Dirk Serries: Three Completely Different Duos

By Eyal Hareuveni

Schneider / Serries (Schneider Collaborations, 2024)

The duo album of Serries and German experimental, free-improv, avant-rock and noise drummer Jörg A. Schneider (known from the free jazz-drone-dub duo Roji with Portuguese bassist Gonçalo Almeida, a frequent collaborator of Serries) was recorded at Schneider’s home base, the Loundry Room in Hückelhoven, Germany, in June 2023. This is the most radical and varied album of these three new duos. Series plays a distortion-heavy, mean electric guitar and pushes Schneider’s manic, primitive drumming to extreme terrains on the opening piece “Muscle Steam” but on the following “Enhance The Machine”, Serries suggests a much more reserved, twisted kind of ballad, accompanied by fragmented rhythmic patterns of Schneider. “Mechanical Collapse” threatens to drown in another manic, noisy freak-out and “Complex Particle System” experiments with a dark and noisy cinematic soundscape. The album ends with the sparsely melodic “Force Regeneration”, and already calls for continuous chapters of this stimulating duo.

Christian Vasseur & Dirk Serries - Floating Simularities (Creative Sources, 2024)

French guitarist Christian Vasseur describes his music as free of any form of dogma and exploring new sound universes with such exotic instruments as archlute, mohan veena, Weissenborn-Harpa and electric 10-string lap-steel guitar. Vasseur brings to this guitar duo an 11-string classical guitar, tuned in quartet-tone, while Serries plays on archtop guitar, often with a bow and objects. Floating Simularities was recorded live at the Kapel Oude Klooster in Brecht, Belgium, and Serries was responsible for the recording, mixing and mastering. The seven intimate and almost chamber duets explore tension-filled, resonant acoustic timbres. Sometimes these duets sketch surreal textures or suggest brief stories, and at other times flirt with delicate, oriental-sounding elements, as in the most enigmatic, beautiful gamelan-like “The Traveller Surprised By His Dream”, with Vasseur adding wordless chanting.

Dirk Serries & Trösta - Magnetar (Projekt, 2024)

Magnetar takes Serries to his formative ambient era, then working under VidnaObmana and Fear Falls Burning pseudonyms, in a second duo album with fellow Belgian alto sax and electronics player-sound engineer-producer Trösta (aka Nicolas Lefèvre), following Island on the Moon (Consouling Sounds, 2022). The album was recorded live between 2021 and 2023 at Serries’ favorite Sunny Side Studios in Brussels, operated by Lefèvre. This 102-minute album offers atmospheric and peaceful yet quite melancholic, free improvised dreamscapes and drones of Serries’ expansive, effects-laden guitar lines, resonating with great reverb the subtle melodic phrases of Trösta. A highly immersive listening experience that highlights the close and powerful magnetic fields Serries and Trösta share.

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Luís Lopes: Solo and Duo

By Eyal Hareuveni

 Luís Lopes - Dark Narcissus: Stereo Guitar Solo (Rotten/Fresh / Shhpuma, 2024)

Portuguese guitarist Luís Lopes describes his idiosyncratic, solo aesthetics as averse to any linearity. He refuses to subscribe to any genre, pushing himself to experiment with paradoxes, and preferring the electric guitar sounds as they are, dirty, crispy, excessive, disoriented, violent and obliterating of the senses. Dark Narcissus is the fourth solo album of Lopes and was recorded at Estúdio do Olival in Alfarim in October 2023. It takes the expressive and noisy music to surprising restrained terrains.

Lopes plays a stereo guitar connected to two separate channels/amps, and all the music was captured in real-time, with no overdubs. The opening, 20-minute “The Cry of Dark Narcissus” is an introspective and sparse piece that offers enough time and space to linger on every resonant note of the stereo guitar, patiently weaved into a surreal, thorny texture. The following “I Ascend So I Could Look At You” is a more abstract but unsettling piece, and surprisingly, even a vulnerable and melancholic one. The last piece, “Reminiscence of A Dark Night” takes an impossible task, sketching a meditative texture through a noisy trance, and most likely only Lopes can make perfect sense of such a demanding mission.

Schneider | Lopes (Schnieder Collaborations, 2024) 

The duo of Lopes with German drummer Jörg A. Schneider was recorded at Schneider’s home base, at the Loundry Room in Hückelhoven in May 2023. The album features two free improvised pieces. The first “One Armed Bandit” suggests an uncompromising, fast and furious, rhythmic interplay between two powerful and stubborn musicians, but without settling on any patterns. In the second piece “Danger Of Suffocation” Lopes takes the leading role and keeps expanding the manic patterns of Schneider with pulse-free, open-ended yet coherent, noisy and distorted ideas.

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Berne/Frisell and David Torn

By Gary Chapin

Tim Berne and Bill Frisell - Live in Someplace Nice (Screwgun, 2024) *****

I don’t often mess with “favorite album ever” talk, but when I do it almost always includes Tim Berne and Bill Frisell’s 1984 piece of magic, Theoretically. I don’t know if you would call it a masterpiece, since both were in early career mode, but there is something about that record that is so perfect, and so right—the sound, the balance, the intrigue, the suspense, the laughs—that I have never stopped loving it. AND, since it came out, I have never stopped wishing for more water from that same well. (Typical fanboi presumption!)

Live in Someplace Nice was recorded around the time they were recording Theoretically. It’s been gone over by David Torn, and has more kick-ass going for it than Theoretically did, which could be for any of three reasons. 1) Conscious choice of Tim and Bill. 2) Torn’s production. 3) Live recording, as opposed to studio. Frisell’s penchant for swells and sustain bring in a hint of ambience. Spaces to be written on and repetitive figures make the structure through which the brilliant improvisation navigates.

I’m trying to remember what it was like in 1984. A lot of us had fallen for this duo, but did anyone understand what a stunning abundance of talent existed here? Five stars in 2024.

 

David Torn - Sway the Palms (sr, 2024) *****

Torn, like Frisell, has an amazing ability to shape the envelope of the sound—through performance and production—it leaves one gasping for air. Torn offers these five tracks as part of a series, the rest of which I haven’t encountered (yet). The method in the madness, here, is that, in studio, Torn improvises the composition on guitar and real-time. In all cases, these compositions are meant to stand alone. In two cases, Torn invites a guest to “play with” the completed conversation not sweetening it, he says, but deepeningit.

Torn’s compositions feel like film soundtracks to me—the first thing of his I ever heard was the soundtrack for Lars and the Real Girl. He draws from the whole guitar template, steel acoustic to fully processed Frippery, but these are surface trappings (though interesting ones), set dressing for the scenes that unfold in my head as he evokes these stories. Tim Berne guests on the first track, and Gerald Cleaver on the third. On the title track, a 17 minute masterpiece, Torn improvises (as an overdub) a poem. The five tracks, though, come together with the coherence of a movement and hearing it all in one sitting leaves me basking, processing, and afterglowing. Also five stars.

More: https://davidmtorn.bandcamp.com/album/sway-the-palms

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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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