Entries associated with the tag "Free Improvisation":

This week’s paper includes a Critic’s Choice I wrote for the Lebanese improviser Mazen Kerbaj , who begins a five-night stint in the Chicago area Wednesday night at the Hideout, where he'll perform with percussionist Michael Zerang and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm (the gig starts at 8:30, earlier than usual). While Kerbaj has become a regular presence in these parts, a couple of recent releases suggest that the innovative scene he’s helped foster in Beirut is growing and making international connections.

Earlier this year Zerang released a collection of duets with various Lebanese players, Cedarhead, on Kerbaj’s Al Maslakh label. Most of the Lebanese folks favor a decidedly abstract brand of improvisation, where the trademark sound of a given instrument is frequently destroyed or forfeited in favor of amorphous noises, hums, clatter, and whinnies. Mostly Zerang, who loves Arabic music and was born to Assyrian parents, follows the "when in Rome" rule--there's hardly a traditional Middle Eastern sound to be found. But there are a few exceptions: Raed Yassin, who usually plays the bass, manipulates tapes of traditional music and regional pop, and Zerang finds a way to implant driving darbuka grooves neatly into the sonic miasma.

 One of the most gripping performances comes from alto saxophonist Christine Sehnaoui, a player who’s really coming into her own with a tactile, almost miniature sound that manages to convey a striking range with a pinched, brittle tone. She’s also a key figure on a fine double CD called Beirut-Ystad on the Swedish label Olof Bright. The release documents a two-day festival that took place in Ystad and Hammenhog, Sweden, in September 2006, just months after the war between Lebanon and Israel. Pretty much the whole Lebanese scene--including guitarists Sharif Sehnaoui and Charbel Haber, reedist Bechir Saadé, and electronicist Jassem Hindi--collaborated with Swedes Mats Gustafsson, Sven-Ake Johanson, and David Stackenas, among others, as well as some other important European players. You can practically hear the Lebanese players gaining confidence, range, and creativity with each one of these releases.

Playing later Wednesday evening is the veteran Norwegian saxophonist Frode Gjerstad, a kind of invisible bridge between the pastoral “Nordic tone” of the country’s first ECM generation (Jan Garbarek, Arild Andersen, Terje Rypdal) and the current wave of more aggressive polymath innovators. Gjerstad has remained committed to a brawny strain of free jazz, braiding pure energy with loose motific elaboration. He’s in good company on The Other Side, a trio date with bassist William Parker and drummer Hamid Drake cut in Chicago back in 2000 and finally issued earlier this year as a download-only release by Ayler Records. Gjerstad’s got a sharp yet slightly thin sound on the alto, but he’s like the Energizer Bunny, storming over every peak and through every valley with unflagging vigor. He’s joined by the Norwegian rhythm section of bassist Oyvind Storesund and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love (pictured), who’s brilliant in this kind of context: driving, prodding, and explosive.

Nilssen-Love, who has graced local stages a lot recently in conjunction with the tenth-anniversary festivities for the Peter Brötzmann Tentet, recently launched his own imprint, PNL, and his first two releases on it focus on more outré collaborations. Late Play is a duet with organist Nils Henrik Asheim but there’s nothing remotely greasy about it. It’s an austere, stark, ominous work, with Asheim creating a dark, hovering atmosphere of doom—almost with an ambient electronic veneer, but much heavier. The drummer focuses on complementary textures--lots of high-frequency scraping, tactile rubbing, and concentrated clatter. Much louder and more visceral is Stalk, a bracing duet with noise maven Lasse Marhaug. The first track is so crushingly violent and frenetic it’s tough to tell if Nilssen-Love is even playing drums. But other pieces are more restrained, though no less physical, with the drummer locking in on Marhaug’s piercing roar with bowed cymbal action even while fighting the onslaught with furious bombs and high-velocity splatter.

Today’s playlist:

Sir Richard Bishop, Polytheistic Fragments (Drag City)
Strountes, Strountes (Slottet)
Ralph Alessi & This Against That, Look (Between the Lines)
Alog, Amateur (Rune Grammofon)
Shahram & Hafez Nazeri, The Passion of Rumi (QuarterTone)

Trumpeter Jaimie Branch is only 24, so I think it’s more than reasonable to say she’s still figuring out her music. Yet while I’m fairly confident she’ll produce something important in the future, she’s already got skills—big time. A 2005 graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music, she’s an active presence around town, working regularly with Keefe Jackson’s Project Project, the New Fracture Quartet, Flytrap, and Sherpa, as well as her own trio, Princess, Princess, with bassist Toby Summerfield and drummer Frank Rosaly.

Princess, Princess played last month in New York at the Festival of New Trumpet Music, an event started by Dave Douglas a few years back and an ideal showcase for Branch’s talent. Too often the trio exhibits inertia—a common enough dilemma in free improvisation—with Rosaly getting hung up on texture, Summerfield seemingly at sea, and no one pushing the music forward. But it’s always hard to miss Branch's sheer potential. She’s got a strong, malleable tone and in this free setting she nevertheless betrays a vast postbop vocabulary; she can also draw on a wide array of the instrument’s more abstract extended techniques. On one live recording I’ve heard she nails the car-engine-turning-over trick that Axel Dörner pioneered. I usually hesitate to proffer recommendations based on potential, but I’d wager good money that Branch will be making serious waves before long.   

Princess, Princess plays tomorrow night, October 24, at the Hideout, sharing the bill with the intriguing trio of saxophonist Greg Ward, bassist Jason Roebke, and passing-through-town cornetist Rob Mazurek.

Today’s playlist:
Andrew Hill, Pax (Blue Note)
Imitation Electric Piano, Imitation Electric Piano (Drag City)
Chucho Valdes & His Combo, The Complete 1964 Sessions (Malanga Music)
Jorge Mautner, Revirão (Warner Music Brasil)
Sound Dimension, Jamaica Soul Shake Vol. 1 (Soul Jazz)

By my count there are only a couple people who play improvised music on the analog synthesizer at a consistently high level; namely, Thomas Lehn and Chicago’s own Jim Baker. It’s an unwieldy, temperamental instrument, a keyboard saddled with patch cords and knobs that make it next to impossible to play the same note twice, even when the player knows the machine intimately.

I haven’t heard enough from Stephen Rush, an associate music professor at the University of Michigan, to put him in the company of Lehn and Baker, but with the trio Yuganaut—with percussionist Geoff Mann and bassist Tom Abbs—he’s certainly making a case for himself. Last year the group released This Musicship (Block), a beguiling mix of free improvisation and loose, intensely rhythmic compositions by all three members, with Rush’s slippery squiggles out front. Sometimes Rush plays genuine chords on the Fender Rhodes, but more often than not he’s ditching conventional harmony altogether, unleashing a furious spew of synthetic wheezing and whining over the turbulent grooves of his partners. All three members play other instruments here and there—including cornet, recorder, violin, vibes, and tuba, usually in loose, ritual-like flurries—but it’s the high velocity roar of piercing, rubbery electronic tones that’s most interesting to my ears.

Yuganaut plays Friday at the Mercury Cafe, sharing the bill with Weave, the multi-disciplinary project of Chicago’s Sarah Weaver, and the Stir Quartet, a newish free jazz quartet with saxophonist Jim Ryan, bassist Joel Wanek, trumpeter Daniel Godston, and percussionist Jerome Bryerton. The show starts at 7:30 PM.

Cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm originally formed what is sometimes called the Valentine Trio back in 2000, when the group paid homage to pioneering jazz cellist Fred Katz for a gig at the Empty Bottle jazz festival. The trio has taken on a life of its own over the years, and its just-released third album (billed to the Fred Lonberg-Holm Trio), Terminal Valentine (Atavistic), is the first to feature all original material. Still, Lonberg-Holm uses this particular vehicle to indulge his interest in dark pop music—the second album included songs by Syd Barrett, Jeff Tweedy, and Cat Power, among others—but that doesn’t stop the group, rounded out by bassist Jason Roebke and drummer Frank Rosaly, from pushing and pulling in any direction they want.

The cellist has created simple yet elegant melodies, which the trio wastes little time tearing to pieces. Yet even while the improvisations seem to dispense entirely with the chord patterns and rhythmic feel, some element of the original structure—a bass line, groove, or melodic shadow—remains, giving the listener something surprisingly accessible to grab on to. In particular, Lonberg-Holm delivers a gorgeous mix of lyric extrapolation and coloristic depth, unleashing elaborate constellations of bowed notes thick with the feel of string on string.

The Valentine Trio celebrates the release of Terminal Valentine with a gig on Thursday, May 10, at the Velvet Lounge. The same three musicians will play in strict free improv mode a night earlier, performing with the Italian reedist Gianni Gebbia at the Hideout.

If anyone wonders why terms like "jazz" and "improvised music" don’t cut it, look no further than two musicians performing in town this weekend: Boston saxophonist David Gross and Denver trumpeter Ron Miles. Gross, who plays Sunday at Enemy, reduces free improvisation to its most elemental qualities. Although he has a jazz background, over the years he’s eliminated all traces of jazz harmony, melody, and rhythm from his playing. In fact, he’s one of those guys (like fellow Beantowners Greg Kelley and Bhob Rainey of nmperign) who’s managed to make his horn sound unrecognizable. For Gross, the saxophone is just a sound generator. On last year’s Things I Found to be True (Sedimental), he doesn’t merely employ extended technique--he eschews any sort of conventional approach to the instrument. Miniature scraping sounds, breathy columns of spilled air, tongue flutters, reed pops, vocal cries muffled by the tubing of his alto sax—those are just the things I feel relatively confident identifying. At other times it sounds like he’s drinking something with a contact mike attached to his throat while jiggling a crumpled piece of aluminum foil in the bell of his horn. Gross will surely test the limits of most listeners, but I really enjoy giving myself over to his alien sound world. He’ll be joined by Chicagoans Jerome Bryerton (drums) and Jason Roebke (bass); all three will do solo sets and then improvise together.

Ron Miles is best-known as a sometime-collaborator of guitarist Bill Frisell. His gorgeous tone and lyric style have been a good fit for Frisell's delicate music, restrained without surrendering strength and suppleness. He's made an equally good partner for Chicago guitarist Jason Steele—they've played together sporadically over the years (Steele's from Colorado himself) and Miles is featured prominently on Some Wonderful Moment, the new album by Steele’s group. The tunes on Moment unfold slowly and patiently, with Steele's warm chords going through loads of repetitive cycles, allowing the melodies to reach their full expositions. (There's a definite rock influence, if the group's take on the Elliott Smith tune “Alphabet Town” weren't enough of a clue.) Unfortunately the structure and pacing becomes numbingly predictable by the album’s conclusion. Billowy, arpeggiated chords from Steele and pianist Keith Johnson form the foundation over and over, as the horn players—Miles, fellow trumpeter Thad Franklin, saxophonists Josh Sclar and Tim Sullivan—elaborate on the melodies with an almost tepid moderation. They kick up some dust on some of the longer pieces, like “Unexpected You” and "No Words,” raising the volume, tension, and density, but even that feels predictable by the second listen. The group has a good sound, and Steele’s composing has plenty of potential, but he needs to try cutting loose, putting more into the performances from the start rather than saving it for the climaxes.

The Jason Steele Ensemble plays Heaven on Saturday. The following night at the Hungry Brain , Miles and coronetist Josh Berman will join Steele and guitarist Bill MacKay as part of Remington 2+2, a free improv quartet that pairs Steele and MacKay with two "mystery guests" at each show.

Canada’s Michael Snow is generally regarded as one of the two or three most important experimental filmmakers in the history of the form, and while his talent as an improvising musician is hardly secret, it's usually overshadowed by his cinematic reputation. (He's known best to music fans for his 1964 film New York Eye & Ear Control, which featured a bracing soundtrack by free jazz heavies like Albert Ayler, Sunny Murray, and Don Cherry.) Snow arrives in town this week for two evenings of screenings at the Gene Siskel Film Center, as part of the Conversations at the Edge series.

On Thursday, February 8, Snow will present Wavelength and Back and Forth, followed on Friday night by a new video piece called Reverberlin, with sound by his long running improv group CCMC (Canadian Creative Music Collective), which these days includes John Oswald and Paul Dutton. This assemblage has a long if obscure history, releasing a slew of hard-to-find records during the 70s. But Snow has spent five decades traveling all over the musical map, and the pianist was initially taken by straight-ahead jazz. A fascinating track on the compilation Eye & Ear—assembled in conjunction with a show at Corbett Vs. Dempsey a couple years back—found him playing with the legendary clarinetist Pee Wee Russell. During Friday’s program Snow will offer a survey of his musical endeavors and discuss various aspects of his work. Snow’s La Region Centrale will also screen on Saturday, February 12 at 2 PM, although the filmmaker won’t be in attendance.