Pandelis Karayorgis Quintet, Afterimages

If a new Pandelis Karayorgis album comes out (and it has) and I do not cover it more or less right away, it is an oversight. My piles of CDs awaiting review can sometimes get cumbersome, and a spill of the box intended for this particular blog late last year put my hypothetical sequence into permanent chaos.

But anything worth hearing is worth talking about at any time, so today we get to contemplate the Pandelis Karayorgis Quintet and their Afterimage (Driff 1404). The quintet date continues Karayorgis's fertile cross-pollination with some of the heavy Chicago cats on the scene. We get a potent lineup on this one with Dave Rempis and Keefe Jackson on reeds, Nate McBride, bass, and Frank Rosaly on drums. Pandelis directs the proceedings from the piano, while also furnishing ten compositions for the quintet to immerse themselves in and blow off of.

The compositions set up a harmonically advanced, modern post-boppish avant-free landscape that has interest in its structures and gives the players a good bit of latitude. Everyone rises to the occasion, with Rempis, Jackson and Karayorgis quite naturally forming the front line.

I have said often enough here that Karayorgis comes out of Monk more than Cecil or Bley. It's as if the music is an outcrop of what Monk might have done if Monk took his music further out in later years. That is a gross simplification, but the jagged-edged angularity is in Karayorgis's pianism, taken in his own way further afield and originally reworked to become something else.

Rempis sounds great on baritone (an important exponent these days) as well as tenor and alto; Jackson gives us some outstanding tenor and bass clarinet. Together their multisax orientation changes the sound of the group accordingly over time and they put in some excellent work. It is no surprise that McBride and Rosaly really nail down the free and the pulsating in swinging ways.

There is much music to be heard here and it all works. This is another fine out expression from a combo of players who work together with the ease of mutual understanding and compatibility.

Oh, yeah! Do not miss this one.

Mike Pride, From Bacteria to Boys, Birthing Days

Mike Pride is not just a hugely capable, brilliantly original drummer. He is a composer-concep- tualist-leader of ever-increasing stature. This is shown especially in the sum breadth and depth of his latest releases, two albums of startling contrast. Drummer's Corpse, which I covered last week on these pages, is a mind-boggling avant blow out. Today, the other sign of the proverbial coin, Birthing Days (AUM Fidelity 077) with his From Bacteria to Boys group.

Where Drummer's Corpse is carefully anarchic and bombastic, Birthing Days is anarchically careful, so to speak. It is propulsive, well composed and texturally built modern jazz. It's a group of some heavies. Mike of course is on drums, the deservedly celebrated Jon Irabagon on alto and tenor, Alexis Marcelo puts his stamp on things on piano and synth, and Peter Bitenc plays some very together double bass. To add to the reed solo clout we have guest appearances by Jason Stein on bass clarinet for two cuts and tenorologist Jonathan Moritz on two other pieces.

What's especially nice about this record is the indivisible meld between the cook, the solo firepower and the compositional girth. The written-out parts intertwine in always interesting ways with the hitting at it. It's fired-up and original jazz of today in the very best sense. Masterful, captivating and very original. Molto bravo!

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.