Jazz

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Evan Parker | Barry Guy | Paul Lytton | Live at Maya Recordings Festival | No Business Records

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As a musician Evan Parker is a man of many faces. On the one hand he is always looking for new collaborations like on C-Section with electronic madman John Wiese (Second Layer Recordings), Live at Akbank Jazz Festival (Re:konstruKkt) with the Turkish group konstruKt or ‘Round About One O’clock (Not Two) with Slovenian drummer and percussionist Zlatko Kaučič. On the other hand he likes long time relations like his Electro-Acoustic Ensemble (although many new members have been added to this project), the legendary Schlippenbach Trio (as to persistence the Rolling Stones of free jazz) and the Evan Parker Trio (with Barry Guy on bass and Paul Lytton on drums). — Martin Schray Continue reading →

Correction with Mats Gustafsson | Shift | No Business Records

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The inmates riot in the House of Correction. The girls who put up postcards in London telephone boxes – are telephone boxes used for anything else now? – offer correction among other delights. The ticker-tape in newspaper offices – also not much used now – hesitates on a story, flags CORRECTION, and adjusts the casualty figures up or down. We know what the word means, and what it means is somewhere on the pleasure/pain divide, somewhere between sticking to and breaking the rules, some measure of restraint coupled to a throwing over of all restraint. — Brian Morton Continue reading →

Quat Quartet | Live at Hasselt | No Business Records

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A foursome that includes vibes and piano may initially put you in mind of the Modern Jazz Quartet. It’s a natural reaction for those who have absorbed the jazz canon going back at least that far. But though there is a certain kind of quietude at times in common with MJQ, the quartet Quat doesn’t occupy the quasi-formal bop-classical-tonal-composed-head territory of the earlier group. Listen to Quat’s CD Live at Hasselt (No Business NBCD54), however, and you will find there is much going on in an intimate interactive setting that the MJQ also excelled at, though the Quat quartet firmly occupies a modern free improv context. Quat comes through with four middle- to long-lengthed improvisations that surely bear repeated listens. —Grego Applegate Edwards Continue reading →

The Convergence Quartet | Slow and Steady | No Business Records

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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). — Grego Applegate Edwards Continue reading →

Satoko Fujii New Trio | Spring Storm | Libra Records

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Yes, a new trio, based in Japan, and featuring Satoko Fujii on piano, Todd Nicholson on bass, and Takashi Itani on drums. Musically, we’re somewhere between the drive of the Fujii’s Quartet and the jazzier feel of her Trio, with also something more evanescent. Six new compositions with strongly established themes tied together by arrangements that leave room for surprises. Itani’s playing is vivid and octopusian (and reminiscent of Yoshida Tatsuya). To tell you the truth, Spring Storm is a little bit of unknown surrounded by a lot of known, for, new or not, this trio is 100% Satoko Fujii. — Monsieur Délire Continue reading →

Engines & John Tchicai | Other Violets | Not Two Records

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In memory of John Tchicai, 1936-2012 It was with great sadness that I heard of John Tchicai’s passing in October of 2012. I’d been familiar with his music since the early 1990’s, when as a high school saxophonist I first heard him on recordings with John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, and Don Cherry that truly changed my own life path. But it wasn’t until the spring of 2008 that I actually heard him in person, and had the opportunity to get to know him more personally. — Dave Rempis, December 2012 Continue reading →

Eric Zinman | Kilian Schrader | Mario Rechtern | Johannes Krebs | Devototionalien | Not Two Records

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The ensemble is the lifeblood of our choices. We learn together. Hey baby your band is so cool they play so far Ooooooouuuuuuut…. no in no in, all very out. What got you into the music scene when it was clean you dig and now you’re all dirty and jive? It was all because of that flying saucer. They picked us up at Celeste. They got us a gig on Mars, called us head generals and booked us in the stars. The moons were dripping down like sliced melons, what a little moonlight can do with that strange speech you make on that thing. My five year old daughter can play better than that. Where are you guys from? They say we will never play here, so we go there, just like children. Why don’t you just stay in church and sing gospel? Cuz all I ask of living is to feel some life in you baby. Romeo pouncing on Juliet (and they both come from good families!?!?!) hot wet teenage seals, their bodies crashing like the sea, in rapture of wind, trees, forests and animals surviving by their wit, their vision looking out like spirit guides, playing in the sand along the shore. We are vagabonds staying up night after night to sing that beast into a trance in it’s corporate austerity bleeding sympathy. What’s your sign baby? Hey honey, I’ve got an elephant at home. Maybe your god can meet my god sometime. — Eric Zinman Continue reading →

Barry Guy New Orchestra (small formations) | Mad Dogs | Not Two Records

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In László Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance, the defeated musicologist Mr. Eszter, distraught at the fraud of equal temperament (which fakes the elegance of pure tuning), decries that the “world […] was too full of the noises of banging, screeching and crowing, noises that were simply the discordant and refracted sounds of struggle, and that this was all there was to the world if we but realized it.” It may well be that the world can be heard in bangs and screeches and crows; however, not all are the product of struggle. Some arise from the joys of cooperation, exploration, innovation, even downright Dionysian celebration and excess. These are the bangs and screeches of Mad Dogs, and they are a rallying cry for a world (or at least music) we can be proud of.– Dan Sorrells Continue reading →