Polyorchard – Red October (Out and Gone Music, 2017) ****
I swear I heard somewhere in the middle of ‘I Would’, the first track off of Polyorchard’s Red October,a ring tone going off. As a live recording, it could be anyone’s phone ringing, but regardless, the sound fits. The track began scattered with Shawn Galvin’s percussion and fricti…
The Orion Congregation is a group out of Berlin, a mix of Malian, Nigerian, and German musicians, which caught my ear recently when I was poking around at a small record shop off of Berlin’s Boxhagener Platz. Ahmed Ag Kaedy, the Malian guitarist, is the group’s leader, and his group is Johannes Schleiermacher on synth and sax, Michael Wehme…
August 15 – 18, 2018. Oslo, Norway
Entering the courtyward, on the way to Cafe Mir
It was Saturday, the last of the Blow Out festival, when an opportunity arose to sit down with drummers and festival organizers Paal Nilssen-Love and Stale Liavik Solberg at a small trattoria in the hipGrünerløkkaneighborhood of Oslo. I had my list of questio…
You really cannot ask for a more serene setting than the Kunststation Kleinsassan, a small art museum nestled in the Rhön mountains of central Germany. Against the setting sun outside the panoramic windows of the cafe, pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach and saxophonist Frank Paul Schubert performed two intimate sets of music to a captivat…
My first realization that the 1970s was an unusual time for jazz came when I discovered Pablo Records. I had just started listening to and collecting jazz recordings, and at the time CDs were expensive and records were really really really cheap, so I picked up a lot of them. One was Dizzy’s Big Fourwith Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Brown, Joe Pass, …
Part II of a tribute to Polish Trumpeter Tomasz Stańko. See part I here.
Tomasz Stańko – Bluish (Power Bros, 1991)
By Colin Green
On Bluish, Tomasz Stańko is joined by Arild Andersen (acoustic and electric bass) and
Jon Christensen (drums), a Norwegian rhythm section that is so much more.
On this album Stańko’s playing has all…
I had been looking forward to Friday’s program, and buoyed by last night’s concerts, I was ready. Maybe what had piqued my interests most was that the line-up featured a solid core of free jazz, topped off with a bit of video enhanced electronic post-rock. Again the heat was an issue, but unlike earlier in the week, when the night tempera…
Earlier this week, legendary Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stańko passed away (learn more here). This weekend on the Free Jazz Blog we pay tribute to his work with a selective and wholly subjective dive into his discography.
Krzysztof Komeda Quintet – Astigmatic (Polskie Nagrania Muza, 1966)
By Colin Green
Recorded in Warsaw in December 1965 b…
It was hot and still in Berlin. Even sitting outside Radialsystem V, alongside the Spree river there was little relief. This was about a half hour before the doors opened to the big event hall where the festival was about to kick off with a solo set by Norwegian vocalist and sound artist Maja S.K. Ratkje and Bill Laswell’s ‘doom raggae’ out…
Early(ish) on an unseasonable warm and bright Saturday morning in Norway, the final day of the Kongsberg Jazz Festival, I was at a kiosk poking at the festival T-Shirts. I was looking at the colorful wheel logo of the main festival shirts, but was also intrigued by the more suggestive line drawing of a person with a cigarette on a different o…
All in All in All, on Relative Pitch is a rich and somewhat beguiling recording by the expansively thinking percussionist Mark Nauseef. The album, recorded in 2001 in Cologne, Germany, is a tremendous soundscape that focuses on the micro: dings of the glockenspiel, muted thud of prepared piano, hiss of electronics, and scrapes of percussion, pla…
Double Up Plays Double Up Plus (Pi Recordings, 2018) ****½
Composer and saxophonist Henry Threadgill’s previous album, Old Locks and Irregular Verbs, with the first incarnation of the Double Up ensemble, was dedicated to Lawrence “Butch” Morris’ conduction method, and was given a thorough review by Lee Rice Epstein in 2016. Noting the re…
