It would be good to hear more voice work in the contested field of free improvisation. These particular three larynx-adapter types seem poised on a precipice between civilisation and the jungle, some of them only too ready to return to a feral state. Collectively the group has taken the name Almufaraka and press blurb confirms they take “inspiration from a mythical primitive tradition”. One fave moment is ‘Story Telling’, which overlaps gibberish-speech and talking in tongues with wild and untamed whoops and neighs from the male corner of the act.

Besides doing the recording, mix, and mastering work, Orins also did the cover art, where to convey the themes of “disorder” he simply turns photographs of ruined buildings through 180 degrees, hoping to reveal powerful forces in the unexpected shadows and planes that appear. Jointly released with Tour De Bras. (21/01/2025)

Once again the pleasure we get from this music is due to many elements – strong melodies, watertight arrangements and playing by the team, the superb synth and electric piano work of Chaudhary, tasty jazz chords. And of course the bright upbeat mood of these very accessible pieces. Her music isn’t always especially “experimental”, apart from perhaps the cyborg-inflected episodes like ‘Ghanaplasticity’, but then it’s also not easy to pigeonhole it for a mainstream audience. It’s not just the fun-loving approach to musical genres (including steel pans, sitar-like instrumental breaks, funky rhythms, 1970s soul, psychedelic touches and electronic decorations), but there is something endearingly “quirky” about her song lyrics which may trip up the unwary. I personally think it’s great people still care enough to compose an entire “jazz ballad” song in praise of the “Rambutan” fruit from South-East Asia, or use a song to propose “National Chocolate Oat Milk Day” as a national holiday in the calendar. As a life-long reader of Mad Magazine, I am well aware of Don Martin’s 1963 story about “National Gorilla-Suit Day”, which (absurdly enough) became a real “thing” across the United States with at least one city where we can find devoted zany-types dressing up as gorillas once a year. Which shows us that satire can never go far enough.

I should perhaps add that Amanda Chaudhary is not a satirist as far as I can see, and she and her band are clearly having a great time making this gorgeous music – the joy is infectious as soon as you listen. When Frank Zappa wrote “silly” songs about details like dental floss and tweezers, there was very little joy in his heart, and he took a perverse pleasure in the absurdities of everyday life. No such misanthropy here, just beautiful tunes and great playing and real warmth. But she loves cats, so what else could we expect? (16/07/2024)

Actually this set Braxton Et Al. (RECORDS AND OTHER STUFF ROS6) contains just one Braxton composition, the piece ‘Composition No. 107 for two Multi-Instrumentalists’ from 1982, although it’s also used as the basis for a ‘Korperstudie’ by Riegler, a new composition which I assume is intended as a homage. Well, Braxton’s complex music is hard to fathom, but these Viennese fellows have elected to perform the composition almost by rote, turning it into a cold, cerebral exercise; despite some flashes of technique, they don’t have a jazz bone in their body capable of fully interpreting the score. Maybe they were intending to be respectful, but it seems to have inhibited them from playing freely.

The group do loosen up slightly for ‘Korperstudie #1’, where the set themselves the task of living the Braxton dream of “comprovisation” – this great African-American made great inroads into resolving the conflict between jazz improvisation and modern composition (as many today are still attempting to do). For the four segments here, Studio Dan show us some more engaging instrumental interplay, unexpected harmonies, and a few snakes in the boots as they wriggle around in the recording chamber. ‘Fassung Fur Quintett’, also by Riegler, is much more like “jazz” than anything we’ve heard so far and this one might sell you on the record, assuming you have a taste for clever cross-patterns and expertly-woven rhythms. Once again the group seem to be oblivious to swing feeling, but it doesn’t seem to matter so much when the material is so rich. ‘Mr. Sierpinski’, another recent work this time composed by the pianist Tiefenbacher, likewise leans closer to conventional jazz moves and is a shade more intelligible, but they still can’t resist doing the stop-start herky-jerky thing with their dynamics, as if to exhibit instrumental prowess.

At four sides, there’s a fair bit of music on offer, but they like a wide canvas on which to express their musical fantasies, which veer from a sort of cinematic sci-fi soundtrack thing, to tasteful fusion jazz noodling, with by-roads in the area of La Düsseldorf and Camel. The science fiction thing seems to blight a lot of players lately; is everyone fed up of the modern world and can’t wait to discover a better future? Teleport Collective are certainly hoping for a “posthuman” existence, a prospect that doesn’t thrill me much, but they make it seem positively comforting with their elegant chords and poised, mannered plinkling. A narrator by name of “Desert Survivor” is roped in to recite spoken-word portions of sides A-B, intoning excerpts from an imaginary diary set on an imaginary world. This particular vision doesn’t quite come into focus, but alludes vaguely to dreams, sandstorms, memories, and a world where our all our excessive consumerism and materialistic ways has finally led us to realise “the uselessness of things”.

There might be a strong message we could support lurking in among the languid sentences, were the music not so bland; the jazz-esque noodling and pastel chords seem to carry on completely oblivious to the implications of this sketched-in dystopia, and the half-baked attempts at emitting unusual electronic noises fall flat. The trio, who used to perform as Killah Tofu and made a couple of “jazz-funk-soul” records in Vienna, are described here as “electronic jazz”, but as usual with many contemporary musicians, one genre is not enough to satisfy them, and they also want to capture flavours of movie soundtracks, hip-hop, and dance beats in their sweep. (01/11/2024)

I can see the musicians are pleased with stirring up these six “quiet riots” in the studio as they proceed to confound normal musical procedures, yet something fails to cohere for me. There’s not enough structure, no root note for safety, and despite oodles of technique and skill it feels like the players are meandering as they play their conceptual games. It might be something worth doing to lace your cool jazz playing with astringent atonal moments borrowed from 12-tone serialism, but Bill Evans did a much better job of this on his 1971 record The Bill Evans Album, with the well-integrated tone-row composition ‘T.T.T.’. On the other hand, there are moments when Herbert and Mitterer find their way into a mini-maelstrom of alien-ness that confounds their mannered control-freakery for a second or two, at which point the music then becomes kind of interesting. (19/12/2024)

Leader Jason Berry has impressed and entertained us with his previous well-polished and expertly-performed records of exciting music, and this one is no exception. The line-up here includes Steve Adams, Myles Boisen, Chris Grady, John Hanes, Amanda Chaudhary, and many other luminaries – the combined CV of these players is pretty staggering, and it’s no surprise they’re in demand as live musicians and session players. Musically, they exhibit the skills needed to negotiate the ingenious changes in Berry’s elaborate compositions, but at no time have I found myself “overwhelmed” with instrumental show-offs or players packing too many notes into each bar. Once again we admire the concision of Berry’s compositional thoughts; no need for a 17-minute instrumental excursion to make his statement, when he can compress his ideas, and the need for musicianly expression, into pieces that arrive as perfectly-realised episodes lasting 4-5 mins.

It so happens Berry is also a gifted illustrator, and his full-colour drawings appear on the cover and in the booklet, expressing in visual form his very unorthodox take on the themes of Julius Caesar, a dazzling combination of science-fiction, optical puzzles, and colourful surrealist japes; the very incongruous juxtapositions will intrigue the questing mind. Berry sees Julius Caesar as a story of “ambition, power, and political violence”, and how the rhetoric of a speaker can incite a mob to violence. The parallels with America’s current political turmoil are self-evident, but let’s hope that the crowned figure in a blue business suit represents some political parvenu, appointed merely because of his position as a tech oligarch, or related to donations from one billionaire gangster to another, is being hounded out of office pursued by whatever agency we have left that still fights for the forces of good. I’m being far too prosaic in my interpretation though, an attitude which does no favours to the many-layered and allusive talents of the creative-thinking Jason Berry, and his talented crew of interpreters. Another essential release…from 29 November 2024.

Breezy (SONIC TRANSMISSIONS RECORDS STRLP25) features some very able playing from Mette Rasmussen, Karl Hjalmar Nyberg, Erik Kimestad Pedersen, Oscar Grönberg and others, plus guests Oddrun Lilja Jonsdottir and Joakim Rainer Petersen, who adds synth on two cuts. The record is evidence of friendly collaborations with close friends over about thirty years, and what mostly comes across is warmth and empathy between these fellow humans. I prefer the lively excursions such as ‘Free The Jazz’, which isn’t so much a platform for boring old take-a-solo conventions, as a joyful all-sound-together explosion full of colour and vitality. You may prefer ‘Hilma’, which starts out reflective and introverted (a walk in the solemn landscapes of Norway, hopefully) before switching to an up-tempo party where the metallic guitar inventions of Jonathan F. Horne add a dash of acidic craziness to the punch. ‘Breezy’, the title track, likewise commences with the sort of melancholic instrumental wistfulness which seems to haunt much Norwegian jazz and music on the Hubro label, before picking up a touch of the Miles Davis small-combo energy.

Vinyl edition also available. (23/09/2024)

As a group they’re quite new, but for his dream-team Andreas picked some old friends and partners to play in this combination, including the sax player Kasper Værnes with whom he’s been making music since 2008. We heard them on the Troposgrafien record in 2018. There’s also Adrian Fiskum Myhr on double bass (sometime member of Oker) and Anja Pauvdal on piano and synths (she made a fine droney tuba-and-synth duo as one half of Skrap).

Andreas Wildhagen’s Spiralis have at least two ambitions – (A) to improve the forms of improvised music and free jazz, and (B) to change the world. For the former, they’re trying to make a move back to using static motifs and repeated themes, which on their part is a conscious rejection of the “anything-goes” school of free improv, where the principal guiding light is constant change. I suppose these Norwegians figured if they alighted on a nifty sequence through their playing, why not replay and recycle it? At the same time, they don’t follow the path of any given post-bop small group in Afro-American jazz, i.e. play the “head” and then circle back to it after a few minutes of instrumental inventions. These strategies (and others) have led to a certain amount of satisfaction and fulfilment for the players in Andreas Wildhagen’s Spiralis, who enjoyed the pleasant surprises as they rehearsed – after which they were led into the recording studio, while the ideas were still fresh. As to changing the world, you can read on the Bandcamp page an impassioned statement about the political and geographic state of the world today, quite possibly reflecting the radical views of Wildhagen himself, where he’s equally inflamed about the global rise of capitalism and fascism, and the remorseless destruction of our natural habitat. It’s a pessimistic take no doubt, but music can help: “Music can be an instrument for changing thought patterns and revitalizing society, and coming back to a natural respect for life.”

While supporting all of these laudable aims, and taking heart in this collective belief in the power of art, I still find myself underwhelmed by the actual music on Beauty No Beauty. It’s ably performed by talented people, yet it feels tentative and meandering, in places like a schematic recasting of elements absorbed from John Coltrane records. The ambitions are strong, but the music is merely pleasant and lacks real force. (01/11/2024)