Roby Glod Christian Ramond Klaus Kugel – No ToXiC (Nemu, 2024)

Even if I widened the palette for this blog, one of my preeminent interests is still the music coming from free jazz and free improvisation. It is difficult to find out great improvisers nowadays, since the music business is divided into three streams. The first stream is composed by musicians who opt for improvised or free jazz music because they think is an easier music to play, where to play incoherent lines. Even Charles Mingus had this opinion, figure out what about less prepared musicians.

Another stream is composed by instrumentalists who want to put contemporary or avant garde music into their Curricula Vitae, to show how serious musicians they are being able to play almost everything in order to raise their revenues basically – it’s harsh to be a musician in the 2020s. And then, there’s a residual amount of interpreters who are driven by passion, competence and creativity. This part is increasingly smaller, but the musicians I’m introducing you today are part of this third stream.

Roby Glod (alto and soprano saxophone), Christian Ramond (double bass) and Klaus Kugel (drums and percussions) are playing together since twenty years, and the fact they were hidden from my radar, so to speak, makes me doubt of my knowledge in the field of music. Their new album No Toxic, out on Nemu Records since Jan. 2, 2024, is an album where, as the trio states, elements such as “swinging pulse” or “jazz phrasing”, along with melodic and rhythmic patterns, give this music its place into the jazz continuum.

With artists such as Lennie Tristano, Lee Konitz or Warne Marsh on the back of their minds, the musicians involved in this trio give life to a warm and intriguing practice in a language that is still far from leaving its best outputs in the past. Obviously the music of the trio is far from being a step ahead and a progression from the ‘tradition’ – is there such a thing for free improvisation? – but one can enjoy their creation throughout the 14 tracks of this album while wondering what the next steps will be.

Unconscious Superglitzer begins with the lines by Glod, a musician that, in Howard Mandel’s words, “does not resemble [...] anyone but himself”. While this is certainly true for his alto, as in the aforementioned piece, even if the freedom given to that horn by the likes of Ornette Coleman and above all Anthony Braxton – another Warne Marsh enthousiast – is something tangible through Glod’s playing, it is also undeniable that at the soprano he is in debt with Steve Lacy and his angularity, as shown in Carol’s Dream.

Ramond and Kugel on bass, both pinched and arcoed, and percussions are weaving a dense sound fabric, even in the more rarefied pieces, and their almost telepathic interplay leaves the listener coping with the memory of some of the best rhythm sections of the past: we will not try to instill some comparisons into the listeners, but the NY scene of the past decades, way back into the 1960s, is full of drummers and double bassists who forged a sound and propelled the brass players functioning as a launch trampoline for them.

Obviously pauses and silences, in order to underline a certain passage, aren’t absent as in the best improvised music tradition. Se Chussa De Re opens with the characteristic small percussions sounds that made recognisable the Chicagoan avant garde movement, while Solution After The Storm, after the previous piece lyricism, can be taken as another example of how the AACM sown proselytes: percussions have that extremely melodic quality, and Glod’s elocution shows an in-depth ability to mix jazz and a little bit of European contemporary tinge, as far as sound colors and matter, at least a little bit.

While it would be maybe futile to describe all the pieces on the album in their entirety, it is not strange to underline how it is surprising nowadays to find out musicians with such a command and mastery of their instruments in an environment that in the last ten or more years has welcomed people belonging to the different streams I was talking about at the beginning of this review, leaving even some of the best and hystorical musicians with less to say than in their past because of a strange but real osmosis.

This isn’t the case. I bet on Glod and friends ability to play also solo, even if I didn’t had the opportunity to listen to them in that context, I mean that their confidentiality with their instruments is palpable even at a superficial listening, and that one thing one can tell for sure is that these musicians play the music on their head and they are driven by the necessity to express themselves through sounds, as it happened for the best musicians of the past generations.

Ramond, Kugel and Glod at least for the moment aren’t revolutionising the music they chose to give their contribution, but they are one of its most interesting expressions in the present time, and the lack of evolution of the genre is not attributable to them as a guilt. If there’s not such an evolution, at least for the moment or under my ears through my researches, it’s because of complex reasons I’m only superficially strarted to point the finger at.

For the moment it is better to enjoy this music and their creators. While the album here reviewed was recorded at Kreuzung an Sankt Elena in Bonn (Germany), I hope to see them live in the future to be even more aware than from a recorded performance of how good their inspiration is. Hoping to hear also more in the future, I believe I will spin this album many times in the following months, convinced of the goodness of this musical proposal.