Frode Gjerstad, Nick Stephens, Louis Moholo-Moholo (Loose Torque, 2009) ****

Frode Gjerstad is a very prolific musician, according to himself preferring to play with his larger ensemble "Circulasione Totale", because the sound is denser and more varied, yet the costs higher. The trio format is of course more nimble and affordable, and he has played in many, with Øyvind Storesund and Paal Nilssen-Love, with William Parker and Hamid Drake, Wilber Morris and Rashid Bakr, with Paul Rogers and Kevin Norton, with John Edwards and Mark Sanders, and now one with Nick Stephens on bass and Louis Moholo-Moholo on drums. The Norwegian had played and released with both musicians in the past, quite a lot even, but never in a trio format.

To hear them play here is quite a pleasure, very much in the European free improv tradition, in which the intensity of the interaction between the musicians is key, with the sounds created on the spot with an immediacy and directness that almost goes against the natural flow you would expect from any music.

The album's title "Quiddity" refers to the very nature of things, the commonality of characteristics that makes an object what it is, and what it shares with others of the same group.

The more abstract a description, the more elements it shares with others, the more you come to total unity. So it can be both a musical as spiritual thing. The music is abstract, starting on the first track, "The Nature",  with high-pitched short, almost whistling notes of the alto, with equally pointillistic support from bass and drums, evolving over very agitated and nervous playing on the second piece, "The Gist", and strangely enough the third track, "The Whatness", ends in longer notes, stretched tones, a concept which is continued on the last track, "The Essence", on which Gjerstad switches to clarinet; a piece which becomes almost intimate, fragile. Obviously each track is more varied than described here, with the necessary shifts in tempo and intensity. I focus too much on Gjerstad while describing the above: the quality of the playing and the unity displayed by the three musicians is absolutely excellent. Stephens is fast, deep, versatile and precise on arco and plucked, and Moholo-Moholo's rumbling and sharp polyrhythmics are as much defining the music. And that is abstract in nature and form. And free. And one.

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Trio Passeurs - Existences (Futura Marge, 2009) ****

 After Alexandra Grimal and Maguelone Vidal, Véronique Magdelenat is the third female French saxophonist that makes an album of value this year. Accompanied by Bernard Santacruz on bass and Christian Rollet on drums, she forms the Trio Passeurs. As Magdelenat writes in the liner notes, her music is about "energy, poetry and freedom, finding new forms, taking care of our souls, caressing our bodies, pulling our heart-strings, mixing the colors of life". Quite a program, yet delivered indeed with a right balance between energy and sensitivity. Only one track, "Petit Caillou", has a clear bluesy rhythmic and melodic pattern, while all the other pieces are more in the free improvised form, mostly downtempo, sometimes nervous, but mostly very subtle in the timbral explorations, even to the extent of negotiating emotional complexities in the hardly audible regions, or bringing full voice wails of agony or liberation of energetic tension. The trio works well together to create a single vision, and Magdelenat for sure a new voice to be reckoned with, especially if she can break away completely from form and structure, she's at her best.

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Five Spot - Poltva (SoLyd Records, 2009) ****

The band's name reveals that this is a quintet, with Lithuanian Petras Vysniauskas on soprano, Ukranians Yury Yaremchuk soprano, alto and clarinets, and Mark Tokar on bass, German Klaus Kugel on drums and Roberta Piket from the US on piano. All five musicians have solid backgrounds, both in traditional contexts as in a more free environment, as is the case here, for this live performance at the Lviv Jazz Festival in Ukraine in 2007, and it is free jazz in the spirit of the seventies, with the whole band working together on a coherent musical flow, rhytmic and forward-moving, with the musicians very concerned to build a unique sound rather than using the improvisation for personal expression. In the hands of lesser musicians this becomes a perfect recipe for either chaos or boredom, but you get the opposite here: discipline and deep listening skills, creativity and variation make this quite a captivating program.

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Bill Dixon - Tapestries for Small Orchestra (Firehouse 12, 2009) *****

Trumpeter Bill Dixon's music has always been hard to classify: rooted in jazz, with the adventurousness of the avant-garde, open for the use of electronics, and with the composed and structured approach of classical music, while still leaving sufficient space for improvisation. Last year he released a stellar album, "Seventeen Musicians In Search of A Sound: Darfur", and this one is at the same high level throughout, if not better even.

The musicians are almost the same, but then in a trimmed down version, with no less than five trumpet-, cornet- or flugelhorn-players : Bill Dixon, Taylor Ho Bynum, Graham Haynes, Stephen Haynes and Rob Mazurek. The band is completed by Glynis Lomon on cello, Michel Cote on contrabass and bass clarinet, Ken Filiano on bass, and Warren Smith on vibes, marimba, drums, typani, and gongs.

Even if this is a solid horn section, most of the music is quite open-textured, with initially a relatively limited number of instruments playing at any given time, duos, trios, quartets, with - no surprise here - almost always a trumpet in the lead role, but then at certain moments the horn section locks in for a huge swell of sound. That being said, the improvisations are not what you would expect: Dixon's overall carefully crafted sound dominates the improvisations, with few notes being played, and themes, in so far as you can call them like that, slowly evolving, with the horns in different groups acting in counterpoint. The music becomes more dense with each track, with the whole small orchestra playing together to create a unique soundscape.

Like on his previous album, the overall mood is slow, dark, austere and somber. No reasons for joy to be found. The flow of the music is interspersed with radical voices coming up, sometimes to take over the scene, sometimes only to let out a few cries, and then dissolve again into the background murmur. Yet the soloists can be very frantic, having urgent stories to tell, often brilliantly accompanied by Warren Smith, who takes a lead role on vibes in the beautiful "Silvers - Sand Dance For Sophia", or the solos are sad, melancholy or expansive. On some pieces, hardly any improvisor comes to the fore, with electronics and the dark background sounds conjuring up images of wild primeval times, when out of universal and unclassifiable existence, suddenly individual voices and life emerge. The whole album is actually one large composition, broken down in eight tracks, with each some distinct characteristics yet all part of the same sound.

Many modern music alienates and shocks, and it may take some time before you get used to certain aspects of it. Here it's the opposite: you get sucked into a universe that is different, weird, inhospitable, mystic, yet feel likes home. As a listener you feel a deep recognition of what is being played. It has such a universal value, that you can relate to it on some very deep and fundamental level.

And that is the absolute marvel of Dixon's music : it is unclassifiable, it is beyond what you expect even from music. An ambitious genre-bending masterpiece. And a spectacular listening experience.

It's a double CD with DVD. Since I downloaded from eMusic, I cannot comment on the DVD, but I would say it's worth having the full hard copy of it.

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Fred Anderson Quartet - Live At The Velvet Lounge, Vol. 3 (Asian Improv, 2009) ****

From the very first notes of the solo sax intro, you recognize Fred Anderson's tone, phrasing, rhythm but also his passion and soul, right there in front of you. Nothing new, but as always a delight. No bad word about the old master, and when his band joins in the festivities, the audience cheers loudly and enthusiastically, and rightly so. With Francis Wong on sax, Chad Taylor on drums and Tatsu Aoki on bass. The latter two have figured on many of Anderson's records, but of his 20-odd albums, it's only the third one with another saxophonist, Kidd Jordan and Ken Vandermark being the other two.

As you can expect, the music brings the usual lengthy yet focused improvisations over a polyrhytmic drums and repetitive bass vamp. If you don't move on his music, you must be made of stone. And if you're not moved by his music, same thing. Yet at the same time, because of the length and the repetition, and the interlocking saxes, weaving great textures, moving towards each other, away from each other, echoing, challenging, the end result is quite hypnotic and spiritual too. While at the same time open to fun and self-relativation. A rare combination. So even if you think like me, that you must have heard many of it  somewhere before on one of Anderson's albums - but which one? - it's a pointless thought, because the music is just great. It was great then, it is great now. Body, heart and soul. Pure joy!

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Piano, piano, piano - from tradition to the future

 Truth be told, I like horns. The way they can twist, bend, split and torture sounds, or make them whisper in sad sensitivity, or sing in voluptuous joy, or scream in tormented agony, or wail in mad intoxication. Horns are so close to the human voice and so emotionally recognizable. Not so with the piano. It's a more intellectual, more academic instrument, often less direct, less raw, less physical than those horn players who blow their lungs out. And although I love the piano, piano albums tend to pile up for your humble servant, who usually jumps at any occasion to review a new record with lots of blowing. So, here you get the worthwhile stuff, all in a row, from the very traditional over the wild and free, ending with modern day avant-garde classicism : from solo piano to solo piano, with a duo and three trios in between.

Freakish - Anthony Coleman Plays Jerry Roll Morton (Tzadik, 2009) ***

Anthony Coleman plays tribute to Jelly Roll Morton, if not the inventor of jazz, then in any case close enough to have been present at its birth. Coleman is a wonderful pianist, and Tzadik his regular label. Don't expect any of Coleman's more avant-garde leanings here: what you get is straight ragtime piano, simple and fun. Although a sincere tribute, it also very much a stylistic exercise.

Ulrich Gumpert & Günter Baby Sommer - Das Donnernde Leben (Intakt, 2009) ***

The "Thundering Live" is the second album by Ulrich Gumper on piano and Günter "Baby" Sommer on drums, no less than thirty years after their first album "Versaumnisse". Despite both musicians' strong presence in European free jazz and free improv, this album is very much linked to the blues tradition of jazz, with even a couple of Wolf Bierman songs thrown into the mix (a German leftist singer/songwriter of some decades ago) and what is rare these days, it is all fun and joy, no high-brow pretense or artsy endeavors, you - YOU - the listener, are welcomed in from the very first notes, to participate in the joy, not to just sit there and listen. There are shouts, fun interactions, mutual jokes, but also great music: sensitive and compelling, and the blues, well, it is omnipresent, if not in form, then at least in spirit.

John Blum - In The Shade Of The Sun (Ecstatic Peace!, 2009)***

Now moving into the realm of free jazz: pianist John Blum is probably best known for his work with his Astrogeny Quartet, but he also recorded with Sunny Murray, Steve Swell and Butch Morris to name but a few. Here plays in the great presence of William Parker on bass and Sunny Murray on drums. Don't expect themes, nor fixed rhythmic patterns, you get six intense pieces of direct interaction and wild excursions. Cecil Taylor comes to mind in his relentless thundering forward movement, a little too much to my taste, but well, you're the judge.

Marilyn Lerner, Ken Filiano, Lou Grassi (NoBusiness, 2009)****

Marilyn Lerner is a Canadian pianist, here accompanied by Ken Filiano on bass and Lou Grassi on drums. Classically trained, maybe, but what you hear on this album is as wild as it gets, free from conventions, idioms and automatisms. It takes you by the throat from the very first notes. What you get here, and what is missing on the John Blum trio, is an incredibly powerful sense of direction, not going into the extreme of one journey, but exploring various options consecutively, or at the same time, flowing one into the other, which makes this album a great listening experience: soft musings, painful beauty, avant-garde string plucking, dark atmospheres, disturbing anxiety, ... it's here. Filiano and Grassi are also absolutely stellar, they are the music, not just the rhythm section to a lead instrument. A greater level of musical focus could have given the entire album a stronger feeling of unity. Although nice by itself, the long boppish "Hommage à Coco Schulmann" (unfortunately misspelled), does not really fit into the overall sound. Less could have been more.

David Arner Trio - Out In The Open (NotTwo, 2009) ****½

And if you want to hear a great musical voice on the piano, try the David Arner Trio, with Michael Bisio on bass and Jay Rosen on drums. Arner's music is something else, light-footed yet with gravity, subtle and sensitive without resorting to any phrases of the "romantic" catalogue, permanently challenging himself, and coming up with insteresing solutions. It's hard to define what makes his music different, yet it has a kind of natural lyricism and a permanent level of surprise, with phrases that end in questions marks, sparse at moments, dense at others. Bisio and Rosen are fabulous, moving along and often driving the upcoming waves of intensity that you feel coming up from deep in this musical ocean, approaching breaking and disappearing again. Tasteful power. Intense sensitivity.

Alberto Braida - Talus (Nuscope, 2009)****

Jazz is not dead (I thought I would never write that), it defines and determines new music. Music had to go through jazz to reinvent itself, and come out all the richer, more subtle, with lots of technical skills, but only as a functional means, not as a goal per se. Next step is to make it more popular while keeping its uncompromising but - in principle - potential for universal appeal.

Alberto Braida is a great example of this. Impossible to say which genre he plays, but this record will probably be filed in the jazz section in the record shops. I already praised the Italian's quality of restraint and discipline : he plays his keys with absolute deliberation, note by note almost - no long phrases or runs or fills or other embellishments that you hear with the less mature players. Braida reduces his music to the essence: no show, but music. No entertainment, but authentic art. It makes listening a little harder, but all the more rewarding. Great stuff.

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Weightless - A Brush With Dignity (Clean Feed, 2009) ****½

British saxophonist John Butcher and bassist John Edwards are two of the most prominent voices in European free improvisation. They are joined by two Italian improvisers, Alberto Braida on piano and Fabrizio Spera on drums. As with many free improvisation, forget about roles in the band: all musicians contribute in equal parts, adding sounds, interacting and creating high levels of immediate intensity. The band's name is well chosen, as the music is somewhere suspended in the air, very sparse and devoid of a need to produce sound, free of earthly concerns, although it flows quite organically, naturally, without structure or foundation. The musicians play their limited notes and sounds with reserve, paying full attention to each of them, infusing every one of them with power. Braida can play a few keys, just enough to add to the overall atmosphere, without feeling the need to make chords, or phrases. It's the sound that counts, and in that he finds a real soulmate in John Butcher, whose careful powerful minimalism is impressive as usual, Edwards' versatility and creativity, both on arco and plucked is astonishing, and listen how Spera builds depth, contrast and color. Some moments are harsh, others are of an incredible subtlety and nuance. The end result is one of ethereal beauty, not easy to get into, but worth every note.

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