Abdelhai Bennani Trio, The Crawling Snake, with Alan Silva, Makoto Sato

Tenor avantist Abdelhai Bennani has been rather prolific with releases on the JaZt Tapes label. I have covered a number of them and today we have another. It is a trio of Bennani, Alan Silva on digital keys and piano, and Makoto Sato on drums, which is a very potent threesome on this live date from Rennes, France. The album is called The Crawling Snake (JaZt Tapes CD 053).

It is a continuous 50 minute performance of the free jazz sort, as you may have imagined. Makoto Sato gives us his dynamo all-over drumming style, Alan Silva reminds us that he is an imaginative avant conceptualist whether on bass or on keyboards, and Abdelhai gives us a robust over-the-top tenor madness very much in keeping with his approach. Everyone gets in-your-face in very good ways here.

With the recent demise of Bernard Stollman, founder of ESP Disks, we are reminded of how the legacy of the visionary artists who first recorded for that label lives on with a recording like this. It is an updated "new thing" we hear on The Crawling Snake, surely. And it sounds to me as fresh as ever. Alan Silva was one of the breakthrough artists of course in those early New York days. And he continues to thrive as evidenced by this recording, with Bennani and Sato giving us very vibrant fellow-artists for a pleasingly out excursion.

For further info and to find out how to order, go the the JaZt Tapes site: http://www.janstrom.se/7.-jazt-tapes-15468036

This is "free jazz" the way it sounds when everybody is attuned to the spirit feel. Recommended!

Abdelhai Bennani, Duo #9, No Goal, with Alan Silva

Is there such a thing as an artist getting too much exposure, too many recordings? Not when there is a notable progression and/or a series of changing contexts for the music. In the case of free tenor player Abdelhai Bennani both progression and change are noticeable.

You can hear that on a fairly recent recording, Duo #9, No Goal (JaZt Tapes CD 043), a part of the JT series of artist demo releases available as quality CD-ROMs. Perhaps what most distinguishes this one is the presence of the great Alan Silva, who excels in his role here as free player of his "orchestral synthesizer" setup.

The recording was made a year ago January, live in Paris.

There is a cohesive spontaneity to be heard in the four improvised segments. Alan lays down some intriguing orchestral blankets of sound and Abdelhai comes through with his patented swallowed-note phrasing, sounding especially loose and limber.

They cover a good deal of territory with explorations of space music and some energizingly brittle, give-and-take pointillisms. The more you hear it, the better it gets. Thank you Abdelhai and Alan for the sounds!

For more information about this and other JaZt TAPES and to order the CD go to http://www.janstrom.se/6.-recordings/6.3.-jazt-tapes-6267605 (copy and paste the URL into your browser address window).

Abdelhai Bennani Trio, Encounters, with Alan Silva, William Parker, 2000

Not-yet-well-known tenor saxist Abdelhai Bennani knows how to pick them. The trio album Encounters (JaZt Tapes CD 037) has Alan Silva on piano and synthesizers and William Parker on double bass.

The program is a live, first set from The Sunside in Paris in 2000. It features three free improv "Encounters" and it gets into the classic new thing outsideness in ways you might expect from Alan and William (Alan delving into the piano and synths imaginatively these days) and then Abdelhai plays an out tenor that has the immediacy of a raw-er Shepp. He goes for the gut responses and gets a wide palette of sound colors going.

Those who dig Parker and Silva will find lots to hear on this. And Abdelhai is well worth hearing as well. I couldn't help wishing that a Sunny Murray would come into the fold to make it a quartet. But one gets used to this trio format quickly and there's much good for the free-jazz ear.

Find out more about this and other Limited Edition JaZt Tapes by going to http://www.janstrom.se/6.-recordings/6.3.-jazt-tapes-6267605.

Alan Silva's Celestrial Communication Orchestra and the Big Box Set

Bassist, key- boardist, sometimes violinist, composer, bandleader, father-figure of the new thing, Alan Silva cannot be dismissed and will not go away. You don't like avant jazz? That's your business. But to anyone else, he's been a seminal force in the new jazz (now coming onto 50 years of age) from the very beginning, playing bass with the greats, giving the music a personal stamp on his small-group recordings, and leading off and on one of the titanic avant big bands, the Celestrial Communication Orchestra. His 1969 three-record set on BYG gives you the cream of the avant garde musicians then in Paris. They aren't just there to blow (though, man, they sure do that). Silva fabricates for them a compositional framework that puts their music into a collective maelstrom that is ever-shifting, creating a sound like no other, though clearly Trane's Ascension, Sun Ra's conductions, some of Mingus's larger band collectivities, and Ornette's Free jazz were and are important forerunners.

Sun Ra will always be remembered for what he did for the big band. Alan Silva should be too.

So we come to the box set released some time ago on Eremite HR 57 I-IV (Catalog number 039-042). In many ways this is an extension of the 1969 set in approach. Directed collective freedom.... The box itself is OOP but the four individual CDs can still be had, sans box. I've spent some time immersing myself in this huge body of music. I emerge to report in.

The music was recorded live in four lengthy sets at Poschiavo, Switzerland in 2001. Some 23 of the finest avant improvisers of today assembled for the music, and collectively they raise the rafters. Alan is on synth and conducts the proceedings. There's O. Thomas, Borca, Allen, Mateen, Carter, F. Wong, Jordan, Parran, Few, J. Bauer, J. Bowie, Swell, B. Lowe, J. Daley, Carroll, Campbell, Oki, W. Parker, J. Krall, W. Morris, W. Smith, and Ijeoma Thomas on vocals. Now that is a heady gathering. Maestro Silva puts them through their paces with arranged/written material, conduction, group collective improvisation and solo-background situations.

Ijeoma Thomas sometimes improvises with (what I believe are) the words of a US Govt resolution honoring jazz music. She introduces the band with a musical backdrop on each set. Now I think what she is doing is very creative. But I did end up with the feeling that by the nature of the attention we give to the human voice (probably it's in our genes) the times she is wordily present she dominates in ways that I think take something away from the impact the master improvisers have on their own. Now that doesn't mean she is not good. I just don't hear her fitting in as well as a Jeannie Lee would have. That may be something personal with me, I do not know. She commands a lot of the attention with an improvised declamatory style. (Of course this is quite desirable when she introduces the band, less so with the resolution recitation-improvisation). When she fits in as another voice among voices (wordlessly) things go better.

This is in all a vibrant, exalting, exuberant, flaming conflagration of voices, a gathering of the free tribe, a melding of the many ultra-individual voices into a massively powerful whole. The compositional-conductional element brings cohesion and structure points into what otherwise could have been chaos. And the elements do so in ways that are pure Alan Silva. Brilliant.

I liked the last volume the best. There is so much music here that it is best experienced a disk at a time. Even after five listens to the set I know there is much more to experience here, more ways the music can and will grow inside me.

That's what Alan Silva's big-band music is all about. Maximalism. A wealth of detail.

If you are a serious student of the avant arts, you owe it to yourself to study (and enjoy) what Alan and the master musicians are up to here. It's a monumental achievement. Whether it's a monument as well time will decide. One thing is sure. Alan Silva must be heard. He is a critical musical voice of his generation. So listen!