Hanam is a Berlin based quintet of musicians coming from different geographic areas: well know musicians like Horst Nonnenmacher (who has been part of the Improvisors poll, a group born to celebrate the collaboration between two jazz monsters as Alex Von Schlippenbach and Sam Rivers) and Alison Blunt (of various important collaborations and member of the London Improvisers orchestra that gathers, together with the Glasgow orchestra, the best of the avant-garde jazz of today in UK), joined here by the fresh possibilities of pianist Nikolai Menhold and two saxophonists, Anna Kaluza on alto sax and Manuel Miethe on soprano sax. Hanam is the perfect demonstration of how singularities can be sublimated: the interplay is the essential referring point where, in a sort of secret conduction, the musicians work on sharing energies. Each one knows how use their personal techniques to be part of a restless sound fluxus. You can easily feel it: look at their video recorded at the Vortex Jazz Club in London and appreciate their abilities and symbiosis. In this cd we find two different recordings: the Lumen Church one is a true hommage to contemporary music made by devoted to improvisation: a suite built on woodwinds overtones (Scelsi), opposed to extended percussive touches on piano and double bass (Berio) that seem to refer to the essential structures so connected to the contemporary composition strategies (Lachemann). In the other performance at the Collegium Hungaricum in Berlin, a two set concert, guest artist Tristan Honsinger, the premises are confirmed: great expression of this group, able to set a quality standard of the highest kind and to play a captivating chaos improvised music, thanks to a wise contrast/fragmentation playing, able to cause that neural involvement that only free improvisation can give. These sounds are imaginative, the instruments themselves seem to cause situations through their musicians: the idea is that of a special narration the goes through innocence and unpredictability of music. Something close to Alice in Wonderland adventures, an idea close to the famous cellist Tristan Honsinger who in his participation here joins his chamber instinct (especially in less dynamic phases) to his experimental side (feeding the transversality and the opposition to the mainstream use of the instrument). Highest level. — Review by Ettore Garzia Continue reading →