Paul Dunmall – Matthew Shipp – Joe Morris – Gerald Cleaver “The Bright Awakening” (RogueArt, 2021)

I started listening to this record as one of the very first things I did since I came home this afternoon, very excited for it, and then bam! Never hearing before the music of Paul Dunmall, not even when I resided in London ten years ago, after a couple of phrases on tenor saxophone I was hooked! The soul, all the values I learned to love in this music were here, coming out of my speakers.

But I wasn’t completely happy. And then, I recognized those sounds. “Oh my!” I though. “I can recognize where this music is coming from!” But lets’ start from the beginning. Paul Dunmall is born in London, or best said Welling, London, in 1953. His father was a semi-pro drummer, and thanks to him Paul started playing with the drum kit at a very young age: at 12 to be precise.

After a couple of years Dunmall got his first alto, then he started playing Otis Redding material with his first regular band. Classically trained at a local conservatoire, his first idols on saxophone were Junior Walker and Chris Curtis. At a record shop he worked after school, Dunmall was finally able to listen to the likes of Ben Webster and Stan Getz.

At 17 he started playing with Marsupilami (“a heavy, hippy, strange band” he stated in an interview) and moved, following his new friends, to a farm in Langford, Somerset. That was the time he first toured in Europe, visiting France, Holland and Germany, and also the time he first heard of Coltrane thanks to his band’s singer.

At first it was “Meditations”, but after a month Dunmall listened to “Afro Blue” and was definitely into Trane. Then, it was the time of Albert Ayler and Wayne Shorter. For a few time he started playing improvising with the drummer, then he came back to London where he experimented what he after called “a spiritual awakening”.

At first, Dunmall thought about a trip to India, but then he discovered the Divine Light Movement in London. Spiritual practicing and making music became his daily life, touring with the musicians he met at the ashram even in the US. The music he played with the guys were “jazz/soul/rock-based modal things with few solos now and then”.

Then after some problems with the ashram the group disbanded and Dunmall played with different rock bands. In 1975 he incided his first record with Johnny Guitar Watson. At the same time, Dunmall was heavily practicing while listening to Freddie Hubbard, Mc Coy Tyner and Rashaan Roland Kirk.

In 1976 he came back to the UK where he played folk and jazz music. After hearing the album “Spirits Rejoice” by Louis Moholo (now Louis Moholo-Moholo) he was introduced to the free impro movement. And now, after you’ll go to his website or to other resources all over the internet just to find out how impressive his discography is, is the time for a more recent history.

Pianist Matthew Shipp – you can find a full, very interesting interview by me with him here – met Dunmall at a Café Oto residency in 2010, and after a couple of years the tenor saxophonist called him to play live with Joe Morris on bass and Gerald Cleaver on drums. The resulting concert is the one hour-long album issued this year by label Rogue Art titled “The Bright Awakening”.

The music is very aware of Coltrane’s album “Meditations” to me, as I said before. Even if Dunmall avoid Coltrane’s use of tri-tones and the sound consequently is not so overwhelming, he in a way reproduces, or cites, some melodic lines from that album and, for the rest, adds that raucous and graspy sound he takes with him from the old days in which he was playing R&B.

Matthew Shipp has always been conscious of the music of McCoy Tyner, Trane’s companion in many sessions, and while Dunmall explores both upper and lower registries, he provides a rhythm according to Morris bass and Cleaver drums that makes the music levitate in an excellent manner. But the reference to Coltrane, quoted not litterally but almost, can be a problem as we’ll see now.

I remember when, at the beginning of my career as a reviewer, I met an Italian critic who told me that Wayne Shorter in some of his older stuff was “embarassingly similar to his idol Coltrane”. I tried to listen to that stuff myself, and even if I recognized big qualities to Mr Shorter, above all in the music he gave life with Miles Davis, I was with the here not nominated Italian jazz critic.

The problem is, I listened to many musicians who claim for their music a spiritual quality. Sonny Rollins as an example, and then his disciple David S. Ware, who played for a long time with Matthew Shipp and who is in no way similar to his master. Because, you see, what’s the spiritual quality in being similar to someone else?

Obviously the quotes can be only quotes, i.e. an hommage to a great spirit and a great music. But the problem here is that the music seems an accommodating version of Coltrane’s free jazz. Some hints on bossa nova pianism and funky drum and bass rhythms can suggest this difficulty in being fully “free” the way Dunmall states in his interviews, not knowing what will happen next.

I’m not saying that while listening to this album you’ll know for sure what will happen, but in a way at the end of the record nothing had blown your mind with something you were not prepared for. The fact that this is really a good album and that I want to listen more to it, even if I usually get bored when immersing myself in things I know yet, doesn’t solve the problem.

Obviously there’s Anthony Braxton great theory to give us a little help: there are musicians, who are great innovators, and others who follow the path – there’s a third way: being nostalgic, but it’s not the case here. Paul Dunmall is a great follower. Great. Anyway, somewhere in my head, something is saying to me that if you cannot be completely original, you are not really yourself.

But for the moment, I want to give credit to the four guys here more than to myself, and give this anyway interesting new record more spinnigs. Maybe one key to this music is from a Dunmall’s quote: “I just want to have my own voice and have a great sound, like Dexter Gordon – but used in a free improvisational context”. I don’t think there’s nothing definitely wrong with that. 

 

 

Mauro Sambo & Marcello Magliocchi “... camminava solo sotto le stelle ...” (Plus Timbre, 2021)

 

A couple of years have passed since my last review. I abandoned – another time! – free jazz and improvised music since I was hearing only some interesting stuff here and there, but lost in a big desert, so to speak. More recently I started writing again, on paper, and I felt the need to go back to my (let’s call it) youth. So I went to a record shop and I came out of it with a bunch of recent records (Cecil Taylor at Angelica, Roscoe Mitchell on ECM, Peter Brotzmann solo...) and finally, while I was listening to those records, I was curious again of hearing new stuff around me.

And then I remembered of Mauro Sambo. I have to confess my readers I feel guilty with him. I never met Mauro in person, but he sent me physical copies of six of his CDs plus a DVD about ten years ago, when I first started writing to this blog. We also had some exchanges through social networks. But I never wrote a single word about his work, that is very singular and interesting. So, while I wait to relisten to all of his older stuff, maybe for a retrospective, Mr Sambo is out right now with a new record in duo with Marcello Magliocchi. And, what a record.

A little bit of history first. Mauro Sambo started his artistic career at Venices’ Accademia di Belle Arti, and during his studies he won some fellowships and had his first exhibitions through Italy and Europe culminating into his participation to the XLIV Biennale di Venezia in a section dedicated to young talents coming from all over the world. His first works are sculptures and pieces of performance art. He shifted to sound in 1986 basically because of his will of putting together sound and images.

As a musician, Sambo is a multi-instrumentalist (reeds, percussions, flutes, guitars, electronics) whose relationship with sound is always peculiar. If you might, think about the first performative sounds of a concert of his beloved Art Ensemble of Chicago mixed with that intimistic but mystical quality of the sound of a musician like Evan Parker, even if grammar and syntax are quite different, and you’ll not be that far from the reality of Sambo’s music.

Created quite often as one of the many brushes for his performances, music is a part of Mauro Sambo’s palette, and it’s very interesting to see him playing saxophones through a metal cage, or sharing the space of a concert with other musicians like he does on this CD from 2021 titled “... camminava solo sotto le stelle ... “ (He was walking alone under the stars, NdA) accompanied by friend Marcello Magliocchi, an intriguing drummer and percussionist who creates music gestures through sounding sculptures aptly created by Andrea Dami, plus an electric guitar with only one string and other percussions.

Magliocchi is an accomplished musician of his own, who in the past played free jazz – with the likes of Mal Waldron or Joelle Léandre, just to name a few, contemporary music and movie soundtracks. His touch is both important in creating the atmosphere and the inner space throught which you move as a listener, and in underlying with his tools his friends improvisers. This is why I compared this sounds to the one produced by the AEOC.

On the other hand, Sambo statements, even if quite often fragmented and short, create a space for a meditative listening that is quite similar to the one you’ll find listening to Evan Parker on soprano, even if the two musicians use a different language. Parker repetitions and binaural sounds open your mind, while Sambo can obtain the same effect almost as if he’s fragmenting the space through sound or, at the opposite, splitting up the sound through space.

“Improvisation – Sambo states in a recent interview – is absolutely necessary, obviously it needs to be inside some predetermined patterns, patterns dictated by your own culture, you emotional approach to the situation created in that particular moment, even if you play alone (the environment and the public has an influence on your path) or with other musicians”. This, as everyone can understand, is a music made out of relationships more than relying on mastering abilities like speed or resistance. And, in this sense, it is true contemporary music. 

 

 

Keiji Haino + SUMAC “American Dollar Bill” (Thrill Jockey 2018)

Japan is a particular place to live in and to make art. One of the most conservative countries in the world, is also inhabited by some of the most hard working men in the world. They quite often use the so-called 'performative drugs' (like cocaine) to stay on business, but they don't talk that much about it since it's 'improper'.

On the other hand, Japan had met the powerful energy of the atomic bomb at the end of WWII, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A scar still vivid in the collective consciousness of the entire country. This combination of psychological repression and surviving a mass destruction created the conditions for developing some form of arts completely different from that of the other industrialised countries.

As an example, Japan didn't have post-modernity, that peculiar condition of having the right words but not the feelings, the remaining of the structures of speech without the subject that is typical of a Thomas Pynchon, but instead Japan had the interpenetration of life and death, as you can read in Yukio Mishima and see in Nobuyoshi Araki.

While the subject is fading in the Western world, it becomes hypertrophic in Japan. You can observe this phenomenon in music, particularly in free jazz during the 1960s: Yosuke Yamashita, Kaoru Abe, Masahiko Satoh, it's as all of them were screaming for coming out of the pain for living. And it's obviously the same for guitarist and singer Keiji Haino.

Haino was the frontman of the impronoise trio Lost Aaraff during the 1970s, but it was in 1981 that he became a true legend with the album Watashi Dake?, the japanese answer to Trout Mask Replica. During the decades, he refined his style coming to a sort of elaboration of the blues he called 'ahyhiyo'. You can listen to the result in the beautiful Black Blues from 2004.

Early this year, Haino joined the metal combo SUMAC, lead by guitarist and vocalist Aaron Turner to give life to this project called American Dollar Bill, which contains some of the best extreme music you'll listen to this year. The music is as abstract and destructured as hypnotic, nervous and anxious. There are some quieter parts here and there – but it's fire smoldering beneath the ashes – and full blasts of pure willingness of power.

In 1972 photographer Daido Moriyama gave life to his most uncompromising and experimental book, “Farewell Photography”, full of shots taken as trials to the setting of the camera, wrong framings, as the 'self' of the photographer was dyonisiacally going to pieces testifying his drift into the world, and this music is the perfect companion to those images.

More than simply extreme noise, this album is a good photography of our egos, repressed by the rules of society but still alive and ready to roar for a last call to our humanity. Is Japan the future for all of us? Maybe, it's still the present time, and it's our goal to say 'no' to repression. Music can be an act of resistance.

Mary Halvorson “Code Girl” (Firehouse 12, 2018)

I've listened to Mary Halvorson in live performances two times in the past: once in a small theatre in Italy with friend and collaborator Jessica Pavone, then in London in a small but famous club (The Vortex) with her quartet The 13^th Assembly. Some years are passed, but her creative vein is still far from draining.

A long-time disciple and collaborator of the multi-awarded composer and reedist Anthony Braxton, and of other giants of improvised music like Marc Ribot, Halvorson has released a couple of albums this year. The first, issued in March by the label Firehouse 12, is titled “Code Girl” and sees Halvorson heading a quintet of musicians including bassist Michael Formanek, drummer Tomas Fujiwara (basically her Thumbscrew Trio), Ambrose Akinmusire on trumpet and Amirtha Kidambi on vocals.

Divided in two Cds, for a total lenght of 90 minutes, this issue is composed by 14 beautiful songs, a little bit obliques – they remind me of Robert Wyatt – where there's space left here and there for some little improvisation. Possibly one of the best output this year, “Code Girl” is composed by nice arpeggios, scales and solos on guitar driven by great grooves of the rhythm section, long melodic tirades on trumpet, some arcos on the bass and a great vocalist, usually trained in South Indian Carnatic tradition, but here completely at ease with alt-rock flavoured melodies.

An advice for all the fans of free jazz/improvised music: sound needs structure to make sense, and the AABA structure can be as interesting and smart as our beloved and chosen composition-with-improvisation scheme. Don't miss the opportunity to be enriched by this form of art, like any other art: you won't regret at all.

Audrey Chen “Runt Vigor” (Karlrecords, 2018)

Two years ago I wrote a long article for this blog in which I was postulating how necessary it was, for the good of improvised music, to have artists who are female and non-European, in order to have new inputs and develop new languages. Now, it is as my prayers have been listened by some god or similia.

Audrey Chen is a young contemporary artist. Born in 1976 outside of Chicago, she is a 2^nd generation Chinese/Taiwanese-American musician. She started playing cello at age 8, and voice at 11. Originally trained in classical music, she started since 2003 to develop her own music and her own style, very far from consolidated clichés.

Typical of her generation of improvisers/contemporary musicians, Chen developed a great number of collaborations: with Phil Minton (voice), Henrik Munkeby Norstebo (trombone), Doron Sadja (electronics), Richard Scott (modular synthesizer), Joke Lanz (turntables), and Maria Chavez (turntables) among the others.

The goal of being often hand-in-hand with other, different, musicians and disciplines is to develop your own language and nuances while answering to different incitements, which is different from developing your style alone.

But on this Runt Vigor, issued only on 180 gr vynil and digital, we can finally appreciate Audrey Chen in an intense solo performance: a vocal solo track at the beginning, then assisted by analog electronics and, finally, her cello.

Chen use of voice is different from the 'classical' avant-garde ladies like Joan La Barbara and Meredith Monk: no melody or narration implied, only destructured microtones, and sometimes some syllables. The cello is bashed and rubbed – not only the strings, but also the body – and the electronics are treated consequently.

Sometimes, listening to this record, I asked myself is Chen has a feminine (meaning: new) quality in her music. Difficult to answer, since the avant-garde isn't rooted in sex like rock music and so is a-gendered – unless you are Cecil Taylor. But for sure this music is something unheard before, a new wave, something necessary. Hope to find something similar in the near future. For the moment, my strong advice is to enjoy Audrey Chen.

Centazzo - Schiaffini - Armaroli "Trigonos" (Dodicilune, 2018)

Andrea Centazzo, composer and performer, is one of the pivotal figures in the so-called NY Downtown Music Scene of the 1970's. Unluckily he is known here in Italy only as 'Giorgio Gaslini drummer' – he played drums and percussions with Gaslini from 1972 to 1976 – and this fact limited his career at a point that Centazzo chose to move to the Us at the end of the decade. There, he played with John Zorn, Tom Cora, Eugene Chadbourne and Toshinori Kondo.

He also founded his own label, Ictus, and recorded with Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, Pierre Favre, Alvin Curran among the others. At the same time he studied composition. A more complex figure than the 'percussionist' described by the press, Andrea Centazzo has now recorded for the label Dodicilune a new album of his own compositions, with the help of vibraphonist Sergio Armaroli and trombonist Giancarlo Schiaffini. If you want to know more about this couple of musicians, read here.

The music provided by this album is 10 compositions, four by Centazzo and Armaroli, two by Centazzo/Schiaffini, and the remaining played by the trio. Being at the border of contemporary music and improvised music, all the compositions have a meditative quality that goes beyond the sum of its parts.

The gestures have a quality typical of the Eastern folk music, but they are not rooted in it: it is more an assonance than a derivation. Listening to the record, I often asked myself how good would it be to listen to this music live in a good theatre, since it's aura would be better exploited in this context.

And in effect, the issue of the record was premièred in Milan, Italy, at the Out Off, a small theatre devoted to theatrical experimentation since the 1970's. Really a good place to start this new adventure for an artist like Centazzo, who in the past has gone well beyond music also thanks to his painted graphic scores.

Marc Ribot “Songs of Resistance (1942-2018)” Anti, 2018

Marc Ribot is one of the most eclectic post-modern musicians you'll ever hear on guitar. He toured exstensively with Chuck Berry and recorded guitars in many of Tom Waits' albums since 1984, but in his discography you'll also find not one, but two Cds dedicated to the music of Albert Ayler. Between the artist he worked with, there are David Sylvian, John Zorn, Elvis Costello and Mike Patton.

In 2018, Marc has become more political than ever. First with his last Ceramic Dog Trio album “YRU Still Here”, then with this new “Songs of Resistance (1942-2018)” issued by alt-rock label Anti. Politics and the resistance to fascism have a noble tradition in avant-garde jazz at least since 1970's album “Charlie Haden Liberation Music Orchestra”, where Ornette Coleman's bassist gave life to some free jazz versions of the anti-fascist and anarchist songs of the Spain of the 1920s.

Now that Trump has won the elections in the Us and the alt-right is spreading their wings all over the world, is time to embrace again the weapons of creativity against the Black Wave. And, who better than Marc Ribot? Helped by a bunch of brave singers like Tom Waits, Steve Earle, and Meshell Ndegeocello, Mr Ribot gives new life to old political songs for our harsh times.

Only the initial We are Soldiers in the Army has open references to jazz, with his textures of saxophones. The rest of the album is divided between folk songs (Bella Ciao, The Militant Ecologist), rock (The Big Fool), ethnic music (Rata de Los Patas), funk (John Brown) taking me back at the good old days in which I was listening to Ani Di Franco and Bruce Springsteen.

Obviously this is a post-modern record, in which you can touch all the time passed between the original songs and the present tense, but the original drive is still here. It's all a matter of our present tense. Fascism is coming back, and so many artists are lost in the supermarket of a sterile experimentation – now that everything has been experimented – but it's not the case of Ribot and his friends, whose idea and practice of music is still rooted in real life and their beings.