On Tom Rainey's second CD on Intakt Records, he surprises listeners with standards from Brubeck, Monk and Ellington. For this recording he chose some of the finest players New York has to offer. 'The players are pretty scrupulous... melodic variation is the heart of their method - they acknowledge the changes, but are very much playing the tune not just the frame. Think of the collective improvisations as multiple obbligatos... ' - Kevin Whitehead, from the Liner Notes.
The Cuban-American pianist and composer Aruan Ortiz has finally arrived on the international jazz scene, following a few earlier releases. His excellent new album "Hidden Voices" recorded as a trio with bass player Eric Revis and drummer Gerald Cleaver is the proof. Ortiz, who grew up in Santiago de Cuba, has been called the latest Cuban prodigy to arrive in the US. His carefully structured music is an exciting mix of contemporary classical sounds, afro-Cuban rhythms and powerful jazz improvisation. All these elements are fused to make a very individual sound. "I was thinking about this album as a circle with no beginning and no end," says Aruan Ortiz. After working with seven original works as well as tunes by Ornette Coleman and Thelonious Monk, the 42-year-old has turned to a traditional song "Uno, Dos y Tres, Que Paso Mas Chevere," that "everybody in Cuba knows from festivities and carnivals."
Everybody who is slightly interested in modern jazz knows the name of Mark Helias. The American double bass player has worked with everyone from Ed Blackwell, Don Cherry and Carlos Ward to Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams and Cecil Taylor. With Tom Rainey (dr) and Tony Malady (ts), Helias founded the trio OPEN LOOSE in 1996 to play his compositions which allow open form improvisation. As the three musicians get familiar with the pieces they recompose them on the bandstand. "The most interesting developments come when we start altering the compositions in a creative way, maintaining the spirit of the piece but taking it somewhere else, into an unimagined place," says Helias. "Every time we come together it's different, it's new and wonderful."
It was only during Ken Vandermark's residency at the Jazz club The Stone in January 2016 that Vandermark found himself in the same vicinity as Nate Wooley, Sylvie Courvoisier and Tom Rainey. A year later they went into the studio with nine compositions - three each by Courvoisier, Vandermark and Wooley. These four musicians have well-documented, distinct personalities which, in this context, results in performances full of surprises, rich contrasts and shared responsibilities. The music sounds thoughtful, but never over-wrought. They play by intuition, yet retain a vivid complexity. Their composing is transparent and uncliched; their improvising provided with a remarkable coherence and openness. And perhaps it is exactly this - a fresh collective unity that keeps their respective personalities and idiosyncrasies intact - that brings them success in this bold and collaborative performance. Art needs to pique and renew your interest, take you on inspiring and surprising journeys and sometimes even confront your own biases. Creating, not reviving as a way to evolve and to keep going forward in all directions.
The concert of the Stefan Aeby Trio at the Intakt Festival at Vortex Jazz Club in London 2017 was a highlight of live music in the capital that year. It made an emphatic statement on how improvisation transcends borders and underlined the strength of a new generation of players. London journalist Kevin Le Genre writes: "Aeby drummer Michi Stulz and double bassist Andre Pousaz make for an inherently contemporary proposition insofar as they are by no means restricted to the standard tropes of the piano trio. This is a group comprising three instruments and three open minds. Hence the performance sees the players organically shift the ensemble towards many stylistic areas, whether it is a suggestion of wistful ambient soundscapes, breezy, percussive African folk, or modern pop that retains the blues to varying degrees. The music is multi-faceted. Throughout the concert there is a palpable sense of breathing space as well as controlled intensity. A quiet fire. The lasting impression of this concert is precisely the cohesion and dynamics of the trio, with it's skillful straddling of natural and digital tones, and it's deft negotiation of sounds past, present and future."
This magnificent concert took place at the Berlin Jazzfest 2017, where Angelika Niescier was awarded the Albert Mangelsdorff Prize (German Jazz Prize). This concert by the Angelika Niescier NYC Trio with Chris Tordini on bass and Tyshawn Sorey on drums - who was Jazzfest Berlin's 2017 Artist in Residence, and gave several performances in Berlin - proved to be a remarkable stroke of luck for the festival, since Niescier had already worked regularly with both for ten years. Christian Broecking writes in the liner notes: "This Berlin Concert of the Angelika Niescier Trio makes it clear in a unique way how something organically complete can emerge from all this unceasing curiosity, questioning and research, from pulse, attentiveness and from an acute sense of judgment and knowledge of what is going to work. When Tordini heard the recording of this very special concert, he noticed both the collective attention and the freedom, a combination which only rarely succeeds in such intense conditions. And Tyshawn Sorey agrees: 'None of us either hung around for the others or hurried ahead of them.'"
Alchemia Garden: the album's wonderful title, creates an enchanting, ambiguous effect. Lucas Niggli relates the organic, biological and growing, which develops on it's own and is cultivated and maintained in the form of the garden, to the metamorphosis of material, the scientific search for something unknown which historically has been seen to generate something new. During his thirty years of playing live Lucas Niggli recorded with many musicians like Aly Kei¨ta, Barry Guy, Sylvie Courvoisier, Luciano Biondini, Michel Godard, Andreas Schaerer, Nils Wogram, Elliott Sharp, Steamboat Switzerland, Erika Stucky. He has occasionally given solo concerts, for example a performance at the big John Cage Festival in Switzerland in the late 1980s at which Cage himself witnessed Niggli's performance of 27' 10.554" for a Percussionist. It is time, in the best sense, for Lucas Niggli to release a solo album. What a great way to celebrate one's own 50th birthday - with this gift to himself and the listener. New York critic Laurence Donohue-Greene writes in the liner notes: "as a drummer blessed with a percussionist's intuitive sense and virtuosic capability and range, Niggli's memorable solo performances here unquestionably add to the tradition of the great solo drummers who preceded him while keeping an eye on the horizon."
