Loop 2.4.3, Time-Machine Music

Loop 2.4.3 is the name of the "entity" devoted to performing the music of Thomas Kozumplik. Time-Machine Music (Music Starts from Silence 06) is the latest album. It is an electro-acoustic reconfiguring of a percussion ensemble of Chinese tom-toms, Indian bells, crotales, log drums, tambourim, bass drum, percussion sample pad, tape echo, delay, marimba, vibraphone, Thai gongs, piano, Wurlitzer, steel drum, kalimba and vocals. The composer plays all of these instruments and uses samples to extend the sounds, and then there is a reworking via digital means.

The music takes advantage of looping to create rhythmic cycles that mesmerize in a quasi-minimalist way while maintaining a linear rhythmic thrust that allows for continued development and variation. There are parts that use samples to sound akin to contemporary tracking in hip-hop worlds, though different in kind. Other parts seem more percussion-ensemble oriented.

All of it retains your interest and does not follow any typical road map. What do you call it? Loop 2.4.3. It will appeal to those who like contemporary sounds with percussive grooves and to the generally adventurous. Give this one a listen!

David Berkman, Old Friends and New Friends

This post is about a new album made by contemporary jazz pianist songsmith David Berkman, Old Friends and New Friends (Palmetto 2177). He is no new kid on the block and this is not his first album by any means. So we aren't about heralding a rookie here, but rather recognizing the plentiful musicianship of an original and his band, in a reunion of artist Berkman and label-owner Matt Balitsaris after a number of years going separate ways. And it's also about connecting with old musician friends and new ones, the old being drummer Brian Blade, the new soprano-tenorist Dayna Stephens, among others.

When you hook up with new friends-associates and at the same time reunite with older ones it can have a sort of creative frisson, in my experience, and that quality comes out on this album. There is excitement, the creative juices flow, there are some excellent compositions and a high level of improvisational attainment. That's what I hear.

Who is the band? It is a sextet of David of course on piano, the aforementioned Brian Blade and Dayna Stephens, then Billy Drewes on alto and soprano, Adam Kolker on soprano, alto, tenor, clarinet and bass clarinet, and Linda Oh on contrabass.

Nine numbers grace the program, changes-oriented contemporary compositions with a flair. There is a wealth of soloists that David generously gives space to, so we do get his very together piano playing in solo but also lots of sax-reed solo space and some room for Linda Oh as a real soloist. Yes, and Brian takes a fine drum solo, too. The rhythm team of Berkman-Oh-Blade has torque and a presence that puts everything in place. Listen to them alone and you get a good deal to hear. Then the three sax tandem allows for a very full sound in the head arrangements as well as some very hip three-way improvising and then distinguished individual soloing styles as well.

The beauty and fine craftsmanship of the compositions-arrangements put this music in a zone where you know you are hearing new, exemplary jazz. They have enough of a quirkiness and contemporary quality that it all feels fresh. But then everybody in the sextet has plenty of chances to shine individually and collectively.

Berkman's lyrically post-bop piano playing is there at all times, and that too makes of this a special thing, perhaps definitively so.

Put all that together and you get one very fine album. Something to come back to often with increasing understanding. It has of it a potential classic in the mainstream zone, a classic of our time. That would need a decade or so to confirm. In the meantime it is a listen that will have no shortage of inspiration. Yes, do try and hear it. Buy it! Play it for your friends. It has that sort of infectiousness about it that one feels like spreading the word!

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.

Dre Hocevar Trio, Coding of Evidentiality

Slovenian-born drummer Dre Hocevar, 26 years of age at the time of the current recording, has sat at the feet of the masters, Michael Carvin, Ralph Peterson, and Marcus Gilmore as well as Reggie Workman, Hal Galper, Joe Morris and Steve Lehman. He has absorbed some of their spirit and gives us more than a little something of himself on this album of the Dre Hocevar Trio, Coding of Evidentiality (Clean Feed 325).

It is not at all typical as a "drummer's album," but maybe that is true much of the time these days. In this case it is very much a group effort, with trio mates pianist Bram de Looze and cellist Lester St. Louis forming with Dre an interlocking wholeness, aided for one cut by the electronics of Sam Pluta.

It is music firmly in the realm of new music/"free jazz" sonics, with some compositional frameworks as jumping off points apparently, though it all comes across as spontaneous as it definitely is.

What we get on this program is an intricate series of improvisations in three-way dialog (or four) that show very much a fluid sense of line and texture, a virtuosity of intent and a mastery of "free" vocabulary. It all gels in seven very focused pieces.

It is exemplary trio ensemble work today. There is an ease of expression and a fundamental sense of gesture and suchness (if you will pardon the term) that sets this trio apart from just good avant. They seem to project a clarity of purpose as you listen, and once you hear it all several times that clarity remains and becomes something you can almost physically grasp.

And so maybe that's enough to say for now. If you dig the piano trio in an advanced modern realm this is an excellent example of what it can be today.

Listen to this! And not once. . . a few times. Then see what you think. Very recommended.

Nick Finzer, The Chase

The trombone in jazz has a rich legacy. Time does not stand still for either the instrument or the music, of course. Nick Finzer is a vibrant new trombonist on the scene. We can hear what he is up to on his recent second album, The Chase (Origin 82695).

The album gives plenty of space to Finzer's noteful-soulful approach, ten of his originals and the fine band assembled for the date. Nick brings in five associates for this sextet, all who have had a close association with the bandleader and work very well together. They are Lucas Pino on tenor and bass clarinet, Alex Wintz on electric guitar, Glenn Zaleski on piano, Dave Baron, bass, and Jimmy MacBride on drums.

The frontline all have something to say as soloists, the rhythm section swings mightily, and the Finzer originals and arrangements have that sort of Blue Note bop-and-after inflection but cover new ground and set the stage well. It's a testament to Finzer's bandleading acumen and his prowess as a soloist.

Nick studied with Wycliffe Gordon, got advanced degrees from the Eastman School of Music and Julliard, and played in Truesdale's Gil Evans Project, Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Frank Wess, Lew Tabackin, Frank Kimbrough and others.

He is an excellent exponent of the bop-and-after trombone, with an acuity, a sense of sound and noting that put him among the elite of mainstream trombonists and an emerging original voice in his own light.

The music to be heard on the album is, as they used to say, a solid gas. It is serious business, serious changes-based music with excellent trombonista flourish. And the band is something else, too. Highly recommended.

Casa Futuro, Pedro Sousa, Johan Berthling, Gabriel Ferrandini

Casa Futuro (Clean Feed 334)? Well, yes indeed. All of us old enough lived through the promise of a future that would somehow be utopian, modular, modern in the fullest sense of the word. And then the future came, almost as a parody of that future, with zombies walking the earth staring at their cell phones for what? The ad that reminds them to stop at a burger place who paid for the recommendation? One of my friends the last time I saw him before he died interrupted his what turned out to be last meeting by finding on his cell phone a suggestion to go to a burger place down the street. Eat one before you die. You must fulfill your destiny on planet earth. Leave your friends now and go consume!

Just about everybody I run into on the street, they are madly texting god-knows-what to god-knows-who as they traverse through a world that no longer is here-and-now, but rather there-in-then? But hey, there's water on Mars so everything may be coming about after all, our long dead Martian brethren may speak to us out of the remains of their civilization, who can say? Meanwhile everybody goes somewhere in order to capture their selfie with the "there" as backdrop. So where ARE we, really?

Casa Futuro reminds us that the future has been here for many years, even though most people do not recognize its existence. The avant garde in architecture, art and music has ever posited that future. And the trio whose album we contemplate today is firmly attached to the tradition of that future in the "jazz" realm, as first experienced so shockingly (for those who listened) in the '60s free jazz, new thing movement.

Pedro Sousa (tenor sax, etc.), Johan Berthling (double bass) and Gabriel Ferrandini (drums) give us some worthwhile free sounds from across the pond (for those reading this in the States), from Portugal, where things are still hopping, a center for modernity as is New York, Chicago, Berlin and a good deal of other places, though ironically most folks out there don't know a thing about it much.

Anyway as we press forward this is a trio that comes out of the "new jazz" convincingly and movingly. It's all about the three-way improvisations that make of the trio a weighted, multi-beinged entity. Pedro shouts out incantations and epithets that follow and expand the footprints of the multi-timbred saxophonists like Ayler and Shepp, Trane and Pharoah, all those initiatory cats that heard Ornette's cry and responded with cries of their own. Pedro Sousa has that in him and he brings out his own version nicely. It is a language of sorts after all, and he speaks it well.

Key to the sound of the music is Pedro's multi-phonic approach and its interactions with multiphonic and wooden toned bass excursions by Johan. Johan too builds from the free roots of the tradition--of Silva, Grimes, Parker, and all the pioneering avant bassists who have given us the sounds and the possibility of new sounds to come. Johan has heard them, internalized them and made something of his own from them.

Drummer Gabriel works out of the new thing tradition too, with the open stance Murray, Graves, Ali, Altschul and the others put forward in the first period of freetime playing. He too has carved a domain of his own out of the tradition of the future.

So there are three improvised segments to be heard on this album, with plenty of nicely imaginative freeplay to be heard from three instrumentalists any avant player of notes would be happy, I'd imagine. to join together with. As it is the trio fills our sonic airspace quite effectively without the assistance of others. They are a casa futuro unto themselves.

The Beats were sometimes obsessed with the need to be instantaneously in the now. The New Thing wanted to create the same in terms of sound. Our cell phone texting brethren may think they are also virtually present in "nowness," but it is not direct. This music IS.

And so this is a fine album, I am saying in so many words. The future may indeed be coming, but in the meantime we have good examples of its intimations in music such as this. Hear it if you can!

Satoko Fujii Orchestra Berlin, Ichigo Ichie

From composer-pianist Satoko Fujii comes the initial recording of her first European-based big band, Satoko Fujii Orchestra Berlin. Ichigo Ichie (Libra 212-037) features the band giving us high spirited readings of the long title piece (in four parts) and a 15-minute rendering of "ABCD." The orchestra is a logical outgrowth of Satoko and husband Matsuki Tamura's move to Berlin in 2011.

Satoko on piano is joined by 11 musicians, including Matsuki Tamura and two others on trumpets, Matthias Schubert and Gebhard Ullmann on tenor saxes, plus baritone, trombone, guitar, bass and two drummers (Michael Griener and Peter Orins).

"Ichigo Ichie" means "once in a lifetime." Satoko composed it for the Chicago Jazz Festival in 2013 and it receives an excellent performance here for the recorded premiere. It is filled with rousing tutti passages and improvised interludes for various instruments alone or in varying combinations.

"ABCD" continues Satoko's special avant jazz approach. The parts were written and numbered. On the day of performance each member selects at will one of the numbered parts, so that each performance will have a maximal spontaneity and freshness, as one can readily hear in the version recorded for this album.

If you already know Fujii's large-ensemble music, this music very much is a continuation of it. It is excellent at any rate, filled with energy and zest, good conceptual thinking and very spirited playing from all concerned.

It is one of her very best. So if you cannot go for the complete set of 70-plus albums she has recorded (!), certainly include this one in your library. It moves along well and has the special total wash of sound that Satoko's large band recordings have in abundance. A great band, too!