Butterfly Mushrooms and a Hungry Ghost

By Ken Blanchard 

Peter Brötzmann/Paal Nilssen-Love- Butterfly Mushroom (Trost Records 2024)  

Somehow I missed the earlier review of Butterfly Mushroom by Eyal Hareuveni at this venue. Having written it, I went ahead and sent it in. Apologies to Eyal.

There are no surprises here for anyone who has listened to more than the first few minutes of almost any Brötzmann recording. Well, maybe one, especially if you enjoy his trios and duets as much as I do. I find the synergetic pacing of those recordings to be woven together as seamlessly as if a four or six handed demigod were playing it all at once. Butterfly Mushroom gives me the feeling that the two musicians are playing independently, isolated in space and time; and yet somehow the result is perfect, dynamic, joinery, something like body and soul in Cartesian theory. As I hear most free jazz, it is the role of percussion to create the aural space within which the other instruments flicker in and out of being. On this recording I often seemed to hear this reversed. The horns make a space within which a range of collisions occur.

That out of my system, most of the pieces present the signature Brötzmann high-frequency fields of sound. On the first cut, “Boot licking, Boots kickin,” Brötzmann’s guttural buzz is produced as he drills into one vein of ore after another. I was reminded near the end of this cut of two cruise ships passing out of port and playing signature tunes with their Godzilla-sized horns. On “Ride the Bar,” the horn lines get smeary, as a pen pressed too hard into parchment, and then gives way to streams of humming punctuated on both ends by high squeals. Nilssen-Love squeezes out a wide and dense ribbon with sparkle and humor. “Frozen nose, Melting Toes” opens with jungle drums at an imaginary distance. The horn sings a sad, breathy lament and the drums, for once, go quiet. When they come back in, the percussive vibe has shifted to East Asia. The romance does survive the next two cuts. However, as the horn goes feral, we still get traces of Zen temple strikers.

Butterfly Mushroom was recorded in Wuppertal, Germany, in 2015. Around that same time, I missed a chance to hear Brötzmann live in Chicago. What a mistake. If you want to hear two extraordinary artists who can evoke pretty much any human experience out of ear and memory, check this one out. 

Hungry Ghosts - Segaki (Nakama Records, 2024)

Hungry Ghosts is described on the Bandcamp page as “Norwegian-Malaysian trio.” Try finding that restaurant in Boise. The trio consists of Yong Yandsen on tenor sax, Christian Meaas Svendsen on double bass, voice, and shakuhachi, and, tying these two recordings together, Paal Nilssen-Love on percussion. You can find a review of their first album by our own Taylor McDowell here.

The term hungry ghost comes directly from Buddhist mythology. The idea is that the ravenous, unsatiated appetites of human beings live on after death. It is less clear whether the ghost is the person herself or just a particularly toxic fragment from that bundle of passions we call a person. I believe this idea appears also in Navaho mythology. A large bit of funerary ritual is designed to detoxify these spirits. The album title refers to such rituals. The title and cover (I learn from the Bandcamp page) are from The Scroll of Hungry Ghosts.

The titles of the four cuts suggest that hungry ghosts have bizarre cravings. “In search of filth like vomit and feces to eat” begins with a thunderous, chaotic dialogue between the saxophone and drums. If Svendsen is there, it was hard for me to tell. A little over three minutes in this intense volume of sound collapses into a moment of silence, into which Yandsen pours his solo. He replicates the dialogue by alternating between higher and lower whimpering, descending to a barely audible crackle. About a third of the way through we get a more explicitly Buddhist vibe. Bells ring and echo. The drums come in and weave a marvelously textured carpet of clicks and plunging knocks. The last section of the piece brings back the jungle drum/soundtrack passion similar to that noted on the previous recording. All the energy rushes back in and we return to the intensity of the opening.

If your ghost is hungry for a marriage of bowed base and sax, you get it on the second cut “Small bits of pus and blood.” The small bits make enough room for one another here that we can appreciate all three virtuosos, but it is the bass that steals the show. Svendsen maintains the dominate role at the beginning of the longest and best cut on the album. “Mountain valley bowls full of grime” reminds me of a sputtering engine more than mountains or bowls. There is more narrative here, but it never leaves the passion for texture that marks free jazz. This one was so good that I had to carry my JBL speaker into my stairwell, which has the best acoustics in my home.

Both of these recordings are brilliant. If you had to choose one, go for Segaki. It’s only Jan 24 as I write this, but if this isn’t the best thing I hear all year… it’s going to be a wonderful 12 months for free jazz.