Friends & Neighbors - The Earth is # (October 2021 Clean Feed Records)

No, Roligheten, Johansson, Grönberg, Strøm and Østvang aren’t newcomers in the Flat Earth Society. They’re stating something much more exciting than a pizza-like world: that the Earth is music, with all its flats and sustains. That music as they love it is the Sixties and Seventies free jazz sound, the one invented by the likes of Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders and John Carter. Energetic and melodic free jazz, to be more specific, with simple and suggestive tunes you can sing, as pop or folk songs, but with complex, multi-layered, improvised developments that can go to the extremes of rage and joy. Friends & Neighbors are, as you know by now, a Scandinavian band, but they’re as authentic and hot driven as the real thing, and we only can distinguish them from the music played 50 years ago because they stretch those ideas from the past to the limit and go deeper with the embraced expressionism, in a sort of hyper-realistic approach. Can the metaphor of something be more than that something? Check it for yourself.

1. Halifax 09:02

2. Untitled 06:34

3. Salad Days 02:51

4. The Earth Is # 09:26

5. Father´s Birthday 08:36

6. Sidelinja 03:58

7. Joseph 10:15

André Roligheten - tenor saxophone, flute, bass clarinet and bass saxophone

Thomas Johansson - Trumpet, flugelhorn and percussion

Oscar Grönberg - piano

Jon Rune Strøm - double bass

Tollef Østvang - drums and percussion

Tracks 1 and 6 by Tollef Østvang (TONO/NCB) | Tracks 2 and 4 by Oscar Grönberg (TONO/NCB) | Track 3 by André Roligheten (TONO/NCB) | Tracks 5 and 7 by Jon Rune Strøm (TONO/NCB)

Recorded April 9th, 10th and 111h, 2021 by Dag Erik Johansen at Athletic Sound, Halden, Norway | Mixed by Ingar Hunskaar | Mastered by Fridtjof Lindeman

Produced by Friends & Neighbors | Executive production by Trem Azul | Design by Travassos | Photo by Peter Gannushkin

PREORDER

The Way Ahead - Bells, Ghosts and other Saints (CLEAN FEED RECORDS 2018)

The title says it all: here is music conceived under the influence of Albert Ayler, author of seminal free jazz pieces like “Bells” and “Ghosts” and one of the most celebrated interpreters of a gospel hymn specially cared by the likes of Louis Armstrong and Fats Domino, “When the Saints Go Marching In”. The name of the band (The Way Ahead) has the same referential weight: the way to go is in front of us, and you’ll find it while walking, as the poet (Federico Garcia Lorca) wrote. On the back there is history, and beyond you have the unknown. Each direction feeds from the other. The procedure could describe the respect that the present day American jazz has regarding its past, but this septet is Scandinavian, reuniting some of the best musicians active in Norway and Sweden. This explains why “Bells, Ghosts and Other Saints” seems simultaneously so familiar and so strange: the connection to the American jazz tradition is solid, but it comes without a cultural vinculation. As Europeans, Roligheten, Alberts, Barnö, Äleklint, Ståhl, Høyer and Østvang don’t feel the obligation to reproduce the exact parameters of the chosen materials, preferring it´s re-creation. The free jazz paradigm is free from itself, not to refuse it on the process, but to face it with fresh ears. The results are as much intriguing as they’re astonishing.

André Roligheten  tenor saxophone and clarinet

Kristoffer Alberts  alto and baritone saxophone

Niklas Barnö  trumpet

Mats Äleklint  trombone

Mattias Ståhl  vibraphone

Ola Høyer  double bass

Tollef Østvang  drums

Tracks 1 and 7 by Tollef Østvang (TONO/NCB) | Tracks 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 by Andre´ Roligheten (TONO/NCB)

Recorded September 16th 2017 by Marcus Forsgren at Studio Paradiso, Oslo, Norway | Mixed and mastered by Mats Äleklint, Stockholm, Sweden

Produced by The Way Ahead | Executive production by Pedro Costa for Trem Azul | Design by Travassos

Mars Williams / Tollef Østvang - Painted Pillars (STONE FLOOR RECORDS 2018)

Mars Williams is an open-minded musician, who commutes easily between free jazz, funk, hip-hop and rock. Despite his busy touring schedule with Liquid Soul and The Psychedelic Furs, he is an active collaborator with improvisers such as Ken Vandermark, Jim Baker, Hamid Drake, Michael Zerang, Kent Kessler, Joe McPhee, Dave Rempis and Paal Nilssen-Love.

Norwegian drummer Tollef Østvang is a key figure in Trondheim's jazz environment, and has established himself in recent years as an active musician at home and abroad. He collaborates frequently with improvisers like Joe McPhee, John Dikeman and Martin Küchen. Over the past few years he has established a close connection to the Chicago scene.

In Spring 2017, they teamed up for a series of shows in the US, EU & Scandinavia. Here captured on the live recording “Painted Pillars”, from Artacts ‘17 in St. Johann, Austria.

This collaboration is a powerful, spontaneous and unpredictable duo constantly searching for new and unheard musical landscapes.

1. Mental Chaos (06:52)

2. Painted Pillars (17:48)

3. Wandering Eyes (14:48

Mars Williams - saxophones and toy instruments

Tollef Østvang - drums and percussion