Mikko Innanen with William Parker and Andrew Cyrille, Song for a New Decade

The Finnish world of young avant saxophonist Mikko Innanen joins with the New York vet worlds of William Parker and Andrew Cyrille (bass and drums, if you need to be told) on a recent two-CD set Song for a New Decade (TUM 042-2). The first disk features the trio in full flower, the second a series of fascinating duets by Innanen and Cyrille.

The first album contains head compositions by Innanen except for one collective improvisation. The second is a free-formed collective improv with thematic spontaneity.

All of it works very well. Innanen in spite of his youth sounds mature and well into his way of playing, on alto especially but also baritone and miscellaneous winds.

Parker and Cyrille sound excellent throughout, with no signs of slowing down, at a peak of inventive creativity. If you were to focus on following either or both players throughout the program, your ears would profit greatly by the experience. Neither player can be mistaken for someone else once you get familiar with their playing and both can get free or swing or both with their own special way.

What they provide Innanen is an ideal playing situation. Wherever he goes, they are not only there, they virtually anticipate.

Innanen is a stylist in the free-zone who is well on the way to a real originality that is nevertheless rooted in the late improv and free tradition. Playing with the two masters here he is inspired to outdo himself.

There is much excellent music to be heard on the two-CD set. None of it sounds rote or routine. Quite the opposite. Hear this one, by all means!

Phil Haynes, No Fast Food, In Concert, with David Liebman and Drew Gress

With a trio of sax, bass and drums in modern advanced jazz these days we expect to have a good amount of interplay between the three artists. Drummer Phil Haynes and his No Fast Food trio has that and maybe even more than is the norm. Haynes has supremely capable improvisers in David Liebman on tenor, soprano and flute and Drew Gress on bass. No one needs to tell you that if you follow the music, yet Phil's compositions and the sequenced dynamic that is on display between Haynes and cohorts make this band explosively triple.

Often enough these days if a band is drummer-led you may not be able to tell. He or she may not always be out front. Not so with No Fast Food. Phil Haynes gives us lots of excellent drumming, though he is in no way out to steal the show. It is a naturally organic triple-sound.

You can hear this plainly and to good advantage on the 2-CD In Concert (CornerStoreJazz) out fairly recently.

The music is culled from two small jazz venue appearances. Both find the band in top form. Liebman seems to be grateful for the hard swinging, open approach of the trio, for he sounds his very best. He is a living master, of course, and does not hang back. Drew Gress has paid dues and played with all kinds of folks, gaining in poise and stature cumulatively as time goes by, so that now he is doing some of his best work. He may not come off the tip of your tongue if someone asks you to name three of the top modern jazz bass players today, but there is no doubt he is one of the very finest for sheer musical imagination and deeply rich tone. And Phil Haynes! He swings hard like Elvin, has an acute sense of set sound and inventive figuration like Tony, and he plays with the others, not especially against them (and not to take away from the latter strategy when it works). He shines forth as an especially well-integrated musical drum master in this trio. A player who has soaked up the tradition and gives out with himself.

That's what you hear in these two full disks, the sound of a very together trio that can play a blues with a soulful contemporary stance, take it out, and at the same time work within varying compositional structures for a program that never tires.

It is perhaps a sleeper? There is so much coming out these days that you might miss it if you are not paying attention. But you should not because it is some great new jazz!

Get it if you can. For Liebman. For Gress. And for Phil Haynes.

Matthew Shipp, I've Been to Many Places

Just coming out now is the latest solo piano album from Matthew Shipp, I've Been to Many Places (Thirsty Ear 57209.2). It marks a point of departure for Matthew in that he in essence is summing up his musical endeavors, looking backwards and by being where he is now making of that looking back something new.

That of course has to do with Matthew's emphasis on the spontaneity of his musical invention. How he plays something he did years ago now is not reproduction but rather re-creation. So we get "Tenderly", recorded originally with David S. Ware's Quartet, "Summertime", first recorded in duet with William Parker, and "Where is the Love," which was used as a loop on a recording with hip-hop artist El-p. And what he does with all of these is to renew them, to make them anew. Such is the case throughout.

As Matt himself suggests on the liners, this album gives us a kind of culmination of Matthew the musical thinker executed one-to-one from thoughts to keys. He is charged with kinetic electricity throughout, taking a step from freedom of expression to a kind of mind-meld of Matt-inside-his-pianistic-head.

The set has real flow. The difference between open-form key weaving and "standard" is one of setting loose the harmonic-melodic familiarity of a song form with the same attention to being in the now of creation.

It gives you an excellent picture of Maestro Shipp as he expresses himself today, right now. And for that it is exceptional. There is nothing that sounds tentative. All sound is in command and commanding. The two versions of "Where is the Love" spell that out nicely. One is filled with forward momentum, the other more reflective. And if there was a third version, it would be no doubt something else again. He has his piano sound directly wired into his creative head, from a jab or a legato phrase to the way he makes the piano sustain when he wants it to. He is moulding the sound at every moment in his own vision.

I've Been to Many Places has all the makings of one of the prime improvisational piano solo albums of the year, maybe the album. Needless to say I recommend you get it!

Jon Irabagon, It Takes All Kinds

Jon Irabagon plays sax like he's been through the style wars and has emerged catalysed and all the better for it. But he's too young to have been on the frontlines then. Yet somehow he's internalized the insightful lessons gained by assimilating the sounds that went before and melding them into his own very alive approach. What makes him so important today is not just that he goes in his own way where he will, but that there is more than one Irabagon. There's Irabagon the over-the-top dionysian bebop mad-hatter like on the full length version of Doxy he did a few years ago. There's the jokester that still takes it outside like on Lundbom's Big Five Chord, and there's the player of many voices who rechannels it all in Mostly Other People Do the Killing.

And today, another Irabagon, that of the serious new-new thing artist on It Takes All Kinds (Irabagast Jazzwerkstatt 139). This is a live trio date at a German festival last year. And it is excellent going. First of all Barry Altschul has been playing with Jon for a while now and it is paying off big in interactions. Barry sounds like his old self with that orchestral-but-swinging drum thing he was doing with Circle, Sam and Anthony Braxton way back. Only he has the maturity of time and growth in plain evidence. In other words he sounds as good as ever! Mark Helias has been playing off and on with Barry for years and so he too has a maturity of association added on to a tremendous sense of space and place in his playing.

This is Jon's date so they do Jon's tunes--which have a bop and after completeness-in-change feel to them. And his playing gives nods to the greats of the past but also gets very much his own multi-dimensional phrasings happening. He is part of a continuum, but a step of his own, which is of course much the way things evolve when they do.

In a way, a very healthy way, this music sums up why the style wars of the '80s and after were bullcrap. There was nothing to challenge. The music was growing, is growing and must not be stopped. So here we are today with how that growth leads to new-in-old and new-in-new classicism, whatever that means. But no, really. It's how the free movement and the past can hook up and move on. One way, anyway. Connie Crothers the other day is another. There are many ways, potentially and in actuality.

Jon's playing is definitive of that. So is Barry's. And so is Mark's. This is a trio of importance playing music that affirms that jazz lives and does so strongly, right in the present. We don't need our heads buried in the sand. Listen!

Tim Berne's Snakeoil, Shadow Man

Tim Berne's Snakeoil band continues and perfects the long evolution and development of his music. The new album Shadow Man (ECM) makes it clear that he is still moving forward. Tim puts together the compositional-conceptual forms as you would expect, plays the alto and fronts a quartet that sounds much denser than a four-person outfit usually does.

That is in great part so because of how Tim and ensemble give you intensely worked out multiple sounding motival rubato often enough. There can be a pulse involved but it is plastic, malleable. In a way Tim Berne has been working out his own group logic from such roots as Trane's Sunship, and perhaps some of Braxton's classic pattern repetition pieces, and maybe Roscoe Mitchell of Nonaah, though the music sounds nothing like any of the three, exactly. There is almost a four-way, subtle-ized free-modern fanfare going on in the music, a way to approach the long-form of modern improvisational music by freeing the ensemble of the standard post-bop role-playing and having each player develop an integral part of the improvised-composed whole. Then there are endlessly counterpointed ensemble passages too, which ultimately work around variable patterns of intervals that extend outwards, potentially into infinity. Soloing on top of either form further extends the long-range, long-term possibilities of a work and yet gives you a feeling like you are still in the "head" mode. Or at least that is what I hear happening.

It helps to have a foursome with excellent improvisational instincts and imagination. Tim of course, Oscar Noriega on clarinet and bass clarinet, Matt Mitchell on piano and Ches Smith on drums, vibes and percussion. This is a group where each member is totally key to the compositional-concept sound, not spelling rhythm or harmonies as much as actively entering the four-way musical discourse.

And so that's what I am hearing. It is Tim Berne's own way and Snakeoil is perhaps the ideal player combination for hearing it. Shadow Man has a breathtaking beauty-in-hardness to it. It is one not-to-pass-by. Tim Berne is here in the present-future and we cannot ignore the music because it is fundamental to OUR present-future, I think. Mind you I am not saying that Maestro Berne is THE next thing. He is clearly A next thing, an important music-maker to coexist alongside some other key cats today. But you listen four or five times yourself. New music, jazz, call it what you want. But don't ignore it!

The Convergence Quartet, Slow and Steady

Free music is no simple matter. It can work marvelously when the chemistry between players is right. Or it can earnestly go along but never quite reach a collective point of convergence. Happily, the group named after such occurrences, the Convergence Quartet, achieves such a state consistently and rewardingly on their album Slow and Steady (No Business NBCD 53).

The band has excellent chemistry. Taylor Ho Bynum (cornet), Alexander Hawkins (piano), Dominic Lash (double bass) and Harris Eisenstadt (drums) each has a hand in the compositions presented (live at the Vortex in England as part of the London Jazz Festival). They are substantial. And each contributes excellent improvisations within a first-tier group dynamic.

I have not explored the music of Alexander Hawkins much at all but he shows himself stylistically well-suited to this outfit, with both a free/new music and a harmonic sensibility as needed. Like the others in this band he is not readily pigeonholed as a follower of x, y, or z, but rather has his own voice.

It's a beautifully hewn set! No one dominates; everyone dominates. There is tender introspection and hard-edged dynamics side-by-side here. It will make you think. It will let you feel. It will inspire you to a far away musical mindset that energizes and causes reflection. Very much an album to hear.

FUSK, Super Kasper

The reasons FUSK are interesting are all the more clear on their new album Super Kasper (Why Play Jazz RS009). It's their sound for one. Rudi Mahall on bass clarinet, Philipp Gropper on tenor saxophone play intricate counterpoint with the sound colors and attack of post-Dolphy and post-Simmons. It's a hard sonorous blend made all the better by the quality of the lines they articulate together, both written and improvised. The compositions are pithy and sharply bittersweet, having angular elements worthy of Lacy and Dolphy as lineage mates, with a shifting rhythmic intensity Mingus would have appreciated. There are three group improvisations and the formal compositions are (well) written by drummer Kasper Tom Christiansen.

The rhythm section of Christiansen and bassist Andreas Lang work together with soul and precision, engaging in wondrous rhythmic shadowboxing together. There are continually shifting accents that the two handle with ease while still deftly implying and/or articulating a loping outside swing feeling.

The individual solo work of Mahall and Gropper is challenging and worthwhile, expanding outwards with stay-the-course originality.

Leader Kaspar Tom C. has managed to found a quartet utterly distinguished by the personalities of the players. . . and Kaspar's energetic, rollicking vision of how a band can swing wildly and be filled with outside expressiveness throughout.

This new album is even better than the last. Listen and you will be transported to a Super Kaspar-land, a very good place to be indeed.

Mitch Marcus Quintet, "Countdown 2 Meltdown," 2010

The West Coast is alive for music. It's not a West Coast jazz in a cool sense for the most part these days. It's something else. San Franciscan (but also New Yorkian) Mitch Marcus and his quintet show us some of that in the riotcap avant romp Countdown 2 Meltdown (Porto Franco 009). It's notable for the presence of the very nimble electric guitarist Mike Abraham, the two-reed threat of Mitch (tenor) and Sylvian Carton (alto), and the very lively rhythm section of George Ban-Weiss on acoustic bass and Tomas Fujiwara on drums.

The music has the Lounge Lizards-Zappa anything-goes quality with the hard-swinging sensibility of Mingus. The band has good soloists all around and they finesse some fine arrangements and play as hard as they need to to get the fire stoked.

If you like the adventurous kind of new jazz that hits it but gives you plenty of super-eclectic composition-arrangements, I have no doubt this will catch your ear as it caught mine. Very much recommended.

Tim Berne Comes Back Strong with "inSOMNIA"

Anybody who follows the avant jazz scene knows that Tim Berne was a major force in the music a while ago. I guess the '90s were the most visible years for him. I don't know that he's been anywhere other than around after that, but it seems that his presence has been somewhat less. It could be that I've simply missed some of the releases and I don't get out clubbing much these days due to a poverty element in my life.

Be that as it may his recent release inSOMNIA (Clean Feed 215) finds him in excellent company with plenty of conceptual thrust. It is a rather large band by today's standards, an octet, and the lineup is filled with some heavy hitters--namely Baikida Carroll, Michael Formanek, Marc Ducret, Dominique Pifarely (violin), Erik Friedlander, Chris Speed, Jim Black, and of course Tim Berne himself.

It's a session that consists of two long pieces with much in the way of free (and often collective) improvisation, pre-arranged ostinato motifs, ensemble parts and a lot of atmosphere. In many ways it's a continuation of the larger group excursions Tim Berne has done. There's a kind of stylistic unity to what he's about. One thing follows out of another with a logic and the Bernian identity stamp, so to speak.

In the end the music satisfies and sounds contemporary without pandering to the peanut gallery. Tim Berne has that serious streak in him that comes with a dedication to doing something modern and substantial, something that has a particular sound yet allows the soloists plenty of free play within the context of the music.

Well worth checking out!