Francois Carrier, OUTgoing, with Michel Lambert, Steve Beresford, John Edwards

Alto saxophone colossus Francois Carrier and his integral partner in sound, drummer Michel Lambert, team up once again in a lively quartet format we first encountered here on the album Overground to the Vortex via the review posted on these pages on August 22, 2013.

The quartet of Carrier and Lambert, plus bassist John Edwards and pianist Steve Beresford are back in action on this album, recorded live at the Vortex Jazz Club, London, on May 25th, 2014. It is in every way a fitting sequel to Overground. The music as before is a product of total improvisation, with the trio sans Beresford holding forth with inventive force for two long segments and Steve joining in for the rest of the program.

It is a chemistry of good things going on throughout. Francois is in his consistently inventive, tone-rich, fire-y and noteful mode on alto as always along with the sharply acerbic, vitally astringent Chinese oboe he unveils for a dramatic contrast. He has the cogent all-over bass ideas of John Edwards to work against along with Michel Lambert's continually artful open drumming, some of his best to be heard here. Then of course Steve Beresford brings a great deal of pianistic clout once he joins the threesome.

Beresford responds well to the challenge of the immediately free totality with a noteful personal unveiling of good ideas at times horn-like and then very pianistically, including a little of the inside-the-piano soundings, all right and creative, all up to the level Carrier sets for the quartet. He clearly inspires and is inspired by the Carrier expressive thrust and the foursome charting territory in less-explored parts of the note-al, timbral universe.

As nearly always with Carrier and his bandmates, this is post-ESP school, new new thing in all its glory, a rolling, tumbling artistic responsibility to create out of total freedom, with the onus for the results placed squarely on the shoulders of each participant, with Francois leading the way with his inspired line creations.

It is a prime example of the improvisatory arts and an excellent album for that. Avant-free acolytes will find much to appreciate, as indeed will anyone committed to hearing and/or making new sounds.

Another fine melange! Highly recommended!

Jason Kao Hwang, Voice

Jason Kao Hwang, on violin, viola and as a formidable composer, is an innovative force in the music of the present, an important voice in the avant jazz realms of today and a composer who manages to combine jazz and new music elements for a stirring, highly impactful sonics one must hear to appreciate.

His latest, Voice (Innova 938), brings that all home to us with a highly charged, two-suite presentation that straddles the avant garde of jazz and classical in highly dramatic and effective ways. "Lifelines" features mezzo-soprano Deanna Relyea, "Words of Our Own" centers on baritone Thomas Buckner. Both suites concentrate on the poetry of some of today's most fertile exponents: Lester Afflick, Patricia Spears Jones, davida singer, Fay Chiang, Steve Dalachinsky, Yuko Otomo.

Jason has composed the two suites around the vocalists' sung-spoken recitations, where they are given great improvisational leeway, articulating their parts totally ad lib in the spaces provided by the composer, to bring us a kind of nicely post-Pierrot Lunaire sprechstimme underneath which Hwang has composed sequences with improvisational freedom and structure for some of our finest avant jazz soloists: of course Jason Kao Hwang himself with (for "Lifelines") Taylor Ho Bynam on trumpet, Piotr Michalowski on sopranino sax and bass clarinet, Andrew Drury on drums, and Ken Filiano on contrabass. "Words of Our Own" brings in Joe McPhee on tenor and pocket trumpet, William Parker on contrabass, Sang Won Park on sayagum, ajeng and voice, and for a minute or two the Charles Gayle trio with Vattel Cherry and Marc Edwards.

The deft combination of experiential poetry, classically strong vocalists and innovative musical powerhouses operates excellently within the frameworks Jason Kao Hwang has constructed. The end result is a music that gives us full force sound-worlds filled with verbal and musical meaning, of expressions that capture something of life in the world today, of a music alive with a new modern intent born of the streets of experience as well as the great maelstrom of currents in the contemporary music world.

Jason Kao Hwang captures in his words, "essences I could not bring to consciousness before," through the words of the poems and the musical bringing-to-life that these talented ensembles make present via Hwang's exceptional conceptual and structural imagination.

This album is a landmark in vibrant, truly synthetic conjunctions of words and musical expressions, of the state-of-the-art in the avant today, with the world, history and time conjoined in two unified suites of great power and merit. It is a blockbuster and a tribute to the imaginative thrust of Jason Kao Hwang and his collaborative associates.

Bravo! Hear this music and hear where we ARE today!

The Paul Smoker Notet, Landings, 2012

Paul Smoker is an artist I have appreciated over the years but mostly due to the serendipity of chance not so much as a band leader, meaning that I have enjoyed some of that at friends's get-togethers and over the radio, and I have reviewed a number of fine albums where he is in a cooperative setting, but I have never had the opportunity to hear one of his recordings as a leader in depth until now.

Through the kindness of Phil Haynes, drummer of abundant talent and all-around good fellow, I have been communing with the 2012 album by the Paul Smoker Notet, Landings (Alvas Records 2105). It is a collection of ten Smoker originals and one standard as performed and interpreted by Smoker on trumpet, Drew Gress on bass, Phil Haynes on drums and Steve Salerno on guitar.

The band is highly focused and absorbed with reacting to one another and with the compositional structures in great ways. The written parts set the mood in each case and allow each member of the Notet to create worlds within worlds, the sum total of which is striking.

There are ostinatos, melodic flourishes and sophisticated music of an advanced avant sort to be heard in abundance. The band takes it all in stride, with a looseness that is not so much casual as open-ended. Thanks to that quality we get four-way movement that gives us a personal stamp of each artist. Paul is limber and subtle, original and fully sound-fingerprinted as himself wholly. Drew has a very musical role to fill which whether arco or pizzicato is always impeccably grounded in bass presence and creative flow. Phil has an open role as percussive colorist as much as rhythmic implicator and he comes through with some phenomenal playing. Steve's guitar acts as a worthy front-line instrument for the compositional material. He solos with a full range of stylistic implications, from electric to woody-classic and back again with intelligence and soul, and full musicality.

The arrangements vary the interactions and roles each play in ways that keep you listening with an eagerness born of the four-way artistry and what they do on this set.

The music stays in the head as primo avant-contemporary jazz played by a state-of-the-art quartet. It is music to fill you with warmth, lyrical yet hard-hitting torque and finesse. It is a peach of a set that you should grab without fear. It is a winner!

Arnold Hammerschlag, No Face, No Name

What's in a name, or for today, what's in No Face, No Name (Skirl Records 030), the recent album by new jazz trumpeter-composer Arnold Hammerschlag? The answer is, a great deal. It's a quintet running very nicely through ten Hammerschlag compositions in a manner one might dub "village jazz." I say that because there is a definite strain of peasant/Jewish music, dance music, old folk music and perhaps a touch of the more urbane cafe sound of yesterday.

The band's instrumentation helps that along, with Arnold of course on trumpet, Sam Bardfeld on violin, Will Holshouser on accordion, Brian Glassman on bass and Aaron Alexander on drums. They are very much stylistically in the zone for such things, playing a modern jazz in touch with those roots and melding the folk-populist strain with contemporary improvisatory ways.

The compositions structure how the music goes, nicely so, and the trumpet-violin-accordion front line has both song-voicing and improvisational clout. The rhythm team, too, does an excellent job straddling the two worlds.

Kurt Weill and Carla Bley are predecessors for this sort of thing, as one is pleasantly reminded of while listening. But this is a step into its own world, a nicely turned original set with excellent playing from all concerned. After the record-setting blizzard this past weekend here I am again reminded of Forrest Gump's box of chocolates, except once you hear this music you DO know what you are getting and it stays right there with compositionally alive melodic-harmonic turns and worthy solo efforts. Hammerschlag plays some exceptional trumpet, but then Bardfeld and Holshouser are no slouches, either.

A very striking set is what we have on No Face, No Name. Hammerschlag is a definite talent and this music sounds great, ever better the more you listen. Highly recommended!

Fred Hersch, Solo

Surely one of the supreme litmus tests for an accomplished jazz pianists is in the unaccompanied solo realm. Not every great jazz pianist in the history of the music did much of it, Bud Powell for example, but these days many if not most of the best pianists give us some solo offerings.

Fred Hersch qualifies as one of the very best today and it is well for us that he does delve into the unaccompanied space where it is only the artist, the instrument and the creative, inventive abilities that hold sway. To celebrate his 60th year on earth he gives us an especially attractive and beautiful volume of such things, simply entitled Fred Hersch Solo (Palmetto 2180).

It was recorded live at a small wooden church for The Windham Chamber Music Festival in 2014. In fact it is his 10th solo album, I read. It sounds fabulous. It captures the master artist in a specially inspired mood and he himself believes it may well be his best.

His pianistic sense most certainly is untouchable. The piano sings. The lines and harmonic sensitivity are acute, alive.

Standards form the bulk of the musical subjects, "Caravan," "The Song is You," "In Walked Bud," Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now," all get very considered treatment, the sort of deep subtlety that only a piano "genius" can provide, and there is much that spells out his brilliant originality in the process.

There are a couple of originals too, one for Robert Schumann, one for Suzanne Farrell, and both speak to us eloquently.

There is a continuous flow of ideas, of striking ways to articulate the implications of the song vehicles.

Fred Hersch is a national treasure by now. He has emerged from a near-death health crisis to gain a new depth and strength. This solo recital must be heard. He is a titan!

Mayman-Pritsker Project, 2015 Annual Report

The Mayman-Pritsker Project is a collaborative effort between Gene Pritsker, an important contemporary multi-stylistic compositional force in the music of today, and Yaacov Mayman, a saxophonist of ability and a writer-arranger in his own right.

2015 Annual Report (Composers Concordance), gives us an album of the wild and wooly possibilities that are actualized when the borders between genres are ignored willfully and creatively. So Gene on guitar, melodica and as DJ joins forces with Yaacov's saxophone, with Yevgeny Lebedev on keyboards and Aleksandra (Mogilevich) Mayman on drums, plus guest Borislav Strulev on cello.

Gene's DJing gives us a wide arc of sampling possibilities and the band gives us some fine improvisational tenor sax while Gene plays some subtle guitar and the rock-hip-hop contemporary arrangements of all sorts of things carry the day.

Mayman and Pritsker give us some worthy compositional ideas but then the eccentric arrangements of Bach, Gershwin, Tizol, and Hancock open things up further. Tabla against the opening Prelude to "The Well-Tempered Clavier"? Why not!

It's all good fun and ingenious at that. There is an occasional smooth jazz gloss that maybe is a bit jarring but all the more unexpected.

It is music you might expect from Gene Pritsker, meaning that it is absolutely unexpected. It is a hoot!

Nick Fraser, Too Many Continents, with Tony Malaby, Kris Davis

Nick Fraser is an imaginative drummer on the avant jazz scene, out of Canada, one I am not well acquainted with. Until now, anyway, and his trio recording Too Many Continents (Clean Feed 336) with his talented cohorts Tony Malaby (tenor and soprano) and Kris Davis (piano).

There are three Fraser-penned compositions; the rest are collective collaborations. The free interplay of three bountifully creative musicians is what this set is about, and it is very nice to hear. All three have no shortage of inspired interactive ideas. They put them to excellent use in the service of the whole.

Kris Davis is a pianist I have come to appreciate very much over the last few years. She is within the scatter and splatter piano zone, individually so. She can let loose with torrential noting but then do sparser phrasings too, all with a keen ear for detail and musical coherence.

Tony Malaby, most everyone will know, has his own ever brimming wealth of ideas and timbral presences. He sounds particularly well here with plenty of testificatory declamations that at times ride atop Kris and Nick's dramatic effusions like a person effectively and artfully riding a wild horse. But then there are quieter moments too and Tony phrases and invents rather brilliantly at those times as well.

Nick shows himself a world-class freetime drummer on the set. The openness of a smaller ensemble that knows what it is all about gives Fraser the space to sound his way artfully, with an ear to the totality of sounds and gestures within which a great drummer can both find and lead the way.

Kris is a player who interacts especially well while making her own personal pianistic statements. Tony and Nick do the same within the material particularities of sounding their respective instruments.

It is an impressive and consistently exhilarating blaze of considered sound we get to experience on Too Many Continents. It says a wealth about the creative originality of the three, but it at the same time summons you, the listener, into the orbit of sound ideas and expressions.

Yes, really good going to be heard on this one. A red-hot ticket item to warm your innards like an avant cup of hot chocolate!