See also Part I and Part IILorenz Widauer (t) ; Yvonne Moriel (s) (Photo by Michael Geißler) Sunday morning I woke to sounds of horns – the hills, it seems, were alive with the sound of music. Indeed, out on the Ritzensee, in a small row boat, saxophonist Yvonne Moriel and trumpeter Lorenz Widauer were welcoming the new day. Along the lake shore, …
See Part I and Part IIIWe Hike Jazz – getting ready (Photo by Michael Geißler)The 7:30 a.m. alarm was a bit brutal and it wasn’t long after that I had joined the group gathered at the base of the mountain where trip organizer and bassist Lukas Kranzelbinder was giving a quick run down of what to expect: we’d be above the tree-line, in the open alp…
See Part II and Part III The weather, I heard, was unusual for the alpine town of Saalfelden, apparently one could expect it to be raining at this point of the summer. At about 80 degrees and with blue bird skies, the only patch of rain encountered so far was on the night of arrival, exactly when the last concert let out. Now, it was early Saturday…
Crowd (above) Roof Deck (below) (photos by Juliane Schuetz
Read part 1 here.Friday, August 11The crowd at the Radialsystem was impressive. On Friday evening, at 7 p.m., the A’LARME! crowd spilled out onto the ample patio space overlooking the the Spree, the river that cuts through the middle of Berlin as well as the side-yard. The bar inside, as …
Thinking back on past editions of A L’ARME!, it has typically been quite hot, and in a summer where extreme heat has reigned over southern Europe and the US, simple reasoning would suggest that the patterns of past years would hold true for mid-August in Berlin; however, how far from it. Seasonably cool and under blue skies with white fluffy clou…
Dom Minasi in 2017. Photo by
Peter Gannushkin.
NYC guitarist Dom Minasi has passed away at the age of 80 after an extensive illness.
Minasi was a true New Yorker. He studied music at Lehman College in the Bronx
and worked as an educator, writer, composer, and …
Celine Voccia, a French pianist currently living and working in Berlin,
couples her classical training with free jazz edge through energetic and
engaging improvisation. In the past half year or so, Voccia’s discography has expanded rewardingly for the free jazz and improvisational music fan. Here are some thoughts on a few recent reco…
Last year, I was introduced to the music of Steffen Roth, a drummer,
composer, and organizer based in Leipzig, Germany, at the now (sadly)
defunct Au Topsi Pohl in Berlin. A little while later, I attended his Potentiale
Festival in the middle of the German countryside, and among some excellent
performances, I had the chance to hear…
Peter Brötzmann. Photo (c) Cristina Marx.
The final day of our tribute to saxophonist Peter Brötzmann. See day one
here
and day two here.
Peter Brotzmann/Paal Nilssen-Love Sweetsweat (Smalltown Superjazz, 2008)
As a listener, as someone with deep love …
Peter Brötzmann. Photo by Peter GannushkinDay two of our tribute to saxophonist Peter Brötzmann. See day one here.
Peter Brötzmann, Toshinori Kondo, William Parker, Hamid Drake — Little Birds
Have Fast Hearts, No. 1 ; No. 2 (FMP, 1998 ; 1999)
These two albums, divided into six parts, were taken from performances by the…
The dimensions of time and space can play a decisive role in the form of a jazz festival. The typical approach is to work with time, like the traditional festival held over a compact
set of dates, a long weekend in one place, a series of shows starting
sometime in the evening of each date. A variation can be overlapping
events at multiple lo…
The reed doubler Ken Vandermark is always juggling many projects of varying sizes and shapes, but one configuration that is always a joy to hear him in is the duo, especially the sax and drums combination. Famously, he has two long standing duos with Paal Nilssen-Love and Tim Daisy, and also just released an album with Hamid Drake. On Distant Cous…
