Vaster than Empires, Three Days

 

Every day moves forward the presence of time, of history, of where we have been and then might in turn be. Today that needle moves decidedly forward with the Avant Improv trio Vaster Than Empires and their recent CD Three Days (New Focus Recordings PAN 28). It is a full album of intelligent, extended techniques invention that brings us forward in the experimental language of abstracted Modernism with sound explorations and noise-pitch dialogues for violin (Erica Dicker), percussion (Allen Otte) and sound artist composer-improviser (Paul Schuette).

This ensemble formed in the course of an intersection in Cincinatti of two of the trio doing graduate  work and the other flourishing in local New Music performance. The  resultant trio gives us a spontaneous and virtuoso bead on sonic arts that hearkens back to classic improvisers like MEV, AMM and Il Gruppo as it simultaneously looks ahead to the world we will hear and see going forward from this day.

Maybe I say this too much but I believe the sure method for hearing this music properly (as well as any else of the advanced kind) is an open mind and a clear deck while listening and then the patience to let the music flow through your hearing in multiple listens. Now for me right as I pen these lines I am working on listen four and I must say it all is making rewarding sense to me. After repeated hearings it does not sound arbitrary but rather smart and timely in its interactive whole. It is complicated and ever-changing but it is excellent and without a doubt some of the best of this sort of thing that has come by me in the past decade. Vaster Than Empires is decidedly inspired on this album. They are the real thing in Improv today, at the top of the heap in results and good sounds. Do not miss it. Give it a streaming listen at bandcamp. https://newfocusrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/three-days Bravo, bravo!

Allen Lowe, In the Dark

 

Allen Lowe has it all going for him in terms of artistry--his saxology, his Jazz composing brilliance, his determined directionality, his historical grasps and insights. Alas his health has not been with him lately with a malevolent cancer and many operations under his belt The good news is that he is back with two new releases that mark him as reassuringly continuing to excel and flourish. 

Today a good look at his more ambitious undertaking, the multiple CD project dubbed In The Dark (ESP-Disk 5080 3-CD) featuring the Constant Sorrow Orchestra. His bandmates are an interesting choice for a stylistic diversity and a wide period coverage of post-eclectic, wholistic Jazz expression from quasi-New Orleans to Bop to Post-Mingus post-Blues and Roots revisited,  ultimately to profundity and beyond. So we have an effective and winning lineup of clarinet great Ken Peplowski in tandem with Allen's eloquent and kicking tenor sax, Aaron Johnson's alto sax and clarinet, Lisa Parrott a most pleasant surprise on baritone, Brian Simontacchi on trombone,  Kellin  Hannas on trumpet, Lewis Porter on piano, organ-synth and synth, Alex Tremblay and Kyle Colina on basses and Rob Landis on drums.

The sprawling 31 composition triumph pits excellent players with memorably appealing and seriously impactful compositions for one of the greatest comebacks ever. Get this one, do not hesitate. Stay tuned for a discussion of his other new release.

Mats Gustaffson, Merzbow, Balazs Pandi, Cuts Open

 

Mats Gustaffsen is something of a world apart as a saxophonist when it comes to a style association. Yes he is free, but he can be very electric too. So today's recent offering is a case in point. Cuts Open (Rare Noise  RNR 0122 2-CD). This one has long extended free articulation for Gustaffson and band. His baritone sax and flute are out front nicely at times but he is as, or even more active throughout with his own live electronics. The well known artist Merzbow (Masami Akita) gives us his usual highly evolved noise electronics and with Matts additional percussion., Finally Balazs Pandi gives us a gradually unfolding blanket of bash on drums and percussion. It has some of the essence, that pioneering vibe heard decades ago the early electronics groups like Il Gruppo amd Musica Electronica Viva. It is still way ahead and not perhaps for everybody with ears. It takes a few listens perhaps before you start working to an understanding of what they do here.

The whole is an extraordinary, long unfolding and a truly orchestra blend of extreme electronics and band with dynamics that keeps evolving and growing until you want to shout at the squirrels. Well I do anyway.

Nicely nuanced and well recommended. Listen here on the BandCamp Site and order if you like: https://matsgustafsson.bandcamp.com/album/cuts-open

Paul Van Gysegem Quartet, Square Talks

 

What yearly developments new and serious music manages to achieve are not always the sort of thing you hear about in the mass media these days. This blog page tries to cover as big a swatch of what's new as possible. Today is no exception with a release worth hearing and consideration, namely the Belgian  New Free Jazz ensemble known as the Paul Van Gysegem Quintet and their live album  Square Talks (el Negocita Records eNR079, Bandcamp).

It is an absorbing, very successful effort from start to finish. All features a nicely adventurous Quintet of Paul Van Gysegem on double bass, Cel Overberghe on tenor and soprano sax, Patrick De Groote on trumpet and flugelhorn, Erik Vermeulen on piano, and Marek Patrman on drums and for one selection a second trumpet.

The open improvisational game plan is to listen to one another and create a mutually inventive set of interactions. This has passion but also a kind of free logic that rings true with nicely tempered contributions from all concerned. There is a specially lucid and thoroughgoing vision to this music that perhaps identifies it as European more so than not, surely in its vocabulary at any rate. At the same time it is not in any way a gratuitous or hasty sort of bundle so much as it is a very successful effort to thrive in a free improvisational state.

Listen and order here: https://elnegocito.bandcamp.com/album/square-talks

Recommended heartily. Not to be missed if you seek the new edges of jazz freedom.

Jacob Chung, Epistle

 

Tenor Sax Hard Bop and Postbop adept Jacob Chung scores big with his Quintet and this most attractive set entitled  Epistle (Three Pines Records) which came out in late 2021 but seemingly stands the temporal test and gladly so as far as I am concerned. So this comes to us as a tight knit and swinging tenor-trumpet-piano-bass-drums unit that includes Christian Antonacci, Felix Fox-Pappas, Thomas Hainbuch, Petros Anagnostakos in a lively album of hard charging Postboppers out of the Blue Note mould of New-Thing-Eve offerings, updated with a new cast of swinging cats.

All six numbers have a sort of anatomically correct bearing and a goodly hipsonic attack. It reminds me obliquely of the Lee Morgan Blue Note middle period album I found  at the Sam Goody Sale Annex  in midtown Manhattan when I was a budding listener in my adolescence years ago. Not that this album is a ringer for that one in any way, but it could have been in that same bin and would not have alarmed me as being out of place were I to have somehow heard it back then. I only set the scene to give you a context for this music. It assuredly refers back to those heady days of the music yet holds its own as a first-tier tenor vehicle to appreciate whether you go back to earlier days or do not.

One thing is certain. Jacob Chung is a tenor star to watch. Meanwhile he has a great sound, motility facility and the guy could be one of keys in the action avenues of Jazz soloing in the years to come,

It is a good bet and I happily recommend it to you. For some additional considerations listen to him on some select videos and such. https://jacobchungmusic.com/

Amjad Ali Khan, Music for Hope

 

If there are good musical ideas out there, I hope someone will hip me to them. In the old days I might frequent a hip record store and maybe as I went in there was a new Don Cherry album on, and I got it musically, so I got it! Nowadays someone might send me a review copy in the mail. So that latter happened happily with Amjad Ali Khan and his album Music for Hope (Zoho ZM202207).

This is sarod master Amjad Aki Khan/s good idea of pairing himself and his two sarod playing disciple sons Ayaan Ali  Bangash and Amaan Ali Bangash with Chinese Pipa  virtuoso Wu Man and Indian-Mideast-Asian drum specialist Shane Shanahan. All get together to play music with compositional and rhythmic frameworks primary of Hindustani origins but then free wheeling improvisations that allow each instrumentalist personal leeway. And so truly we experience a synergy between North Indian and Classical Chinese commonalities.

The album clocks in at 35 minutes of pungent compositional improvs that thanks to all concerned truly punches in for a genuine fusion of two local art brilliances.

It is an album that actually is what it purports to be and in very winning ways. Nice compositions, vital improvisations. So do not miss it! Here is a taste of the music and a little more about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_Y0vf9KXMY

Sara Caswell, The Way to You

 

Every so often I catch up with somebody who I have missed in the years of isolation I have endured when some significant miles away from the urban centers of Jazz. Happily I have recently connected with such a luminary in violinist-Jazz composer Sara Caswell and her quartet in her first outing as a leader in more than 17 years. It is the album entitled The Way to You (Anzic Records ANZ-0085-02) and I am very glad to have gotten to know it in the last few weeks.

If you go back a few years in your listening it might strike a resonance in you if I say that this music reminds me nicely of the sort of lyrical melodic jazz that was practised by Gary Burton in his fertile middle period with Steve Swallow, Keith Jarrett, Sam Brown, violinist Richard Green, etc. Then also some of the more memorable early ECM records by Eberhard Weber come to mind as well. Sara and her tight-loose sympathetic quartet bring you significant performative elements that set off the songful niceties of Sara's pieces with a Jazz immediacy that gives them vibrant life.

Sara's violin understandably is a central component of it all and a marvelous voice for Jazz it is. She handles the written-melodic and the improvised passages with a special ease and beauty that sets her apart. But then a critical voice in it all too is electric guitarist Jesse Lewis in a sport of post-Friswellian post-Abercrombie-like universe makes for especially attractive ballsy lyrical flow soloing throughout. Ike Sturm is a marvelously anchoring bass component who can give us a lovely solo too without hesitation. Drummer Jared Schonig has a loose Swing-Rock feel that sets each piece apart and breathes periodic charm always. Finally on about half of the numbers here the quartet is joined by vibist virtuoso Chris Dingman to give us that classic Rock-Jazz interwovenness we have so happily heard in years gone by on Burton albums, etc.The program of originals and nicely turned cover arrangements stand out as terrific vehicles for Sara and the artists to shine forth.

When it comes to this kind of expressive  harmonically impressive fare I must say it is the very nicest sort of music in this style that I have heard in years. Very recommended.