Olaf Rupp - Earth And More (scatterARCHIVE, 2024)

By Martin Schray

Nostalgia is a powerful feeling. Who doesn’t want to return to their youth or doesn’t like to think about what they have achieved back in the days. Also in music, there are bands that still exist but haven’t produced anything new for years. However, they keep on touring satisfying the audience’s desire to bring back days long gone. On the one hand, that’s absolutely okay, but on the other hand such concepts represent artistic stagnation. Of course, this idea of music hardly works in improv and especially the German guitarist Olaf Rupp certainly can’t be accused of suffering from nostalgia. "I don’t like to look back. Mostly I prefer to dream about the future," he says in the liner notes of his new album.

Nevertheless, he has now released an almost two-hour long album with music from the turn of the century. But in order to understand Earth and More one has to go back in history. At the time when the music published here was created, Rupp’s band STOL (with Stephan Mathieu on drums and Rudi Mahall on bass clarinet) had just disbanded and he began to focus more on freely improvised music. However, in order to see in which direction he wanted to go, he recorded and produced complete albums every month, sometimes pieces with the acoustic guitar, the electric guitar or electronics. Some were released, the rest became demo cdRs that were distributed all over the world. Some made it to Liam Stefani in Glasgow. The head of the Scatter label has kept them to this day. He was the one who initiated the idea to publish some of them and Rupp actually thought about his earlier music, listened to old tapes and “found a way to overcome [his] nostalgia phobia”.

On Earth And More we listen to a musician who is strongly fixated on electronics and for whom the guitar tends to take a back seat. Pieces like “Lorraine Rain“ or the title track remind me of Aphex Twin (without the drum’n’bass background), Throbbing Gristle, Test Department or This Heat! “I did not have a computer at that time, so I recorded directly onto cassette tapes and audio cdRs“, Rupp explains. “The setup was a heavily abused Behringer mixer which I modified so that I could cascade and feedback several channels. Then I had a few guitar effects: a looper, a distortion pedal and a bass guitar synth-pedal.“ Another influence on this music is techno. Whether the tracks are more ambient-like (“Makyō“) or seem to be based on computer game sounds (“Mai Outtake“), Rupp seemed to enjoy the purity of rhythm and sound.

Another surprise is the fact that he sings on two of the tracks. On “Goodlook“, with his constantly looping chorus line, which becomes increasingly alienated as the song progresses, he sounds a bit like Robert Wyatt. On “Lonely Woman” he is reminiscent of an experimental Nick Drake, who seems to have John Martyn as a second guitarist and who extends his melancholy songs to infinity with ambient sounds.

Finally, the last two tracks - all in all 35 minutes long - are pure ambient music. “Upstate 1 and 2” were created as music for an exhibition by photo artist Gabriele Worgitzki. The music is functional and very spatial, with loops that work like a beat. Both tracks are wonderful, especially “Part 1” with its echoes of music of the spheres and the sparse guitar arpeggios even gives the piece a psychedelic touch. Bands like Autechre and Boards of Canada come to mind.

The result of this journey into his artistic self was Rupp’s turn to improvised music. Life Science, his first album on FMP, was released in the summer of 1999. Nevertheless, it would have been exciting to see in which direction the electronic musician Rupp would have developed.

Although it is unusual music for our blog, for me it’s one of this year’s most interesting releases so far.

Earth And More is available as a download. You can listen to it here:

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Raphael Rogiński - Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes (Unsound, 2015 / 2024)

By Martin Schray

Raphael Rogiński is not a guitarist like any other, and his playing style is particularly unusual for guitarists from the field of free jazz or improvised music. There are hardly any references to Sonny Sharrock, James “Blood” Ulmer or Derek Bailey and Masayuki Takayanagi. So it may seem all the more surprising that this album deals with the music of John Coltrane and the lyrics of the most famous representative of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes (the vocals on “Walkers With The Dawn“ and „Rivers“ are sung by Natalia Przybysz).

First of all, however, it must be said that Plays John Coltraneand Langston Hughes is not a new piece of work, but the expanded reissue of an album from 2015 that has not yet been released on vinyl and has long been out of print on CD. The fact that the Unsound label is now making the music available again cannot be appreciated enough, because Rogiński’s solo guitar approach to John Coltrane’s music is completely new and exciting. Although the album is full of Coltrane classics like “Blue Train”, “Naima” and “Lonnie's Lament”, you’d hardly recognize them, if you didn’t know that. Rogiński only leaves parts of the melody lines, if at all, the harmonic and rhythmic structures are virtually ignored and the tempo is sometimes radically throttled. It’s as if Coltrane had been deprived of jazz. This almost sounds like blasphemy, but what the Polish guitarist makes of it is simply spectacular. “Blue Train” and ‘Equinox’, for example, sound like Bill Frisell was jamming with Maleem Mahmoud Ghania, while the arpeggio-drunk “Mr. P.C.“ and “Seraphic Light“ are reminiscent of Spanish flamenco guitarists which are influenced by a harsh punk attitude. “Countdown” wouldn’t stand out on an album by Ryley Walker, so relaxed and shiny is the folk/country framework that Rogiński has put under the piece. Approaching Coltrane’s singular, spirited music with a perspective formed outside the jazz tradition, the music turned out to struck the guitarist as a revelation, the liner notes claim. “Suddenly these songs became full of glowing moving pictures, with a melancholy, but also with something like promise,” Rogiński says. Another characteristic of the atmosphere conveyed by this music is intimacy. A piece like “Spirituals”, in which something like a Coltrane melody line actually seems to be recognizable, is imbued with a great tenderness. One might actually believe to be sitting unrecognized in Rogiński’s living room while he plays this music just for himself.

The grail keepers of John Coltrane’s music may be horrified, but Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes is simply a wonderful piece of music, like fine wine it has only gotten better over the years. Anyone who has heard the guitarist’s music with Shofar or his project Yemen. Music Of The Yemenite Jews , with Perry Robinson, Wacław Zimpel and Michael Zerang, will love this music. Outstanding.

Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes is available as a double album on vinyl and as a download. You can listen to it and order it here:

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Guitar Week - Day 1

by Nick Ostrum 

Guillaume Gargaud and Eero Savela – Syyspimee (Ramble Records, 2023)

This one escaped me last year. However, it seems to have been released on Bandcamp just this year, so I will include it in this year’s guitar week.

Guillaume Gargaud is French guitarist, who, despite release with the late Burton Greene I covered a few years ago for FreeJazzBlog, has over 35 releases under his belt. Finnish trumpeter Eero Savela was previously unknown to me, though a quick internet search shows he has been quite active in live performances, especially in various forms of dance, theater and even circuses. This is their second duo release, the first being 2020’s Helsinki.

There is a real ease to this music. The title, Syyspimee, is Finnish for “the darkness of autumn,” but this is a calm darkness, a welcome extended twilight after an active summer. I hesitate to go much further along this somnolent line, however, as the music is not sleepy or enervated or boring. IT is just relaxed. Both musicians display a range of techniques, some conventional, some less so. However, the volleys of sound, the vining of guitar and trumpet runs, the skill and vision behind the deceptive veil of simplicity make this one stand out. Gargaud lays an almost classical progression on his acoustic guitar, Savela responds with a series of smokey spirals. Gargaud responds with another slowhand lick and Savela, with a jaunt that evokes a smokey Miles or Chet Baker. If this loose serenity is what this autumn holds, I happily bid summer adieu.

Syysipmeeis available as a CD and download on Bandcamp.

 

Eldritch Priest – Dormitive Virtue (Halocline Trance, 2024)

 

Eldritch Priest, composer and guitarist who released the infectious Omphaloskepsis two years ago is back with another solo effort. This one, Dormitive Virtue , focuses less on earworms, and leans much harder into layers of riffing and light feedback. There is a fine line between noodling and this type of performance, and that line seems to consist of intentionality and dedication to a motif and mood. Priest strides the right side of this divide.

Dormitive virtue refers to opium’s hypnogogic properties, which invite the blurring of sleep and hallucination. I am not sure how this would sound in an altered state, but it is certainly mesmerizing. Each of its eight tracks sucks the listener into its frequently liquid sound world. The guitar is measured and spacey, flickering like an ill-defined and distant star or blurred like a moon lightly covered by a gauze of cloud. The music sounds composed, if not on paper than at least in Priest’s head, but follows no regular pattern. And, as with Omphaloskepsis, there are sections that are so rich (think the more elevating moments of Kraftwerk) that they border on juicy pleasures.

Dormitive Virtueis available as a slick-looking vinyl and download from Bandcamp.

 

Eyal Maoz and Eugene Chadbourne – The Coincidence Masters (Infrequent Seams, 2024)

Here is another review of a guitar duo that does not disappoint. Eugene Chadbourne, of course is a freakabilly, radical country, free improv extraordinaire. Eyal Maoz might have less of a reputation, but that is no reflection of his wide musical interests (rock, reggae, Jewish/Eastern European folk traditions, reggae, free jazz [of course]) nor of his playing.

From the first notes of The Coincidence Masters,Chadbourne leans on the avant-garde of his unique syntax and Maoz holds his own. That sounds too combative, though. On any of these pieces Maoz and Chadbourne seem of like mind, playing a combination of straightforward picking and augmented chords and piercing shreds. Much of this is comparatively relaxed, a front porch jam just when the alien vessel arrives. O, maybe a dazed contemplation of the constellations, complete with heavy connotations of just how ethereal and strange that process can be. (For those to whom this means something, I cannot shake the thought that this might be, even subconsciously or mistakenly, a meditation on the Flatlanders’ The Stars in My Life, albeit without the groove and vocals, and chopped up, processed, digested, and distorted almostbeyond recognition.) Anyway, this one is a real standout in its skill and understated oddity. Rock on, Eyal and Chad, and watch out for those tractor beams.

The Coincidence Masteris available as a CD and download from Bandcamp. 

 

Elliot Sharp, Sally Gates, Tashi Dorji – Ere Guitar (Intakt, 2024)

To paraphrase Ash Williams when confronted with a triad of Necronomica in Army of Darkness, “Three guitars? Nobody said anything about three guitars? Like what am I supposed to follow one guitar, or all guitars, or what?”

The second installment of Elliot Sharp’s E(e)r(e) Guitar presents the listener with that conundrum. This time with Sally Gates and Tashi Dorji, the answer is, well, opaque. Ere Guitaris a cauldron of electric whirling, twirling and more general electro-rummage cacophony. One almost immediately loses track of which guitarist is playing which line, as everything mixes in the same stew. Flecks and shards of atmospherics bleed in and out of the background, as one guitarist, then another steps in to shred, or lay out a fusillade of clicks and plinks. Some parts, such as the beginning of Survey the Damage – incidentally the longest cut on the album – adopt a darker mood, laying drones on feedback. Then, however, the shocks of sound emerge, jetting back and forth and tearing into the gloomy tonal canvas. Then, the striated shocks open to finer moments of precision etching and, more often, blunter ones of gouges and scrapes, and the clunky repeating click of an engine. I am not sure what Ash would have made of this, especially way back in 1992, when the film came out, or the generic medieval setting in which it took place. That said, this would have been a fitting soundtrack at least to his journey through the time portal from one to the other. Just awesome.

Ere Guitar is available as a CD or download from Bandcamp. 

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Philippe Deschepper & Noël Akchoté- MMXXIV AD (Ayler 2024)

By Nick Ostrum

This one is it. The final release from an Ayler Records going on indefinite hiatus, which is never a good sign. It is fitting that this one, titled in Roman numerals MMXXIV, involves guitarists Noël Akchoté, who has been featured on Ayler Records various times, and Philippe Deschepper, who is new to me and the label’s catalog.

In true Akchoté fashion, many of the compositions are from other artists – three from Paul Motian, one each from Steve Swallow and Ornette Coleman, one from fellow French double-bassist Henri Texier. However, likewise in true Akchoté fashion, he and Deschepper make them their own. It took some effort, for instance, for me to connect the version of Sex Spy captured here with the Prime Time version. In this one, there is not hint of funk and, beyond a loose melody, only gestures toward the original. She Was Young, the Swallow composition, is more identifiable, but, again, without more meandering, especially when as the melody volleys between two guitars. Indeed, these as well as Motian pieces, sound like fragmented and reconstituted versions of the original. Something of the core is there, but this is more homage in difference than in feeling or faithfulness.

It is more difficult for me to weigh in on the fractures and reconstitution that went into the Deschepper and Akchoté compositions. However, to these ears, the stylistic commonality reaches back to Akchoté’s masterful 2021 release Loving Highsmith, which likewise featured Akchoté with complimentary guitarists, though there they were the great Mary Halvorson and Bill Frisell. Deschepper is different but no less masterful. He is tender, maybe even more in tune with Akchoté’s style, though the liner notes assure that this was their first collaboration and, moreover, there is no reason beyond my own subjective knowledge to consider this any more of a product of Akchoté’s vision than Deschepper’s. Frequently enough, it is difficult to distinguish the lines of one from the other, and, once one does, the musicians switch roles, as the repetitious rhythmic lines in one ear shift to freer exploration just as the sounds in the other ear settle into mode or concept. The unifying elements seem to be flurries of earworms and raw stepped waltzes, wherein one can hear the pluck, but rarely a muzzled and mistaken note. Tracks like Sad Novi Sad (a play on the Serbian city ) use more effects and step toward Doors-styled trippiness. Through it all, the guitars intertwine, gnarly. Descepper follows a tendril here. Akchoté traces another one there until it begins to bud. Then, they return to the stem.

Truly transfixing, and a truly fitting album on which Ayler Records can pause and contemplate its future. If this really is it for the label, it is at least an appropriately high note on which to end.

MMXXIV is available as a CD and download from Bandcamp: 

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Darius Jones - Sunday Interview

Photo by Niclas Weber

1. What is your greatest joy in improvised music?
   
   The unknown
   
   
2. What quality do you most admire in the musicians you perform with?
   
   The ability to listen deeply and be fearlessly themselves.
   
   
3. Which historical musician/composer do you admire the most?
   
   Sun Ra
   
   
4. If you could resurrect a musician to perform with, who would it be?
   
   Ed Blackwell
   
   
5. What would you still like to achieve musically in your life?
   
   I have so much to still achieve but I would love to have a band with a consistent group of musicians I could develop with and write music for until I’m an old man. Something feels so romantic about this to me.
   
   
6. Are you interested in popular music and - if yes - what music/artist do you particularly like?
   
   Yes, Kendrick Lamar
   
   
7. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
   
   My mental health
   
   
8. Which of your albums are you most proud of?
   
   I think the latest one, Legend of e’Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye), because it’s me at my bravest self on record to date.
   
   
9. Once an album of yours is released, do you still listen to it? And how often?
   
   Yes but not very often at all.
   
   
10. Which album (from any musician) have you listened to the most in your life?
    
    Madvillain - Madvillainy
    
    
11. What are you listening to at the moment?
    
    Pierre Henry’s composition Variations pour une porte et un soupir
    
    
12. What artist outside music inspires you?
    
    Toni Morrison 

Darius Jones on the Free Jazz Blog:

• Darius Jones - Legend of e’Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye) (AUM Fidelity, 2024)
• Jazz em Agosto 2024 (Part 3/3)
• Jazz em Agosto 2024 (Part 2/3)
• Monheim Triennale II: The Prequel - July 2024
• Darius Jones - fluXkit Vancouver (its suite but sacred) (Northern Spy Records/We Jazz Records, 2023)
• Solo sax - The Overview I
• Phil Freeman - Ugly Beauty (Zero Books, 2022)
• Darius Jones - Raw Demoon Alchemy (A Lone Operation) (Northern Spy, 2021) *****
• Astral Spirits - Upcoming Releases
• Vision Festival #24 2019 - Day 6
• Vision Festival #24 2019 - Day 5
• 25th annual Guelph Jazz Festival
• Vision Festival #23 2018 - Day 6
• Vision Festival #23 2018 - Day 3
• Vision Festival #23 2018 - Day 1
• Vision Festival 2017 - Day 4: Don't Let Them Take Your Joy Away
• Vision Festival 2017 - Day 1: Calling All Visions
• William Hooker - Light (The Early Years) (NoBusiness, 2016) ****½
• Steve Swell - Kanreki. Reflection & Renewal (Not Two, 2015) ***½
• Darius Jones Quartet (featuring Emilie Lesbros) - Le Bébé de Brigitte (Lost In Translation) (AUM FIDELITY, 2015) ***½
• Period – 2 (Public Eyesore, 2014) ***½
• Eric Revis - In Memory of Things Yet Seen (Clean Feed, 2014) ****
• Adam Lane Trio – Absolute Horizon (NoBusiness, 2013) ****
• Black Host / Slobber Pup: Required Listening
• Little Women - Lung (AUM Fidelity, 2013) ****
• 15 From 2012 Right Before 2013 (part 2/2)
• 15 From 2012 Right Before 2013 (part 1/2)
• Weekend Roundup: December 2, 2012
• Darius Jones Quartet - Book of Mae'bul (Another Kind of Sunrise) - (AUMFidelity, 2012) ****
• Cosmic Leaders
• Mike Pride’s From Bacteria To Boys – Betweenwhile (AUM Fidelity, 2010) ****
• Little Women - Throat (AUM Fidelity, 2010) ****
• William Hooker - Earth's Orbit (NoBusiness, 2010) ****½ & ***½
• Darius Jones Trio - Man'ish Boy (AUM Fidelity, 2009) ****

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Darius Jones - Legend of e’Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye) (AUM Fidelity, 2024)

By Lee Rice Epstein

In the context of the previous six chapters in Darius Jones’s Man’ish Boy epic, the cover of chapter seven, Legend of e’Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye) is most striking for its black-and-white portrait of the artist looking out towards the listener, eyes wide open, welcoming, inviting, asking, also demanding to be seen. Previous covers showcased Randal Wilcox, Justin Hopkins, and Risha Rox, featuring bold colors and dense imagery. Oh yeah, and then there’s the music. This is a necessary album, a heartbreaking and passionate collection that explores self, trauma, healing, affirmation, and community.

It’s been 15 years since the first album in this series was released, Man’ish Boy (A Raw and Beautiful Thing), and one of the more striking elements of Legend of e’Boi is how Jones’s performance has evolved and grown in that time. From the jump, he played with such a clear vision it could be easy to skip over the cleverness and openness of his compositions, especially when songs like “Roosevelt” and “Chasing the Ghost” were revisited on subsequent albums, where a listener could zoom in and hear more of his ideas at play. Arguably, Legend of e’Boi reaches a mighty high peak; throughout the album, Jones plays with the lushness of Arthur Blythe, the lyricism of Julius Hemphill, and the compositional range of Oliver Lake—oh, how he swings, how he skronks, and all with one of the most beautiful alto tones.

Joined this time by drummer Gerald Cleaver and bassist Chris Lightcap, Jones premieres five originals—“Affirmation Needed,” “Another Kind of Forever,” “We Outside,” “We Inside Now,” and “Motherfuckin Roosevelt”—alongside an adaptation of “No More My Lord,” one of many songs recorded by Alan Lomax on February 9, 1948, at Parchman Farm (the Mississippi State Penitentiary) in Parchman, Mississippi (about 20 miles from the Mississippi River), in two performances by Henry (Jimpson) Wallace: first accompanied by an anonymous group of men, then performed solo. With Lightcap playing a drone and Cleaver improvising alongside Jones’s melody, “No More My Lord” is a potent, vital plea, seemingly drawing from his personal history, as well as the song’s and the history of Parchman Farm, known as an abusive prison that was run like a pre-Civil War plantation.

All this history feeds into Legend of e’Boi, which, per the liner notes, acts as a means of acknowledging and processing trauma and overcoming the stigmatization of so-called poor mental health. In the enclosed booklet, following Harmony Holiday’s liner notes, Jones asked several artists to listen to the album and reflect on what they felt and heard. In this way, every moment on the album is a revelation and invitation—going back to the portrait on the album cover—asking us to reflect, listen, and to also participate.

There’s no true center of the album, but the couplet “We Outside”/“We Inside Now” might be closest. In 20 minutes, Jones, Cleaver, and Lightcap lean way in, then pull back, a patiently swaying rhythm gradually settling into one of Jones’s most (least?) unvarnished solos that will pierce whatever shell surrounds you and slowly hopefully support your peeling it away, not leaving something behind as much as baring yourself to yourself. Maybe perhaps, you’ll listen to all this music and come away thinking, “It inside me now.”

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Stefan Wittwer (1953 - 2024)

Photo by Peter Gannushkin

By Martin Schray

The Swiss multi-instrumentalist Stefan Wittwer recently passed away, as we have somewhat belatedly learned. Wittwer, born in Zurich on March 1, 1953, was considered one of the most important Swiss musicians when it came to experimental music and improvisation. He first became known primarily as a guitarist, later using every conceivable device to create music: amplifiers, the recording studio itself, and finally mainly computers. Wittwer had piano lessons as a child and then taught himself to play the guitar. At the age of 18 he was already playing in the jazz-rock band Wiebelfetzer with renowned musicians such as John Tchicai, Irène Schweizer and Fredy Studer. Later he played with Anton Bruhin, Hans Reichel, Paul Lovens and then with trombonist Radu Malfatti. Wittwer was then a member of Rüdiger Carl’s legendary COWWS Quintett, Werner Lüdi’s Sunnymoon (with Martin Schütz, Hans Koch, among others) and Red Twist & Tuned Arrow (with OM members Christy Doran and Fredy Studer. Actually, he has played with almost all the greats of the European and international free jazz scene in all kinds of projects, including Han Bennink, Steve Lacy, Pierre Favre, Alfred Harth, Paul Lytton, Butch Morris, Jim O'Rourke, Christian Marclay, John Zorn, Peter Brötzmann and William Parker. And that is by no means all of them. He also occasionally wrote film music for Peter Fischli and David Weiss, among others. Additionally, he can also be found in free rock, for example with Werther / Wittwer, his duo with Michael Wertmüller or with SLUDGE 2000, his rock group with Lucas Niggli and Marino Pliakas.

It’s worth exploring Stefan Wittwer’s work, even if the occasion is a sad one. His two duos with the Austrian trombonist Radu Malfatti, Thrumb lin (1976) and Und? (1978) have both been released on FMP and are highly recommended for lovers of European free jazz. Together with Anton Bruhin he released Nine Improvised Pieces 1974 / Rotomotor 1978 (Sunrise) in 1978, an album that is more akin to Musique Concrète but is also reminiscent of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. My personal favorite is the COWWS Quintett (an acronym for Rüdiger Carl on saxophone, accordion and clarinet, Jay Oliver on bass, Wittwer, Phil Wachsmann on violin, viola and electronics and Irène Schweizer on piano). The first two albums, Seite A (FMP, 1991) and Grooves'n'Loops(FMP, 1994) offer a nice overview of Wittwer’s skills as a guitarist, e.g. when he sounds like he’s trying to mix a twangy Morricone guitar with free jazz in “Relativ Ewiges Lied”. Something completely different, actually a brutal piece of art, is Sprawl, with Peter Brötzmann and Alex Buess on saxophones, William Parker on bass, Wittwer on guitar, and his long-time musical partner Michael Wertmüller on drums (Trost, 1997/2015). His soundtrack for Peter Fischli/David Weiss' film Der rechte Weg shows him more as an electronic avant-garde musician is definitely underrated.

Stefan Wittwer left us too soon, the news came like a complete surprise. He’s surely to be missed.

Listen to a part of his soundtrack for the Peter Fischli/David Weiss film „Der rechte Weg“:

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Splitter Orchester – splitter musik (Hyperdelia, 2024)

By Nick Ostrum

In the Splitter Orchester, one hears a convergence of trends that bridge new orchestral music and big band free jazz. There is a group sotto voce, wherein larger and larger units play quietly, creating timbral textures that largely eschew the natural dynamic range posed by the instruments at hand. There is also the use of field recordings, or, in this case, recording in the field. The wind, the cars, the passers-by, the environs of the recording become part of the performance, at times gobbling up the band and at others providing the sonic backdrop, a sort of non-rhythmic rhythm section used in a way that many musicians now use background electronics. In both of these themes, one hears echoes of the Insub Orchestra and, in the latter (disc 3 in this release), the related but self-consciously bucolic Polytopies project , though far be it from me to claim which group inspires which, or whether this is just an avenue many groupings are exploring autonomously.

Disc one of splitter musik, Vortex, begins quietly and builds slowly, with the odd cluck and hiss here, bass pluck there, other noises of various derivations darting back and forth. At about 19 minutes, a brief trumpet fanfare, then a barrage of saxes, breakthrough and incite a powerful crescendo, followed by an extended plain of varying levels of activity. Think: Seven Storey Mountain, but steelier. The music is hardly harmonious, but the components work together toward an oddly variegated stasis. Disc two, Imagine Splinter, has a busier and fuller sound that vacillates between the new big band sound described above and droning sound art. More traditionally musical elements pop up from time to time, but in flits. Muffled voices pop in after about a decade, and various percussion hint at a rhythm. Inevitably, these features converge into a thrumming crescendo. The effect is as if Tim Olive or someone of his ilk were leading an orchestra. Disc three is a different beast. Apparently recorded in the open air (or with quite convincing field recordings), Pas involves voices, sonic scenes of feet tromping through water, chiming bells (or water drops on metal) and various other environmental sounds. Long tone explorations distinguish the band from the ambient foreground, but the interaction between the two is key: it sounds as if they are all vying for space. The tones eventually disjoint from each other and short punctuated clusters meet children’s voices and giggles in a playful section that sounds as if the band has found a live and lively audience. This passage gives way to the tromping that comes earlier, now accompanied by heavy scrapes and quavers. By the end, the piece relaxes. The voices appear again, as do the water sounds and a drone, which draws Pas to its conclusion.

This is a big album, in terms of time and sound. It is not loud but expansive. I would not necessarily suggest swallowing all three discs in a single sitting, but I also would not deter you if you can dedicate the time. That is what I did the first time, and, to my surprise, it held up for those three hours. And, it has held up on subsequent listens, admittedly in shorter chunks, as I tried to make sense of it for this review. I am not sure that I have unlocked its code, but I can say for certain that splitter musik is riveting and, after many spins, continues to offer new clues and new points of intrigue.

Splitter musik is available as a CD and download from bandcamp.

In case the review has not hooked you, yet, here is the line-up, which consists of many key figures from the current echtzeit scene : Liz Allbee (trumpet), Boris Baltschun (analog synthesizer), Burkhard Beins (percussion), Anthea Caddy (cello, electric bass) Anat Cohavi (clarinet), Mario de Vega (electronics), Axel Dörner (trumpet), Kai Fagaschinski (clarinet), Robin Hayward (tuba), Steve Heather (percussion), Chris Heenan (contrabass clarinet), Mike Majkowski (double bass, electronics), Magda Mayas (clavinet, harmonium), Matthias Müller (trombone), Andrea Neumann (inside piano, mixer, hydrophones), Morten Joh (percussion), Simon James Phillips (organ, piano, Korg CX3), Jules Reidy (guitar), Ignaz Schick (electronics, turntables), Michael Thieke (clarinet), Clayton Thomas (double bass), Sabine Vogel (flutes, hydrophones), Biliana Voutchkova (violin), Marta Zapparoli (tape decks, hydrophones, radio receivers, antennas).

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Weird of Mouth - s/t (Otherly Love, 2024)

By Eyal Hareuveni

Weird of Mouth is one of the new, intrepid and aptly-titled bands of Danish-born, Norway-based alto sax player Mette Rasmussen that can outlive the imaginary barrier of a debut album, alongside ØKSE (Axe in Danish, with New York-based drummer Savannah Harris, Haitian electronics player Val Jeanty and Swedish bassist Petter Eldh) and the unrecorded yet The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (with British turntables player, Italian trumpeter-electronics player Gabriele Mitelli and Austrian drummer Lukas König). Weird of Mouth features pianist American, New York-based Craig Taborn, who performed sporadically with Rasmussen since 2004, and drummer-percussionist Ches Smith, who has collaborated with Taborn since 2009 (in a trio with violist Mat Maneri, in Smith’s The Bell and Interpret It Well, ECM, 2016 and Pyroclastic, 2022, and with Dave Holland and Evan Parker, Uncharted Territories, Dar2, 2018).

The debut, self-titled album of Weird of Mouth was recorded at Big Orange Sheep in Brooklyn in June 2022 (and mixed by Deerhoof guitarist John Dieterich, with surreal cover artwork by drummer- painter-tattooist John Herndon), following a handful of gigs in North America since their first appearance at Manhattan’s The Stone in 2016, and the trio reconvened recently to celebrate its release. The trio relies not only on the extensive experience of its musicians in free jazz and free improvised settings as well as its deep camaraderie but also introduces a fresh and compound comprised of Rasmussen raw sax sound, with and without preparations, the sophistication of Taborn’s piano playing and the rhythmic wisdom of Chess, who is also a devout student of Haitian Vodou drums.

The music of this trio is entirely improvised but its instrument-defying format blurs the common distinction between the composed and the improvised. The three musicians were recorded close-miked and in the same, resonant room, so you can feel the raw and immediate, tangible in-your-face energy. The stream of ideas feeds the powerful dynamics as the trio expeditiously moves between fierce and fiery attacks to brief and more sparse interplay, as the first pieces - “Wolf Cry”, “Dogs in Orbit” and the cathartic “Existension” - suggest with their fast dances of overlapping blows and jabs. And, indeed, the newly-founded Otherly Love label compares such heavyweight dynamics to the one of the legendary Japanese Yosuke Yamashita Trio (with Akira Sakata and Takeo Moriyama) that referenced boxing champion Muhammad Ali (in April Fool: Coming Muhammad Ali, Super Fuji Discs, and Clay, Enja, 1975).

But Weird of Mouth is more than just sheer power. “Brooders Of Joy” offers its lyrical, contemplative side with Rasmussen singing the soulful ballad, and on the following “Planisphere” Taborn and Smith cleverly contrast and subvert Rasmussen's commanding, soaring sax flights. “In Search of Soul Pane” is the sparsest, most mysterious piece here, with Taborn employing preparations on the piano strings, Rasmussen muting her sax and producing long tones and Smith adding ritualist percussive touches on the tuned gongs. The last piece “Proven Right, Then Left, Then Right” cements the wise, real-time architecture of the trio that relies on deep trust about what all can bring into the masterful, creative process.

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Karen Borca Trio, Quartet & Quintet - Good News Blues (NoBusiness, 2024)

By Martin Schray

Already the first notes of this album are something special. They are reminiscent of a saxophone, however they are clearly different. The rather low notes are raw and woody, even abrupt. The vibrations of the reed are clearly audible. But the sound is never muffled or blurred, it retains a clear presence at any volume. In other registers, it’s sonorous, sometimes even slender and sharp, which is particularly advantageous in solo passages. We are talking about the bassoon and its master in free jazz: Karen Borca.

Born on September 5, 1948 in Green Bay, Wisconsin, she studied music at the University of Wisconsin. While there, she met Cecil Taylor, who taught at the university during the 1970/1971 academic year. It was, as Ed Hazell puts it in the liner notes of this album, "the single most important event in her career." She studied with him, played in some of his bands and ensembles - first and foremost the Cecil Taylor Unit - and was his assistant while he worked in the Black Music Program at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. She was also an assistant to Taylor’s longtime collaborator, saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, while he was artist-in-residence at Bennington College in Vermont in 1974. Finally, she married Lyons and played in his ensemble until the saxophonist’s death in 1986.

Since then, she has performed as a side woman and with her own ensembles at various great festivals with musicians like William Parker, Bill Dixon, Sabir Mateen, Pheeroan akLaff, Paul Murphy, Alan Silva and Jackson Krall. However, in spite of all the kudos she has got from fellow musicians, she has never released an album as a leader and presenting her own music until this album here, which NoBusiness has put together from two Vision Festival performances from 1998 and 2005.

Good News Blues are four original recordings with alto saxophonist Rob Brown, bassists William Parker, Reggie Workman and Todd Nicholson and drummers Paul Murphy, Susie Ibarra and Newman Taylor-Baker. The title track opening the album is a trio with William Parker and Paul Murphy. A good decision, because none of the four tracks pushes Borca’s sound as strongly to the fore as this one. “Her low notes are nice and big and fat; the middle of the horn is robust and fulsome; and her high notes are clothed in a vibrato that gives them a singing quality. Sometimes her sound is sensuous with a soft luster. At other times it’s gritty and growling, a rough edged abstraction of the blues“ (again Ed Hazell in the liner notes). She also uses special trills and surprising stops, which control the further improvisation depending on length and expressiveness.

In the next pieces (two trios with Rob Brown, William Parker and Susie Ibarra), a different structure of the music is noticeable, and it’s here that Taylor’s influence is most evident. Both begin with a hard bop-like head, held together primarily by bassoon and saxophone. Then the wind players digress individually into their solos, but they complement each other excellently, which has to do with the fact that Borca has found a second Jimmy Lyons in Rob Brown. “The charts changed a lot after I started up with Rob. I got back into the way Jimmy and I reacted to one another. (…) I started specifically writing for two voices. Sometimes the voices were separate and I juxtaposed lines, sometimes in unison“, she said.

The quartet with Brown, Reggie Workman, Todd Nicholson and Newman Taylor-Baker uses the compositional structure of the trios again, but the two double basses (arco and pizzicato) display a different dimension both in sound and texture. On the one hand, they are more subtle and fragile than in the pieces before, because the whole thing is also like a finely woven piece of cloth, when the wind instruments circle around each other in a very elegant way. On the other hand, the solos are very boisterous because bassoon and sax seem to wrestle with each other, which is a pleasure to listen to.

Good News Blues is not only a nice opportunity to get to know Karen Borca as a musician and to discover the bassoon as a jazz instrument. It’s simply an excellent portrayal of a musician who deserves to be more in the limelight. Perhaps this will happen with this release.

Good News Bluesis available on CD and as a download. You can listen to “Good News Blues“ and order the album here:

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