Five Spot | Petras Vysniauskas | Yuri Yaremchuk | Roberta Piket | Mark Tokar | Klaus Kugel | Poltva

The band’s name reveals that this is a quintet, with Lithuanian Petras Vysniauskas on soprano, Ukranians Yury Yaremchuk soprano, alto and clarinets, and Mark Tokar on bass, German Klaus Kugel on drums and Roberta Piket from the US on piano. All five musicians have solid backgrounds, both in traditional contexts as in a more free environment, as is the case here, for this live performance at the Lviv Jazz Festival in Ukraine in 2007, and it is free jazz in the spirit of the seventies, with the whole band working together on a coherent musical flow, rhytmic and forward-moving, with the musicians very concerned to build a unique sound rather than using the improvisation for personal expression. In the hands of lesser musicians this becomes a perfect recipe for either chaos or boredom, but you get the opposite here: discipline and deep listening skills, creativity and variation make this quite a captivating program.– Stef Continue reading

Ganelin Trio Priority | Live in Lugano | Not Two Records

Ganelin, Vysniauskas and Kugel are more than just plain avant-gardists that break up all connections behind them just to pay tribute to some future aesthetic. They make use of the method of American jazz in order to listen deeply into the European musical tradition. That way, they shed light on great gestures of baroque music, they internalize the painful individualism of Romanticism and recapitulate the careless lightness of traditional folk music. It is no less than trans-European, inter-traditional and multi-sensual improvised music. What was said above about their rich musical supply is also true without exception for the pianists new formation. With Vysniauskas and Kugel, Ganelin may be less missionary and pugnacious as in the 70´s. But in an age of euphemisms where all fronts have been veiled or dissolved, precisely translatable statements make sense only for the most ardent of idealists. Today´s Ganelin Trio draws from the variety of life an even greater amount of options and perspectives. By not submitting to the worn out primacy of the moment but instead implicating the freedom of the whole process in every moment of their play the new Ganelin Trio is without comparison in European music. — Wolf Kampmann, Berlin, 2006 Continue reading