Jason Yeager Trio, Affirmation

A pianist who can come up with a fresh angle on postbop and contemporary deserves hearing. Jason Yeager does that and does it well on Affirmation (Inner Circle 043). You get the Beatles' "Julia," a movement from Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time" and a host of nice originals. It's the trio of Jason plus Danny Weller on acoustic bass and Matt Rousseau on drums. That's the very together tripartite framework, to which are added guests here and there, the trumpet and flugel of Jean Caze, Noah Preminger on tenor and Aubrey Johnson on vocals. They broaden the sound and add much to the proceedings as needed.

Jason has internalized the modern jazz tradition and gives it back in a personalized way. The flow, the harmonic sense, the lines are where you expect them, only they are not cloned from a generic source. This is Yeager piano, music in the Yeager zone.

And as you listen you get a program of nicely turned contemporary jazz that pleases without trying to make a grandstand-raising play for radio coverage. The music is the way it is no doubt out of artistic conviction and that comes through as an honest triumph of sorts. Bravo!

Andrei Razin, ARSolo

Russian pianist Andre Razin is not known very much in the States. Based on his ARSolo (SoLyd 0412) album of solo piano he should be more widely heard. It is an album that came out in 2011 but shows the artist in a timeless light. There are seven works presented in the program, all showing a poetic ingenuity, an original harmonic-melodic approach that is somewhere between new music classical and contemporary solo piano jazz.

A Russian Keith Jarrett? Maybe, except he sounds unlike Jarrett and much more like himself. There is a kind of alternation between rhythmically active sections and contemplative atmospherics. His playing shows an excellent sense of form-in-spontaneity, with structured elements ordering what sound like impromptu improvisations. And indeed, this is the more improvisatory side of Razin, who also composes in the new classical mode.

His classic roots may come through clearly, but that is not to say that the improvisations sound pre-planned as much as informed by some key motives. As the liners say the program comes off as a continuous suite, touching on Razin's diverse, inventive approach in sections with a feel in-the-moment but somehow inevitable in their logic and spirit combined.

In the process you'll hear some jazz roots, resituated in a context that has as much of the post-Bartokian as an improvisational middle ground that rests in neither camp.

It is a bracing, invigorating performance that should be heard by anyone interested in the contemporary pianist and where the music can go these days. Andrei Razin should not be missed! An excellent album is this. Try and find a copy if you can.

Garrison Fewell, Outside Music, Inside Voices

We've known Garrison Fewell on these blog pages as an important jazz composer, guitarist and bandleader. But today we look at him as an author. His latest book, Outside Music, Inside Voices (Saturn University Press, 329 pages, paper, $25), examines the creative process among 25 leading lights in advanced improvised music today, music sometimes referred to as "free jazz."

The book presents 25 fairly in-depth interviews conducted by Garrison over the course of nearly a year, interspersed with good photographs of the artists concerned by Luciano Rossetti. The basic issue involves spirituality as a component of or impetus to the creative act. "How much does your music," Garrison asks, "get its energy and being from a spiritual mind- and body-set?"

The answer, which may come as a surprise to those who are not immersed in the contemporary improvisational world, is a pretty resounding "yes, it does, in important ways." So we hear from such luminaries as the late John Tchicai and Roy Campbell Jr., but also Steve Swell, Nicole Mitchell, Dave Burrell, Joe McPhee, Matthew Shipp, Wadada Leo Smith, and on from there through 17 others.

And no, it is not that all of them practice a particular form of organized religion, though Buddhism does seem to be an element in some artist's lives, but rather that the sounding of the music has a spiritual intent or immersion-component. Anyone who experienced the first flowering of the "new thing," especially via later John Coltrane, should not be surprised to hear this. Nevertheless what matters, and what the book brings out strongly, is exactly how each artist talks about her or his music in these terms. Are there set practices they use to bring such things in their music? Are there political-social components? How do they relate their self-in-spirit to other musicians and the audience in the playing situation? How can such improvisational ways of being be of general use to the public at large in their own lives?

These are just some of the questions and themes that run through the dialogs. In the end readers get a rather full picture of open-form improvisation as a kind of way of life. Everyone seems to have something interesting to say. Not everyone puts a great deal of active thought into the way of the spirit and their music, mind you, but virtually everyone acknowledges an extra-material inspiration that goes into their spontaneous being in performance.

The book moves along at a rapid pace and brings insights to musicians, music fans and curious outsiders alike. It's a great read, something for a general audience concerned with creativity and of course for the avid new music listener and performer. Those who do not understand "free" music should get a framework that will help them grasp the creative processes and motivations of the players. Those who do get the music already will nonetheless benefit from the ideas so nicely expressed by some of our greatest living practitioners of the improvisatory arts.

Very much recommended. An absorbing and inspiring discussion.

Natsuki Tamura, Alexander Frangenheim, Nax

Natsuki Tamura is the trumpet master often associated with Satoko Fujii, as many will know. He has built a solid reputation out there as a free player who can go folkish or get very abstract, depending on the project. Today we hear him in the latter zone, in duet with contrabassist Alexander Frangenheim on a CD program entitled Nax (Creative Resources CD 280).

Tamura and Frangenheim dedicate themselves to fully abstracted free soundings, from full-toned utterances to noise-tinged sound colors. It's not an album where a tango or an old folk song intervenes; it is uncompromising new music making, both well conceived and sequentially unfolding.

As avant zoning it more or less pre-selects itself to listeners attuned to the outer stratosphere. Those who appreciate the inventive turbulence and sometimes quietude of cutting-edge improv will find this a bracing adventure into what can be done.

It blows, pizzes, and bows its way into rare territory with confidence and creativity. If you respond to that as I do, you will find this one a real ear-opener!

Tineke Postma, Greg Osby, Sonic Halo

Wherever we are in improvised music we are always subject to the mental compass points we oriented ourselves with. Depending on those we could think we are halfway on the way to some goal, or beyond that goal and on the way to another. It depends on how you chose to get your bearings.

Take for example the sort of jazz-rock-funk that Miles had much to do with and then some of the acoustic-progressive furtherings that Steve Coleman and Dave Holland were important exponents of. We could say that now we are at the full flowering of a progressive, free-flowing post-bop rock-funk sound. Or perhaps we have gotten to a halfway point. We don't know what is to come in the years ahead so we cannot be sure of where we are on the "map."

One thing though is this: wherever we are, the album Sonic Halo (Challenge 73370) is in the vanguard. It's a two-horn alto-soprano frontline of Tineke Postma and Greg Osby, with some very excellent sidemen in Matt Mitchell on piano and electric piano, Linda Oh on acoustic bass and Dan Weiss on drums.

Dan can be counted on to contribute nicely to whatever he is on, so that in itself is a staple of this music. Linda and Matt are subtle and very worthy voices here. And then there's the two horn line of Greg and Tineke. These two work hand-in-glove so well that they open up a sort of zone where through alternating compositions and together-blowing they stand out as exceptional.

This is very progressive modal-centered music with sophisticated harmonies, complex rhythmic hits, and an open-sky hipness that gives a basic straight-eight funk an evolution similar in complexity to what later bop did for swing. Endless free flowing variation is the rule here, and it all is handled with inventive, brilliant ease.

And the blowing is very hip indeed. Postma and Osby are perfect foils for each other; the three-rhythm team make sure that the cauldron never stops boiling, so to speak.

It's music that bears your most intensive aural inspection and comes off as breakthrough soundings.

Sonic Halo has wings, has brains, has soul. It is an excellent listen!

Allison Au Quartet, The Sky was Pale Blue, Then Grey

From Canada comes the Allison Au Quartet and their The Sky was Pale Blue, Then Grey (self-release). I don't know a great deal about the artists here. A few listens, though, and you know you are in the presence of thoughtful and expressively accomplished players. And the compositions, by Allison Au with one co-written by pianist Todd Pentney, have a contemporary freshness that frames everything well.

The band features Allison on alto sax. She stands out as a player with an alternatingly pure and hard-toned strength, facility and imagination. Pentney is on piano and keys and gives the band a second solo voice of distinction. Then there is the rhythm section of Jonathan Maharaj on bass and Fabio Ragnelli on drums, players with contemporary looseness but continuously vibrant pulsation.

The music is evolved contemporary, the pulses rocking ahead with jazz-rock-funk-swing and Latin feels but at the same time involved compositional intricacies and straight-to-your-being blowing which has smarts and feeling.

It is, if you want forebears, a sort of extension of ECM middle-period acoustic jazz-rock and maybe Gary-Burtonian involved lines, but then not quite and it is renewed by Allison's good sense both at the pen and at the alto.

She is a player very well showcased here in ways that bring pleasure and good sounds to your ears with consistency.

Recommended!

Keith Jarrett, Charlie Haden, Paul Motian, Hamburg '72

For all the beautiful things Keith Jarrett has done in his career, the original trio of Keith, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Paul Motian, with or without Dewey Redman, holds a special place in the music of the later 20th-century. After all this was, following Keith's important association with Charles Lloyd, the group that gave us the first phase of Jarrettian music. The amazing runs, yes, and the compositional clout of the man, the free interplay of the three masters which both came out of the influences of Ornette Coleman and Paul Bley in solo and group playing, but then went beyond that into something very special and original.

Sitting here listening to the newly released, previously unreleased Hamburg '72 (ECM B0022313-02), with that trio in their last phase, I am struck anew on the tragedy of loss. Paul Motian is gone and now so is Charlie Haden. We can never hear this trio as a living entity, never again. But we can hear them of course in all their recorded glory. In this case a finely sonic live recording of the trio in their last full flowering is what brings tribute and remembrance in a very fitting way.

It is beautiful to hear this, to me. Make no mistake. They are filled with the special creative synergy of the three as a oneness, no less here than in previous recordings. There is a spirit of adventure in their extraordinarily productive looseness. Keith is playing at one of his peaks, not just from the piano chair but also on soprano sax, something we took for granted then, but in its absence today we shouldn't have. He was singular there as on piano, just a bit less developed technically, of course.

But the interaction of Keith, Charlie and Paul is there. Again we may have taken it for granted in some ways, but there was a magic and a tabula rasa uniqueness of the way Paul and Charlie came up with ways of propulsing freely yet very personally. Add Keith and there is a dynamism of free structure in every way pattern-setting. The trio ultimately had a huge influence, on just about every piano trio that came after, in terms of those with a free avant approach, and even those who didn't.

And you can here why on this recording clearly. More than that, the pieces played on this date sound especially good because they are never played quite like this before or after. Charlie's "Song for Che" is momentous, never played by Keith otherwise in recordings. Rather momentous also are the versions of Keith's "Piece for Ornette," "Everything that Lives Laments" and "Take Me Back."

It is as fitting a tribute to Charlie and Paul as anything, for they sound beautiful. And so does Keith. All three would go on to do other work, great work, but the special magic of these three together would never quite be equalled. This issue is important because it gives us the trio in ways that we didn't hear on record at that point. The trio so late on, as a trio.

If you love this period, or even if you don't know it all that well, this must be heard!