Sunday, April 4, 2021

"Come Sunday" – Single from Trineice Robinson & Cyrus Chestnut

“Come Sunday,” vocalist Trineice Robinson and pianist Cyrus Chestnut’s intimate duet performance of Duke Ellington’s revered classic as a single. 

Robinson says the track, out just in time for Easter Sunday, “definitely brings out my church influences… The concept behind it is that no matter what's going on, on Sunday things are going to make sense, even for a couple of hours.”

"Come Sunday " is from Robinson’s long-awaited debut All or Nothing, out August 6, 2021.  A revered educator (Princeton University, her own Soul Ingredients teaching methodology), researcher, author and scholar, Robinson emerges, at age 40, as a confident and dazzling performer.  

The album brings together a lifetime experience and influences from jazz, R&B, gospel and classical music with an all-star band featuring Don Braden, Cyrus Chestnut, Kenny Davis and Vince Ector, along with guest appearances by Phil Orr, Joe “Stretch” Vinson, Kahlil Kwame Bell, Ian Kaufman, John Meko and Nils Mossblad, as well as her children, Laura-Simone Martin and Lindsay Martin Jr.

Michele Calgaro - Round About Monk (April 4, 2021 Caligola Records)

Chitarrista di formazione autodidatta, si specializza negli anni ‘80 nella tecnica del fingerpicking con Duck Baker, Stefan Grossman e John Renbourn. Approfondisce in seguito lo studio dell’improvvisazione e del linguaggio jazzistico grazie alla frequentazione di stages tenuti da Mick Goodrick, Jim Hall, Lee Konitz e Dave Holland. Dopo essersi messo in luce nei corsi estivi di Siena Jazz ’90, dal 1991 è direttore della scuola di musica Thelonious, di Vicenza. Conosce il sassofonista canadese Robert Bonisolo, e con lui guida un quartetto completato da Lorenzo Calgaro, contrabbasso, suo fratello, e Gianni Bertoncini, batteria, che registra nel 1995 per la Flex Records «The Edge», con ospite Paolo Fresu.

Suona quindi nei gruppi di Claudio Fasoli (quartetto e trio) e nella Lydian Sound Orchestra diretta da Riccardo Brazzale, con cui registra tre dischi. Collabora inoltre con Kenny Wheeler, Manfred Schoof, Erik Truffaz e Claudio Roditi, ma anche con alcuni dei migliori jazzisti italiani, come Mauro Negri, Paolo Birro, Pietro Tonolo. Ha suonato nel disco e nel tour di «Del Magico Mondo», un ambizioso lavoro del cantautore Federico Zecchin, cui hanno partecipato Rossana Casale e Giorgio Albertazzi.

Oltre a guidare proprie formazioni, Calgaro suona spesso con la cantante chicagoana Cheryl Porter e nel Monkgomery Quartet, assieme all’amico chitarrista Sandro Gibellini. «Round About Monk» è quindi il primo disco firmato da Michele Calgaro come unico leader (in «The Edge» le scelte musicali erano infatti condivise con Bonisolo). L’originalità del lavoro, in cui ci vengono offerte delle personali rivisitazioni del repertorio monkiano (più un brano originale, Lazy Cats), sta nella varietà delle formazioni assemblate dal chitarrista vicentino, che vanno dal trio all’ottetto, senza tralasciare una parentesi per sola chitarra (Crepuscule with Nellie).

Suggestive sono soprattutto le esecuzioni dell’ottetto, da Bemsha Swing a Monk’s Mood, grazie ai preziosi arrangiamenti di Calgaro, capaci di bilanciare sapientemente gli insieme orchestrali dei fiati ed i brillanti assoli degli musicisti coinvolti nel progetto, da Kyle Gregory a Robert Bonisolo, da Ettore Martin a Beppe Calamosca. Due brani (Let’s Cool One ed il già citato Lazy Cats) sono eseguiti in trio con Lorenzo Conte ed Eliot Zigmund, vero e proprio maestro della batteria, per anni al fianco dell’indimenticato pianista Bill Evans.

1. Bemsha Swing 06:16

2. Ugly beauty 06:06

3. Epistrophy 06:21

4. Let's Cool One 05:18

5. Four In One 05:18

6. Monk's Mood 07:50

7. Crepuscole With Nellie 02:28

8. Brilliant corners 05:13

9. Lazy Cats 04:40


Michele Calgaro (chitarre)

Lorenzo Calgaro e Lorenzo Conte (contrabbasso)

Mauro Beggio ed Eliot Zigmund (batteria)

Robert Bonisolo ed Ettore Martin (sax tenore)

Kyle Gregory (tormba)

Beppe Calamosca (trombone)

Dario Duso (tuba)

Jeff Pittson - Modern Artifact (April 2021)

1. Solar 07:15
2. Blue Skies 06:17
3. Just In Time 05:11
4. The Face of Love 07:45
5. Out of Nowhere 04:33
6. Zoyd 06:25
7. Everything Happens to Me 08:00
8. I'll Follow the Sun 04:22
9. Ruby 03:12

Jeff Pittson: Wurlitzer 200A Electronic Piano
with Tel-Ray Variable Delay

Recorded: Sanctuary Sound
San Francisco, CA
December 1999

Mastering: Dave Bell
Bellboy Recording, Richmond, CA
December 2001

MOVE (feat. Sjöström / Kaufmann / Pultz Melbye / Narvesen / Gordoa) - MOVE in Moers (April 2021 Fundacja Słuchaj)

Album MOVE in MOERS was recorded at the legendary Moers Festival by a super-group of Harri Sjostrom on soprano saxophone, Achim Kaufmann on piano, Adam Pultz Melbye on double bass, Dag Magnus Narvesen on drums, and fantastic Emilio Gordoa on vibraphone. They play one set lasting 42 minutes and exploring all shades of contemporary free improvisation that from the beginning became an unbelievable magical music spectacle.

1. Move in Moers 42:08

Achim Kaufmann – piano
Adam Pultz Melbye – double bass
Dag Magnus Narvesen – drums
Emilio Gordoa – vibraphone
Harri Sjöström – soprano & sopranino saxophone

All music by Achim Kaufmann (GEMA), Dag Magnus Narvesen (TONO), Adam Pultz Melbye (KODA), Emilio Gordoa, Harri Sjöström (GEMA)

Live concert recorded by Moers Festival 8th June 2019
Sound engineer: Thomas Block
Mixing/mastering: Patrick Römer, Unisono Studio – Berlin

Produced by Harri Sjöström & Maciej Karłowski in co-op.
Executive Producer: Maciej Karłowski
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Thomas Heberer / Joe Fonda / Joe Hertenstein - Remedy (April 2021 Fundacja Słuchaj)

When Europe headed to Covid-19 lockdown in March 2020, Joe Fonda and I were there with the Michael Musillami Quintet. Our concert tour was cut short, and we returned to NYC with no musical interactions for the next few months. Basically, we quarantined at home, particularly as our city became the epicenter of this health crisis.

In June, Fonda called me up. He had met my old friend and partner in crime from many gigs and recordings, drummer Joe Hertenstein, at a pre-pandemic event. Both had spoken about getting together and working on some new music at the time and were wondering if I’d be up for joining. With coronavirus cases dropping locally, it was the first time in a while that such an idea could be entertained.

We started playing together once a week, everybody bringing in tunes – making music and socializing a little, creating a space beyond the grim realities of our surroundings.

A routine started to take shape. Fonda would come down from his place in Washington Heights and pick me up on the Upper West Side. We then would drive, all masked up, to Brooklyn, where Hertenstein lived on Ocean Avenue in a spacious apartment. There we’d play. After our rehearsal, we’d take a slightly different route than on the way in, going through the Lower East Side, SoHo and West Village in Manhattan, each time on the lookout for signs of a re-emerging vibrancy. Beyond that, we always liked to stop by our favorite Swedish bakery on 14th Street for a loaf of their cranberry-rye bread and a cardamom bun – everybody needs a little treat from time to time.

In August, our drummer told us that he and his wife Daisy had decided to leave the US for Berlin, hoping to sit out the situation, and return once NYC got back to a “new normal.” We concluded that our music deserved to be documented; we literally recorded this album the day before Joe left town.

Very proud of the results. This will always serve as a reminder of an insane period in mid-2020, when our gatherings served as a Remedy that kept our bodies and minds together. Thomas Heberer
1. Closer You Are, the Further It Gets 10:01
2. For Wadada Leo Smith, Opus 2 06:03
3. Pink Umbrella-Panicballad 07:45
4. You Are There-Roadmap 616-James J. 12:27
5. Zebra 05:51
6. Fast #2 05:56
7. Wadada Leo Smith, Opus 1 07:57
8. Waltz for Daisy 04:56

Thomas Heberer - trumpet
Joe Fonda - bass, flute (track 7)
Joe Hertenstein - drums, percussion

tracks 1, 4a, 4b, 5 composed by Thomas Heberer (GEMA)
tracks 2, 4c, 6, 7 composed by Joe Fonda (GEMA)
tracks 3a, 3b, 8 composed by Joe Hertenstein (GEMA)

Recorded August 26, 2020, by Tom Tedesco, Tedesco Studios, Paramus, NJ
Mixed & mastered January 2021 by Jon Rosenberg, Brooklyn, NY

Joe Hertenstein plays Bosphorus cymbals exclusively

Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble / Warszawa 2019 (April 2021 Fundacja Słuchaj)

From the opening strike of metallic percussion, the oscillator-like wave of soprano saxophone, the burble of electronics, a resonant piano bass string, the shimmering decay of a gong and the broad-toned brilliance of the trumpeter’s brief melody-then-feint-to-intermittent-oscillation, we are in the special ‒ spectral and material ‒ world of Evan Parker’s ElectroAcoustic Ensemble (EAE), a band over 50 years in the making, its official existence 30 years. It is, in an era-defining way, both a great moment in the history of late-20th century music and the early-21st century’s, a unique response to the notion of large-scale free improvisation that, rather than the cultish practice of a disaffected elite, is a signifying laboratory for human interaction, social, meditative, meaning-defining and edge-blurring, a forward probe in the necessity for calm that sees atheists going on pilgrimage, the tone-deaf joining choirs and an explosion in sales of fashions for fitness in which to sit around and drink coffee, no qualitative judgement here, all perhaps equally beneficial. It is a moment of collective definition, an episode of a group mind in which shared concentration gives meaning and form to shared time and space, the period of its making and its later listening.

This listening, I’m 19 minutes in, to a piece I’ve listened to perhaps 20 times, and I’m in a space I can’t recall hearing before, a space where a room’s locating echoes are sufficiently vast to suggest the distance between planets or solar systems, national economies or, for the cognoscenti, the musical instruments and appurtenances floating as a space station in a brown cosmos in Richard Jenning’s (aka “Prophet”) painting on the original 1961 release of Eric Dolphy’s Out There. There is nothing undemanding, jejune, simplistic, coddling, easy about this music. It asks just enough to challenge, and when you’ve met that reward, it asks just enough to challenge again, leading you into a world of increasing grandeur, intensity and, strangely, intimacy, like being alone in a room with Guernica, Des canyons aux étoiles or the Grand Canyon itself.

The EAE is one of the great bands of improvised music with a prehistory of over twenty years before it formed in 1992, and with a history of nearly thirty years since. In its later forms, it’s a big band; in its beginnings, a duo. Reflecting on this latest form, Parker remarks that only he and Paul Lytton are left from the original. That references the 1990s sextet of Toward the Margins (ECM) but it could suggest the 1969 Parker-Lytton duo, whose performances sometimes added previous performance tapes.

A notion of the double is essential. If there’s a clear parallel for the EAE, it’s Ornette Coleman’s Double Quartet of Free Jazz (1960), in which Coleman paired each member of his then-current quartet with a musician playing the same instrument. To create the EAE, Parker matched an electronic musician, each processing an individual signal, to the members of his trio with Lytton and bassist Barry Guy.

Each successive episode balanced the physical and the abstract, the acoustic and the electronic. Eventually, it would assume a global element. By 2010, an 18-member version appeared in a Lisbon concert. Earlier technologies were supplemented with other developments, including an Apple MacBook, as well as precursors, like a Stroh violin and an electric guitar.

Ancient instruments, a Japanese sho and a shakuhachi were also included. The original twinning reached its apotheosis in a kind of globalized, pan-temporal process of recording and reprocessing and rethinking, all in an essentially free-improvising big band in which sectional play and organization could also be perfect, live as Memorex, instruments picked up and processed in the instant.

In this latest incarnation, Parker and Lytton remain from the ensemble’s earliest days; the electronic duo of FURT, Richard Barrett and Paul Obermayer, have been present since 2007’s The Moment’s Energy, while clarinetist Peter van Bergen first appeared in 2010. They’re balanced by five recent arrivals: Adam Linson, bass and electronics; Matt Wright, laptop and turntable; Percy Pursglove, trumpet; Mark Nauseef, percussion; and Sten Sandell piano and synthesiser.

Usually adding to a band means adding more of the same thing. With the EAE, Parker has expanded relationships. As well as contributing their own material, the electronic musicians pick up the precise content of the acoustic improvisers, creating facsimiles and treating that material accordingly, adding essential quantitative levels, the literally recorded, to the process. If Parker once said with a special precision, “My roots are in my record player,” so too are the processes of the EAE. Ideas of the section, of call and response ‒ many of the components of the big band ‒ were translated into a form that contained both free improvisation and that transforming and transformative electronic unison. Quite wonderfully, Barrett, Obermayer and Wright have added music made out of Evan Parker records.

The spontaneous exchange of data with repetition and transformation connects the EAE to the great tradition of the jazz big band, specifically the riff culture of the early Count Basie band, a spontaneous phrase picked up, replicated, exchanged, multiplied, to assemble a piece of music out of the interconnected syndicates of brass, reeds and rhythm. Here it’s expanded to include synthesizers and samplers as modes of digital reproduction rather than the digital reproduction from ears to fingers on keys. The special time of the Basie band: it more fully occupied time than any of its orchestrated contemporaries, by its very appreciation of spontaneous creation.

As the piece continues to unfold, it becomes increasingly about the experience of sounds in space, sounds as they’re picked up, repeated, reimagined, redistributed. Eventually, it grows increasingly sparse, its components fewer and further apart, yet the sounds themselves more resonant, the space both opening and enriched in the process. These spatial relations have temporal consequences. Priority belongs to the immediate sound as it comes to the fore, occupying attention, attention as earworld, we are both in the process and in the sound, and the reverberations in space combine with those of time to create the collective composition, a collection of instants in time mixed together in the incipient moment, this music moving us closer and closer to its present.

Eventually our specific position in this space, so immediately pressing, loses its very particularity…it is the shared uniqueness of position that becomes the collective moment for musicians and audience alike, as well as the community of sounds themselves, which have become an entity, a pattern, that is both continuous with and distinct from the experience of the group. Resonance, an echo as continuity, stretches duration.

What is happening to time here? Sometimes individuals‒Parker, Pursglove, Sandell stand out‒will at times play very rapidly, at others very slowly, seemingly independently of one another and what is going on around them, later in the music particularly, amidst the multi-spatial echoes, the resonant hang of piano, percussion, gong. As the piece seems to spread out, especially in the final third, this cumulative effect of rapid and stretched music develops its special quality, a mutation in the perception of time: the way in which a listener experiences the present has stretched; the musicians become architects and engineers of time itself. Stuart Broomer
The ElectroAcoustic Ensemble was formed in 1990 as a sextet to explore the possibilities of real-time signal processing in an improvising context. and shortly became an opus magnum ensemble in the whole of Evan Parker's musical biography. Most of the CDs documenting the development of this exciting large ensemble were released by the legendary ECM label. The last time when EAE brought us its new CD titled Hasselt was nine years ago (PSI).
Now, after this very long period, we proudly announce the brand new Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble is coming! Beautifully recorded two years ago on the Warsaw-based festival Ad Libitum by Kuba Sosulski and beautifully mixed by Fil Gomez and Evan Parker himself in the middle of 2020 at Arcobarco, Ramsgate, UK.
So let's listen and enjoying the ten pieces ensemble led by one of the greatest musicians in the world. Here comes WARSZAWA 2019

1. Warszawa 2019 part A 24:42
2. Warszawa 2019 Part B 33:58

Evan Parker - soprano
Matt Wright - laptop and turntable
Paul Lytton - percussion and analogue electronics
Richard Barrett - sampling keyboard
Paul Obermayer - sampling keyboard
Percy Pursglove - trumpet
Peter van Bergen - bass and Ab clarinets
Mark Nauseef - percussion
Sten Sandell - piano and synthesiser
Adam Linson - bass and electronics

Recorded live on 12 of October 2019 at 14th Ad Libitum Festival, Laboratorium, U-Jazdowski, Wojciech Krukowski Hall, Warsaw by Kuba Sosulski
Mixed by Evan Parker with Fil Gomes at Arcobarco, Ramsgate, UK
Mastering by Grzegorz Piwkowski (High End Audio)
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Stefano Bollani / Orquesta Sin Fin / Exequiel Mantega - El Chakracanta (Live in Buenos Aires) 2021 Alobar

El Chakracanta is a dynamic live record from Italian pianist Stefano Bollani, with two original works of his for piano and orchestra and two tangos by Ástor Piazzolla and Horacio Salgán.

Stefano Bollani's Concerto Azzurro (2017) and Concerto Verde (2019) can be considered works of "classical" composing, in the sense that Bollani has written them for piano and classical orchestra and has, as tradition wants, classically structured them in four movements of distinct character of melody and rhythm, but both compositions are strongly informed by Bollani's very own exhilarating jazz genius and idiom, favouring playful moments of improvisation and freedom that disobey the rules that demand that a pianist shall stick to the rigorously immutable score.

Concerto Azzurro was commissioned by visionary Kristjan Järvi and the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra. Azure is the colour of the fifth chakra, associated with self-expression and communication. Concerto Verde premiered and recorded with the Sin Fin Orchestra directed by Exequiel Mantega in Buenos Aires in June 2019 for the album El Chakracanta, refers to the colour of the fourth chakra, associated with love.

Both concertos were recorded live in Buenos Aires: Azzurro at Centro Cultural Kirchner on 17th June 2018; and Verde, next to Piazzolla's Libertango and Salgán's Don Agustin Bardi at Teatro Coliseo on 19th June 2019. With Bollani (piano) and the Orquesta Sin Fin, directed by Exequiel Mantega.

 Don Agustin Bardi

Concerto Azzuro (Prologue)

Concerto Azzuro (First Movement)

Concerto Azzuro (Second Movement)

Concerto Azzuro (Third Movement)

Libertango

Concerto Verde (First Movement)

Concerto Verde (Second Movement)

Concerto Verde (Third Movement)

Concerto Verde (Fourth Movement)

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Satoko Fujii - Piano Music Vol​.​1 (April 2021)

She’s “a virtuoso piano improviser, an original composer and a band-leader who gets the best collaborators to deliver," says John Fordham in The Guardian. In concert and on nearly 100 albums as a leader or co-leader, the globe-trotting Japanese native synthesizes jazz, contemporary classical, avant-rock, and Japanese folk music into an innovative music instantly recognizable as hers alone.

1. Shiroku 18:59
2. Fuwarito 27:02

Satoko Fujii - piano, recording, editing, and mixing

Sound collage of the fragments of my piano solo, recorded and edited and mixed by myself.

Will Guthrie & James Rushford - Real Real World (April 2021)

Real Real World is the first collaborative effort from Nantes-based Australian drummer/percussionist Will Guthrie and Australian keyboardist/composer James Rushford.

Primarily recorded in a fluid, spontaneous studio session in Nantes, with overdubs added later in Melbourne and Nantes, Real Real World presents five spacious, unhurried pieces that inhabit a unique sound world characterised by wheezing, half-voiced organ chords, chiming metal percussion, and eruptions of small sounds. Beginning with the eerily beautiful, shakuhachi-esque sound of Rushford performing on detuned portative organ, the opening title track is abruptly transformed by the entry of Guthrie’s sizzling cymbals, deep gong strikes, and rustling hand percussion.

On the epic ‘Lumbering’, which occupies the majority of the record’s first side, organ chords define a space in which a kaleidoscopic succession of amplified thuds, chiming bells, rustled and dragged objects, and abruptly silenced clusters advance and recede in an oneiric blur, eventually making way for a passage of Guthrie’s virtuosic polyrhythms, itself unexpectedly overtaken by waves of melting fairground organ.

The record reaches an energetic climax mid-way through the second side with the stunning ‘Slakes’, where lugubrious chords in the organ’s lowest register are joined by Guthrie’s skittering rhythms, which somehow manage to call to mind both the most chaotic moments of Balinese Gamelan and the stochastic breakbeats of late-90s Autechre. On this piece, Guthrie and Rushford are joined by Melbourne saxophone maverick Scott McConnachie, who contributes an alto sax solo of burning precision, working with a single-minded palette of piercing long tones and wild intervallic leaps.

Though it makes extensive use of overdubbing, Real Real World retains a strong sense of having been performed, rather than constructed: while at times the fleeting succession of events can recall electroacoustic music, its primarily acoustic nature and unhurried pace is also reminiscent of the music of AACM affiliates or Marion Brown’s classic Afternoon of a Georgia Faun. Immediately engaging while also hiding countless details in the folds of its polychrome fabric, Real Real World is a relaxed and joyous document of collaborative musical invention.

1. Real Real World 04:18
2. Lumbering 13:11
3. Gojek Eltham 02:14
4. Slakes 06:36
5. Blue-eyed Boy 09:23