Don’t Go Gentle – A Film About Idles by Mark Archer, Milano, Ariosto Spazio Cinema, 05/11/2023

Filming music is easier than photographing it. Herman Leonard, one of the greatest music photographers, was accustomed to capture jazzmen in smokey clubs and venues, where smoke was taken as a direct emanation of the sound of the instruments. Filming music is easier, as we were pointing out, since you have both movement and the sonorous aspect of it all.

Having a great film of a performance by a musician is always so fine. You can see how musicians approach physically their instruments, how they produce their sounds, and finally many things that previously, while you were listening to your albums, were up to your imagination, now are real in front of you, as something your eyes can almost bite.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to see Don’t Go Gentle – A Film About Idles thanks to a small review in a small cinema in Milano city not far from the train station and the center of the city itself. It was the fourth and final act of a review featuring movies about Kurt Cobain, Joy Division and a documentary about the NY city scene. The movies were introduced by a nice panel discussion held by music journalists, musicians and other people coming directly from the music business. 

Obviously the movie about the Idles was the most interesting since Idles are the most contemporary musical act between the ones featured in the review. They tell so much about what can happen to musicians nowadays, about how they relate to music, to business, to fans and to themselves, and about the present time.

We are, so, introduced in Bristol, a city open to otherness through immigration and love for music like reggae and dub since the 1970s. It’s not a chance that musicians like Tricky, Massive Attack and Portishead, but also, way before them, The Pop Group, come from this city. Joe Talbot and his pals started playing for fun and in the end they become professionals.

This road is filled with mournings, like Talbot mother’s and son’s deaths, great encounters, like the community revolving around the band, and obviously great music. The movie is both enojoyable and strange in a way. It is strange to hear a band in 2020 proclaiming that they don’t like Pink Floyd as a symbol of progressive rock in general, as an example.

This is obviously part of an old script, and if it is thought as useful in introducing Idles’ music, it doesn’t help in understanding what this music is made of. Possibly Archer’s and the band’s idea was to let the music talk about itself, focusing all the interest into the human factor. A winner’s game, since if we all are aware and well known about post-punk, it would have been useless mimicking Simon Reynolds. A musician is not a critic.

The movie cover Idles since their beginning until their first release for Partisan Records with the album Joy as an Act of Resistance. During this first years they gave life to music that was in a way a soundtrack for Brexit, problems with immigration, recession and more intimate topics like the aforementioned mournings, love, friendship and mental health just to name a few.

Hated by conservatives all around the world, even by rock fans who in front of them discover to be conservatives – it’s full and they’re cultivated also by some magazines as such – because of their ‘sloganistic’, or better said anthemic approach to politics, critisiced as a bunch of white privileged men who try to criticize white privilege itself, Idles are nonetheless one of the most intriguing band nowadays.

Because of their approach to music, precise as a razor blade, because of their approach to life, with this attitude made of bringing to light every possible weak point and made a force out of it, because of their relationship with fans, that are allowed to feel fragile and open to each other during meetings and online, they in a way say nothing new in the realm of the history of music, but say something relevant as far as human being in the present times.

When Joe Talbot in an interview reported in the movie says ‘I want to become a better man through music, and so in the end I want to create better music from it’, these are the exact same words pronounced decades before by John Coltrane. And if the music is different stylistically, the importance of this thought is nonetheless that of a person who want to create a virtous relationship between his art and his life.

The fact that this approach to both reality and sound is explicit and appreciated is something not completely new but interesting in a world, that of the art, where we are accustomed to hear things like “political correctness is impossible to manage because we should erase the memory of most of the artists in the world because of their behavior towards other human beings” – think about Picasso and women, or Gaugin and native Tahitians as good examples.

Far from wanting to create a Police of the morals through music, Idles and Coltrane, or Idles and other musicians, like many in the punk and post-punk scenes all around the world, are part of a history of music and of musicians wanting to create a community to make life more bearable for its participants. We sould not erase artists, but also we should not erase the importance of these attemps. 

 

Free Jazz on the tracks

Some time has passed since my last post on this blog. I haven’t listened to so much free jazz or improvised music in these last months or so, as long as I’m listening more to post-punk or other genres. Fact is that the only record I bought issued in 2023 so far is Algiers’ Shook, an interesting mix of electronics, hip hop, free jazz, soul, blues, dub, all played with a punk attitude.

Other artists I’m currently listening to are black midi, a band who plays punk with a progressive attitude – and some hot horns on it – and Idles, who are possibly the most important band to come out of Bristol in these last years. Ah, I wanna name also Fontaines DC, at least their first releases. Obviously all these musicians, along with others as Shame or Murder Capital – the less interesting to me, since they hide a lack of concreteness behind Flood production – are part of an interesting revival that remains such, even if with a lot of personality.

Anyway I can’t find not even such a thing as a revival right now in free jazz and improvised or experimental music. Obviously the great ancient musicians are still producing good stuff, but younger musicians, if there are some, are insanely hidden and I can’t find them. To tell the truth, some young or ‘new’ people is sending me music. A young guy from Italy sent me some audio files of what he calls an attempt to actualize Lettrism through electronics, but the final effect was sloppy and poor.

This is how younger musicians seem to me. But since I’m planning to write, as I did with Don Cherry, a retrospective on Anthony Braxton, I think it’s time to take some pause from wild experiments with a little bit of rock music tinged at various degrees with free jazz, and so here you’ll find some advices for your purchases. The first band I’ll talk about diffusely in this post are Algiers, from Atlanta, capital of the Georgia state.

They are a quartet composed by Franklin James Fisher (voice, guitar, piano, percussions, cello), Ryan Mahan (bass, percussions, piano, synthesizers, voice), Lee Tesche (guitar, loops, percussions, voice), and Matt Tong (drums, percussions, voice). Born as a trio at the beginning of the 2010s, Algiers are a politically conscious post punk band who in their career released four albums all under Matador Records.

Shook is possibly the most intriguing release you’ll find out this year. A shift in the territories of hip hop (Irreversible Damage) and electronica (Cold World), the music of this album is full of references to blues and gospel (Green Iris), free jazz (the sample of Nuclear War from Sun Ra with an electric bass superimposed), funk (I Can’t Stand It), and some incursions in the territories of punk music (A Good Man, 73%).

With a strong tie to the post-punk coming out of Bristol at the end of the 1970s as an interesting interview with Mark Stewart from Pop Group released before the death of the latter testifies, both as far as sound (as in the song Something Wrong) and as ideals, but with all the experience coming from decades passed to refine a sound, Algiers are the perfect act – you’ll find some intriguing live concerts captured on the internet – for those of you who’ll want to explore new territories until pure experimentations will come back to us again.

Far from being a music of pure rage, the songs contained in Shook will lead the listener to an inner voyage and to discover how creating a community can be the most assertive part of the work of a musician. The album is, indeed, also full of hosts, from Zack De La Rocha (Rage Against The Machine) to Big Rube (The Dungeon Family), from Patrick Shiroishi to Backxwash.

And if the so called post-punk revival started at the beginning of the new millennium with bands like Interpol, the acclaimed gurus of these last years are undoubtely the Idles, to whom even a movie, titled Don’t Go Gentle and directed by Mark Archer that I’ll attend to next week was dedicated in 2020. The same year Ultra Mono, in my opinion one of their most focused records, was published by Partisan, a label you’ll want to deepen as far as catalogue since PJ Harvey signed with them for her new release this July.

“How d’you like them clichés?” sings Joe Talbot in Mr Motivator and two things hit you: first, the band makes always the same music through their records – sometimes with more anger, sometimes more introspective – but second, it is always good music. Like the Ramones, never changing their three chords formula, Idles, composed by Talbot on vocals, Adam Devonshire on bass, Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan on guitars and Jon Beavis on drums, are able to build incredibly good songs without boring the listener. 

And if the previous Joy as an Act of Resistance (2018) featured a song against toxic masculinity like Samaritans and a beautiful cover of Solomon Burke’s Cry To Me, the purchase of Ultra Mono (2020) is mandatory for those who love hear Jamie Cullum (sic!) introducing a punk song with his piano (Kill Them with Kindness), the violin of Warren Ellis from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds duelling with Colin Webster’s saxophone (Grounds), and to end a punk album with a tight and anthemic cover of True Love Will Find You In The End originally written by Daniel Johnson aptly renamed Danke.

But in general if you are interested in hearing a band chatted by the likes of Pearl Jam and the rock’n’roll gotha, Idles are the perfect act for you. Possibly live – they’re adding dates to their rich list. And if Idles are making everyone come to an agreement, not the same is possible to say about our next hosts on this blog: black midi. After their debut Schlagenheim (2019) they were compared to Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica by Steven Edelstone on Paste, and hailed as the next big thing in the rock industry; black midi in the meantime have released three records different the one to the other.

Their last album, Hellfire (2022) is a mix of post-punk played with a progressive approach (interestingly enough, not vice versa), with one of the singers more into David Thomas than into Don Van Vliet, and a good dose of horror vacui that can be handled only by expert musicians. So Geordie Greep (guitar, voice), Matt Kwasniewski-Kelvin (guitar, voice), Cameron Picton (bass, guitar) and Morgan Simpson (drums) have created a concept album that depicts a dystopian future populating it with bass, guitars and drums weavings that are raising the bar of the listener expectations.

While we obviously wait for their future releases, we can report also how part of the reviewers, at least here in Italy, have tried to bite the brake of enthusiasm underlying the fact that this music features solutions that in a way are oddly blasé – there are also some references to some of the classical Decca songwriters with their albums full of orchestral arrangements – and that Hellfire can be taken to the utmost as a good alternative to bands like Porcupine Tree with their loose and limp, and always equal to themselves, records.

Last band I’d like to give you advice about are Fontaines D.C., a nice group of musicians coming from Dublin and that since 2019, year the band released their first album Dogrel, issued three albums that are always more and more a mix of pop music and folk influences, with some clear limitations in the singing – Grian Chatten is great as a punk singer but pop music requires a different attitude. We won’t talk diffusely about them since there are no jazz tinges in their music but if you have ever been into Joy Division and The Clash you’ll for sure have to give these guys a chance.

Post-punk, as Simon Reynolds stressed enough through his 2010 book Rip It Up and Start Again, was possibly the last effort, before Slint, Gastr del Sol, June of ’44, Goodspeed! You Black Emperor and others in the 2000s, to create a music coming from popular basis but open to contaminations with different elements, from free jazz to avant garde, from dub to ethnic tinges. It was also a music in opposition to bourgeois and conservative values. It is not strange this music is living a revival in our confused times.

Hope you’ll enjoy this music even if it is not completely bathed in free jazz because it is vital and interesting. I still remember how much protest letters came to the desk of The Wire after their interview to Sunn O))), but interestingly enough movie director Jim Jarmusch, for whom music is important throughout his movies and as part of his creative process, after using musicians related to the avant garde as The Lounge Lizards or Mulatu Astatké deepened the relationship of images and sound through the music of Wu Tang Clan and Boris, showing how overcoming close-mindedness can be a victory for creativity.

This is also why I’m happy to host these musicians on my blog. If you want to enlarge your discographies without completely betraying jazz, but widening its language, these bands are here for you. They will also help you to live more the present time and its tensions. Hope in the future they also will be of incitement for younger generations of free jazz and avant garde players not to loose both wickedness and self consciousness, commitment and fantasy. It is also a reminder to myself not to fossilize into a single genre since music is out there and it’s good in every shape and form. 

Don Cherry: the eternal theatre of fantasy and the sound of surprise

“[...] Being connected with children as I have in my life, I feel that it’s important to keep this alive, this fantasy. [...]What is reality? What is fantasy?” Don Cherry, March 12, 1970

Born in Oklahoma City (Oklahoma) in 1936, Don Cherry is well known as the trumpet player of Ornette Coleman during his successful attempts to revolutionize jazz music. Mind, my readers: we won’t discuss here the principles of harmolodics, thing we hope we’ll face in the future, even if we’ll talk diffusely about the records our two heroes gave life together. For the moment it is important to stress that, if Coleman played a plastic saxophone in order to utilize the microtones – do you remember what we were discussing some months ago when talking about soprano saxophones and straight horns? – to create a freer music in comparison to bebop and the previous jazz music, Cherry used a pocket trumpet, an instrument with a nasal and a less chrystalline sound than an usual trumpet.

One thing that always hit me when I think about Coleman and Cherry’s instrumental choices, and an example I want to use to explain myself better, is that of those photographers who, in the digital i.e. in an extremely precise era, go back to Polaroids and toy cameras. Leaving some processes to the accident, to a form of creative chaos – as the saturation of colors, the impossibility to control contrast through different films and papers or, in the case of music, the difficulty in controlling instruments that are not thought to be heavily precise – is a good way to play a music in which there is no wrong note in a given process since it depends from what will follow.

So, what Coleman and Cherry were trying to obtain was an extreme freedom starting from extreme constrictions. If Something Else!!!, the first album by Ornette Coleman (Contemporary, 1958) shocked the audience of that time for its extreme freedom, it is true that it is an album full of beautiful, recognizable and memorable melodies. Mind about Jayne, third track of the album: trumpet and alto go at a nice unison before soloing, with Coleman producing himself in his typical ‘laughters’ before playing a melody with an undefined and mocking tonal center.

Things change a little with the following album Tomorrow is The Question! (Contemporary, 1959) where piano is excluded from the palette, which increases in tonal and harmonic freedom. Coleman is taking bebop revolution to its extreme. If Charlie Parker and his peers were playing with dissonances resolution trying to give life to a more and more complex game, defying the listener and the other musicians involved, the music of Ornette Coleman instead is prone to give into new directions.

Once John Coltrane, a Parker’s enthousiast during his younger age and a contemporary of Coleman,  told an interviewer that he was, during his ‘sheets of sound period’, trying to express one sentence going in two different directions at once; Coleman himself wanted to reach with his music every possible direction. What we have here is a conscious attempt to go beyond the limits of an intellectual experience as bebop became in the end, trying to open new paths to the musicians who wanted to follow this new road even if at risk of not being understood.

There’s in fact a huge tradition of musicians who not only did not dig Ornette Coleman’s idea and practice of music, but also a great quantity of musicians who imagined the jazz Coleman and Cherry were creating was only a sum of incoherent, unrepeteable melodic lines in which dissonance had the effect of destroying the musicians ability to change chords and play with different intonations. Coleman music was taken by many – by Charles Mingus as an example: take for instance his interviews contained into the book Mingus Speaks by John F. Goodman where the bassist and composer talks diffusely about the music of Albert Ayler and others – as an attack to the seriousness and complexity of music itself.

If we try to observe better how things happened, we will notice, instead, that a huge amount of musicians from the end of the 1950s until the end of the following decade dedicated their energies to sort out of the shallows of a more and more intellectual drift in order to obtain always more freedom of expression. Albery Ayler with his ‘speaking in tongues’ melodies, Coltrane with his ‘sheets of sound’ and then with his collaboration with Pharoah Sanders in order to obtain the unpredictability of a music driven by two different musicians instead of one, Archie Shepp with his rawness and fierceness, and so on.

Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry gave life to a music that conveyed different emotions, as one can feel listening to his most known composition, Lonely Woman, that opens his third album The Shape of Jazz To Come (Atlantic, 1959) where a simple and again memorable melody is played through a rough and raucous style in order to create some anguish, as in the famous picture The Scream by Edvard Munch. A nightmarish urban solitude is what we can approach through Coleman way of playing. Don Cherry, on the other hand, with his graspy and anti-crystalline sound is the perfect, crackling partner for the altoist and composer.

And even if tracks like Peace and Focus on Sanity are less anguishing, the unpredictability of where the horns will go was leaving the linstener of that time with a potent sense of disorientation. Things are going even worse – but we prefer to say: even deeper – with Free Jazz (Atlantic, 1961), an album where two quartets, one led by Coleman and the other led by his friend and pivotal figure of that time Eric Dolphy, are intersecting each other in a disorientating stream of consciousness of about 37 minutes.

Notably, the previous album This is Our Music (Atlantic, 1960) features a Coleman composition titled Beauty is a Rare Thing that in a way anticipates the trumpeter’s future enterprises as you can hear through Mu, a collection of two LPs issued by Actuel in 1969. But let’s keep on following the tracks in the right order. Obviously Ornette Coleman’s music not only encountered solid oppositions, but also arose curiosity at a point in which another contrasted innovator, the above nominated John Coltrane, in 1961 wanted to record an entire album of Coleman compositions alongside with his partners Don Cherry on pocket trumpet, Percy Heath and Charlie Haden on bass, and Ed Blackwell on drums.

Listening to the album The Avant Garde released by Atlantic is a strange experience. One can hear Coltrane trying to fit Coleman melodies with his peculiar style, not following harmolodic rules – harmolodics is the name of the music theory Coleman gave shape through his playing and thinking – but his own path. In a way this is comprehensible since no jazz musician can play as someone else and everybody has to stay as close as possible to his or her world of reference, but in another way this album seem to me as a wasted opportunity since there is not a real encounter between Coleman and Coltrane worlds, only a juxtaposition of compositions and styles into one album.

Anyway, soon Don Cherry started figuring out how his own music would sound, and soon he signed a contract with Blue Note producing his own trilogy in which one can hear how playing with two giants saxophonists helped him developing his own conception of art. Cherry’s trilogy embodying Complete Communion (Blue Note, 1965), Symphony for Improvisers (1966) and Where is Brooklyn? (1967) is one of the most accomplished statements in the realm of improvised music.

The concept is similar for each of the three records: there is a theme introducing a ‘tutti’, a unison, and then there is place for every soloist in order to express himself. If Complete Communion, featuring Gato Barbieri on tenor, Henry Grimes (from Albert Ayler combos) on bass and Ed Blackwell on drums, divided into two different parts, one for each LP side, it’s the most airy and catchy, relatively speaking, while the ending of the trilogy is left to the most newyorican, groovy and nervous Where is Brooklin?, where Cherry is supported by Pharoah Sanders, increasing his debt with Trane idea of sound and music.

Symphony for Improvisers, the album that stays in the middle of the trilogy, is possibly the most complex. The line up is comprised of Cherry on pocket trumpet, Pharoah Sanders and Gato Barbieri, Henry Grimes, Karl Berger on piano and vibraphone – possibly after the removal of these melodic instruments from the Coleman groups Cherry would love to know how they could be reintegrated into the music without loosing that peculiar stream of consciousness his pal gave life to – and the resulting music is aggressive, intimate and fluent at the same time.

Another couple of collaborations we have to mention are Charlie Haden project of the Liberation Music Orchestra (Impulse!, 1969), where Cherry is present with both his pocket trumpet and a flute, giving life to a melange between the songs the Hispanic anarchists were singing between their courageous battles against the army of Francisco Franco and more free jazz oriented parts, and the previous album recorded by the New York Contemporary Five with Archie Shepp (Sonet, 1964), where Cherry, Shepp on tenor, altoist John Tchicai, bassist Don Moore and drummer J.C. Moses give life to a music devoted to Coleman’s and Monk’s heritage.

But Cherry is the kind of person who don’t sleep on other people’s music theories, and by 1968-69 he starts exploring new territories in music, thanks also to a fruitful collaboration with Terry Riley, giving life to a previously unheard mix of improvised, ethnic music, art rock and psychedelia (not all the subgenres are always present together in the same project, but they convey into Cherry’s music as far as their essence, leaving every album and every project free to develop where the particular moment and musicians involved can make the sound fluorish).

More theatrical than his previous music, as one can see through different live performances recorded live and reproducible online, Don Cherry’s new path will be harshly absorbed by jazz intellighentzja, but important tracks will be visible in artists like Sergeij Kuryiokhin, a musician we talked diffusely last year. Mu – First Part and Mu – Second Part (BYG, 1969 and 1970) are possibly Cherry masterpieces, together with Symphony for Improvisers. Featuring the trumpeter accompanied only by Ed Blackwell on drums in a series of beautiful duets where Don Cherry plays time after time his pocket trumpet, a bamboo flute, piano, his own voice and a series of small percussions, this couple of records helped the musician in finding his own most personal voice.

Not ascribable exclusively to the realm of improvised music nor to that of exotic or world music but living a life of its own somewhere in the middle, this music is the higher point in Cherry’s career, not easily replicable as the less accomplished El Corazon (ECM, 1982) will show and an inspirational source for musicians to come, as the double CD Piercing The Veil (AUM Fidelity, 2007) by Cherry’s enthousiasts bassist William Parker and drummer Hamid Drake will show you.

Don Cherry’s releases at this point in his career become discontinuous and sometimes repetitive even if in a way fascinating. Orient and Blue Lake (both BYG, 1971) are attempts to broaden the landscape adding tampoura – played by his wife Moqi Cherry – and other instruments to the palette of the two Mu, but partly for the repetition of some formulas partly because of a lesser compelling inspiration the result is discontinuous.

A fascinating result is, instead, Brown Rice (Horizon, 1975) where Cherry, at his own pocket trumpet and also at Yamaha keyboards is accompanied by Frank Lowe on tenor saxophone, Charlie Haden on bass, Billy Higgins on drums and Ricky Cherry at acoustic and electric piano, giving live to a music similar to the so called krautrock explored in the same years by Can – raised by Irmin Schmidt, a student of Karlheinz Stockhausen, where psychedelia and trance are scratched by Lowe’s statements and sweetened by Don’s caressing but at the same time determined voice.

During his last years, Cherry’s music was issued by Manfred Eicher’s ECM, a label famous for his peculiar sound design: Cherry encountered old friends like Charlie Haden and new accolites like percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, producing a less adventuros but better recorded music coherently in line with his Theatre of Eternal Music idea. Passed away on October 19, 1995, Cherry’s music is one of the most intriguing and personal statements of one of the most creative of XX Century. 

 

 

James Brandon Lewis "Eye of I" (Anti-, 2023)

One of the main reasons people love jazz is because it is a multi-layered music – since its tradition and heritage – and being so it offers a multi-layered experience of listening. Take for instance a multi-instrumentalist like Lao Dan from Dandong (China): he plays jazz with a post punk attitude, not mixing two different styles of music but bringing jazz out of the academia. In fact, he plays a music that is usually based on reflexion and inner listening into the realm of expressive urgency, even if what he plays remains jazz music (mostly and for the most part of it).

Something similar happens with the album Eye of I (Anti-, 2023) released by African American saxophonist James Brandon Lewis. In this case we have at least one ‘fusion’ of jazz with a completely different style – thanks to the Messthetics’ ‘jazz punk jam’ in the ending ‘Fear Not’ – but not only: all the album is a jazz album driven with the energy and the need to express something less elaborated than in the conservatory-trained musicians.

All is good until the moment in which you realise that Lewis, a solid player in the tradition of Coltrane whose –isms are unluckily solid as the tradition he echoes, is expanding his palette only to resemble others, clearly identifiable, hystorical musicians instead of try to find his own language. This way, you can run into the ‘Brotzmanisms’ of the 47 seconds of the machine gun-esque Middleground, or into the ‘Aylerisms’ of Eye of I – there’s also a guitar riff reminding the opening of Ayler’s The Last Album (Impulse!, 1969) – or again into the ‘Wareisms’ of the oblique melody of Womb Water (listen to the album David S. Ware released in 2010 by Amu Fidelity under the title of Onecept).

It is difficult to decide, after listening to this album in its entirety, if Lewis is only a true connoisseur/devotee to the history of the most innodic and/or confrontational free jazz or if the shadow of some craftiness is emanating from his personality, at this point in his career. Obviously one wants to believe that a musician who is trying to find his place into the jazz continuum, and not only into the market, making difficult choices like the one explained at the beginning of this review is something more than a smart guy. But playing jazz is also psychologically demanding since you don’t know where you will be at the end of your rhetorical constructions, so the need for solid ground can be tricky even if you are honest.

For the moment we can enjoy these pieces of music, and also the likes of Send Seraphic Being, a ballad tinged into the New York sound of the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, even if in listening to a piece like Within You Are Answers one can notice how much less adventurous JBL saxophone raids are in comparison to his models. Nonetheless this is an album that will be chatted, because Lewis is the kind of musician many people are wanting to hear in order to continue one of the most intriguing traditions into the jazz history, and because his aesthetic choiches are nontheless intriguing. 

 

 

Moor Mother: a short introduction to art of the spoken poetry

It was 2000 when Age by Daniel Givens came out. As a newbie of the so-called post-rock movement, and having in my collection of CDs albums by people like Tortoise, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, June of ‘44, Trans Am, Sigur Ròs, Enfance Rouge and Stereolab, and being also interested in free jazz with the then new reissues of BYG Actuel albums, I hailed that record by Givens, as some magazines did in my country, as one of the most intriguing attempts to create a synthesis between many creative rivers.

Daniel Givens hosted the AACM member Joshua Abrams on bass, cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and guitarist Jeff Parker between the many others, creating a music that has one of his peaks and manifestos in the composition titled No Visible Colors, where he recites “No Visible Colors/No Particular Race/No Sign of Borders/No Expiration Date”. If the last affirmation is a sign of Givens idea that art can transcend mortality, the rest of the quote is showing how much this music is behind every conceived boundary.

Unluckily Givens issued only another EP a few times after and another album in 2008, so this idea of ‘popularizing’ hip hop, post-rock, free jazz and the avant-garde creating from them a new form of music has faded without any particular glory, and sadly enough I settled for listening to different genres of music instead of a great, new form of art that was able to mix them together in a unique vision from a single, peculiar artist.

Obviously there are musicians mixing different styles together, as Terrie Ex playing with his punk band and Getatchéw Mekurya or alone with Ab Baars or Paal Nillsen-Love, and what about Tom Waits who mixed songwriting with avant garde sounds for all of his life after 1983? But the idea of people living in a ‘no safe zone’ where you can encounter elements of jazz, of rock, of electronics, of rap, etcetera without any of them as a mainstream or predominant element was still not perfectly embodied by anyone.

This is possibly the reason I reviewed different kind of music on different websites: being a fan of a music that doesn’t exist, I can listen to every other style without being prone to it. But now, after a long period since my last article, I encoutered the music of Camae Ayewa aka Moor Mother and finally that particular idea is finally carried up a flag by a relatively new, and great artist. This is the reason I dedicate to her this post on my blog, because the more I listen to her, the more I listen to the music I wanted to hear from the very beginning.

Grown up at Aberdeen, Maryland, Camae Ayewa faced since as a young girl all the difficulties of living in a community taken as second class. She started also listening to various styles of music, including rock, hip hop, ska and jazz. Becoming and adult, she started playing bass in bands like Girls Dressed as Girls and The Mighty Paradocs.

I had the opportunity to listen to the 2007 release of the latter band, titled Live at Grape Street, and I took note of that hardcore punk sound sometimes inspired by Rage Against The Machine (Burning Mississippi, Copspit, Silence), sometimes by Dead Kennedys (Hollywood Meets Bollywood, Story of Africa, Safety Patrol), playing on full and void dynamics before the release of all the accumulated tension (40 oz of Hurricane/Pissy Politician), and with some guitar solos betraying an heavy metal ancestry even if rehashed (WMD’s).

At the end of the 2010s Ayewa started experimenting with a microKORG, a vocoder/synthesizer, and gave life to her new project named Moor Mother Goddess, whose principal elements are electronics and samplings. Since 2012 she started issuing on the internet a hundred recordings, mostly spoken poetries with music – a sample of Fugazi’s Waiting Room stands out between the others. Soon the ‘Goddess’ fell from the name of the project, and Moor Mother issued the single titled Change with Sham-e-Ali Naheem as a guest.

A synthesizer burr and few hits of the keyboards on contemporary electronic rhythms, Ayewa voice is in the foreground while Naheem’s on the background. Moor Mother on that same years got in touch with the Philadelphia underground creative scene, where she planted the seeds of the projects that flourished the following years in Los Angeles, where she started teaching composition at the Southern California’s Thorthon School of Music.

As the collective Black Quantum Futurism raised, with Rasheedah Phillips as major partner-in-crime, the first soloist albums are released initially trough the label Don Giovanni, responsible of all of her efforts until 2021, when she started publishing records with the label ANTI-. Fetish Bones is a 30 minutes album that for its structure is reminiscent more of some Terre Thaemlitz records than of Gill Scott-Heron or Daniel Givens.

The music, introduced by industrial/dubstep/trip hop sounds mixed to spared percussions leaving then space to the voice and sampled horns, is full of disturbing rhythms and free jazz blows, percussions claiming the attention to an inner listening that is heckled by some noise (Creation Myth), paranoid rhythms (KBGK), poems recited on noise bases (Deadbeat Protest), dramatic tensions (Valley of Dry Bones), Tricky’s rememberances (DIY Time Machine), hammering rhythms on distorted melodies (Chain Gang Quantum Blues), martial rhytms with a distorted voice (By The Light), more cinematic moments (Cabrini Green x Natasha McKenna).

If The Motionless Present (2017) breaks the boundaries of noise and hip hop anticipating Moor Mother’s involvement with the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Irreversible Entanglement, Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes (2019) is the most varied output to that date: arcoes in crescendo on which Ayewa declames a strange ritual (Repeater), a male and a female voice mixed together on martial rhythms (Don’t Die), a collage of different voices on a noise rug and a syncopated rhythm (After Images), a baritonal chant layed over various effects (Engineered Uncertainty), African-American poet Saul Williams featured on a trip hop base (The Myth Hold Weight).

Moor Mother starts in that period many collaborations with the likes of flutist Nicole Mitchell and others, giving life with Circuit City (2020) to an opera in four acts. This is the first Moor Mother production I would advice to a listener whose ears are oriented towards free jazz. This ‘cicle of afrofuturist songs for our climate’ is split in four parts and features musicians like Steve Montenegro (electronics), Luke Stewart (upright bass), Keith Neuringen (saxophone and percussions), Tcheser Holmes (drums), Aquiles (trumpet, percussions), Madam Data and Elon Battle.

Working Machine, the first part, remembers some of the Bill Dixon works in which musicians are painting more than playing melodies and rhythms. Circuit Breaker sees Moor Mother declaim on what seems to me as an attempt by the musicians to play without following the one the other – as the Velvet Underground did in the famous film by Andy Warhol or Area, the Italian prog band, did playing with Steve Lacy in 1976. Time of No Time seem to come from Miles Davis and his musicians during the Bitches Brew sessions; and in the end No More Wires is a Coltrane hymn.

The music is consistently different for Moor Mother two last output with ANTI-. First of all, these couple of records seem to be more a synthesis of Camae Ayewa’s music different sources, and they also introduce a new, determinant factor: a good dose of soulqarianism. Do you remember the records J Dilla, The Roots, D’Angelo and Erykah Badu created during the beginning of 2000? Yes, ‘that’ idea of soul and hip hop is the skeleton of a music that in Moor Mother sees influences from free jazz and other musical souces – as we have seen – to rotate around it.

It is something new in the underground world: a musician that takes inspiration on an almost mainstream movement, a little bit of a minority but not a niche, like R’n’B and that shores it up with elements coming from more underground musical languages. Another characteristic of Moor Mother’s music is her style of spoken poetry, her ability, so to speak, to ‘loose herself’ repeating more and more one particular sentence until she feels the music is coming back to her ready to put her on the trails again.

If Moor Mother were a man, for sure this two traits would have been taken as expression of a new language, as something authentically revolutionary, and we would have seen many other poets copying it. In a male dominated world, this will not happen but it is not a bad case since we will be able to appreciate the original instead of the many possible copies. But let’s go back to the music.

Both Black Encyclopedia of the Air (2021) and Jazz Codes (2022) start with percussions and a subtle melody remembering Daniel Givens’ past works. Encyclopedia in particularly, less jazz oriented than the follower, finds his roots in Gil Scott-Heron and in post-rock without being derivative. It’s a synthesis and a new start. Mangrove and Shekere show a mature artist, that uses her sound sources in order to express a precise meaning: it’s not mere experimentation. Cello, rhythm and voice are mixing together into a unity.

Obsidian is dominated by a limping rhythm that creep into effected voices, as in the following Iso Fonk accompanied by liquid keyboards. Rogue Waves sees a use of scat that is almost lettrist, Made a Circle is almost chill out, Tarot is an attempt to create a groove with words instead than with a rhythmic. And if Zami with his noise and spoken poetry fusion remember the past output of the artist, in other places of the album the trip hop tension is decisely transposing itself into analogic percussions.

Jazz Codes, nominated by some music magazines and critics as the most interesting output of 2022, is, as we said before, following Encyclopedia’s tendency lines adding to it the jazz flavour that the many collaborations that Moor Mother is accumulating in that field, as we have seen. In particular Ode to Mary sees pianist Jason Moran in a dialogue with Ayewa’s words, in the track titled Woody Shaw spoken poetry and rap are mixed with the keyboards pointillism, and Meditation Rag is a come back to a recitation mixed with the horns and with a lyric chant.

But if the album is varied, at a point that it is useless to describe every single track, the use of featurings and of different musical sources, from sampling to real instruments, is at the service of songwriting, a songwriting that it is pure and intense as we didn’t hope to find out since many years. Since Jazz Codes close with a precise speech, in which it is said that the word ‘jazz’ was a term indicating ‘sex’ at the beginning, which is, being at ease with yourself and being natural, we will close this monography remembering to our listeners that listening to music is a particular process.

Art is, as Moor Mother pointed out in many interviews, a mean to be taken into another world. In this other world we can see ourselves complete as we would love to be. This is why is so important to be in a place that didn’t existed before also musically, as I explained at the beginning of this post. Musicians like Moor Mother and Daniel Givens before her gave life simply to the dream of every other musician: not only to be original, but also to live through music in a new place. Someone would call this new place utopia. A serious indication where we want to put our feet in the future. Music is an invitation to that. Let’s follow it. 

 

Jazz In China Pt. 2: Musicians and Labels

Linked as it seems they are, politics and jazz in China are a delicate topic to write about. But, as it seems to me, many of the musicians I chose to show you in this second article are in a way ‘rebels’. Many of them are classically trained, but at a certain point in their career they chose to become independent musicians. Possibly, a way to remove themselves from a certain politeness, artistically speaking, and start exploring new territories.

If John Coltrare wanted to be ‘a true force for the good’, insinuating that there’s a link in the African American jazz tradition between music and ethics (music and creativity as a source for ethics?), in experimental jazz and avant garde music from China independency from morality (from words and their meanings, as Carmelo Bene tried to do in his theatre plays) and politics are a way to give life to a music that seek an unprecedented freedom of expression.

Setting itself apart from politics and from jazz as a link between the East and the West, claiming with their works that avant garde jazz is bigger that the words of reconciliation because its source is at the core of what’s vital in every human being, these artists are showing also with their collaborations with musicians outside of their country that there’s another way, not institutional, to create a net between people, between musicians, and their audience, another way to make community and to communicate.

Incidentally this is a political act, even if it belongs to the idea that a musician can express through music what he is, indicating the art he is creating as a mirror for his own being (the metaphor of art as a mirror is taken from an interview with guitarist Li Janhong). This immediate correspondence between creation and creator, between what we are and what we do, is almost revolutionary. Obviously it is valid for Ornette Coleman and for Lao Dan, but seeing it riaffirmed with so much strenght in the 2020s gives us so much confidence for the future.

Born in Dandong, a border city in Northeastern China across the Yalu River from North Corea, Lao Dan started playing saxophone at the age of 8. In 2007 he was admitted with the highest score to Shenyang Conservatory of Music. But, instead of pursuing the conventional career path as a professional conservatory flutist, he decided to become an indipendent musician.

Saxophone and bamboo flute remain his main instruments even if he’s capable of playing various world instruments such as xiao, bawu, suona and duduk. He is always trying to put those instruments at their extreme limits, exploring non conformist ways of playing and utilizing a ‘punk’ attitude towards his jazz music.

In 2018 he tourned America playing in different cities with local musicians, while in 2019 he toured Japan, playing with the legendary drummer Sabu Toyozumi. Finally last year an album we’ll talk about later in this article was issued by No Business, a label devoted to new material and to reissue historical works by the likes of William Parker and Sam Rivers.

The album Self Destruct Machine (2022) start alternating the high tone pitches Lao Dan is well known for with sparse fragments of soft melodies, strong statements, vocal ‘scat’, severe outbursts on saxophone. Solo albums are an interesting output for every jazz musician from the 1960s onwards, and this record shows a musician that can be not only a notable partner, as it happens with some more upper crust European young improvisers we described in the past underlying their limits, but a true master musician in his own right.

The record is divided in four parts: the title-track we described here above, Clown, a meditative suite for flute and more or less cacophonous various instruments interspersed with vocal experimentations, until a more straight, intense saxophone statement. Fish Ball Hotel is a shorter piece that sees again a progression from a meditative mood to a rassemblement of higher pitches sparsed with silence and other fragments of melodies. Finally, Marathon has this Evan Parker eloquence but more physical, less abstract and spiritual.

Ze Ze The Milky Way (2021) by Jooklo Duo and Lao Dan is a collaboration between the chinese multi instrumentalist and an Italian interesting duo (Virginia Genta, saxophones; David Vanzan, drums) who collaborated also with the likes of Sabu Toyozumi, Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth, Makoto Kawabata and Chris Corsano. This album is comprised of five tracks. Dragon Tongue starts with the drum sticks drawing interesting small but quick rhythms in which what seem a keyboard introduces itself.

After, the magic of a flute (both Dan and Genta play this instrument) starts being surrounded by small percussions in what can be described as a theatrical approach to musical vision. Bamboo Secret is a small composition for flutes, keyboards and percussion with a dramatic urge, Drunk Funk maintains the promises of its title, while Dalla Cina Con Furore sees drums and keyboards building an atmosphere suitable for the saxophones to slowly but relentlessly explode, with the last two minutes devoted to a drums and bass/keyboards plus saxophone march, and the final Tofu Blues is a mystical but ironic immersion into the waters of an inner but cacophonous meditation through the sound of pipes and the atonal keyboards.

Then, another record we want to analyze is a duo album by Lao Dan (here on dizi, alto, duduk and duck whistle) and Li Daiguo (pipa, prepared piano, tabla, bass drum, voice) as BBB & BBB (Ben Bo Er Ba & Ba Bo Er Ben) titled Hu Nian An Yu (2020). This album, recorded live as the previouses, is comprised of five parts where the meditating qualities of the introduction are sometimes interspersed sometimes mixed with the materic qualities of improvisation and the abstractness of contemporary music.

One of the most active sound artists in China nowadays, Li Jianhong, born in Fenghua, Zhejiang in 1975 is now residing in Hangzhou. In few times he became known as ‘the best noise musician in China’. In a long interview for an Italian webzine the founder of the label 2pi and of the 2pi Festival stated that his love for psychedelic music comes from listening passionately records of historical artists such as Jimi Hendrix, Tangerine Dreams and Les Rallizes Dénudés, plus from his interest in old sci-fi culture.

In his album Mountain Fog (WV Sorcerer, 2021) the fist track Did You See The Fireball? It Just Leapt Beyond The Wanghai Gang is composed mostly by noise feedbacks weaving through different rhytms and peaks. The long titles and the practice of the music obviously makes one think about the great japanese guitar player Keiji Haino, but the press (see the reviews by the Chicago Reader) find more useful comparisons with the Sonic Youth immersed in Buddhism and traditional Chinese Art (for sure the sense of space and the lyricism is different than in Moore & Co).

Mountain Fog is, instead, a duo improvisation featuring saxophonist and noise musician Wang Ziheng. 32 minutes of a live, more granular and noisy music than the previous, that has this quality as a kind of a sweetness emerging from the mass of sound. The saxophone is not electronically treated but it sounds coherently in line with what the guitarist proposes, with prolonged lines and sonorous slimes before elevating a painful chant that soon emerges itself into a barrier of noise reminiscent of Einsturzende Neubauten music, with that quality of something falling apart. 

Another interesting project by Li Janhong is D!O!D!O!D! featuring drummer Huang Jin, as you can listen through the album Ghost Temple from 2005 where the music is more destructured and less fluent, with drums and guitars elevating the wall of sound to a spasmodic research for the highest noise peak. One for sure wonders if the 30 seconds metal/jazz gems of Torture Garden by John Zorn had sons in the world of music, and this album for sure can be taken as such, even if the noise tradition in Eastern countries is solid and autochthonous.

Born in inner Mongolia, Deng Boyu has been active in the Chinese underground music scene since the late 1990s. He is appreciated as a drummer, as a solo electronic artist and as a collaborator to many artists, including Marc Ribot, Lee Ranaldo and Akira Sakata. His music has reached the Western ears also thanks to mini 20 minutes albums such as Inertion issued by a label linked to the Café Oto, a famous venue in London devoted to free jazz, avant garde and experimental music in general.

Deng Boyu uses electronics as the Art Ensemble of Chicago used small percussions at the beginning of their shows in order to create an atmosphere of contemplation and recollection, with pulsating rhythms surrounded by different layers of noise and sounds. After a small pause, a distinctive rhythm and an electronic melody take place, surrounded by the noise of what can seem a guitar drone or a guitar feedback. This music comes from a place where it is used in order to reflect, and is definitely not a word of chaos.

Tutu, a duo album played by Lao Dan and Deng Boyu, updates the tradition of the albums with drums and horns as the hystorical Mu (first and second part) by Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell. Less teathrical and meditative than Lao Dan’s previous output analyzed, this record shows a mastery and incisiveness by both players. The construction of melodies and the noise parts are equally preeminent, and the use of different tools like saxophones, flutes, voice and many percussions enrich the palette of the music giving it a high range in dynamic quality.

Apart from the single musicians here above, peak of the underground avant-garde scene in China, there are lots of interesting labels who issue albums from China artists and artists coming from all over the world. As an example, take Old Heaven Books, held by Ty Fei in Shenzen, and that features artists exhibiting at the most important free avant garde festivals in China, the OCT Loft Jazz Festival and the Tomorrow Festival.

One of the records described above, Ze Ze The Milky Way, was released by Old Heaven Books. Other records recommended to me are Burning Bookshops I & II and Faintish Radiations. Released in 2017, Old Bookshops I sees a “jam session” between such musicians as Shinpei Ruike, Hiroski Mituzani, Shinnosune Takahashi, Lao Dan and Deng Boyu, a lyrically croocked suite in three movements where every musician has his glory moment.

Recorded during the ninth Tomorrow Festival in 2019, Old Bookstore II features Masayko Koketsu, Lao Dan, Li Daiguo and Deng Boyu, and it follows its predecessor in exposing every musician’s mastery even if emphasis is a bit more on the overall result than on individual efforts, and it’s full of beautiful weavings of saxophones.

As one can hear, through the years and the multiple encounters the various scenes – Japanese, Chinese, even Russian since many musicians I introduced to you in the past from that country exhibited themselves in the above mentioned festivals – have melted and learned to collaborate in creating beauty.

Another label worth of being mentioned is WV Sorcerer Productions; mostly devoted, as the name of the label itself report, to ritual music, it also has a branch of its productions focused on experimental music and free jazz. A good starting point in approaching the label is the cassette Funcioning Anomie, featuring again Lao Dan recorded solo for the first time in a beautifully rich of sounds natural environment reminding the experiments of Peter Brotzmann and Han Bennink in the forest of Schwarzwaldfahrt.

We, the Fire are One is an intriguing album by reedist Wang Ziheng, who claims to have applied the film editing techniques elaborated by Masao Adachi for his medium film “AKA Serial Killer” to the music in order to paint shan shui, a classical chinese technique of painting natural places, like mountains, cascades, rivers. The result is a meditative music, that leaves space in equal part to sound and silence, making you experience an inner space that becomes real only while listening to music and that stays with you, at least for a little bit, even when the music’s over.

For my readers it will be possible for sure to recognize in these musicians the same creative fire we pursued in years of listening and creating new music as the one you’re reading every month on the pages of this blog. Lao Dan and his peers create music that has roots in many aspects of Chinese culture, from painting to folk music, but that has trascended their origins becoming a way to be confrontational and meditative at the same time.

Honestly I don’t know if this bunch of records would find a place in the emblazoned magazines devoted to more ‘classical’ jazz, but one thing I can say is that this music is vital, deep and it maintains their qualities of breaking up with an embellised tradition without loosing the force of the roots of those traditions, and at the same time, mixing their own origins with innovation of free playing they’re creating something new.

That’s why I’ll keep on searching for new music in the world while reviewing material from more rooted and known musicians. At the same time, I would like to express a big thank you to Liu Yuheng, owner of a beautiful blog in Chinese about alternative music, who also translated one of my article for his creature, for helping me on being aware of the music you have read about in this post. Keep up the good work, my friends all over the world. 

 

 

Jason Kao Hwang and J. A. Deane – Uncharted Faith (Blue Coast Music, 2022)

I have to admit it, this album comes in the right moment in my shelves. A few time ago I bought for my collection a double CD titled “Electronic Music – It Started Here ...” published by the label Not Now, devoted to the reissue of old material in every field of contemporary music, from the 1920s blues to jazz to contemporary music, and this double CD was very interesting for me because it comprised two different ideas of dealing with electronic sound.

On one hand you had people devoted to abstractness, or with experimenting with new structurres if you want, as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Schaeffer, on the other hand you had composers like Ray Cathode who used electronic sounds to surround piano melodies and Dick Jackobs who loved to reproduce the melody of the famous italian song Volare.

This almost schizoid abyss and difference between this two kind of idea of contemporary music helped me in understanding how insidious is for a musician to write or execute electronic music. This style of music can be the most volatile, the most abstract, and while a composer as John Cage argued that musicians could help human beings in having a new familiarity with everyday noise of a city life, it is true that electronic and experimental music need some anchor points in order to not fear the abstractness, or newness, they carry with themselves.

That’s why I truly believe Qi Gong, an interesting way people from the Far East tried to discipline the body of men, was a real inspiration form for J. A. “Dino” Deane, one of those figures you feel a profound interest for when you meet their work. J. A. Deane was devoted to electronic music and sound manipulation until his recent death in 2021, long before this album was completed by his collaborator Jason Kao Hwang. But let’s start from the beginning.

Jason Kao Hwang is an important figure in the field of improvised music. His art speaks loud outside of the barriers we put on art forms because we feel we can understand them better that way. In an old review for a reissue on double CD of old and complete recordings by one of his first bands, The Committments, featuring a young William Parker, I wrote in my language that that music was “indespensible, vital music, an expression of the human at its best like few others”.

Mr Hwang, a first generation descendant of chinese immigrants, has been raised near Chicago and partecipated very actively at the first season of the New York loft scene held by Sam Rivers. His music was a bridge between the AACM school and the New York sound, fusing them together in his playing both violin and viola. In a way, he continued experimenting in the tradition of other great players of string insturments like the late Leroy Jenkins.

Very active in the field of improvised music since the 1980s, with this last output Uncharted Faith he poses his idea and practice of music at high peaks of creativeness thanks also to his collaboration with J. A. Deane. After Deane lost her wife Colleen Mulvihill in 2019, he left Denver in order to live in rural Cortez, Colorado. There he finished a book titled “Becoming Music, Conduction and Improvisation as forms of Qi Gong”.

Deane sent one copy of his book to Hwang in 2020. Hwang answered sending Deane copies of his music, and the two decided to collaborate despite the pandemics. Hwang in this album plays a Tucker Barrett solid-body violin, while Deane, who died before the album was ended, contributes electronics such as Sensei Morph touch controller, Spacecraft granular synthesizer software and Akai MPC Live Digital Audio Workstation.

Just to go back at the beginning of this review, the album is in the tradition of great experimention with sound, but in a way it is also concrete. In fact Hwang violin is filtered or played, I cannot tell precisely but this is the impression, through a wah wah pedal like that of Hendrix or Miles Davis during the 1970s, plus echo effects (but it can be also Deane post-production). I cited Miles Davis not by chance because the first thing I thought listening to Parallel Universe, the CD first track, was that of listening to an abstract rendition of On The Corner.

Miles Davis during the 1970 was not only exploring with timbres and colors from rock amplification, he also tried to change the structure of music, asking for help to his collaborator Paul Buckmaster who suggested him to use modular, i.e. repetitive, structures taken from Karlheinz Stockhausen and Indian music. Davis did it his own way, taking bass figures from funk after listening to Sly Stone music in particular but taking it all to a more abstract level.

Not dissimilarly here, we have on the first track of the album a distorted violin surrounded by small electronic sounds the same way Davis played his muted and distorted trumpet surrounded by bass, three drums and electric guitars. Hwang is not playing a direct melody and is not mimicking Jenkins’ trills and vibratos, but he’s finding his own way to communicate in a more abstract, but also very concrete, world of electronic sounds: he tries to win the battle against abstractness, and possibly he and Deane has won this battle.

On Singularity, the collateral electronic sounds are not following or preceeding the violin, but kind of dancing around it. There are moments in which you hear the violin alone, as a moment in which you recollect your ideas, then you are pushed again in the flux of music where some small sounds are used as percussions in order to give a more vivid rendition to the violin’s ‘quasi-melodies’.

Crossing the Horizon is one of those pieces of music in which you cannot tell what is the analogic source for music and what is the electronic one, and this is his charm: the music has a great variety not only as far as sound used, but also as far as volumes and colors. Sometimes this piece of music reminds me of Laurie Anderson when she was playing a violin without strings and with a tape recorded at their place, but no voice emerges from Hwang, only abstract shapes.

In Shamans of Light you can almost feel a strange organ depicting a liturgic armosphere, while the violin, here a little bit more material than in the other tracks, at a certain point explodes and leaves you with the sensation of a transfiguration. Speaking in Tongues is a title that makes me think of texts I was reading about Albert Ayler many years ago, that idea of many horns playing different things together at once, but what we have here are different layers of sound, from a small melodic background to the violin, effected as in the first track.

Finally, the long, almost 20 minutes of Uncharted Faith start with small electronic and violin sounds developing into almost musique concrète and what in pop music is called a wall of sound, with the violin expressing a mysterious chant and the electronics answering with what can seem a ‘fire of sound’, with small percussions in the AACM tradition and after them a strange organ or piano, pushing the music on more concrete territories without losing that aerial and abstract quality.

A record that grows undoubtely one listening after the other, Uncharted Faith is a great attempt to push the boundaries of improvised and electronic music forward, in territories that in other hands could result more tricky, but that in Deane and Hwang practice are for sure thrilling and demanding. If you decide to committ, they will leave you satisfied and wanting for more.