Blued Dharma
Adrean Farrugia; Joel Frahm
GB Records GBCD1804 (gbrecords.ca)

It was while on tour with drummer Ernesto Cervini’s band in 2014 that the idea of recording a duo album emerged for Toronto-based pianist Adrean Farrugia and New York City-based saxophonist Joel Frahm. Fortunately for us, Blued Dharma, released last month, is the result of a splendid idea taken seriously and brought, beautifully, to fruition.

Farrugia and Frahm are masterful musicians and improvisers. And clearly, these two mutual fans and musical friends revel in playing together. Simpatico, musical connection, uncanny understanding, empathy – call it what you will – these two have it, and it permeates the CD. Of the album’s eight tracks, five are originals by Farrugia – as insightful a composer as he is a pianist – two are utterly refreshing and intriguingly different turns on Roy Noble’s Cherokee, and track five is Farrugia and Frahm’s joyful jaunt through Kern and Hammerstein’s Showboat classic, Nobody Else But Me; listen for the brief, playful nod to Over the Rainbow. The title track sounds like what you’d imagine something called Blued Dharma would: contemplative, expressive, deeply personal. The third track, For Murray Gold, is a heartaching ballad. If someone ever writes a piece of music for me, please let it be that gorgeous!

Farrugia and Frahm do not merely improvise. They complement, interact with, enhance, cajole, inspire, coax and charm each other. Blued Dharma is nothing short of magical. You, too, will be charmed.

Plant
Éric Normand & Jim Denley
Smeraldina-Rima 26/Tour de Bras TDBLP990002 (tourdebras.com)

Quebec’s smaller cities sometimes spawn radical music. Michel Levasseur has produced 34 annual editions of the epic FIMAV festival in Victoriaville, while Éric Normand has created an extraordinarily active scene – complete with record label and improvising orchestra – even further afield in Rimouski. One of Normand’s ongoing collaborations is with Australian saxophonist/flutist Jim Denley: they first recorded together in a Rimouski quintet in 2010 on Transition de Phase. Plant, available as a beautifully packaged, limited-edition LP or a download, presents the two in a 2013 performance. If the title suggests organic growth, a first hearing suggests it’s a pun, linking garden and industrial plants.

If the combination of flute or saxophone and electric bass might suggest sparse work, that’s hardly the case here. There are dense, sustained sounds, whether alternating or layered, coming from Normand’s electric bass and Denley’s “field recordings” of a clothing factory. Whether playing flute or saxophone, Denley often focuses on the slow alternated notes and trills, sometimes sustained with circular breathing. Normand and the field recordings suggest the factory, Denley’s winds in the glade.

Together they create a kind of post-industrial pastoral in which the vibrating amplified strings and machinery ultimately fuse with Denley’s minimalist, gestural language, his flute sound almost a kind of first brush with music in a primeval forest. The result is an extended meditation on the nature and meaning of sound, its threats, codes and ambiguities transfigured into resonant repose.

Returnings
Jakob Bro
ECM 2546 (ecmrecords.com)

Danish guitarist Jakob Bro appears here in a stellar quartet that includes two elders of Scandinavian jazz, trumpeter/flugelhornist Palle Mikkelborg and Norwegian drummer Jon Christensen. The result is a classic program in the Nordic school that ECM has perfected, a clear, spacious essay in spare melodies, nuanced emotions and subtle background shadings. While Christensen and American bassist Thomas Morgan supply optimum, empathetic foundations with subtle comments and suggestions only occasionally coming to the fore, much of the music feels like a close collaboration between Bro and the 77-year-old Mikkelborg, who composed and produced the orchestral suite Aura with Miles Davis in 1985 when Bro and Morgan were young children.

The profound affinity between guitarist and trumpeter even inflects their luminous timbres as well as their economy of line, Bro’s electric guitar sound clarified to the point that it might be a brass instrument. Their empathy is apparent immediately in the opening tracks in which the two develop ballads with contrasting moods. The opening Oktober is pensive and introspective, foregrounding Mikkelborg’s Harmon-muted trumpet, while Strands is pure reflection in pastoral hues. The title track provides contrast: it’s a collaborative composition between Bro and Mikkelborg with an edge of metallic feedback to the guitar and an echoplex for the trumpet, summoning up something of Miles Davis’ electric period. The concluding track, Mikkelborg’s yearning Youth, restores the dominant texture.

While this description might suggest background music, the CD would likely prove too distractingly beautiful for that.

Masters Legacy Series Volume 2
Emmet Cohen featuring Ron Carter
Cellar Live CL062917 (cellarlive.com)

Masters Legacy Series Volume 2, from New York-based pianist Emmet Cohen, represents a confluence of multiple productive collaborations. The first: between Cohen, drummer Evan Sherman, and bassist Ron Carter, the latter of whom, for the unfamiliar, is the titular master whose legacy is being celebrated. Now 81, Carter has appeared on over 2000 recordings, and came to prominence in the 1960s as a member of Miles Davis’s “second great quintet,” along with Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams and Wayne Shorter. The second collaboration: between Cohen and Vancouver-based record label Cellar Live, helmed by Cory Weeds. Initially a label that predominantly released live recordings made at the now-defunct Cellar Jazz Club in Vancouver, Cellar Live has grown into an independent powerhouse, with over 120 releases since its inception in 2001. The third collaboration, in a somewhat broader sense: between New York and Vancouver. Weeds and Cohen first met in 2016, as part of an annual Weeds-conducted jazz-centric tour of New York, and Masters Legacy Volume 2 was recorded at Vancouver’s Pyatt Hall.

With 12 tracks and over 70 minutes of music, the album is packed with interesting material. All Of You kicks things off, recalling, in its tasteful, playful minimalism, the work of Ahmad Jamal, another living jazz master. The Carter-penned blues It’s About Time is an album highlight, with strong, swinging playing from the trio, and a fiery, tempo-shifting Joshua closes the show, showcasing Carter’s propulsive facility. A strong album, both in concept and execution.

Ninety-Nine Years
Satoko Fujii Orchestra Berlin
Libra Records 211-047

Bright Force
Kira Kira (Satoko Fuji)
Libra Records 204-048 (librarecords.com)

The brilliant Japanese avant-garde composer and improviser Satoko Fujii, who happens to play piano and accordion and conduct three separate orchestras on three continents, celebrates her 60th year in 2018. Japanese tradition calls it kanreki, which is best explained to a Eurocentric as literally coming full circle in life. The Japanese (lunar) calendar, unlike our Gregorian one, completes a whole cycle covering 12 junishi or animals – mouse, cow, tiger and so on. But with each animal comes the mystical elements, measures of space and time or five jikhan which, when factored in means that a person completes a life cycle at 60 (12x5). And so Satoko Fujii has been born again. To mark the fire and brimstone of youth Fujii has decided to celebrate her 60th year with 12 new albums, one for each junishi.

This very unique and year-long Japanese birthday fête also means that we get to experience the full force of Fujii’s creativity. It’s clear from the fecund surge in the music of two of the 12 albums that Fujii’s music comes from a part of her being that is highly imaginative. The music that ensues is audacious and is propelled through her body to the nerve endings of her fingertips, from where it explodes out of the instruments that she plays. Magically, on the music of Ninety-Nine Years with Orchestra Berlin and on Bright Force with the quartet Kira Kira, the spark of the Fujii-electricity also reaches the members of both ensembles in such a manner as to ignite each one like a nuclear burst from the corona of the sun.

On the former recording Fujii simply acts as conductor; the proverbial catalyst in the detonation of her musical bombs. There are five songs on Ninety-Nine Years – each forming a vignette in an unravelling scroll that begins with a mystery in Unexpected Incident, and ends with another one, Follow The Idea, as well. Meanwhile each work on the disc is linked to the other like a series of arresting complexes of musical events characterized by movement, from immobility through acceleration, to a vanishing point propelled by both metronomic pulses and effusive lyricism. The music of Bright Force – as the album title suggests – emerges from its own proverbial solar explosion and is resolved in the quietude of the mysterious Luna Lionfish suite, a strikingly lyrical feature that closes an extraordinarily edgy album.

Globe Unity – 50 Years
Alexander von Schlippenbach; Globe Unity Orchestra
Intakt Records CD 298/2018 (intaktrec.ch)

Recorded at Jazzfest Berlin in 2016, this CD marks the half-century of an experiment that has become a great instrument and a flexible institution. In 1966, pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach was invited to present a free jazz big band at the same festival. He created the 13-member Globe Unity Orchestra, combining and expanding the Manfred Schoof Quintet and the Peter Brötzmann Trio. The group has frequently reconvened, with nine to 19 members, demonstrating that minimal organization and committed listening can create both order and ecstatic chaos. By current standards of inclusion, it represents a small “globe,” but it celebrates an ambition that began in the European Union and crossed the Iron Curtain.

This edition has 18 members – three from the 1966 assembly (Schlippenbach, saxophonist Gerd Dudek and Schoof, the band’s eldest member at 80 in 2016) and seven significantly younger newcomers. Among the members are some of the most lyrical of improvisers (Dudek and trumpeter Tomasz Stańko [both joined in 1970]) and great sonic explorers (saxophonist Evan Parker [also 1970] and trumpeter Axel Dörner [2006]).

From the pointillist beginnings in which the members assemble in pecking isolation, the work moves organically through sub-ensembles and solo turns and moments of full-tilt incandescent glory. The trumpeters and trombonists – functioning with nothing resembling a conventional score – stretch a swing-era harmonic model to a mind-melding vision. The ultimate 44-minute piece celebrates the joy of untrammelled improvisation, testimony to the invention, openness and generosity of its members.

Echo Painting
Peggy Lee
Songlines SGL1626-2 (songlines.com)

The artistic genius of Vancouver-based composer/performer/leader Peggy Lee is in top form in Echo Painting, a suite commissioned by the 2016 Vancouver International Jazz Festival. The Lee-composed tracks touch on free improvisation, jazz, and classical genres, providing her new ten-piece ensemble (comprising veteran and younger Vancouver area musicians) eloquent music to interpret. 

The opening Incantation sets the stage with mellow, slow, full ensemble held-note soundscapes and a jazz-tinged tenor saxophone solo against florid drumming. A Strange Visit touches on many styles with its fast, almost minimalistic string opening leading to a slower atonal improvisational section, and finishing with a march-like groove. More diverse style references emerge in Snappy, as Lee’s opening cello improvisation leads to atonal squeaks and repetition. A surprise polka-sounding section with string lead follows, with more fun in the subsequent wall-of-sound drum section. It all ends with crackling new music sounds. Hymn is a relaxing, reflective work with classical tonal harmonic changes. which develops into a more modern-day jazz number. All but three tracks were composed by Lee, the most notable being a straightforward cover of Robbie Robertson’s The Unfaithful Servant sung by guest vocalist Robin Holcomb, a surprising yet gratifying closing musical moment.   

Lee and her musicians move seamlessly between musical ideas with tight ensemble playing whether from notated scores or improvising. This is an original, detailed, unique recording.

The Core-Tet Project
Dame Evelyn Glennie; Jon Hemmersam; Szilárd Mezei; Michael Jefry Stevens
Naxos 8.573804 (naxos.com)

All of us who love to free improvise (and all the rest of you too) need to listen to The Core-tet Project improvising over 70 minutes of in-the-moment illuminating, live musical sounds. Members Dame Evelyn Glennie (percussion), Jon Hemmersam (guitar), Szilárd Mezei (viola) and Michael Jefry Stevens (piano) are each musical superstars, but the big surprise here is how well they create music together.

From the initial piano ping in Steel-Ribbed Dance, each soloist joins the cohesive tight group with virtuosic rapid lines, beating repeated notes and tinges of guitar and piano jazz flavours. The Calling is a quieter, slower soundscape. I love the hypnotic percussion and piano opening leading to a classic middle free improv section with piano and percussion strikes, guitar lines and viola slides. A sense of humour and individuality shines in Walk of Intensity. From the opening pacing piano feel, each instrumentalist runs at their own pace, building to a higher pitch, then gradually subsiding to a final piano note. Silver Shore is a moving, expressive piano and viola duet with its counterpoint and harmonies emulating a notated piece of music. Black Box Thinking features a wall-of-sound setting with the percussion and viola in a “Who will win this percussive banging conversation?” contest. The closing Rusty Locks has a fun groove-driven upbeat dance feel.

The booklet notes, penned by Glennie and Stevens, give a sneak peek to each track. Recording is clean and alive. Enjoy!

D’Agala
Sylvie Courvoisier Trio
Intakt Records CD 300 (intaktrec.ch)

Nearly 15 years of collective rumination about the jazz trio tradition has led to this collection of original compositions by Swiss pianist Sylvie Courvoisier, dedicated to many of her inspirations. Here, Courvoisier is joined by her American associates, bassist Drew Gress and drummer Kenny Wollesen. Intense, but not insensate, Courvoisier’s tunes are unique enough to equally incorporate brooding meditations, solemn threnodies and springy acknowledgments.

Dedicated to pianist Geri Allen, for instance, D’Agala is actually more reminiscent of Bill Evans’ trio elaborations, where emphasized keyboard tones move forward crab-like, as each texture is shadowed by connective double bass thumps and underscored by echoing bell-tree-like and chain-shaking percussion that frames each carefully thought-out pattern. Éclats for Ornette, honouring saxophonist Coleman, jostles with a wobbly effervescence as the semi-blues melody and walking bass emphasis work into a clanking climax that’s as self-possessed as it is solid. South Side Rules for guitarist John Abercrombie is as sparse, distant and darkened as his work, yet each isolated note is kept from formalism by cymbal swirls and drum shuffles; while Fly Whisk, for Irène Schweizer, isolates the celebrated pianist’s distinctive keyboard tapestry, relieved by bursts of forceful chording, without every compromising Courvoisier’s singular identity.

Immersing herself in these nine demonstrations of jazz trio wizardry, the pianist does more than appropriately honour her important influences. Her playing and compositions confirm her membership in the coterie of innovative improvising keyboardists.

Thoughts Become Matter
Zero Point
MTM 006 (zeropoint-music.com)

Controlled free improvisation of the precise kind, this quartet demonstrates that free music doesn’t have to reach zero point – the lowest form of energy – to foam. Harmonized like a chemical formula, without one element missing, the band is Swiss guitarist Marius Duboule, Canadian bassist Michael Bates, plus Americans, drummer Deric Dickens and multi-instrumentalist Daniel Carter.

Never exceeding the boiling point on any track, the group improvisations are nudged along by Bates’ paced and responsive thumps and Dickens’ mediated shuffles and nerve beats. From that point, sound actualization usually depends on whether Duboule is accenting his acoustic guitar strings or crunching rough timbres from his electric instrument, as Carter moves with equal facility among flute, clarinet, trumpet or soprano, alto and tenor saxophones. Carter slips from one to another with such discretion that he’ll often be playing another instrument instants before you’ve finally identified the first. Arabesques and flutter tonguing from his flute highlight storytelling beauty on Go for the Gold, with the same skill that his muted trumpet has on Crystal Lattice, as it hovers beside vibrating guitar strums until they harmonize at the perfect moment. Even Duboule’s electric projections on the title track simply contrast with alto saxophone refinement long enough to ensure Carter’s subsequent harmonizing defines the piece as ductile and dense.

The CD’s one drawback is that its longest track is shorter than eight minutes. Fewer tracks and more protracted improvising would allow Zero Point to stretch its imaginative concepts still further.

Shine Sister Shine
Ian Shaw
Jazz Village JV550005 (pias.com/labels/jazz-village)

Consummate jazz vocalist and pianist Ian Shaw first emerged onto the international jazz scene after his warm and agile voice was heard on the soundtrack of Richard Curtis’ hit film, Four Weddings and a Funeral. Since his auspicious debut, the Welsh-born and London-based Shaw has created some of the most intriguing jazz vocal recordings in recent memory – and his latest offering is no exception. In his own words, Shine Sister Shine is a “celebration of the actions and art of extraordinary women.”

Shaw – who arranged the CD and is joined by his fine trio of Barry Green on piano, Mick Hutton on bass and David Ohm on drums – is also an activist, focused on working with refugees. He contributes two original compositions here, Keep Walking (dedicated to a brave Eritrean mother) and Carry On World, written in praise of women and their steely strength. The other fine tracks on the CD include Shaw’s innovative interpretations of compositions by Peggy Lee, Joni Mitchell, Phoebe Snow and Carly Simon.

Things get cooking with Carry On World (Starring Everyone), which is a supple, contemporary jazz tune with luscious multi-tracked backing vocals by Shaw. Shaw’s pitch-perfect baritone is recognizably his, while still manifesting nuances of iconic jazz vocalists such as the late Mark Murphy. On Not the Kind of Girl, Shaw demonstrates his innate and compassionate ability to communicate the deepest of human feelings. The closer, a piano/voice re-imagining of Carly Simon’s Coming Around Again, is a triumph. Without question, this is one of the finest jazz vocal recordings of the year.

(Ex)Tradition
The Curious Bards
Harmonia Mundi HMN 906105 (thecuriousbards.com)

Hands up, those organizing an Irish ceilidh or Scottish Burns Night. Look no further for your music. These pieces were performed for the most part in the 18th century and what emerges is a highly individual blend. The Curious Bards received formal training in Baroque musical instruments. They have gone on to apply their expertise – and such instruments as the viola da gamba – to perform Irish and Scottish music which has emanated from a variety of sources.

The Curious Bards start with three Scottish reels collected by Robert Bremner in 1757: see if your guests can keep up with the raw energy of The Lads of Elgin! The Irish are not to be dissuaded, with their own opening trio. While some pieces are more melancholic than their Scottish counterparts, The High Road to Dublin displays the spirited quality of the works of Ireland’s renowned bard Carolan.

The most imaginative arrangements on the CD must be the Highland Battle. Just as other Renaissance composers, for example, Byrd and Susato, set the sounds of a battle to music, so the Caledonian Pocket Companion of 1750 conveys the battle via flute and violin, even down to the mournful Lamentation for the Chief.

And so the jigs and reels continue (not least the Reel of Tulloch), enough for an evening’s Irish and Scottish celebrations. This choice by Baroque-trained musicians is strange, but it should not deter anyone. There is a crispness to the interpretations, which that very training brings out.

Rosewood Café
Margaret Herlehy
Big Round Records BR8950 (bigroundrecoreds.com)

In Rosewood Café, a small band of Latin jazz performers, fronted by an oboe of all things, presents a sweet collection of songs in the South American popular idiom. Oboist Margaret Herlehy has a lively sense of rhythm and phrase. She matches well with the more typical elements of a Latin jazz combo: drums, guitar and piano.

The CD title gives a good indication of one likely market for this product: it’s exactly the sort of fresh sound one might hear for the first time over a latté in the local coffee haunt, played slightly below the surrounding murmur of conversation and clicking of laptop keyboards. One approaches the server to inquire and one sees that it does indeed feature the oboe in this atypical mix, and one revisits one’s sense of what exactly the oboe can or should do. It’s lovely to hear the pairing of oboe and flute racing to the finish of track six, Diabinho maluco by Jacob do Bandolim, the only really uptempo cut on the collection, by.

Apart from the final track, Astor Piazzolla’s Café 1930, the composers featured are fairly unknown to the non-aficionado of popular Latin music, and in spite of a promise of an online listing, neither the disc nor the website provide any great detail about them. Interesting to note that the one most often featured is Brazilian guitarist Celso Machado, who lives, according to Google, in British Columbia.

Listen to 'Rosewood Café' now in the Listening Room

Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa
Jeremy Dutcher
Independent jd003 (jeremydutcher.com)

Jeremy Dutcher is a multi-gifted artist who also expresses his humanity as an activist and musicologist. Dutcher is a member of the Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick, and he began this remarkable project by transcribing Wolastoq songs from vintage 1907 wax cylinders at the Canadian Museum of History in Halifax. The voices and souls of Dutcher’s people reached out to him through those cylinders, which were rife with unfamiliar songs and lore.

The 11 deeply moving compositions on this CD are the result of Dutcher’s “collaboration” with those ancestral voices, as well as his almost classical piano approach and dynamic vocal instrument. Each track is also enhanced and integrated with Wolastoq spoken word and singing that was preserved on those cylinders. Dutcher has surrounded himself here with a scintillating wall of sound, including himself on piano and vocals, Devon Bate on electronics and an array of strings, brass and percussion – all the voices of a classical orchestra. He has said that he is doing this remarkable work in part because there are only about 100 Wolastoqey speakers left, and “It’s crucial for us to make sure that we’re using our language and passing it on to the next generation.”

In the initial track, Mehcinut/Death Chant, Dutcher’s voice soars in power, strength and purity, moving contiguously with the voice from a wax cylinder recording. Other stunning compositions include Ultestakon/Shaker Lullaby, which has a simply gorgeous melody and sonorous percussion that evokes a comforting heartbeat; and also Love Song, which is arranged with angelic and complex vocals that act as sonic waves of uplifting awareness and oneness.

ID
MAZ
Bleu 44 BLEUCD-4445 (mazworld.ca)

Montreal group MAZ has many accolades under their belt. With this, their third album, there should be many more to come as the group tastefully takes Québécois traditional music in a new direction, as the group self-describes, “in a flow of trad, jazz and electro.”

Each member is a superb performer/composer. Leader/electric guitarist/banjoist Marc Maziade plays and sings with confidence and originality. His opening zippy clear vocals in the traditional tune La guenille foreshadow what the future tracks will bring, with a fast-driving bass groove by Hugo Blouin, great fiddling by Pierre-Olivier Dufresne, and Roxane Beaulieu on keyboards. The rest are original tunes which feature interesting style developments. Love the club dance feel of Projet 4, as a touch of folk is supported by solid low-end bounce and electro music. Le fléau moves at a nice walking pace as traditional music is modernized with a nice accelerando, bouncy melody, instrumental solos and closing squeaks. Le cercle dives into more contemporary sounds with its larger interval leap melodic lines, multi-rhythms and quasi-atonal harmonic changes. The fun upbeat closing of ID 4/4 – reel du chemin moves subtly from pop vocals and grooves to a more traditional reel so we can all remember where their music came from!

MAZ members are so respectful of each other that the multi-genre styles they are transforming and combining never feel contrived and produce fresh, accessible, inventive Québécois world music.