tour with the Jump Arts American Road Project in 2002, Landis taking the stage with poet Steve Dalachinsky, dancers, and musicians like Tom Abbs, Daniel Carter, Steve Swell, and Okkyung Lee. Cisco Bradley's recounting of the tour in The Williamsburg Avant-Garde touches on Landis's intense engagement with his materials and an approach to live painting that's still present in Paint & Drums:

"[Landis] would paint through the entire evening of performances, with two wooden panels covered in paper on which to work. One panel was covered by one large piece of paper, while the other panel had multiple smaller pieces stapled to it. Landis described his process: 'I painted the whole board, not thinking about where one piece of paper stopped or started. I liked how it gave the work a sense of being midstream, like capturing a sound in time.' He added, 'The intensity of the music made the painting intense. It felt like I was doing months' worth of painting within a few hours.'"

Left: american road project 1L (2002); Right: j.a.a.r.p. [#12.] (2002)

It was during his time in NYC that Landis met Sarin, then drumming in the storied Thomas Chapin Trio (just one facet of his deep and continued embeddedness in the New York avant-garde). Nearly two decades later, Sarin lamented that he never had a chance to see Landis paint in a live setting and asked if he'd be willing to collaborate. Two performances were arranged in May 2024, and the duo have now met three more times in 2026.

A Visual Musician

There's an enticing trap, or at least a long stroll to a dead end, in approaching the relationship between Landis's paintings and free jazz. It is to interpret them as somehow "representing" the music. Landis is clear on this: "I don’t mean for [the music] to define the work because I’m not interested in making visual representations of music, or anything for that matter. These paintings and drawings are artifacts of a creative process; a recording of my reactions to not just music, but to life and my living it."

Establishing that the relationship is indirect, two smaller traps await, both common responses to abstract music and painting. Treading carefully between them, I'm likely to get a foot caught in each. The first comes from the dismissive "Even I Could Have Done That" school of art criticism; the other adopts a transcendental tone that inflates the abstract nature of these artforms until they're lofted into the clouds. Something like "overwhelming directness" versus "overweening mystery," to borrow from Stanley Cavell.

Left to Right: MONK 3. THINK OF ONE (2005); MONK 4. HACKENSACK (2005); MONK 5. 'ROUND MIDNIGHT (2005)

The first response is an almost defensive tensing in the face of such directness. A move to immediately let the air out before the overweeners get too jazzed up. "I get it. Your painting is like free jazz: random and improvised and spontaneous." Nothing enigmatic here. You don't really have to know anything, you just have to do.Splatter the paint, whack the drum, toot the horn. This attitude tends to badly underestimate the skill that's required to achieve the allegedly facile result, but there's something perceived here, a focus on the plain fact of bodies in action, that can't be entirely dismissed. The process, the doing, is integral—it's what's insisted by these artforms, what we can always sense even when we try (willfully or otherwise) to bracket it out. In viewing pieces like the "Monk Work" paintings, those initial impressions of sheer spontaneity belie the fact that, just as in lots of jazz and improvised music, accumulated experience and an incredible depth of consideration are channeled into an application of skill, shaping an ongoing process that didn't have a specific end in mind when things got underway.

What get overlooked are all the particularities: the whorl of circumstance, body, and action that actually birthed that painting or moment of music. Landis's painting isn't merely like free jazz because both can be loud and break rules. Many of his pieces represent a series of events and decisions through time—sometimes over weeks and months—that are fervently attuned to intention and accident and their intertwining.

Left : 16.35T (2016);Right: 19.155 (2019)

We often fall back on visual metaphors when trying to talk about music, but the counterintuitive thing about Landis's paintings is that their material likeness to music is not visual, but temporal: they are "impossible" images that inscribe action-through-time in the same way that music does as it plays out. This sense of movement-across-time leaps from their surfaces. Looking at a piece like 16.35T, I really do find myself reaching for musical concepts: there's a staccato rhythm to the marks, which have a lively motion in their stacks of contrapuntal bands. There's dissonance in the dabs of glowing green, which seem to punctuate moments in the painting's development.

The paintings have no telos, just as improvised music isn't about getting to the end of playing. They aren't planned and realized ends or even a representation of an instant or "the now" but rather they are a holding-open, a paradoxical attempt to spatialize temporality, or express it all at once. The time-taking is the work in the way music is the running of the clock. This temporal nature is never more apparent than during live performance. There, we see the changing cadences of painting, the transformation of color and form as new strokes merge with old, the accumulation of layers that continually supplant the painting's character, even as glimpses of its previous features remain.

Brice Marden once said of Jackson Pollock, "He doesn't apply the image; he lets the image evolve out of the activity." Landis: "I like to push what I make ‘til it feels right, in some inner logic kind of way, even when that leads me to something that might look off or clumsy, but in a way that attracts me." All of these evolved and evolving particularities are exactly why just anyone couldn't create that painting or improvise those sounds. Those unrepeatable elements in concert with the artist's grappling are what constitute the work. If such painting or music could be said to have "content," this is all it could possibly be, and encrypted. You may be physically capable of executing the work, but you could never be existentially capable—you have no access to its means of creation.

Top, Left to Right: wd3060 (2006); wd2034 (2004); wd5625 (2013)
Middle, Left to Right: wd5921 (2014); wd6016 (2014); wd6058 (2014)
Bottom, Left to Right: wd6831 (2016); wd7972 (2019); wd6562 (2016)

This idea of paintings as ledgers or accretions of activity is hyper-concentrated in the wd series ("warehouse drawings"). Landis produced 10,000 wd pieces in the nearly thirty years between October 1996 and March 2025. Nearly all began as a folded piece of paper that Landis would carry with him throughout the day, often marked with notes, reminders, shopping lists. "Later in the studio, I chronologically staple them to boards, usually working on 20 at a time, drawing and painting on them, often in multiple layers over many days, weeks and sometimes months in response to whatever is happening in my world at each session."

Like a recording of an improvised performance, the wd paintings are the record of happenings that can't ever be restaged, a ledger of events that could never be repeated exactly so. Their accumulation of texture, their creases and sometimes ragged edges, are evidence of their travel through the real world, are the grounding reminders that, however abstract the visuals, they are the products of a creative drive that is selfsame with Landis, moving through life. Though Landis has retired the wd series, hints of their methodology have emerged in a new FP series created on small pieces of folded hand-made paper.

Left to Right: FP26.78 (2026); FP26.103 (2026); FP26.174 (2026)

Paintings from the wd series often made their way back to music, and the influence began running in the opposite direction. Several have been used as album art, and over the years musicians would ask Landis if they could use a painting as inspiration for music. Most notably, Loren Connors and Suzanne Langille took a number of wd pieces and projected them in the studio while recording, which was subsequently released asI Wish I Didn't Dream.

During the pandemic, Landis began a series of smaller, heavily contingent paintings called "Notes." Each month, he starts dozens, which he lays around the house or beneath paintings in the studio, allowing them to gather stains and marks of daily life. "Notes" can be shuffled and combined into larger pieces called "Compositions," forming the basis of graphic scores. In 2024, the Cannery in Penobscot, Maine staged a series of concerts in which "Compositions" were performed by musicians like E. Jason Gibbs, Phillip Greenlief, Leslie Ross, Steve Norton, Laura Cromwell, and others.

Top, Left to Right: Note 138 (2020); Note 126 (2020); Note 154 (2020); Note 1131 (2026)
Bottom, Left to Right: Note 964 (2025); Note 1121 (2026); Note 1 (2020); Note 702 (2023)

Accepting that there's something more than brute, unskilled doing behind such vast and varied artistic output, the "overweening" approach—a propensity I admit I must actively temper—starts from trying to articulate the interesting whatness of all those coalesced particularities . But it can be quick to flight and risks overstating its case. In seeking some ultimate source for often dumbfounding glimpses into a pure creative stream, it also risks leaving the artist behind entirely. Firebrand critic Robert Hughes famously had little patience for this. He once wrote that all of the "verbose obeisances to the Ineffable" in discussions of Mark Rothko's work tended "to be coercive, because of a deep uncertainty about the nature of his art." (I'm not sure what Hughes would make of something like Paint & Drums, though I can imagine him satisfied, standing before the large paintings at the end of the show, still gleaming and dripping.)

Hughes's warning is not unfounded, but it's also dismissive of the role uncertainty and small-i ineffability play in the experience of art like Landis's (or Rothko's, for that matter). We find the ineffable creeping up not because this sort of art is a direct mainline to the transcendent Godhead or a manifestation of universal Truth, but because it carries the possibility of ringing within us some deeply sympathetic tone, a personal and close-feeling resonance that never quite carries through into words. This isn't absolute or guaranteed. In truth, it is fleeting and infrequent. But we each know our own private tone and we hope in our encounters to feel that vibration. Returning to Cavell, in "Music Discomposed" he says these kinds of art are "known by feeling, or in feeling," and this underlies our anxiety and difficulty in communicating this knowledge:

"I want to tell you something I've seen, or heard, or realized, or come to understand, for the reasons for which such things are communicated (because it is news, about a world we share, or could). Only I find that I can't tell you; and that makes it all the more urgent to tell you. I want to tell you because the knowledge, unshared, is a burden . . . It matters, there is a burden, because unless I can tell you what I know, there is a suggestion (and to myself as well) that I do notknow."

This uncertainty is not a defect. It is an essential component of the improvised musical set, and of Landis's practice as he steps into his studio each day and faces dozens of paintings in various stages. And, Hughes's self-certainty aside, I think it is also the essential, brightly dark core of our aesthetic experience of these works. It's the same doubt the skeptic amplifies until it distorts into nothingness, easy to dismiss. Uncertainty—not-quite-knowing—is the grip that pulls the artist into the stream, and it's also the grip that gets us by the collar and stops us, to look or to listen. Picking up a paint brush or a saxophone are also attempts to convey news about a world we share, or could.

Left: 15.14 (2015); Right:20.03 (2020)

"Somehow Precise, Intense, and Vague All at Once"

The heading is Michael Gallope's description of what he calls music's "affective inconsistency," but it also beautifully captures Landis's paintings and the particular energy of his live collaboration with Sarin.

One of the more charming aspects of Landis's and Sarin's partnership is that they still aren't quite sure of it. Each time, they gently ease into a start and there's always some hesitation about whether they've finished. This thread of uncertainty runs through the whole performance, is what fuels the excitement, but it also feels more palpable than during a musical improvisation.

Left: M P Landis and Michael Sarin, May 15, 2024 at the Apohadion Theater, Portland, ME
Top Right: P+D 04 01 03 (2026); Bottom Right:P+D 03 02 02 (2026)

In the audience, witnessing the real-time change in the paintings draws out tensions between arising aesthetic judgments and a curiosity about what continuing will yield. As elements emerge in the paintings, there are times when things "feel" finished, or where particular sections or forms satisfy some personal preference. I find myself becoming protective, secretly wishing that further actions will spare a notable swirl of black or a blaze of orange that still burns though layer after layer. I wasn't alone. At several of the performances, others talked about fearing a painting was "ruined" at points during the show, feeling satisfied with a certain stage of the process and forgetting that the process must continue, that the painting in the moment they esteemed it also arose by that process. After the April 2026 performance, one enthusiastic young audience member bantered with Landis about the range of emotions he felt during the show: "At one point, I actually felt angry with you, man! I thought you fucked it up!"

Imagining how you think someone should be behaving toward certain sounds or stimuli also leads to subverted expectations. I wonder if the way Landis is moving should be more . . . what? Theatrical? Synchronized? Wouldn't that be inauthentic? How do I suppose live painting and drumming should look, and where'd those ideas even come from? It feels like the risks of improvising are magnified. And are they greater for M P? Notes melt away, but marks on canvas remain.

Left: P+D 01 02 04 (2024); Center: P+D 01 01 03 (2024); Right: P+D 02 02 08 (2024)

It's all quite different from watching two musicians improvising. At times they seem at odds, or moving just past one another. Sarin whips himself into a storm, a deluge of creative energy that—in my mind—is an arc of electricity shooting across the stage to directly animate M P's limbs. But Landis is opening a paint bottle or looking for a brush. All that, just dissipated! But has it? I presume bolts of lightning, but am likely missing the charged potential in the air. In some ways, it becomes easier to sense these shifting emotions when there's a visual element, a continuing remnant. In music alone, things often move so quickly that only the most egregious "missteps" or a complete failure to gel create notable feelings of resistance in the witness. Here, things move as fast, but your eyes are drawn to the canvas, which holds on to the movement of the performance like streaks of light in a long exposure.

Through all these contours, there's an unmistakable resonance between what Landis and Sarin are doing, if not an equivalence. I feel an immense mental force that wants to draw their activities into a neat consonance, but it's like pushing repelling magnets together. As Landis has always maintained, the painting doesn't "represent" the sounds any more than the reverse. Instead, there's a joyous, if ambiguous, exchange of energy. You can see that it's mutually reinforcing. Sarin is palpably exhilarated. The propulsion of his drumming spurs Landis into action, and the emerging images become mutable graphic scores, giant ever-changing "notes" urging Sarin further. The exact how just evades a tight grasp. Together or separately, the painting and drumming are abstract art that many would accuse of being untethered. But there's something stubbornly literal in their doing. The paintings are just that: caked and layered paint, ink, and pastel, thick and viscous or water-thinned and dripping. The drums: driving, rhythmic, sometimes crashing, deafening, sometimes the faintest texture of hand's skin on drumskin. It is all, plainly, what it is, a frustrating tautology because there is yet, as Sarin said at the end of the most recent performance, an alchemy.

"Whole" and "Divided" Painting from Paint & Drums 4, May 9, 2026 at the Loove Annex, Brooklyn, NY

Fever Bed

To quote another M-P, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote in "Cézanne's Doubt" that "before expression, there is nothing but a vague fever, and only the work itself, completed and understood, will prove that there was something rather than nothing to be found there." I'd gently propose shifting the sense of the word "work": M-P wrote l'œuvre, a finished piece of art, an "artifact" of the creative act. I'd like to read it as the doing, le faire, le travail—the undertaking of creating.

I often sense that vague fever while listening to improvised music, like the back of my hand against a warm forehead, and admittedly less often when facing a painting. I vicariously feel it in the dim light, watching Landis and Sarin on stage. Still, I sense in myself an inhibiting self-consciousness, like I'd never be able to start, even as I also discover expectations and opinions welling up and fading away as the performance plays out. Once in motion, there's an odd sort of courage in continuing to mark the canvas, to pound the drum, but I wonder if the central task of the improvising artist is to continually overcome that uneasy inertia and just begin. An unstopping at imagination's edge that risks mistake and awkwardness and dissatisfaction to possibly reach something that at best can only be hazily made out, and not at all while sitting in caution and doubt. Unsure if you can know you've reached it. Something about the feeling of reaching.

Left: FEVER BED (MAT MANERI TRIO) (2003); Right:manifestation (before fire music) (2001)

See much, much more of M P Landis's work, including video clips and other pieces from the Paint & Drums performances, on his Instagram or Facebook pages. You can see what Michael Sarin is up to on his Instagram page.

All photos of paintings used with the artist's permission.

All performance photos by Dan Sorrells.

Bringing down the walls of Jericho

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

By Richard Blute

And when they make a long blast with the ram’s horn, when you hear the sound of the trumpet, then all the people shall shout with a great shout, and the wall of the city will fall down flat…

-The Book Of Joshua, Chapter 6, Verse 5

Today we’re looking at two albums featuring saxophonists whose playing could bring down the walls of Jericho. Don Dietrich and Martin Escalante aren’t interested in melody in any ordinary sense of the term. You won’t find a cover of Surrey With The Fringe On Top here. They are living entirely on the very edge of what their instruments can do, skronking, screeching, howling, maybe a made-up verb with -ing on the end should go here. You won’t come away from these albums humming. But if you can find yourself in the same headspace as these musicians, you will come away from listening to this stunning, frequently shocking music exhilarated.

Richard Cook and Brian Morton, in writing The Penguin Guide To Jazz, used the word “god-bothering” several times. I’m not sure they meant it as a compliment, but I take it as one. I frequently think of it when I listen to music like this. This music certainly isn’t for everyone, even among free jazz fans. But for those looking for extremity in their music, these albums are special.

Dietrichs - Live Bahdu (Relative Pitch, 2026)

First up is Live Bahdu by the Dietrichs. Don Dietrich, along with Jim Sauter and Donald Miller, formed the thunderous free jazz/harsh noise band Borbetomagus. Rather than sitting around trying to think of new adjectives to describe Borbetomagus, I would just urge you to check them out. They aren’t on Bandcamp, but there are many samples of their music on Youtube.

(True story. I was once on a jazz open discussion group when someone wrote in asking for recommendations for music similar to Chuck Mangione. Some evil person who was not me, I swear, suggested Borbetomagus. I’ve often wondered what became of that poor listener.)

Here we have Don joined by his daughter Camille Dietrich on cello. While this album has much of what you would expect from an album with Don Dietrich, Camille’s cello provides an exciting counterpoint to Don’s saxophone. She’s equally skilled at plucking and bowing, her classical music training brings moments of peace and musicality and then her desire to wreak musical mayhem takes over. Don responds and the result is some serious fire and brimstone. There’s a moment just before the 4-minute mark when there is some relative calm, and then the duo turns on a dime to create a shocking racket. The whole album is full of such surprises.

Live Bahdu by Dietrichs

Max Devereaux & Martin Escalante - Consequences Live! (Caresse Cassettes, 2026)

And then there’s Martin Escalante. Another frequent creator of extreme sounds, Mats Gustafsson, said of Escalante:

“This is the JAZZ we need! URGENT! DEDICATED! RADICAL! Unique-face-peeling-cutting-edge- and-totally-in-your-face-MF! This is ALL we need for a better living!”

Who am I to argue with Mats Gustafsson, especially when he’s writing in ALL-CAPS? You might think Mats is exaggerating, but a listen to this album will tell you otherwise. Escalante, especially when he’s accompanied by a guitar, sounds punk as hell to me. I’m taken back to college days when I would crash off the walls of my dorm room screaming along to Black Flag. On this release he’s accompanied by the guitar of Max Devereaux, who manages to hold his own amid the noise and haste. He’s capable of creating his own ruckus but also quite good at providing accompaniment to Escalante on his wildest flights. At times he sounds like a rhythm section and at times he sounds like a machine gun. I wasn’t familiar with him before this album, and have been checking out his work since getting it. I hope to write more about him in the future.

Consequences Live! by Max Devereaux & Martin Escalante

Luke Stewart, Chad Taylor, Aymeric Avice - Deep in the Earth, High in the Sky (RogueArt, 2026)

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

By Brian Earley

In February of 2025, the trio of bassist Luke Stewart, drummer Chad Taylor, and trumpet-playing-electronics-wizard Aymeric Avice gathered in Studio Sextan-La Fonderie in Malakoff, France to make this exciting recording for RogueArt. Having recently performed at Périscope in Lyons, France with drummer Ramon Lopez, Stewart and Avice clearly had chemistry, and would continue to play together with both Lopez and Taylor, including a September 2025 show at the Sons d’hiver festival, a fifteen destination event orbiting Paris that focuses on experimental music, that year operating under the theme of Great Black Music. Check out part of that show here.

Deep in the Earth, High in the Sky is a high-energy event. I used the word “exciting” above I think to refer more to how I feel when I listen to the music than to any specific innovation on the part of the trio during this recording. Stewart and Taylor have clearly established themselves as two of THE masters on their respective instruments on the experimental music scene, and here they display sharp and deeply communal listening as they lock-in or open-up with near ESP levels of communication. A good example of this takes place around the three-minute mark of “Pangea Suite #1,” as the two transmute a funk-oriented rock feel into a free improvisation that defies any kind of circular rhythm. Taylor seems to hit his ride cymbal just one time outside of the established backbeat and the two musicians instantaneously take off together into realms unknown.

Aymeric Avice, for his part, is just so much fun to listen to, and I fear that I have slept on this musician. Avice is a trumpet virtuoso who lives and plays in electro-sonic amusements. He spends much of his time on this recording swirling and bending the pitches of his trumpet using electronic effects. And, thanks to Avice’s electronic experimentation, often these trumpet pitches come in harmonies wild, fierce, or even a little frightening. “Pangea Suite #2,” for instance features space-age trumpet electronics that can make the listener feel like they are floating in a slightly unreal ether. Check out the three-minute-ish section of this song to hear this levitation.

The album is clearly conceived and follows an organized layout. The opening song is “Deep in the Earth,” book-ended by the closing composition “High in the Sky.” Both of these works feature Chad Taylor and Luke Stewart on mbira and are a lovely and meditative introduction and conclusion to the album as a whole. In between these works lie three suites: Pangea Suite, Unknown Suite, and Escaped Sounds, all of which feature the exciting interplay of drums and bass and the electro-experiments of Avice mentioned above.

To my ears, the album has two clear reference points. The first is Live-Evil or Bitches Brew era Miles Davis. There are moments in the Unknown Suite , for example, that if cyphoned in ten-second snippets, could have been lifted right from one of these Miles records. “Unknown Suite #2” around 7:30 or 7:40 is evidence of this.

The other unmistakable reference point is jaimie branch. jaimie’s mark is all over this album. I mean, goodness, listen to the same song just before and just after the section I referenced above. Avice’s somehow both soft and sinister distortion on the trumpet around six minutes into “Unknown Suite #2” reminds me so much of sections of fly or die. This is to say nothing of the opening of “Unknown Suite #3,” with its ebullient toms, optimistic bass line and trumpet soaring overhead. Even the opening “Deep in the Earth” uses meditative mbira playing reminiscent of some of the beautiful breezy’s work. Of course, part of this connection is because the drummer on this record IS the fly or die drummer.

Deep in the Earth, High in the Skyis a fun record to listen to, and is filled with kinetic energy and intuitive interplay. At times serene and moving and at others scorched-earth electronic, this is an album worth checking out.

Deep in the Earth, High in the Sky can be found here

DEEP IN THE EARTH HIGH IN THE SKY by LUKE STEWART - CHAD TAYLOR - AYMERIC AVICE

Mikołaj Trzaska / John Edwards / Mark Sanders - Because it Happens (Gusstaff Records, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Martin Schray

I’ve seen the most magical of all magical rhythm sections in free jazz / improvised music - John Edwards on double bass and Mark Sanders on drums - several times now, the first time as the Foils Quartet with Frank Paul Schubert on saxophone and Matthias Müller on trombone. I was immediately blown away; my jaw literally kept dropping at the musical fireworks the two of them set off. Later, I saw them with Trevor Watts and Veryan Weston, then with Swiss saxophonist Omri Ziegele, and finally, three years ago, with John Butcher. However, the most spectacular gig was a concert with Roscoe Mitchell at the Météo Festival in Mulhouse in 2016. After ten minutes, the audience jumped to their feet and gave a standing ovation, yelling, shouting in pure ecstasy - right in the middle of the piece. Sometimes I think that even a way below-average amateur guitarist like me could play with them, and the result would be - let’s say - not a complete disaster.

Because It Happens is part of a gig at Café Oto (the other part, Not So Late, is available on a separate CD), and for this recording, the rhythm twins have enlisted the help of first class Polish saxophonist and bass clarinetist Mikołaj Trzaska. It’s no surprise that the trio is in full swing from the very first seconds,. Sanders stays firmly on the drums, which lends the improvisation a dark, driving character. Trzaska uses this for insanely fast runs, which are nonetheless underpinned by a deep spirituality. Many influences converge in his playing: Coltrane, Brötzmann, Shepp, Parker, and many more. His style is both energetic and subtle, he uses vibrato when appropriate but he can also sound very dry and abstract. Added to this is his excellent timing that leaves plenty of space for Edwards and Sanders. All of this is evident right from the opener “Running Loose”. Throughout the entire set a wide range of emotions is explored; there are moments of intense density followed by very lyrical passages (e.g., in “Creator of Creatures”) and superbly integrated solos (see Sanders’s drum solo in “Written By”).

However, the highlight of the album is the encore, “Light Inches”, which Edwards and Sanders kick off with an off-the-wall rhythm. The piece swings back and forth, Trzaska lets the notes dart through the room, breaks off abruptly, plays somewhere in the background, then Edwards takes the lead - the three musicians seem to be arguing over the direction of the improvisation, only to then agree almost instinctively on where to go. The rest is sheer madness in terms of power, harmony, and perfection.

Because It Happens is an outstanding album in every respect. Anyone who wants to hear state-of-the-art European free jazz (or “live composition”, as the musicians call it) should give this release a try.

Because It Happens is available on vinyl and as a download.

Because It Happens by Mikołaj Trzaska, John Edwards, Mark Sanders

These Things Happen - A Gentle Reminder (Corbett vs Dempsey, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 04:00:00 +0000

By Ferruccio Martinotti

It's rare to come back home empty-handed from a foray into Corbett vs Dempsey’s territorial waters, and this mission is no exception. Today, we're talking about the Atlantic Pact, set between the ever-erupting, volcanic Chicago scene and the anarcho-free stronghold of Amsterdam, that nothing and no one will ever conquer. No drones, tanks, Patriots, or F-35s, but the only weapons useful to humanity: reeds, pianos, drums, and basses. These Things Happen provide them with their sophomore album, "A Gentle Reminder", following their 2022 self-titled debut.

This album, recorded at Hyde Park Jazz Festival in Chicago and at WNUR Studio, Northwestern University, confirms the band's recipe: original songs interspersed with renditions of Misha Mengelberg and Thelonious Monk, presented not in a slavish, calligraphic manner but through a contemporary reinterpretation of tradition.

The players on the field deserve to be met up close. Keefe Jackson, tenor saxophone, bass clarinet. Born in Fayetteville, Arkansas, he arrived in Chicago in 2001 and performed across US and Europe with the likes of Tomeka Reid, Tim Days, Dave Rempis, Mike Reed, Jeb Bishop, Jason Adasiewicz, Satoko Fujii, Ab Baars and Bill Meyer. His partner in crime on the other side of the Pond, Oscar Jan Hoogland, piano, is a top notch badass. A leading figure on the Dutch impro scene, Hoogland sprung onto the Amsterdam landscape around 20 years ago, at the forefront of a new group of improvisers to arrive and simultaneously uphold the tradition of New Dutch Swing even while tearing it apart. As always, collaborations define the breadth of a musician's chromatic palette and so, read here about Oscar: improvisation with Senegalese singer Mola Sylla and percussionist Frank Rosaly; sound installations and performances with Practical Music and his Phonograph Orchestra; cumbia with Ibelisse Guardia Ferraguttis’s Superinca and the Galactic Green; Ethiopian jazz and Eritrean traditional music with Semer Welday’s Adulis. His work with Arnold de Boer and the duo with mythologic Han Bennink incontrovertibly attests to the caliber of the artist. The rhythm section that supports the two pals features Jason Roebke on double bass (collaborations with Ken Vandermark, Jeb Bishop, Jeff Parker, Chad Taylor, and Rob Mazurek), who replaced Joshua Abrams during the process, and Mikel Patrick Avery on drums (Rob Mazurek, Marshall Allen Tomeka Reid, Jeff Parker, and Kurt Vile on his CV).

The record: Jackson's opening track "20 Years Past 12 O'Clock," a sonic excursus that moves across multiple time scales, is followed by a piece by Hoogland dedicated to Ab Baars, "Upperclass Underground," and a reinterpretation of Monk’s "Green Chimneys," whose genesis is described as follows: "it started out as a punk song on the setlist before taking a thin-threaded turn on the night." Two original compositions keep the pace in the right mood, constantly balancing compositional rigor with a loose flow, free from excessive constraints. The revisitation of Mengelberg's "Een Beetje Zenuwachtig," from minor to major, pays homage to the legendary Ukrainian pianist's key change when he played "Round Midnight" in Chicago, while "Well You Needn't" pushes Monk "max so far," as Hoogland puts it, with a sculptural declination of an ongoing sonic pendulum swinging between modernity and tradition. The album closes with “Over het Zijn en het Hoera”, its title drawn from an absurdist story by Dutch writer and artist Armando.

As it has rightly been said, this is music that knows its history inside out and wears it lightly. The generosity of spirit here, between players, between cities, between Monk and Mengelberg, between composition and the moment, is the real subject. You know, sometimes things like these happen.

A Gentle Reminder by These Things Happen

Okuda Müller Hall - ³√ (Unit Records, 2026)

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

By Martin Schray

In July, Europe was grappling with extremely high temperatures and, as a result, thunderstorms due to the heat dome over the continent. I live on the top floor of an apartment building and therefore had a particularly privileged view of these natural spectacles. On one occasion, I could see such a storm approaching - a dark wall rapidly pushing toward the city - though it was obvious that the weather front would only graze the city. The gusts of wind were fierce, trees bent under the force of nature, thunder roared, and lightning lit up the sky. But why am I telling you this? Because it fits perfectly with “Equilibrum”, the first track on the new album by the international trio Okuda Müller Hall - Rieko Okuda (Japan; piano), Matthias Müller (Germany, trombone), and Samuel Hall (Australia, drums) - perfectly. At first, the drums just tingle softly; Hall rubs the toms and strokes the cymbals, while Müller delivers an unsettling drone that shifts only slightly. Sometimes it grows louder, then fades again; it literally fluctuates. Then the piano slowly enters the picture, with Okuda attacking the interior of the instrument. Almost imperceptibly, everything grows louder, darker, and more menacing. The thunderstorm is now over you, but only a few heavy drops are falling, symbolized by isolated piano notes. Even though you know you’ll get off lightly, a hauntingly beautiful, fascinating feeling lingers.

“Six Lights,” the third and longest track on the album, continues this form of improvisation in a similar vein. Müller, however, forgoes the drone, opting instead for deliberate, sustained notes over which Okuda showers bright piano sprinkles, while Hall works his magic on the dark drums and simultaneously manipulates extended materials. Müller then takes a two-and-a-half-minute break, and when he rejoins the piece, it actually sounds like contemporary European free jazz or like - say - a trippy ECM recording.

In general, ³√ (“Cube Root”) combines wide-ranging developments with a finely balanced structure, it’s a perfect showcase of Berlin’s Echtzeitmusik scene, the trio’s music flows organically into a distinct sonic language - multi-layered, crystal clear, a combination of density and openness. The liner notes mention that an “acoustic space of great depth and fluidity unfolds, within which a steady pull develops, drawing the listener ever deeper into this flowing, ever-changing soundscape“.

My favorite track on the album, though, is the last one, “Sputnik.” The thunder and lightning of the opener are gone; what remains is the wind - rough, wild, hissing around the corners and producing strange sounds. Rieko Okuda creates a powerful soundscape against which Müller and Hall enjoy a great deal of freedom, and which ultimately proves what they are - in a musical sense: a force of nature. The album ends with a few subtle dabs of piano. Fascinating and stunningly beautiful.

³√ is available as a download. You can listen to the cording here:

³√ by Okuda Müller Hall

[Ahmed]أحمد - Live at Cafe OTO, London, 12/11/2025

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

What can we say about [Ahmed] that hasn't been said already on these pages by Ferruccio Martinotti, Fotis Nikolakopoulos, Stuart Broomer, Lee Rice Epstein, Sarah Grosser and Paul Acquaro?

So, instead of trying to say more, we say, take a front row seat at Cafe OTO and enjoy a show:

Video by roustghoti, published on YouTube.

Bezau Beatz, Aug. 6-9, 2026, Bezau, Austria

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

By Eyal Hareuveni

Second time at the Bezau Beatz festival, located in a small, beautiful, and most peaceful village in the Austrian Alps, but much closer to Switzerland, Italy and Germany than to the Austrian free music scenes. Thanks to the festival's artistic directors and producers - drummers Alfred Vogel and Valentin Schuster - the festival has managed to create a friendly and highly attentive community of music lovers and musicians that is welcoming and shares all kinds of musical adventures and experiments. A perfect place to take a vacation from the local or global disturbing reality and its abhorrent horrors and stupidities, and find some nurturing, fresh air - literally. This festival will celebrate its 20th anniversary next year.

1st Day, Aug. 6

The festival opened with the Danish-Norwegian quartet Emmeluth’s Amoeba - alto sax player and bandleader Signe Emmeluth, her partner, guitarist Karl Bjorå, pianist Christian Balvig, and drummer Ole Mofjell - which stormed the intimate space at the festival’s headquarters, Hotel Post. This quartet has already released four albums and has developed a tight, telepathic interplay, using Emmeluth’s skeletal compositional motifs for exploratory, intense rhythmic improvisations. There were times that the interplay sounded as if Bjorå, Balvig, and Mofjell challenged Emmeluth’s commanding, natural flow of ideas with playful, even disruptive moves. Still, she used their tactics to steer the quartet into collective, even more powerful, cathartic eruptions.

Later, down at the hotel’s basement - the SuBBwayZ - the duo NarrSteidle - German guitarist and electronics player Steffi Narr and drummer and electronics player Oliver Steidle (of The Killing Popes and Ilog), who has released a debut album on Vogel and Schuster’s Boomaslang label (Ghost Ants, 2025), weaved resonant acoustic, electronic, and processed sounds into fragmented rhythmic patterns, that slowly evolved into rich yet twisted and restless grooves.

The evening program moved to the main space - The Remise, a vintage locomotive garage most days of the year (with a strong aroma of grease), where Danish guitarist Teis Semey (who confessed that he has never seen mountains so high before) led his Amsterdam-based quintet: alto sax player José Soares, tenor sax player Jesse Schilderink, double bass player Jort Terwijn and drummer Giovanni Iacovella - with a set of playful pieces that flirted with free jazz, fusion and even pop songs, charged with youthful, passionate uplifting energy.

The following performance of the German, all-female quartet Hilde - vocalist Marie Daniels, violinist Julia Brüssel, cellist Emily Wittbrodt, and trombonist Maria Trautmann - was completely different. This quartet has already released three impressive albums (the most recent, Timbre, on Boomslang, 2026) and offered its refined aesthetics that search for unexpected ties between abstract timbral invention, chamber art song format, and free improvisation, with elegant grace, organic interplay, and wit, always highlighting the four distinct voices. Hilde never chose familiar routes, and it explored coordinates of time and space with its own mysterious and thoughtful inner logic. There were some arresting musical games, especially when trombonist Trautmann contrasted Daniels’ warm and beautiful vocal delivery with her subversive, ironic trombone vocalization.

The day ended at the Hoel Post with Schuster’s new quartet WOBBLE8 - baritone sax player Sofia Salvo (of Kuhn Fu), guitarist-vocalist Dan Peter Sundland (of Frank Gratkowski's Entrainmen, and Lina Allemano's Ohrenschmaus), vintage synth player Sebastian Pfeifer, and Schuster with a drum set with two pedals on the bass drum. This quartet prepares for the release of its debut album soon, The Moon is not there when nobody looks and exploded on the small stage with manic energy, propelled by Schuster’s massive, metal-like drumming, Salvo’s merciless Ayler-ian blows, Pfeifer’s prog-rock keyboard layers, and Sundland’s spiky guitar lines. The endless Dadaist-apocalyptic energy could supply enough electricity for the whole region for months. Looking forward to exploring WOBBLE8’s new album.

2nd Day, Aug.7

Austrian, New York-based Luisa Muhr opened the day’s program with an early performance of her conceptual work TEUFLIN/SHE-DEVIL (released on Boomslang, 2024), a feminine, irreverent interpretation of original, rich German texts from Goethe’s Faust, accompanied by cellist Elisabeth Coudoux and tenor sax player Jonathan Reisin, all dressed in black, and performing in the small church, Kloster Bezau. This work is based on a graphic score and questions the concept of "evil" from a female perspective, the separation of "good" and "evil," as it is particularly ingrained in Western traditions, and contemplates issues of life, death, and morality. It centers on Goethe’s phrase “Was glänzt, ist für den Augenblick geboren; / Das Echte bleibt der Nachwelt unverloren” (What dazzles, for the moment spends its spirit; / What’s genuine, shall Posterity inherit). Clearly, not the easiest issues to process early in the morning, but the wise, graceful performance of Muhr, Coudoux, and Reisin charmed and deeply moved the audience, some even to tears.

Luckily, the next performance of the free improvising trio of Portuguese alto sax hero José Lencastre and bassist João Hasselberg and Danish master drummer Kresten Osgood changed the atmosphere. This trio released its debut album last year, This Anger is a Liar (Fundacja Słuchaj!; the title is taken from a song by Kip Hanrahan), and the performance suggested how three idiosyncratic and opinionated improvisers converse and explore the unique space of the local artist locksmith’s workshop, Kunstschmiede Figer, and its artifacts. Lencstre opted for exploring brief melodic and introspective ideas; Osgood, with a Ninja Turtles T-shirt, was, as usual, all over, playing his drum kit as if he was making love to it, with commanding pathos but equipped with a profound musical sensibility, provoking the audience with his eccentric antics, but completely bewitching all; and asselberg was torturing his bass guitar (titled “Lily”) with feedback sounds, aggressive hammering, and effects. Somehow it all made perfect sense, as the trio relied on its deep listening dynamics to search for uncharted timbres and resonances, even when Osgood sang solo the Hanrahan’s song. The performance ended with Hasselberg dismantling the neck of the guitar and rubbing the bass string against the pickups, offering a symbolic interpretation of Eric Dolphy's immortal saying: “When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone, in the air. You can never capture it again”. All left this performance with a big smile on their faces, agreeing that our world needs many more Krestens desperately.

The afternoon performances returned to Hotel Post with a performance by the German, Cologne-based Philip Zoubek Trio - Zoubek on piano and synth, double bass player David Helm, and drummer-percussionist Dominik Mahnig. This trio has released five albums (including one in its electric version as Placebo Domingo) and is about to release its sixth one soon on Boomslang. It played a highly powerful set that highlighted its tight, inexhaustible, resonant kinetic-rhythmic energy as if it were a three-headed sonic entity, synchronized to the most minute detail, while following the intricate, composed score.

Down at the SuBBwayZ, the futurist trio Meat.Karaoke.Quality.Time. - EWI and Moog synth players Florian Walter and Jan Klare, and Karl-F. Degenhardt on sensory and AI percussion, all dressed in black, as mad scientists from another planet. They cooked otherworldly - literally - weird but accessible sonic spices.

Back in the Remise, Argentinian, Berlin-based tenor sax player Camila Nebbia presented her sextet, The Hanged One, inspired by the tarot card number 12, representing letting go, patience, reassessment, insight, and sacrifice, which is usually a symbol for new perspectives. This band: : cellist Julia Biłat, guitarist Arne Braun, electronics player Andres Marino, double bass player Vinicius Cajado, and drummer Lukas Akintaya, is about to release a new album by Relative Pitch. The sextet explored the tension between jazz-tinged composed parts with powerful grooves and experimental improvisation and timbral explorations, with Biłat and Marino more active on this edge. Nebbia encouraged individual, generous solos that allowed all ideas to be turned upside down, and new perspectives to emerge without fear of clash, but Nebbia’s economic, soulful solos glued all contrasting poles into an impressive, coherent statement.

Next, at the same location, French drummer Edward Perraud presented his Sauvages Paradis (White Paradise) quartet - organ player and pianist Eve Risser (the leader of Red Desert Orchestra), flutist Delphine Joussein (of Nout trio and the Flöjter duo with Mats Gustafsson) and guitarist Arthur Delaleu. This collective quartet just released its criminally short debut album, Wild Thing (Gigantonium, 2026), and immediately captured the audience with its hyperactive, ever-inventive, and inspired sonic paradise. This quartet created cathartic, hypnotic, and trance-like textures that demonstrated how these resourceful improvisers keep feeding and pushing each other, with generous doses of humour, ecstatic storms, and dream-like, cosmic soundscapes. Perraud sang in gibberish, played on a strange guitar, Risser introduced North African meditative pulses on the piano, and Joussein transformed her flute into a mean, effects-laden electric guitar, and only Delaleu sat still as if the exhilarating sonic mayhem did not touch him. This quartet delivered on its promise from its album: “surrendering to the collective fever and opening yourself up to a journey of no return”.

Day 3, Aug 8

The morning performance began with "Three men in a church with no Maria", the Littorina Saxophone Trio - Finnish Mikko Innanen, Swedish Fredrik Ljungkvist, and Lithuanian Liudas Mockūnas - playing within the beautiful acoustics of the ancient Kirche Reuthe, but without its founding member, Estonian Maria Faust, who had another engagement. This quartet of reed masters, who play the saxophone family, from the sopranino to the bass, is titled after the original name of the Baltic Sea and released a debut album last year. Leaking Pipes (NoBusiness, 2025). The touching, beautiful set stressed the profound, emphatic, and playful dynamics of this trio and its own independent aesthetics, rooted in Nordic folk motifs and European schools of modern jazz. Ljungkvist’s soulful, moving ballad “Nils-Olof”, dedicated to his father-in-law who passed away, and the trio’s interpretation of Ljungkvist's “Oslo”, were the highlights of this set, which could have been much, much longer, as far as the attentive audience cared.

In the afternoon, Israeli-born, New York-based tenor sax player Jonathan Reisin presented his thought-provoking, complex compositions from his album Too Good X Unreality (Boomslang, 2025) at the Remise, with Korean-born, Amsterdam-based pianist Chaerin Im and Italian drummer Francesca Remigi (neither played on the album). Reisin introduces post-Cageian extended techniques and Steve Reich-like minimalism, and his sax playing and his compositions suggest a distant, sober, often even ironic perspective on the jazz legacy. This performance allowed his demanding, intricate compositions to blossom with the new voices of Im and Remigi, and often Reisin simply stood aside and enjoyed how they breathed new, unpredictable fresh air into his ideas, letting this ad-hoc trio push the boundaries of its instruments.

At the same location, Finnish, Berlin-based guitarist Kalle Kalima presented his new trio Detours, with German drummer Christian Lillinger (who plays with Kalima in the KUU! quartet) and Argentinian, Brooklyn-based keyboard player Leo Genovese, who played the Hammond organ, Crumar electric piano, Korg synth, and piano. This trio was formed in the 2025 edition of the Saalfelden Jazz Festival, but this was one of its first-ever performances, and music was composed, focusing on the high-energy, dense, and physical rhythmic outputs of these gifted, versatile improvisers, with little variance in the radical, electric textures. But there were times that I could swear that Genovese had at least four hands, if not much more.

The night ended at the same location with the first-ever performance of the Vanish trio - the one and only American vocal artist Shelley Hirsch, Swiss master double bass player Christian Weber, and master drummer Alfred Vogel. This trio released its debut album earlier this year on Boomslang that revolved around Hirsch’s stream of thoughts, observations, insights, and stories. It was clear from the first moment that Hirsch is a natural on stage, with a deeply sensual, touching presence that immediately bewitched the audience, as well as Weber and Vogel, who kept challenging her with fragmented rhythmic patterns. Hirsch transformed this performance into a funny, moving, and thoughtful love letter to the festival, to the appreciative audience, and especially to the “beautiful white-haired women of Bezau” and to Weber and Vogel. She did so with a remarkable, commanding ability to shape the English and the German languages to her needs, with amusing onomatopoeic games, and poetic quotes from jazz standards. I hope that this trio will find more opportunities to explore its great potential.

Day 4, Aug. 9

The festival ended with a morning performance at the Remise with a guest band from a twin festival in Porto, Portugal. Portuguese, Amsterdam-based Vocal artist and composer Vera Morais presented her new quintet EUPNEA - with vocalists Līva Dumpe, Sarah van Eijk, and flutists Teresa Costa and Ketija Ringa-Karahona - that just released a debut album. Morais’ compositions offer a beautiful, touching synergy of breath, air, and vocal pitches, flirting with contemporary music and influences of Meredith Monk ensembles, and encapsulate the quintet as a human organ that explores highly immersive chamber music. Morais is a creative force worth following.

MoE & Ikuro Takahashi featuring Signe Emmeluth - Live at Børsen Kulturhus

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

By William Rossi

MoE, the vocals, guitar and bass duo of Guro Moe and Håvard Skaset, is one of the most interesting rock acts around today, merging aggression and a punk attitude and with a love for improvised and experimental music. On this release they're joined by frequent collaborator Ikuro Takahashi on drums and alto saxophonist powerhouse Signe Emmeluth. While collaboration and experimentation are to be expected with this band this record is notable for mainly two reasons: it was recorded live in concert (which came as a surprise to me because their chemistry is so great that I'd assumed a lot of their records were recorded live) and it's the first MoE album in which frontwoman and backbone of the band Guro Moe trades her trusty electric bass for a double bass.

While each of the six untitled tracks has its own identity, the album is a full gig recording with the dynamics of a concert as a consequence. After a short minute of mood setting and acclimatization the four musicians get straight to business with pummeling, fluid drumming, furious guitar bashing and driving bass setting the stage for Emmeluth to shine on her sax. This no holds barred first track immediately shows just how tight this band is and will be throughout the album, the especially fantastic interplay between the sax and the guitar being a highlight. The second track brings the energy down a bit and rests on Moe's signature bass playing, simultaneously gluing the band together and laying down a delightfully off-kilter groove. Takahashi and Skaset take a step back, the former focusing mainly on the cymbals and the latter turning his guitar into something that resembles a synth pad, leaving the bass and sax to their polyrithmic dance.

Track four, the midpoint of the concert, introduces hints of psychedelia, with its effects-heavy guitar and a saxophone that at times sounds like a half-remembered dream, but the music and the mood are in constant evolution and the underwater feeling is soon spirited away by a massive bowed bass riff and a desperate shriek.

In the latter half of the album the music takes on a mysterious quality and something else takes center stage: Moe's fantastic vocal performance. While the vocals and lyrics are present throughout the record (MoE is a rock band at their core at the end of the day) it feels like at a certain point all four musicians collectively decide to give priority to the vocal performance for a while. And what a performance it is! Full of passion, melody and angst, ranging from hissing whispers to operatic highs, often in conversation and sync with Emmeluth's altissimo notes, it's endlessly engaging and captivating Takahashi and Skaset then take on a more active role, guiding the band towards a final crescendo of distortion, blister-inducing bass playing and squealing sax overtones. For the second time on the record the band proves to be just as capable at bringing the energy down as building it up, something arguably harder to do convincingly, and they close the concert out with a slithering bowed bassline enveloped by Moe's soaring vocals.

All four musicians are extremely talented and have a very assertive voice. The challenge for the band then becomes creating music that's balanced and doesn't particularily revolve around any one musician and I think they pass this challenge with flying colors. The players know exactly what and when to play, when to be active and when to play support in order to serve the music first and foremost. Emmeluth in particular is fantastic at exchanging ideas with the others, always picking the right notes to embellish a guitar chord or supporting a vocal melody,. There are no flashy solos or traditional jazz or even rock forms, just collective creation of a kind of music that revolves around attitude and emotion. It's an elating, moving and lively album, beautifully recorded and presented. I hope to hear this lineup together again soon.

Released on digitally and on CD by Conrad Sound.

Live at Børsen Kulturhus by MoE & Ikuro Takahashi featuring Signe Emmeluth

Jack Wright/Ben Bennett – Tourne (self-released, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 07:09:00 +0000

By Fotis Nikolakopoulos

This, unfortunately, digital only release is a treat, a future hidden gem, probably, for all those interested in the free thinking ethos of improvisation. Jack Wright is on the saxophones (alto and soprano, I believe) and Bennett on the drums and some other percussive objects. Tourne is comprised of three long tracks, each over or around the ten minute mark, and presents their take of playing live.

When I’m saying that this is their take, I mean it literally. Even though there’s a certain generational gap when it comes to those two players’ age, they both refer to the early days of free improvisation (we could comment that those days where having jazz as a reference but nothing more) when a new language –every sound is possible and only the players are liable for it- was being formed and presented through playing live.

This is how both of them antagonize with their preconceived ideas about playing music: by challenging each other to go further and further, even beyond the margins of what is sound, what is music, what is that should be heard from percussion and saxophones. This is not their first collaboration but, still, they sound fresh and willing not to fall in the shaky ground of presenting “good” music-not even playing “challenging” and “adventurous” stuff. They just are themselves, staying true to the basic ethos of free improvisation. Trying, at least, to present something new each time.

Bennett’s playing is agile, feverish and energetic as never before. He seems to be enjoying himself as he releases low level percussive barrages. Wright, restless as ever, follows but also runs in parallel releasing saxophone sounds as if his respected instrument is made of rubber and can bend and displace notes and phrases.

I’m not sure if I made my point clear out to you, but this is a joy to experience release that has to be, at least, listened by a lot of people.

Tourne by Jack Wright and Ben Bennett

Fot.isn