08 Allison AuWander Wonder
Allison Au Quartet
Independent AA-18 (allisonau.com)

The Allison Au Quartet has been together since 2009 and their first album, The Sky Was Pale Blue, Then Grey (2013) was nominated for a JUNO. The second album, Forest Grove, won a JUNO in 2016 for Best Jazz Album of the Year: Group. Wander Wonder is their third release and is a thoughtful and subtle work with each musician contributing their technique and inspiration to Au’s complex and layered compositions. For example, the group’s casual precision is demonstrated during the drum solo which ends Force Majeure: Fabio Ragnelli plays with abandon while Todd Pentney (piano) and Jon Maharaj (bass) lay down an understated and contrasting, repeating chordal vamp. Throughout the album, Au’s alto saxophone is light but intense and reminds me a little of Paul Desmond but leaner; it fits well with her writing where solos are interspersed with ensemble sections and melodic fragments.

Highlights include Looking Up which begins with Ragnelli’s subtle drum intro. Then Au plays a beautiful looping melody over clever rhythmic punctuation, an ostinato bass pattern interrupts before the melody returns and leads into an elegant piano solo. Red Herring begins with a syncopated minor melody over funky and jagged beats. As the piece progresses, Pentney’s Prophet Rev2 adds an ominous texture for some additional tension. The piece winds its way down a number of genre alleys (as its title suggests) and is ultimately satisfying and not at all misleading. Wander Wonder is an exquisite album that balances introspection with some terrific solos.

09 AutoschediasmAutoschediasm
Karoline Leblanc; Ernesto Rodrigues; Nicolas Caloia
Atrito-Afeito 010 (atrito-afeito.com)

Autoschediasm (the term indicates something improvised, offhand or casual) presents a three-segment collective improvisation created by Montreal-based pianist Karoline Leblanc and bassist Nicolas Caloia and Portuguese violist Ernesto Rodrigues. All are accomplished improvisers, but each brings different threads: Leblanc’s background stresses the classical avant-garde; Caloia’s career emphasizes free jazz; Rodrigues, who leads several distinct improvising orchestras in Lisbon, has championed free improvisation for over 30 years, appearing on scores of CDs.

While the title suggests something casual, the music sounds appropriate to its Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal setting, the trio bringing a high modernist discipline and precision to the work. The opening movement flows with an energy that is dense and light. Sparked initially by LeBlanc’s imaginative keyboard flights, in its later stages it settles into a churning rhythmic pattern that ignites Rodrigues’ radical virtuosity, resulting in a flurry of microtonal lines that sometimes create their own counterpart. Offhand? Casual? The only thing that distinguishes it from composed music is the challenge of writing it down.

The second movement takes a contrasting approach, developing little sounds, arising discreetly, sometimes pointillist, at times muffled, at others percussive, a gently humming underbrush alive with detail. The final segment moves from delicate sonic events to a turbulent, vibrant world that recalls the opening, a formal motion that exaggerates a pattern evident since the early classical era. It’s an act of “autoschediasm” rich in taut attention to nuance and form.

10 Pressing CloudsPressing Clouds Passing Crowds
Kim Myhr; Quatuor Bozzini; Caroline Bergvall; Ingar Zach
Hubro HUBRO CD 2612 (hubromusic.com)

Initially commissioned and performed at FIMAV in Victoriaville, Quebec, Pressing Clouds Passing Crowds is a musical rumination on immutable nature and human disruption, composed by Kim Myhr, the Norwegian guitarist whose strums underscore the narrative that ululates through this six-track suite.

Accompanied by Norwegian percussionist Ingar Zach and framed by the harmonies of Montreal string ensemble Quatuor Bozzini (QB), the music shares space with the idiosyncratic recitation by French-Norwegian poet Caroline Bergvall. Her distinctive phrasing helps set up a rhythmically charged program where her vocal narrative adds as much to individual sequences as the QB’s intermittently buzzing glissandi, the percussionist’s hand pops and vibrations, plus the guitarist’s string strokes and spanks on 12-string acoustic, which constantly move the theme forward. Moving efficiently through word images that range among simple instances of nature appreciation, chimerical retelling of dreamlike surprises, and astute allusions to political events involving refugees and dangerous water crossings, Bergvall sets up hypnotic sequences whose resolution depends as much on the feints and fancies of instrumental virtuosity as the players’ strategies depend on her verbal concoctions.

With its echoes of folksay, impressionism, stark improvisation and poetics, Pressing Clouds Passing Crowds is a distinctive creation which can be experienced more than once – which is precisely what can be done by listening to this CD.

11 LingerLinger
Benoît Delbecq; Jorrit Dijkstra; John Hollenbeck
Driff Records CD 1801 (driffrecords.com)

Reshaping improvisational parameters, Dutch alto saxophonist Jorrit Dijkstra and French pianist Benoît Delbecq add flexible oscillations to the ten performances here by also improvising on, respectively, Lyricon and preparations for synthesizer, aided by the flexible percussion patterning of Montreal-based John Hollenbeck.

With instrumental additions that can process tones as they’re created, the Europeans’ secondary voices multiply interactions past standard trio voicings to suggest enhanced melodic lyricism and rhythmic vigour, often simultaneously. On Stir for instance, reed smears and outer-space-like oral currents vie for supremacy challenged by wave-form squibs and measured keyboard chording. Unfazed by timbre multiplicity, the drummer not only keeps a backbeat going, most powerfully on Push, but also bluntly asserts his agenda with individualistic rolls and ruffs plus cymbal splashes there and throughout the CD.

Dijkstra and Delbecq don’t just depend on texture supplements as they aptly demonstrate on Dwell, where irregular saxophone trills and split tones confront a flowing keyboard narrative plus inner piano string stops; or on Stalk, where modulated piano clusters create an impressionistic theme that complements inchoate Lyricon echoes as well as cursive beats plus drum-rim rubbing from Hollenbeck.

Contrapuntal yet communicative, the textural sound-melding throughout the disc suggests that Dijkstra and Delbecq, who first met at the Banff Jazz Workshop in 1990, should collaborate more often. As it is, the two, plus Hollenback’s fluid and inventive patterning, have created a session over which one can beneficially linger.

12 Eric DolphyEric Dolphy – Musical Prophet
Eric Dolphy
Resonance Records HCD-2035 (resonancerecords.org)

When Eric Dolphy died in a diabetic coma in 1964 at 36, he represented a special loss to jazz: a master of three distinct woodwinds (alto saxophone, bass clarinet and flute) whose exalted technical acumen and creative intensity contributed immeasurably to great recordings by John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, George Russell and Oliver Nelson, among many others.

Musical Prophet is a 3CD set that expands the 1963 sessions that produced the LPs Conversations and Iron Man. Ranging from unaccompanied saxophone solos (Love Me is an expressionist masterpiece heard here in three versions) to a tentet, from jazz standards like Fats Waller’s Jitterbug Waltz (on flute) to Dolphy’s own dense, swarming Burning Spear, it’s the finest portrait of the breadth of Dolphy’s genius available. There are no finer examples of the “third stream” impulse than Dolphy’s duets with bassist Richard Davis, abstract weavings that press Ellington’s Come Sunday and the standard Alone Together into classics of improvised chamber music. On Music Matador, his bass clarinet roars with celebratory abandon.

Dolphy’s breadth is as apparent in his range of collaborators, from bassoonist Garvin Bushell, who recorded with Mamie Smith in 1922, to 18-year-old trumpeter Woody Shaw, here making his recording debut. Along with the expansive and illuminating alternate takes, the set includes a remarkable bonus, A Personal Statement, with an extended musical dialogue that includes pianist Bob James (yes, that Bob James) and countertenor David Schwartz.

13 Keith JarrettLa Fenice
Keith Jarrett
ECM ECM2601-02 (ecmrecords.com/catalogue/1532415893/la-fenice-keith-jarrett)

A new release from the Keith Jarrett concert archive is always a welcome occasion. Such is the case with La Fenice, the ECM label’s latest offering from the virtuoso pianist, which comes to us as a two-disc set featuring an improvised solo concert recorded at Gran Teatro La Fenice, Venice, in 2006. By this time, Jarrett had adopted a concert format during which he would improvise a series of relatively short pieces, as opposed to the long uninterrupted sets that he favoured on earlier iconic recordings such as La Scala and Bremen/Lausanne.

Interestingly though, Jarrett begins La Fenice by breaking these self-imposed format limits, as he launches into a mostly atonal musical exploration which clocks in at over 17 minutes, until its final unexpected resolution in F-sharp Major. In Part 3, the pianist visits one of his more familiar trademark styles wherein his left hand lays down an ostinato pattern while the right hand improvises fluid gospel/blues lines. Rhythmic clarity, direction and superb melodic development are present throughout, as Jarrett pulls off one amazing pianistic feat after another with apparent ease. The music then segues into an achingly beautiful ballad, possibly one of the most breathtaking improvised pieces he has ever recorded.

On disc two, the pianist breaks up more complex harmonic territory with a bittersweet Gilbert and Sullivan tune (The Sun Whose Rays), before proceeding on to a straight-out blues romp. We are also treated to several encores, including My Wild Irish Rose, Stella by Starlight and a stunning Jarrett original, Blossom. On Stella, the pianist is clearly enjoying himself as he weaves complex bop lines over a left hand walking bass, while also tapping his foot on beats two and four: a one-man band!

All told, La Fenice is a deserving addition to Jarrett’s long and distinguished recording legacy.

As the advances, musical and otherwise, that transformed the 1960s and 70s recede into history, new considerations of what happened during those turbulent times continually appear. Reissues of advanced music recorded during that time, some needlessly obscure, some better known, help fill in the details of exactly what transpired.

01 Milford GravesProbably the most historically relevant set to become available for the first time on CD is Bäbi (Corbett vs. Dempsey CvsDCD052; corbettvsdempsey.com) by master-drummer Milford Graves. Recently the subject of Full Mantis (a documentary about Graves’ contribution to sessions by the likes of Albert Ayler and Paul Bley and his years teaching at Bennington College), Graves is acknowledged as one of the originators of multi-pulsed, free-form drumming. This legendary 1976 disc, with the sophisticated drum patterns evolving alongside frenetic screeching and jumping multiphonics from saxophonists Arthur Doyle and Hugh Glover, captures that trio at its zenith, and the 2CD set includes an additional four tracks recorded in 1969 by the same band. If anything 1969 Trio 1 to 1969 Trio 4 are even further out than the sounds Graves, Doyle and Glover would record seven years later. With sabre-sharp altissimo cries, and fractured split tones plus near bloodcurdling vocal interruptions, the performance is the epitome of 1960s ecstatic jazz. Yet beneath the reed gurgling and glossolalia, Graves’ press rolls, cymbal-splashing and elastic textures create a thundering counterpoint and moderating influence on the saxophone astringency. The drummer may be kicking off and time-marking his performance with more speaking in tongues and whooping in 1976, but he’s refined his percussion strategy still further. Pounding ruffs and rebounds at a whirlwind pace, his patterning pushes reed peeps and fissures to a higher plane, and then brings them back to earth. Meanwhile on the concluding Bäbi, his verbal counting-off and vocal time and tempo shifts for the others resemble Africanized tribal chants. With Glover and Doyle becoming more exaggerated in their screeching and slathering irregular vibrations, Graves empties his percussion trick bag, fluidly jerking from steel-drum-like rhythms to bell-ringing, wood and Mylar block thumps and skin slaps. The horns may be heading for outer space, but the drummer’s pacing ensures that the pieces judder with foot-tapping rhythms as well.

02 Roscoe MitchellIf Bäbi has been more legendary than listened to over the past 45 years, then saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell’s defining work from 1966, Sound (Delmark DE 4408; delmark.com), has an opposite history. Constantly available since its release, this new reissue uses the original analog mix and includes alternate, longer takes of the title track and Ornette. A breakthrough which put the burgeoning Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians’ (AACM) sound on disc for the first time, two of the members of the sextet – trumpeter Lester Bowie and bassist Malachi Favors – soon joined Mitchell and others to form the influential Art Ensemble of Chicago. At that time Ornette confirmed that Ornette Coleman’s early 1960s advances were now accepted additions to contemporary jazzers’ vocabulary, though granted the mix of duck-like quacks and piercing kazoo-like peeps from Mitchell and tenor saxophonist Maurice McIntyre on both takes probably draws more from the AACM’s sardonic viewpoint than Coleman’s more naïve concepts. Plus reed trills are artfully balanced by sophisticated guitar-like patterning from Favors and cellist Lester Lashley. Even cursory listening to the alternate takes reveals subtle differences between them with different emphases and climaxes. With its harmonica breaths and cogwheel ratchet cracks, The Little Suite is even more indicative of how Mitchell compositions could be moderato and spiky simultaneously, as advanced Coleman-John Coltrane-like reed-tone explorations share space with vocal yelps in a tambourine-smacking pseudo march. With over 20 minutes to elaborate his sonic concepts on either take of Sound, Mitchell creates a mercurial sound kaleidoscope. His sometimes snarling, sometimes circular-breathed alto saxophone line negotiates a distinctive exposition that ambles past near-breathless trombone signs, spectacular trumpet accelerations, driving cymbal rattles and tough sul ponticello string nips. No matter how abstract the exposition however, the composition advances harmonically with the initially available track even concluding with a recapped head. Sound maintains its reputation since it synthesizes the music that preceded it and adumbrates sounds to come. 

03 The HauntExperiments in free-form sounds were spreading outwards from New York and Chicago all during that time, and 1976’s The Haunt (NoBusiness Records NBCD 105; nobusinessrecords.com) documents the now almost-forgotten New Haven scene. Ironically, although Connecticut-based clarinetist Perry Robinson was from New York, and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, an AACM linchpin, a Chicago expat, local vibraharpist Bobby Naughton was the third trio member and composed all the tunes. Stripped to chamber improv, the six tracks don’t suffer from lack of conventional chordal or percussion timbres, since Naughton’s just-in-time steel bar resonations purposely and craftily fill any gaps left from the sonic contrasts among Smith’s heraldic open-horn keens and Robinson’s abstruse glissandi or whinnies. While gorgeous trumpet storytelling on tracks such as Places moves with contrapuntal injections from shrill clarinet pitches, from polychromatic expanse to uncomfortable abstraction, mallet-chiming pops prevent this. Instead, shimmering vibes tones help assume a forward-moving group pulse. Skillful in adding diaphanous, but not delicate, mallet strokes that ring like toy piano keys; or adding extra weightiness by striking while diminishing the motor speed, the vibist’s skill and The Haunt’s individuality are highlighted on the concluding Ordette. With calm mallet-on-metal strokes preserving the narrative, textures resulting from blending Robinson’s note spews and Smith’s graceful slurs are now harmonized, moderated but no less powerful on this disc recorded a decade after Sound.

04 Group ComposingMidway between when Sound and The Haunt were recorded is the 1970 instance of truth-in-packaging Groupcomposing (Corbett vs. Dempsey CvsDCD056; corbettvsdempsey.com), which shows off the free-music conceptions European players had been developing on their own during the previous half-decade, only peripherally influenced by stateside experiments. Trans-European long before the 1993 Maastricht Treaty created the European Union, the Instant Composers Pool here includes three players from the United Kingdom, three from The Netherlands and a German. A couple of years after such defining LPs as Machine Gun and European Echoes were recorded (featuring most of these players), sound-searing saxophonists Peter Brötzmann and Peter Bennink, slippery-toned trombonist Paul Rutherford plus unpredictable drummer Han Bennink were still producing oppressive timbres that bounce from polyphony to cacophony to multiphonics. Meanwhile guitarist Derek Bailey’s distinctive, spiky twangs occasionally peer from the near-solid sound mass and saxophonist Evan Parker, two months away from recording the BritImprov-defining Topography of the Lungs (with Bailey and [Han] Bennink), tries out both the agitated and allayed approaches in his solos. One defining moment occurs midway through Groupcomposing2 when the guitarist’s astringent clanks join Parker’s split tones and pinched snores from the trombone for a caustic lull that is soon swallowed by long tones from the saxophones, plus belligerent cracks and blunt ruffs from Bennink’s hand bells, cymbals and odd percussion add-ons. Other eventful sequences among the claustrophobic mass of upwards spiralling broken-reed glissandi and trombone gutbucket smears, are sardonic intermezzos from pianist Misha Mengelberg, who defies the others by clanking keys at divergent speeds and pitches. Like Sound, Groupcomposing is suggesting alternate improvisational paths for the future.

05 Cosmic ForestThe most inclusive sonic snapshot of the 1960s and 1970s is, however, Cosmic Forest – The Spiritual Sounds of MPS (MPS 4029759122562; mps-music.com) which collects 13 tracks by American and European musicians trying out conflicting musical strands to unite with jazz. A few which foretold the intellectual dead end of vocal-led smooth jazz are best forgotten, but others such as saxophonist Nathan Davis’ Evolution, find a committed bopper adopting modal currents to his own style; still others inaugurating a version of expansive Nordic narratives; while Timbales Calientes from the MPS Rhythm Combination & Brass is a reimaging of Latin-jazz rock with the layered section work goosed by Palle Mikkelborg’s stratospheric trumpet lines. More compelling are players pioneering a fusion between improvised and so-called world music. For instance clarinetist Tony Scott’s Burungkaka Tua is a notable melding of Scott’s moderated tone, tough ethnic blowing from Javanese flutist Marjono and a decisive blues underpinning from Chinese pianist Bubi Chen. Pianist George Gruntz’s Djerbi takes a traditional Bedouin dance melody played by Sadi El Nadi on ney and unites it with the pianist’s chromatic thrusts aided by Daniel Humair’s foot-tapping drumming. A crucial harbinger of what was to come is Yaad, which, propelled by tabla slaps, unites the exploratory comping of pianist Irène Schweizer and Barney Wilen’s whispery flute with the sitar twangs and vocalized chants of Dewan Motihar mirrored by trumpet blats from Manfred Schoof.

Free music orchestrator Schoof’s presence confirms that improvisers of the time were committed to experimenting with all sorts of sounds. Many exceptional projects were recorded in the 1960s and 70s, and the more that become available again, the more they increase our knowledge of what was attempted and accomplished. 

Back to top