Moment's Notice
Reviews of Recent Media
(continued)
Sophie Agnel + John Edwards + Steve Noble
Three on a Match
Otoroku ROKU038
Sometimes the thing unsaid can speak volumes. That is the case with the cover of Three on a Match by the trio of Sophie Agnel, John Edwards, and Steve Noble, compiled from performances over two nights at Café Oto in June 2023. In this case, it’s the things not listed (nor shown in photographs): their instruments. What Otoroku, the house imprint of Café Oto, says with this omission is clear: we know you know these folks; no further explanation required. That will be true for the vast majority of listeners who will encounter this well-constructed album. And their expectations will undoubtedly be met, as it is exceptionally good.
A useful one-word descriptor of the time-honored opening gambit in improvised music is “coalesce,” the coming together of particles into molecules into living music. “Part 1” does not simply confirm Agnel, Edwards, and Noble’s skill and sensitivity mingling textures until tonality and pulse – even tempo! – are introduced. It’s where they take it that is thought-provoking, as, ultimately, a metronomic pulse intensifies to a jackhammer attack to end the piece – a practice that seems to be spreading among their contemporaries.
The bulk of the album is the half-hour-plus “Part 2,” which unfolds at a comparatively glacial pace. Unlike “Part 1,” it culminates in a compelling rubato exchange, calling to mind Andrew Hill’s early ‘80s trio with Alan Silva and Freddie Waits. From the frontloaded applause, it seems that “Part 3” was an encore; adhering to the bell curve shape of much improvised music, it grows organically to a thundering apex and then dissipates to silence. It also seems it was snipped, since there’s no applause at the end: no matter; “Part 3” supplies a very satisfying conclusion to the proceedings.
–Bill Shoemaker
AMM (Eddie Prévost + John Tilbury)
Aura
Matchless Recordings MRCD 116
Ute Kanngießer + Prévost + Seymour Wright
Splendid Nettle
Matchless Recordings MRCD 117
These are among the first Matchless recordings released since the extensive documentation of A Bright Nowhere, four CDs and a film devoted to AMM’s final performance, the trio of percussionist Eddie Prévost, Keith Rowe playing tapes and pianist John Tilbury contributing remotely, as well as other concerts with Prévost and related ensembles in July 2022.
Aura presents the final concert of a two-man version of AMM with Prévost and Tilbury, performing in the Sibelius Museum concert hall in Turku, Finland in October 2016. Aptly named, Aura is a single, hour-long improvisation, a kind of shimmering, transparent auditory light, a reverie on materiality that is in part mounted on Prévost’s horizontal bass drum, at once table, resonator, and stage. Its materiality is a compound, at once rooted in things like alchemy and Marxism, though not those necessarily, yet a mystery of things and social organization, a reverie on time from clock to epoch, a special principle. Tilbury’s playing here matches delicacy with precision, creating the sense of a quieter Morton Feldman composition, as if the piano played by a flight of birds, some light precipitation, a strong breeze.
The most stunning singular moment of this live concert occurs at its conclusion as stroked metal and a levity of bells disappear into silence, followed shortly by the startling eruption of a sonic wall of consistent and sustained applause from an audience that has maintained an hour of rapt silence. Until that moment ... seconds after the work’s conclusion, one has existed within an absolutely interior sonic realm, less a dialogue than an unfolding, a work in which each gesture of percussion or piano seems ordained in the purest realm of sound – it is the bliss of the materiality of sound, from the work’s opening sound, a distant rumble on the horizon of hearing that is eventually lit up by a metallic scrape of percussion.
Splendid Nettle presents the trio of cellist Ute Kanngießer, alto saxophonist Seymour Wright, and Prévost, performing at All Saints Church, High Laver, Essex in November 2022. Here Prévost is playing a more typical drum kit – a snare is central – in place of the percussion set-up of Aura.
As with Aura, this is relatively spare music, but from the initial moments, there is an active rhythmic field created by Prévost’s drumming and Kanngießer’s bass-like pizzicato that gradually gives way to accelerating arco lines, sometimes almost etude-like, that are variously tense, refined and vigorous. Group dialogues arise and ebb, an initial episode gives way to a shift signalled by a Prévost interlude, Kanngießer developing one pattern, Wright exploring another line of short multiphonic blasts.
It’s a consistently remarkable three-way collective improvisation, but there’s a singular element in the work of Seymour Wright, whose musical personality is sufficiently distinct from Tilbury’s, that this CD might have come from a different planet than Aura. While Tilbury’s work might suggest a bucolic reverie, Wright can suggest – whether here or with أحمد [Ahmed], with XT, and with his solo recordings – a tonal inquisition, fixated on short multiphonic blasts, sometimes bending into cries, sometimes shifting honks of compounded notes and inflections, always changing, but mutating with the narrowest of inflections. Call it, perhaps, the visceral analytic, but 60 years on it can suggest the effect of Jackie McLean’s Let Freedom Ring, when the veteran hard bopper suddenly introduced high-pitched squeals to his vocabulary to striking effect. This, of course, goes much further: individual blasts are analyzed, subjected to minute alterations in extended patterns of repetition.
Wright’s performance is remarkable enough to monopolize attention to a degree, at least that part that might be verbalized, there is much more going on here. If the materiality of sound is often intensely human, at other moments – notably in the second half of the performance, Wright’s sounds can feel like they’re being dialled in, creating stranger moments of anxious pastoral, somehow suggesting, contra my earlier comment, the combination of delicacy and precision heard in Tilbury’s work in Turku, particularly in the three-way dialogue of the performance’s concluding moments.
The two halves of the performance are entitled The wings were closed and The wings were opened again. The image is explained in the liner note: Wright observed a butterfly in the church at the start of the concert that he thought was dead, but which later revived and flew off.
That liner note may be the most remarkable thing I’ve read about music this year. One becomes accustomed to the frank, erudite, and analytical liner notes that Eddie Prevost and others have been providing for Matchless recordings through the decades, but Wright’s liner note (a 16-page booklet) is a miracle of writing on music, somehow mixing the group's conversations – about books (on medieval graffiti, history, and sound) and observations from the ancient church performance site (John Locke's resting place, that butterfly mistaken for dead, the nettles in the courtyard, insects) – into an essay so erudite that it has to transcend its erudition to become one of the most revealing works about the processes and environment of a collective improvisation that one might ever read, touching on the minds and materials of the improvisers and the ways in which such music might at once develop from, sublimate, and transcend its myriad circumstantial influences. It might be the most interesting text about improvised music that you’ll read this year.
–Stuart Broomer
The Kris Davis Trio
Run the Gauntlet
Pyroclastic PR 36
On Run the Gauntlet, Kris Davis’ first trio recording as a leader since 2014’s Waiting For You To Grow (Clean Feed), the Grammy Award winning pianist pays homage to six female pianists who have inspired and supported her: Geri Allen, Carla Bley, Sylvie Courvoisier, Marilyn Crispell, Renee Rosnes, and Angelica Sanchez. Davis observed how Rosnes and Sanchez balanced family and career; Sanchez and Crispell demonstrated how to pursue a more experimental path; Courvoisier’s prepared piano techniques were instructive; and Bley was a formative influence, while Allen’s impact is more recent. Davis has internalized her myriad musical influences into a singular style that is kaleidoscopic in scope. Interestingly, Davis’ new group features two straight-ahead veterans: bassist Robert Hurst and drummer Johnathan Blake, whose virtuosic interplay and affable rapport enable Davis to showcase how the voices of these six innovators are refracted through her own vision.
Opening with crashing chords in irregular patterns, the title track is one of the most exciting pieces Davis has ever recorded. Davis plays exuberant, sweeping crescendos, while the rhythm section builds intensity, modulating from a lopsided rhythm into a hypnotic line. The tune traverses a bracing gauntlet of vamps as a series of challenges for Blake and Hurst, simultaneously representing the hurdles faced by the album’s dedicatees. True to Davis’ exploratory nature, the visceral opener sets the stage for even more diverse moments, such as the rubato “Softly, As You Awake,” which drifts in and out of focus with incandescent prepared piano, somber bowed bass, and skeletal percussion.
Recalling the past, Waiting For You To Grow was made while Davis was pregnant with her son. A decade later, his growth is documented on “First Steps,” “Little Footsteps,” and “Heavy-Footed.” The chaotic unaccompanied piano solo “First Steps” leads into “Little Footsteps,” where Davis rhythmically varies a memorable line, alternating between funky and sophisticated phrases. Evoking Allen’s compositional approach, “Heavy-Footed” recalls a more standardized song form. Built around a repeated motif, Blake and Hurst dovetail in and around the pianist’s melodic variations, establishing a joyous reverie.
The meditative eloquence of Blake’s tender “Beauty Beneath the Rubble” is ambiguous but lyrical and Davis achieves an almost bell-like sonority on the following “Beauty Beneath the Rubble Meditation,” where she improvises shifting harmonies with exquisite muted notes on prepared piano, while Hurst bows his bass and Blake attends to his cymbals. Following this abstract interlude, Davis breaks the contemplative mood with the rhythmically driving “Knotweed,” which is followed by the similarly propulsive “Coda Queen,” the hazy atmosphere of “Dream State,” and the captivating free improvisation “Subtones,” closing out a memorable program.
In a sense, the concept of dedicating Run the Gauntlet to these six women is an outgrowth of Davis’ work at the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. She stated, “I’ve seen the importance of women mentorship to other young women, as well as men and non-binary folks having strong female role models ... I wanted to highlight some of these pianists that were really important to me and that continue to be sources of inspiration.”
–Troy Collins
Marina Džukljev + Michael Thieke
Motionless Pool
Scatter Archive (digital only)
Liam Stefani’s Glasgow-based, now digital-only label scatterArchive has been releasing a phenomenal collection of improvised music over the last three decades, from early releases by Derek Bailey, Lol Coxhill, Tony Bevan, and Steve Beresford through recent batches including musicians like Pat Thomas and BARK! as well as less documented musicians like Semay Wu and Christian Moser. Motionless Pool is a recent gem, bringing together the duo of Serbian pianist Marina Džukljev and Berlin-based clarinetist Michael Thieke. Džukljev has played in contexts ranging from improvised ensemble settings for Serbian folklore songs to duos with Manja Ristić on violin, Dieb 13 on turntables, Noid on cello, and Ilia Belorukov on alto saxophone. Thieke has been a stalwart of the Berlin improvisation scene, as part of the clarinet duo International Nothing with Kai Fagaschinski, in duo with violinist Biliana Voutchkova, and as a member of Splitter Orchestra and Magda Mayas’ Filamental. The two met at the 2019 Konfrontationen Festival in Nickelsdorf but due to COVID, didn’t get the opportunity to play together until this recording from 2021.
The duo navigates their way through seven compact collective improvisations, each of which carves out a particular sonic area to explore. The recording opens with “Pockets of Silence,” with the pianist’s sparely-voiced, resonant chords and prepared strings melding with the clarinetist’s patiently repeated rounded tones which move from the dark chalumeau register to high-pitched sine tone-like pitches. “The Shadows and Ghosts We Mistook for Her” mines to a more active mode, with Thieke’s percussive reed slaps, pinched notes, and microtonal smears melding with Džukljev’s scraped textures, bent string plucks, and fluttered buzz into an inextricable amalgam. “Motionless Pool” and “When Gravity Doesn’t Work” each zero in on repeated motifs, building with unwavering focus.
“Set and Settings” starts with quiet pools of sound that gradually gather into morphing skeins of overlapping drones, sounding orchestral in its timbral depth. The eight-minute “Light Codes” is the longest piece, with warm, woody clarinet breaking into shaded overtones placed around a tapestry of angular piano chords. The two resourcefully work in tandem, overlapping lines of harmonically rich singularity as they progress toward a percussively chiming conclusion. The final piece, “On Being Unable to Stand Up and Leave,” builds from layers of shuddering plinks, creaks, sputters, crackles, and burbles, settling into subtle patterns that the two float against each other with rapt attention to the subtle shifts of tones and textures as they gradually open up density and velocity. The two have performed together since this recording and one hopes to hear more from them.
–Michael Rosenstein
Joe Fonda Quartet
Eyes On The Horizon
Long Song LSRCD 163
It must take a while to scroll through bassist Joe Fonda’s contacts list. After over 45 years in the business, he’s amassed a slew of collaborators, including Anthony Braxton, Archie Shepp, Dave Douglas, and Barry Altschul among them. But he has called on the cream for his latest adventure Eyes On The Horizon, which features trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, pianist Satoko Fujii, and drummer Tiziano Tononi. Fonda first encountered Smith as the mainstay of the New Haven based Creative Music Improvisers Forum (CMIF) in the early ‘80s and found the trumpeter an inspirational mentor.
In homage, the bassist dedicates four of the seven tracks to Smith, but he plays to his partners’ strengths throughout in a conception which emphasizes the collective, but not at the expense of the individual. Though Fonda’s tightly marshaled themes tend towards the somber, he ensures sufficient variety with treatments which vary from the stately processional “Inspiration Opus #1” to the energetic bass/drum underpinning of “Listen To Dr. Cornel West.” He imbues them with an annunciatory quality which is catnip to Smith who gifts the leader’s lines the gravitas of portentous news headlines.
Fonda and Smith take “Like No Other,” a refrain full of wily pauses, dedicated to vibraphonist Bobby Naughton who was an influential presence in the CMIF alongside the brassman, as a duet with unaccompanied spots for each. Here and elsewhere the trumpeter exudes blues feeling, even though the structure is never invoked. He filters the lyricism of Miles Davis through an abstract prism in which his fanfares and sustains jostle with more open textures such as pedal tones, splutters and wheezes. For his part Fonda’s arco ruminations fray into emotive overtones and harmonics and his dark pizzicato solo is both tender and stark.
The bassist also shines in a sparkling introductory twosome with Fujii on the wide ranging “We Need Members Opus #4,” which recalls the wonderful fluid interplay of releases such as Mizu, Triad, and Four also on the Italian Long Song imprint. While the pianist largely buttresses the written material, her wayward flourishes and appreciation of space, a characteristic which has previously made her an empathetic foil for Smith, illuminate and add depth. She also shows a keen feeling for timbral innovation, delving inside the innards for an unearthly string shimmer on the fragmented “Bright Light Opus #5,” to complement Fonda’s wood flute as it entwines around the trumpet.
Perhaps Fujii’s finest moment arrives on the concluding title cut, where she artfully undercuts her grandiose rhapsody with a reiterated figure in the extreme treble which she gives an off-center twirk through interior preparations. This same number also offers an extended outing for Tononi’s drums in which he expertly corrals pitches to dramatic effect. Having appeared with Fonda on seven albums since 2018, the pair manifestly work off the same page, with the doyen of the Italian scene filling the gaps in the bassist’s wiry melodicism with an attractive unruliness. Indeed, that’s the same spirit in which everyone approaches this heartfelt and rewarding session.
–John Sharpe
