Vandeweyer, Van Hove, Lovens, Blume, Quat, Live at Hasselt

A foursome that includes vibes and piano may initially put you in mind of the Modern Jazz Quartet. It's a natural reaction for those who have absorbed the jazz canon going back at least that far. But though there is a certain kind of quietude at times in common with MJQ, the quartet Quat doesn't occupy the quasi-formal bop-classical-tonal-composed-head territory of the earlier group. Listen to Quat's CD Live at Hasselt (No Business NBCD54), however, and you will find there is much going on in an intimate interactive setting that the MJQ also excelled at, though the Quat quartet firmly occupies a modern free improv context. Quat comes through with four middle- to long-lengthed improvisations that surely bear repeated listens.

Who is Quat? It is a European free jazz ensemble that includes Els Vandeweyer on vibes, Fred Van Hove on piano and accordion, and the two percussion-drum team of Paul Lovens and Martin Blume. They are in excellent form here, running the gamut between the new music end of free music and the more expressionist improvisation side, jazz if you will, and everywhere in between.

Ms. Vandeweyer, not someone I have been exposed to much, has a post-Hampelian all-overness that works very well with Van Hove's comprehensive keyboard scatter and cluster approach. The Lovens-Blume pairing works very well with the two-person melodic frontline, laying back a tad and laying down dense but often quiet washes of exotic and virtuoso-istic sound colors.

There is a very effective balance between the four that gets maintained throughout. All four voices meld in continuously permeating, endlessly varying abstractions of sound.

I found the subtlety of the music to take several listening sittings to embrace. Once the foundational listens were done with I started hearing the whole as a creative and sequential inevitability.

This is high-ambition freedom music. They do not veer into multi-stylistic referential moments (save for a brief moment when Van Hove's accordion has an almost folksy but still free-new connotation) but stay pretty firmly within a special zone that advances the abstract sound world that perhaps more typifies the European improv school than is the case with their American counterparts. They do it so well, though, that you fall into the music more than wonder what else there could be. What is, is in the best sort of way.

MJQ it isn't. It's Quat. Beautiful sounds. Recommended.

Evan Parker, Barry Guy, Paul Lytton, Live at the Maya Recording Festival

In many ways the threesome of Evan Parker, Barry Guy and Paul Lytton is the ideal lineup for European free music, free jazz if you will. They of course are no strangers to each other, having played together rather often. But there is something in the performance Live at Maya Recordings Festival (No Business CD 55) that is even more than you might come to expect from them.

There are three long and one shorter improvisations involved. Evan plays in his patented soprano style (that circular blur of invention) but puts forward his tenor playing a bit more than is sometimes the case. And maybe I've missed some of his pretty considerable output in the last decade, but at any rate I notice something in his playing on tenor here that is perhaps evidence of an evolvement. That is, it is still about the sound, yes, but there is much more about the notes than usual. His tenor playing is phenomenal here. And it's note choice as well as timbre that stands out.

Barry Guy is firing up the bass in exceptionally expressive and impressive ways and the recording brings out his extraordinarily way quite sharply. Paul Lytton gets that excitingly busy wash of drums that makes him integral, as always.

And it's funny but on this one I feel like there is a direct link between the music and the classic Ayler trio. It's an extension, a development, but there is a rootedness that branches out of the Ayler-Peacock-Murray nexus in very nice ways. No one into the music would mistake the one for the other, but there's a real connection, a logical progression out of that classic lineup.

These are some of the very best of the Euro-avant masters, of course, and this is one of the very best recordings. It is powerful. It doesn't flag. And Parker on tenor was (and is) thrilling to hear on that night. But then they all sound perfect!