By Don PhippsOne thing about John Zorn: he never ceases to surprise. And “Parrhesiastes” is exhibit A. Performed by the electric Chaos Magick ensemble – which features two keyboard players (John Medeski on organ and Brian Marsella on Fender Rhodes piano), an electric guitarist (Matt Hollenberg) and drummer (Kenny Grohowski) – “Parrhesiastes” is an entertaining and enjoyable romp through three Zorn surreal and fantastic compositions (Zorn also arranged and conducted the ensemble). The music resembles a rubber band, something that both stretches and retains form. Or maybe metamorphosis is ..read more

By Eyal Hareuveni It is quite unusual that a free improviser, even the most innovative and creative one, gets a chance to invite many of his past collaborators to perform a composition that relies on idiosyncratic improvisation qualities. But British sax player John Butcher was commissioned in 2021 by HCMF - the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival - to perform a composition, Fluid Fixations, where the ever-spinning oxymorons - fixed and fluid - may seem to present a conflict of interests, but eventually offer a kind of mysterious harmony. Fluid Fixations was performed and recorded in N ..read more

By Nick Ostrum “…In quiet solitude or blasting across the alkali flats in a jet-powered, monkey-navigated...... and it goes on like this.” – Rev. Timothy Lovejoy, The Simpsons In the above quote, Rev. Lovejoy was reading the wedding vows of one Homer J. Simpson. With just a little imagination and minus the “quiet solitude” part, however, he could very well have been describing the two releases reviewed here. Each is from one of PEK’s newer ensembles, which are based more around electronic environments than the acoustics of the sax-cello core of Leap of Faith, or the drum-propulsion of the Me ..read more

By Fotis Nikolakopoulos Organismic Theory is the Greek duo of Nicolas Skordas on various wind instruments and Selfish Limbs on analogue synth and fx. On this cd they approach jazz and free jazz, from another point of view. As especially Skordas is mostly know for free playing and being an acolyte of free jazz, A Space from Spaces seems quite different –especially for the small Greek scene. On the four tracks of the cd, all mentioning the word space on their title but concerning a different (social, personal, public, intimate) field of what we call space in this age of social media, the liste ..read more

  Photo by Cristina Marx/Photomusix What is your greatest joy in improvised music? To play the clarinet What quality do you most admire in the musicians you perform with? Swing. Which historical musician/composer do you admire the most? Charlie Parker. If you could resurrect a musician to perform with, who would it be? Eric Dolphy. What would you still like to achieve musically in your life? To play like Benny Goodman. Are you interested in popular music and - if yes - what music/artist do you particularly like? I don't like pop-music at all. If you could change one ..read more

By David Cristol From March 28 to 30, the 2024 edition of (Ne)poslušno / Sound (Dis)Obedience took place in Ljubljana, in the Španski borci cultural center housing different rooms for rehearsals and performances, a bar, terrace and records stand, in the center of Slovenia’s capital. Programmed by musician Tomaž Grom – who also operated as a good-humored and entertaining MC throughout – the festival is produced by the Zavod Sploh organization, dedicated to sound performance and associated research, education and publishing (through a record label) of acts that fit under the “free improvis ..read more

By Sammy Stein Songs Of The Fathers is a recording by Phil Raskin and Frank Doblekar, the duo at the core of the Satya collaboration, here enhanced by Synthesist Malcolm Cecil and Paul Anthony who created the orchestral feel the duo wanted. It should be mentioned there is a caveat here. I was asked to write the liner notes for this album and readily agreed. The recording is a mindful tribute to Abdullah Ibrahim, one of music’s great masters. Each track is a first-take recording apart from one, which felt right for Raskin, who was keen to impart a sense of an ‘of the moment’ atmosphere to ..read more

By Nick Ostrum Damascene Vancouverite Emad Armoush has been at it for almost 25 years, now, bringing Arabic and Iberian oud, ney, guitar and vocal traditions to ears across the globe. When I say “tradition,” however, I do not mean conventional or faithful to some decontextualized, staid practice. Rather, Armoush first came to my ears in Gordan Grdina’s Haram ensemble (reviewed here and here ). The tradition is there, but in new contexts and new forms and necessarily with new meanings. Hence, the title Electritradition, a portmanteau that joins the new and old, the faithful and the divergent ..read more

By Martin Schray Free jazz trios consisting of saxophone, bass and drums have a hard time these days, because - let’s be honest - the paths on which they travel are largely explored: whether it’s classic free jazz like that of Alberts Ayler’s legendary Spiritual Unity Trio, which revolutionized the genre for this line-up, the finely chiseled playing of the Evan Parker Trio, David S. Ware’s trio with William Parker and Warren Smith, which combines tradition with modernity, Peter Brötzmann’s various projects, most of which used an iconoclastic philosophy and influenced newer trios such as The T ..read more

By Don Phipps Complexity is at times its own virtue. And the music on Chad Fowler’s Birdsong certainly is complex. Take its instrumentation – Fowler on sax and bass flute, Shanyse Strickland on French horn, flute and vocals, Sana Nagano on violin, Melanie Dyer on viola – and a standard rhythm section (Ken Filiano on bass and Aders Griffen on drums). French horn is most certainly rare in jazz and combined with the violin and viola lines, the result is a modern but uneasy interweaving of soulful bluesy jazz with abstract modern music. Experimentation is a hallmark of modern free jazz. A wi ..read more