Jean-Marc Foussat & Les Autres, Alternative Oblique

Today's program covers so vast a terrain that I find myself gathering my thoughts even as I begin to write. It is by Jean-Marc Foussat & Les Autres, a four-CD set entitled Alternative Oblique (improvising beings ib38). So what is it? It is an extraordinary gathering of musical examples of an avant sort, centered around Jean-Marc Foussat and some of the music he has made with self and "others" from 1973 to 2015.

As many readers may know (especially those who read my blogs regularly) Maestro Foussat is one of the principal practitioners of electronics & electro-acoustics on the free music scene in Europe these days, a voice of distinction in the live arena for the most part with a very creative flair that he applies to synths and other means to create tone-noise textures that often blend with live free musicians for potent and varied mixes.

This album set is a kind of retrospective, a biography in sound, of some of the music he has made over the years, I believe all of it unreleased. We begin with Jean-Marc on home-made guitar in a power trio of avant garage sorts, and experience him with various groupings that include his guitar and electronics for some raw avant adventure. In the course of this adventure we hear some of his solo electronic works, and a good deal of highly electric zonings in a shifting array of local free and free-rockers. In the end we get some recent music making with Foussat on synths and an array of avant totems along with lesser-knowns in a varied ensemble-oriented outer jazz and new music hybrid. So there are important appearances by Joe McPhee, Paul Lovens, Makoto Sato and others.

There is so much music here that a summary is difficult. There are moments of quasi art brut, raw, primal rock and beyond. And then there are essays in pure noise-sound. Then there is avant free ensemble music of the improv variety.

Altogether the listener has much work to do in absorbing the sheer infinity of possibilities. Some of it is intentionally crude, garage like, but there is a good deal that has a free sophistication as well.

Not all of it is in the masterpiece vein, but it all pushes the envelope as to what is "proper" to the avant garde at the same time as it defines what that is and has been for Jean-Marc Foussat. Some may find some of this rough going, "difficult" in various ways, but if you open yourself up you may well find yourself captivated with the sounds, the rigor, the looseness, the trajectory and even the intensive experimental foundering-floundering that some of the early work intentionally puts forward.

Much of it is exceptional in ways perhaps only Foussat can be right now. It all has that joy of underground spirit that brought many of us to the avant in earlier days. Now that does not mean that absolutely everybody will like all of it. I find it bracing but best served in single-CD doses in a sitting. There is nothing the least bit routine in this music. If you don't like electronics this may not be for you. But if you do and would like to get a real grip on the Foussat universe, this is the dope!

Mike Pride, Listening Party

Mike Pride, as many readers will know, is one of the leading, innovative drummers on the contemporary jazz scene. He's made a first solo album, Listening Party (Akord/Subkulturni Azil) that conceptually has more to it than one might expect from a solo drum album. Sure, it shows us a very inventive approach to the drum set as free music, but it extends outward to sound poetry via various means--electronics, glockenspiel, practice pads, natural sounds, vocalizing and so forth.

Making the drums eminently musical...it is not easy to do. Of course Max Roach and Andrew Cyrille (and Baby Dodds) pioneered such things in the recorded realm as well as live. This is Mike's own take on what can be done.

He succeeds in creating music-sound event worlds that keep you expectant through the sheer spectrum of events, making a contemporary new-music-improvisatory series of gestures that provoke and satisfy.

This is music that you can appreciate even if you are not a drummer, though drummers of course will find this fascinating as well.

Mike Pride is a creative cat, for sure, and he shows us just how imaginative, creative, and innovative he is on Listening Party. It's serious but it is fun to hear, too!

Bravo, Mike!

Ozere, Finding Anyplace

This blog covers jazz as anybody reading it will know. But from time to time it covers other genres of interest, as yesterday's and today's post will attest.

Today, the band Ozere and their Finding Anyplace (self-released). It is a Canadian outfit that starts with the premise of a string-band instrumentation for a folk-country orientation. There is Jessica Deutsch on violin and vocals, Emily Rockarts on vocals, Adrian Gross on mandolin and acoustic and electric guitars, Lydia Munchinsky is on cello and background vocals, and Bret Higgins plays acoustic bass.

There are modern singer-songwriter string band songs to be heard here. They are quite good and the vocals are excellent. Then there are instrumental adventures that take folk fiddling and otherwise folk-country styles and make something modern of them. Ms. Deutsch plays violin in a convincingly post-fiddle fashion, but the rest of the band is excellent as well. There are also world music elements to be heard with guests on darbuka and bandir, etc., and that keeps you guessing for what is coming next in the best ways.

The memorable songs, the excellent folk vocalizing, and the band's very interesting arrangements carry the day.

I find after repeated listenings that Ozere has something very much of their own going. If you like a hybrid modern folk sound that retains a modern version of authenticity yet a contemporary knack for winsome songstering, this one will give you some very satisfying music.

Komitas, The Gurdjieff Ensemble, Levon Eskenian

The Gurdjeiff Ensemble of folk instruments under Levon Eskenian received a good deal of acclaim back in 2012 with their ECM release Music of G. I. Gurdjieff. They return with Komitas (ECM 2451), an album of "ethnographically authentic" versions of the music of Komitas Vardapet (1869-1935), considered a father figure of contemporary Armenian music.

The instrumentation of the ensemble is very much indigenous to traditional Armenia and its surrounds, with santur, folk oboe, oud, and such.

Komitas's music is very much appropriate for the treatment, as well as being ravishingly beautiful in itself. We get 18 brief pieces, played with care, zeal and striking sonance.

This is essential for its arrangements and its core Komitas repertoire. It is a must for those who love things Armenian and those who would in any case welcome a musical adventure of lasting value.

Highest recommendations for this one!

William Parker, Raining on the Moon, Great Spirit

The music of Great Spirit (AUM Fidelity 098) was recorded in 2007 (except for one song, recorded in 2012) by William Parker and the Raining on the Moon ensemble at the same time as the music of the earlier album Corn Meal Dance. I have yet to hear that one but this companion volume has a completeness and togetherness so that one feels no lack whatsoever.

It is a perfect congress of songs, vocals and instrumental brightness. Leena Conquest does the vocals and she sounds wonderful, soulful and swinging, committed and just right for the song lines. William Parker is on bass of course and sounds as ever busily foundational, a titan, a force on the contrabass in the ranks of the very best. Hamid Drake, as you can imagine, locks in with William to make a formidable tandem that moves the music into that undescribable nether zone where the music not only swings but also torques forward springingly.

Rob Brown on alto, Lewis Barnes, trumpet, and Eri Yamamoto on piano drive into the great spirit of the music with real musicality and soul. They accompany and solo exceptionally well.

And the songs, the songs, they have great memorability, depth and a lyric-poetic directness. It is about the pain, resolve and spirit-ecstasy of being black in an America that is ever-changing yet at times tragically never-changing.

It is all very beautiful, a monumental set for all involved. Surely this is some of the best vocal-song oriented jazz sets I have heard since the Millennium. It is superb.

Blaise Siwula, Luciano Troja, John Murchison, Beneath the Ritual

Today, the final volume of three recent releases by Blaise Siwula, this time a trio of reeds, piano and bass, Blaise, Luciano Troja and John Murchison, respectively. Twelve improvisational segments grace Beneath the Ritual (No Frills 0009).

This is open-ended free spontaneity in the "jazz" realm. It is a measured, subtle shifting of moods that throws light on the productive possibilities that these three together realize fruitfully.

Pianist Luciano Troja has internalized the history of the music to give out with his own freewheeling exploratory style somewhere in between the absolute iconoclasm of a Cecil Taylor and the more thorough structuralism of the inner-outness of someone like Chick Corea in his adventurous days. He straddles the jazz piano tradition and finds a way to be himself here.

Bassist John Murchison brings strength of purpose and anchorage to the ensemble. He is open-endedly lucid in response to the others when that seems the way and propulsively forward-moving at other times.

Blaise brings on his arsenal of alto, tenor, soprano and clarinet. If you sometimes hear traces of Barney Bigard or Jimmy Hamilton or even Sidney Bechet in the clarinet and soprano segments, it is because Blaise embodies the tradition at the same time as he subverts it and/or converts it to his own personal expressive style. In the end you hear a perpetual motion of inventiveness here with Blaise filled with great ideas and a mastery of tone and timbre as well as his own idiosyncratic notefulness. This is another great example of the mature Siwula at his best.

But needless to say the whole totality of three way outcomes are critical to this session. If, as been famously noted by Whitney Balliett, jazz is the "sound of surprise," it is also the sound of affirmation. The ideal consists of a kind of dialectic of the two melding together and continually mutating if you are to recognize the music as being within itself, first, and innovative outside of the typical combinations, second.

That we get that exceptionally well in Beneath the Ritual it is because Blaise, Luciano and John are attuned to a foundation as a place to spring forward from and transform endlessly so that in the end it is a new place to dwell within musically. It is Blaise Siwula once again in excellent form and a place where Troja and Murchison have equal say in where the inventiveness can go and does. It's a tribute to all three and a fine set! Recommended!

"Zingaro" Mitzlaff Viegas Rosso 4tet, Day One

More new avant improvisation from Portugal today. It is the 4tet of Carlos "Zingaro" (violin), Ulrich Mitzlaff (cello), Joao Pedro Viegas (bass clarinet, clarinet) and Alvaro Rosso (doublebass). The album is called Day One (JACC Records).

The first thing that struck me was how the three strings interplay with the bass clarinet or clarinet. This is busy round-robin improvisations with each player staking a claim to the whole but nearly always in a contrapuntal multi-voice setting. It is strikingly situated in a new music context with less of an obvious "jazz" element. But you can find some of that if you listen carefully.

The string trio plus reeds sound is what comes straight at you. Zingaro, Mitzlaff and Rosso give us a cohesive whole most inventive and impressive. Viegas adds his considerable ears and reed-voice to put it all together.

Zingaro comes across as the monster player he is; but then everybody seems to do exactly the right thing at the right time in such profusion that there seem to be endless possibilities. The album gives us eight events. As you listen you feel they could event productively for a great deal longer, into "Day Two," "Day Three," and so forth.

Day One is one of those sessions where everything comes together. The four are truly as one, a four-headed behemoth who takes the music in definite directions in time, consistently, variably and eloquently.

I am certainly not here to tell you what to think or what to like. But this is one I would definitely point to when asked about the current state of affairs in new music improvisation. There are no hindrances. Everyone flies in an instinctive formation, a kind of musical "V"! Hear this.