Category: Recordings
By Jim Marks
This is the first full-length release by this trio—
an ep appeared in the fall of 2020
—made up of the Rotterdam-based Portuguese bassist Gonçalo Almeida,
Riccardo Marogna, a native of Verona working mainly in The Hague, on
tenor saxophone, bass clarinet, a…
KERN is a group comprised of Berlin-based woodwind player Edith Steyer, trombonist Matthias Mueller, and percussionist Yorgos Dimitriadis. As a trio, they released Mittendrin (‘In the middle’) in 2017 on Creative Sources. For their 2020 release Poles and Pulse on Trouble in the East – an artist run label out of Berlin – they welcomed the Berli…
Berlin, through the trees.(c) Paul Acquaroechtzeit musik – Day 1 When the question was posed to the folks in the Free Jazz Collective, who would like to join in on a tribute to the echtzeit musik scene in Berlin, the main question was “what is the echtzeit scene”? Funnily, that was a similar answer to some that we received from several of the music…
Guitarist Ava Mendoza is depicted with prickly pear cacti infront of a
barbed-wire fence on the cover of her new recording New Spells. It’s a fine
visualization of the sounds that crackle forth from her electric guitar.This is her sound. Some recent group settings featuring Mendoza, like
Mayan Space Station with William Parker and Gerald …
Today, something a little different. Carina Khorkhordina is a trumpeter and photographer from Russia, now living and working in Berlin. Some of her recent works are sound/site-specific videos that she has created showcasing some of the quickly disappearing ‘verlassene Orte’ (abandoned places) in the rapidly gentrifying city.The first is set in a de…
Jon Irabagon – Bird with Streams (Irabbagast, 2021) ****½
Ahh, COVID-19. How much has been written about it and how much has been lost to it? At the same
time, how many new possibilities appeared along with the global mayhem? For NYC
based saxophonist and composer Jon Irabagon, the pandemic took him and his
family on a journey westward t…
Angelika Niescier – Alexander Hawkins – Soul In Plain Sight (Intakt, 2021) ****½Germany based saxophonist Angelika Niescier and British pianist Alexander Hawkins share an intimate and explosive 52 minutes together on Soul in Plain Sight. The album, which was recorded after a series of concert dates last year in Europe was committed to tape (o…
Irene Schweizer, in concert in 2015. Photo by Peter Gannushkin.This year the Swiss pianist Irene Schweizer celebrated her 80th birthday. The writers at the Free Jazz Blog have covered the influential pianist’s work over the years and we thought it would be an appropriate celebration of her milestone year by reviewing not only her most recent releas…
When I first put on the drum and piano duo of John Blum and Jackson Krall, I felt a familiar sensation. It was that same, immediate and visceral reaction that I felt the day I stuck Cecil Taylor’s Conquistadorinto my car’s CD player, driving away from Jack’s Music Shoppe in Red Bank, NJ, where I had just bought a used copy of it, oh so many years a…
First off, this is one of the more creatively packaged CDs that I’ve opened in a long time. Inside a white cardboard shell with stark simple lettering and black and white images of wood or maybe cut stones, the CD itself is wrapped in a folded plastic envelope. Demanding delicacy in just its appearance, pulling at the corners of the wrapper then re…
A few weeks ago I wrote about several duo recordings featuring the guitar. Guitar and guitar, guitar and bass, guitar and flute, and several other combos. Now, I am moving into trio configurations and the definition of what makes this list gets even trickier. At first, I thought my basic approach is that the guitarist is the group’s organizer, but …
I still rather vividly recall first hearing woodwind’s Anna Webber’s compositions sometime ago and looking back at a review of the Simple Trio from 2014, I realized that all I wrote then still applied. All of the notes on her music’s concentrated intricate interconnecting pieces and edgy improvisation still apply, and if anything, her powers have o…
