Ezz-thetics a column by The previous Ezz-thetics column reflected the near-simultaneous appearance of three works of individual brilliance, solo recordings by Liz Allbee, Hannah Marshall, and John Butcher. In the months since, three mid-size, improvisation-rich ensembles, drawing inspiration from more or less explicit environmental themes have appeared, with varying degrees of composition and improvisation, led by musicians of comparable vision: Magda Mayas, Pascal Niggenkemper, and Marta Warelis. Each is characterized by different degrees of copyright participation, signalling contrasting relations of composition and improvisation. Magda Mayas’ Filamental’s Murmur, evidently as collective as a murmuration of starlings, is copyrighted in the names of all eight musicians. Pascal Niggenkemper’s d’une rive a l’autre is largely copyrighted to the composer/bassist, 11 of the 17 tracks, with six tracks credited to improvised duets from the eight instrumentalists of the Ensemble Tuvalu. Marta Warelis’s Still Life with Lemons is largely credited to the leader/composer. All recently released, the three come from a specific moment in time, the autumn of 2024: Murmur was recorded in Berlin in September; Still Life with Lemons in Amsterdam in October; d’une rive a l’autre in Berlin in November. Magda Mayas’ Filamental’s Murmur (Relative Pitch) is an octet with a strong emphasis on strings in its make-up; as well as the leader’s piano, there are two harpists, Zeena Parkins and Rhodri Davies, pretty much covering the terrain of free improvising harpists; two cellists, Aimée Theriot-Ramos and Anthea Caddy; two reeds, alto saxophonist Christine Abdelnour and clarinetist Michael Thieke, and violinist Angharad Davies. Murmur is a singular piece, almost 38 minutes long. There are few spectacles as emblematic of collective mind as a murmuration of starlings, thousands of birds joined in extraordinary aerobatic maneuvers that mock the reckless waste, noise, and danger of fighter jet ballets. Part of the special genius of Magda Mayas’ Filamental is that it never sounds anything like what one might expect from its string-heavy personnel. Everything is sublimated into quiet percussive events, a music that suggests the sublime piety of chance events in nature, like a light rain on large leaves. Hence, Mayas’ description of the work: I am fascinated by the coordination and elegance of a flock of birds flying, forming beautiful murmurations, constantly changing, seemingly without effort. This communal act provides protection through the sheer number of birds and their changing position; it is an exchange of information amongst them, and it has a clear collective ending when the flock decides to fly back to the ground. In Murmur, I want to explore how a large ensemble can make use of these instincts of communal movement, coordination, shape shifting and, eventually, potential simultaneous endings through distinct decisions around material and structure but also shared memories of events that were created together. The doubling of instruments will lend a certain anonymity to the music, furthered by the frequency of isolated percussive details, whether a sustained note from Abdenour suggests a bowed string instrument, or cellos and/or violin are used for a maze of quarter tones. It’s the very nature of the murmuration that will define this collective composition, hive mind or flock consciousness, yes, some overriding shared awareness, existence, and impulse. With no dedicated percussionist present (depending on how you might classify the piano), this is frequently percussion music of the highest order, struck strings on piano and string instruments create a bevy of string-drum plosives. The collective act itself is essentially harmonious in its nature, the special transparency of string harmonics creating a sonic window that opens onto the Cagean silence of the entire ensemble. The cumulative experience is of an interior soundscape in art channeled through the piano and taking place both in the octet and in the listener. A rare and beautiful sonic act. Pascal Niggenkemper’s Ensemble Tuvalu’s d’une rive a l’autre (Subran 07) is inspired by Tuvalu, the Polynesian archipelago that is currently set to disappear below the Pacific’s waves in a few decades, a paradisical world doomed by climate change. As with Mayas’ Murmur, the bassist/composer’s ensemble is an octet, made up of instrumental pairings: Ben LaMar Gay’s cornet with Louis Lorain’s trumpet; Mona Matbou Riahi’s clarinet with Joachim Badenhorst’s; Tizia Zimmermann’s accordion with that of Artemis Vavatsika’s; Niggenkemper’s double bass paired, less precisely, with Elisabeth Coudoux’s cello. Each of the musicians will also have a vocal role, singing, chanting, or reciting, and Jaumes Privat will appear near the end of the work for an extended spoken word passage. In her expansive liner note, Julia Neupert, cites the composer’s overarching concerns here: Niggenkemper is interested in how differently people are shaped – culturally, socially, emotionally – not only in musical terms. He is concerned with broadening perspectives, recognizing other points of view, and collective thinking and creation. In this way, the project also reflects a central cultural value of Tuvaluan society: “Kaitasi” – the principle of always shaping one’s own life in connection with the community. An idea that could hardly be more relevant in our time. d’une rive a l’autre is a work of daunting complexity. In a “live” staging, drums and metal discs are center stage; a series of 16 sound curtains of plastic and metal with exciter resonators activated by foot pedals surround the stage. All the musicians sing and speak traditional Tuvaluan songs and poems as well as singing freely adapted poems drawn from multiple languages. It comes as both a CD and a DVD. The CD was recorded over four days in the Südwestrundfunk Baden-Baden studio. It has 17 tracks and represents something like the totality of the audio work. The DVD was recorded with an audience in the Tollhaus Karlsruhe a day later. It has 12 tracks, is significantly shorter, sacrifices the instrumental duets, but is enriched by sheer theatrical intensity. Either way, it’s stellar work, with Niggenkemper’s insistence on a humane art reflecting both human potential and the necessity of engaging our collective condition with work of special power. The multiple demands that he places on his musicians are answered with stunning results in the additional tracks on the studio recordings, reflecting the brief individual duets among the matched instruments. The DVD performance was also presented on the Free Jazz Blog at the time of its release, and it remains available online. It’s an immediate introduction to the work’s combination of visceral emotional power and often luminous instrumental textures: https://www.freejazzblog.org/2025/03/pascal-niggenkempers-tuvalu-ensemble.html Marta Warelis’s Still Life with Lemons (Relative Pitch) may be less immediately shaped by environmental concerns than the preceding, but lyric ideas of landscape and the impress of environment still figure in her compositions, from “Birds” to “The Sky Blushes Sunset” to “Ashes to Sea.” The group is a multi-national sextet, with the Polish pianist/synthesist Warelis joined by Hollander Ab Baars, clarinet, tenor saxophone; Canadian Karen Ng, clarinet, alto saxophone; Norwegian Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, double bass; and Americans Ben LaMar Gay, trumpet and electronics and Frank Rosaly drums and gongs. That might suggest a forceful, wind-driven ensemble, but the emphasis is reflective, intimate, sometimes pensive, often witty. Thin instrumental textures predominate, sometimes with different instruments’ sounds penetrating one another, even creating beat patterns as pitches approach one another. The opening “Birds” begins with an extended solo piano passage immediately emphasizing a certain intimacy. It will persist as the horns enter, with significant dissonance, in a slow interweaving of instrumental voices, ultimately matching the longing of the winds’ theme against the chaotic rush of Warelis and the rhythm section. “There to the Bridge,” an Albanian folk song, receives a plaintively nostalgic performance with Gay setting the mood before the two clarinetists carry the mournful theme to its furthest reaches. The band possesses genuine wit, as apparent in “Alternate Endings,” continuously propelled by Warelis and Håker Flaten’s broken rhythms, effectively extended by the flaring tone of Gay’s trumpet and the dense squawking supplied by Baars’ tenor saxophone. “Intermittent Web of Sorts” proceeds from the initially hesitant patterns of Håker Flaten and Rosaly before Warelis and Gay introduce the theme, textures gradually accumulating. It ultimately reaches an accumulation of sustained winds and electronics, pitches sliding in and out of beat patterns, a high point in the music’s special interconnectedness.
© 2026 Stuart Broomer
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