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

Joe McPhee / Pascal Niggenkemper / Stale Liavik Solberg - Imaginary Numbers (CLEAN FEED RECORDS 2017)

A living legend of the open-form kind of jazz he plays since the Sixties, Joe McPhee is one of the most requested players of several musical fronts besides jazz, from Pauline Oliveros’ “deep listening” approach to new music to the free rock coalition formed by The Thing and Cato Salsa Experience (he played the music of Led Zeppelin with them), going through a collaboration with the noise makers of Nihilist Spasm Band. In recent years, he’s being invited frequently to work with European musicians of the improvised music field, and this trio is one of those cases: we find him with the German-French double bassist Pascal Niggenkemper (mostly associated with people like Harris Eisenstadt, Frantz Loriot and Joachim Badenhorst) and the Norwegian drummer who initiated this trio Ståle Solberg, usual companion of the likes of John Russell, Steve Beresford and John Edwards. And free improvisation is what you have in “Imaginary Numbers”, even though the one with its inner essence derived from the tradition of free jazz – in this case, searching for a stronger connection with the source, as the piece “A Supreme Love”, dedicated to John Coltrane, testifies. Indeed, the music here seems a coming back to its original home, with the improvisatory ideas of the rhythm section making peace with all the American cultural bag we listen in the way McPhee uses the pocket trumpet and the tenor saxophone. But this isn’t the peace of the swamps: there’s tension all along the narratives, showing that a group improvisation isn’t the search of a lowest common denominator. There’s no bad record with Joe McPhee on it, but this one may be one of his best.

1. I 23:43

2. A Supreme Love (For John Coltrane) 10:19

3. Zero 9:03

Joe McPhee pocket trumpet, tenor saxophone

Pascal Niggenkemper double bass

Stale Liavik Solberg drums, percussion

All music by McPhee/Niggenkemper/Solberg (JOMAC Publishings / ASCAP – GEMA – TONO)

Recorded at JACK in Brooklyn on December 13th 2015 | Recorded by Jonathan Goldberger, mixed by Fred Lonberg-Holm, mastered by John Butcher

Produced by McPhee/Niggenkemper/Solberg | Executive production by Pedro Costa for Trem Azul | Design by Travassos