Tag: Free Jazz Blog
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…
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…
Ignaz Schick. (c)Cristina Marx/Photomusix
FJB: What is echtzeitmusik to you? Is what might be considered
echtzeitmusik connected through any approach, process, or sound result?
Ignaz Schick:
For me „Echtzeitmusik“ mostly is a community of similar minded musicians
who started arriving in Berlin i…
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 …
Silent Green, Berlin
Thursday night at Boulez HallWe raced it from the Hauptbahnhof to Boulez Hall in
the rain. My train had been delayed and we had about 10 minutes to make the 10
minute bike ride, show our proof of vaccination, scan the tickets, peel off our
wet rain clothin…
