Rocco John Quartet, Embrace the Change

Altoist Rocco John is a fixture on the New York scene, keeping the new new thing free flames stoked with his own brand of avant jazz. He records more infrequently than I would like, but then that makes his new releases all the more welcome.

His latest, Embrace the Change (Unseen Rain 9947), features a cohesive and compatible quartet of Rocco John on alto and soprano, Rich Rosenthal on electric guitar, Francois Grillot on contrabass and Tom Cabrera on drums. Rocco John provides the originals, attractive springboards for the often collective improvisations that make good tracks into the horizon.

Rocco John sounds quite limber and full of spontaneous musicality. So too Rich makes creative paths that go well with what Rocco John is doing. Francois Grillot is, as always, the complete bassist, whether walking or making horn-like statements. And Tom Cabrera swings and frees it all up well depending on what is needed.

It is an album that stays in the avant mode with lots of fire and ideas. It's well worth hearing, another notch in the Rocco musical belt. Recommended!

Thomas Heberer, Leap of Faith, Solution Concepts

Reed jazzman PEK has been quite prolific making avant jazz happen up in Boston with his two ensembles. Today we hear a CD of characteristically interesting music played by his Leap of Faith outfit with guest Thomas Heberer, Solution Concepts (Evil Clown 9076).

It is a full set recorded live at New York's Downtown Music Gallery last August. The outer numbers are long improv tracks with Heberer on cornet for the latter, plus PEK on tenor, piccolo oboe, clarinet and contra-alto clarinet. Glynis Lomon is on cello and aquisonic, Steve Norton on sopranino, alto clarinet, and alto sax. And Yuri Zbitnov is at the drums with resonant metal objects adding to the sound.

This is full-blown free outness in the grand tradition, spontaneous outbursts of individual and collectively free sound with all playing and hearing one another to create shifting constellations of aural expression. Thomas Heberer enters following the first long improv for a series of unaccompanied solos. Thomas shows us his smartly expressive way in a kind of tour de force of melodic invention.

The final number is a twenty-minute conflagration of Heberer and Leap of Faith joined together. It gives the entire ensemble space to open up worlds of improv and at the same time gives space as well for Heberer's voice to respond to the others and vice versa. The track has a great deal of strength and shows the complete complement of artists at their best.

All in the end is worthy ear fare. It is a fine example of Leap of Faith in its current guise and Thomas Heberer in an inspired frame of being, both with and without the ensemble.

Recommended!

Wadada Leo Smith & John Lindberg, Celestial Weather

Wadada Leo Smith is one of those few artists whose every release these days should be heard. That list of artists for me is small but his music, his trumpet playing and composing show us a creator who keeps getting better, deeper, never flagging, ever.

So though I am late in posting on this, his album of duets with long-time bassist associate John Lindberg is another essential listen. The album is entitled Celestial Weather (TUM 046). I can't remember hearing John Lindberg doing something I did not like, either, for that matter, so not surprisingly this one makes me smile.

The Finnish label TUM does its usual exemplary job with the audio and physical packaging.

And so the music....It is an hour of excellent things to hear. There are three multi-part numbers involved. The first, by Wadada, pays tribute to the wonderful bassist and human being from the AACM and especially the Art Ensemble of Chicago. "Malachi Favors Maghostut - A Monarch of Creative Music" does the late master honor. John's bass playing seems suitably puckish here and Leo plays something that Malachi would no doubt have loved to be a part of. Both fill the air with some fine, outgoing extroversions worthy of the tribute.

Next follows the two-some's collective five-part "Celestial Weather Suite." It is open-freedom music, each part named after an unusual weather event, "Cyclone," "Hurricane," etc. They explore various creative possibilities, each interacting sensitively and soulfully to the other. There is agitation, there is relative calm, but there is never a loss as to what to play.

The final is the two-part Lindberg piece "Feathers and Earth." As with the others the compositional element is so integrated into the improvising that it is not all that easy to separate the two, but here there is a head melody/motif beginning the second segment. What matters is the totality and that there is no denying. It is essential.

In the end we get inspired trumpet and bass playing, a duet far beyond the expected status quo, whatever that might be, and into some SERIOUS (Sirius) stellar explorations that while spontaneous as a whole are the product of two lifetimes of committed musical direction.

So of course I can only recommend this to you. It is celestial in the best sense. And the listening is nothing but pleasure.

David S. Ware / Apogee, Birth of A Being (Expanded), 1977

How much we have lost with the passing of tenor titan David S. Ware is especially clear when you listen to the expanded edition of his first recording as a leader in 1977 with his trio Apogee, Birth of A Being (AUM Fidelity 096/97 2-CDs).

Plain and simply, it is a remarkable recording. The original, shorter version was put out by Hat Hut as an LP in 1979. And now for the first time we hear the complete session. Joining David's tenor is the energetic all-over piano of Cooper-Moore and the virtuoso force of drummer Marc Edwards. This is the right band for David's avant-spiritual power debut as each member of the group comes through with performances that parallel Ware's in their creative onslaught of significant sound.

For the expanded version of the album we get the Hat Hut material remixed plus a full CD of additional music, including a worthy alternate take of "Prayer," the lengthy numbers "Cry" and "Stop Time, a brief "Ashimba" (Cooper-Moore on his hand-made xylophone) and a Ware unaccompanied solo tenor spot. Put that together with the original released version and you have a hugely impressive date, with David on fire with passion, energy and that great big sound he had already mastered.

Marc Edwards by then had perfected his very busy, driving and dense free drum style (he and David were key figures in Cecil Taylor's band during this period) and Cooper-Moore had developed a strong presence as a convincingly engaged, extroverted and very musical splatter-note pianist. They form with David a highly combustible unit at its peak, absolutely driven and devastating in their expressive power.

The music goes from strength-to-strength in a blazing meteoric flight across the firmament. This is some of the most engaging free jazz of its time, without a doubt. It's been 30 years since the original LP went out of print, but the time is most definitely now for a re-appraisal of this trio and the full impact of the complete session. It is phenomenal music!

Jon Irabagon, Inaction is an Action

Today a look at one more recent example of the music of Jon Irabagon, Inaction is an Action (Irabbagast 005). Where the previous releases were ensemble oriented, composition and improvisation based, this one is devoted entirely to solo sopranino sax improvisations in an avant-free jazz mode.

The emphasis is as much on sound color and timbre as it is on line, on expression as it is on form (form follows inventive content, in other words).

For this, his ninth outing as a leader, Jon roams freely onto pathways of personal self-expression that utilize technique, subvert it and create it anew in unusual ways of sounding the instrument.

The avant history of the sax is channeled and renewed Irabagon style. From Trane and Ayler to Lacy, Braxton and beyond, Jon assumes a level of sound innovation and adds to it. There are arabesques of line sounding that identify themselves as personal and original but also as coherent partly by means of the avant tradition. There are pure moments of sound, then some things equally line and sound oriented.

It's not just a matter of creating new sound-colors and creating melodic form both inside and outside those parameters; it is ultimately a series of cohesive sound-images organized and framed by the parameters of slices of time, selections, pieces, eight in all.

Jon most certainly dwells in rarified territory for this album, more extreme perhaps than most of his previously recorded work, but connected to the whole of his artistry in its keen attention to timbre elements. There is no "jazz" saxophonist out there today who does not work out of a personal set of timbral possibilities. Jon is no exception, yet he can unveil a wider set of sound-color extremes than many and appears to take delight in interjecting them during the course of his soloing. Here that tendency is taken much further than usual, with the unaccompanied solo format lending Jon an unlimited freedom he makes great use of.

And then when he turns to episodes that zero in on line extensions, as in "Ambiwinxtrous," he phrases in unusual melodic clusters, then in turn phrases the extended techniques that follow in their own way, combining clusters of tone and sound as part of a totality of phrased gesture.

In the end Jon pushes his own personal boundaries of the limits of expression further beyond what we ordinarily hear from him in recorded form. In so doing he again establishes himself as an important and breakthrough player in the avant sax mode. Perhaps he will treat us to some of this outside playing with an uncompromisingly out ensemble in future. If so I will certainly want to hear it.

In the meantime we have this unaccompanied flight to the nether worlds of expression. Jon is essential listening for what's going on today. He pushes the envelope especially and satisfyingly on Inaction is an Action. Danger, bare wires? No. No danger here. Just keenly insightful explorations.

Highly recommended.

Joe McPhee, Jamie Saft, Joe Morris, Charles Downs, Ticonderoga

If you've been reading this blog regularly you will notice that Joe McPhee has been very active of late. And so today we have his vital presence again, on a quartet date, with Joe, Jamie Saft (piano), Joe Morris (in his double bass persona) and Charles Downs (drums). The album is another goodie, called Ticonderoga (Clean Feed 345).

The four let sail with four collective, freely improvised pieces in the best tradition of post-new thing expressive heft. It's great to hear Joe carry forth with his tenor and soprano on this album. Clearly he is inspired and comes through with his personal way, fluid like crazy and able to create stunning hairpin turns of expressive color, vibrato and non-vibrato, a master of his instruments who both sounds and phrases with a linear conversational logic and fluency that puts him at the top of reedists in the "free jazz" zone.

Jamie Saft is a treat in this context because you don't hear him that often on disk in this total blow-out vein. He makes full use of the inside-the-piano possibilities as well as conventional note-ing and he creates a beautiful congress with Joe and Joe's way to get beyond. Jamie is monsterful and masterful here, beyond Cecil Taylor while in some ways channeling his legacy, but adding to it with a less cyclical, more linear horizontality.

I've said this before about Joe Morris on bass but I will say it again because it still has relevance for sure: that he is the kind of bassist who can, in the language of pitching in baseball, "expand the strike zone," that in other words he creates a busy and cogent foundation of expanded tonality that allows the soloists to go wherever they will in terms of key center and beyond and make it all seem inevitable and right. And he does it all with a rhythmic all-over quality that lets the band go in time wherever they will, too, freely.

Charles Downs has that special all-over quality on the drums as well. He establishes a multi-present open rhythmic space and ever varies it while using the kit sensitively for all the sound fields he uncovers at any point in timelessness. Whew.

And in this quartet setting all four get a oneness of result that takes years to do right like this. I never tire of exceptional freedom sets of this sort, because there is a continuity of variability and there is nothing to tire of--for there is never just one thing happening. Like the best free players, they all are bent on creating a confluence born of an open totality, an infinite variability within the free jazz parameters they come out of, which takes all of the past and makes it present in a future now, if you can dig what I am trying to say.

In short, a free gathering of total togetherness, a whole of great artistry born of linear fluidity and exceptional avant virtuosity. Is that enough? You bet it is! It is an album of vital presence and if you dig the outer realms this will make you smile and play it twice, more than twice!

Blaise Siwula, Carsten Radtke, Joe Hertenstein, Past the Future

I have been listening to and appreciating saxophonist Blaise Siwula for a pretty long time now. He is a central figure in the avant free jazz realm in New York City. I don't recall hearing him more inspired in recordings as he is on the new disk Past the Future (No Frills Music NFM 0008).

It is a three-way cooperative improvisational meeting of Blaise on alto, tenor and soprano, the electric guitar of Carsten Radtke, and the drums of Joe Hertenstein. And a fine confluence is made out of the excellent chemistry the three generate together.

Joe Hertenstein is a drummer of great sound color and smarts. He unleashes his timbre-ally diverse kit and puts it to the service of creating cohesive and moving panoramas of percussive logic. His playing lays an important foundation for what the trio freely creates.

Carsten Radtke gives us some very inventive guitar work that is as unpredictable as it is diversely astute. Chordal inventiveness goes with single-lining dexterity and sound manipulation for an impressive voice in the proceedings. And what he does stays in the mind and catapults the others to overtop the norm, launch into creative overdrive.

And Blaise Siwula? He is extraordinarily articulate, blazing with a big sound on tenor, plying equally well his agilely inventive alto and his puckish soprano. This trio gathering seems to especially inspire him to go beyond to the highest realm of creative saxophony. He invokes all of his avant chops for an expressive tour de force on this one. And you can hear in his playing here as elsewhere the entire history of jazz and avant as sonic reference points on the way to his own considerable immediacy and originality. If you want to know what Blaise is about, why he is an important stylist and innovator, seek no further. You can hear it in concentrated and explosive form on this, Past the Future. His tenor playing is not often in the limelight. He sounds very much at home on it here! So that is a welcome added bonus to it all.

Ultimately the point of it all is the threesomeness that is achieved in all glory on this session. Each member carves out of his creative and preparatory actions over the years a special trio sonance, an interactive virtuosity that really puts a burn in the retro-rockets to propel them to the musical heavens.

For a jazz-rooted avant freedom this is one of the finest sessions I've heard this year. Needless to say I do strongly recommend that you grab this album.

Universal Indians with Joe McPhee, Skullduggery

The teaming of avant titan Joe McPhee with the trio Universal Indians was an inspired idea that bears excellent fruit in the live 2014 Antwerp recording Skullduggery (Clean Feed 328). It is music with some of that classic "new thing" exuberance. It is music that Albert Ayler would have loved to be a part of!

McPhee is on saxes and pocket trumpet, John Dikeman on saxes. The two form an imposing front line with some beautifully in-your-face avant testifying. Jon Rune Strom on acoustic bass has a huge presence in the music both in the solo realm and in the ensemble. Totlef Ostvong's drumming is chargingly extroverted and always interesting.

The vehicles are collective compositions with some thematic guideposts now and again that may well be spontaneous but all the better for all that.

Both McPhee and Dikeman are in fine solo form and work in tandem together particularly well. It is great to hear Joe stretch out in flat-out free context. Truly this is a kinetic four-way blow out, infectiously forward moving and ecstatically satisfying for those who move on the free-way of uninhibited expression.

A fabulously out set! Need I say more?

Open Field + Burton Greene, Flower Stalk

Not all so-called "free" music is alike. Anyone who listens to it extensively knows that. Just like not all Indo-Pak classical is alike. So Open Field + Burton Greene and their beautiful Flower Stalk (Cipsella 002) is by no means quite like any other album in the avant improvisation realm. Why is that?

Burton Greene is an integral part of this music. He is virtually an avant institution, a pianist soundsmith with extraordinarily open ears and a superb sense of what to play and when to play it. He fills a key role here on piano and prepared piano. Open Field joins Burton on this album. It is a Portuguese-based trio of Jose Miguel Pereira on double bass, Joao Camoes on viola, mey and percussion, and Marcelo dos Reis is on nylon string guitar, prepared guitar and voice.

The drummerless quartet enters into chamber jazz territory that has a new music spaciousness to it, a sensitivity to part playing and sound color. All work together in pretty profound ways to get some immediate and vibrant ensemble combinations that vary dramatically in mood but create layers of invention that stand out.

There is no idling or preparatory runs on this one. All five pieces are filled with significant totalities where each instrumental part has its own special presence yet the working out of the ensemble as a whole gives the listener a poignant unity.

It's a beauty. The album is in limited edition release so get this one while you can. Kudos! Collective improvisations of excellence are here to be appreciated!

Francois Carrier, Michel Lambert, iO

The alto saxophone of Francois Carrier and the drums of Michel Lambert have formed an excellent tandem for some time now, as an entity in itself and as a core nucleus that adds sympathetic others as fitting. You can look up Carrier's various releases with Lambert that I've covered on these pages by typing Francois' name in the search box above. It has been and is an association that bears much excellent free jazz fruit.

Now we have a new duo recording of the two that productively documents the ongoing collaboration with iO (FMR CD 384). It comprises nine open improvisations that feature Lambert on drums and Carrier on alto sax and Chinese oboe.

The music was recorded live at two different venues in Montreal in 2012 and 2013. On both occasions the two are in great form. They explore the terrain they are known to do, free, open improv with expressive torque and spontaneity.

Carrier is fast becoming one of the very premiere alto sax voices out there in freedomland, with a beautifully lucid sense of line and sound. Lambert is his perfect foil, so to say, with a creative brilliance of his own.

Together they make magic here. If you like the open world of the intimate duet on the new improv scene, this is one you'll no doubt thoroughly enjoy. Carrier and Lambert have much to say and they say it!

Abdelhai Bennani Trio, Waves

Europe-based avant tenor sax stalwart Abdelhai Bennani has been rather amazingly prolific with the number of albums he has released on the JaZt Tapes label (type his name in the search box above to see what I've covered). He specializes in an uncompromising free jazz approach without concessions and without relent. For the latest, Waves (JaZt Tapes CD-052) he fronts a very sympatico trio in a live date from Paris, recorded in 2006.

The presence of Benjamin Duboc on double bass and Edward Perraud on drums does much to drive the music forward.

Bennani gives us at some length his characteristic sound, born of hoarse throated harmonics, swallowed notes, upper register cries and a sort of conversational phrasing. He is in fine form.

Benjamin Duboc plays with a true front-line extroversion, pizzicato-ing with torrents of notes and rumbling double stops and bowing lines that mingle and meld with Abdelhai's in interesting ways. He can and should be listened to closely in interaction with the whole.

Edward Perraud provides exemplary free drumming with exotic sound colors conjoined with dynamic set cajoling.

The music revels in a pure "new thing" derived freedom that may remind you of some of the classic ventures done over the years. The music excels in a stylistic singularity.

So though there is already much by Bennani available out there, this one by virtue of some excellent trio interactions must be counted as one of the more indispensable ones. It is not music destined for great popularity and gold records, surely. But free jazz acolytes will certainly take to it.

Go to Jan Strom's website to find out about how to order this one.

http://www.janstrom.se/6.-recordings/6.3.-jazt-tapes-6267605

Laurence Cook, Burton Greene, A 39 Year Reunion Celebration

As Eric Zinman's liner notes to the album at hand explain, Paul Bley introduced drummer Laurence Cook to pianist Burton Greene in 1968. They hit it off musically and made some excellent sessions together with Mario Pavone on bass in the next couple of years.

Now 39 years later they reunite thanks to Zinman on a session titled appropriately A 39 Year Reunion Celebration (Studio 234 011).

Laurence has always impressed me as a kind of "thinking person's drummer," a free player who chooses his notes wisely and provides a very creative backdrop for free ensemble explorations. Burton it goes without saying has for a long time now prevailed as one of the new thing's pioneering pianists and an artist who continues to grow and expand his compass, year after year.

The two together in this 2008 Cambridge session are in a most inspired mode. Obviously the intervening years have done nothing to dampen their mutual musical compatibility and it shows in the way they interact. Laurence plays the drums as a modern painter wields the brush (and in fact he started as a painter), deliberate yet open to the spontaneity of the creative moment, sensitive to the drums in front of him and their potential, patiently drawing out the sounds in conjunction with Burton's varied and expressive creative stance.

And Burton sounds as good as ever, perhaps a bit more reflective now than when he first started out, not afraid to work in tonal realms but ever the abstractionist at heart, giving weight to each episode, drawing from other's compositions as well as some of his own, and just going it spontaneously with Laurence when that seems right.

The meeting turned out, not surprisingly, most opportune and fortunate. This is some of the finest recent work from either of them, worthy of listening to closely and often. In short it is a winner! Encore!

François Carrier, The Russian Concerts Volume 2, with Michel Lambert and Alexey Lapin

François Carrier has been pretty extraordinarily productive in the number and quality of his releases of late. I've covered many here over the last several years (type his name in the search box above for those posts). Now there is another very good one. It's Volume 2 of The Russian Concerts (FMR CD381), continuing the live recordings made on location in Moscow and St. Petersburg in 2013.

As before Carrier is on alto, joined by long-time drummer associate Michel Lambert and Russian pianist Alexey Lapin for a full set of open-form free jazz, avant jazz, free improvisation with the emphasis on complete spontaneity. François Carrier has become one of the guiding lights on the international saxophonic scene and he comes through once again here with some vibrantly stirring improvisations.

And as with the first volume, the threesome make inspired sounds together. Alexey is spikey and all-over present on piano; Michel punctuates and cracks the percussive sky with responsive free-time sensibility.

As is the case with the last volume, the trio have their quieter moments but much is about an on-the-edge expressivity, as much concerned with the notes as horizontally panned and fanned out as about the vertical concern with aural texture.

If you liked the first, this one continues the immediacy. If you know neither or for some reason have missed Carrier and his music, you probably should start with the first volume. Either way this is excellent free expression, confirming the threesome and their significant encounters in those days in Russia.

Very recommended.

Darius Jones, Matthew Shipp, Cosmic Leider: The Darkseid Recital

You take two players of real breadth, stature, improvisational genious maybe, and you put them together. What will be the result? Sometimes you can't be sure the two will mesh. That's not the case today. Take the rolling-and-tumbling all-over-the-piano ballet of Matthew Shipp and put him with and against the starkly purposive alto of Darius Jones. You get Cosmic Lieder: The Darkseid Recital (AUM Fidelity 088).

It's from a couple of different live get-togethers recorded between 2011-13. It amazes, if I might suggest, with its bold give-and-take. This is free improvisation of the best sort. When Matt asserts a way through the open field, Darius counters with his own way, and both work together beautifully. Now that would be great whatever the content, pretty much, but what excites is the wealth of invention involved. Structure gets into the picture, the structure of the moment, but not just any moment. It's moment-ful as it is event-ful. There are spontaneous musical events that occur one after the other and each is in its own way a surprise, and each in every given segment works with the segments before and after to form a complete statement.

Now maybe that's easy to say but it's true of the music here throughout. You listen closely, you hear how it all works together and you revel in it. The best free music has something to say and, if everything is right, says it with consistency, with excitement, with an inner presence. That's what this set does.

Matthew Shipp is an institution among avant-free pianists today. He's paid the dues and he's surmounted the obstacles to forge a playing style that belongs to himself alone and he comes through, here as elsewhere, as one of THE CREATORS. Darius Jones may not be as well-known. But he too has that something here, that one-to-one thought-to-execution lucidity. His soulful abrasiveness and intensive line creativity complements what Shipp is doing excellently.

So that is what I feel after a good number of listens. If somebody wanted to know what is going on in the free-avant sectors right now, I would recommend she/he listen to this, among some select others, to get it. That's how strong I think this set is. Strength. It's here.

Oh, this release has an official street date of August 12th. But you can order it now direct from AUM, and/or you can pre-order a download version from i-tunes.

Farmers By Nature, Love and Ghosts, Gerald Cleaver, William Parker, Craig Taborn

Love and Ghosts (AUM Fidelity 089/90) constitutes the latest, third album by Farmers By Nature, the name given the trio of Gerald Cleaver (drums), William Parker (contrabass) and Craig Taborn (piano). It is officially on the streets August 12th but you can order it now directly from the label.

I don't believe I've heard the first two albums, but I can say that this double live set is some of the finest avant piano trio music I've heard so far this year.

What's so impressive is the wide variety of territories and moods the trio covers. They can get inside themselves collectively and give out with some very inner musings, they can worry phrases until they become cosmic otherness, and they can scorch you with some heavy statements of transcendence.

The remarkable interplay of three equal partners makes for music that rivets. William Parker is lucid and supercharged with ideas; Gerald Cleaver plays with an aural awareness most drummers don't get near; and Craig Taborn never sounded better on piano, hiply chordal, melodically alive, tumbling into open zones without a safety net, taking risks that pay off every time, locking into patterns that develop and set the stage for a further ripping apart of the heavens.

Seriously this one blows you away. Two full CDs of live trio and they never flag while giving your ears much to digest and dig.

This is a holy grail of free music in many ways. It's one excellent example of what a free-avant piano trio can do when all members are gifted and inspired.

Just get it!

Akira Sakata, Giovanni di Domenico, Iruman

One cannot be everywhere at once, ear-wise or otherwise. The result is that I am guilty of paying insufficient attention to Japanese reedman Akira Sakata over the years. I am catching up though (type his name in the search box for two previous postings), and as luck would have it I received a copy of his recent disk with pianist Giovanni di Domenico, Iruman (Mbari 21).

I am very glad I did. This is a 40-something minute get together of the two that shows an avant sensitivity and a synthesis of Japanese roots and international expression. Akira plays alto, clarinet, and vocalizes a bit while Giovanni plays a centered outness on piano that suits well Akira's brightly explosive outbursts between seas of calm-tone contrasts.

Akira sounds excellent on both alto and clarinet. Giovanni has lots of avant fullness that comes through and plays off of Sakira's well-conceived reed spontaneity. They run a gamut of expression here and do so with long-form and miniaturist monumentality.

It's an excellent outing!

Tesla Coils, Blaise Siwula, Harvey Valdes, Gian Luigi Diana

The world of improvised music continues to evolve. There are those ensembles that favor an acoustic "purity" and there are those that incorporate electronics. Today we have a great example of the latter, Tesla Coils (Setola di Maiale).

It is a potent threesome of Blaise Siwula on soprano-alto-tenor sax, Harvey Valdes on electric guitar, and Gian Luigi Diana on laptop doing real-time sampling and sound manipulation. The advantage to this set up is that the electronics are integral and part of the live performance/improvisation.

Blaise and Harvey lay down a carpet of vivid improvisations and Gian transforms the sounds in various ways, adding a third instrument which is a direct consequence of the other two sound generations.

Anybody who reads this column knows I cover Blaise Siwula and his smart yet torching reedwork. He sounds excellent as ever here. Harvey Valdes plays in an out, fragmented and sometimes psychedelically inspired guitar style that works well in the ensemble. Gian Luigi Diana adds varied textures and densities that form an organic part of the proceedings.

In short, it all comes together. This is first-tier experimental music that once again shows the way to Brooklyn, a world hotbed for new music.

If you like well-executed, fertile-free soundmaking, this one is for you. Now if they used me on drums/percussion...no, just kidding. This is the dope.

Jason Ajemian, Tony Malaby, Rob Mazurek, Chad Taylor, A Way A Land of Life

You take a lineup of Jason Ajemian, bass, Tony Malaby, saxes, Rob Mazurek, trumpet, and Chad Taylor, drums, and if you know these players your expectations are high. And they make a limited edition LP vinyl album, 400 copies. They call it A Way A Land of Life (Nobusiness LP74).

And not surprisingly, the album comes through. Nobody on these sides is playing tiddlywinks. They are serious and inspired. There are good compositional elements, by Jason, and the playing is first-rate free jazz.

The front line includes bass at times, there is some good solo bass work too, and when the drums are going at it Chad has front-line presence. It's a four-way conversation broken up in segments but always absorbing your attention.

Each player has a personality that puts him in a zone--but you know that if you know the players. I guess this is Jason Ajemian's date officially. And more power to him for it, because the four dedicate themselves with no reservations to the music and it all reflects well on Ajemian's leadership and musicianship.

This is good, hard-hitting freedom music! Recommended.

Rodrigo Amado Motion Trio & Peter Evans, The Freedom Principal

There are pairings of artists in the improvisational avant garde that make very good sense. Some others surprise you with unexpected chemistry. Still others may not exactly have been written in the stars. The recording up today is of the first kind. The gathering of tenor-master Rodrigo Amado and his Motion Trio with trumpet firebrand Peter Evans on The Freedom Principal (No Business NBCD67) results in music as good, as accomplished as one might expect.

Rodrigo and Peter are joined by Motion Trio members Miguel Mira on cello and Gabriel Ferrandini on drums. The results are all you could hope for. Peter Evans brings the fired-up color sound playing and facility that mark him as one of the primo trumpet stars of our time. Rodrigo matches him sound-for-sound and note-for-note when they play in tandem. Each one solos with avant-free authority, with a boil-over-the-pot-lid insistence and dexterity that one would be hard put to better among today's free-jazz, free-improv players. It's about the sound and about the notes here. Both are at the top of their game, which means the sounds and the notes are something very worth hearing.

The cello-drums backwash from Miguel and Gabriel performs its function very nicely--opening up rhythmic, harmonic and sonic possibilities that play off of what Rodrigo and Peter are doing and vice versa.

This is one of those sessions that was meant to be. It comes across as excitingly and artistically as one would hope.

It doesn't flag but you could well salute it. In fact, I do! An indispensable out disk for your collection!

Francois Carrier, The Russian Concerts Volume 1

The trio of Francois Carrier (alto sax), Michel Lambert (drums) and Alexey Lapin (piano) have been going at it for some time now (type Francois's name in the search box for previous albums), principally via a number of concert appearances of the three in Russia. The 2013 tour is bearing fruit in the release The Russian Concerts Volume 1 (FMR CD367).

Based on this volume one hopes for a good deal more. The first volume finds the three in excellent form. Francois is a dynamo, a force of nature-through-art, playing endless streams of inspired saxophony notable for its exceptionally developed sound fingerprint as well as a liquidity of continuous invention. Michel Lambert's drums are always appropriate, original and sonically alive. Alexey Lapin gives us his far-ranging, freely spontaneous yet incisive pianism at peak levels.

Put these three together these days and you have some spontaneous combustions of great power and poetic art.

This is some free improvisation to define the medium today. This is art! It's also one of their very best! Listen and be convinced.