From their prophetic debut New Jazz Imagination which was released on Umlaut Records back in 2017, the quartet of the pianist Pat Thomas, the double bassist Joel Grip and the drummer Antonin Gerbal – who previously founded the cross-pollinatory trio اسم [ism], whose most recent album Maua blossomed on 577 Records this past February – plus Seymour Wright on the alto saxophone have sought to navigate and recuperate the spurned catalogue of the double bassist and oud player Ahmed Abdul-Malik.
Born as Jonathan Tim, Jr. in Brooklyn in the first flush of 1927 to parents who had arrived from Saint Vincent in the Caribbean, the young Abdul-Malik took up the bass after first training in the violin, fell in with a jazz crowd and converted to the Ahmadiyya branch of Islam, then changed his name and as his musical career took off in the fifties, increasingly traced his lineage to the Northeast African nation of Sudan. He played on a trio of 1956 recordings by the pianist Randy Weston, an early ambassador of African music within the pantheon of contemporary jazz, then was scooped up by Thelonious Monk before playing on the raga-inspired ‘India’ as part of John Coltrane’s seminal 1961 residency at the Village Vanguard. He would subsequently play alongside the flautist Herbie Mann and the civil rights singer Odetta, but in the meantime at the instigation of Coltrane and Monk, he established a career as a leader starting with the evocative Jazz Sahara which was released on the Riverside Records label in 1958.
Jazz Sahara pioneered the use of the pear-shaped, fretless and short-necked oud in the context of jazz, with Jack Ghanaim on the box zither qanun establishing a rhythmic counterpoint, Mike Hemway playing the goblet-shaped Egyptian darabuka drum and Naim Karacand’s violin tuned in the fourths and fifths, a system traditional to maqam and other forms of Arabic music. Also accompanied by hard bop stalwarts like the trumpeter Lee Morgan and the tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin, the foundational flautist Jerome Richardson, the perfectly poised free jazz spirit of the drummer Andrew Cyrille and the reed player Bilal Abdurahman, who alongside the clarinet and percussion also blew breathtaking spells on the Korean daegeum and piri, between 1958 and 1964 across his six albums as a leader, Abdul-Malik continued to broach new frontiers, serving as something of a missing link between innovations in modal jazz and the first forays of what would become known as world music.
Sometimes dismissed as a pastiche before fading from view and turning his hand to teaching, the British pianist Pat Thomas says that Abdul-Malik’s original composition ‘Nights on Saturn’, the opening track from the 1961 album The Music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, changed his life when he first heard it sometime around 1981. A crucial touchstone which retained the capacity to shock, it was nevertheless a chance encounter with Seymour Wright in 2014 which led to the creation of أحمد [Ahmed], with Thomas citing the percussive tone clusters and polyrhythms of Cecil Taylor and the calypso stylings of Taylor’s early collaborator Dennis Charles as influences as he set about reinterpreting Abdul-Malik’s sound on the piano.
Three records down with a live concert in Hong Kong deepening their commitment to the groove, now أحمد [Ahmed] embrace their moment courtesy of two simultaneous live releases. Wood Blues, a double vinyl on Astral Spirits, sees the quartet tackle for the first time ‘Oud Blues’ from The Music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, stretching out a four-minute piece with a dark and viscous swing described in the liner notes by the Black Audio Film Collective founder Edward George as ‘like a Brownian bridge, an A&J Tranean train, a Byrdian plane or a Blountian space-time myth-machine’. The performance stems from the Counterflows festival which was held in the long and narrow warehouse space of The Glue Factory in Glasgow in the spring of 2022, with the cover of the album, a dusky palm tree depiction of the blue city of Chaouen in northwest Morocco, fittingly drawn from the archive of the photographer and writer Val Wilmer whose first book Jazz People featured interviews with Weston, Monk and Taylor.
A few months later, the quartet embarked for Stockholm and the Fylkingen festival of other music, where they played for five successively balmy nights as the Swedish capital sweltered during a rare heatwave. Each night was given over to a separate tune, beginning with their own stonking and serpentine rendition of ‘Nights on Saturn’ and climaxing on the fifth and final night with ‘El Haris (Anxious)’, something of a signature piece for أحمد [Ahmed] as it served as their introduction to the world on New Jazz Imagination. A reimagining of the track ‘El Haris’, which roughly translates to ‘cautious’ or ‘guarded’ in Arabic, from Ahmed Abdul-Malik’s debut album Jazz Sahara, the quartet inscribed their own version with the title ‘Anxious’ as an indication of both their excitement and apprehensiveness as they set about their new undertaking, explaining in the notes for New Jazz Imagination that:
أحمد [Ahmed] make music about the music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik. They excavate, reinhabit and use anew the now overlooked documents, and fragmentary plans, of his mid-20th century synthetic vision to produce a new jazz imagination for the 21st century.
The opening minutes of ‘El Haris (Anxious)’ from the Fylkingen festival capture something of a peacock’s proud strut, with Pat Thomas’s piano leading a staggered march as the bass and drums of Joel Grip and Antonin Gerbal wobble and shimmer and the staccato of Seymour Wright’s alto saxophone splays like the furling and unfurling of a train of covert feathers. As the title suggests, the playing evinces a certain anxiousness, an iridescent display which stands in wont of a response as the band are forced to plough their own furrow. Soon muddied and roiled, they never let up until breathless saxophone and scattered drums are joined around the 15-minute mark by cascading arpeggios as Pat Thomas plots another devious course, jolting ahead like a raft down a wild water rapid. Amid the clangorous din, أحمد [Ahmed] renew their sense of swing. The 27th minute marks a shift to triple time and a sort of backslide characterised by the whinnying of Wright’s saxophone, and by the 33rd minute a short and ominous piano motif is leading the piece but nothing stays on top for long as ‘El Haris (Anxious)’ constantly shifts shape, its players pushing and pulling each other along while always ready to instigate another rumble. Then in the closing moments the track falls into a tango rhythm, before quavering tremulously to a halt.
The five long tracks of Giant Beauty, packaged as five compact discs in a ribboned box with extensive liner notes by the festival’s publishing imprint Fönstret, were performed each night following a programme by the continuous composer Éliane Radigue, the tributaries of whose Occam series are intended to highlight the individual styles of an array of acoustic instrumentalists. Artists like Silvia Tarozzi, Enrico Malatesta, Nate Wooley, Julia Eckhardt and Deborah Walker performed Occam pieces during the festival, their subtle gradations and watery aspects finding a mirror in the torrents, drones and repetitions of the أحمد [Ahmed] quartet.
Elsewhere on the second night of Fylkingen – part of an old brewery complex with a Renaissance façade on the waterfront of Södermalm, which also houses Stockholm’s trailblazing Elektronmusikstudion – the quartet returned to ‘Oud Blues’ with its walking bassline and woodsy accents. ‘African Bossa Nova’ proved a driving example of the form replete with shakers and saxophone squibs, while the rubbery bass-led ‘Rooh (The Soul)’ from the album East Meets West channelled the work of the cellist Abdul Wadud, who died at the age of 75 during the week of the festival.
With her last album Potential on Cafe OTO’s in-house label OTOROKO, which issues the best in experimental and new music alongside important archival releases, the musician, writer and filmmaker Sunik Kim used General MIDI instrumentation to spark patterns of disruption featuring giddy trumpet squalls, elemental key clusters and orchestral sweeps, chiselling away at the representational quality of the Spectacle, evoking everything from the happy slapstick of Henry Cow to the brassiness of Stockhausen’s Gruppen, from the atonalism and rapid-fire percussive character of Cecil Taylor’s piano to the whirring domesticity of the Animal Crossing: New Horizons quartet Lil’ Jürg Frey, still hewing in the direction of organ peals and choral throbs sans liturgical pronouncements, swapping those for a strained economy of clangorous and riotous cyborg bursts. Now for her upcoming album Tears of Rage the composer goes further still, with a heightened focus on the physicality of computer music, saying:
I challenged myself with this release to use pure electronic sounds in a way that avoids generic ‘harsh’/computer music tropes, and is very ‘clear’/’dry’ and structurally complex.
On the opener and title track, those eponymous ‘Tears of Rage’ sound like violin strings peeled and then flayed from their instruments before a cacophony of massed electronics give way to iron-clad symphonic swells, a subcellular dream of life and death played out here as the final perilous stage of a fantasy role-playing video game.
A new compilation from Séance Centre – which has mined the library of the Palo Alto multi-instrumentalist Jon Iverson and spotlighted the hallucinatory Night of Power of the homebrewed New Jersey duo Abdur Razzaq and Rafiyq – and the archival project Smiling C focuses on an obscure network of Mexican electronic and electroacoustic composers from the eighties and early nineties. Culled from a contemporary wasteland of cassette tapes, private presses and public access television stations and billed as an ethnomusicological pursuit where ancient Mesoamerican traditions, pre-Hispanic ocarinas and flutes, ritual chants and the teponaztli and huéhuetl drums of the Aztecs warped and weft the tapestries of ambient music, the seventeen tracks of Triángulos De Luz Y Espacios De Sombra stretch from slapped cajon percussion and other Afro-Caribbean rhythms to proggy chord changes, brassy banda and New Age or Fourth World aesthetics.
From the glistening Afro-Caribbean incantation of ‘Brisa’ by Antonio Zepeda and Eblen Macari to the progressive rock chords of ‘Dafne’ by Armando Velasco, on the track ‘Clarion’ by Macari strummed strings, mallet percussion and shakers stand in for synth pads and kicks on what might otherwise pass as a quintessential slice of eighties synth-pop. There is a bit of Peter Gabriel or even Phil Collins about some of the tracks, with their twinkling keys, temperate drums and abundance of gated reverb. The tresillo pattern and the bass tumbao are ubiquitous and there are six-stringed serenades, windswept reeds and lucid field recordings, with ‘Non Observan’ by Germán Bringas a late standout as the producer and improviser takes an incessant synth-pop beat and pairs it with bifurcating, chanted folk vocals, percussive squiggles and louche jazzy squalls, inspired by the likes of Fred Firth and John Zorn while serving as a prelude to his opening of Jazzorca, which remains an important venue for free jazz and experimental music in the heart of Mexico City.
The latest batch of four on the curatorial platform Longform Editions features a durational outing on the Mills College Chapel pipe organ by Chuck Johnson, with the haunted chorals and keys of Mills alumnae Kristine Barrett and Marielle Jakobsons plus Patrick Shiroishi on reeds rounding out the small ensemble, a document by turns wistful and blistering of the Quaker Run wildfire composed by Daniel Bachman for fiddle and guitar, and a sojourn into the staggered heart of Cajun isolation through the treated strings of Weston Olencki with Jules Reidy.
Yet between the sustained organ drones and American primitivism, The night we slept under an overhanging cliff by the Warsaw-based electroacoustic composer Piotr Kurek serves as both skittish upstart and spirited likeminded salve. Elaborated from a series of short and unfinished sketches which Kurek left on the cutting room floor as he completed the skewed vocal harmonies of Peach Blossom and the sprawling root system or curlicued landscapes of Smartwoods – captivating full-lengths which the composer released on Mondoj and Unsound in 2023 – the finished collage or montage is made up of seven more or less discrete segments.
In the opening moments of The night we slept under an overhanging cliff a woman’s voice slips out amid the clamour of the forest, a cloaked call from beneath the tree of life or a sublimated Eve in the tropics. A clarinet supported by snatches of saxophone and bass then introduces the reedy character of the piece, resonating with the wetness of a Cristal Baschet with its tuned glass rods daubed by moist fingertips. Amid the whispering reeds and sloshing waters, synthetic woodwinds and harp take on the character of shakuhachi and plucked zither, tranquil and tentative while underlaid by New Age or Celtic, almost Enya-esque choruses. Pitch-shifted vocals play out like long yawns or stretched bass, and as the choir comes to the fore its transportive choral chants feel like water droplets, each splash or coo having a rippling effect, or like pan pipes cleaning themselves from the inside out with slender whorls and wisps of synthesizer for accompaniment.
At just over 14 minutes the choral swell segues into scarcely audible dinner chatter, metallophones standing in for cutlery while electronic squelches zip around the dining room and disappear into the pall of the evening. After a few loose keys, the sense of cosseting warmth is displaced by clarion bells as The night we slept under an overhanging cliff offers a cracked take on the stained glass and stultifying ambiance of a liturgy, with the occasional bell chime and warped organ peal against a droning background creating an atmosphere of heightened portent, the wily Kurek having successfully sculpted a few loose scraps into a bristling and nimble subterranean narrative.
At the heart of Noise and Cries (굉음과 울음), the compelling debut album by the South Korean artist bela, the track ‘풀이’ for ‘explanation’ also carries an Enya-like refrain but layered to create a dervish or dense whorl of fog over staccato drum beats. Developing the album in Seoul before moving to Berlin, where they are presently based, Noise and Cries (굉음과 울음) stirs guttural death metal growls, the throbbing hiss of industrial music and the cybernetic maximalism of the contemporary queer club together with a couple of well-known pansori arias plus aspects of hwimori and dongsalpuri, two jangdan or traditional Korean folk rhythms.
The Brazilian percussionist Djalma Corrêa is best known for playing alongside so many illustrious compatriots like Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Jorge Ben, Chico Buarque, Maria Bethânia and Gal Costa and for founding the percussive jazz fusion ensemble Baiafro, who collaborated with the vibraphonist Dave Pike, but the prolific performer and composer also held a love for incidental and spontaneous music. A new compilation on the São Paulo label Lugar Alto, with the full title Espontaneamente se Tenta: Aventuras Sonoras de Djalma Corrêa, serves as both a primer and a guide through his tempestuous soundscapes.
A double vinyl which features previously unreleased recordings, most of which were digitized for the first time for this set in collaboration with Corrêa before his passing in December of 2022, the compilation moves from the haunted house theatrics of the electroacoustic piece ‘Evolução (Para Fita e Filme)’ to free jazz excursions like ‘Evolução (Excerto Djalma Corrêa & Banda Cauim)’ which unleashes woodwinds as a flock of shrieking birds to the more quintessentially Afro-Caribbean and bossa nova flavours of ‘Brasil Mal-estar (Excerto Ensaio)’. Then the palette-cleansing ‘Exemplo de Sintetizadores’ plays out as a proto-mixtape or pleasantly chintzy compendium of louche jazz with wispy ambient New Age interludes, stretched out cymbal reverberations and carnival melodies with the spinning nausea of a carousel, winsomely and judiciously described in the album notes as a series of transitions ‘from transcendental drones to astral cha-cha-chas’.
‘Suíte Contagotas’ brings nothing but the bathroom sink and a depleted one at that, in so far as the piece delivers not quite running water but the dripping of a tap which briefly breaks into a flurry of splashes before the kerplunking climax, as the suite is subsumed by a swell of strings which feel like they’ve been tautly waiting for some action. The 16-minute experiment demonstrates Djalma Corrêa’s bond with the Swiss-born composer, sculptor and instrument maker Walter Smetak, with whom he shared a studio during his formative years at the Universidade Federal da Bahia, an inquiry into the randomness of dripping water just one of the ideas envisioned by Smetak for his Projeto do Estúdio Ovo, which was conceived as an egg-shaped sound and listening studio for the exploration of his interests in resonances, miking, amplification, microtonality and space.
‘Stress’ shrouds mallet percussion and strings in layers of distortion, with electroacoustic engine revving and a gaggle of noise which sounds like unruly students in the midst of an attempt to get a Mexican wave going inside a lecture hall. The final track of Espontaneamente se Tenta: Aventuras Sonoras de Djalma Corrêa comes from the famous Nós, Por Exemplo . . . concert which inaugurated the Teatro Vila Velha in Salvador, the capital city of Bahia, in the winter of 1964. An assemblage of friends which has been credited for giving birth to the tropicália movement, the night was capped by a duet as Gal Costa and Maria Bethânia performed the ‘Sol Negro’ of Caetano Veloso up on stage. Corrêa was the only artist in the lineup to use electronics, by way of oscillators and contact mics which were intended to augment his percussive palette. In setting up his equipment, he left a tape recorder on the stage which wound up documenting the entire show. Thus we can hear on ‘Bossa 2000 DC’ his submerged baroque melodies, which are brusquely overcome by teetering electronics and the percussive throes, as his scattered cymbals and riddled bass drum finally give way to a crisp surge of audience applause.
Tinashe gets nasty as she announces Quantum Baby, the second phase of her BB/Ang3l era. Written and recorded over a period which encompassed the death of his father – the acclaimed Fluxus artist, downtown scenester, reedy drone purveyor and instrument builder Yoshi Wada – and the birth of his daughter, Tashi Wada turns from slender strings and xenharmonic tuning systems to experiment with surreal song structures at the head of an ensemble which includes Julia Holter, Ezra Buchla, Dev Hoff and Corey Fogel, introducing What Is Not Strange? with the baroque trills and charged atmosphere of ‘Grand Trine’.
While Shabaka’s solo debut after laying to one side both his trusty saxophone and the influential fusion bands Sons of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming lands jam-packed with features, including album regulars Carlos Niño, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Brandee Younger and Charles Overton plus Moses Sumney, Elucid, Esperanza Spalding, André 3000, Laraaji and Floating Points as he turns his hand to the shakuhachi and svirel among other types of flute, some of the sparer tracks on Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace shine with a special lustre, such as ‘Breathing’ with Rajna Swaminathan on mridangam percussion and ‘Song of the Motherland’ which accentuates Overton’s harp and the soothing voice of Anum Iyapo, the artist’s father.
And after cutting what might be the first album for solo sherter, an ancient Kazakh instrument typically used as a tenor dombra with three strings, a shorter fretboard and fewer frets, the psychedelic noisemaker Mamer picks up an acoustic guitar to artfully deconstruct Han Chinese music scales, with his gusty strums and screwed tunings paying homage to Tursun Matia, the late master of the Mekit Dolan Muqam Group, or resonating like the ragas of Robbie Basho and John Fahey, even ringing out at some moments like the rust and vinegar of early-nineties grunge and alternative rock.
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Djalma Corrêa – ‘Evolução (Para Fita e Filme)’
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Sunik Kim – ‘Tears of Rage (Un sueño de vida y muerte)’
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Antonio Zepeda & Eblen Macari – ‘Brisa’
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Piotr Kurek – ‘The night we slept under an overhanging cliff’
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Tinashe – ‘Nasty’
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أحمد [Ahmed] – ‘El Haris (Anxious)’
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