Joel Futterman - Creation Series (July 15, 2021 NoBusiness Records)

1. CD1 - Part One 22:04

2. CD1 - Part Two 32:19

3. CD1 - Part Three 17:26

4. CD2 - Part One 38:13

5. CD2 - Part Two 37:57

6. CD3 - Part One 32:07

7. CD3 - Part Two 13:44

8. CD3 - Part Three 11:47

9. CD3 - Part Four 01:32

10. CD4 - Part One 32:57

11. CD4 - Part Two 19:10

12. CD4 - Part Three 03:19

13. CD4 - Part Four 01:52

14. CD5 - Part One 36:15

15. CD5 - Part Two 32:11

All compositions by Joel Futterman (BMI)

Recording engineer Dr. Benjamin Tomassetti

Recorded at the Paradise Studio, Virginia Beach, Virginia

Each track is complete unedited first-take and is in the orderi n which it was recorded.

Photos by Michael Wilderman

Mastered by Arūnas Zujus at MAMAstudios

Design by Oskaras Anosovas

Producer - Danas Mikailionis

Co-producer - Valerij Anosov

Joel Futterman - piano, curved soprano saxophone

CD 1 - VOLUME ONE

1. Part One 22:06

2. Part Two 32:21

3. Part Three 17:29

Recorded 16th June, 2008

CD 2 - VOLUME TWO

1. Part One 38:18

2. Part Two 37:57

Recorded 14th August, 2008

CD 3 - VOLUME THREE

1. Part One 32:10

2. Part Two 13:48

3. Part Three 11:50

4. Part Four 1:36

Recorded 1st September, 2008

CD 4 - VOLUME FOUR

1. Part One 32:57

2. Part Two 19:10

3. Part Three 3:17

4. Part Four 1:52

Recorded 10th November, 2008

CD 5 - VOLUME FIVE

1. Part One 36:15

2. Part Two 32:10

Recorded 27th December, 2008

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'Kidd' Jordan Quartet - New Orleans Festival Suite (SILKHEART RECORDS 2018)

This live recording was made in May 1999 at the Dream Palace in New Orleans during the annual jazz festival. The session was improvisationally interactive to an explosive degree, even for these four musicians, and the recording had become legendary a while before it was released. 'Kidd' Jordan is from New Orleans and that is where he’s mostly played, but lately he’s been in demand in New York and Chicago, and Europe too.

Pianist Joel Futterman is a Chicagoan now based in Virginia and before he became a cohort of 'Kidd' Jordan he was a cohort of the late Jimmy Lyons. Alvin Fielder held the drum chair for the Roscoe Mitchell Sextet album, 'Sound' (Delmark DECD-408) when, in 1966, it signalled the appearance of new jazz activity in Chicago. He’s been on innumerable sessions since, including a number for Silkheart Records.

Bassist William Parker is just about the most central, and creative, figure on the New York new jazz scene and has been for twenty years or thereabouts. The quartet’s 'New Orleans Festival Suite' confirms what may or may not be common knowledge, namely that the 'Kidd' Jordan Quartet is not only the senior improvising jazz group on the scene but also the hottest and the most excitingly...  more

1. Decateur Street 28:10

2. Dream Palace 32:49

3. Ole Miss Lovesong 11:56

Edward 'Kidd' Jordan tenor saxophone

Joel Futterman piano, soprano saxophone, indian flute

William Parker bass

Alvin Fielder drums

Joel Futterman - 'Kidd' Jordan Quintet: Nickelsdorf Konfrontation (SILKHEART RECORDS 2018)

"For lovers of this music, here is a disc with a definitive place reserved for it, a very lofty place." 

Gustave Cerutti, Improjazz, October 1996 

"(Futterman) can zip out those tone clusters, which have given him a reputation as a Taylorite, but there is much variation in density – sometimes on this CD the clusters metamorphose into quiet little sprinkles in the top octave of the piano. His ability to move from keys to strings and back again continues to impress. Co-leader Edward 'Kidd' Jordan's duet with Futterman on Soul Mates is an excellent sample of his art; he always counterbalances his harshest outpourings with heartfelt lyricism. Elsewhere the music fares best when Jordan is setting the tone, as in the balladic first half of Nickelsdorf Summit, Part Two. Even when the proceedings begin to babble in tongues à la late-period Coltrane, his line is readily discernable and always coherent. Alvin Fielder contributes mobile drumming in the tradition of Ed Blackwell; just check out what he does on the tom-toms, and savor the solo that opens his piece in honor of Vernell Fournier (another key member of the New Orleans drumming fraternity). 

Robert L. Campbell, Cadence, April 1997 

Nat Hentoff wrote the following in his liner notes for...  more

1. Hear with You 01:23

2. Soul Mates 09:03

3. Meeting Place 06:43

4. Nickelsdorf Summit: I. 07:55

5. Nickelsdorf Summit: II. 07:58

6. Nickelsdorf Summit: III. 03:17

7. Nickelsdorf Summit: IV. 06:48

8. Nickelsdorf Summit: V. 05:24

9. Nickelsdorf Summit: VI. 05:55

10. Nickelsdorf Summit: VII. 06:51

11. Fournier 05:18

12. Going with You 01:53

Joel Futterman piano, curved soprano saxophone, Indian flute

Edward 'Kidd' Jordan tenor saxophone

Mats Gustafsson tenor saxophone, baritone saxophone

Barry Guy acoustic bass

Alvin Fielder drums

Hal Russell - Joel Futterman Quartet: Naked Colours (SILKHEART RECORDS 2018)

"Mostly one is washed over in a turbulent gush of geyser power like the wild snaking of a firehose on the rampage. Russell has a worthy sidekick in Joel Futterman, whose manic, deftly fingered piano playing blows up a storm. Textures collide and capsize, thrown upon each other with not a thought for thrift or stability. These two manically ecstatic musicians are backed up by virtuoso bass and drums playing."

Thomas Millroth, Gränslöst, April 1996 

"Futterman's blazing melody-tumbles fall into one another in a most impressive cadence, but Russell's full tenor/sop/tpt range is also on breathtaking display – playful honking, upper-register overblowing, and manic flashing runs that simply swing very f. hard. All spilling so much energy and sounding so alive that any last date scenario claims would seem rather mawkishly inappropriate." 

Nick Cain, Opprobrium, November 1996

Consider the chances. The brief musical association between Hal Russell and Joel Futterman is one of those lasting "what ifs." As products of Chicago's jazz scene they are a full generation removed. Until 1991, they had never met despite both having devoted 20 years to the uncompromising development of the free jazz form. They performed two concerts together, the first ever in Berlin for...  more

1. Part I: 278,000 Shades 19:31

2. Part II: Solid Colours 21:56

3. Part III: Naked Colours 23:43

Hal Russell trumpet, tenor and soprano saxophones

Joel Futterman piano, recorder

Jay Oliver bass

Robert Adkins drums

Joel Futterman Trio - Berlin Images (SILKHEART RECORDS 2018)

Futterman's restless churning lines are countered by the questing trumpet of former Cecil Taylor associate Raphé Malik, who, along with drummer Robert Adkins makes The World Watched and Ask The Price enticing, thought provoking experiences. The collection's closing title, There Is Peace, provides the listener with a intensely swirling, though decidedly less harrowing, aural imagery." 

Reuben Jackson, Jazz Times, April 1993

Berlin Images 

The trail of the decades we call home is recorded in certain cities as though they were dry lake beds or rock strata. These cities have spoken names whose associative sonorities come from the various ways in which they have marked our century. When the name Berlin is said, the sound is longer than its syllables, and bronze: the name has been heated, cast, tolled, scrapped, re-melted, and poured again. And has yet to be let out of the foundry as finished.

Because so little of the instant mindscan of gyrating, mutable Berlin seems commonplace, one of the residual unspoken charges against the Berlin Wall is that it was ordinary (seen from the West). And in its perversity, bewitchingly humanscale. It also, in the American perspective, came to seem like the last chapter: the sullen change that would forever make an eventful place into something static as well as partitioned.

American Improvised music is of its moment, but not always of its time. The Wall was a big-story barricade, framed as it hardened by a thrust to push those kinds of things aside elsewhere. Improvising composers of the period, continuing a grand general tradition of genteel indifference wanted not much to do with this galvanic political rostrum, not musically, at any rate.

As the Wall settled into its tenure, it also became a powerful icon that confirmed thematic art which had preceded it while inspiring fresh attempts to grapple with what it had come to represent. Here again the appeal of such a focus was largely lost on the improvising community in the U.S. Despite odes to such luminary structures as the Watts Towers or the Williamsburg Bridge, American improvised music has not been routinely based on static, man-made icons, regardless of scale or merit. Musicans in the States have typically been far more directly involved with matters of flux, immediacy, torsion, reactivity - the muscle tone of human living.

In this light, the changing of the border landscape from political experiment to tidal human experience will likely prove to be a subject of equally surging allure to composers and improvisers. As evidence this superbly titled recording, among the initial wave of referential works in the post-wall world, devotes itself entirely to the episode. 

In fact, the lineage of the program here is rather unusual. Its spur came from producer Philip Egert, who wrote the poem which inspired this music during the peripatetic (parapetic) meeting of the Wall and its new owners. Pianist and composer Joel Futterman, having been as equally affected by those events as Egert, took the poem straight to heart and song, creating the three sections which comprise this recording. The poem "Berlin Images", incidentally, is one of series of works by Egert for which Futterman has written music, making this effort more that a casual collaboration. Egert then oversaw the subsequent recording session with this trio, thus able to hear the results of the partnership with all due immediacy.

The business of non-industrial music making is not without its quick rewards. 

With that having been a rather circular experience, the project's creative genesis was also a centrifugal and accumulative process which owes its shape to a fortuitous confluence of time and events. Berlin has always been a notoriously nocturnal city, and typically reserved many of its major open border rave-ups for times of night that were truly after hours by any standards. That timing, however, allowed viewers on the American east coast (such as the principals here) to watch those events as they occurred during regular nightly television broadcast hours, giving the proceedings a binding immediacy that would have otherwise been diluted through editing and sound bite repackaging. 

Over the course of an extraordinary series of days, these broadcasts became laced into a charged continuum, bright with the flicker of discrete images. This improbable long moment will likely remain a popular and convenient U.S. impression of the changed Berlin. However, the vitality of those dominant images nearly belies the breadth of experiences held within the overview. Thankfully, Egert's writing journeys beyond the exuberance of the nightly cathartic meetings as he considers the aggregate value and costs of our having arrived at that Berlineal point in time

Futterman, in turn, describes his music as being a tone poem, and it is audibly related to the printed verse. In fact, this piece was originally scored for voice, which accounts for its closeness to the text. Having had such a previous compositional life gives the music an added dimension: it creates a valuable conceptual tension similar to that which exists between the vocal and instrumental renderings of a jazz standard or show tune. 

Accordingly, the music is built of a variety of moods, alternately sober and inquisitive, then clarion and emphatic as it joins with the verse in a reflection on the Berlin procession from a distant but sensitive vantage. Similarly, both works share an evocative economy of expression, in contrast to the richness of the televised rush to ramparts, as they attempt to include points of reference beyond the immediate glow of the prevailing montage. 

From the composer's standpoint, this economy is to an immediate extent due to the chosen instrumentation. Futterman's past recordings have favored a general quartet format including bass, which makes its absence notable here. While this change has a timbral effect on the ensemble, it hardly has a functional one as listeners familiar with Joel's work would know. He is possessed of a left hand technique and concept that has long been strived for, hard-won, and that is not to be fully described, even with superlatives. Suffice it to say that he finds freedoms in the bassless arrangement here that other free ensemble leaders ironically once found in pianoless settings, and further to say that he uses those freedoms wisely. 

So, too, does drummer Robert Adkins. Like Futterman, his approach to New Music is founded on purposeful discipline. Additionally, he has been listening to and working with Futterman's left handed strengths far more than with any bassist. The two have been rehearsing and performing together for years, with a lot of that time spent as a duet. 

Their mutual development allows both the breadth of expression found in this recording, and the mighty control shown over the vital aspects of dynamics and density. These are of primary interest, as much of the New Music genre may be characterized by a lack of development in this regard, and because the success of this particular work rests to a large degree on the players' mastery of these elements. There are moments here that are thickly layered and note-rapid, yet which nearly whisper; conversely, there are moments taken at full volume that are as clear as a carillon. Regardless of situation, this unit can create musical tension by whatever means it wants, which is, at the very least, a liberating skill.

Futterman and Adkins were fortunate to have been able to rehearse this music in advance of the recording date. Trumpeter Raphé Malik, on the other hand, first saw the material in the studio just before the appointed hour. Great things have continually come from such fresh encounters, as most popularly witnessed by some of the benchmark Miles Davis sessions. Davis, however, would perhaps not have been comfortable with the challenge that Malik rises to answer here, chiefly that of being a following front line voice, one-taking it over the free and extended terrain of these compositions, with no control over the process other than what his musicianship affords. Malik, due to his long associations with Cecil Taylor and the late Jimmy Lyons (the latter an expecially dear one that Futterman and Adkins have likewise enjoyed), is no stranger to such tasks, and might not call them inhospitable. He shows himself to be sensitive and responsive to the various avenues of this music and a thorough listener, as he lays out and rejoins the others at critical junctures, always focused on the business at hand.

Malik's range of concept and delivery are compatible with Futterman and Adkins': crisp, dense, full-toned passages are balanced with long notes that trail out of volume and pitch as the music requires. He brings the kind of care to music that transcends the nature and limits of his instrument, in the context of this setting, his is an added voice in the best possible sense of the word. 

Care is always precious, but in the case of this work, absolutely vital, for the group was recorded under distinctive circumstances. Even before the project was finalised, Egert had decided to schedule the date with engineer Pierre Sprey at Mapleshade Studio. Sprey's recording approach is as uncompromising as it is unorthodox, and in his studio the risks of creation may only be overcome by musicianship.

Sprey records with two microphones fixed in a proprietary array, suspended overhead in a single, open sound room. There are no headphones for the players, no giant control board, nor is there any heavy remedial management of recorded material. The result is as clear and actual an acoustic sound as one might imagine which is fair compensation for the musicians having shared the task of essentially performing live without a sound system or an audience.

The trio is clearly comfortable in this setting, making the studio guidelines as well suited to this project as any of the other challenges involved. Actually, as large as the challenges here might seem, they are also quite compatible. The story at hand is not fragrant, lighthearted or neatly clothed, but it works as a superb dance partner with the parameters of New Music. 

Similarly, the altered Wall has proven to be well paired with its new requirements as a tactile, conductive meeting place and shrine. Along with the American Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington, D.C., the Wall suggests that the uses we now have for such structures might finally move beyond barricade and more fully toward remembrance. The day may come where we use them exclusively to help us, as with improvised music, and as with a bent popular image of the tango, stare a glance backward as we dance ahead to something different.

William Tandy Young
December, 1991

1. Part One: The World Watched 31:20

2. Part Two: Ask the Price 09:06

3. Part Three: There is Peace 23:37

Joel Futterman piano 

Raphé Malik trumpet 

Robert Adkins drums

Various Artists - Spirit of New Jazz (SILKHEART RECORDS 2018)

"We'd like to thank you at Silkheart for making the best compilation album of any kind that we've ever heard." 

Rick Petrie, WITR/FM 89.7 Rochester Institute of Technology, N.Y., April 1993

Through the long and rich history of jazz there have been a handful of labels that have defined their own jazz era. In the 1920s it was pioneering labels like Paramount and Vocalion, in the 1930s it was Decca and Bluebird. In the post-War era, with the creative burst of Bop and Progressive jazz, it was labels like Dial and Roost and Prestige and Blue Note that gave the musicians their first place to be heard. Now, in a new jazz era, it's a new label, Silkheart, that's giving us the sound of today's break-through musicians who are defining jazz in their time.

On Silkheart you'll hear artists like Charles Gayle, William Hooker, David Ware, Matt Shipp, Ahmed Abdullah, Charles Brackeen, Rob Brown, Charles Tyler, and Steve Lacy, and this is the only kind of music you'll hear on Silkheart. This is a label that's dedicated to the new music and its creators.

Silkheart is the result of a collaboration between two enthusiasts who have spent years hearing and evaluating what is happening in today's jazz. The studio production is in the hands of Keith Knox, who is well known as a jazz writer and critic and as producer of some of the most adventurous music to be found anywhere. He produced artists like Okay Temiz for the World Jazz catalog of Sonet Records, and he brought Charles Tyler to Storyville Records for two breakthrough albums.

The final decisions on what to record are made with his partner, Swedish jazz lover Lars-Olof Gustavsson, who spent many years in New York soaking up jazz in the era of loft music and free jazz. Lars seems to spend as much time in New York as he does in Sweden, and he is just as involved in the NewYork jazz club scene today. It is this personal involvement in the new jazz that makes Silkheart unique, and gives the music on Silkheart its immediacy in today's jazz world.

Sam Charters

1. Ahmed Abdullah Quartet - Reflections on a Mystic 5:12

2. Michael Bisio Quartet - A.M. 5.28

3. Charles Brackeen Quartet - House of Gold 9:04

4. Booker T. Trio - What a Friend We Have in Jesus 5:38

5. David S. Ware Trio - An Ancient Formula 5:45

6. Dennis Charles Triangle - Afro-Amer. Ind 7:15

7. Charles Gayle Trio - Eternal Now 7:32

8. Ethnic Heritage Ensemble - Ancestral Song 5:43

9. Joel Futterman Quartet - Reality on Edge 7:51

10. Rob Brown Trio - Escape Velocity 6:36

11. Dennis Gonzalez Quartet - Boi Fuba 3:03

12. Other Dimensions in Music - Spirits Rise/Fall 6:13

Joel Futterman Quartet - Vision in Time (SILKHEART RECORDS 2018)

"Futterman's piano sound is the result of having the strongest left hand technique in the business coupled with a unique three-hand technique developed while working in isolation for the past two decades. For me, though, the beauty of Futterman's approach is that his technique is always contained within the music, serving as a conduit for the development of ideas, and not used as a display of Lisztonian fireworks." 

Paul Niles, Jazz Review and Collector's Discography, March 1992

Improvised music is a warehouse full of paradoxes. Among them is the sense that this music, which promotes freedom and personal expression like no constitutional amendment ever did, is nevertheless governed by a set of clubhouse rules that often seem downright draconian.

Joel Futterman, who has been making music for a long time, with a 23 year involvement in New Music alone, is an individual whose career is well delineated by a healthy neglect for those rules. Currently working in theVirgina tidewater area, having forsaken the prototypical urban center, he is continually forging a music that is made with an early Ornette-like sense of separation from the neighborhood of creative and nurturing forces. As with Coleman, Futterman's music is indelibly his own, and has clearly and of necessity been reached through a continual and deeply-held belief in himself. 

It cannot be simple or easy to develop the urgent, frankly communal forms often found in New Music, while maintaining such a creative life apart. In truth, Futterman is not entirely alone in his work, for he enjoys a luxury almost as dear as his self reliance – that of a close and constant collaborator, Robert Adkins, who is the drummer on this recording. The bond that these two have achieved through their years of work together would be precious in any setting, but is especially focused, vital and well-kept in its own context.

Getting to hear the output of this collaboration is as great an opportunity as that of the two being able to bear down consistently on a shared vision, in lieu of working more intermittently with a wider circle of musicians. 

If anything, though, this work is under-documented. Vision in Time represents the first recorded venture forth for the pianist and drummer since 1984's Inneraction, made with bassist Richard Davis and the late altoist Jimmy Lyons.

That record proved to be Lyons' last date, a turn which had a deep effect on both Futterman and Adkins. Both speak of Lyons, to this day, incredulous that they encountered such a touchstone and kindred spirit, let alone that he's now departed. He is remembered here with the dedication of "There is a Smile". 

Having established a working closeness on his last recording, Futterman met with producer Philip Egert in 1988 and set about recapturing that quality in a follow-up quartet session, again with bassist Davis. The leader then contacted fellow former Chicagoan, Joseph Jarman, having written the music for this date with tenor sax and bass clarinet in mind, both prominent weapons in Jarman's arsenal of things great and small. Adkins, of course, was equally committed to recording in this setting.

He had met up with New Music when he met up with Futterman in 1974, after years of paying a surprising variety of straightahead dues with well knowns at home and abroad. He hasn't spared any effort in his development since. And, as is now especially evident, he has mastered the rigors of playing free time with purpose.

The way in which the quartet was formed for this recording is a measure of the acknowledgement given Futterman, despite his years of removal from the larger music making community. Jarman, a man of keen insight and curiosity, became interested in the project despite his being unfamiliar with Futterman's most recent work, and was furnished scores in advance of the date.

Davis, with customary elegance and assurance, agreed to fly in for the recording the moment the subject was broached. His admiration for Futterman's abilities and his offer of artistic support and fellowship (which is not lightly given) date back to his musical introduction to the leader some years ago. As to the present day, the ease of wresting Davis from the embrace of the American heartland for this recording was likely occasioned by a warm remembrance for the freedoms of the previous quartet project, and by his continued appreciation for the company of a player who shares his breadth of experience and length of service to the foundations of improvised music.

Indeed, as Futterman warms up the studio piano, it's clear that he is the master of many possibilities, some familiar; some, as Jon Hendricks would say, "unforeheard". When an artist of such range focuses on making a music that is continually new to his vision and capabilities, it's clear that such art is completely of necessity, and that it will be made regardless of the opportunity to record it. The pianist, who has miles of ideas waiting to be brought to sound, nevertheless has made the most of this occasion, and has fashioned the music into a distinct and evolutionary statement by changing some parameters from past work.

Vision in Time represents a more fully compositional effort for Futterman, and the compositions are of a relatively concise and discrete nature, as opposed to the extended format of Inneraction. Some multiple takes were made during the recording (running the risk of countering the freshness of the first take), and if the ensemble sounds close enough to have had the privilege of rehearsals, it is because the vital axis of this quartet, Futterman and Adkins, have been in rehearsal for all those years near the shore.

This undisturbed unity between the two men is clearly the great reward for their having kept faith apart from the bigger climates. They navigate the charged, dense structures of these New Music forms with complete and singular clarity, which should be a revelation to the listener. This clarity, obviously hatched from a distinction of purpose, is an empowerment that can help clear the way to higher ground for both artist and listener.

Thankfully, New Music is still the riskiest music in town to create, and when the risks are taken with such care and experience, they can be made irresistable to us. When the fruit of the risks is expressed with such clarity, we can be certain that when the notes have disappeared, as Dolphy said, into the air, we will have heard and been affected by them all.

William Tandy Young
November 8, 1989

1. Reality on Edge 09:45

2. Talking with You 10:14

3. Vision in Time 08:05

4. There Is a Smile 08:52

5. I Never Knew Her Name 04:31

6. I Remember 15:29

7. Round Two 12:31

Joel Futterman piano

Joseph Jarman tenor sax, bass clarinet

Richard Davis bass

Robert Adkins drums