Jason Kao Hwang Critical Response Trio “Book of Stories” (True Sound Recordings, 2023)

It is almost a commonplace the fact that “fusion”, born in the middle of the 1960s, burned itself after a fist and beginning incredible, creative season leaving the most adventurous listeners dry and thirsty becoming a catchy and more pop-rock oriented (i.e.: simplified) style of music.

In fact, after the fist creative outputs by the like of Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock as On The Corner and Sextant, after incredibly skilled musicians such as Jaco Pastorius, after creating a music that mixed the principles of improvisation with instruments coming from all over the world like Trilok Gurtu’s tablas and tampouras, “fusion” became a label for sometimes easy to create and to play music, sometimes cerebral and unproductive experimentations.

The same thing happened with post-rock at the end of 1990s, with band such as Tortoise giving originally life to a music that was funk but also hardcore punk – at least in spirit – but that degraded in few years into a mere juxtaposition of different elements in order to find out the most rare approach to various notes, instruments and styles of music. 

A complete different path, reminiscent of the famous Loft Era we talked about in the past, is that of a leader of those faraway days, violinist Jason Kao Hwang. While for more info on him we recommend another review of one of his last year works, one of the most important issued in these times, this new album titled Book Of Stories (True Sound Recordings, 2023) is played by the Critical Response Trio.

The trio features Hwang at electric violin, Anders Nilsson at electric guitar and Michael T.A. Thompson at drums. The music is flavored with funk and reggae hints and spices here and there, but the compositions, all by Hwang, are anyway adventurous enough to be interesting for all fans of improvised music, even non idiomatic, because the most recognizable parts are in a way ‘abstracted’ and conducted into climaxes or moments of rest that are fully dynamics and that can bring the listener a lot of fun, being a mix of the ‘mental’ approach of spontaneous improvised music and the more enjoyable characteristics of popular music without being ‘populistic’.

This way, compared with the previous Hwang release in duo with J.A. Deane, the album offers the listener another face of the instrumentalist and composer way of understanding and exercise creativity, likewise interesting and daring. Powered by the experience of the musicians involved (Anders Nilssen played guitar with William Parker, Paquito D’Rivera, Elliott Sharp and Ken Filiano among the many others, while Michael T.A. Thompson was a solid drummer for musicians such as Charles Gayle, Joe McPhee, Matthew Shipp, Henry Grimes and John Patitucci), the record is solid enough to make you want to listen to it more than once.

The album opens with The Power of Many in the Soul of One. Violin phrases, and subsequent silences, are interspersed with rhythmic outbursts while the guitar arpeggios embellish Hwang phrases. A sense of urgency and, together with it, a meditative quality, are mixing together in what seem to be an attempt to create a dramatic peak that abruptly diminishes into a more introspective, even if electrical, interaction.

A pedal change atmosphere leaving then space to a beautiful drum solo, after which electric guitar explodes in different rhythmic approaces on an atonal basis. After the guitar express itself in full, it’s time for the effected violin to recall all the musicians involved into a more meditative mood, played almost until the end of the track. Many nuances and the overall approach makes you think about the Loft Era music, but played through a more contemporary vision.

Music continues with Upside Circle Down, and more than of the Lofts it it reminiscent of the first AACM experiments – I’m thinking in particular to the first releases in the 1970s by Anthony Braxton with Dave Holland on cello or Kenny Wheeler on fluegelhorn. Brief assertions are interspersed with silence, inviting people to listen to the music and themselves more carefully, but the drums’ almost funky groove creates a first difference, almost a new idea of “fusion”, and a recontextualization of experimental music from the end of the 1960s.

Guitar arpeggios create a magical atmosphere, as you can listen through works such different but with a similar emotional approach as In A Silent Way by Miles Davis and Andrew Cyrille’s Lebroba – notably with two pairly sensitive guitarists as Nilssen like John McLaughlin and Bill Frisell. A Silent Ghost Follows is a slightly shorter composition introduced by the colors of mallets and a contemporary claim by the violin, making us remember Anthony Braxton again or the AEoC.

This time the use of different pitches – the violin looks for very high notes, the guitar opens up to middle tones – captures the listener, again carried in a past era still harbinger of stimuli for the future – the violin creates almost modern electronic textures into the solid structure we depicted. Dragon Carved into Bone takes the same matter on another temperature, with violin soloing on higher pitches and drums depicting a more bustling sonorous landscape, while the guitar gently deconstructs a melody into parts and pieces so to rebuild them together in another, interesting shape.

More quiet parts are alternating with denser structures, while drums nod to some reggae/dub or blues rhythms. Last piece, Friends Forever, is an hommage to the musicians that in the past gave shape to the music here present, through ages and through all the difficulties that didn’t prevented anyway many of them from creating beauty. The piece is the most melodical of the lotto, even if doesn’t lack the blues scrape but also the sweetness typical of the genre.

Living on the other side of the ocean, I’m not completely aware of what Hwang and friends future steps will be. For the moment, enjoying this music is an unexpected gift that deserves to be shared with fans of improvisation. The album has been released on June 30 this year and is available also through the artist Bandcamp page. 

 

Tom Waits: The Island Years Remastered (1983-1993)

Twelve years have passed since Tom Waits’ last effort, the album Bad As Me (Anti-, 2011), was released. Never officially retired, the singer, songwriter, musical experimentator committed in these last years more with cinema than with music, appearing in such movies as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza (2022). While rumours affirm that he is back to work on writing new music, is time for an engagement with his most daring and interesting period in my opinion, which are his 1980s and 1990s, that will be reissued in almost its entirety this fall.

During that period, after marrying his wife Cathleen Brennan, collaborator and sound designer for Francis Ford Coppola with a respectable background in contemporary music, Tom Waits, who co-opted his spouse in order to write new intriguing material, changed shape and skin definitely passing from the bluesman and the jazz crooner of the 1970s to a more interesting experimental musician, collaborating on records and in live concerts with people as avant-garde guitarist Marc Ribot, just to name one, in order to deconstruct rock music and give life to a new world populated by unlikely and absurd “American dreamers” like Frank, the main character of his triology as we will speculate in the following lines. 

This trilogy begun with the 1983 output Swordfishtrombones, first to be released by Chris Blackwell’s Island Records. If the title, and the music, made hangry Captain Beefheart who felt someone has stolen his inspiration for the album Trout Mask Replica (Straight, 1969), we can praise it as one of the most interesting albums coming out of the NY – where Tom Waits relocated from Los Angeles with his family – experimental music scene of those days.

As every post modern music, Swordfishtrombones is composed by songs where melodies and structures are apparently mongrelized while at the opposite they are deconstructed and reconstructed in order to give the listener the feeling of being put into another, but yet familiar (thanks also to Ennio Morricone and Kurt Weill inspired melodies), world, as if the music itself would be an invitation to reconsider the place we’re living in with new eyes and, above all, ears. 

The purpose is to put Frank, the lead character of the songs of the trilogy composed also by the following Rain Dogs (Island, 1984) and the double Frank’s Wild Years (Island, 1985), under the light as an American dreamer who, thanks to his passiveness – he goes looking for a new life in a new land always by train – is destined to failure and to loose himself. And if the trilogy will culminate in a theatrical play put on the scene by the famous Steppenwolf company, the following albums by Tom Waits are nontheless interesting.

Bone Machine (Island, 1992) is Tom Waits’ album most dominated by strange and dangerous to play (in Waits’ own words, see Tom Waits On Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters, 2011, Chicago Review Press) percussions such as the self-built “conundrum” which dominates pieces like All Stripped Down and Such a Scream. The ghost of Harry Partch, an U.S. composer who built his own instruments (and the scales to play them over) dominates the album, possibly another gift from Waits’ wife Brennan who is clearly present as a co-writer through Ireland-influenced melodies like I Don’t Wanna Grow Up, a song covered subsequently by the punk band The Ramones.

And finally, last but not less interesting, The Black Rider (Island, 1993) is the album, co-written by Waits and Brennan with the Beat writer William S. Burroughs, which signs the beginning of the collaboration between the Pomona songwriter and the dramatist Robert Wilson. The story is similar to Carl Maria Von Weber’s (1786-1826) Der Freischutz and it narrates about a hunter who fall in love with a girl promised to a richer hunter. 

In order to gain her love, he will use on a competition some magic bullets given to him by the devil himself (“some of these bullets are for you and some are for me” the devil will proclamate) but one of the bullets will kill the young girl, and the hunter will get mad and lonely. Obviously influenced by the relationship Burroughs had with heroin and its being a double-face substance, The Black Rider was put on scene during the 1990s with a discreet success of public and critics, and it will be Waits’ last release with Blackwell’s label.

After almost a decade, Waits will sign with Anti-, a label created by Brett Gurewitz as a companion to Epitaph, more keen on experimental music than the latter devoted to punk rock, and his career will gain new peaks thanks to albums like Mule Variations (Anti-, 1999) and the collection of rarities Orphans (Anti-, 2006). But this is another story, and we will narrate it when new reissues will be released. 

Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs and Franks Wild Years will be issued on September 1^st, 2023, on vynil and CD, while Bone Machine and The Black Rider on October 6, 2023. 

 

 

An Hommage To Peter Brotzmann

On June 22, 2023 multi reedist, composer, improviser and fluxus alumni Peter Brotzmann has sadly passed away. This article is our way, after a long interview released many years ago, to remember him. Peter Brotzmann during the 1970 was the true face of European avant garde jazz, and along with his partner and mutual friend Evan Parker one of the pivotal figures of improvised music.

A close friend of visual artist Nam June Paik and others pertaining to the Fluxus movement, Brotzmann tried to incorporate elements of this iconoclastic idea into his own playing. Brotzmann style at saxophones is assertive, violent, abrasive and a little bit ironic. In the following years, after being cherished by Don Cherry and other American avant-garde artists more than by European critics, he started playing with musicians coming from the other side of the ocean like William Parker, Ronald Shannon Jackson and Bill Laswell.

This is a quick introduction to his discography. The first album you have to listen is Machine Gun (FMP, 1968). Here Brotzmann is leading an octet featuring Willem Breuker, Evan Parker, Fred Van Hove, Peter Kowald and Han Benning among the others. The music is surprisingly violent, with at the beginning the horns section imitating the sound of machine guns, in an attempt to give life to an  anti militarist concept. But the music is texturally rich, with the various musicians giving life to a multi structured creature.

You can find the same assertiveness on subsequent records like Nipples (FMP, 1969) and Fuck The Boere (FMP 1970), an album dedicated to the South African musician Johnny Dyani who died in the same years. An album that is worh of attention and of deep listenings, a true testimony of creativity and fantasy, is Schwarzwaldfahrt (FMP 1977), in which Brotzmann and mutual friend Han Bennink recorded a live set of free music into a forest, with Bennink beating logs and other natural elements with his sticks and Brotzmann utilising his many saxophones so to create a site specific music inspired by nature.

During the 1980, a period not favorable for experimentations, Brotzmann gave life to the quartet Last Exit, with U.S. musicians such as Sonny Sharrock, Ronald Shannon Jackson and Bill Laswell. The music here is even more heavy and dense, and in a way it anticipates what John Zorn at the end of the decade will create with his band Naked City. Now finally accepted as the uncompromising musician he is, Peter Brotzmann can finally manage to give life to various line up and various musical creations.

During the 1990s, his most important combo is the Die Like a Dog Quartet, an hommage to Albert Ayler that featured again U.S. musicians like William Parker, Hamid Drake and japanese trumpet player Toshinori Kondo. The quartet issued four albums of pure existential poetry, in which reflecting on life and death through notes is part of a project that is one of a kind. While in effect many musicians like Marc Ribot tried to hommage Ayler playing his own music, Brotzmann quartet gave life to new material instead of reproposing old tunes.

A second life, if necessary, was given to Brotzmann music during the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the new century by the Peter Brotzmann Tentet, featuring musicians such as Ken Vandermark, Jeb Bishop, Joe McPhee, Paal Nilssen-Love and Fred Lonberg-Holm among the others. The tentet and his various combinations in duos, trios, etc. gave life to a live adventure that brought Brotzmann all around the world performing fresh and harsh music, making the old master known to younger generations of musicians and fans.

As every master musician, Brotzmann is particularly fond in the art of soloing, even if that part of his own work is not completely above the banner of his most recognised art. Two albums in particular can be advised to the listeners issued in recent years: No Nothing (FMP 1991) where Brotmann imagines a different concept for each of his instrument like e-flat clarinet, alto sax, bass sax, tenor, tarogato, and I Surrender Dear (Trost 2019) where he reinvents classics like Lover Come Back to Me or Con Alma at tenor saxophone.

Having toured extensively during the last years, Brotzmann has played with an enormous variety of musicians, among which Keiji Haino and many others coming from all over the world: from the East to the West, many artists payed a tribute to the complex art of Peter Brotzmann playing with him. Impossible to imitate, difficult to be inspired by, Brotmann was one of a kind for technique and vision. Possibly his leaving is the sign of the end of an era.