On David Liebman's trips to Europe, as with many of his gigs in the U.S., he chooses to play with so-called "pickup" bands. In Italy, one of his favorite and most skilled combos features drummer Tony Arco, bassist Paolo Benedettini, and pianist Roberto Tarenzi, a trio more than capable of knowing Liebman's tendencies, having played with him on numerous occasions overseas. As a result, they play Liebman's original music and standards favored by all four participants, done with no filler, some hefty solos, and a wonderful sense of the teamwork expected from a seasoned ensemble. These performances are culled from club dates in Florence, Bari, and Lamezia Terme, full of the fire and passion that Liebman's playing on tenor or soprano sax is known for…

Having spent the last decade focused on compositions and recordings for his Jazz Orchestra, Scott Reeves took some time during the pandemic to revisit unreleased recordings from his quintet, which put out several albums during the 2000s. Discovering this set recorded live at Harlem's City College of New York in 2005, Reeves re-experienced the palpable chemistry and magic of the night as the band was connecting in a deeply musical place. He had been experimenting with electronic enhancements to his alto flugelhorn and alto valve trombone at the time. In combination with Russ Spiegel's electric guitar on the melodies, and alongside Mike Holober's piano and Fender Rhodes orchestrations, they uncovered a border between the warmth of more traditional forms of jazz and the edginess of more experimental explorations. The quintet is rounded out by veteran New York musicians, bassist Howard Britz and drummer Andy Watson.

This CD contains new compositions. Even this time, the basic creative principal has not radically changed: the development of basic musical ideas is shown by clearly structured compositions, mixed with organic, free improvisations. We offer our listeners not a hodgepodge from this musically unparalleled region, enriched with jazz harmonies; rather, we try to approach music as Bartók did. In line with this, these works were inspired by the ancient roots of musical tradition in the Carpathian Basin, but our music does not quote or reproduce; respecting the ancient methodology, it attempts to capture what can be expressed of archaicism using the means we have today. It is neither a desert island, nor an anachronism, because today even the wildest avant-gardism is just one of the things on the syllabus in the conservatoires.

Extending the concept initiated with his critically-acclaimed Jazz Composer’s Orchestra Update album, described by Down Beat as “pretty fantastic”, Michael Mantler radically reworks music from several phases of his career. On Coda he shapes favourite pieces – a personal “best-of” - into new musical suites, now played by an orchestra comprised of both jazz and classical players. Source material is drawn from the albums 13 and 3/4, Cerco un paese innocente, Alien, Folly Seeing All This, For Two and Hide And Seek. Coda was recorded at Vienna’s Porgy & Bess Studio in September 2019, and mixed at Studios La Buissonne in the South of France.

Daniel Herskedal is the epitome of brilliance – an esteemed composer of beautifully lyrical, rhythmically charged music and a world-class performer and technically proficient on an instrument he has made uniquely his own.

Franz Koglmann & Lee Konitz - We Thought About Duke (1994) {Hat Hut hatOLOGY 543 rel 2002}
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© 1994, 2002 Hat Hut | hatOLOGY 543
Jazz / Avant-Garde Jazz / Modern Creative / Trumpet / Saxophone

Duke Ellington tributes, much like Cole Porter, George Gershwin, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis tributes, were a dime a dozen in the '80s and '90s. All too often, these Ellington tributes were unimaginative and predictable, sticking to the standards while ignoring the many lesser-known gems that were written by Ellington or his partner Billy Strayhorn. But predictability isn't a problem on We Thought About Duke, a cerebral post-bop date that trumpeter/flugelhornist Franz Koglmann co-led with alto sax master Lee Konitz.

No composer looms over modern jazz quite like Johann Sebastian Bach, whose harmonic rigour seems to have provided the basis for bebop and all that followed. Listen to the endlessly mutating semiquavers tumbling from Charlie Parker’s saxophone and it could be the top line of a Bach fantasia; the jolting cycle of chords in John Coltrane’s Giant Steps could come straight from a Bach fugue and Bach’s contrapuntal techniques crop up in countless jazz pianists, from Bill Evans to Nina Simone. Bach certainly casts a long shadow over US pianist Brad Mehldau: even when he’s gently mutilating pieces by Radiohead, Nick Drake or the Beatles, he sounds like Glenn Gould ripping into the Goldberg Variations. Which is why it comes as no surprise to see Mehldau recording an entire album inspired by Bach. However, this is not a jazz album. Instead of riffing on Bach themes, as the likes of Jacques Loussier or the Modern Jazz Quartet have done in the past, After Bach sees Mehldau using Bach’s methodology. Mehldau plays five of Bach’s canonic 48 Preludes and Fugues, each followed by his own modern 21st-century response.

The music of Norwegian trumpeter/Nu Jazz progenitor, Nils Petter Molvaer, has always been cinematic. Call it music for a non-existent movie or a film of the mind, Molvaer's albums, beginning with the groundbreaking Khmer (ECM, 1997), have always been about aural landscapes evocative of highly personal imagery and plenty of club-ready grooves. Even in performance, the lighting provided by Tord "Prince of Darkness" Knudsen is intended to provoke the imagination rather than focus attention on the musicians. It's no surprise, then, that Molvaer has been recruited to provide music for film. His score for the 2005 French film Edy already saw limited release on Molvaer's Sula imprint the same year. Re-Vision culls four pieces from Edy and, by combining them with music from two other films—the 2007 German film Hoppet and 1999 Norwegian documentary Frozen Heart—and one non-soundtrack piece, fashions a continuous 46-minute suite that stands independently as yet another highly visual piece, incorporating Molvaer's ever-expanding frames of reference. Re-Vision is also Molvaer's first release in years to not primarily feature members of his touring band, but guitarist Eivind Aarset remains a fundamental part of its overall soundscape.

Greg Osby's outings for Blue Note are always challenging, always extending one boundary or another in his own idiosyncratic jazz iconography that uses elements of the historical tradition, the mainstream, and the avant-garde> in forging that signature. Public was recorded in January, 2004 at New York's Jazz Standard. Osby was playing in support of 2003's excellent St. Louis Shoes album. That band - trumpeter Osby on alto, trumpeter Nicholas Payton, bassist Robert Hurst, and drummer Rodney Green - all make this gig. The only change is the replacement of pianist Harold O'Neil with Japanese prodigy Megumi Yonezawa…

One of the greatest jazz trombonist sui generis, a phenomenon who has recorded for ECM, Blue Note and! K7, the other is one of the best Italian vibraphonists. On 11 June Gianluca Petrella and Pasquale Mirra will release the album Correspondence for Tǔk Music. The first excerpt is Correspon-Dance which the two define «the most surreal window of the record, a hammering of drums and percussion without a defined melody or theme, but characterized by a tight rhythm. The instruments we use and the intention with which we play them are as if they represent an ideal embrace between the north and south of the world, such as between the Malian balafon and the more western-sounding trombone".

Alexander von Schlippenbach - Friulian Sketches (2008) {Psi Records psi 08.07}
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© 2008 Psi Records / Emanem | psi 08.07
Jazz / Avant-Garde Jazz / Modern Creative / Piano

Sketches from the interface of jazz and modern chamber music. Powerful, dynamic and richly rewarding. You can probably look at the instrumentation and personnel on this disc and know approximately what to expect. Alexander von Schlippenbach will be well known to many listeners as the leader of the Schlippenbach Trio that also features Paul Lovens and Evan Parker. He’s also the founder of the Globe Unity Orchestra, and has famously recorded interpretations of all of Thelonious Monk’s original compositions.

This end-of-the-millennium quartet session probably best defines all the inherent contradictions in who ECM attracts to the label – what kind of musician records for them – and what concerns these artists and ECM's chief producer (and creator) Manfred Eicher hold in common. This set, although clearly fronted by Markus Stockhausen and Arild Andersen on brass and bass, respectively, allows space for the entire quartet to inform its direction. Héral and Rypdal are not musicians who can play with just anybody; their distinctive styles and strengths often go against the grain of contemporary European jazz and improvised music. Of the 11 compositions here, four are collectively written, with two each by Andersen and Stockhausen.

This is the third album by Polish Jazz ensemble High Definition Quartet, which comprises of saxophonist Mateusz Śliwa, pianist/composer Piotr Orzechowski (a.k.a. Pianohooligan), bassist Alan Wykpisz and drummer Grzegorz Pałka (each of the three albums features a different drummer). On this album the ensemble collaborates with five electronic music composers: Polish veteran/pioneer of the idiom Krzysztof Knittel, Igor Boxx (a.k.a. Igor Pudło), Americans William Basinski and Robert Rich and Austrian Christian Fennesz. The album presents ten original compositions, five of which are performed by the ensemble and were composed by Orzechowski and five shorter pieces, each composed and performed by one of the above listed electronic music composers (except for the Knittel piece which was co-composed with Orzechowski and co-executed with the ensemble), which are sandwiched between the ensemble pieces.