Jensen/Liebowitz/Blancarte/Wagner – Ephemeris (Marsken, 2024)

Odd as it seems, now that I opened Complete Communion to other sounds like ethnic music, post punk and weird songwriting, I’m finally finding new interesting free jazz and avant garde musicians. In Portugal, as an example, there’s a nice scene whose key figures are double bass players like Joao Madeira or Gonçalo Almeida (who lives in Rotterdam), but also in New York you can find musicians who create valid outputs even if they’re not famous like the ones I have interviewed in the past for this blog. 

Since in the past I also wrote about how sexist can be the jazz environment, it is with great pleasure that now I can introduce to you the quartet composed by multi-reedist Louise Dam Eckardt Jensen, pianist Carol Liebowitz, bassist Tom Blancarte, and drummer John Bernard Wagner. The performance of almost an hour comprised in their new album Ephemeris was recorded in March 2023. 

When I first met the quartet, I thought about the large ensemble Italian Instabile Orchestra, since as this orchestra, the small combo was alive in the last ten years but had few opportunities to express itself as a whole, at the point that this record is their first official release on an album. Difficult as it is to manage a group of people improvising together and making money from this activity, this particular quartet features interesting music and is an interesting starting point to explore lesser-known musicians. 

One can obviously think that living in New York is a thrilling experience, with the energy of the city fuelling your dreams and your abilities, but, apart from common thinking, the music you’ll listen in the album Ephemeris is meditative and able to build, minute after minute, a surprising melting of four different languages. The single musicians have their own specificities, so you won’t find in this review obvious comparisons with the most famous improvisors: I believe we can try to describe and listen to their music in a more interesting way. 

The record starts with the more than 17 minutes of Gnomon. Percussions, piano and alto saxophone open the meditation. The melodies intertwine themselves in a pointillistic way before the bass enters, making every note a swirl of responses the one to the other. Briefer and longer statements, fragments of melodies, the usual gentle drumming of the piano or the dense melodic textures from the drums we are accustomed to hear in as avant garde concert are here as always. 

But this time the key focus is on how much each one is able to sustain their peers, and how much a saxophone line can be surrounded by the drum sticks and the single piano notes, before the piano affirms itself with the reed snorting with decision, and so on in every possible combination from the four instruments, until the drums and the saxophone are left dialoguing in a nervous but gentle manner at the same time. 

And then again, the fellows reunite in a new quartet configuration. This time is up to Jensen and Liebowitz to duet, even if Blancarte and Wagner are surrounding them with determined particles of sounds, in a crescendo that ends in a new drums statement. This time Jensen switches to the flute. The duo, opening a space which is not ethnic music nor free improvisation, is crossed by a bowed bass and rare piano notes. 

The last three minutes of the composition are an attempt to give life to an organic life form, and it is what everyone with heart and ears would call ‘holistic’. The flute solo is finely articulated and its dialogue with the piano is something of interest even for people who is accustomed to free improvisation. Born In 1980, Louise Dam Eckardt Jensen is a Danish-American saxophonist, vocalist and composer, who divides herself into her two countries of origin, giving life to a music that reflects both. 

Noisy and melodic at the same time, her music attracted the attention of such different musicians such as Peter Evans, Marc Ducret, Weasel Walter and Jim Black. Carol Liebowitz, not only a pianist but also a singer in her own right, focused on improvised music after studying classical composition at the High School of Performing Arts and NYU. She had as mentors musicians like Sheila Jordan and Sal Mosca – the latter one of the pivotal figures in the music of Lee Konitz, and praised also by Anthony Braxton. 

Peers who enjoyed playing with her are Daniel Carter, Ken FIliano and many, many others. Praised by many jazz critics and reviewers, she accompanied herself in many records and concerts with bassist Tom Blancarte, born in Texas and with a twenty-five years career on his shoulders. Pivotal figure in the world of free improvisation in NY City through his work with Peter Evans and other lineups, he lives today in Denmark but continues to play in various formations like the Copenhagen-based quartet Tacticla Maybe. 

Finally, drummer John Bernard Wagner lives in Lynbrook (NY) and has an important training curriculum that led him to be a teacher of music at the Green Vale School (a private institute in Long Island) beyond being an accomplished musician. It is useless at this point to describe all the tracks present in Ephemeris. In effect, I believe that my readers have enough elements to taste this music, an important step in the continuum of NY avant garde jazz. 

Since one month ago Carol Liebowitz has published on Youtube a video performance of the quartet recorded just three days before the concert on the album, I’m happy to embed it here below and leave you in company of it. I believe it will give many of you the will to buy the album and enjoy some new and fresh sounds. Expect more in the future, since I’m putting my hands not only on the albums by the Portuguese scene I was referring myself to at the beginning, but also on a couple of books of interest for each avant garde music lover.