Linda Sharrock, Eric Zinman, Noah Rosen, Mario Rechtern, Acknowledgements

Linda Sharrock is back! Her double CD No is No has been getting good reviews from those disposed toward the outside music she embodies. I reviewed the album myself last December 8th here.

As a prelude or a postlude we also have her with piano and sax in another live recording from Paris on May 2013. It is a limited edition recording issued on JaZt Tapes (049). Acknowledgements, Not for Sale has some very volatile music, often the equal to her more expansive release, though more informal (she coughs for a second at the beginning, for example). Linda may not reach the screaming heights of No is No but she is very playful in mood and her cohorts play some inspiring free expressions that she brings out of them (and vice-versa).

Mario Rechtern smokes a heady fire on what sounds like a baritone. He is liquid and blazing, blowing his top as the beboppers used to say. The piano chair is occupied alternately by Eric Zinman and Noah Rosen, and they too are in a fine fettle.

It's stormy music of a very high order. It contains some fine fringe outsideness that those who revel in that will most definitely appreciate.

For more info and a link to get a copy go to http://www.janstrom.se/6.-recordings/6.3.-jazt-tapes-6267605

The Impossible, Ignition, The Unanswered Question

When my basically chronologically ordered queue piles unearth something from a while back, I sometimes have no idea how it chose to surface now. Not that the pile has a mind of its own (I hope not) but the stress and strain of getting through life blanks out the details. So when the trio known as the Impossible and their CD Ignition, The Unanswered Question (UHF-01) hit the top of the "to review" stack, I know I had heard it initially and liked it. Beyond that, zip.

The CD was recorded live in Brisbane last year, apparently came out last October, and here we are. Some things are worth the wait. As I played it the requisite times last week I remembered why I liked it. It is brash, thrashing free trio jazz from Sam O'Brien, alto, Mitch Green, acoustic bass, and Tony Irving, drums.

This has all the trappings of a DIY release. Simple graphics and production values, little info. The recording is quite reasonable and clear. It captures the trio in the throes of over-the-top spontaneity.

There is plenty of heat and frisson on this all-free two-part set. Sam O'Brien carries on throughout with some frenetic chromatic outbursts that are well-seconded by Mitch Green and especially drummer Irving.

Does this cover new territory, break new ground? Not really. But should we expect that out of every free jazz outing? No, not really. What saves this date from the dust bin is the uncompromising freedom. It will not change the world and there are others who have conquered free space with greater distinction, but for sheer abandon this one has something to offer.

It's perhaps for the free jazz completist more than anyone else. Nevertheless you have to admire the zeal with which they go about it! Tony Irving's drumming is classic bombast and virtuoso all the way. Sam O'Brien never lets up. Mitch Green thunders. You have to hand it to them for all that.

Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre Quartet, Musical Blessing

Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre left this earth this past November, after a long career dotted with important milestones and after garnering great respect from those who follow and make the new jazz music sometimes called "free".

He is gone but his recorded legacy remains for us to appreciate. One of his last recordings came out last year and shows him in good form. It is a quartet in his name and the title of the disk is Musical Blessing (CIMP 395).

Kalaparusha on tenor is joined by the acoustic basses of Michael Logan and Radu Ben Judah (aka Richard Radu Williams) and the drumming of the the prolific and percussively beautific Warren Smith.

It's a game combination that Smith particularly brings some strong, timely fire to, as you can depend upon. He is hard hitting, propulsive and creatively stoked throughout. The two bassists work well together and give considerable bottom drive to the pieces.

Kalaparusha sounds strong. After a bit of reed trouble that he works around well, he comes through with the sort of performance that made his reputation over the years. One thing Kalaparusha is not here and never was is a "lick" player. He creates his improvisations afresh every time out from the raw melodic-harmonic materials available to him, his interactions with the players on hand and the implications of the compositional materials that are put into play.

The disk contains a few somewhat unexpected touches--an impromptu version of Trane's "Impressions" and a mostly unaccompanied solo version of "The Very Thought of You," which Warren suggested Kalaparusha play in the manner he did when working his horn for subsistence on the NY subway--a sad reality and part of the reason he found himself caught as a new improviser in what he called a "starvation box". He is free of all that now. But we will miss him. We will remember him.

This disk is a fine tribute in its own way to his legacy. Kalaparusha puts himself out there like he always did, with no pretensions and just the love of playing to bring us to a good place. RIP, Kalaparusha.

Marilyn Lerner, Ken Filiano, Lou Grassi, Live in Madrid

When a music considered by most to be in the avant garde reaches a certain maturity, there usually is some sort of consensus among those practicing it as to what the language consists of, what has become standard operating procedure, that sort of thing. I am not sure that is the case today with the music ordinarily known as "free jazz". The music has license by its own definition to do whatever it sees fit at any given moment. One can of course group practitioners into various schools and some have done this, myself included at times. Yet the reality is at least at this point that "free" means there is free invention, that improvisation is a critical element, and that at least theoretically "anything goes". Of course there is nothing wrong with this. In fact it is a sign that the music is living, healthy, moving ahead.

I preface these comments to the album at hand today because my first reaction to it was, "oh, this is classically free piano trio music". Then I stopped myself. What can that mean? In any given point in the performances on this disk there are so many choices to be made by the three musicians collectively and individually that one could not say that the results are in any way predictable. And maybe that's crucial to what makes "free" music good.

What we have on hand is a recent disk, Live in Madrid (Cadence Jazz 1247). It involves Marilyn Lerner on piano, Ken Filiano on acoustic bass and Lou Grassi on drums. This is a well-recorded set they played live at a Musicalibre-sponsored 2012 Hurta Cordel Festival in January of that year.

There are three collective improvisations involved and they are by all definitions "free". The fact that each of the musicians are consummate masters of this musical zone of course has a great bearing on the results. You expect a certain level of interaction of all three in tandem; you expect solo moments where one of them steps forward, dynamic variations from quietude to rousing energetic fullness. You get all of that. Yet there is no real blueprint that an audience will have (if they know the music, anyway) about what should happen when.

What's especially good about this outing is just that. The three come together with highly inventive fare, each contributing in their own specific way whatever they deem goes together at any point. And it works, whether it's a full blown energy drive with each emerging from time to time with a riveting figure, then an equal sort of three way mix, then on again to someone coming a little forward to assert something else that stands apart, and so on.

The longish middle improvisation starts very quietly with a logic of bowed bass, malleted drums and inside-the-piano colors, gathers momentum with Marilyn emphasizing a repeating interval in her lower register that sets up freely articulated lines in the right hand while Lou's drums gather steam and Ken's bowing becomes more heated, switching to pizzicato while Lou switches to sticks and breaks out into a very busy, musical working of toms. This is what it's about. The arco solo that follows by Ken fits the sequence perfectly, too. And then it's on from there. It would mean virtually little if each musician did not have that inventive touch.

But of course they very much do. That's what makes this excellent "free jazz", a set that hangs together and builds excitement by the ecstasy of being in the moment. This is what musical creativity is about in the new improvisations today. Is it "classic" free jazz? In a way, yes, but not in any foreordained way. These three play what they hear and feel and the open form gives them all they need to place themselves in a state of continual invention.

So I would certainly recommend this one. Great trio sounds!

Psychotic Quartet, Cordyceps

Cordyceps (New Atlantis cassette and download NA-CAS-003) is the third recording of Psychotic Quartet. The group comprises trombonist Dan Blacksberg, violinist Katt Hernandez, bassist Evan Lipson, and percussionist Michael Evans. These are four musicians who bring a complexly spontaneous improv/new music perspective to playing "free".

All four play in different contexts outside of this quartet, but for this band engage in a kind of compositionally inspired outness, spontaneous composition, if you will have that phrase.

Throughout the course of the four segment performance they engage in a sort of four-way structure-building endeavor, almost as if four architects showed up at a site with various materials and, without any set plans, spontaneously set about putting up a building.

Needless to say in such an exercise there may be some moments where the windows are in question, or the roof may need rethinking, and so it is with Cordyceps. Not every moment is a gem of inspiration. Since it is never a question of living inside this structure those moments do not matter.

The sound of the band is distinct. Katt's violin work is acidic, etching lines with a pointedness that goes well with the burnished expressive blur of Blacksberg's trombone. Lipson and Evans get adventursome sound results that compliment the "front line".

After a number of listens, one begins to feel this outness as familiar, friendly, whimsical but also aggressive. And that is what I was left with. They map out their own world on this album, and the world is one it turns out you can live in happily, if you make the effort. If there's a bit of sharpness now and again, it's better than being flat. And in the context it all comes together with conviction and style.

Boris Hauf Sextet, Next Delirium, with Keefe Jackson and Jason Stein

Some music takes time to absorb. I don't always get it right away. The Boris Hauf Sextet and their Next Delusion (Clean Feed 238) was one of those. I suppose that is because it is a sextet of an unusual sort, doing things one doesn't expect.

It's three reeds--Boris Hauf (tenor, soprano), Keefe Jackson (tenor, contrabass clarinet) and Jason Stein (bass clarinet), the latter two especially known as important improvisers. And it's three drummers--Frank Rosaly, Steven Hess and Michael Hartman.

Improvisation is there throughout, and especially on the last track, but the overarching push is toward open compositional structures: long tones and chordal voicings, clicks and pops, multiple velocity jabs, and drums as color, and when they get going, as irresistibly anarchic barrages.

There's not a great deal of wind improvising in the traditional new jazz sense until the final section, where you get a cascade of three-horn energy blasts.

Once you understand the structural arch and compositional trajectory, you cease to expect something else and just sit back and let the sounds envelop you. And that for me was when I starting liking what I was hearing a good deal. It's an exercise in disciplined freedom. And it's very good!

Farewell Bill Dixon...Dixon with Exploding Star Orchestra, 2008

The great Bill Dixon is gone. I am late at putting my hand at a fitting memorial line or two. This is all I think I need to say: Bill Dixon never sounded like anybody else on trumpet and he never wrote a line that didn't have his indelible stylistic footprint squarely emblazoned upon it.

So we turn to one of his last recordings, Bill Dixon with Exploding Star Orchestra (Thrill Jockey 192). As I nabbed this as a download I as per the usual received the music with absolutely no information about it, which is fine for the pop hits of the day but terribly insulting to the artists who do creative music. So here is what I managed to gather about the music after that fact of downloading. It's a collaboration of Bill and Rob Mazurek's Exploding Star Orchestra, quite obviously. And it was recorded in 2008. It seems as if Mazurek was responsible for the compositions but even that wasn't clear on the key sites that had to do with promoting this release. I've gotten to know the Exploding Star through later recordings and it is a beautifully advanced large outfit with many of the leading lights of Chicago's new jazz, but I was unable to find a personel listing for this recording. No matter.

What's important is that the music is quite wonderful. Exploding Star is a fine free orchestra, the music is adventuresome and Bill Dixon plays every note with deliberation and personal conviction. I believe I read a review a while ago where the writer complained that he sounded like he was aging and tired. I think he sounds like Bill Dixon in his last years. I'd rather hear him in that stage of his career than 100 of today's players at the peak of their physical ability. Like the late paintings of Picasso or DeKooning, it is a last statement filled with meaning.

John Blum Astrogeny Quartet and Farewell Denis Charles

John Blum played piano on several cuts of Sunny Murray's excellent Perles Noires Eremite two-CD set. Beyond that his Astrogeny Quartet (Eremite 049) is my first exposure to his playing in depth.

The album has a classic free-new thing ring to it, thanks to all involved. William Parker centers the music with his usual very strong and personal approach. Denis Charles. a drummer who has not been given the recognition he deserves, fleshes out the freetime barrage with shifts in emphasis and a sonic control over his set that marks him one of the very best free drummers of his generation. (Not to mention, of course, the beautifully brittle staccato swinging he lent to early sessions by Cecil Taylor and the Steve Lacy-Roswell Rudd first edition group.)

Antonio Grippi positions well in the group as altoist (and alto clarinetist) in the firey tradition of others before him. He brings a vital life force to the ensemble's energy level. And as a clarinetist he stands out as someone with a bit of post-Redman originality. And then there's John Blum. He works out of the Cecil Taylor tradition to formulate his own dynamically turbulent piano. It's inventive and consistently stratus-seeking. The head compositions are a product of Grippi and Blum and certainly set things up well.

This was the band's only recording and comes out of the single gig they had (in 1998) before going their separate ways, seemingly temporarily. Unfortunately this was to be Denis Charles last New York recording, and he died unexpectedly not long after. So in a way this is a Denis Charles memorial as well as a rare look at an extremely short-lived line-up.

Ultimately it has some excellent spontaneously free playing in the best tradition. William Parker and Denis Charles form and extraordinarily driving rhythm team and the Grippi-Blum front line head out to a high place and stay there for the duration.

This is a recording that wears well on the ears. In fact the more you listen, the better it comes together in your head. The level of intensity is not perhaps for everybody, but those who respond to a whirlwind energy session will most definitely dig what happened on that gig.

And so long Denis. We miss you.

William Hooker Duets with Thomas Chapin! "Crossing Points" Documents the Convergence.

I have a friend who is dedicated to the music. He prides himself on NOT being a collector, of not making a fetish out of owning thousands upon thousands of recordings to line up in long rows and nod knowingly about the music when guests arrive. "Yes, you see I own all this music, so you know that I know all about it." He doesn't imply that. He rejects it. He is in the music for the music. Yet his likes and dislikes are a matter of importance to him. Great importance. One day he told me, "You know, I've had enough of William Hooker." And that was that. I never got a bead on exactly why he'd had enough. And that's his business. Fact is, William Hooker is a drummer who does not hang back. He is a mainstay in the school of bash and burn. He lets fly and he does it in ways that are very free, varied, and if you don't respond to the style, very in-your-face.

I happen to be someone who's liked out-front drummers all throughout my experience of the music. They bring energy to the gig, they bring fire, they cajole soloists onward to things they might not do otherwise. Sure, there are other ways of playing. But for those dates where I detect a kind of suppression of the drummer and his dynamic, I feel uneasy. Anyway I bring my friend up as someone who may not always go in for the bashing sort of drumming. And that's fine.

And so we segue to the music today, a two-LP or one-CD offering featuring the late Thomas Chapin (mostly on alto) intersecting with William Hooker on a long duet. Crossing Points (No Business NBCD 28) shows a side of the late master Thomas Chapin that you saw less of in his own group's recordings: the possessed, supercharged, fire-breathing energy man.

This is a very free session and shows that plenty of synergy was going on on the bandstand that night in 1992. It's a tour de force honk out. You can get it for how it looks lined up with all your other CDs. Or you can get it for the music. Either way, it will be a good addition. I would recommend this as MUSIC more than room furnishings. But music like this needs your support whether you are listening to it or just collecting it. You are a great help to the small labels and avant artists trying to survive today if you BUY this. So get with that if you will.

Cylinder Plays New Jazz with A Thoughtful Smoulder

We met up with bassist Lisa Mezzacappa and her notable first album on the Gapplegate Guitar and Bass Blog (see link on this page). We cross paths with her again today, this time with the group Cylinder (Clean Feed 219). This, as the liner notes tell us, is a San Francisco-based cooperative group. The players share the composition duties, and the compositions form interesting and substantial frameworks for the freestyle improvisations on the album. It's a well-matched group of players. Darren Johnston plays a trumpet that has personality and imagination. He is a definite voice in development. Aram Shelton, now in Frisco by way of Chicago, plays alto, bass clarinet and clarinet with a wryness and large ears. Lisa is fully grounded on her instrument and bows or pizzes in ways that make one listen. Kjell Nordeson plies the drums freely and swingingly, depending.

A four-way dialog ensues throughout, which the compositions tend to encourage in the main. It comes out of their truly cooperative stance at any rate. This is "free" music but not primarily "energy" music so much, though there are moments. The improvisations tend to be somewhat more temperate rather than hotter; though there is fire, just not a great deal of the ecstatic rafter-raising some groups are known for. That is of course not necessarily a bad thing. In going in a kind of melody-line intertwining direction, the emphasis is more on the notes themselves than it is on the timbres. They are captured well on this disk and they come through with music that holds my interest throughout.

Recommended.

New York Encuentro: Blaise Siwula in Excellent Form with K. Itakura and R. Gilman-Opalsky

Now that what was once called the "new thing" is nearly 50 years young, we have a chance to assess what has gone on so far. Not today, however, since as I write this New Jersey is headed toward 100-plus-degree weather and my office is rapidly becoming an oven with yours truly as the tuna casserole. Nevertheless there are substyles in "free" improv that are well marked out and players are working within the various parameters with increasing economy of expression and a kind of certainty years of experimentation and musically genetic drift have made possible.

The trio of Katsuyuki Itakura, piano, Blaise Siwula, alto and tenor saxes, and Richard Gilman-Opalsky on drums serves as a good example. New York Encuentro (No Frills Music 002) finds them in a free-blowing set that has the consistency of music by players who know where they are coming from, know where they want to be, and then get there.

Itakura comes out of the Cecil Taylor school of pianistic all-overness. He's quite good at keeping the lines and clusters coming. Gilman-Opalsky has the Sunny Murray-and-after freetime drumming down and interacts well with the others. Then there is Blaise Siwula. He has a way of his own that relates to what has gone before but does so in ways that are endlessly inventive. It's not so much a timbral sound sculpting that goes on with Blaise on this set, though he does of course have a sound. It's the way he keeps coming up with lines of interest, setting up a dialog especially with the piano, laying out line after line of musical improvisation with a lucidity of someone who knows what he is about...that is what makes New York Encuentro music well worth hearing.

Sunny Murray Meets Sonic Liberation Front On High Two CD

The student of the music we call jazz at some point must come to terms with the impact of the avant garde from the '60s onwards. Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, later John Coltrane, and the musicians who associated with him brought about a vast infusion of musical vocabulary and ways of speaking into improvisational practice. Looking back we can see that regardless of the rhetoric let lose in the years that followed, the innovations of these important artists have entered, in one way or another, into the music we hear today. It was a revolution in sound, in note combinations, in harmony, and in time. Sunny Murray was right there behind his drums from the very beginning, changing the function of his instrument from time keeping to time shaping, constructing beautifully loose melodies of rhythm that enabled soloists and ensembles to recreate more freely the relationship of note weaving to implied or actual pulse.

Sunny of course has continued on over the years, mostly with his own ensembles, making important music. On today's CD we find him in close collaboration with the Sonic Liberation Front [Sonic Liberation Front Meets Sunny Murray (High Two 027)] in a live session from 2002 and a studio follow-up from 2008.

This is bold and exciting new music that begins with the premise of pitting Sunny Murray's dynamic style against a battery of Afro and Afro-Latin hand drums. Joining them are Henry Lawson's tenor along with acoustic bass, cornet or trumpet, and in the 2002 session, alto sax.

It reminds a little at times of some of Archie Shepp's 1969 BYG sessions, where African percussion intertwined with jazz improvisation in a stimulating way. "Reminds" does not mean "imitates" however. The Sonic Liberation Front puts the hand percussion in motion in different ways and there is more of a give-and-take dialog going on with bass, percussion and Sunny's unique artistry. The horns play ensemble passages that further enrich the music mix, and freely solo on top of the complex of sounds.

It is a combination that works on every level--with abundant room for expansion, the development of an open-ended excitement and a truly AFRO-AMERICAN approach. A high point of the music is certainly the way the regularity of the percussion section gets a musical dialectic going with Sunny's expanded time sense. But it is a group sound, with important contributions from all in the heady mix of momentum and fire that develops.

Notch up another excellent outing for Sunny Murray. And for the Sonic Liberation Front. You get 69 minutes of adventure for your money. If that seems like a lot, break the listening session into two and the time will fly. Recommended.

David Mott's Latest and Best Unaccompanied Baritone Set "Dragonhorn"

David Mott, baritone sax. Up there in Canada. A real player. He's had one or two solo baritone recordings out. They are very good. The new one, Dragonhorn (MAE 013), I think is his very best.

With David's solo work, there is virtually always an energy component, motor repetition, sound color and structured improvisational ideas. What's generally true of his playing is particularly evident on this one.

He sometimes circular breathes while articulating particular repeating note patterns (a little bit inspired by late-period Trane), letting the embouchure and differences in blowing strength allow the horn to shift back and forth between registers and sometimes catch that space between the two registers where you get harmonics and overtone change. Roscoe Mitchell does that sometimes on his soprano or alto too, but David does not sound like him, partially because it's the baritone with its expanded space between registers where you can get more cross-talk and because David sounds and phrases differently. In any case you get a full disk of Maestro Mott exploring melodic ideas and the baritone horn, and it's quite well done. Zen baritone? Yes.

Very much recommended.

Bob Gluck's Exceptional Piano Trio Outing: "Returning"

Bob Gluck goes his own way. He is an excellent pianist, with harmonic and melodic ideas to spare. His recent Returning (FMR 292-0710) finds him in formidable company. Drummer Dean Sharp has the sensitivity and big ears to thrive in the intimate free-oriented trio setting. Michael Bisio has basso profundo status these days. He has become a major player (see my recent interview with him in All About Jazz), and for good reason. You have to have independent inventive prowess plus good team-interactivity to thrive in an open piano trio setting as a bassist now (and mostly always), and Michael surely has both.

Returning shows the integrity and artistic brilliance of those early Paul Bley trios, then affirms that this is the Bob Gluck Trio, with certain affinities, but with the compunction and talent to extend the forms and personalize them.

The level of playing has consistency. It is high throughout. The music can be forceful, or whisper to you. It can get a head of steam in the linear swing-zone, then turn around and head into space. The improvisations revel in thematic logic and yet remain open to spontaneity.

Gluck is a stylist of stature. The trio has six hands, and at least three feet (in the musical sense) and they are put magnificently to use here.

Highly recommended.

Laurence Cook and Eric Zinman Show Musical Vision in "Double Action" Duet CD

New-England based avant jazzmen Laurence Cook and Eric Zinman each have an impressive track record in improvisatory music. Laurence has played drums and percussion in a number of important ensembles over the years; Eric Zinman's pianism has been a central part of significant live and recorded dates.

For all that, one might nonetheless be unprepared for what happened when the two began working on a series of duets in 2009. The fruits of that collaboration can be heard on Double Action (Ayler 085). Eric plays on a Yamaha Stage Piano throughout; Laurence alternates between drums, percussion (including mallets) and a Casio keyboard. What you get with the increased timbral palette of this set-up is an almost orchestral ambiance. The two make maximal imaginative use of the wide variety of musical sounds available to create a series of sound poems, "free" yet the opposite of random; serious yet playful; self-determined yet almost selfless in their dedication to the ensemble whole. This is not your grandpop's bebop; it's not your dad's "free jazz" either, should you have had a free-jazz dad (I didn't, but I digress).

This is sound-color painting of an ingenious and musically stimulating sort. It has electronics and acoustics woven together in a fabric that dazzles with its colorful patterns yet can be "worn" frequently without aesthetic fatigue setting in. It is a tribute to their impressive musicality and imaginative timbral sensitivity. It is a bold statement of intent, a declaration of independence from rote repetition and an enslavened compulsion to repeat what has gone before.

So do I like this music, then? Yes, I most certainly do. If you are looking for something rather authentically "new" out there, Double Action is that. Bravo!

Blaise Siwula, Solo Tenor Sax, "Live in London"

How many solo saxophone records have I heard? A good many. Are they all wonderful? No. If the player is not imspired or comes to the date unprepared, it can be slow going for the listener. Happily that is not the case with Blaise Siwula's Live in London (No Frills Music 001).

It's from two separate live appearances in 2008. He switches to clarinet on one track and Alan Wilkinson joins him on the baritone for the final number.

What I find excellent is how Blaise creates differing spontaneous compositions (free playing, if you like) by concentrating on the rich possibilities that the tenor offers. Siwula channels the big, timbrally complex sound worlds. Like Ayler and the Texas tenors, Blaise Siwula gets a sound that has wide expressive impact. Yet he doesn't really sound like those players because he has worked through his own take on the sounds.

It's free saxology from the nether regions of the land of Wail. And it's about as good an example as I've heard in a few years. Just as Blaise and Alan Wilkerson go out with a madcap flourish on the final number, you should do the same. Go out and get this--or Google Blaise and find a way to order it. But don't expect toe tapping. Do expect to set your MIND tapping.

Tony Malaby's Tamarindo Live!

Soprano-Tenorman Tony Malaby has been getting around much of late, appearing as a sideman or co-leader on quite a few dates, and putting together some very worthy sides as a leader. I'm now catching up with his latest, out a month or so, Tony Malaby's Tamarindo Live (Clean Feed 200). It certainly has clout and brilliance aplenty. There's Tony, the bass master himself--Mr. William Parker, a drive-and-bash specialist in drummer Nasheet Waits, and one of the most creative and prolific trumpet wielders active today, Mr. Leo Smith. "OK," you might say, "You don't need to say anything more." Ah, but words-r-us here, so I will go on.

Tamarindo isn't just a gathering of some heavy cats, an all-star avantiana. No. It's the ever-shifting variety of combinations and moods that makes this music especially brilliant. Trumpet and bass have a moment to reflect, then drums and trumpet give the moment a little more linear expansiveness, then sax-bass-drums get kicking, and on from there, to give an example.

Each player has something good to say, the ideas flow, the scene changes, something new pops in. It's a cliche to say that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and it is also not entirely true. The sum of the parts of this quartet date are great to begin with and nobody becomes something other than who they are as players. Yet still there is some kinetic transformation that takes place, as in any great group improvisational moment, that brings the music onto another level. It happens here frequently.

I recently heard a tape of Coltrane practicing "Oleo" from around 1956. It was fascinating. Ultimately though he was running some ideas through with a thought to what ways around the changes he could devise. Hear him do it with the classic Miles group and there's much more in the way of emphatic speech-making going on. Tamarindo caught live is about the same thing. These are heavy cats speechifying, making musical statements in a collective zone, rather than kind of mumbling through some various ideas as one might do in practice.

And the opposite side of the coin is when players become too concerned with what an audience expects them to do, so that playing in a live situation becomes almost a matter of them playing at playing themselves, each playing a role as an actor that represents himself, but is not actually that self. Perhaps some of the moments of JATP have that quality on occasion, and I think it is not ideal for the best improvisation.

Tamarindo Live has neither of those tendencies--tentativeness or too much of a meta-self-awareness (perhaps a fancy way of saying that somebody is "hamming it up.")

The point though is the four masters that make up Tamarindo on this disk are making definitive collective statements on some un-expressible subject. They may repeat themselves (as a musical way to proceed), they may backtrack or "change the subject," but what they are doing has conviction, pacing, eloquence and drama. And I believe that great improvisation, free or otherwise--whatever that might mean, has those qualities. All four of these players have been musicians to watch for a long time. When they get together as Tamarindo and selected other gatherings, they are THERE. Watch for some other cats; Malaby-Parker-Waits-Smith are doing what you were watching for in the first place!

Luther Thomas's Probingly Incisive Alto in A Good Setting

There are a number of the late Luther Thomas's recordings on Ayler records. One of the very best is the download digital release of Finally! Total Unity in 3 Phases (aylDL-041). It's a 2006 quartet date that brings some lucid Thomas alto sax within the context of the ubiquitous Jeffry Hayden Shurdut on guitar and drums, Ed Chang on computer electronics, home-made reeds and tenor, and Motoko Shimizu on toys, recorder and voice. The quartet sets up interesting textural clouds of freely articulated sounds that are pieced by some very vibrant Thomas alto.

This is pretty much free improvisation all the way. It is distinguished by an interesting mix of electronics, little instrument sounds and Luther Thomas at his freely expressive best. Click on the Ayler link on this page for further details.

Jason Robinson, Solo Sax and Live Electronics

OK, Jason Robinson has released three excellent albums lately. There's the stunning duet disk with Anthony Davis (see this blog, below), there's the powerful sextet date (see yesterday's posting on my Gapplegate Guitar blogsite) and then there's his solo date Cerberus Reigning (Accretions 1), which is what we are about today.

In some ways this last piece of the three-chunk puzzle of Mr. Robinson the musician today is the most astonishing. It's just Jason on tenor, soprano, the gorgeous alto flute, and computer. The computer part enables real-time electronic alteration and augmentation, made possible by Ableton Live software and something Jason names as Cycling '74's Max/MSP. There's also a program he calls "Synchronous Aether." It evaluates the live music signal as it is made, and based on various parameters provides a complementary electronic voice to what is going on at any given time.

What you get with all this is some very interesting music. Jason plays compelling solo and/or structural-melodic cells on his various winds and electronically a kind of all-Jason orchestra appears as the end sonic result.

These sorts of exercises can sound random or they can sound disjointed. None of that here. Mr. Robinson has conceived of the music carefully so that it has movement, flow, contrast and memorability.

It is one of the most effective, musically fulminous and pleasurably contrasting programs I have ever heard in the solo & electronics realm. I think even people who don't think they like electronics will be forced to reconsider. That's their business though. For me, this is first-rate music. I'd say it is a tour de force, but that's become the cliche of critic's phrases. It's a tour de Robinson? OK, that.

Jeffrey Hayden Shurdut's Incendiary "Allemansratten"

From time to time I've been taking a look at Ayler Records' Download Only releases, which form a rather considerable body of work. Today we consider Jeffrey Hayden Shurdut's Allemansratten (Ayler Download 045).

This is a free-blowing date with Mike Fortune on drums, Mr. Shurdut on electric guitar and the three-horn lineup of Blaise Siwula, Ras Moshe and Nick Gianni (with Gianni also playing some Mandolin). It was recorded in the summer of 2005 at Fortune in Brooklyn, NY.

Jeffrey has been quite prolific in recent years with CD-ROM releases of free music. One might dub him the Eddie Condon of free jazz, in the sense that his guitar work on the date at hand is more felt than heard, and his principal role here is as organizer and facilitator.

There's a motif in seven that starts things off. From there the music centers around the free-blowing, collective improvising of the three saxophonists and the post-Sunny-Murray drumming of Mr. Fortune, for the most part.

What's nice about this one is the inspired saxophony. Each player has a distinct sound and attack, and they work together in classically free ways.

In the end I felt the exhilaration of the energy surge such impassioned free playing can bring. I also was left with the desire to hear more! This is a nice one if you like the free blowout. It goes for $10. See the Ayler link on this site.