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Ballister: Dave Rempis (s), Paal Nilssen-Love (d), Fred Lonberg-Holm (c)

W71 in Weikersheim, Germany. March 2024.

Chris Corsano (d), Kelsey Mines (b & voice), Casey Adams (d)

Casa del Xolo, 1/16/2024, Seattle, WA. (pic: Gregg Miller)

Absolutely Sweet Marie: Alexander Beierbach (s), Anke Lucks (tb), Steffen Faul (tp), Gerhard Gschlößl (Tu), Lucia Martinez (d)

Panda Theater, 12/2023, Berlin

Dead Leaf Butterfly: Els Vandeweyer (v), Maike Hilbig (b), Lucía Martínez (d), Lina Allemano (t)

Jazzwerkstatt, 12/2023, Berlin

Han-earl Park (g), Camila Nebbia (s), Yorgos Dimitriadis (d)

Morphine Raum, 12/2023, Berlin

Thursday, March 28, 2024

The Laws of William Bonney Saxophone Quartet 1993 - 2007: self-titled (Acheulian Handaxe, 2023)

By Martin Schray

At the beginning of the 1990s Jeffrey Morgan, an alto saxophonist from Seattle, came to Cologne. In 1993 he, Stefan Keune (sopranino and tenor saxophones), Martin Speicher (sopranino and altosaxophones) and Joachim Zoepf (sopranino and altosaxophones) formed a saxophone quartet that was different from most of what had been heard in the field of free improvisation up to then - and in fact to this day: The musicians focused on sound production, but also on a high degree of expressivity. The challenge was not only to push the saxophone’s possibilities to its limits, but also to combine the different playing styles and attitudes of the different players into a punchy whole. On the one hand, it was all about musical interaction and communication, confrontation and invitation at the same time. On the other hand, it was also about violence, outcast status and ultimate freedom, which was also to be understood as a reference to the irony of the project’s title. After all, William Bonney was no one else but Billy The Kid.

As a consequence, The Laws of William Bonney - a collection of musical fragments from over 14 years of the band’s existence - still demands a lot of the listeners. Beautiful melodies are nowhere to be found, nor are uniform beats. Instead, a million different ideas and different interjections shoot out of every corner. The quartet spared no risk “often coming precariously close to the limit of falling off without ever losing the desire to cross it. Safe paths were unknown to the quartet, even though each of them knew how to contribute their personal and tested ingredients“, as the liner notes reveal. Morgan, Keune, Specter and Zoepf hurtle through the stratosphere and generate an enormous density of information through frenzied speed and subtlety. This is mainly achieved through the use of contrasts. Often, one of the four produces deep, dark drones, another swings off in a barely recognizable manner, while the other two fire away like snipers. “XI - 2006“ is exemplary for their philosophy of music. Here you can see all their artistic skill, which is never celebrated as an end in itself, it’s simply radiant beauty. It’s a pool of chirps, tongue beats, bubbling and cascades of sound, driven to a point where everything comes together. As a listener you cannot escape this pull. The music is exhausting in the most positive sense and relentlessly self-referential. When dialogical improvisation transforms a quartet into a kaleidoscopic wonder of sound, when saxophones transcend worldly boundaries, it’s like 45 minutes of fireworks.

Unfortunately, it’s not surprising that the quartet remained an insider tip in the underground. It was avoided by so-called jazz connoisseurs anyway, because they regarded free jazz as formless and amateurish, but even traditional free jazzers knew little about it because the quiet sound explorations meant nothing to them. What is more astonishing is the fact why a label like FMP didn’t bother with this music, especially as they released a related project with Duets, Dithyrambisch by Wolfgang Fuchs, Hans Koch, Evan Parker and Louis Sclavis (although this was about alternating duets) in 1990.

As a consequence, the end of this adventure came in 2007. It’s therefore all the more welcome that the decision has been taken to make this forgotten gem accessible again.

The Laws of William Bonney Saxophone Quartet 1993 - 2007 is available as a download.

You can listen to it and buy it here:

 

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Aruán Ortiz - Pastor's Paradox (Clean Feed, 2023)



While it may pain the conservatives to admit it, Martin Luther King Jr. was and remains a radical figure for human rights in the US and all over the world. Despite the decades-long concerted effort of whitewashing his legacy, his life's work extends beyond the "I Have a Dream" speech and the Civil Rights Act; he opposed the Vietnam war, was critical of capitalism and the ineffectual apathetic tendencies of the white moderates of his day, he was an advocate for women's rights and was a strong proponent of reparations, knowing that real equality would only be achieved by levelling the unfair playing field black people, and minorities generally, have been subjected to for centuries up to today.
Pianist and composer Aruán Ortiz is very aware of Dr. King's radical nature and for this album dedicated to his memory he wrote equally radical music, performed by a quartet consisting of himself on piano, Don Byron on clarinet, Pheeroan akLaff on drums and Lester St. Louis and Yves Dhar alternating on cello duties, with occasional contributions from spoken word artist Mtume Gant, who interpolates bits and pieces of some of King's speeches into the music.

This album features world class musicianship from world class musicians who operate as a well-oiled machine, playing with incredible synergy and showcasing great interplay, often mimicking and expanding on each other's ideas and melodies (despite the deeply atonal nature of the music) and matching each other's energy, with Ortiz in particular doing a fantastic job as bandleader, always serving the music first and being willing to step aside and give each musician the spotlight, something that requires restraint, faith in your collaborators and confidence in the merits of the music itself.

And the music on this record is, simply put, absolutely brilliant, with energetic tracks such as the opener "Autumn of Freedom" taking the listener on a journey of wailing clarinet lines, exploring the whole range of the instrument effortlessly and with purpose while the tense cello moans, fluid and endlessly churning drums and Ortiz' staggered note clusters provide the perfect foundation for the wild instrumental explorations and Gant's recitation of passages from the aforementioned "I Have a Dream" speech.

"Turning the Other Cheek No More" is of a similar nature but ramps up the energy even more, the clarinet more daring, the interplay tighter, the drums managing to sound unpredictable and fresh while introducing some elements of Latin American rhythmic sensibilities and the piano hammered with even more ferocity and passion, resulting in a deeply compelling listen merging the energy of free jazz with hints of the atonality of some of Howard Shore's more audacious compositions.

The music on this album is not simply a tour-de-force of nonstop flurries of notes, however, and, as most good music often is, it's a music of contrasts. While the slower pieces might eschew the ferocity and give the listener a break from the breakneck pace, the teeth-gritting energy still bubbles underneath the surface of the quiet compositions like the title-track "Pastor's Paradox", a deceptively simple piece: St. Louis' cello and Byron's clarinet swim in the murky pond of dissonant-yet-delicate chords from the piano for the first half of the song, the second half introducing shimmering, pristine high piano notes that, while never approaching something that could be considered consonant, give a great sense of finality to the emotional crescendo of the track.
"The Dream That Wasn't Meant to Be Ours" is a multifaceted, deeply somber piece that begins with a whimper: a beautiful duet between the cello and the drums cradles the spoken word performance of a portion of "The Drum Major Instinct" sermon, only to be later joined by the piano and clarinet exchanging their own personal and subdued dialogue for the remainder of the track that never quite turns into a bang, rather a sort of controlled demolition, a slow implosion of deeply moving and affecting music with many moving parts that work greatly on their own, even better in the context of the other instruments and perfectly as a whole; a fantastic achievement and the best piece on the whole release.

The album ends with one final sendoff, "No Justice, No Peace, Legacy!" featuring all musicians on vocals rhythmically chanting the title of the piece before grabbing their instruments of choice for one last performance, a constant crescendo in honor and in memory of Dr. King's legacy, urging us all to do more and do better, in the hopes of reaching true equality and justice one day.

The recording matches the music in its liveliness and rawness, with the piano mics sometimes on the verge of clipping from the sheer intensity of Ortiz' playing, the audible clacking of the clarinet keys in the most involved passages and the buzzing of the snare making you feel like you're in the room watching the band perform right in front of you, but you don't have to rely on your memories to revisit these fantastic performances, you can just listen to the album again.

Released digitally and on CD by Clean Feed, radical music in honor of a radical man.

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Old Mountain – Another State of Rhythm (Clean Feed, 2024)

By Don Phipps

Another State of Rhythm by Old Mountain, a quintet which features Pedro Branco on piano, Tony Malaby on tenor sax, Joao Sousa on drums, and two bassists, Joao Hasselberg and Hernani Faustino, offers bluesy and soulful introspection within music of grace and beauty parsed with free playing elements and abstractions.

The musicians draw upon a wide range of historical idioms – for example, the opening number, “Goodnight Irene,” a 1933 Leadbelly composition, offers a mix of Branco’s free playing juxtaposed with Malaby’s soulful melodies and the gentle rocking rhythm of the bass players and Sousa’s drums.

One is also struck by the solemn expressions of some of the numbers. For example, “The Sixth Commandment” offers a subtle repose, with agitating bass lines and harmonic piano abstractions underneath Malaby’s pleading wails. In “Ballad for Paul” the piano overtones provide a sorrowful counterpoint to the bass plucks and bowing that underlie the harmonics (captured magnificently by recording engineer Eduardo Vinhas). And, featuring Sousa’s colorful cymbal and drum work, “Blend in By Standing Out” combines moments of grace beneath its despondent themes.

Perhaps the most interesting tune on the album is also its longest – “Montanha” – which in Portuguese means mountain. It opens with Branco’s wistful lines which seem to imply a distant view of some mountain landscape that stretches forever. Importantly, Branco’s efforts are given space by the other musicians to fully come to life. After a pause, the music turns bluesy again – almost like a New Orleans funeral procession – suggesting the odd combination of sadness and joy. And for those who like pure free playing, the number “Freebus,” will not disappoint. Especially enjoyable here is Branco’s use of the upper registers of the piano to add sprinkles, flavor, and hops to the mix.

Those who enjoy a diverse palette of musical influences interspersed with improvisations that challenge while remaining grounded will most certainly enjoy Another State of Rhythm. Its compositions tinged with melancholy are a relevant reflection of today’s increasingly disappointing world.

Monday, March 25, 2024

Carlos Bica - Playing with Beethoven (Clean Feed, 2023)

By Stuart Broomer

This recording sat around for a while, collecting my increasing interest, I confess, without me getting around to engaging with it to the extent it required. I was initially drawn to it by a 50-year fondness for Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Opus '70 (1969), a work for an improvising quartet using materials drawn from Beethoven. Playing with Beethoven is the work of a well-travelled veteran, bassist, composer and bandleader Carlos Bica, whose playing possesses a tremendous elegance, his arco playing often sounding more like a cello than a bass. He’s accompanied by a collection of fine musicians, though their instruments hardly form a typical alignment: Daniel Erdmann, plays tenor and soprano saxophones, João Barradas, accordion, and DJ Illvibe, turntables. Whether it’s the musicians, the instruments or the material, composed over generally familiar Beethoven themes, everything is inspired and worked with a kind of transcendent lyricism. Especially on tenor, Erdmann possesses one of the great lyric tones, as compelling in its own way as Getz or Coltrane. It’s immediately apparent on the opening “Leonore”, composed by Carlos Bica “after” Beethoven’s “Leonore Overture No.3”.

Part of the recording’s genius is that, in a world of improvised music, it’s almost “overcomposed”, composed to the point where methodologies collide, fracture or, most happily, elide into new sonic worlds. Each of the 11 tracks is both “after a Beethoven composition” and also credited to an individual—eight to Bica alone, one to Bica and João Paulo E. da Silva, one to João Barradas (a luminous solo) and one to DJ Illvibe, but it hardly stops there. Beethoven/Bica’s “Tiny Change” has Illvibe inserting and altering a hefty sample of Tom Wait’s “Small Change (Got Rained on with His Own .38)” then altering Erdmann’s tenor as well with bubbles of pitch- shifting entering the saxophonist’ lines. “Euch Werde Lohn In Bersern Welten” has a recording of chanting and a great stereo duet by Erdmann and Erdmann. Illvibe’s “Kids See Ghost Sometimes” is the turntablist’s solo piece constructed on the ruins of “Moonlight Sonata” with an R&B vocal, a distorted trumpet and a mangled horror movie theme adding to the haunting.

Whether individually or collectively, the group creates its own radical space out of a sense of reverence and/or playfulness — apart from Ill Vibe everyone is essentially a lyrical musician (maybe him too), with Barradas a kind of national treasure of accordion tunefulness, possibly sampled in repeating chunks by Illvibe.

The special joy of this music is that you can put it on repeat and it will always sound both the same and different (“Leonore” really is more beautiful with every pass), almost like a collection of radios tuned to random stations. Oddly, it intrudes not on the listener but on itself, the easy listening music of chaos, something the world itself can’t stop making and for which we have a legitimate need, as in this wondrous product that makes classical beauty at once classic and beautiful in a fresh way.

Sunday, March 24, 2024

Mathieu Bec - Sunday Interview

  1. What is your greatest joy in improvised music?

    The intensity of the exchanges in real time, like a deep and enriching dialogue, a conversation between friends where there is little need to speak to understand each other, the simplicity of the meetings, interactions nursed with benevolence.

  2. What quality do you most admire in the musicians you perform with?

    Respect for listening to the silence which is a deep telepathy and a common inaudible tempo. This silence unites us in the present time.

  3. Which historical musician/composer do you admire the most?

    Milford Graves, Bartók, Ligeti, John Coltrane... There are many and most of them are jazz or classical composers. If I had to pick just one it would be John Coltrane.

  4. If you could resurrect a musician to perform with, who would it be?

    I have a lot of love for the African influence and wisdom of Milford Graves and the solar energy of Elvin Jones... Both have brought me a lot.

  5. What would you still like to achieve musically in your life?

    Find a jazz trio or quartet which would be open to improvisation instead of reproducing standards played ten thousand times.

  6. Are you interested in popular music and - if yes - what music/artist do you particularly like?

    No, I have to admit. A long time ago I played in punk bands and loved The Stooges, MC5 but those days are gone.

  7. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

    I’d love to have the possibility to travel more with my music.

  8. Which of your albums are you most proud of?

    Flyin Sufi with Boris Blanchet on sax and Standards combustion with Daunik Lazro and Benjamin Duboc.

  9. Once an album of yours is released, do you still listen to it? And how often?

    I don’t listen to myself very much. The next project is always the one I’m looking forward to.

  10. Which album(s) (from any musician) have you listened to the most in your life?

    Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and Lux aeterna by Ligeti.

  11. What are you listening to at the moment?

    Miles Davis’ Nefertiti and Milford Graves’ Stories.

  12. What artists outside music inspires you?

    David Lynch is a superior example, sometimes an inspiration as well as the disquieting strangeness of reality… I like “The Blair Witch project” film, psychological thrillers where everything is suggested and not shown. The dark paintings of Caravaggio, the chiaroscuro de Georges de La tour, J.M.W. Turner’ fire… And poets such as Rimbaud, Michel X Côté, Serge Pey.

Reviews with Mathieu Bec on the Free Jazz Blog:

Also, Mathieu Bec will be performing in duet with Daunik Lazro at Domaine de Montbarri (France), on Sunday, June 23, for a tribute to John Coltrane and others.

Saturday, March 23, 2024

Giuseppe Doronzo - Futuro Ancestrale & AVA Trio

By Guido Montegrandi

Giuseppe Doronzo - Italian saxophone player, composer and educator based in Amsterdam - is one of the most interesting voices in the European free music scene. His last two records mark a further step into his creative development that mixes free improvisation and ancient musical cultures. He also has a talent for choosing the people he plays with. Both the AVA Trio (which is one of his long standing project) and the trio of Doronzo, Moor, Rosaly exhibit a remarkable level of interplay and musical taste.

Giuseppe Doronzo, Andy Moor, Frank Rosaly - Futuro Ancestrale (Clean Feed, 2024)



Futuro Ancestrale documents the debut performance of the trio composed by Giuseppe Doronzo (baritone sax and Iranian bagpipe) Andy Mooor (electric guitar) and Franc Rosaly (drums and percussion) at the Amsterdam’s Bimhuis in June 22.

Somehow developing the concept of music from an imaginary land that Doronzo conceived with his AVA Trio in 2017, the music in this album explores sounds, infiltrate contemporary takes and echoes of ancient musical cultures developing an explicitly non linear storytelling made of noises, broken rhythms drones and melodies.

Futuro Ancestrale (ancestral future) tells of futures coming from or going to the past –which direction? Your ears, your choice or maybe you don’t have to choose, that’s the beauty of oxymoron.

An direct reference to a non linear approach is given by the track Hopscotch whose title mirrors the English translation of Cortazar 1963 stream of consciousness novel Rayuela. This piece of music is made of erratic segments that combine in a continuous flux of exchanging parts between the musicians - Moor scraping guitar and Rosaly broken drumming are crowded by Doronzo quasi melodic figures and then the other way round.

In Magma, Doronzo leaves the baritone for the Iranian bagpipe creating an exotic sound tapestry on which Moor and Rosaly display their patterns until in the finale the bagpipe is left alone on sparse percussions.

The final piece, Digging the Sand, is a re-imagination of a piece of the AVA trio here taken to its outer limits by the slow and imaginative beat and the meandering sax and guitar.

The music that this meeting has produced has an imaginative quality that develops in the space that each musician creates for the others to play in alternating bursting moments to sparse sound and noise sections and you can even encounter melodies! I really would have loved to be there that night.

But if like me, you weren’t there, you can buy and download it from bandcamp.

You can also read another point of view on the album, see Sammy Stein's review here

AVA Trio – The Great Green (Tora Records – 2024)

AVA Trio is:

Giuseppe Doronzo - baritone saxophone, ney anbān, longar double flute
Esat Ekincioglu - double bass
Pino Basile - frame drums, tamburello, percussion

Words and colours and sounds.

Ancient Greeks did not have a specific term to indicate the colour blue - more specifically the colour of the sea, and the story told in the booklet accompanying AVA Trio's The Great Green focuses on this twilight zone of language telling of a fisherman’s quest for the name of the colour of the Great Green just to discover in the end that “The Great Green is not green after all. The Great Green reveals his true colours with every rolling wave, million of different hues yet to be named”.

And this quest takes us into a journey of sounds and melodies and rhythms that move and meander offering to the listeners unexpected glimpses of musical brilliance.

An upright solo opens Didima just to be carried away by the encircling sound of Basile frame drums doubled by a distant and melodic baritone melody that slowly gains the center stage.

Basile performance is outstanding, it’s the real backbone of the entire work, while Doronzo and Ekincioglu dig deep into a music that often evokes eastern-like scales and melodies, Basile’s percussions create the environment and the horizon of the journey. The result is almost 40 minutes of stimulating music that carries on a sonic research through and around the Mediterranean Sea, evoking sounds and melodies that could have existed. From Music from an Imaginary Land (2017) to Digging the Sand (2019), Ash (2023) and now The Great Green, the AVA Trio continues its musical archaeology extracting sounds from ancestral memories and introducing them into future. The use of traditional reeds in some of the pieces (Tsamikos and Didima) emphasizes the ethnic roots of this music but, just like in the case of the percussion set used by Pino Basile, these sounds are perfectly integrated in a sonic search that is well rooted in contemporaneity.

A meaningful record.

You can buy and download it on bandcamp.

Friday, March 22, 2024

Moor Mother – The Great Bailout (Anti-, 2024)

Although Moor Mother (Camae Ayewa) has received justified acclaim for her vocal work with Irreversible Entanglements, that praise has to some extent overshadowed the attention given to the substantial series of solo albums and other collaborative projects she has pursued since the 2010s. Perhaps that will change with The Great Bailout. With a harrowing and relentless interrogation of Great Britain’s legacy of slavery and colonialism, this uncompromising artist sketches a world in sound that demands to be heard. It is a listening experience both challenging and immensely rewarding.

This is Moor Mother’s ninth studio album under her own name, and her third with the Anti- label. Her previous Anti- release, 2022’s Jazz Codes, was a kaleidoscopic engagement with the jazz tradition itself, drawing from a pan-idiomatic template in celebrating and scrutinizing the work of artists from Woody Shaw to Joe McPhee to Mary Lou Williams. The sound collages on The Great Bailout continue to mine the resources of jazz, but they appear as fugitive traces rather than sustained explorations. But they are no less powerful for that, to be sure.

The opening strains of “Guilty” establish the trajectory of the album, with a disarmingly lilting soundscape undergirded by harpist Mary Lattimore and vocalists Lonnie Holley and Raia Was, before Moor Mother’s emphatic entrance in which she questions and confronts the historical weight of oppression through half-whispered, half-shouted entreaties. It is a dichotomous effect that recurs throughout the record: the music, which is sometimes quite beautiful, is continuously disrupted and threatened by the horrific subject matter.

Each track is tightly constructed, without an emphasis on spontaneous improvisation. The voices from the jazz world are instead woven deftly into the fabric of each track: “Liverpool Wins” contains haunting echoes from Sarah Vaughan, while Lester Bowie’s trumpet winds its way through “God Save the Queen,” and Angel Bat Dawid’s inimitable clarinet moans like a wraith through the brutally grim “South Sea.” But as with Jazz Codes, these elements are filtered through Moor Mother’s broad stylistic prism, one that seeks to move beyond musical category altogether, into a much more amorphous realm.

The album’s title is a reference to England’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which resulted in a massive taxpayer-funded effort to compensate British slaveholders when slavery was finally abolished in the empire. The fortunes of thousands, including the ancestors of Prime Ministers William Gladstone and David Cameron, were enlarged through this unprecedented act of government largesse (or theft, more accurately). While the attempt to obtain justice for the long legacy of slavery both in Britain and elsewhere will undoubtedly remain pressing for generations to come, recordings like The Great Bailout will continue their vital work of disturbing, troubling, and probing the consciences of those who will have to heed this call.

Thursday, March 21, 2024

Dell, Lillinger, Westergaard (DLW) - Beats II (Plaist, 2023)



I've waited too long on this one. I've been determined to review it for months now, and there have been a number of false starts and public declarations (to whomever could hear me) that Beats II would be my next review. So what went wrong? It's not the album, that's for sure ... so, if there is any reason that could shift the blame from myself, it would be that it's hard to tell where to begin with it. DLW creates music that can be hard to pin down. It has a way of unsettling your equilibrium, and on first approach it can be quite formidable.

The trio, vibraphonist Christopher Dell, drummer Christian Lillinger, and bassist Jonas Westergaard have been working together for several years, developing a musical 'grammar' that has been documented in several trio releases over the years, starting with Grammar (gligg, 2013), Grammar II (PLAIST, 2019), Beats (PlAIST, 2021) and now Beats II.

Some of the press around Beats II spoke of "multiperspectivity" and "multidimensionality," which is likely not a bad way to capture in words the fractional beats and cut-up nature of the recording, but it is a bit foreboding. The music itself, however, is not. It was recorded as one long improvised piece then processed/reprocessed in such a way that individual tracks became sharp fun-house mirror reflections of each other. Hard cuts between the songs suggest beginnings and ends, but they also could be middles and related pieces that don't necessarily follow in a recognizable pattern, but as suggested by the names of the pieces, represent (or are represented by) colors.

Thus, I think there is where, possibly, I got hung-up. The colors, the cut-ups, the short tracks that both work with and against each other, and my wobbly balance after listening. However, if one lets go and allows Lillinger's staccato hits and Xacto-knife slices of the beat to simply propel Westergaard's commanding bass lines and Dell's highly syncopated loop-like melodic statements, it is quite easy to slide into the musical world that they have been fastidiously building over the years. The opening 'red' lasts all of 16 seconds, but in its short brutal life, it establishes that what you are hearing will require your full attention. In the follow up, 'yellow' (a generous two and a half minutes) finds Dell playing a looping set of chords over slightly shifting time-frames and on 'wine' (a color in the Crayola Crayon 64-pack, right?) it's Westergaard who embodies the fluctuating pulse. Throughout the 20 short tracks, nothing is solid, but everything is hard and sharp. The music is utterly compelling, and at some point, the shards of fun house mirrors become more like a kaleidoscope of fascinating sound.

Beats II ... once you find your way in, you'll start hearing shapes and tasting colors anew.


Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Fundraiser for Steve Beresford

We do not typically post funding requests but when it comes to the health and well-being of a creative musician who has given so much to the musical community, we see it fit to make an exception.

"Hi. I am Steve Beresford. I’ve played the piano since I was 7 and now I’m 74. Sometimes I was a university lecturer. I mainly play improvised music and up until Covid had an OK time. But my savings went during Covid, my pension is small and post-Covid gigs are sparse. I need financial help, not least because I’ll be having an operation for a thing I’ve had since birth. I’d appreciate your help." www.gofundme.com/f/musician-needs-a-hand

Mary Halvorson – Cloudward (Nonesuch Records, 2024)

By Don Phipps

Guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson has become a mainstay of the free music scene – her albums winning accolades for their innovative compositions and challenging abstractions. Cloudward is no exception – with eight compositions whose musical ideas seem never to touch the ground, but prefer, instead, to suspend themselves in mid-air.

Her choice of bandmates on this outing certainly help to make this happen. In addition to Halvorson, the sextet is comprised of Tomas Fujiwara on drums, Nick Dunston on bass, Jacob Garchik on trombone, Adam O’Farrill on trumpet, and Patricia Brennan on vibraphone. The band is large enough to add colorful voicings to the outing yet small enough that each musician has the space to contribute. The sextet is even joined on “Incarnadine” by Laurie Anderson, who chips in on violin.

The dissonant and abstract tunes are not harsh or difficult. Instead, they are seasoned with just enough sauce to provide a tasty gumbo of sounds and effects. Each has its own captivating themes and there’s plenty of counterpoint to establish these themes in clever and enticing ways.

One can marvel at the way the group navigates the compositions both together and apart. Take the first number, “The Gate,” where Halvorson and O’Farrill open with joint guitar and trumpet over Dunston’s engaging bass. Or the abstract picking and electronics Halvorson uses on “The Tower,” which migrates into Brennan’s gentle vibraphone phrases. As the tune progresses, the music seems to disassociate, almost like a tapestry unraveling into different strands.

For variety, there’s the industrial rock found in “Desiderata,” with its electronic distortions and cascading guitar notes juxtaposed against the vibraphone arc, as Brennan’s lines pilot the turbulence like a moth flying in circles around some distant light. Fujiwara drives the bus forward with some excellent drum work underneath the eerie guitar and dream-like vibraphone phrases.

Perhaps the most fascinating number is the final one – “Ultramarine,” Dotson opens the piece with adroit maneuvering on the bass and he’s joined by Halvorson, whose twangy tones sound almost banjo-like. As the number moves forward, it develops a gentle swing, highlighted by the abstract bluesy chords created by Garchik’s trombone and O’Farrill’s trumpet atop Halverson’s arpeggios. O’Farrill’s contribution is particularly noteworthy – as his trumpet slides up and down the registers like butter on a hot skillet.

There’s more of course – from the odd time meter employed in “Unscrolling” to the discombobulated Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole effects generated by the group on “Incarnadine.” Cloudward certainly displays Halvorson and colleagues at their best – a stunning exhibition of musical ideas and fluid musicianship.