Where other artists who have embraced the windy strains and shifting timbres of the pipe organ tend to go in for liturgical refrains, celebrations of the mundane or juxtapositions of the two – like Charlemagne Palestine whose swirling harmonies and rippling overtones for carillon and pipe organ from Strumming Music and Schlingen-Blängen through Godbear and his recent outing on Blank Forms have increasingly paid ode to his stuffed toy divinities – the long opening track of the latest album MMM by the Japanese composer FUJ||||||||||TA sounds like a Munchian scream observed in slow motion through the fogged porthole of a submersible.
Returning to Hallow Ground for the first time since his breakthrough effort iki, which was released back in the harrowing spring of 2020 during the first throes of the coronavirus pandemic, on ‘M-1’ the wheezing steam train of the artist’s patented pipe organ slips surreptitiously off the tracks and takes a deep dive through choppy waters. Vincent van Gogh might have imagined the nauseous, blocky and muted flats of reds and greens which characterise his La Berceuse portraits of Augustine Roulin as lullabies or tangible sources of comfort for lonely Icelandic fishermen, but on ‘M-1’ the idiosyncratic organ specialist pulls us out of the cosseting cabin and into the dankest hull of the ship, pressed up against its swaying sides as noxious fumes from the smokestacks accentuate the sky and muffled foghorns trail off into the azure aether.
Back on shore, ‘M-2’ finds FUJ||||||||||TA engaging in a gasping and palpitating ritual chant, a kind of stratified or sublimated panic attack which evokes the manner and patterns of Inuit throat singing. Since 2009, the artist has been recording almost exclusively with his hand-built pipe organ, hitherto comprised of eleven pipes and a fuigo box bellows of a kind which was traditionally used in Japanese swordsmithing, but on MMM his organ’s hand-operated air pump was swapped out for an electric version which freed up the composer’s fingers and wrists. So the chugging rhythms of ‘M-1’ were wrought by a gun microphone waved close to the pipes of his organ, while ‘M-2’ features the inhale and exhale of his ‘third voice’ singing technique, cultivated over the past decade alongside the whinnying cries of his organ without keys.
‘M-3’ serves as a synthesis of the two pieces, combining their rhythms and melodies with more subdued shifts. In its opening moments the track is redolent of gagaku, traditional Japanese courtly music which blends regional dances, shamanistic Shinto ceremonies and a folk poetics, here cut across by a sort of sawing motion which abjures the loftier inclinations of FUJ||||||||||TA’s instrument. Looser chants and breathy whispers are buttressed by guttural grows and throaty exercises of a percussive nature, a topline of curled smoke which rises above a garden of gravel and grit.
Another artist whose practise revolves around the chutes and stops of hand-made organs and other makeshift wind instruments, the Edinburgh-born and Vilnius-based composer Sholto Dobie has been a fixture on the experimental margins over the past decade, from an ethnographic preservation of khroniky alongside Lucia Nimcová across a series of visits to Rusyn villages in the Carpathian mountains to dadaist collaborations with Shakeeb Abu Hamdan and Mark Harwood and performances at such venues as Café OTO, Les Ateliers Claus and the Fyklingen festival of new music. Mining the absurd with an improvisational flair and a keen attention to the contours of local detail, his patchwork of compressed air, reeds and flutes, timers and variegated field recordings finds a home on Infant Tree, with the record 23 officially his debut solo album.
Attaching an air pump to a series of reeded and metal pipes culled from organs, bagpipes and the Laotian khene, a contraption which is brought to life by an interrelated system of timer modules, valves and swinging microphones, Dobie opens 23 with an intrepid and wavelike hiss which gives way to a chorus of bells and rattlesnake percussion. Distended radio chatter and snatches of overhead conversations or didacticism allow ‘Low time’ to segue effortlessly into ‘Forest logic’, which rustles somewhere between canopy and floor as a sine tone drifts in and out of focus amid the prevailing ambiance, before more rattling reeds offer a portal between the organic or natural and urbane or mechanised worlds, sounding by the end of the song like the stalled revving of a motorcycle engine.
Eschewing or perhaps inhabiting its paradoxical title, ‘Ice pancakes’ carries a brassier tone with a pulsating trance-like sine fraying slightly and then flattening around the edges. Sholto Dobie has a knack for blurring the mosslike with the medical or medicinal. ‘Among intersecting breaths’ sounds like a room full of oscillators or typewriters run amok, or else an ultra high-speed game of ping-pong as played by a pair of barely receptive tonsils. So on 23 there are video game divertissements which serve as a prelude to long, breathy, shakuhachi-esque drones, and times where single reeds sprout litanies of bagpipes and organs. After the stately, somber and even somewhat furtive ‘Passages’, the penultimate track ‘High time’ offers a high-pitched drone and breathy swarms over bucolic field recordings, the sound of chirping birds trammelling the sky as night draws its curtain. Then ‘Hot steps’ plays like a pump organ, the toing and froing of the pedals providing a human touch as the suite ends on a yearning and plaintive air.
After becoming the first ever Pakistani artist to win a Grammy and releasing Love in Exile with Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily, described as ‘haunted cycles’ which the singer ‘glides across like a dark moon’, Arooj Aftab follows up Vulture Prince with the announcement of Night Reign, an album which is set to feature Moor Mother, Cautious Clay, Joel Ross and James Francies alongside returning collaborators Iyer and Ismaily, Maeve Gilchrist and Petros Klampanis. Played over a music video by Tessa Thompson which portrays ‘a person whose allure, magnetism and charisma floats through a beautiful evening garden party’, Aftab captures the theme and mood of ‘Raat Ki Rani’ by suggesting that ‘Interaction with the queen of the night feels unthinkable. Sometimes we must be content with an exchange of glances’.
Inspired by the book Water Always Wins by Erica Gies, the bassist Stephan Crump channels a flow of sorts, tramping downstream in a barge in the company of a fluid yet watertight ensemble, with his frequent collaborator Patricia Brennan on vibes, Joanna Mattrey on viola, yuniya edi kwon on violin, Jacob Garchik on trombone and Kenny Warren on trumpet. ‘Angels Migration’ from the upcoming Sweet World finds the same Kenny Warren exploring Mexican banda through the lens of Serbian ornamentation, with the trumpeter alongside the cellist Christopher Hoffman and drummer Nathan Ellman-Bell also imbuing his track with a little bit of Ayleresque truth marching as the song steers to a climax.
Mette Rasmussen digs out a live recording from the old SuperDeluxe in Nishi-Azabu, a vaunted space for avant-garde jazz and underground music which played regular host to the likes of Keiji Haino, Yoshihide Otomo, the Boredoms guitarist Seiichi Yamamoto, Eiko Ishibashi, Oren Ambarchi and Jim O’Rourke before closing down at the beginning of 2019 ahead of the demolition of its building. Rasmussen and O’Rourke were joined there in the summer of 2017 by the free jazz saxophonist and vocal sorcerer Akira Sakata and the sinuous drummer Chris Corsano, whose searing melee led by duelling horns cedes around the nine-minute mark into a lullaby of solo guitar before steadily rebuilding through a crescendo of caterwauling strings and saxophone. Furry distortion provides a bridge between the two parts of the live outing, with the highland drone and covetous searchlights of the second part soon brayed by burbling overtones and a roiling buildup of cymbals and kicks, Sakata’s guttural vocals coming to the fore amid saxophone spurts before squibs, licks and scurrying runs are punctuated by a final growl of approval.
Following up on last year’s Children of the Forest – a careening series of sessions from the percussionist’s basement workshop in Queens, the last of which occurred just nine days before the iconic Bäbi dates – the Black Editions Archive continues to mine the private tape library of Milford Graves, presenting for the first time on record something of a free jazz holy grail. The trio of Graves, the tenor saxophonist Charles Gayle and the bassist William Parker gave just seven public performances between 1985 and 2013, with the third instalment of this vivid and recuperative archival series capturing them in June of 1991 on a two-night stand at the short-lived Lower East Side venue Webo.
Gayle, who had been homeless for a period of around fifteen or twenty years, busking on subway platforms and street corners, had only recently achieved a degree of notoriety for a trio of albums which he recorded in the space of one week and released in short order on the Swedish label Silkheart Records. The only sanctioned release by Graves in the fourteen years since Bäbi and Meditation Among Us – which came out on Kitty Records and helped to consolidate a longstanding collaborative partnership with the Japanese dancer and performance artist Min Tanaka – was as part of a quartet alongside his fellow drummers Andrew Cyrille, Kenny Clarke and Famoudou Don Moye on the 1984 record Pieces of Time. More than ten years their junior, William Parker had won respect in the jazz world as an accompanist for Cecil Taylor and had commenced a longstanding collaboration with David S. Ware, but had yet to establish himself as a leader. Together their two nights at Webo burnished a legend, described as a ‘signal event’ in the nineties resurgence of the New York City free jazz scene, with the first salvo from the painstakingly mastered and packaged concerts establishing the screeching tires of Gayle’s tenor saxophone as Parker plays a nimble and feline bass while Graves clatters about behind the drum set like a cat on a hot tin roof.
Across two inspired concert hall performances, Brussels Philharmonic and Umbria Jazz Orchestra accompany the Bill Frisell trio with Rudy Royston on drums and Thomas Morgan on bass, as the guitarist aided by the subtle arrangements of Michael Gibbs turns his penchant for piquant and sunswept Americana to parlour songs, standards and spirituals like ‘Beautiful Dreamer’, his own ‘Strange Meeting’, the civil rights bastion ‘We Shall Overcome’ and a standout in Billy Strayhorn’s world-weary, complex and clandestine ‘Lush Life’, wringing a little bit of oxygen and the faintest glimmer of daylight into the cocktail-hour gloom.
Discrepant and Pacific City Sound Visions edit down the gargantuan and hermetically sealed double cassette of H.R. Giger’s Studiolo from back in 2014. A project of the elusive Spencer Clark, which pulls visually and conceptually from the biomechanical art of its namesake – conceived as a sort of soundtrack which might play through the abandoned palazzo halls of his imaginary art collection – and the Cenobite iconography of the Hellraiser films, after the elaborate ropes and pulleys of the first section the ‘Salla D’Arco’ suite plays out as a marble labyrinth which stretches away into watery mirage.
The New York-based Iranian Canadian siblings Mohammad and Mehdi Mehrabani-Yeganeh as Saint Abdullah and the Wicklow-based producer Ian McDonnell as Eomac rekindled their fiery and disorientating, staggered, sacred and beat-heavy collaboration of percussion and haunted vocals as the war broke out in Gaza last fall, enlisting fellow artists of the Iranian diaspora in Aria Rostami and Cinna Peyghamy, commingling field recordings, recitations from the Quran and revolutionary chants with aspects of hip hop culture, with the proceeds from Light meteors crashing around you will not confuse you heading in the direction of UNRWA.
Sometimes characterised as Mexico’s first free jazz ensemble, between their formation in 1975 and their untimely disbandment in 1983 the trio of the pianist Ana Ruiz, saxophonist Henry West and percussionist Evry Mann as Atrás del Cosmos became a centripetal force within the artistic community of Mexico City, drawing equally from the loft jazz scene in New York City and the surrealist theatre of the Chilean expatriate Alejandro Jodorowsky, holding an eight-month residency at the El Galeón theatre and collaborating with vaunted American improvisers including the trumpeter Don Cherry, who in 1977 afforded a new level of national recognition to the group.
Honing their own improvisatory alignment behind the Cosmos cinema, the trio only released one solitary cassette before they chose to disband. Restored and issued on vinyl for the first time by Blank Forms, the live album Cold Drinks, Hot Dreams catches Atrás del Cosmos plus the bassist Claudio Enriquez on stage in 1980, with Henry West’s saxophone weaving around the ensemble, Evry Mann adding rotund hand drums and a graceful balafon solo to his broad palette of percussion, and Ruiz on the piano described as a distinctive amalgam of Horace Tapscott’s meditative radiance, Mal Waldron’s blues minimalism and Cecil Taylor’s percussive touch. As part of the album rollout, to celebrate the reemergence of the group, Ruiz and Mann will make a one-off appearance next Friday alongside the saxophonist Daniel Carter at the Blank Forms home base along Grand Avenue in Brooklyn.
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Akira Sakata, Jim O’Rourke, Mette Rasmussen and Chris Corsano – ‘Live at SuperDeluxe, part 1’
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Bill Frisell & Brussels Philharmonic – ‘Lush Life’
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Charles Gayle, Milford Graves and William Parker – ‘WEBO C3’
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Kenny Warren – ‘Angels Migration’
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Saint Abdullah & Eomac – ‘The people who initiate a new world’
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H.R. Giger’s Studiolo – ‘(Salla D’Arco, Mantua) Giger’s Zodiac Fountains’
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Arooj Aftab – ‘Raat Ki Rani’
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