Jazz and Improvised

Legendary as the country where every type of Western music has some followers and where every disc extant is rumoured to exist in some form or another, Japan likewise has a healthy jazz and free music scene. This appreciation extends to homegrown improvisers, but few are known throughout the larger musical world. Not only do these discs demonstrate how this situation is changing as Asian players interact with more Westerners, but some outsider players have also moved there since they found the country’s audiences to be sympathetic to their music. 

In the former group, one of the most prominent is Hiroshima-born alto saxophonist/clarinetist Akira Sakata, 74, who’s been improvising in an individual free jazz style since the early 1970s which also involves his off-the-wall vocalizing. A marine biologist as well as a musician, Sakata organized the co-operative trio Arashi a few years ago with Norwegian percussionist Paal Nilssen-Love and Swedish bassist Johan Berthling. The exciting Jikan Arashi (PNL Records PNL 045 paalnilssen-love.com) is its newest disc. Reminiscent of the heyday of “The New Thing” sound explorers, on saxophone, Sakata has seemingly never found a tone he couldn’t split or a timbre he couldn’t overblow. This is demonstrated most convincingly on the extended Yamanoue-no-Okura with a solo that’s all snarls and growls, and that inflates with pressurized vibratos and propelled reed bites each time he outputs a phrase. In sympathy, Betherling’s accelerated strumming and Nilssen-Love’s constant thumping, fluidly pulse and push with the same intensity. Besides the trio’s sliding and shredding instrumentally up and down the scale, here and elsewhere Sakata vocalizes guttural syllables that wouldn’t be out of place on a Japanese horror film soundtrack. Eventually, gurgles and mumbles that involve the guts and throat more than the mouth and lips give way to small instrument whumps and cymbal lacerations from the drummer culminating in triple intensity. While the saxophonist’s frenetic Aylerian screams and pressurized stutters mix with Nilssen-Love’s constant pounding on the title track, he also shows off restrained chalumeau-register clarinet storytelling on Tsuioku, partnered by cymbal slides. Despite his concluding shrilling output and a return to guttural mumbling, Jikan is another indication of why the reedist has maintained his creativity over the decades.

Another first-generation Japanese improviser who has maintained a similar musical ingenuity is Yokohama-born percussionist Sabu Toyozumi, two years Sakata’s senior. Having worked over the years in different-sized assemblages with local and foreign Free Music players, Sol Abstraction (Sol Disk SD 1901 soldisk.com) is a stripped-down live date from the Philippines where he goes head-to-head with American alto saxophonist Rick Countryman on nine tracks. A committed free jazzer, the saxophonist’s collection of multiphonics, irregularly pitched vibrations, tension- building and sopranissimo screams are met with expressive touches, resonating conga-like hand slaps brought into play alongside claps and swing affiliations. Although only the extended Integrity of Creation includes what could be termed an albeit brief drum solo of claps, clatter, press rolls and rattles, Toyozumi’s constant rumbles and patterns keep up with Countryman who crams as many notes as he can into every bar, pulls his split tones as far as possible without breakage and triple tongues into the stratosphere before ending with crying flutter tonguing. The drummer’s skill using the erhu or spike fiddle is also displayed on a couple of related tracks as he cannily manages to mirror the saxophonist’s circular textural screams and squeaky overblowing with two-stringed slices, even as place-marking drum beats remain. The two also manage to append a relaxed shuffle groove to the feverish sallies that make up Broken Art Part I and Part II, but the best expression of Toyozumi’s – and by extension Countryman’s – versatility occurs on the three parts of Ballad of Mototeru Takagi. A threnody for a deceased saxophonist colleague, the suite moves from tongue-slapping, reed-shaking theme development to repeated diaphragm-intense cries from the saxophonist, as the drummer’s narrative contribution is cymbals tolling with narrow clangs. Finally Toyozumi’s slaps rebound at a choppier pace as Countryman elaborates the now passive theme with melancholy sound spurts.

Moving on a generation and compounding Japanese improvisers, almost-clichéd fascination with electronics is In Cotton and Wool (Ftarri ftarari-980 ftarari.com), a duet between the audio feedback generated by Toshimaru Nakamura’s no-input mixing board and the trumpet and electronics of Berlin’s Axel Dörner. Moving past expected musical tropes, or for some music, the program mixes manipulated loops of industrial-strength voltage feedback from Nakamura’s machine to such an extent that the outcome appears to possess the strength and velocity of both a high-speed locomotive and a tropical thunder storm. This is particularly true of the extended Hemp, especially when extended electronic rumbles nearly attain drum-beat qualities, with Dorner`s response a combination of dissociated peeps and an intermittent moose-call-like ending. Variations of this strategy play out during the subsequent selections, with, for instance, grace notes from the trumpet audible through a cloud of heavily amplified drones on Silk, before the track speeds up to the extent that it could be the sound of a car crash captured in real time, until the noise is abruptly cut off. The loops of blurred whistling and puffs are resolved on the final track, Cashmere, as narrow tongue splatters from the horn are overshadowed by blurred input-output pulses from the mixing board to create an ambulatory synthesized exposition which Dörner amplifies with capillary bites and echoes until brass qualities are buried under synthesized pulsation created by both his and Nakamura’s electronics.

More general acceptance of projects like Nakamura-Dörner’s is what persuades even more experimental players to settle in Japan. Case in point is Saskatchewan-native Tim Olive, who lives in Kobe. Using his preferred tools of magnetic pickup and electronics, Olive joins with Beijing-based Yan Jun, who manipulates electronics and field recordings, on Brother of Divinity (845 Audio 845-10 845 audio.bandcamp.com), for a fascinating 28-minute sound collage that admittedly makes even the previous discs appear conventional. A rare electronic session that culminates with foreground resonance after synthesizing the impulses created by the duo, Brother of Divinity works its way from loops of crackles and pops, as distant voice singing or beating out rock-styled music comes in and out of aural focus. As ring modulator-like gonging-feedback loops become more prominent, the blurry interface also takes on percussive side scratches and bounces until what initially seemed to be neverending pulses splinter into chirps and thumps in double counterpoint. With its keyboard-suggested bent-note narrative, the final section becomes more reductionist with metronomic timepiece-like clicks, suggesting a stain spreading slowly on a yielding surface, crunching beats and church-bell-like pealing, project with synthesized pulsations into conclusive buzzes and shuffles.

If Japanese free improvisers are little known outside of a small coterie, imagine the situation for a Korean saxophonist committed to experimental music. Yet An Eternal Moment (NoBusiness Records NBCD 115 nobusinessrecords.com) is a 76-minute live 1995 Yamaguchi concert by Japanese percussionist Midori Takada and alto saxophonist Kang Tae Hwan, visiting from Seoul. One track is an extended solo saxophone meditation and the last, Dan-Shi, posits what sonic challenge would result if sax/drum duos like it mixed narrow, high-pitched, sometimes barely audible reed explorations, with gamelan-like marimba pops and sizzling cymbal hisses, besides regular drum beats. However, the key paring is the nearly 42-minute Syun-Soku, During the exposition, Hwan’s strained reed vibrations work up to lacerating split tones and down to narrowed ghost notes, then up to bagpipe-like overblowing timbre-smears as Takada hits tuned aluminum bars and shakes reverberating cymbals. Rhythmic drum taps spark thin chirps from the saxophonist, who soon seems able to simultaneously output a slim, whistling tone and more rounded coloratura variations. Reaching the first climax at mid-point, the narrative slows down to the extent that Hwan’s dissonant slurps seem to be being pushed back into his horn’s body tube. Crashing ruffs from the percussionist become non-metered whacks in opposition, helping to transform reed multiphonics into low-pitched trills that neatly affiliate with unforced cymbal patterns, leading to a finale that links splash cymbal power with retrained reed snarls.

Politically and sociologically Asia is no longer the Mysterious East for most Westerners. These CDs could provide a similar demystification of sound when it comes to improvised music. 

Joan of Art
Dave Robbins Sextet
Cellar Music CM110518 (cellarlive.com)

Jump Up
Brad Turner Quartet (with guest Seamus Blake)
Celler Music CM123018 (cellarlive.com)

Just Like Magic
Mike Allen; Peter Washington; Lewis Nash
Celler Music CM010519 (cellarlive.com)

This Quiet Room
PJ Perry featuring Bill Mays
Cellar Music CM121018 (cellarlive.com)

The Real Blue
Pureum Jin (Jeremy Manasia; Luke Sellick; Willie Jones III; Sabeth Perez)
Celler Music CM020219 (cellarlive.com)

The Cellar Music Group: As a high school jazz musician in Metro Vancouver in the early 2000s, The Cellar Jazz Club, owned and operated by Cory Weeds, was the centre of my musical universe. Despite the fact that it was located below street level, it stood head and shoulders above comparable Vancouver venues, bringing in a healthy mixture of performers, from local standouts such as Jodi Proznick, Bill Coon and Brad Turner, to major international acts, including organist Joey DeFrancesco, pianist Monty Alexander and Chris Potter’s Underground project, with Adam Rogers, Craig Taborn and Nate Smith. (I have a vivid memory, at the Potter show, of strategically hiding a recording device under a napkin at my table, on behalf (I swear) of a friend.) Out of the club grew the label: Cellar Live, as it was initially known, was a vehicle by which the club’s live performances could be documented and distributed, helping to further develop the identity of the Cellar, the musicians who played on its stage, and the Vancouver jazz scene as a whole.

Though the Cellar Jazz Club is no more, the label has continued to thrive, and now operates as The Cellar Music Group, with three distinct imprint categories: Cellar Live, which primarily releases live recordings, Cellar Jazz, which primarily releases studio dates, and Reel to Real Recordings, a relatively recent venture, which releases rare archival recordings. With close to 150 albums over the course of its 18-year history, Cellar Music has a broad range of releases in its roster. Some highlights: the late Ross Taggart’s Thankfully, with Bob Murphy, Mike Rud and Bernie Arai, Curtis Nowosad’s Dialectics, with Jimmy Greene, Derrick Gardner, Steve Kirby and Will Bonness, and, on Reel to Real, Etta Jones’ A Soulful Sunday: Live at The Left Bank, a recording made in Baltimore in February 1972.

Cellar Music has five new recordings worth checking out, which, taken together – but listed in no particular order – showcase the label’s aforementioned breadth.

Joan of Art, from drummer Dave Robbins’ eponymous sextet, takes its name from the title track, written in honour of Vancouver jazz patron Joan Mariacher. Robbins is a strong, dynamic drummer, with a propulsive swing feel that lends itself well to a sextet format (he is joined by Steve Holy, bass; Chris Gestrin, piano; Mike Allen, tenor saxophone; Brad Turner, trumpet; Rod Murray, trombone). Robbins is also a thoughtful, conscientious arranger, both of his own compositions and of the album’s two covers (Lennon/McCartney’s Can’t Buy Me Love and Paul Desmond’s Take Five). 

Jump Up, a new album from the Brad Turner Quartet with special guest Seamus Blake, is a follow-up almost 20 years in the making: around 2000, the same group (Turner, trumpet; Blake, tenor saxophone; Bruno Hubert, piano; André Lachance, bass; Dylan van der Schyff, drums) released Live At The Cellar. Packed with exciting playing and Turner’s mature, well-developed compositions, Jump Up covers a wide range of material, from the funk-tinged The Enthusiast to the swinging up-tempo title track to Catastrophizer, a welcome bonus, recorded live at Frankie’s Jazz Club during a three-day stint leading up to this album’s recording at The Warehouse Studio in Vancouver.

Tenor saxophonist Mike Allen’s new album, Just Like Magic, is a trio outing with the famed rhythm section of Peter Washington and Lewis Nash, recorded in Rudy Van Gelder’s Englewood Cliffs studio in New Jersey in January of this year. From the downbeat of Big Bertha, the focus is on melody, time and tone, the intimacy of the sax trio configuration only enhanced by the headphone-free, live-off-the-floor approach and the legendary acoustic characteristics of the studio.

This Quiet Room, a duo album from Canadian alto saxophonist PJ Perry and American pianist Bill Mays, is another essay in intimacy. Recorded live-off-the-floor at a private home in Vancouver, the session feels warm and immediate, and successfully produces the sensation of being in the room as the songs are being performed. Both Perry and Mays are veteran jazz players, with a firm grip on the idiomatic conventions of the music they’ve recorded. Bud Powell’s Parisian Thoroughfare and Charlie Parker’s Laird Baird are highlights, and both give Perry ample room to demonstrate his bebop prowess. The album’s quieter moments are also memorable: the medley of The Folks Who Live On The Hill (played solo by Mays) and Two For The Road is a lovely treat. 

The Real Blue, the debut studio album from New York-based alto saxophonist Pureum Jin, was recorded at GB’s Juke Joint, in Long Island City, New York; relatively close to Van Gelder’s New Jersey Englewood Cliffs studio, at least compared to Vancouver. Joined by pianist Jeremy Manasia, bassist Luke Sellick, drummer Willie Jones III and special guest vocalist Sabeth Pérez, Jin has a bright, strong sound, rooted in the hard-bop style of Phil Woods, to whom she pays tribute on the song Remembering Mr. Woods, one of eight originals on this ten-track disc.

Musique-Politique: Anthologie 1971-1974
Le Quatuor de Jazz Libre du Québec
Tour de Bras TDBHIST0001 (tourdebras.com)

This has been a momentous year for the documentation of Quebec’s entry into the world of free jazz. First came Eric Fillion’s book Jazz Libre et la révolution québécoise : Musique-action, 1967-1975 (M Éditeur: 2019) and now this ambitious four-CD set to provide sonic evidence of the achievement of the founders of free jazz in the province, Le Quatuor de Jazz Libre du Québec. The CDs, drawn from the group’s archives of performance tapes, are supplemented by a 24-page, LP-size volume that includes essays in French (including ones by Fillion and producer Éric Normand) and reproductions of manifestos, news stories and even a cover questionnaire from the group’s social outreach program, all of it providing context for the most radical Canadian-born jazz movement in history.

The group existed from 1967 to 1975 with two constant members, tenor saxophonist Jean Préfontaine and trumpeter Yves Charbonneau. If jazz has rarely been political in Canada, Le Quatuor was insistently so, creating a distinct connection between the ferment in Quebec society and the ferment in their own music, initially inspired by American free jazz as played by Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler. The music here is very much a soundtrack to the times, an intense element in the rise of Quebec nationalism that followed on the FLQ crisis and the War Measures Act, enacted in October 1970. The quartet’s reach into the heart of Quebecois culture included the founding of an artist commune (Le Petite Québec Libre), a later performance space (L’Amorce) and public self-analysis of their work (interspersed here between the performances).

The music here runs from 1971 to 1974, arguably the group’s strongest period despite shifting support. Jean Préfontaine, born in 1926, is the strongest presence here, a musician who found free jazz after a career in a military band. His extended opening solo on a September 1973 performance is a riveting example of all that free jazz saxophone could be: a radical soliloquy that’s part jeremiad, part exhortation, part abstract interior monologue cut through with doubt and excitement at the coming day. Yves Charbonneau is a fine foil, a subtler provocateur, adding thoughtful solos and detailed support as the set documents the band’s developing sense of a commanding freedom. The presence of American cellist Tristan Honsinger on the 1973 material, passing through en route to a brilliant career in European free improvisation, signals a broadening musical language and the achievement of the group’s final period.

The set adds substantially to the history of jazz in Canada, casting new light on its most intense moment, as well as a significant contributory stream to Quebec’s diverse concept of musique actuelle, perhaps the most vigorous scene in contemporary Canadian music.