Bob Gluck, Aruan Ortiz, Textures and Pulsations

Put together two very accomplished pianist-improvisers-composers, supplement their arsenal with computer and Moog extensions and turn them loose. If the two involved are Bob Gluck and Aruan Ortiz, Textures and Pulsations (Ictus 167) is the very satisfying, adventurous result.

What transpired in concert that day was a live set of collaborations, no overdubs, Bob with a Moog, Aruan a laptop, both at the piano and both with some very good ideas.

This is extended music that harnesses fertile improvisational imaginations to the end of a new music, jazz inflected, thoughtfully electrified, avant but more freely structured than purely free in some ultimate sense. That means there are seemingly spontaneous motives that emerge, then ascend to a full performative height through the use of samples, echo, electronic enhancement and synthesizer coloration.

There are cyclical ideas (the pulsations) joined by a wide-ranging harmonic-melodic creativity and a well-chosen palette of sound colors (the textures).

What especially impresses me about the duet is the natural way the ideas flow in any given piece. It doesn't feel like the two artists are working up a sweat to come up with the good-idea music, yet the meeting nonetheless provides a forum for some excellent two-peopled invention to take place. And it does. It is not easy to make difficult-to-make music seem easy. But they do. And that is quite an achievement.

Gluck and Ortiz are at the top of their game on this session. The electronics and piano playing fit together happily and in the end some fascinating music comes about. It is an advanced music that comes out of the meeting, yet it has a very communicative, accessible, listener-friendly side to it.

This is one of the most successful melds of pianistic imagination and live electronic vivacity that I've had the pleasure to hear. It manages to unify elements of jazz, rhythmic pulse and advanced spontaneous composition in ways that are wholly original. Maestros Gluck and Ortiz find each niche without fail and develop it with ear-enriching, musically satisfying intelligence. You must hear this one!

Samuel Blaser Quartet, As the Sea

Samuel Blaser is fairly young, a relative newcomer to the jazz scene. Yet his trombone playing has depth, an expressive vocabulary that reflects and makes personal the tradition--from Ory to Mangelsdorff.

This and much more can be experienced on his new CD, As the Sea (Hatology). The music is in four parts. Part one is loosely based on, as I understand it, a tuba obbligato from Wagner's Siegfried; part four makes use of the Indian musico-rhythmic concept of the tihai. Beyond that this is excellent free-wheeling acoustic-electric improvisation with a top-gear band: Blaser, Marc Ducret on electric guitar, Banz Oester on acoustic bass and Gerald Cleaver on drums.

The four parts hang together as a suite. The performance was recorded live at a jazz club in Belgium and the sort of immediacy you can get in such a situation is a big factor on the date.

There are interesting written parts that smoothly segue into the improvisations. The nature of the whole is a kind of free jazz with some rock heft to it. Everybody sounds great. Gerald Cleaver gives everything a distinctive, well-drummed thrust, Banz Oester is rock solid, Marc Ducret sounds devastatingly on top with a very noteful, soulful, avantly well-connect free attack, as good as ever, and Samuel shows us he's a player that needs to be heard, someone with a future in the music, but already a treat to hear.

This is fine music, electric avantdom with a real kick. Highly recommended.

Eric Zinman, Rocks in the Sea

Eric Zinman, pianist of the wider spectrum of possibilities in improvisation, has not exactly basked in the limelight of critical and popular attention in recent years, and yet there is a concentrated consistency of intelligent expression in his music. The same could be said of flute and reedman Mario Rechtern. When the two decided to put their heads together on a somewhat lengthy tone-poem composition-improvisation, there was a compatibility of outlooks that made it a most sensible proposition.

They assembled a quartet by adding the very sympathetic and articulate players Benjamin Duboc on acoustic bass and Didier Lasserre on drums. The four set to work expressing the collaborative idea in a recording session in Paris, 2009. The results are here for us to explore and appreciate on the recently released CD Rocks in the Sea (Cadence Jazz 1225).

Very cohesive "free" playing is the order of the day, a continuous 45-or-so minute performance that brings a beautiful four-way interaction into being. The music explores avenues of introspection and energy in turn, and in the end one is left with the feeling of having traveled some personal distance, of having embarked on a journey in music that somehow captures a little of life the way it is lived today. Or at least that's how it felt for me.

It's a free-flowing tour de force with Eric playing his version of an all-over piano style of energy and emotional precision, with Mario unleashing a barrage of heat, especially on the baritone, and with the rhythm section giving free-thrusting propulsion.

This is music that does not compromise or back down. Avant improv aficionados will take readily to the music. It's a good way to experience the music of Eric Zinman and Mario Rechtern. It is a good addition to anyone's free improv library.

Fire Music, Volume One, An Anthology of Classic ESP Avant Jazz

After Ornette Coleman sounded the clarion blast of freedom in jazz in the late '50s-early '60s, others began to enter the fray. A new music rapidly evolved, mostly out of New York. By around 1966 it was in full bloom.

ESP Records was there to record many of its important participants, from Ornette himself to many if not most of the seminal players of that decade.

For those who don't have the time or space to get all the important releases of the label in this vein, ESP has wisely put together an anthology of some of the highlights: Fire Music, Vol. 1 (ESP). To celebrate their 50th Anniversary year, ESP looks back to some of what put the label on the map in the first place and in the process covers the new thing jazz in its original, full-blown first wave. The music startled many at the time and this collection gives you the undiluted, heady version in all its glory. Or a bit of it anyway.

Since this is volume one and no doubt there will be volumes two and etc., this is not the place to quibble with the initial selection. It is a goodly assortment of firey free jazz played by well- and lesser-known denizens: Albert Ayler, of course, Frank Wright, Sunny Murray, the rather obscure Norman Howard (related to Noah?), John Tchicai, Roswell Rudd, Paul Bley, Don Cherry, Sonny Simmons and Sun Ra.

I've lived with the complete albums in just about every instance for many years and know them by heart, mostly. So I have no idea what someone new to this music will hear if they buy the anthology. Dedicated avant fans who have had the time to amass a collection probably will have most or all of these disks already. The new folks are in for a learning-curve experience. It's something you'll take to naturally and then grow into or you won't. I do think that the desire for the "new" is what puts you halfway there.

Those who make that effort are in for a world of historic fire, so to speak. There is lots of energy here, lots of expression, lots of iconoclastic wall tumbling.

And I say, "yeah!"

Asuka Kakitani Jazz Orchestra, Bloom

If spring comes, or I should rather say when spring really comes, in the weather on in the mind, there is music for it. Or any other time, for that matter. I allude to Asuka Kakitani and her Jazz Orchestra, and their first, somewhat startlingly fresh inaugural album Bloom (19/8 Records 1025).

Asuka makes her own sort of jazz composition, mainstream but not Basie/Jones-Lewis derived, lyrical, tonally full and original. The band is well-suited for her music, well rehearsed and sounding beautiful. There are folks like John O'Gallagher on sax, Jacob Garchik on trombone, Sara Serpa on vocals, often a wordless part of the ensemble, and other excellent players.

The music is sometimes inclined toward full-block tutti writing but there are sectional moments as well. There are times when she shows a little of her Japanese roots. But at all times Asuka Kakitani shows a sure hand writing for a large band, a melodic knack, a dramatic sense.

Bloom is what Ms. Kakitani is doing. She is showing herself as a beautiful musical flower. And she is giving us some very lovely new big band compositions. This is a happy thing!

Barry Altschul, the 3Dom Factor

If Barry Altschul was less present in the past few decades than one might have hoped, he is most assuredly back. At age 70 he has been sounding great, gigging with important cats new and older, and now he has a new solo album, his first in many years.

The 3Dom Factor (TUM 032) pits Barry as bandleader with a lively trio of Joe Fonda on double bass and Jon Irabagon on tenor in a program of Barry's compositions, many of which are well-known from previous Altschul band recordings, some new, and one classic Carla Bley piece. All get new life on this disk.

This is a trio that works together very nicely. Joe Fonda is a presence whose playing has the sort of dynamic virtuoso, hitting-it quality Barry always responds to in a bassist. Jon Irabagon has been gigging and recording with Barry over the last few years, and quite productively so. He is also the sax presence in Mostly Other People Do the Killing and Jon Lundbom's Big Five Chord, two highly acclaimed outfits of today. Jon plays with a full grasp of the history of music, has the humor of a Sonny Rollins, and comes across freely with lots of imagination and ability. He is a tenor of today, destined one hopes for many great things to come.

Put the three together with these tunes and you have some damned fine music. Barry has all the fire and drive of yesterday and the ability to swing as mightily as ever while still being a primary innovative force in imaginative and creative free drumming.

The album is a joy!

Brian Groder, Tonino Miano, FluiDensity

Brian Groder, trumpet, and Tonio Miano, piano, carve out an improvisational niche on FluiDensity (Latham-Impressus CD) that is a smart mix of avant jazz and new music. In a series of freely flowing but focused duets they show a mastery of a tumbling, widely harmonic, melodically rich tonal invention.

Brian Groder plays a singular trumpet. He can be dense, soulful, technically diverse and melodically pristine, all in one gulp, and that he is on these recordings. Tonio Miano makes the perfect foil for Brian on piano. He has some of the forward momentum of a Cecil Taylor but his cascades are musically distinct. He is all over the place on the instrument but at the same time has ideas in his phrasings that sound as if they could be composed, in that they have a logical, speaking component, so to say.

There are parts that do indicate either extraordinary telepathic synchronicities or pre-planned motifs. They could be either and that says much of the flow of the music here. On "Pinion" they do specifically reference musical quotations from a Frederic Rzewski piano composition. Otherwise it's a music of free thought, or so it sounds.

If you are looking for free but very meaty content in a trumpet-piano duet set, look no further. This one is a model of what two fine players can come up with in the course of a recording session.

Excellent!