The Free Jazz Collective

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

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

Frangenheim / Keune - New Traces (scatterArchive, 2026)

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

By Martin Schray

Bassist Alexander Frangenheim and saxophonist Stefan Keune belong to the third generation of European Improvised Music (or fourth, depending on how you calculate). I came across Keune and his trio with bassist Hans Schneider and drummer Achim Krämer with No Comment (FMP 2009), Frangenheim was on my radar because he was a member of Cecil Taylor’s Workshop Band (Legba Crossing,FMP 1988) and later on he released several very good recordings on the Creative Sources label. Their musical style - not atypical for European Improv in the 1990s and 2000s - was more abstract than the recordings of the godfathers of this music which - while experimental - were often very concrete. Whereas concrete improvisation works with direct, tangible materials, situations, or predetermined rules - be they small melodies, energetic structures, or even a pure desire for destruction (one need only think of Peter Kowald’s and Peter Brötzmann’s “Kaputtspiel” phase - even if the latter disliked the term), abstract improvisation detaches itself from external circumstances to express feelings or states of mind primarily through sound, structure, and form.

Abstractions are evident in many ways on New Traces, Frangenheim’s and Keune’s debut collaboration as a duo: first, in the pauses - moments of silence that are repeatedly interspersed among the music’s hectic passages, as in “New Traces 1” or “New Traces 7” - and second, in the music’s extreme density and concentration. Both musicians employ extended playing techniques such as harmonics, overtones, and percussive strokes. It’s not about melodies, but about exploring timbres, textures, and dynamic extremes. Ultimately, however, the abstract moments are most evident in the frenzied runs and competing trills, the contrasts in register (especially in “New Traces 4“, where they really reach the limit of what listeners can bear to hear), the impetuous stylistic drive, and the simultaneous clarity of the sound. True, Keune still hisses, coos, hums, and gurgles for all he’s worth, and Frangenheim scrubs away, making his bass weep and crash - yet it’s as if one had stripped Barry Guy & Mats Gustafsson’s Sinners, Rather Than Saints (No Business, 2009) of all its embellishments, oriental flourishes, vibratos, frills and obvious crescendos (don’t get me wrong, I love this album) - to draw a concrete example for comparison. Just listen to “New Traces 8“. Here, the improvisation takes unpredictable turns and surprising sounds are created, yet the structure of the piece remains crystal clear. A prerequisite for this is that both musicians have such an excellent technique that during the more frenzied moments, instrumental timbres coalesce without getting in one’s way.

The album is a treat for fans of abstract music and sonic exploration. Very recommended.

New Traces is available as a download.

new traces by Frangenheim / Keune

Melvin Gibbs - How Black Music Took Over the World (Basic Books/Hachette Book Group, 2026)

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

By Lee Rice Epstein

As a writer, researcher, musician, composer, and artist in the public sphere, Melvin Gibbs seems to have been working towards something like How Black Music Took Over the World for while now—a synthesizing work that brings together personal history, polemic, Black music made in and beyond America both under and in spite of a racialized cultural hierarchy, and the heartbreak and joy that come with learning and acknowledging this shared (like it or not) history. How that synthesis enacts itself on paper is one of Gibbs’s particular skills, his melding of register (as he lays out in the Prelude) replays his musical practice. An open reader who lets the book take over will be, I think inarguably, rewarded.

One of the key areas that’s under-discussed in literature, as far as I’m aware, which Gibbs both personally and academically goes over in the book is the Gullah-Geechee, the community rooted in the Sea Islands, along the Georgia and Florida coast. In the chapters “Stono’s Children” and “Changing Time With the Times,” Gibbs recounts his discovery of his Gullah heritage, then takes readers on a fascinating journey of the elemental components of rhythm, from ring shout, hambone, swing, and backbeat, to dub. What works pretty well in idea—merging registers, mixing personal memoir with rhythmic analysis—plays out (pardon the unintentional pun) wonderfully on paper. From an extended rhythmic analysis in “Stono’s Children,” Gibbs drops us right into a Harriet Tubman rehearsal. In a later chapter “Can’t Stop,” Gibbs breaks down a specific rhythm he’s dubbed the “lunch table cell,” then demonstrates its use in school lunch ad libs, James Brown’s “Soul Power,” Fela Kuti’s “Shakara,” and Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks.” There’s a joy in taking all this in, and the infectious enthusiasm Gibbs seems to take in sharing the rhythms and ideas he’s studied and generated.

“The Music of Black Science” demonstrates the linkage from mythos developed through sharing stories to cosmologies that underpin systems of belief, math, science, and artistry. As a somewhat mystical rumination on West African frameworks, and what Gibbs describes as an ontology of Black music. The ensuing pages explore mythologies, fables, and physics through the lens of oral communication and visualization. It’s one of the chapters I’ve dipped back into multiple times, letting myself drift to and fro, which doesn’t seem to contradict Gibb’s intent.

However intentional, or not, How Black Music Took Over the World is in conversation with two crucial writers and researchers in this area, Race Music by Guthrie Ramsey and Blacksound by Matthew Morrison. Ramsey’s been in the space for over 30 years building up a compelling and provocative (for me, personally, I’m using this word in terms of “provoking intellectual thought and reflection”) body of work, and Morrison’s Blacksound is the kind of seminal work that hopefully becomes required reading for anyone seeking to understand the acoustical aspects of blackface minstrelsy that became the bedrock of the recording industry. Much like Gibbs’s assembly of evidence showing Black performance and foundational rhythms permeating styles and genres, Morrison demonstrates how Blacksound (re-)centers the ephemeral sonic and performance aesthetics that were capitalized on by early white adopters of vaudeville and dance. While no single author can be expected to cover all aspects of a topic, there are areas Gibbs elides or leaves out of his narrative that are readily picked up in these two—and, yes, many other—books, which an earnest reader is encouraged to also seek out.

Ines Terra and Santiago Bogacz - Boca De Acero (ScatterArchives, 2026)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Acquaro) — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 06:00:00 +0000

By Hrayr Attarian

To say that a work starts with a bang is a cliché, yet Boca De Acero definitely has an explosive intro. Not only that, the momentum on this five-movement duet remains taut till the final note. A collaboration between two singular musicians, the Argentinian vocalist Ines Terra and Uruguayan guitarist Santiago Bogacz, this album is entirely improvised and demonstrates a seamless camaraderie between them.

This abstract, cinematic conversation has a shifting mood and thrilling twists and turns within the underlying harmonic narrative. Track “1” opens with fiery, angular guitar strums and Terra’s wordless vocal acrobatics. Terra makes her shouts and cries bounce off Bogacz’s strings with dramatic flair. The guitarist weaves a dense and dynamic soundscape around Terra’s chants.

[Text Wrapping Break]Despite embracing dissonance, the pair maintains a subtle lyricism throughout their exchanges. The darkly hued “2” brims with mysticism. Terra’s rising and falling voice hauntingly floats over Bogacz’s sparse chords. The refrains that evolve with each repetition have a ritualistic feel, almost like the ceremonial liturgy of a long-forgotten ancient rite.

With “3” the somber mood continues, becoming quieter and more nocturnesque. Terra softly whispers, and Bogacz plucks single notes that underscore the serenity of the mood. Their conversation takes on a sublime theatricality. Meanwhile, on “4” the two artists fully embrace mysticism as her throat singing and his hypnotic strums ebb and flow against a quiet backdrop, ending on a passionate note.

The fifth piece features synthesizer sounds that distort the emotive and stimulating improvisation, creating a delightfully otherworldly atmosphere. The burgeoning piece melds the organic quality of the human voice with sharp, acerbic electronic vamps for a performance that is simultaneously stimulating and eerie.

With Boca De Acero, Terra and Bogacz have undertaken a successful sonic experiment that is provocative and moving. It is also a much-needed glimpse into South America’s vibrant improvisational scene. That, much like the recording’s creators of this album, is unique, expressive, and fearless.

Boca de acero by Inés Terra + Santiago Bogacz

XENOFOX @ Konfrontation, July 2026

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

This past month, the duo XENOFOX — Olaf Rupp on electric guitar and Rudi Fischerlehner on drums — performed at the Jazzgalerie Nickelsdorf during the 46th edition of Konfrontationen. Held under the motto ‘A Tribute to Hans Falb’ in honor of the festival’s founder, who passed away in December 2025, this year’s program carried an added weight: this edition may be the festival’s final one.

Caleb Wheeler Curtis - Ritual (Chill Tone Records, 2026)

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

By Brian Earley

Tempus fugit . A number of up and coming adventurous saxophonists who once surprised with their original voices suddenly, it seems, have been around for quite a while now. Immanuel Wilkins, Stacy Dillard, and Caleb Wheeler Curtis, the subject of this review, by now have expansive discographies. Wheeler’s album The True Story of Bears and the Invention of the Battery was listed as a top album of 2024 on the Free Jazz Collective by one reviewer. Ritual, for goodness sakes, is the multi-instrumentalist’s sixth album as a leader . And it’s so easy to lose track and just call a musician “new.” A case study for mistaken novice is the pianist on this record, the legendary Orrin Evans. Evans had anchored the Philadelphia jazz scene and had been a mainstay in New York’s jazz community for decades when he won Downbeat’s Rising Star award. It was great for the maestro to get some long overdue recognition, but remains one of the most baffling episodes in the history of that magazine’s historic poll.

Evans after all, by that point, was already serving in a mentor capacity to Caleb Wheeler Curtis, signing him to Imani Records. Ritual advances the narrative even more, as this is the first album as a leader Curtis has recorded for a label other than Imani, going this time with Chill Tone Records.

Ritual is a beautifully free-roaming album that is somehow simultaneously tightly controlled. For me, there are two standout tracks on this album: the first, “Fantasmas,” and the last, the title track “Ritual.” “Fantasmas” is a wonderful rubato ballad for which Curtis composes a traditional AABA theme. Despite the thematic jacket, the piece just meanders and floats in a sea of rhythm and atmospherics. The rhythm is largely thanks to drummer Michael Sarin, who on this album often chooses not to simply play time. The atmospherics are mainly the result of a stunningly powerful guitar performance by Emmanuel Michael. Together, Sarin and Michael remind me of the ECM Paul Motion and Bill Frisell albums.

Joe Lovano often was the horn player on those ECMs, while here Caleb Wheeler Curtis’s tone is much more hard edged, made a little sharp and prickly by his saxophone of choice: the stritch. Wheeler’s website cites possibly a more accurate reference point: Wheeler “draws from a wide range of influences including progressive bop and post-Coltrane/Ornette free improvisation.” Actually, one might say a song like “Fantasmas” is like Ornette Coleman playing with Liberty Ellman.

“Ritual” is a stunning composition that leaves bold seams of silence intact throughout. After a mournful eight note melodic line, this time featuring Curtis on trumpet, multi-instrumentalist Henry Paz on flute, and Vincente Archer bowing the double bass, the band stops playing for a full four seconds–and this four seconds of silence contains so much weight and power as I listened for when, or if, the band would return. These gaps are slowly filled in by the musicians: first Curtis on saxophone, then Sarin on drums, and finally Emmanuel Michael’s guitar.

The album, I should note, is more straight ahead than some followers of the FJC may want it to be. While there is tremendous freedom on the record, even those who loved The True Story of Bears may find Ritual to be quieter and tamer by comparison. And don’t mistake my point, I love the two tunes referenced above, but this album is filled with beautiful songs (check out “Florence,” “Pond,” and “The End of Power,” for instance). The Bandcamp page for Ritual says Caleb Wheeler Curtis “celebrates the ritual and practice of communal music making,” and this should appeal to those of us who love this music not so much for its virtuosity, but for the kind of world it imagines and makes possible. A ritual provides solace through routine. I would like to imagine our world in such dedicated practice of community that doing so becomes routine.

Ritual can be ordered here: https://calebwheelercurtis.bandcamp.com/album/ritual

Ritual by Caleb Wheeler Curtis

Skúli Sverrisson with Bill Frisell - For All Your Flowers (Newvelle Records, 2026)

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

By Nick Ostrum

For All Your Flowers does not check the usual boxes for my reviews. It is not free jazz or avant garde. It does not really stretch the boundaries, or fuse unlike elements, or shattered the eardrums. Nor is it quiet, or phased, or whatever other attributes I often ascribe to experimental music. What is more, it is guaranteed to get due attention in a variety of other music publications and will likely come to listeners’ ears regardless of what I write. Still, For All Your Flowers presents a blend of crystalline beauty and pastoral expansivism that I find irresistible right now. It captures warm feelings of nostalgia that I have been pining for lately. And it is good music.

None of this should be shocking. Both Bill Frisell and Skúli Sverrisson have catalogs that run decades of years back and albums deep. They have earned their reputations, and I am not sure For All Your Flowers is as much a departure or venture into new pastures than a continuation of the styles and sounds Frisell and Sverrisson have already made their own. As points of comparison, one could include Frisell’s mid-1990s collaborations with Gary Peacock, which are generally more abstract, or the 2021 Sverrisson-Frisell duo Strata, which occupies similar sonic space, but is glitterier. In terms of feeling, however, Charlie Haden and Hank Jones’ 1994 Steal Away , a collection of masterfully performed and unadorned southern spirituals, comes to mind as a reference point. Differences, of course, abound. For one, the songs on For All Your Flowers are primarily penned by Sverrisson, rather than unknown American authors and communal groups of generations prior. The instrumentation is also different with the commonality of bass and the substitution of electric guitar for upright piano. (And Sverrisson and Haden are very different bassists.) However, For All Your Flowers hits me in the same visceral and mistily wistful way. The folky melodic simplicity, the spaces of controlled adornment, and the impressionistic imagery of the hinterland are all there, as is that sense of a time and place past, regardless of where or whether they actually existed. Owning that ambiguity is, of course, what the best art can do. It takes the listener away to a fantasy land to experience vicariously, through sound, image, or narrative, something new and apart from their own lifeworld. Sverrisson and Frisell achieve that, not through uncompromising innovation or eccentric displays of virtuosity, but a shared sense of melody, vision of space. and untouchable precision.

For All Your Flowers is available via Newvelle Records as part of the Newvelle Ten collection.

Mats Gustafsson / Kimmo Phjonen - Two Balls Are Enough (Trost, 2026)

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

By Sammy Stein

Some musicians seem destined to play together at some point. Not always at the beginning of their careers, but as their music develops, it feels as if their paths are compelled to cross. Gustafsson and Pohjonen have been in the other’s orbit for some time, but it took a suggestion from Bogdan Benigar that the duo perform together at the 2024 Ljubljana Music Festival to provide the impetus and foundation of a pairing that has since enlivened stages at events such as the Tampere Jazz Happening in 2024, where their energised performance impressed audiences.

Finnish accordionist Kimmo Pohjonen plays the accordion in ways you would not imagine. He creates music that changes how the instrument is viewed. With roots in regional folk and classical music, Pohjonen is also influenced by rock and punk. He has written string music for the acclaimed Kronos Quartet and played in the art-rock band KTU alongside King Crimson percussionist Pat Mastelotto and Trey Gunn.

Pohjonen uses accordions with additions to create enhanced effects, and his delivery has revolutionised accordion music and visual performances. He has, in effect, created a genre of his own, with the accordion at its heart. For the last thirty years, he has toured the world, taking part in events, festivals, and playing in different venues. His solo 5-row accordion project featured extreme and original compositions with effects and performances with lights and sounds. His custom-made accordion, along with his imaginative playing, has given him a renown as one of music’s most intriguing characters. He has released several albums and toured extensively in Europe, Asia, and America.

Swedish musician Mats Gustafsson needs little introduction to improvised music appreciators and is also known for his experimental music, his diversions into punk, rock, classical, and his dynamic performances. He has composed for orchestras, created solo recordings, and toured extensively, as well as being a writer for jazz magazines.

Both musicians have strong stage presence and dynamic personalities, yet each is capable of pulling back to leave space. Their strong personalities could see them clash, but they also have the altruism and connection to others that true musicians possess, so as a duo, they create music both individual to each musician and that stands as duo work. Their similarities and differences combine to create a connection where they are pushed to excel beyond their normal range. It is clear from this recording that ‘Two Balls Are Enough’ brings together kindred spirits, each of whom contributes equally.

Gustafsson told me, “The duo was initiated by Bogdan Benigar, a mutual friend of Pohjonen and me. I have admired Kimmo for years. He may be slightly from another side of the improvised music spectrum, but the energy he is playing with is very appealing. He has amazing levels of energy, and the vibe and feel of the music is one hundred percent 100 % DIY.

We are both the same age, and both spring from punk rock in our teens. Our stupid interest in ice hockey and saunas unites us even more. This is just the beginning. The way Kimmo is using samplers and electronics with his accordion is heaven-sent.”

Both appreciate the capabilities of their instruments but embrace technology and effects that enhance and work with the sonic measurements of their instruments. Since that inspired curation in 2024, they have been blending their sound worlds, and ‘Two Balls are Enough’ is their first album out on Trost Records.

The opener, ‘Ice Heaven’ is a fierce, sparking, energy-laden piece, with intricate, heavy rhythmic patterns, backed by harmonics between the two musicians that bind and create a wholeness to the divergent patterns. Gustafsson unleashes a stentorian solo, while Pohjonen maintains harmonies and high-energy, powerful lines behind. The unified lines are loud, forceful, and incredibly effective in contrast.

‘Magna’ combines chords from the accordion with electronics and screaming effects across a pounding, intense litany of rhythms. A piece of three sections, divided by total silences, this is an intriguing listen. And wholly irreverent.

‘Snow.Linat’ is gentle, with Gustafsson’s flute floating, whispering over the constantly shifting soundscape foundation. Some sections feel powerful and intense, with the flute slashing through, contrasting with emotive, delicate sections, where the accordion’s voice sings, adorned with breathy vocal tones. The sudden shift to a powerful, pithy solo from the sax is gorgeous, and the intensity becomes palpable.

The title track is a messy, joyful, eclectic mix of pops, whistles, accordion chords, and electronic effects, into which Gustafsson’s flute weaves and dives. The track sums up the essence of the album, distilled into just over two minutes of chaotic mayhem, while ‘Its Body Falls Open’ is a tinkling, high-pitched maelstrom of swirling sounds and effects, topped by Gustafsson’s eccentric sax playing and jittering accordion, with ‘Worn Out Words’ providing more of the same.

‘Slow Down The Beating’ is a track that creates deep impact. It has gentleness, with the flute introducing a melodic section before a percussive deluge of changing patterns. This is backed by intricate beats and rhythms, and a development into a raw, pared-back piece with some beautiful rhythmic clashes and dynamic changes over a steady background beat.

‘Naga’ is an exemplar of interaction between two minds with chaotic intent, yet a definitive directive, the result of which is a confident exchange of ideas, manifestations and rhythms that rise and fall, creating an engaging listen. The musical foundations shape-shift, creating powerful imagery and an aural dynamism that evokes spirit. The tautness of the atmosphere is tempered with melodic lines from Gustafsson, as well as his fulgurating, strident phrasing.

“Backengrillen 1” (maybe named after the punk band Gustafsson plays in) creates epic grandeur yet is surprisingly intimate and filled with rustic beauty. The repeated melody on the sax intensifies and provides a gentler interlude before Gustafsson varies the phrasing, and all the while the rapid accordion runs provide a tight but moving backdrop.

Gustafsson and Pohjonen have been touring regularly over the last couple of years, and the release of ‘Two Balls are Enough’ demonstrates the powerful connection these two musicians have.

I commented to Gustafsson that the accordion was not an instrument I really liked – until I heard this. His response was, “Same here - it was never my favourite instrument, but after working with Kimmo, and also some insane Norwegian players: Kalle Moberg, and Ida Lövli (fantastic!) and Frode Hatli - I had to change my mind. It is a funny instrument!. I never thought I would work seriously with anyone playing it, but ha!”

(Moberg has recorded with Nilssen Love, Hakion thelin and many more, Lovli recorded her debut album Skumring (Twilight) on Lawo Classics, and Hatli is a composer who has released several albums and is part of multicultural projects worldwide).

Recordings like this unite different genres and also expand the possibilities of instruments, and maybe, just maybe, change how we hear and feel music.

To quote Gustafsson – “This is just the beginning.”

Two Balls Are Enough by Mats Gustafsson / Kimmo Pohjonen

Mats Gustafsson / Kimmo Phjonen - Two Balls Are Enough (Trost, 2026)

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

By Eyal Hareuveni

The work of Finnish hyper-accordionist Kimmo Pohjonen has never been reviewed on this site. He comes from Finnish folk music but has revolutionized how it sounds, is played, and looks. Pedals and effects augment his accordion, and his own wordless vocals, and it sounds like a mini-orchestra. Pohjonen looks like a modern-day pagan shaman who moves with ecstatic dances and feels at home whether he plays with Kronos Quartet, French jazz drummer Eric Echampard or in the art-rock band KTU (alongside King Crimson alums drummer Pat Mastelotto and Touch guitarist Trey Gunn).

Swedish reed and electronics player Mats Gustafsson, like Pohjonen, is an adventurous, inimitable iconoclast who enjoys turning genres inside out like others do their pockets. He comes from punk rock and free jazz, but just look at his new collaborative projects from last year - the surf rock meets free jazz, The MagNuts (with guitarist Hedvig Mollestad), death metal meets free jazz, Backgrillen, and the free-improv flute duo, Flöjter, with French Delphine Joussein (of Nout trio), that already produced two live albums.

The musical union of Pohjonen and Swedish reed and electronics player Mats Gustafsson was envisioned by Bogdan Benigar, the director of Druga Godba festival in Ljubljana in Slovenia, who invited both of them to the 2024 edition of the festival, without letting them know that this was his plan. Gustafsson and Pohjonen bonded instantly. They share a love for ice hockey and saunas, and are motivated by a great passion - for spontaneous, risk-taking improvisations, creating a community, and cultivating individual and collective consciousness (as Gustafsson says: fighting against local and global stupidities). Throughout their live performances, they sounded like a powerful, raw, and intense sonic entity, Kimmats, and often Gustafsson’s saxes are channelled through Pohjonen’s effects.

Two Balls are Enough is the debut album of Pohjonen and Gustafsson, and it was recorded in a two-day session in Vienna in February 2026 by Martin Siewart (of Radian), with Pohjonen and Gustafsson responsible for the mix. Gustafsson brought to the recording session slide, tenor, baritone and bass saxes, Ab clarinet, flute and slide flute, live electronics, harmonica and organ, while Pohjonen played his electro-acoustic accordion and sang.

Each of the nine pieces sends you into unpredictable, uncompromising, deeply visceral, and wonderful hyperactive territories. Club dance pulse on steroids collides with ecstatic free jazz sax blows. Noisy electronics join a cathartic pagan dance, with Pohjonen’s organ-like chords ascending from hell to dance with Gustafsson’s garrulous baritone sax patterns. A poetic cinematic vision of a snowy Arctic storm. Experimenting with feedback-filled, mutated timbres. A touching, singable folk song. Three pieces were inspired by French poet Danielle Collobert. The last piece, “Backgrillen”, sketches a completely different texture from Gustafsson’s death jazz band, and offers a surprisingly intimate, touching melody filled with rustic beauty. It sounds like these Nordic wolves found a new pack of like-minded partner who enjoy creating a genre of their own.

Two Balls Are Enough by Mats Gustafsson / Kimmo Pohjonen

Miroslav Vitous, Michel Portal, Jack Dejohnette - Mountain Call (ECM, 2026)

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

By Ferruccio Martinotti

To understand why we're here—we writers, you readers, both listeners to this kind of music—requires skills that we, with a law degree, can't offer. Instead, we’d need to turn, depending on which School of Thought we’re referring to, to Freud or Lacan. What we could try to do is to share what drives us to buy certain records rather than others, excluding the dyschaolic compulsiveness that isn't ours. In short, we could say:

1) claiming to be completists of some musicians (try that with Mats Gustafsson and then tell us...);

2) a recommendation from a source (magazine, blog, fanzine, radio etc.) we trust;

3) the advice (damn, they're NEVER wrong...) from the FJC editors;

4) taking a leap into the void with an artist completely unknown to us, just to push away our personal horizon or, vice versa,

5) the need to breathe a little bit in our comfort zone, let’s say, with a reissue of Mingus or Taylor.

There's reason number 6) for this review: to pay homage to an artist we love, in this case the Frenchman Michel Portal, who passed away at 90 last February.

While Weather Report was never our cup of tea, we're not so obtuse as to fail to recognize the greatness of Miroslav Vitous, whose bio, from Chick Corea to Miles, is completely pointless to summarize, just as it is for Jack DeJohnette, honored on these pages on the occasion of his passing, in a way only this blog can do. We will always remember Portal as the author of that 1969 Our Meanings and Our Feelings, which represents to us one of the "6 Star Records" to be sent into hyperspace to make aware anyone who should find it of what free music means. His extraordinary artistic career has been enriched by collaborations with the likes of Boulez, Berio, and Stockhausen, which have defined his profile as a forward-looking musician, always respectful of History and Tradition. In our more than humble opinion, he remains a resoundingly underrated musician, so much so that, if memory serves, even our forum archives have no trace of him. Now you know.

Ten years after his last album with ECM, as the label's liner notes tell us, Vitous creates with Mountain Call, a sort of musical self-portrait that demonstrates his immense talent as an improviser, composer and sampling pioneer. The album strikes a balance between spontaneous improvisation and sequences in which the recording studio's technology is put at the musicians' service, like a canvas on which to paint brand new soundscapes. Miroslav and Jack have not forgotten that they were one of the most thermonuclear rhythm sections ever and the rust of time has not affected their sublime class: “Tribal Dance”, “Epilog” and “Evolution” are there to demonstrate it incontrovertibly. The latter features Bob Mintzer's bass clarinet (Tito Puente, Buddy Rich, Art Blakey, Thad Jones, Jaco Pastorius, and Billy Cobham among his collaborations), while in the five-part suite "Rhapsody" we can hear Esperanza Spalding's vocals, making her ECM debut. The extraordinary bassist/vocalist joins Vitous, Gary Campbell's sax (on record with Randy Brecker, John Abercrombie, Dan Wall, Adam Nussbaum, among others), and Gerald Cleaver's drums (Sylvie Courvoisier, Charles Gayle, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, William Parker, Craig Taborn) on "Fun and Games," where "call and response" dynamics are inserted within the textures created by Vitous. The keystone, however, lies in the opening and closing of the album, which see Vitous and Portal perform astonishing duo sequences, probably the freest moments of the Czech bassist's artistic journey, since his collaboration with Jan Garbarek on "Atmos." Sheer beauty and irrepressible bliss, period.

Anyway, forget the trivial and negligible considerations that drew us to this album and, whatever yours, if any, definitely give it a listen: this is a really relevant work that delivers much more than it promises.

SoundScapes Series: Buck, Duthoit, Sjöström & Kääriäinen

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

This week's video comes from the SoundScapes Series organized by Finnish saxophonist Harri Sjöström in Berlin. Surrounded by ever changing exhibitions of contemporary at the Wolf & Galentz Art Gallery in Berlin, Sjöström performs with his own ever changing arrangements of top-flight improvisers for his quarterly Soundscapes Series.

Here in an appearance in May is Jukka Kääriäinen (guitar), Harri Sjöström (soprano saxophone), Tony Buck (percussion) and Isabelle Duthoit (voice & clarinet).

Learn more about SoundScapes: https://soundscapesberlin.de/, and more about Wolf & Galenz: https://wolf-galentz.de/.

A new trove from Udo Schindler and company… (Part II)

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

By Nick Ostrum

German multi-instrumentalist Udo Schindler has been recording and releasing music relentlessly over the last few years. The reviews below offer a glimpse of just some of his production over the first half of this year.

See part 1 here.

Udo Schindler and Andreas Willers – Analytical Pre-Summer Retreat (FMR, 2026)

Analytical Pre-Summer Retreat captures Schindler (tenor sax, e-flat clarinet, piccolo flute, and cornet) with Berlin improvisor Andreas Willers (guitar and devices) at a live date at Studio+Atelier SCHINDLER in Krailing/Munich in 2025. The two had previously collaborated on 2022’s STORM without WIND and a 2023 trio session with Eric Zwang Eriksson titled Cassiber Complex_Unconditioned Sounds In A Box. As with the other, this one shows range, but a different range than the more restrictively acoustic outings reviewed above. Here one hears how electric Schindler’s trills and flutters can sound, and Willers, with over forty years of electro-acoustic collaboration under his belt, is the person to bring that out. He veers from shreds and electronic chaos to simple repeating clusters and other rummaging to prickly vines with a Scandinavian free rock sensibility a la Tellef Øgrim, Gunnar Backmann, and their ilk. A gritty and textured set that is as much about Schindler’s arsenal (including some nice trumpet work) as it is about Willers’ clattery fretwork.

Analytical Pre-Summer Retreat is available via the arc-musik website: https://arch-musik.de/project/analytical-pre-summer-retreat/ .

Udo Schindler, Harald Kimmig, Eric Zwang Eriksson – Imprints of Experiences (Creative Sources, 2026)

With a total of three members, Imprints of Experiences captures the largest unit of the releases reviewed here, and its sound is correspondingly (and comparatively) full. Schindler deploys a range of instruments, some heard before (clarinets, cornet, saxophone) and one (b-flat tubax) unique to this recording. Harald Kimmig meanwhile contributes an energetic violin and Eric Zwang Eriksson, an array of prattling percussion. Playing live over two nights in Munich in 2024, the trio offers quite a range of sounds. Schindler does his thing, screeching, torquing, huffing, and, now, even singing through an array of horns. Kimmig and Eriksson, however, really distinguish this release. Eriksson and Schindler have collaborated frequently over the last half-decade, and the resulting concordance shows especially in the quieter segments, when Eriksson matches Schindler’s clucks and clicks with a concerted pitter patter of his own. Kimmig, who has a shorter history with Schindler, can also tap raindrops and rustling foliage, but shows he can also drive the trio out of these moments through his sharp and shimmering tremolo, at which points Schindler starts to stretch out into more frenzied spaces. This may be less rambunctious than some other releases, but it is no less probing, and even more entrancing. And some of that pull should be attributed specially to Eriksson and his controlled but curious rummaging. It lays a calm but spumy sediment that gives bubbly rise to the harmonics that fill out the wider sound.

Imprints of Experiences is available on CD and as a download on bandcamp.
Imprints of Experiences by Udo Schindler, Harald Kimmig & Eric Zwang Eriksson

PS: I had originally intended to review Schindler’s 2026 releases up through June, however quickly I realized that was a fool’s errand. For those interested, this year he also released albums with Andrea Centazzo and Harnik on Itcus, Nicola Hein and Nikolaus Neuser on Creative Sources, and Flo Stoffner and Michael Wintsch on arc-musik. By the time this review runs, there will likely be others, as well. Happy listening.

A new trove from Udo Schindler and company… (Part I)

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

By Nick Ostrum

Udo Schindler and Elisabeth Harnik – Poetry of Friction (arch-musik, 2026)

To his immense credit, architect of buildings (by day) and sounds (by night) Udo Schindler is tireless and itinerant. He has some of core collaborators – see Harald Kimmig and Eric Zwang Eriksson on Imprints of Experiences below – but, more often, he pushes his music forward by performing with new musicians. Presumably, this forces him and his collaborators to adapt to each other on the spot, and in the process explore unanticipated sonic territories.

Poetry of Friction captures Schindler on tenor sax, clarinet, and cornet in a duo with Elisabeth Harnik on Bechstein piano (in and out) at a May 2025 performance at Musik- & Pianohaus Schwinghammer in Weilheim in Oberbayern, Germany. The affair is largely muted. Both Harnik and Schindler have been studying extended techniques and uncustomary articulations for years, and as should be of no surprise given the title, they continue to do so here, focusing on frictions, burbles, and heavy vibrations rather than anything crisp or ostensibly melodic. If one were to consider this a duel, Schindler has found his match in Harnik, who just as adeptly swings from idiomatic to non-idiomatic techniques. Some passages are blustery and beautiful. Some are hardly audible, roughly textured flutters and other understated soundscaping. Whichever way the duo veers, however, Schindler and Harnik stay linked and measured, wandering wide spaces but most often in tandem, which finds an unexpected potential in the soulful and dramatic climax and release of its final minutes.

Poetry of Friction is available as a download on Bandcamp.
Poetry of Friction by Udo Schindler & Elisabeth Harnik

Udo Schindler and Sergio Armaroli – Transalpine Sound Bridges (Munich-Milan) (Fundacja Słuchaj, 2026)

Transalpine Sound Bridges is the oddball of the group. Whereas the other releases were recorded live in studio or in front of an audience, this album came out of a canceled duo gig. As no in person collaboration had (or has yet) taken place, Sergio Armaroli responded by recording a series of vibraphone and percussion solos for Schindler (soprano sax, clarinets, flute, cornet) to improvise over. The result is a music that wafts through space. As the other releases here attest, Schindler can honk, contort, and scream with the best of them. Here, likely inspired by Armaroli’s dreamy runs on the vibraphone, Schindler also shows that he can lean into minimalist, calmer motifs. One hears his expert control, but in restraint rather than this John Butcher-like acrobatics. This album reflects on some remote Alpine mountain range rather than conquering the Großglockner’s peak. In a sense, this is impressionist more than expressionist, which is notable given the improvisations have taken place remotely. It grapples with that tension in the colorful patchworks of yielding and unyielding pastures, unsteady breezes, a panorama of beautiful flowers juxtaposed to barren crags, peace with a soft undertone or playful danger. Consider Transalpine Sound Bridges yet another side of Schindler that ranges from the bucolic and airy to the positively bluesy, coaxed in those directions by Armaroli’s knottily vining solo chasses and the vagaries of circumstance.

Available as a double CD and download from bandcamp.
Transalpine Sound Bridges [Munich-Milano] 2CD by Udo Schindler & Sergio Armaroli

Udo Schindler and Uwe Oberg – Schädel-Magie (FMR, 2026)

The title, Schädel-Magie, is German for skull magic, which sounds quite macabre. But maybe we should think of it in terms of sounds bouncing around the inner caverns of the head, in the eardrums and the auditory cortex and amygdala, rather than something more sinister. The skull in this analogy is self-evident, and the magic lay in the music produced, received, and processed. (A quick internet search tells me sound processing is an extremely complicated and weird, and in that sense quasi-magical, process, as much higher brain functioning is.) The album, Schädel-Magie, features Schindler on various clarinets and alto flute, and Uwe Oberg on piano (like Harnik, in and out) and captures the duo in studio in 2024. The track titles are untranslatable (or nonsensical?) compound nouns invented by the late German poet Thomas Kling.

If the words themselves do not quite carry over into English (what the hell is a body-branch or night machine?) the collectivity of the sounds are universal and perform a universal linguo-emotive magic of their own. Schädel-Magie begins as a wild and winding romp but quickly dissipates into extended passages of piano and saxophone constructivism. From there, Schindler and Oberg shift into a series of noirish pieces that explore a range of techniques and dynamics, though always drawn to some dark, mysterious corner. Or a winding staircase at the darkest part of night, wherein nothing nefarious has to happen but various anxious potentialities nevertheless reside in its shadows. As much as anything else, Schädel-Magie distinguishes itself from the other albums reviewed here in its mood – even in its tender moments one senses something cryptic, if not also haunting – and its barbed-wire spiraling.

Schädel-Magie is available via the arc-musik website: https://arch-musik.de/project/schaedel-magie/.

Eyal Maoz, Piero Bittolo Bon, Zeno De Rossi - Forced to Feel (self released, 2026)

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

By Guido Montegrandi

Improvised free music recording develops around some recurring patterns: the single event in which musicians group, play and then disperse – the recording freezes a moment in time; the long term association – each recording a moment in a sequence sometimes with the risk of developing idioms, of creating a comfort zone at the expense of creative freedom; or a core of frequent collaborators meet a guest / guests - in this case the embryo of an idiom is here but it is tested and mutated by the newcomers.

Forced to Feel offers still another possibility being recorded after the group has “already tested its chemistry on stage (…) at a moment of deepened trust and heightened risk, refining a shared language forged in performance and now pushed further in the studio” (linear notes). What I understand is that they are on their way to create an idiom but are still willing to experiment and take risks… their language is still a virus.

Eyal Maoz (electric guitar), Piero Bittolo Bon (alto and baritone sax, shakuhachi, electronics), and Zeno De Rossi (drums, bells) all come to this meeting from different directions with Bittolo Bon and De Rossi having played together many times in many different contexts, and the results are intense.

A meaningful use of electronics, a sort of underground groove that flows into this sonic universe, splinters of melody scattered into the noise. In the opening piece, Renato’s 'Arcade,' a set of electronic sounds coming directly from a 1980s arcade creates a foundation on which De Rossi builds his texture and Maoz and Bittolo Bon display their fragments of melodies.

Music then evolves into a more pensive mood in 'Invoking the Ancestors' - the guitar provides a net of arpeggios and fragmented melodies while percussions, bells and electronics create a field for the alto sax to play a eerie song that dissolves into itself.

In 'Nervous Butterflies' a quasi unison of electronics, sax and guitar open the piece developing a swarm of circular motives that evolve one into the other with the addition of the percussion. Something like a jazz-rock guitar emerges over a riff just to develop into angular sounds that seem nostalgic of other times. The drum than brings the sax into a jazzy atmosphere that seems to freeze into the end.

'Moon Hovering' builds on an obsessive percussive patterns and offers the possibility to mark the essential contribution that De Rossi offers to the trio creating a unifying but open and volatile design that enriches sense of global improvisation. The same may be true for 'Part Hypnosis' where the three musicians seem to find a place of their own.

The baritone sax develops an obsessive melody in 'Flickering Wings,' this slowly changes into a deconstructed blues, sometimes some electronic noise adds an ironic note to prepare the finale with De Rossi again in evidence.

'Pull Me into the Blue Water' contains all of the elements presented so far with the addition of the shakuhachi flute that adds rarefaction to the mix. The guitar reacts with dreamy sonorities, the drum marks its path with a sense of necessity.

That’s it. After many listening sessions, I feel that all of the fragments, the different sounds, the different attitudes gather into sonic nebulas each with its distinctive features but with an overall inner coherence. Undetermined and yet beautiful.

You can listen to and download the digital album on bandcamp.

forced to feel by Eyal Maoz, Piero Bittolo Bon & Zeno de Rossi

Paradoxical Frog: Kris Davis, Ingrid Laubrock, and Tyshawn Sorey: Live at the Village Vanguard – July 21, 2026

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

By Brian Earley

My daughter and I walked up Seventh Avenue on a balmy, post-thunderstorm July night to one of the most well-known, and most sacred, of all jazz venues on the planet, the storied Village Vanguard, to catch the opening night of a week-long residence by the trio Paradoxical Frog.

Readers of the Free Jazz Blog might care to know this was a historical occasion and one that involved the reuniting of three musicians often discussed here at the FJC: pianist Kris Davis, saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey.

Behind the famous red doors that evening would perform an avant-garde trio that had not played together in over a decade. And the band’s unconventional leanings are perhaps less alien to the Vanguard than one might first guess. Davis and Sorey have performed at the Vanguard countless times, and Laubrock’s appearance is as rare and welcome as the recent celebrated stint of the James Brandon Lewis Quartet in the West Village club. This is to say nothing of the audience in the house that night: I spotted Sylvie Courvoisier a few seats behind me, and encountered William Parker outside the doors after the first set had concluded. Davis actually opened the show fact-checking the record. “I was corrected on social media,” she said. “It has not been fifteen years since the three of us played together; it has been eleven.” In any case, for listeners to either of the group’s two Cleanfeed recordings, 2010’s Paradoxical Frog, and 2012’s Union, it had been a long wait to hear these three masters perform in this distinct context.

The opening night’s set consisted of four long compositions, all of which have appeared on record at some point. The first performance, a combination of Laubrock’s “Masterisk” and Davis’s “Union” spanned over twenty-nine minutes. Seeing the work live allowed me to confirm just how through-composed these Paradoxical Frog pieces are. Note the extensive paper scores in Davis’s and Sorey’s hands and the extensions on Laubrock’s music stand: a necessary tool to display the lengthy writings of each work without requiring the saxophonist to flip pages of these surprising compositions that challenge functional harmony and defy circular rhythm.

The third work was “Whistlings” from 2020’s Blood Moon, the Intakt Records duo of Davis and Laubrock. The live performance, over twice the length of the original recording, featured Laubrock on soprano saxophone and Tyshawn Sorey on a sonic array of material, at times the room so quiet that Sorey’s percussion would consist of simply waving his brushes in the air, an effect that hauntingly filled the room with audible whisperings.

The set concluded with Sorey’s “Slow Burn,” clocking in at over sixteen minutes and featuring the mysterious repetition of single notes on Davis’s piano keys. It was moving to see these three unite again, and I am certain I do not speak alone in voicing my hopes for more work in the future, maybe even a Live at the Village Vanguard recording to place among some of the mythical voices who have passed through that hallowed underground room.

Fermín Suárez, Shantala Ferreyra, Gonzalo Goicoechea - Las Instancias (625 Discs, 2026)

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

By Sammy Stein

Las Instancias comprises Shantala Ferreyra on clarinet, Fermín Suárez on double bass, and Gonzalo Goicoechea on drums. Ferreyra is an Argentinian clarinettist and composer who graduated from the Jazz Performance Program at the Manuel de Falla Conservatory in 2024. In 2025, she released her debut album featuring her original compositions performed by her quintet, and in 2026, she was awarded a scholarship to study composition in Basel, Switzerland. Her work combines composition and improvisation.

Suárez is a double bass player, improviser, songwriter, and composer from Rosario, Argentina. His artistic work encompasses a wide range of genres, including jazz, tango, Argentine folk, improvised music, and classical, often mixing, stretching, and breaking the limits between languages and traditions. He co-created the punk-tango and avant-garde ensemble ‘La Rompiente’ for which he composes and arranges. In 2026, he started the solo project ‘Ola de sótano’, a double bass and vocals set with electronics, featuring songs, improvisations and spoken word. He’s also a frequent collaborator of composer and pianist Rocío Giménez López.

Goicoechea is a drummer and educator specializing in jazz. He began his studies at the Leopoldo Marechal School of Arts and later continued at the Manuel de Falla Conservatory. Since 2021, he has performed with a variety of jazz-oriented ensembles.

After a year devoted to live performance and composition, Las Instancias is released by the Argentine label 625 Discos, and captures the result of their ongoing collaboration so far.

With no harmonic instrument, the trio leans into timbre, register, and the register distances between clarinet, bass, and drums. The pared-back format serves as the foundation upon which the group builds its identity and scribes its musical language.

The ensemble work their way through various compositions (mostly written by Ferreyra and Suárez) that constantly flirt with the edges of jazz and improvised music, exploring their aesthetic possibilities and different orchestration combinations.

Recorded during a session in Rosario, the album seeks to become a living reflection of a live performance, with all its nuances and dynamism. There are fierce solos rooted in jazz language contrasted with moments of introspection expressed through a more abstract idiom, all while maintaining a strong sense of tension and attention. There is a sense of a group whose members perform in proximity, without separation or post-production tricks. The recording is an intimate encounter between both the musicians and the listener. The absence of a harmonic instrument becomes a presence: a framework that pushes them toward inventive orchestration, elastic structures, and an exploration of musical language.

This album contains some standout solos and ensemble work. There is a subliminal quality to this trio that makes the music fun, as well as profoundly interesting to listen to. Don’t be fooled by the opening bars of the first track. ‘Lampara Nueva’ starts like a traditional jazz piece, but develops into something extraordinary, the dialogue flowing between the clarinet, bass and percussion like water, flowing back and forth, with a swing here, a change there, and something just for the heck of it anywhere you might care to drop in. There is a taste of traditional jazz, particularly in the drum solos that emerge from the ensemble work, particularly in the second half of the number, but there is also much free playing.

‘Mucho Agora Mismo’ starts with a gentle bass solo and works itself into a frenzy, the clarinet delivering fiery solos across the percussion, with many variations in between. This is a track of many parts, blended seamlessly together. Just beautiful.

‘Dos Veces Agosto’ is a track of harmonies, rhythms, and counter-rhythms, with some bass solos, clarinet that works around the theme, and explores many musical avenues, while maintaining a connection with the central theme. ‘En Meyo’ is a clarinet solo track, with Ferreyra meditating on a theme, while ‘Ok/Off’ is a track where all three instruments lock into the same rhythmic pattern, creating a hypnotic dynamic. A bowed bass emerges, warm and resonant, before the trio returns to their lively, idea‑trading interplay.

‘Pegao’ is introduced by a bowed bass solo, over which the clarinet drops, adding light touches and a rapid change of texture, which the drums enhance, adding their own feel and colour. It is worth listening to this for the changes and rhythmic patterns that evolve, disappear, and re-emerge, led largely by the bass, whose voice is central to this number.

The album closes with a second take of 'Mucho agora mismo' which is extravagant and allows each musician to deliver improvised music of the highest calibre.

Las Instancias are three musicians whose shared curiosity has shaped a sound that feels both stripped back and richly alive. There’s a cohesion that makes the music both fun and deeply absorbing. You hear three musicians who trust each other enough to take risks — to push, to pull, to leave space, to fill it, to let the music breathe and then ignite. It’s intimate, inventive, and full of personality.

Las instancias by Las instancias

Get it on vinyl here: https://elasticstage.com/625discos/releases/las-instancias-album