SoKo Steidle + Alexander von Schlippenbach was recorded on 6.5.22 and 15.5.22 at the XJazz Festival / Berlin. Oliver Steidle: For me, freedom and spontaneity as well as rival competition until harmonious interaction, is the main core of the Berlin sound of Jazz, rich as a whole wheat bread. It arises a pulsating movement, a organic body, full of energy and virtuosity.

The current work, JELLY ROLL PLAYS MORTON, explores one of the legendary figures of the origins of Jazz with splendid sensitivity. With her Jelly Roll Quintet, Helga Plankensteiner tackles Morton's splendid legacy with an attitude that on a first listen appears joyful, colorful, rich in moods and dynamics, with a few sprinklings of funk amid the rhythms of early 20th-century New Orleans.

Celebrate the trombone – Appreciate its slipperiness and weight; how it amplifies the intimacy of the voice and becomes vocal itself. Admire its ability to saturate and cut. Applaud its softening of the distance between nearly indistinguishable lows and all-too-present highs. The trombone is an object of comfort and warmth, an instrument of war, a field for play, and a surface on which to map revolutionary sound. The TRIO is that celebration: a celebration of the sound and possibilities of the instrument. And this is a glorious document of the kind of people that understand what the trombone is: absorbing and shocking; technical and transcendent; radical and human.

The trio has released a half dozen albums over the last 20 years, each with the freshness of a first encounter. There’s always a sense of discovery in their playing, as if it were their first time meeting. The trio seems somehow to exist perpetually at dawn. So the encounter in Lucerne in December, 2021, documented on this recording but it was, at any rate, the first time they played this particular concert: there’s wisdom in the conversation. None of the participants rush to dominate the discussion.

SOUNDBRIDGES was recorded on September 24, 2021 as part of the 'Ruhr Jazz Festival' at the Bochum Art Museum. Sharing the stage that evening were four musicians whose paths have crossed several times over the decades: Ken Vandermark, Matthias Muche, Thomas Lehn and Martin Blume. And the fun they are having is audible – They go straight into full swing, as if they had a world to win: Shouts on the saxophone and trombone are amplified by driving rhythms and analog synthesizer sounds.

REVIEW:

Soundbridges offers a lot: wide dynamics, wild free jazz, contemplative phases, sound excursions. Everything flows homogeneously into each other as if there were no dividing lines. Through sound bridges, in the most beautiful sense of the word.

-- Free Jazz Blog ()

We are memory and repetition. We repeat familiar sounds and communicate in this way, we call them language or music. We vary the repetition and create something new out of the old, shifting behavior and perception. Without a counterpart, our ego would be without borders - but our spirit also perforates the borders. Change occurs. Art, or in another word, communication. Tenor and soprano saxophonist Bruno Angeloni has worked with many fine musicians, including Reggie Workman, Andrew Cyrille and Michael Zerang. Although primarily regarded as a Free Jazz musician, his playing actually comprises virtually all types of music. The inner and outer struggle to find his way in the '80s music business, as a then young improvising saxophonist, without having to work in a commercial and adapted manner, eventually made him abdicate the market entirely and to earn a living on construction sites. Through perseverance he eventually travelled to Iran, South Africa and Russia, where he could rediscover his own sound, sharpen and strengthen it in such a way as to let music once again govern his life. After a short orientation phase in Rome at the beginning of the noughties, invitations to the Monterrey Jazz Festival took him two years in a row to Mexico, further broadening his musical pallet. Since 2016, back in Leipzig, he has had several rather coincidental meetings at public sessions with the 24 years younger drummer Steffen Roth. Henceforth, together they formed the duo 'Spirale' and have recorded this fascinating album.

1989: the wall falls – freedom at last! What could be more obvious than a German/ German jazz band. The musicians claim it as the first German/ German jazz band, as contact among them already existed before the wall came down. Not the form, but the musicians and their being are the quintessence - the form adapts. Every note, a statement. It's about creativity and improvisation. 1992 is the time. 30 years after the fall of the wall, much has changed in Germany. The mood is completely different. It is no longer a time of change and exploration, and now uncertainty and radicalization dominate. The music sounds different, but remains just as brilliant. Polyphonic melodies and rhythms characterize the sound. Jazz becomes even more of a home. The metamorphosis succeeds! The music fits into the new era.

Cecil Taylor, who died on April 5, 2018 in his hometown of Brooklyn, had a style all his own. With Ornette Coleman (1930 – 2015) he began in the 1960s to develop a music dominated by tone clusters and staccato notes that we later came to know as free jazz. The style icon on piano always began his concerts softly, slinking up to the instrument, murmuring texts to himself, almost dance-like, until the entire force of his playing style let the music’s unique power resound. Here we have one of his last concerts from 2008, performed in the Chamber Music Hall of the Berlin Philharmonie. jazzwerkstatt had already begun impressively documenting the era of free jazz with the last recordings of Ornette Coleman (jw 090 'For The Love Of Ornette'). We hear the last sound cascades from Cecil Taylor in 'Conversations with Tony Oxley'.

REVIEW:

Taylor said that Oxley‘s playing excited him like no drummer since Sunny Murray, perhaps even more so. They performed in Taylor’s last official recording Ailanthus / Altissima: Bilateral Dimensions Of 2 Root Songs , and when he toured Europe, it was often with Oxley as a duo. This album was recorded at the Chamber Music Hall of the Berlin Philharmonic in February, 2008.

Taylor was attracted to Oxley’s playing because of his unique sound, centered on a selection of different cymbals. His more fine-grained approach combined with Taylor’s supersonic technique resembles a musical shower of shooting stars. Oxley uses a highly original drum set consisting of regular (but higher pitched) drums and cymbals to create “intricate soundscapes” giving the music more of a vertical than horizontal sound. Taylor’s playing has almost always had a strict on-the-spot, definite, forward-looking phrasing, and by choosing Oxley he became the connection between modern jazz/blues and European classical traditions.

All this can be heard on Conversations with Tony Oxley. Again, Taylor uses small riffs which he reconstructs and expands, processed in his runs and shifting them to different registers. In the second part of the piece there are many staccato chords, again the basis for the development of certain riffs, but now more aggressive, and as they escalate the typical clusters come into play. Taylor needs some time before he reaches full intensity but as soon as he’s there he’s able to keep the improvisation at an incredible level. Yet there’s also a softness, a more romantic side to his playing that became more pronounced since playing with Oxley, especially towards the end of his life.

On this album Oxley foils Taylor’s runs and staccato chords with short drum rolls, but when it comes to dynamics he follows the pianist’s guidelines. Oxley dances around Taylor’s clusters tenderly and puts them even more to the center, cutting through them at once. Especially in the more intense parts of the piece, Oxley uses his whole lower array of percussion. In this performance as elsewhere they are complimentary, which is why their cooperation worked over so many years. Their music is about the exchange of cultural experiences and the sensitivity of sound – different musical languages, but mutually inspiring. By using its extremes within a split second, he is creating rhythmic illusions and simultaneously unfolding a vast color palette”. No other drummer except Tony Oxley was able to match that range in such a sympathetic way.

-- Free Jazz Collective

On NOT ABOUT HEROES, the haunting yet hopeful new album from the Berlin-based quartet AZOLIA, the words of WWI-era British poet Wilfred Owen are woven into rich tapestries of stark anti-war sentiment and urgent optimism. NOT ABOUT HEROES takes its title from the self-penned introduction to Wilfred Owen's 1920 collection Poems, which sets out a kind of mission statement for his work. Despite the tragedy of Owen’s experiences and the darkness of much of his work, it is hope for peace rather than dread of war that emerges from AZOLIA'S transcendently gorgeous and mesmerizing music.

On SEVEN WHITES the three musicians (Peter Ehwald - saxophone, Stefan Schultze - piano and Tom Rainey - drums) sketch out a complex musical structure, whose brilliance and depth lies precisely in the way they elaborate upon shades. Crucial are the shades and intricacies with which the musicians immerse themselves in a rhythm that is sometimes an energetic shared quest, and sometimes a contrapuntal pulsing, which dissolves into a frame of each other. The music on this album has a magnetism far beyond that of a black and white painting.

The titles of this music are as much a play on words as its content is a play on musical idioms and abstraction based on the 30-year-old 'Ground Music' concept developed while composing for Blue Collar, the Andreas Willers Octet and Montauk among others, striving for further development of a contemporary European jazz language. Andreas Willers started out as a blues and avantgarde guitarist, first outing 1981 on the FMP label (‘Hier & Als Auch’, solo guitar), studied electric guitar and composition in Los Angeles (MI/GIT, with Joe Diorio), Hamburg (HfM, w. Harry Pepl) and Banff/Canada (w. John Abercrombie). He has composed for the Jazz Baltica Ensemble, the NDR Bigband, numerous new music ensembles, and is a founding member of the musicians cooperative Jazzfront Berlin-Brandenburg.