Back in 2008 as Jon Irabagon prepared for his first album as a leader, his plans were as simple as they were ambitious: to take his main three horns in the alto, tenor and soprano saxophones and compose an album for each, focusing on the monumental figures in the history of each instrument. Inevitably the eclectic Filipino-American saxophonist, who later that year would win the Thelonious Monk Jazz Competition, added more strictures: while the records would be mostly comprised of original material inspired by the great masters, with a focus on group interaction and improvisation, each album would also feature one reworked standard, one movement or segment packed with as many musicians as Irabagon could fit into the recording studio, and one track of unfettered guitar shredding.
Jon Irabagon’s Outright! duly landed in the spring of 2008, with the saxophonist playing alto alongside Russ Johnson, Kris Davis, Eivind Opsvik and Jeff Davis as they summoned a raucous version of the Dizzy Gillespie hit ‘Groovin’ High’, while the ‘Outright! Theme’ played by the 30-piece Original Outright! Jass Band shuffled between New Orleans rag and sheer cacophony. Next up for Outright! Unhinged in 2012 a fresh ensemble of Ralph Alessi, Jacob Sacks, John Hébert and Tom Rainey joined the fray, with Irabagon on tenor flitting between Latinate licks, slippery funk and free jazz abstractions, on an album which paid tribute to the likes of Dewey Redman, John Coltrane and the stomping Arnett Cobb and served to inaugurate (alongside the stonking second volume of I Don’t Hear Nothin’ but the Blues) his self-published label Irabbagast Records.
Yet the lissome soprano proved less easy to bend or tame, and it was only the onset of the coronavirus pandemic with its enforced spells of isolation and surfeits of time which allowed Irabagon to settle down with renewed focus on the instrument. So the third instalment of the Outright! series Recharge the Blade finally arrives, with Irabagon on the soprano saxophone joined by Ray Anderson on the trombone, Matt Mitchell on piano and synths, Chris Lightcap on the acoustic and electric bass and Dan Weiss on drums, while Ben Monder plays guitar on a revised version of ‘Quorum Call’, and Chris Cash returns to add percussion, guitar and programming to the louche closer ‘Welcome Parade’ which features by my own count the 60 transcontinental and multigenerational members of The Trans-Atlantic Luxury Cruise Line Cigar Lounge All-Stars. Before that it’s on tracks like ‘Blood Eagle’, ‘Nightshade’ and the title track where Irabagon and crew showcase their sense of swing and post-bop syllogisms, while ‘Trés Bechet’ languors in an amber haze as with wit and panache the saxophonist concludes his trilogy.
12,000 years ago around the end of the last major ice age, the North Sea which now lies between Great Britain, Norway, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and France was an area of land full of sloping hills and wooded valleys, inland streams, rivers and marshes with a coastline of beaches and lagoons, saltmarshes and mudflats. Connecting Britain to continental Europe by way of the Netherlands, the west coast of Germany and the Danish peninsula of Jutland with a watershed which stretched between East Anglia and the Hook of Holland, this area of land was one of the richest hunting, fowling and fishing grounds in Europe before it was flooded by rising sea levels around 6,500 BC.
Named after the Dutch fishing boats which once trawled the North Sea and the large sandbank which serves as a remnant of where the waters closed in, today the landmass is remembered as Doggerland, with modern fishing vessels gathering a steady stream of antler points, animal and Neanderthal skulls, flint flakes and other artefacts as archaeologists and climate scientists continue to search for signs which might illuminate the present.
Embarking on another epic adventure in the form of a year-long series of extended plays, this week Laura Cannell trawls the depths and traces the wispy contours of Doggerland, taking us beneath the sea and its lost layers of ice and with a big gasping breath giving voice to the uncanny and the unseen. Supporting her signature overbow violin and array of recorders with the octave violin and cello, for SEALORE she constructs the soundtrack to an imagined film, where a wild girl caught between two worlds whittles practice harpoons out of wood and deer antlers, a conceit which might sound coy or far-flung if it wasn’t for the profound resonances and transportive qualities of tracks like ‘Down and Down We Go’, ‘Wood Silt Water’ and ‘The Earth Under the Sea’.
Trost Records the longtime home of Peter Brötzmann honours the free jazz bastion through the first volume of a hitherto unreleased studio session from Antwerp in 2015, where the tárogató, a signal instrument for Hungarian folk music, his bass saxophone and a plethora of clarinets including a newly acquired contra-alto were accompanied by his frequent collaborator Paal Nilssen-Love on drums and a set of Korean gongs. Eschewing a full-frontal assault, Chicken Shit Bingo is dirge-like and elegiac between the bar-room brawlers, from the stately march of ‘Ant Eater Hornback Lizard’ and ‘South of No Return’ to the flailing arms of ‘Dancing Octopus’ and the brackish bray of ‘Smuddy Water’, before the sustained tones and caterwauls of ‘Five of them Survived the Dream’ augur the resounding chimes and harrowing hollows of ‘Found the Cabin but no People’.
After banding together for a Tiny Desk Concert in the spring of 2023, the scabrous guitarists and dauntless improvisers Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendoza and Shane Parish accompany Bill Orcutt for a live rendition of Music For Four Guitars, which was recorded last November at Le Guess Who? festival during the quartet’s first European tour. On the occasion of her hundredth year, the archival rampart Mississippi Records prepares to issue the first vocal album by the beloved nun and inspired pianist Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, wrapped in childhood nostalgia and forebodings of exile as she sang directly into a boombox at her family’s home in Addis Ababa during the tumultuous years of the Derg regime.
From Lisbon by way of Amsterdam, the duo of Pedro Branco and João Sousa as Old Mountain scale their third long-play in the company of Tony Malaby, with Branco drawing inspiration from his ivory-juggling heroes Misha Mengelberg and Masabumi Kikuchi as he foregoes his trusty guitar for the piano and the prolific New York collaborator Malaby lending his aching tone and smokey textures on the tenor sax as they reconfigure the suicidal fantasies and fireside timbres of the Lead Belly standard ‘Goodnight, Irene’ and pay spare tribute to the late Paul Motian.
Burnishing his retro-futurist style of Brazilian music, which draws from its Afro-Brazilian roots, choro serenades and laments plus the mid-tempos of samba-choro sometimes with the swing or added gauze of contemporary jazz and electronica, the guitarist Fabiano do Nascimento picks up his seven-string alongside the slinky saxophonist Sam Gendel for a collection of folkloric pieces from across South America. The sax blaster and sonic manipulator Ayumi Ishito, hardcore guitarist George Draguns and dexterous drummer Kevin Shea play Black Flag jazz, the vocalist and tambooro player Bhagat Bhoora Laal sings a bhajan based on the writings of the Indian mystic Kabir, and from the State of Mexico the artist known as El irreal Veintiuno unshackles club histrionics through arpeggiated synths, fading chimes and vocal snatches which waft from the riverside up into the ether.
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El irreal Veintiuno – ‘Ilusión’
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Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou – ‘Ready to Leave’
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Laura Cannell – ‘Down and Down We Go’
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Peter Brötzmann & Paal Nilssen-Love – ‘Smuddy Water’
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Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet – ‘Out of the corner of the eye’
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Old Mountain – ‘The Sixth Commandment’ (feat. Tony Malaby)
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Fabiano do Nascimento & Sam Gendel – ‘Kwere’
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Bhagat Bhoora Laal – ‘Mann Lago’
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Ayumi Ishito – ‘Healing Gaze’ (feat. Kevin Shea & George Draguns)
