For more than three decades the saxophonist and bass clarinetist Andrew D’Angelo has been testing the boundaries or teasing the horizons of contemporary music. After moving to Boston he joined the big bands Orange Then Blue and the Either/Orchestra some of whose members proved lasting collaborators as D’Angelo continued to perform regularly alongside Cuong Vu, Matt Wilson and Jamie Saft. But his breakthrough came when he hooked up in Boston with a couple of friends from his Seattle youth in Chris Speed and Jim Black. They formed Human Feel whose best-known iteration was as a bassless quartet with Speed and D’Angelo on reeds, Black on drums and Kurt Rosenwinkel on guitar.
Human Feel moved to Brooklyn in the early nineties and therefore caught the last blush of the Downtown scene as it almost codified or institutionalised an indiscriminate approach to genre, already orbiting to some extent around the Knitting Factory and John Zorn’s various musical projects. Human Feel took an indefinite hiatus following the release of Speak To It in 1996 but their blend of dynamic free jazz and searching chamber music with elements drawn from alternative rock, funk or contemporary electronics has continued to characterise much of D’Angelo’s output.
In the 2000s among other collaborations he was part of Morthana with Anders Hana and Morten Olsen while the core trio of D’Angelo, Hilmar Jenssen and Jim Black were later buttressed by Chris Speed and Peter Evans for an expanded version of the mighty Tyft. D’Angelo also formed his own trio with Trevor Dunn and Black (a tantalising late-nineties trio project called Squawnk with Ben Street and Jeff Ballard appears to have left little trace). And in recent years he has been a member of Teun Verbruggen’s shapeshifting Bureau of Atomic Tourism while his DNA Orchestra – a large ensemble comprising such figures as Trevor Dunn, Dan Weiss and Kirk Knuffke – released a self-titled album in 2020.
Yet back in 2008 he had a seizure while driving in Brooklyn and doctors subsequently found a tumour in his brain the size of a tennis ball. He underwent two brain surgeries and tended to split his life as a musician and composer into two halves, the before and after of those surgeries with D’Angelo saying upon the release of DNA Orchestra that ‘After having two brain surgeries, I embarked on a new existence: one of healing’. Long since relocated to Berlin, the outset of 2025 then found him back on the treatment table as he had brain surgery for the third time followed by radiation and a course of chemotherapy that carried him into 2026.
D’Angelo’s relationship with Jakob Bro stretches back to 2008 when he appeared on The Stars Are All New Songs as part of a cast that included Kurt Rosenwinkel, Bill Frisell and Paul Motian and on White Rainbow with Bro’s nonet. Later in 2015 he appeared on Hymnotic / Salmodisk as part of the guitarist’s tentet. Those recordings were all released by Loveland Music. But from the turn of last year the label experienced something of a reawakening, a process fittingly inaugurated by Bro’s large ensemble album New Morning which expanded his nonet while still featuring a core of Danish musicians plus D’Angelo on the alto saxophone and bass clarinet.
Loveland Music continues to release a more than steady stream of Bro’s typically stellar collaborative projects, which stretch from large ensemble works and bottled-lightning performances to pieces with a more tenuous or playful chamber character. Sets with such names as Joe Lovano, Thomas Morgan, Larry Grenadier, Brian Blade and Craig Taborn captured Village Vanguard residencies or their aftermath while The Montclair Session placed Bro in the orbit of the veterans Wadada Leo Smith, Marilyn Crispell and Andrew Cyrille and Murasaki was a deft exploration of the trio format alongside Smith and Marcus Gilmore. A second duet with the percussionist Midori Takada is in the offing and for Bjerge, Strand the bandleader put together the classic rhythm section of Grenadier and Jorge Rossy while managing to entice Charles Lloyd into the recording studio for a rare foray in a featuring role.
At the same time Loveland Music has played home to spare solo votives from Mark Turner and Palle Mikkelborg while Thomas Morgan’s curious and long overdue debut as a leader Around You is a Forest leaned into generative processes as his WOODS virtual instrument engaged in a series of wonderfully vetivery duets. Andrew D’Angelo’s new album BCDELUXE is in this same stream as a solo outpouring which feels highly personal but in sometimes diffuse ways while demonstrating a mastery of tone as part of an unusually deep connection with a chosen instrument.
BCDELUXE as the name might retrospectively suggest is a solo bass clarinet record. Those are plenty rare and BCDELUXE is D’Angelo’s first engagement with the form but the album is equally notable for its manner of composition. D’Angelo recorded BCDELUXE at his home studio in Berlin between October of 2025 and April of 2026, during the period when he was undergoing chemotherapy for his latest diagnosis of brain cancer. While he says that he became ‘obsessed’ with the process of recording at home, the location and his personal circumstances meant that he could only work in small doses with sessions lasting fifteen minutes at a time as he played low to avoid disturbing his neighbours.
There is an absorbing history of music composed during periods of illness and recuperation or in moments of apparent depletion where it seemed like illness and struggle had become the prevailing theme. The examples run from Beethoven’s late String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, whose third movement he described as a ‘holy song of thanks from a convalescent’ as he wrote it while recovering from an intestinal illness in the spa town of Baden to Robert Wyatt’s influential Rock Bottom, on which he continued to work ‘in a trance’ while in hospital after a drunken fall from a fourth-floor bathroom window left him paralysed from the waist down.
I think also of the jazz and blues historian Allen Lowe and his album In the Dark which he called ‘a commemoration of the worst time of my life’ as he composed it during a period of sleepless torment following an operation to remove a cancerous tumour in his sinus. Struggling to breathe, suffering from neuropathy in his left foot and maddened by the morning sun which blazed out his fitful attempts to slumber, nevertheless the music began to pour out of him as he produced In the Dark and America: The Rough Cut in short sequence. And too of S. Hollis Mickey and her album Cocoon which was recorded in diaristic and impressionistic fashion whenever she felt capable, sat within a specially arranged setup of lap harp, flute, harmonium, kalimba, toy piano and various effects pedals as she suffers from severe myalgic encephalomyelitis which is sometimes referred to as chronic fatigue syndrome.
Zeroing in on the bass clarinet, BCDELUXE will also conjure sentiments relating to the instrument’s major practitioners at least within jazz and experimental contexts, from pioneering figures like Eric Dolphy and Bennie Maupin to David Murray who made an album of Ballads for Bass Clarinet or perhaps to Christer BothĆ©n, John Surman, Louis Sclavis and Rudi Mahall who variously helped to establish the instrument in avant-garde and third stream, crossover folk or world fusion landscapes. Most recently I’ve been listening to new work by Jeff Anderle who is a member of the reed quintet Splinter Reeds and bass clarinet duo Sqwonk, with Warp & Weft showcasing his winning interpretation of two pieces of music by the post-minimalist composer Marc Mellits.
The dashing figures and interlocking rhythms of Warp & Weft could hardly be more removed from the opening to BCDELUXE as D’Angelo really chomps down on his solo lines while playing a Selmer A series low-Eb bass clarinet, an instrument produced in the late sixties or early seventies which has been his clarinet of choice since 1996. In fact the verticality of his sound on ‘BIC’ calls to mind the shunting airs of a pipe organ but D’Angelo immediately shows his range as ‘Blues Lightening’ evokes other roots traditions and origins from Dixieland on.
There are some vocalisations here as the artist engages with the musicality of his performance while perhaps straining against its staggered or stop-start process. And the percussive aspect of his fingerings is especially pronounced on ‘Blues Lightening’ as those metal keys (of which there are upwards of twenty on a bass clarinet) are pressed and released to create a slack rhythm or beat which often seems to lag behind the melody. From an urban blues rooted in the milieu of the early twentieth century, ‘Blues Lightening’ grows woodsy and apparitional over the course of its near-five minutes.
D’Angelo recorded the album at his home in Berlin using two microphones, an Audio-Technica ATM450 at the neck and a Shure SM58 lower on the body of his clarinet. That mix of condenser and dynamic microphones should give a detailed, even slightly brusque depiction of the attack, the raspiness through the reed and the quality or closeness of D’Angelo’s breathing while consolidating the middle range and picking up the fingerings further down the instrument. Many of the pieces on BCDELUXE are layered while the tracklist shifts between short vignettes of less than one or two minutes and longer song-length features. Within those short and circumspect fifteen-minute sessions D’Angelo progressed from mustering thirty-second takes in the autumn of 2025 to three or four-minute passages the following spring, as he revised and sought to perfect the material.
‘Referendum’ is another short and sounds ornate, almost baroque like a traverso played at a lower register. D’Angelo then dashes off a kind of martial drum roll just on the keys before the conclusion of the composition, a gesture he repeats later on ‘Dingsbums’. Meanwhile on ‘PK 3809’ layers emerge from a low fuzzy drone, with a ripe pastoralism that reminds me of AntonĆn DvoÅĆ”k’s famous New World Symphony. The piece is gruff on the surface but elegant in terms of its melody, as you hear some of the pauses and cuts and commencements of the recording process then a cry of ‘fuck’ which sounds borne of rhapsody rather than pure frustration.
Through its yearning motif ‘PK 3809’ also summons up the Albert Ayler signature ‘Truth is Marching In’ or other tunes which find Ayler at his most thematic and overtly spiritual. For his own part D’Angelo credits his longtime friend and collaborator Chris Speed for inspiring BCDELUXE, with Speed releasing a solo clarinet album Light Line on Intakt Records in 2021 and including D’Angelo’s own ‘Sphasos Triem’ as one of the compositions. He also cites the alto saxophonist Lee Konitz – a late-career Jakob Bro collaborator before his death in 2020 at the age of 92 – as one of his major stylistic influences.
‘Nicolele’ is a little sworl that flattens out and wanders or strays in narrow directions. ‘Sonification’ evokes the kind of eddies of sound which are the stock-in-trade of Colin Stetson, though D’Angelo can produce a wide and furrowing vibrato then holds some long and clear tones about a third of the way into the piece. By now the combination of brusqueness or textural roughness with ripe and sensitive pastoralism has become native to BCDELUXE as the rhythms of the clarinet interweave to quite choppy effect.
The album notes state that for ‘Sonification’ the artist sought to capture an ‘added resonance’ which he heard all around him while undergoing months of chemotherapy, with D’Angelo explaining ‘When you take these super toxic drugs, there is some type of distortion on everything. It feels like you’re in a movie that’s being edited in real time’. To this end he made use of a ‘spectral effect’ in the Digital Performer sequencer and workstation, an early and relatively niche piece of software which has been favoured by such artists as Wendy Carlos, John Adams, Pat Metheny, Matmos and Autechre.
‘Contrast Agent’ gets bluesy again and ‘Bambara’ is impish and frolicsome, with a quickening pace and cascading repetitions as D’Angelo like rolling waves stacks up the melody. ‘Norsk Mystique’ is elegiac and fond as the musician gives plenty of space to clear and sustained tones, which sound wispy and solitary and sentimental. Once more there is a trace of Albert Ayler and jazz spiritualism or even a distant kinship with ‘Amazing Grace’ and that tradition of Christian hymnals or spirituals. Then the piece seems to gain an echo or gradient, as though it was laced with feedback and distortion or animated by a bit of a growl before D’Angelo restates the theme in his plaintive and sylvan tone right at the end of this lovely composition.
‘Happy Mellow’ submerges and thereby transforms the sentiment. It plays like a gaggle or throng of limpid water sprites, naiads or nereids, and gets more swampy in the middle section before a splashing finale. Then the artist stretches out into ‘Light Language’ which closes BCDELUXE and at more than nine and a half minutes is almost double the length of any other piece on the record.
‘Light Language’ commences through tender, lapping drones before a deeper tone resonates like a solitary walk down an arboreal lane. The song is a bit soulful and a bit bluesy, with some low buzzing or fowl sounds, some marshy or folksy passages and some animated sequences, as D’Angelo’s brisk percussive fingerings suggest sudden escapades or the quickening of one’s heartbeat. Mostly though ‘Light Language’ swoons and sounds shaded and arboreal. You might even think that you can hear the rustling of leaves, but it’s only over the last minute and a half when the piece slows down and becomes slender like kindling that you really notice a slight rasp to D’Angelo’s tone and the moistness of his lips before there in the clearing one last spectral swallow.
