It was a windy, warm mid-summer day when I sat down with saxophonist
José Lencastre in the concrete
amphitheater of the Gulbenkian gardens in Lisbon. We talked about his music,
the flowering Lisbon scene, and his new baby, who was – at the time – about the same size of
his alto sax. Another topic we spent spent some time discussing was…
Guilherme Rodrigues, photo from his website.
Cellist Guilherme Rodrigues, from Lisbon, has been living in Berlin for six years, developing musical partnerships with musicians across intersecting scenes. His simultaneous roles find him a part of Lisbon’s Creative Sources Recordings record label, musical director of Berlin’s Hosek Contemporary Art Ga…
The creative process is really fascinating. Where it begins, how it evolves, when it achieves something, are evergreen questions. Trace the bouncing lines of a simple thought, it may begin with “what shall I eat for breakfast” and within a few moments ends up at thinking about a stretch of the Utah desert with rock formations that look like goblins…
Let’s begin with the players on Untitled (London Leipzig Luzern). I had the chance to see saxophonist Urs Leimgruber play in a duo with keyboardist Jacques Demierre (who was playing an enhanced spinnet) and it was, even by the wide berth given experimental music, an unusual show. Leimgruber had extended passages in which he would either simply mov…
Percussionist and composer Devin Gray released several recordings during the COVID time warp. Today we take at look at a few of these releases which range from adventurous modern jazz to daring avant-garde explorations.Devin Gray, Ralph Alessi, Angelica Sanchez – Melt all the Guns (Rataplan, 2021) ****½This album struck a chord from the first time…
The small white box sits on my desk. Perfectly square, about an inch and a half high, featuring a light grayscale photo overlayed with white lettering. Inside, a slim booklet with saxophonist Ivo Perelman’s image. Then, nine cardboard sleeves, each with a black and white image of a different pianist … first, David Burrell, then Marylyn Crispell, …
We are pleased to bring you the Free Jazz Blog’s top album(s) of 2021. Last week we presented our top recordings of 2021, which was drawn from the top 10 lists of the writers and then held a vote for the top album.In first place, we have “Pan-European” group أحمد [Ahmed] with Nights on Saturn (Communication).أحمد [Ahmed] – Nights on Saturn …
It is sort of maximum minimalism. New York City based Pianist and composer Eli Wallace, perhaps in reaction to the unique constraints of the Covid situation, setsome stringent constraints of his own to produce the music behind his new recording Precepts,and the result is an intriguing, layered and controlled suite of impressionistic music. Impressi…
The Free Jazz Blog has never covered the seminal Mujician quartet directly. There are references in reviews of recordings from the late pianist Keith Tippett or the wonderfully prolific saxophonist Paul Dunmall, and an entry from the obituary of drummer Tony Levin. In a sense, Mujician’s time was a bit before this publication’s, but the quartet’s i…
Snowman, rooster, gryphon, Lady Liberty, and a horse.Ok, so 2,110,000 page views and several hundred reviews between the bookends of year start and end, it has been a busy year on the Free Jazz Blog. We’ve welcomed new writers, heard over 2,000 new recordings, and tried to navigate the dicey world of mid-pandemic concerts and festivals. Live stream…
This review will be no surprise to anybody who knows the players in Mofaya!, saxophonist John Dikeman, trumpeter Jaimie Branch, bassist Luke
Stewart, and drummer Aleksander Škorić. Each musician listed is well known in the jazz realms which readers here at the Free Jazz Blog
frequent. In fact, it is only Škorić who somehow seems to keep…
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…
