Ignaz Schick x 3

Douglas R. Ewart & Ignaz Schick - Now Is Forever (Zarek, 2023) 

By Eyal Hareuveni

When German turntables wizard Ignaz Schick was a teenager, and then only an alto sax player, he bought George Lewis & Douglas R. Ewart’s post-free jazz Jila-Save! Mon. - The Imaginary Suite (Black Saint, 1979), expecting some Art Ensemble of Chicago-tinged tribal Afro-Americana. But, surprisingly he was completely drawn by the non-conformist mix and naked interplay of contemporary abstraction with AACM roots and blues and totally outer space electronic drone scape with some spiritual woodwinds and brass. This album encouraged young Schick to trust his artistic instincts, take risks with musical textures and collages but also to achieve musical friendships in the process.

Many years later, in 2017, while Schick was in a composer residency in Los Angeles, he initiated a two-day recording session with the exceptional visionary, multi-instrumentalist, luthier (he designed and built the shakuhachi, bamboo flutes and the didgeridoo he plays in this session in addition to the sopranino and alto saxophones and the English horn), poet, afro-logical conscience keeper and critical thinker Ewart in Minneapolis. Schick arrived with a bad flu (Ewart’s Jamaican rum recipes did wonders), but completely ready for a magical dialog, and it is clear that he is well-versed in Ewart’s work, poetry and palette of sounds. This double album sounds like an updated reflection of the seminal and powerful Jila-Save! Mon. - The Imaginary Suite, experimental and ritualist, poetic and spiritual, and matching beautifully and naturally the AACM Afro-American free jazz aesthetics with the post-2000 European electro-acoustic free improvisation. Ewart’s wise and passionate narration of cultural and socio-ecological criticism sounds prophetic and urgent, and Schick’s reserved and imaginative sonic layers deepen Ewart’s unsettling spoken messages and musical outcries. This double album documents all the extended studio improvisations and the live ones in front of a small but generous audience. Now Is Forever is a unique masterpiece, a pan-generational and pan-cultural warning, and an inspiring and motivating musical document. 

Ignaz Schick & Oliver Steidle - ILOG3 (Zarek, 2023)

ILOG3 is something totally different. It is the third duo collaboration of turntabalist Schick with Berlin-based drummer-live electronics player Oliver Steidle who have been working as ILOG since 2013. ILOG3 was recorded at Studio Zentrifuge Berlin in October 2021, a little more than a year after ILOG2. ILOG3 was conceived originally to be a video shooting session but Schick and Steidle performed such a fascinating set that they demanded to be released. ILOG3 is a set of dense and multilayered but surreal and uplifting electroacoustic, polyrhythmic mayhem that stresses the rich musical vocabularies of Schick and Steidle. Schick adds to his turntables sampler and pitch shifter/looper as well as a stack of new and quite “clubby" vinyl while Steidle is armed up with two new midi controller pads integrated into his drum kit with which he can control in a much more virtuoso way his portion of samples. Their interplay is super fast and juggles with crosscut tricks and beats but flows organically, as Schick and Steidle know each other’s eccentricities so well that they can anticipate the next moves and already prepare counter, subversive answers. ILOG3 guarantee to spin your head even faster than the tricky beats and satisfies the most cerebral listeners as well as the ones who only want to have their share of fun. It is released in two versions, a long extended suite for the CD, and a compact compressed version for the LP. Best to get both to enjoy the different constructions and the rebellious flow of this manic and chaotic music. 

Ernst Bier / Gunnar Geisse / Ignaz Schick - Hawking Extended (Zarek, 2023) 

Hawking Extended brings together Schick, on alto sax, turntables and sampler, with fellow Berliner jazz drummer Ernst Bier, who played with Schick in the Hawing duo since 2013, and here adds wave drums and electronics, with Munich-based guitarist and live-electronics player Gunnar Geisse, who plays on laptop guitar and virtual instruments. This trio was recorded at Bonello Studio Berlin in May 2018, a year after the first concert of the trio. These idiosyncratic musicians mirror and are being fed by the tension of their acoustic setting of alto sax, electric laptop guitar and drums, with the electronic and processed layers of wave drums, laptop and turntables. This unique setting forces Schick, Bier and Geisse to take risks, dive deep into unpredictable and cryptic interplay, and sketch highly eclectic and obscure sonic textures, collages and collisions that occasionally touch taboo kitsch or alien kind of cartoon music and flirt with anything from poetic and cathartic free jazz to SciFi cinematic-nightmarish atmospherics. One of the pieces is titled “No Boundary Proposal” and this title captures the essence Hawking Extended weird, provocative but totally captivating, as well as the aesthetics of Schick’s work.