Fred Frith Trio with Lotte Anker and Susana Santos Silva - Road (October 15, 2021 Intakt Records)

Fred Frith is a multi-instrumentalist and a shrewd outsider who walks the line between rock and jazz, improvisation and composition, and hereby presents a breathtaking live double CD with his long-time Bay Area trio. CD1 documents an inspiring trio concert by these extraordinarily creative musicians at Stadthalle Köln as part of Week- End Fest 2019. CD2 features the trio with guests Lotte Anker and Susana Santos Silva. Both musicians have a long history with the trio – Lotte Anker has played with the trio in San Francisco and New York, and Susana Santos Silva joined them for performances in Brazil in 2018, while both have joined the trio to tour the U.S. East Coast and Europe in 2019. Lotte Anker and Susana Santos Silva fire up the trio. And in turn the trio’s inspiration has an effect on Lotte and Susana which feeds back into the group. This creates a unique collective sound that delivers an infectious live energy.

1. Lost Weekend 1

2. Lost Weekend 2

3. Lost Weekend 3

4. Lost Weekend 4

5. Lost Weekend 5

6. Lost Weekend 6

7. Lost Weekend 7

8. Color of Heat

9. The Trees Speak

10. Sinking In

11. Color of Heart

CD 1 (Tracks 1-7)

Fred Frith: Electric Guitar, Voice

Jason Hoopes: Electric Bass

Jordan Glenn: Drums

CD 2 (Tracks 8-11)

Fred Frith: Electric Guitar, Voice

Jason Hoopes: Electric Bass

Jordan Glenn: Drums

Lotte Anker: Saxophones (Tracks 9+10)

Susana Santos Silva: Trumpet (Tracks 8+11)

All music by Fred Frith Trio (CD 1); Fred Frith Trio, Susana Santos Silva, Intakt Records

Lotte Anker (CD 2).

Mixed and compiled at Guerrilla Recordings, Oakland, CA, on May 12, 2021. Mastered at Headless Buddha, Oakland, CA, on July 23, 2021. Creative engineer: Myles Boisen.

Cover art and photo: Heike Liss.

Graphic design: Fiona Ryan.

Produced by Fred Frith and Intakt Records.

Published by Intakt Records.

PREORDER

Lotte Anker / Gerald Cleaver / Craig Taborn - Floating Islands (Three Pieces) CENTRIFUGA November 1, 2018

The album is a live performance recorded during CPH jazz festival in 2008. Floating Islands was issued on CD in 2009 on ILK music, and finally we are able to make this superb recording available on vinyl in a collaboration between ILK, Insula Music and Centrifuga.

Saxophones – Lotte Anker

Drums – Gerald Cleaver

Piano – Craig Taborn

Mixed and Mastered By – John Fomsgaard

Recorded live at Borups Concert Hall

Satoko Fujii - Mahobin (Live at Big Apple in Kobe) LIBRA RECORDS

Satoko Fujii Turns 60!

International supergroup Mahobin delivers one sonic surprise after another on debut release Live at Big Apple in Kobe

Quartet features pianist-composer Satoko Fujii, trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, saxophonist Lotte Anker, and electronics from Ikue Mori

“Fujii’s sound world is a kaleidoscope, and those familiar with her work have come to expect the unexpected. If any artist can be said to meet expectations by upsetting them, she’s one.” 

― Mike Chamberlain, Coda

Live at Big Apple in Kobe (Libra Records, release date: August 24, 2018) captures a riveting, wildly unpredictable live performance by Mahobin, a formidable quartet of improvisers gathered together for the first time by pianist-composer Satoko Fujii. The recording is the eighth of Fujii’s yearlong birthday celebration which has her releasing a new CD every month. Joining her on this recording are trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, Danish saxophonist Lotte Anker, and laptop musician Ikue Mori. Performing without any compositions or pre-arranged plan, the quartet improvises a thrilling album of music laced with brilliant colors, compelling rhythms, and melodic beauty balanced with otherworldly abstraction.

Although they had never before performed as a group, the members of Mahobin have worked together in other formats. Mori and Fujii collaborated for the first time in 2013 during Fujii’s residency at The Stone. Then in 2016, Fujii and Anker joined Mori at her Stone residency. Anker later joined Fujii and Tamura for a 2017 tour of Japan. This year, Fujii decided the time was right for them to converge in one group to see what might emerge.

Mori came up with the band’s unusual name. “Mahobin” is a Japanese word for “thermos,” but it literally means “magic bottle.” They all loved the name. “It’s nice to have a band name with the word ‘magic’ in it,” Fujii says, “and I like it because a thermos keeps everything in it hot for a long time.”

And the music does stay hot for long stretches during the two improvisations that comprise the CD. “Rainbow Elephant” slowly wends its way through passage after passage of astonishing sounds, following a slowly evolving path. There’s a continuous weave of sound—sparkling electronics; saxophone clicks and cries; textured, breathy drones on the trumpet; and subtle prepared piano timbres. The sound expands and contracts, dense one moment, open and airy the next. Fujii plays a long melodic arc with scintillating sounds dancing underneath. Later, Anker starts her own extended melody, supported and embellished by the others. “Yellow Sky” grows more directly from soft electronic flutters and breathy tones on saxophone and trumpet to become progressively darker and more agitated with hot raspy trumpet, rumbling piano, clattering electronics, and wailing saxophone. The album is one of the most sustained abstract performances in the Fujii discography.

The quartet is truly a meeting of equals, and everyone’s familiarity and friendship with one another allows a natural give and take between players. “We all are about the same age,” Fujii says. “We are good friends. Before the show, everyone came to our place to have tea and cookies. We talked and talked, but not about music. We knew the music would be good and we let it flow without talking about it.”

Fujii’s unprecedented birthday bash continues in August with Mizu a duet CD with Joe Fonda followed in September with a duet CD with Australian keyboardist Alister Spence. In the final months of the year, there will be a new recording by Orchestra Tokyo, a CD/DVD package featuring Fujii’s collaboration with percussive dancer Mizuki Wildenhahn, and a double CD of selections from Fujii’s “diary project” of compositions written each day before she practices, accompanied by the scores. The unforgettable outpouring of musical riches continues. 

Critics and fans alike hail pianist and composer Satoko Fujii as one of the most original voices in jazz today. She’s “a virtuoso piano improviser, an original composer and a bandleader who gets the best collaborators to deliver," says John Fordham in The Guardian. In concert and on more than 80 albums as a leader or co-leader, she synthesizes jazz, contemporary classical, avant-rock, and Japanese folk music into an innovative music instantly recognizable as hers alone. Over the years, Fujii has led some of the most consistently creative ensembles in modern improvised music, including her trio with bassist Mark Dresser and drummer Jim Black, the Min-Yoh Ensemble, and an electrifying avant-rock quartet featuring drummer Tatsuya Yoshida of The Ruins. Her ongoing duet project with husband Natsuki Tamura released their sixth recording, Kisaragi, in 2017.

“The duo's commitment to producing new sounds based on fresh ideas is second only to their musicianship,” says Karl Ackermann in All About Jazz. Aspiration, a CD by an ad hoc band featuring Wadada Leo Smith, Tamura, and Ikue Mori, was released in 2017 to wide acclaim. “Four musicians who regularly aspire for greater heights with each venture reach the summit together on Aspiration,” writes S. Victor Aaron in Something Else. She records infrequently as an unaccompanied soloist, but Solo (Libra), the first of her projected 12 birthday-year albums, led Dan McClenaghan to enthuse in All About Jazz, that the album “more so than her other solo affairs—or any of her numerous ensembles for that matter—deals in beauty, delicacy of touch, graceful melodicism.” As the leader of no less than five orchestras in the U.S., Germany, and Japan, Fujii has also established herself as one of the world’s leading composers for large jazz ensembles, leading Cadence magazine to call her, “the Ellington of free jazz.”

Trumpeter and composer Natsuki Tamura is internationally recognized for his unique musical vocabulary blending extended techniques with jazz lyricism. This unpredictable virtuoso “has some of the stark, melancholy lyricism of Miles, the bristling rage of late ’60s Freddie Hubbard and a dollop of the extended techniques of Wadada Leo Smith and Lester Bowie,” observes Mark Keresman of JazzReview.com.

Throughout his career, Tamura has led bands with radically different approaches. On one hand, there are avant rock jazz fusion bands like his quartet, whose album Hada Hada Peter Marsh of the BBC described this way: “Imagine Don Cherry woke up one morning, found he'd joined an avant goth-rock band and was booked to score an Italian horror movie.” In contrast, Tamura has focused on the intersection of folk music and sound abstraction with Gato Libre since 2003.

The band’s poetic, quietly surreal performances have been praised for their “surprisingly soft and lyrical beauty that at times borders on flat-out impressionism,” by Rick Anderson in CD Hotlist. In addition, Tamura has recorded five CDs in his ongoing duo with pianist (and wife) Satoko Fujii. Tamura also collaborates on many of Fujii’s projects, from quartets and trios to big bands.

As an unaccompanied soloist, he’s released three CDs, including Dragon Nat (2014). He and Fujii are also members of Kaze, a collaborative quartet with French musicians, trumpeter Christian Pruvost and drummer Peter Orins. “As unconventional as he may be,” notes Marc Chenard in Coda magazine, “Natsuki Tamura is unquestionably one of the most adventurous trumpet players on the scene today.” 

Laptop musician, composer, and percussionist Ikue Mori first gained attention in the late ’70s as the drummer in the seminal No Wave band DNA, with fellow noise pioneers Arto Lindsay and Tim Wright. In the mid ’80s she started in employ drum machines in the context of improvised music. While limited to the standard technology provided by the drum machine, she nevertheless forged her own highly sensitive signature style. In 2000 she started using the laptop computer to expand on her already signature sound, thus broadening her scope of musical expression. Mori has released more than 20 albums as a leader or co-leader with innovative bands such as Mephista with pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and drummer Susie Ibarra; and Phantom Orchard with harpist Zeena Parkins. She is a frequent member of ensembles led by John Zorn, and was a featured soloist with Ensemble Modern on guitarist-composer Fred Frith’s Traffic Continues (Winter & Winter). Her most recent releases are Obelisk with Courvoisier, Okkyng Lee, and Jim Black; and Highsmith, a duo with pianist Craig Taborn, both on Tzadik.

Lotte Anker is a Copenhagen-based saxophone player and composer working in the field between experimental jazz/improvisation and contemporary music. Her music includes both melodic (often twisted or fragmented) elements and more abstract textural material and covers a wide territory from minimal, transparency to dense and dark expressionism. Her recent bands include a trio with pianist Craig Taborn and drummer Gerald Cleaver and a trio with pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and Ikue Mori.

She also leads the 8-piece What River Ensemble and the septet Electric Habitat.  She performs in duo with Fred Frith and Sten Sandell and was a member of a cooperative quartet with the late trombonist Johannes Bauer, bassist John Edwards, and drummer Paul Lovens. In addition, Anker has performed at major festivals and concert spaces around the world and has also played and toured with Marilyn Crispell, Tim Berne, Okkyung Lee, Paal Nilssen-Love, Joelle Leandre, Raymond Strid, Sten Sandell, Andrew Cyrille, Phil Minton, Axel Dörner, Fred Lonberg-Holm, and many others. John Fordham writes in The Guardian, “Anker’s rich saxophone palette takes in skimming falsetto sounds like Evan Parker’s, but she also has a soulfully desolate quaver that recalls Albert Ayler, and a sense of narrative drama that keeps her in compelling motion between ghostly impressionistic effects and brusquely percussive exclamations.” 

Lotte Anker, sax

Natsuki Tamura, trumpet

Satoko Fujii, piano

Ikue Mori, electronics

1 Rainbow Elephant 42:22

2 Yellow Sky 7:10

www.satokofujii.com

Anker · Pat Thomas · Flaten · Solberg - His Flight's At Ten (ILUSO RECORDS April 19, 2018)

Iluso Records presents His Flight’s At Ten, a stunning live concert recording by free music luminaries Lotte Anker (saxophones), Pat Thomas (piano), Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (double bass) and Ståle Liavik Solberg (drums and percussion). 

Copenhagen-based Lotte Anker is a saxophone player and composer of unsurpassed reputation in the creative music world. She works in the field between experimental jazz/improvisation and contemporary music and leads acclaimed trios with Craig Taborn/Gerald Cleaver and Sylvie Courvoisier/Ikue Mori. Anker has performed with Tim Berne, Okkyung Lee, Joelle Leandre, Raymond Strid, Sten Sandell, Andrew Cyrille, Phil Minton and many others. 

Electronic experimenter and piano player Pat Thomas is a unique voice in the UK/European creative music scene. Embracing improvisation, jazz and new music, his significant contribution has included performances and recordings with Derek Bailey, Tony Oxley’s Quartet and Celebration Orchestra, Lol Coxhill, Steve Noble and Alex Ward. 

Ingebrigt Håker Flaten is an internationally sought after double and electric bassist in the jazz, free jazz, and improvised music worlds. He is most known through his work in the hard-hitting bands The Thing, Atomic and Scorch Trio. Flaten has worked with Joe McPhee, Mats Gustafsson, Paal Nilssen Love, Neneh Cherry, Thurston Moore, and Ken Vandermark. 

Drummer Ståle Liavik Solberg is a central part of Oslo's thriving improvised music scene. Working with ensembles VCDC, Will it float? (with John Russell, Steve Beresford & John Edwards), Silva-Rasmussen-Solberg trio and in duos with Fred Lonberg-Holm and John Russell. His endlessly creative drumming is renowned in the world of free jazz/creative music. 

His Flight’s At Ten comprises three long form pieces of spontaneously improvised music by this quartet of acclaimed improvisers in an encapsulating concert performance at the 2016 Blow Out! Festival in Oslo. 

Departure begins as a cacophony of crash cymbals and sustained cluster chords. Anker’s growling entry bulldozes through the clutter, lifting the band to a dizzying height of frenzy. Long tones segway into a sparse and lineal movement of minimalism and delicately suggestive interspersions before Anker’s multiphonic experiments inspire a pedalling down beat and oozing groove. Thomas’ succinct piano solo offers sparse resonating statements before barrelling drums and bass and tongue-slapping reeds morph the music into a closing hypnotic rumble underlying short motivic statements spat from Anker’s saxophone. 

In Flight commences cautiously with each performer delicately layering plink plonking statements in a swiftly rousing conversation. Anker’s short bursting phrases reach across the group-talk before a series of impromptu stop-start moments begin a passage of gleeful expressions realised through virtuosic extended technique. Thomas’ unhinged montuno inspires long notes and scattering drums at which point the band are truly in full flight. Dissipating squeeks and short running phrases by Thomas on piano lead into a Solberg cymbal solo. Piano and saxophone join with high scraping glissandi, this delightful interplay carrying the group through to the end. 

Arrival, the third and final piece, begins with percussively bowed bass joined by breathes, whistles and intricate dealings from within the bowels of the piano. A stunning suspense is patiently created by the group’s innate spatial awareness. Gentle and ghostly, Thomas and Flaten dance in synchronised wave-like motion luring the band into the same before together embracing a violent and thrashing dance that cascades gracefully to a final moment of reflection. 

All the energy and nuance of this captivating convert are captured in this stunning live recording. Both exhilarating and hypnotic, the album is a cutting edge release traversing the worlds of contemporary classical music and avant-garde jazz by a group of improvisers at the forefront of the creative music world.

1. Departure 16:59

2. In Flight 14:50

3. Arrival 10:40

Lotte Anker (saxophones)

Pat Thomas (piano)

Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (double bass)

Ståle Liavik Solberg (drums and percussion)

Recorded by Stig Gunnar Ringen at Blow Out! Oslo on 1 March 2016. Mixed by Lasse Marhaug. Mastered by Sardi at Sugarland Studios

All music by Anker / Thomas / Flaten / Solberg (KODA/PRS/TONO)

Artwork and design by Adam J Bragg