(text) and Cristina Marx (photos) The Uferstudios, in Berlin’s Wedding district, sit on the edge of the Panke, a small creek that cuts through the city from north to south. This collection of low red-brick buildings that once housed public transit workshop is now the long-term home of studios and theaters dedicated to dance. However, on a recent m…
Excerpted from https://www.freejazzblog.org/2023/12/free-jazz-blogs-2023-top-10-lists.html So, here we are, standing on the precipice of a new year looking back at the current one — who would have thought that would see the future catching up with the present so fast, especially with…
Colonge based Angelika Niescier is a brilliant force on alto saxophone. Whether she’s playing melodious lines or blasting out searing ones, she is a musician with complete control of her instrument and flush with ideas. What can then be said of cellist Tomeka Reid? Hailing from the incubator of effusive jazz in the heart of America, Reid’s wide ran…
Is this the album from Marcelo dos Reis that I had been hoping to hear or is it one that I had never expected to hear? After all, the Portuguese guitarist is a masterful player who weaves experimental lines with melodic results, and sharp tonal clusters with harmonic sophistication – for example, his recent duo release with trumpeter Luis Vincente …
An evolving post … here are my top albums of 2023 … Historic/Archival/Reissued Recordings:
Bill Laswell. Photo by Ziga Koritnik
By
Paul Acquaro
and
David Cristol
Both David and I have seen Bill Laswell perform a few times. For me, once at
the old Stone in NYC and once at the
A’LARME Festival in Berlin, and for David, starting in 2003, seeing M…
Guitarist Tisziji Muñoz is a somewhat under-the-radar player in improvised music. Perhaps better stated, he is more of an open secret, and those in the know, know that his fiery Coltrane-like approach to his instrument should have him cresting the top of any “fiery-guitar” music fan’s list. He also happens to be a teacher of spirituality and combi…
By
Paul Acquaro
See part 1
here.
SATURDAY, November 4
The main event of Saturday evening was a concert by AACM founding member and
ever creative composer and saxophonist Henry Threadgill, who had
written a piece specifically for the festival that melded his New York based
Zooid quintet with Berlin’s own ever creati…
It was the last day of the Jazzfest Berlin, a rainy Sunday morning, and I was decked out in rain gear and biking through glistening streets on the way to the Delphi Filmpalast am Zoo – a posh art-deco theater dating from 1927, and also home to the famous Quasimodo music club. As I was dodging the deepest puddles and thickest patches of wet leaves, …
Entrance to the Downtown Music Gallery, June 2023 with Bruce GallanterIn the early 2000s as I was fumbling my way into ever more challenging music, I somehow ‘discovered’ the Downtown Music Gallery in its incarnation on the Bowery in downtown New York City. I was innocently walking up the street and in a somewhat opaque window noticed Dave Douglas’…
I’ve been savoring every crisp note from guitarist John Scofield’s Uncle John’s Band for a bit now. The trio format, I believe, is Scofield’s calling – he has crafted a distinct approach to his guitar playing that works best with skeletal, but solid, accompaniment, like on his ECM debut Swallow Tales (ECM, 2020) and years prior on Enroute (Verve, …
I’ve been thinking about extended technique and the saxophone a bit lately, and I am starting to come up with a taxonomy, a classification scheme, if you will, of the various sound possibilities and their application. For example, there are the extended tonal systems that musicians like Evan Parker and John Butcher have developed and extended, rich…
