New releases May – August 2010
Sequence of introduction:
177
157
178
655
679
686
690
692
698
hat(now)ART 157
Morton Feldman
Clarinet & String Quartet
Total time 49:41 DDD, Barcode: 752156015727
Perhaps surprisingly, I find that Clarinet And String Quartet and the epicritical, aleatoric (thus the two different versions released here) Two Pieces For Clarinet And String Quartet, composed twenty-three years earlier, have much in common. Both are intimate, introspective, transparent, and concise, and despite the earlier work’s delicacy and brevity, their differences are of surface, not content and certainly not feeling. Though their means are unalike, they illuminate key issues in Feldman’s music: commitment, integrity, and wonder, turning anxiety into discovery, and emotion into art.
hat(now)ART 177
Sergei Prokofiev & Dmitri Shostakovich
Works For 2 Pianists Under Soviet Rule
Total time 59:56 DDD, Barcode: 752156017721
With Socialist Realism Stalin promulgated and imposed a cultural doctrine which in accordance with the ruling party and ideology demanded of the artist the truthful and positive representation of reality plus it also decreed that art should appeal to the masses, be simple, folkloristic and understandable to all people. The Stalinist cultural campaigns of 1936/38 and 1946/48 enforced the doctrine ruthlessly, among the artists denounced for straying from the official line are Dmitri Shostakovich and – in the last campaign – Sergei Prokofiev.
hat(now)ART 178
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Plus-Minus
Total time 72:41 DDD, Barcode: 752156017820
Perhaps more than any other composer of his generation, Stockhausen realised that serialism had an expressive potential which went far beyond the method of twelve-tone composition devised by Schoenberg. In these three key works works from the 1950s and early 1960s he found ways of using the serial principle to govern not just pitch, but every aspect of sound-types and their distribution in time and space, culminating in Plus-Minus, a score which specified not sounds but rather a system of organising sounds.
hatOLOGY 655
John Zorn
George Lewis
Bill Frisell
More News For Lulu
Total time 77:53, DDD, Barcode: 752156065524
In 1987 John Zorn, George Lewis, and Bill Frisell were all members of New York’s thriving, conceptually-minded downtown scene. They approached the Blue Note material with a considered artistic agenda — to test its capacity for tolerance of outside techniques, and to critique bop’s ethos of individuality, which required many of its practitioners to trade a life of penury and exploitation for the chance to attain individual expression on the bandstand.
hatOLOGY 679
Vienna Art Orchestra
A Notion In Perpetual Motion
Total time 76:40, DDD, Barcode: 752156067924
Does the “perpetual motion” of the title refer to life on the road? Or the ongoing continuum of musical tradition, which in the hands of Rüegg can be honored and manipulated at the same time? Hard to say, since in the musical realm of Mathias Rüegg, meanings have multiple choices and anything is possible.
hatOLOGY 686
Loren Connors & Jim O'Rourke
Are You Going To Stop...In Bern?
Total time 48:46 DDD, Barcode: 752156068624
In fact, the art of O’Rourke and Connors lies in letting one feel the immobility withi n movement, and in instilling movement right at the heart of immobility. It’s almost superfluous to say that this music belongs to the realm of dreams, it’s music for the mind, abstract and yet wholly present to itself and therefore totally concrete too. The two guitarists set off in search of sound. Their quest is wildly raging now and then, but only for a brief moment, most of the time it’s contemplative. Just as the meditative mode can suffice unto itself, so O’Rourke and Connors let the sound come to them, thus giving it all the time and space it needs to unfurl in suc cessive waves, all alike and yet all different. This music, figurative and non-figurative, almost oriental in its sparseness yet eternally rooted in the American landscape, invites the following thought – if John Cage had ever composed any country music, it would certainly have sounded like this
hatOLOGY 690
Marc Copland Trio
Haunted Heart
Total time 65:56, DDD, Barcode: 752156069027
Playing ballads is, in many ways, the ultimate musical challenge. A ballad is like a window into the soul of the artist. From the first note, it must be approached with true and honest feeling, and a sense of openness. At the beginning of a musician’s journey, one tends to believe that playing fast is difficult; as that journey progresses, one realizes that playing slowly is much more difficult. Musical values that are important elsewhere, are here absolutely essential: sensitivity, color, dynamics, economy, and clarity. We hope that in opening our hearts, we have touched yours.
hatOLOGY 692
Lee Konitz,
Don Friedman & Attila Zoller
Thingin
Total time 65:08, DDD, Barcode: 752156069225
So if this disc establishes a new incident of history, influenced by lines of inspiration drifting together from the past, it also effects our perspective of that past as an agent of discovery in the present. What they have discovered on this particular occasion is an area of engagement free as the breeze – or perhaps three breezes that momen tarily meet, tangle, blend, and dissolve, warm and invisible, in their own sweet way.
hatOLOGY 698
Sun Ra Arkestra
Sunrise In Different Dimensions
Total time 71:04, DDD, Barcode: 752156069829
“Beauty is necessary for survival.” So Sun Ra told me in 1983. But whether or not you believe beauty is necessary for survival, you can be sure that you’re holding a little piece of it in your hand right now. And who knows but that, in different dimensions, Sun Ra speaks for you?
Recent releases
hat(now)ART 141
Chritian Wolff
Early Piano Pieces
Steffen Schleiermacher
Total time 73:06, DDD, Barcode: 752156014126
For Prepared Piano (1951) was my first experiment with John Cage’s invention (putting various objects into the piano strings to produce percussive or non-specifically pitched sounds) and a continuation of interest in percussion as such. I had been a friend of John’s, after a brief time as a student, for about a year. But I’d known about the prepared piano earlier from scores in Henry Cowell’s New Music Publications.
hat(now)ART 142
Morton Feldman
For Samuel Beckett (1987)
Ensemble Modern
Total time 43:36, ADD, Barcode: 752156014225
For Samuel Beckett is a late (1987) work, rich in detail and lush in sound (especially in relation to so many of his more «austere» pieces, early and late), but troubling, obsessed, claustrophobic in spite of its scope. Given their shared attraction to shadow (Feldman’s music uses chiaroscuro in the way Beckett meticulously exploited darkness and light and the moods in between on the stage and on the page), it’s perhaps surprising that Feldman’s dedication didn’t involve the starker textures of solo piano—an individual surrounded by ... nothing. In any case, this is not dazzling, but muted, orchestration; instrumental timbres and tonal colors emerge as if by chance and quickly disappear.
hat(now)ART 143
Ivan Wyschnegradsky
Quarter-Tone Pieces
Josef Christof & Steffen Schleiermacher
Total time 59:20, DDD, Barcode: 752156014324
Wyschnegradsky saw microtonality as a mystical impulse, a metaphysical method of transcendence; not so for the pragmatic Ives, whose father invented instruments and playfully experimented with twisted tonalities and microtonal singing. For Ives, microtonality was another technique (along with his fistful-of-notes clusters, collisions of keys, out-of-tune quotations, and multiple marching band allusions) toward the ultimate acceptance of all conceivable dissonances. Today, Ives’ and Wyschnegradsky’s time has finally come. For 21 years there has been a Festival of Microtonal Music in New York, attracting ever younger generations of composers; for over a decade now electronic musicians engaged in ambient, trance, dance, and improvisational idioms are using the kind of free frequency sonorities that Wyschnegradsky idealized. In his rare essay «Some ‹Quarter-Tone› Impressions,» Ives wondered «How much of a fight will the ears have to put up?» For more listeners than ever before, the fight is nearly over.
hat(now)ART 145
John Cage (1912–1992)
Imaginary Landscapes
Total time 51:15, DDD, Barcode: 752156014522
Improvising guitarist Derek Bailey has expressed the belief that «If you’re going to explore uncharted territory, it’s okay to carry a compass, but not a map.» It’s obvious; if you know where you’re going and have plotted the most efficient or scenic course to get there, you may arrive without mishap but deprived of much of the drama, the danger, the unpredictable uniqueness of the journey. In the years following 1950, John Cage walked these paths of musical uncertainty, providing performers with a sense of direction but without indicating a final goal or specifying the sights one would encounter along the way. By attempting to emulate Nature in its own manner of operation, Cage sought to erase what he felt were the artificial boundaries of conventional form, escape the clichés of familiarity, and make each musical experience a discovery of detail and destination – for himself, the performer, and listener alike.
hat(now)ART 149
Transatlantic Swing
John Snijders
Total time 77:30, DDD, Barcode: 752156014928
Transatlantic Swing is a CD of music rich in elusive connections. Some of the music is ‘transatlantic’ because it’s music by Europeans influenced by the Americas, some because it’s music by an American played by a European. In some way all the music ‘swings’, but no two pieces swing in the same way.There’s also a network of friendships between the composers represented here, although together they don’t represent any one tendency in contemporary musical aesthetics. And there’s a network of shared preoccupations in the music here – the balance between process and fantasy in musical form, the dynamics of sound and silence, the reconfiguration of popular music – but not all these preoccupations occur in every piece.
hat(now)ART 151
James Tenney (1934)
Pika-Don
Total time 65:30, DDD, Barcode: 752156015123
Tenney has often characterized himself as a kind of «tone scientist», that is, one working on an almost microscopic level with the primary materials of sound in order to expand our knowledge of its properties (what makes it what it is) and perceptual identity (how we respond to it). To do so, he has composed music that isolates the components of sound production into their most basic acoustic phenomena; music that explores and illuminates the subatomic pitch relationships within the harmonic series; music that combines these pitches into complexes motivated by systematic patterns or chance procedures. By thus objectifying music, and consequently rejecting its romanticized «self-expressive» nature, Tenney links composition with phenomenology. «The basic idea in phenomenology», he told Gayle Young, «is making a more strenuous effort to see things as they are, depending upon whatever one is focusing on. I think the best scientists and the best artists are precisely that – phenomenologists». – Art Lange
hat(now)ART 161
Stefan Wolpe (1902–1972)
Enactments
Total time 54:59, DDD, Barcode: 752156016120
The piano was Stefan Wolpe’s instrument, the playground of his imagination, and most of his pieces have a part for at least one piano to play.
hat(now)ART 162
Pierre Boulez (1925)
Notations & Piano Sonatas
Total time 75:20, DDD, Barcode: 752156016229
It is hardly surprising that the significance of the chapters in music history does not depend on their size. But almost never has there been such a concentration of events as in the case of the development, manifestation and overturning of serial music.And what is even more remarkable is that the individual stages of a historical process (post-twelve-tone serialism in our case) can be illustrated with the works of one composer, that is, with the piano pieces of Pierre Boulez. Just one decade passed between the fragile as well as fugitive Douze notations and the prodigious torso of the Third Piano Sonata – between the early work of an unknown composer in his twenties, who was already firm in his resolve not to keep up the tradition he was part of, and the work of the thirty-year-old avant-garde star, who only had to loosen the ties he himself had put on before.
hat(now)ART 166
George Crumb
Vox Balaenae
Ensemble für Neue Musik Zürich
Total time 63:40, DDD, Barcode: 752156016625
George Crumb should be seen not as an isolated, iconoclastic voice who emerged unexpectedly in the ‘60s and continues to follow his own separate path, but as another important historical figure in the long line of American maverick composers... As a composer in search of transcendence, think of Ives, Cowell, Morton, Partch, Ellington, Nancarrow, Carter, Cage, Feldman,Tenney, Monk, among others, each in their own way. It is in this company that George Crumb belongs. A company beyond category.
hat(now)ART 167
Morton Feldman
Ives Ensemble
String Quartett
Total time 76:57, DDD, Barcode: 752156016724
The string quartet has a special place in classical music, second in importance among ensembles only to the orchestra.The string quartet repertoire is rich, ranging from the 18th and 19th century Classicists and Romantics—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert most prominently—to Modernists of the past century—Bartok, Shostakovich, and Milhaud among the most prolific and respected. Even iconoclasts like Schönberg, Berg, Babbitt, and Carter confirmed a connection to the tradition and created works which adhered to the formal logic and dramatic ambience of those of their predecessors while incorporating their own compositional procedures. But there have been exceptions as well, extremist composers who rejected the genre outright, or distorted it beyond recognition. Morton Feldman fits into the latter category...or does he?
hat(now)ART 168
Luciano Berio & Edison Denissow
Works for Voice and Chamber Ensemble
Ensemble für Neue Musik Zürich
Total time 55:15, DDD, Barcode: 752156016823
hat(now)ART 169
Isaac Babel
The Sin Of Jesus
Total time 55:47, DDD, Barcode: 752156016922
Transcribing Babel’s text into music, Hans-Peter Frehner followed a rigorous system of rules, with the words generating the melodic lines, and the letters the rhythm and harmony, while the action of the story determines the structure and form. It is an arcane system that becomes sound and music here, and which cannot be recognised simply by the ear. For the rules that determine our action and our longing are not visible on the surface, as we all know.They operate in the depths of our instincts, in our longings and passions – and this is the moral of Babel’s frivolous legend of Jesus – dangerous even for frail angels.
hat(now)ART 170
Makrokosmos Quartet
Total time 71:34, DDD, Barcode: 752156017028
The idea of an ensemble composed of pianos and percussion instruments first came about in Stravinsky’s The Wedding. Shortly thereafter, Bartok, who frequently emphasized the percussive aspect of the piano, developed this idea in his orchestral works (Piano Concerto No. 1, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta). In his 1937 Sonata for two pianos and percussion, he established a new instrumental archetype which was taken up by subsequent composers, such as the ones represented in this recording. However, for these composers, it isn’t so much the rhythmic and dynamic elements which link the piano to the various percussion instruments, as was the case for Stravinsky and Bartok, but rather the full range of sound possibilities—the set of different colors—provoking the idea of a fusion between the two entities. One of the characteristics of the huge diversity of percussion instruments that have been adopted from around the world during the past hundred or so years, is indeed the extraordinary variety of specific tonal qualities, in which the kinds of attacks and resonances—the way sounds appear, resonate, and disappear—play an important part. The works of Crumb, Gervasoni, and Haas are built upon such a range of sounds requiring new arrangements and new ways of articulation. Each work has its own range of colors which constitutes the basic material of the composition. Far from the intrinsic structures which reached their peak in serialism, the organization of pitches is here subsumed by the originality and combination of sounds as such. The acoustic quality as a structural and sensitive element is not produced exclusively by a combination of pitches whatever the complexity, but by a very thorough analysis of sound and dynamics. In Makrokosmos, George Crumb uses archaic modal structures and tonal music quotes, which also can be found in Georg Friedrich Haas’ second piece, where tonal chords seem to be lost and found objects.
hat(now)ART 174
Morton Feldman
For Bunita Marcus (1985)
Total time 71:41, DDD, Barcode: 752156017424
For Bunita Marcus has an aura like that which emanates off Rothko’s greatest paintings, an aura that makes the experience, no less than the creation, more than an act of will, an act of devotion.
hatOLOGY 602
Joe McPhee, Lisle Ellis, Paul Plimley
Sweet Freedom
Total time 72:31, DDD, Barcode: 752156060222
«A Timeless Protest, Updated» – 14 years have passed since the recording of Sweet Freedom – Now What? Today, the world is a very different and infinitely more dangerous place. The Berlin Wall has fallen, only to have new ones rise up in Israel and along the US southern border with Mexico; to name a few. Physical walls which separate people for what ever reasons are deemed legitimate, pale before psychological walls caused by economics, politics and wars spanning generations. Civil and human rights fall prey to expediency, caught up in a meat grinder of opinion, while the revolution is being televised in full, bloody and horrific color daily...hourly. Ends justify means, with manifesto, bravado and claims of responsibility. The words from Janis Joplin’s song: «Me and my Bobby McGee», «Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose», give pause for reflection. Still, at the end of the day «TOMORROW IS THE QUESTION», and the question is, NOW WHAT? Joe McPhee, August 2007
hatOLOGY 610
Anthony Braxton
Performance (Quartet) 1979
Total time 71:13, AAD, Barcode: 752156061021
The great advantage of having complete live concerts on record is that we can hear also those intriguing spaces between the compositions: the improvisations which take the group from point A to point B are also the areas in which some of Braxton's most radical notions have first been voiced. As we shall see, Performance (Quartet) 1979 is of particular interest in this regard.
hatOLOGY 615
David Liebman & Ellery Eskelin
Different But The Same
Total time 58:25, DDD, Barcode: 752156061526
It should be noted that Liebman is heard on the left channel and Eskelin on the right throughout, as their similarities emerge frequently throughout the program. «I can’t always tell the difference myself,» says Liebman, … Eskelin adds that this was no afterthought, but rather the result of natural musical choices and the joy in speaking a shared language. For this listener, Different but the Same manages the singular feat of living up to its title by not sounding like any previous two-tenor encounter, while relating to all of them.
hatOLOGY 619
Marc Copland Solo
Time Within Time
Total time 62:36, DDD, Barcode: 752156061922
With his solo art, Marc Copland tries to do both. In the metastructure of the CD, in which the standard «Some Other Time» by Leonard Bernstein (a song Bill Evans loved as well) is repeated three times, he suspends time through repetition; actually, in the variation, the increasing evanescence of the piece. In the individual tracks, which follow a sophisticated dramaturgy and besides Bernstein’s tune comprise four compositions by Copland and pieces by Wayne Shorter, John Lewis, Miles Davis and Don Sebesky, he «robs» time from the metre to install his own (most significantly in «All Blues», a little broken waltz, which in the original is characterised by rhythmic rigidity). Time within time.
hatOLOGY 620
John Carter – Bobby Bradford Quartet
Seeking
Total time 46:59, ADD, Barcode: 752156062028
This was the debut on disc of the John Carter – Bobby Bradford Quartet (then under the cooperative name New Art Jazz Ensemble), and captures their marvelous cohesiveness, moral vibrancy, and quiet determination in equal measure. Subsequent recordings (and there were precious few of them) may have widened our view of their talents slightly, but didn’t necessarily alter any early assessment of their unique capabilities. Their music was fresh and vital from the git-go, and remains so.
hatOLOGY 624
Joe McPhee & Survival Unit II
with Clifford Thornton
at WBAI’s Free Music Store,
N.Y. N.Y., October 30, 1971
Total time 56:38, ADD, Barcode: 752156062424
Producer’s note: I first heard these tapes during my visit to the U.S.A. in 1974. The occasion was my first meeting with Joe McPhee and Craig Johnson of CJR Records. That meeting and the impact the music of these and other unreleased tapes had on me, are the reason I became a record producer. Originally this release was planned for 1988 on LP. Due to the rapid rise of the CD medium, the original plan was postponed and was eventually forgotten. 1996, 25 years later, this music/concert has been made available in a limited edition for the collectors of Joe McPhee's creations. 2006, 35 years later, this newly remastered version is the sole release to celebrate the 30th year of Hat
hatOLOGY 625
Steve Lacy
Brion Gysin
Songs
Total time 63:42, AAD, Barcode: 752156062523
Doubtless, Steve Lacy is one of contemporary music’s most prolific practitioners – and certainly one of the most recorded. But even within a catalogue as bulging and varied as his, this sequence of Songs is a singular experience...
Throughout these remarkable Songs the music is inseparable from the words. Extramusical echoes may occur – for example, the melismatic winding of themes in «Gay Paree Bop» and «Somebody Special» may suggest Gysin’s Moroccan excursions. Or they may not. It doesn’t matter. What matters is their emotional resonance and unity of feeling, as urgent and accessible as those of Schubert transported to an age of anxiety.
hatOLOGY 627
Manuel Mengis Gruppe 6
Into The Barn
Total time 56:21, DDD, Barcode: 752156062721
Born in the Swiss canton Wallis in 1972, trumpeter and part-time mountain guide Mengis probably is virtually unknown to most people. It thus comes as a surprise that his first release is for a label that has not pledged itself to promote and encourage local young talents but to track down adventurous and ambitious music of our time. Which, however, is another sign that the world of jazz has been undergoing fundamental changes for the past couple of years. Whoever still believes that New York is the hub of the jazz world is on the wrong track. Unfortunately many influential CD producers, festival organisers and music critics are still barking up the wrong tree (even in Europe), thus it will take some time for innovative impulses from regions which so far have been regarded as the periphery to be duly recognised. Globalisation, which has often been demonised, could turn out to be a truly positive force in this respect.
hatOLOGY 628
David Liebman
The Distance Runner
Total time 54:53, DDD, Barcode: 752156062820
Here’s Dave Liebman with his saxophones and a wooden flute in his very first concert of unaccompanied solos. It didn’t happen until his fourth decade as a working jazz artist, even though he had recorded four solo albums down through the years. Once again we hear his brilliant sound and technique, and there are his devotion to spontaneity combined with his high instinct to shape improvisations. What Liebman offers most of all is a personal quality of adventure, the result of his endless musical curiosity. This music has so much vitality.
hatOLOGY 629
Russ Lossing
All Things Arise
Total time 61:19, DDD, Barcode: 752156062929
For Lossing, improvisation is clearly a special act, a study in transparence and transformation, a creative exchange among the elements. One hears fresh relations of time and space. His acute sense of time connects inevitably to its absence. Space is heard in his sense of density, the room he can make around a note even at high speed, the contrasts between counterpoint and elegant strings of single notes. Space is also vertical in Lossing’s music--in the ways that wide and tight intervals interact in his chords. This solo CD seems almost two-sided, like the LP of tradition. There is a side of free improvisations followed by treatments of largely familiar themes. We might think of it as a voyage inward and a voyage outward; a journey forward followed by one into the past.
hatOLOGY 2-630
Horace Tapscott
The Dark Tree
Total time 127:23 DDD, Barcode: 752156063025
In This was an important, revealing release when it was first issued in 1991. Now, with both Tapscott and John Carter having passed on, it takes on even more significance with our knowing that they are beyond the vagaries of man and Fate, and cannot contribute any more to our lives. On The Dark Tree they created music of power and drama, beauty and spirit. It’s a shame we had to wait so long to hear it, and now we should treasure it.
hatOLOGY 631
Steve Lacy
New Jazz Meeting Baden-Baden 2002
Total time 60:47, ADD, Barcode: 752156063124
This synthesis of jazz, composition and electronic music was made possible above all by Steve Lacy’s extraordinary openness, which – as he himself said – has often brought him together with musicians whose roots are not in jazz. Steve Lacy was a searcher to the very end. We are going to miss Steve Lacy’s overwhelming passion for sonic exploration.
hatOLOGY 632
Daniel Levin Quartet
Some Trees
Total time 50:01, DDD, Barcode: 752156063223
It's obvious this is not an ordinary jazz quartet. Paul Bley once suggested to me that «one of the ways to get out of a particular era of music that has us locked in is to change the instrumentation.» The traditional jazz ensemble is a functional balance of soloists and rhythm section. But if the instruments that establish the rhythmic foundation – especially the drums – are removed, then each remaining instrument is free to vary the timing, spacing, and emphasis within its own phrasing.... Altering the relationship between instruments forces closer attention to be paid to dynamics, pacing, sound placement, and group interaction. The almost telepathic level of empathy between the quartet members («each joining a neighbor») sustains the music’s creative tension, and defines its singular identity.
hatOLOGY 633
Polwechsel
Archives Of The North
Total time 51:35, DDD, Barcode: 752156063322
The Polwechsel project has been exponential in defining new approaches to the composition/improvisation paradigm and in doing so have created a music that defined, examined and radically reassessed its own genre. Each phase of Polwechsel has been marked by a defining document and the releases of their recordings have frequently book-ended trends and movements in improvisational and experimental music – Polwechsel has had a direct and profound influence on the agenda of a genre coined «electro-acoustic improvisation» for example... On Archives Of The North, Polwechsel has switched again. The unit has transformed itself by adding the two percussionists, and these works all deal the application of percussion as centrifuge. This is a generative music which stems and blooms from a controlled and deliberate structural center. This work ascends from common notions of musicality and sound production, where obliteration, feedback and the extraneous are emancipated into a fully blown dialect which could be defined as expanded technique.
hatOLOGY 634
Christian Weber
3 Suits & A Violin
Total time 49:16, DDD, Barcode: 752156063421
What Christian Weber and Co. have achieved on 3 Suits & A Violin is a music that eschews formulaic approaches and instead temper their group sound in dense laminations of texture and sonic residue. The result is an arresting music which combines elements of group-improvised minimalism, electro-acoustic improvisation and avant-garde chamber music into a texturally rich exploration of detailed noise texture... In Christian Weber’s work noise has become closely connected to the repertoire, that his music sits very comfortably within this, as if to question if, then, noise has such a natural and reflexive occurrence on the instrumental practice, so then, he constructs pieces which are bathed in these static residues and phantom details.
hatOLOGY 635
Mike Westbrook Orchestra
On Duke’s Birthday
Total time 74:34, AAD, Barcode: 752156063520
What’s most remarkable about the music’s resultant structural integrity and intricacy is that it all flows so seamlessly, sounds so spontaneous and organic, without artifice or contrivance. Mike Westbrook seems to share similarities with Gil Evans in this regard – long, slowly evolving pieces built upon a few seemingly static chords or minimal thematic material; initially unassuming background figures or fills growing gradually to major proportions; a sometimes slouching restless, deliberate yet relentless momentum eased along by shifting instrumental colors or intense, integrated solo statements.
hatOLOGY 636
Colin Vallon Trio
Ailleurs
Total time 56:45, DDD, Barcode: 752156063629
The members of this band all share a strong awareness of sound quality and timbre, which sets them apart from other musicians. Three distinct instrumental voices – Vallon's «singing» piano, Pat Moret's «full reverberating» bass and Samuel Rohrer's «polyvalent» drums – blend into a highly complex ensemble sound; here, too, the band has hardly anything in common with the traditional jazz piano trio conventions.
hatOLOGY 637
Nagl
Bernstein
Akchoté
Jones
Big Four Live
Total time 57:44, DDD, Barcode: 752156063726
In Max Nagl's varied jumble of creative activities, Big Four comes nearest to what we traditionally perceive as jazz. Formed at the suggestion of the producer Werner X. Uehlinger, who introduced him to the recordings of the original Big Four (Sidney Bechet, Muggsy Spanier, Carmen Mastren, Wellman Braud) from 1940, the band released its first album in 2002 (hatOLOGY 585). «I wanted to work again with trumpet player Steven Bernstein anyway, and this was an opportunity to do so,» Max Nagl explains. «I knew that he was at home in many genres of traditional jazz. It was clear to me that he, too, should score pieces for this band. I myself was more interested in the instrumentation than in the music of Bechet, actually.» When the adventurous guitarist Noël Akchoté and the agile and equally powerful bassist Bradley Jones teamed up, an exciting mélange of strong, idiosyncratic personalities was born.
hatOLOGY 638
Georg Graewe
Ernst Reijseger
Gerry Hemingway
Sonic Fiction
Total time 68:31, DDD, Barcode: 752156063827
This trio's music is easier characterized than described, since the wealth of colors, moods, textures, and melodies is fluid enough to shift not only from piece to piece, but moment to moment. There is, for me, a European aesthetic at work here, a blend of modern and historic sources with the added bittersweet spice of folk elements from the soil. It's a delicate, demanding juggling act, drawing on past experiences while remaining alert and honest to the immediacy of this particular moment. Their intuitive tactics are frequently mesmerizing, as they simultaneously shadow each other's moves, suggest spontaneous new directions, and sustain individual perspectives; Reijseger etching deft melodic contours out of the merest effects, Hemingway exhorting and embellishing, Graewe – with a crisp clarity of articulation, an ear for piano sonorities, and a resolute insistence on building block foundations – instilling structural support and lyrical alterations.
hatOLOGY 639
Oliver Lake Trio
Zaki
Total time 56:34, AAD, Barcode: 752156063926
Lake’s trio functioned on a democratic basis. «I‘m not the boss. One of our concepts is that we try to have an interplay. It’s not me being accompanied by the others. Pheeroan may start something that I’ll pick up on. From that Michael may add something, and then it will just keep on evolving and changing. We will sound like one flowing thing. It’s me (and sometimes Michael) writing the tunes, but we are all on an equal level in terms of where the music is coming from. We’ve been working together for three and a half years and are very sympathetic to each other. I feel very, very comfortable. We tune into each other and are very open inside. We play a melody and then try to go into other areas. I don’t like to structure the middle part because that’s where improvisation comes in. A preconceived structure would restrict us.»
hatOLOGY 2-640
Max Roach & Archie Shepp
The Long March
Total time 93:20, DDD, Barcode: 752156064022
Two significant artists of different generations share a creative impetus of social and political concern, find a common ground of sound, and improvise a music of conscience and consequence that transcends time and place and comments on the human condition
hatOLOGY 641
Steve Lantner Trio
What You Can Throw
Total time 55:18, DDD, Barcode: 752156064121
I’m still surprised when I hear new jazz, and Steve Lantner plays it, reconstituting and reinventing the tradition. First hearing this trio, you’ll be struck by its sheer kinetic joy, its ability to swing and to drive in ways that are central to jazz, without simply repeating some specific events in that tradition. The opening of Joe Morris’s New Routine has a collective lope rarely achieved, an off-hand and offkilter movement that is immediate and reaches across time.
hatOLOGY 642
David Liebman
Richie Beirach
Ron McClure
Billy Hart
Redemption – Quest Live In Europe
Total time 76:13, DDD, Barcode: 752156064220
To be back on tour with Quest after fifteen years was like going home. We are peers with a common language that traverses the past several decades of music; experience and commonality are intangibles which when present create a sum much greater than the individual parts. What a joy to be back with the brothers...not a step was missed.
The present performances, from two stops on its 2005 European tour, find the band revisiting and extending longstanding concepts with the added conviction of four wiser, and if anything bolder explorers.
hatOLOGY 643
Anthony Ortega
Afternoon in Paris
Total time 55:46, DDD/ADD, Barcode: 752156064329
On first glimpse this recording might seem to be a sequel to the 1966 alto saxophone and acoustic bass duo session which formed one-half of Anthony Ortega's critically acclaimed «New Dance». But for Ortega to try and recreate that once-upon-a-time, now legendary date would be folly. He has not changed his approach to the duo (or solo for that matter) format all that much in the years between then and now. But significant differences occur in the details. Remarkably, we have the previously unreleased performance of «Ornithology» from the earlier session, not for comparison, but like a snapshot of an earlier time which provides us with a renewed perspective on the Ortega of today—the same person with some new ideas, a complementary partner, and an improvisational integrity undiminished over time. Art Lange
hatOLOGY 2-644
Anthony Braxton
Creative Orchestra (Köln) 1978
Total time 104:25 DDD, Barcode: 752156064428
The Köln concert shows us these positive vibrations marching through
hatOLOGY 645
Fabian Gisler
Backyard Poets
John Schröder
Colin Vallon
Henrik Walsdorff
Total time 50:03, DDD, Barcode: 752156064527
We hope now that you stop reading for a moment and seriously ask yourself: Why have I bought this CD, anyhow? ...
Furthermore Fabian Gisler played with: Franco Ambrosetti, Gianni Basso, Bill Carrothers, Philip Catherine, Don Friedman, Dusko Gojkovic, Tony Lakatos, Robert Lakatos, Dado Moroni, Adam Nussbaum, Dick Oats, Dré Pallemaerts, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Gary Smulyan, Donny McCaslin, Mark Soskin, Matthieu Michel, Makaya Ntshoko, Andy Scherrer, Roman Schwaller, Co Streiff, Nat Su, Kenny Werner und Nils Wogram.
Not only being a very busy sideman in several Bands, Fabian Gisler also maintains his own quartet featuring Colin Vallon, John Schröder and Henrik Walsdorff.
hatOLOGY 646
Theo Jörgensmann & Oles´ Brothers
Alchemia
Total time 57:58, DDD, Barcode: 752156064626
Perhaps surprisingly for a conceptualist like Jörgensmann, «straightahead» jazzers Tony Scott and Buddy De Franco now seem even more relevant to our updated perception of Alchemia. Both were powerful clarinetists who brought idiosyncratic phrasing and a harmonic bite to solos that balanced on the cusp of freedom. The most impressive aspect of Alchemia, to my ears, is the trio’s ecstatic, elastic freedom of line and design. Fluid internal tempo changes create spontaneous shapes and intensify momentum, as the three push up against and out of alignment with each other. In moments of nearly transparent texture, their lines hover and revolve like figures in a Calder mobile, but as energy levels rise they thicken and tumble in responsive friction. In the manner of Scott and De Franco, Jörgensmann employs remarkable speed, facility, and inventiveness to escape the suggestion of bar lines as indications of time, while avoiding bop clichés attached to the implied harmonies. Alchemia is aptly titled—the process of transforming something common into something precious is audible in every choice, every gesture, every move the trio makes.
hatOLOGY 647
Jackson Harrison Trio
Land Tides
Total time 51:36, DDD, Barcode: 752156064725
Jackson Harrison is a brilliant young pianist / composer who brings fresh perspectives to the traditional piano trio through his thoughtful and sensitive compositions.
Harrison’s attitude to the work—his regard for the fundamental mystery of the creative process—bodes well for the future: «When playing I am not attempting to ‹make› or construct something, I'm just trying to let the music dance, which is the more difficult path to take. That is what all the real masters, like Miles, do. It's not technical mastery, but an openness which is more powerful, vital and mysterious, and not so easily explained.»
hatOLOGY 648
Hans Kennel
Mytha
How It All Started
Total time 78:45, DDD, Barcode: 752156064824
Mytha in this sense attempted the opposite of a reconstruction of Alpine roots. The energy of the music of this (at times extended) alphorn quartet hasn’t diminished since its first CD was released in 1991. Hans Kennel is a leading expert on folk tradition, in particular on that of Central Switzerland. His interest, however, does not stem from ethnomusicological hunting and gathering practices but from a living experience with music, both improvised and other kinds. In his approach, distance and emotion are equally involved. The many English titles are not used to jazz up something old or familiar; on the contrary, they are used to eschew ingratiation, or arrogance that here we have jazz musicians coming to show the Alpine folks what traditional music really sounds like. As for the original titles, they are meant as reverence: for the Muotathal (Muota Valley) Kennel knows like the back of his hand; for Martin Christen, the doyen of the Swiss alphorn Renaissance, who already in the forties of the last century because of his polyphonic experiments had to fight against the narrow-mindedness of the self-appointed guardians of the Holy Grail of Swiss folklore; or for Hans-Jürg Sommer, the most important composer in the field of «traditional» alphorn playing. You are mistaken if you believe that the traditional alphorn players ignore what Kennel set in motion. It’s the national associations that are inflexible, or at least almost immovable, and still regard themselves as the custodians of tradition, of so-called time-honoured, localised customs.
hatOLOGY 649
Paul Bley
12 (+6) In A Row
Total time 59:08, DDD, Barcode: 752156064923
As in any improvised music, there are challenges accepted, risks taken. Bley himself has suggested, as a measure of the success of free spontaneous music, asking «Is it eventful?» The next step, I propose, would be to ask oneself if each event is meaningful? (with the understanding that each listener will apply his/her own definition of that word to their personal response). For me, the music on this disc is beautiful, humorous, provocative, confusing, even at times elegiac. All of which makes it undeniably human, and worth sharing.
hatOLOGY 650
John Zorn
George Lewis
Bill Frisell
News For Lulu
Total time 78:12, DDD, Barcode: 752156065029
The trio’s selection of material was not only inspired by musical considerations, but to rattle a few historical perspectives—to introduce, or reacquaint, an audience with distinctive compositions that had undeservedly been lost in the cracks of time. Of course, once chosen, the next, necessary, step was even more difficult and decisive—to play them. And there is a sense of play in the trio’s attack, a joy that emerges from confidence, commitment, and freedom.
hatOLOGY 651
Russ Lossing
John Hebert
Line Up
Total time 55:43, DDD, Barcode: 752156065128
It's a rich and varied tradition in which Lossing and Hebert locate themselves, and their duets are both an incidental celebration of the tradition and a commemoration of their working partnership. John Hebert remarks of these duos, «This was a project that we put together as a document of years of playing together in various ensembles. I have known and played with Russ for just about 10 years now, and there aren't too many musicians that I have such a unique bond with.» Russ Lossing adds, «John and I have developed a very close musical kinship, and friendship too. So, finally we recorded the duo after years of talking about it.» The relationship is apparent in all the ways Lossing and Hebert find to both interact and prod one another here, and the special ways they find to contrast their instrumental voices, from the fleet evenness of Lossing’s piano to the gritty expressiveness of Hebert’s bass.
hatOLOGY 652
Pandelis Karayorgis
Nate McBride
Curt Newton
Betwixt
Total time 65:45, DDD, Barcode: 752156065227
Over the course of nearly 20 years and approximately that many recordings, Karayorgis has established himself as one of the singular, and significant, pianists of his generation. One of his trademarks has been to examine and illuminate the irregular edges of the jazz piano repertoire, as he does here ... along with original pieces that venture into peripheral terrain. But there’s an unexpected ingredient in the mix of Betwixt—his choice of instrument.
hatOLOGY 653
Daniel Levin Quartet
Blurry
Total time 59:49, DDD, Barcode: 752156065326
For anyone hearing the Daniel Levin Quartet for the first time, there’s apt to be a dual response, a sense of something at once familiar and very different, a sound in which chamber music sonorities promise an unexpected emotional possibility, an invocation of something lost that is also an intimation of what is to come.
The cumulative effect of the quartet’s music is particularly vivid, as if its vocabulary of precise timbres is gleaned from the density of our past listening, as if high frequencies previously consumed by cymbals have been restored to us. It seems to operate on a principle of exchange in which all those things formerly adjudged hot and cool in the jazz tradition have temporarily traded identities.
hatOLOGY 654
David Liebman & Ellery Eskelin
Renewal
Total time 62:26, DDD, Barcode: 752156065425
There is a common understanding that we all share of freedom and spontaneity framed within underlying structures accompanied by a loving nod to the jazz legacy. The compositions heard on this CD evidence a diversity of idioms and styles unified by a common aesthetical approach. This is a group where straight ahead and free jazz clearly intersect with a feeling of immediacy and urgency that is palpable. Enjoy the music.
We covered a lot of ground on Different But The Same (hatOLOGY 615) but due to the fact that Tony and Jim are now contributing compositions I think Renewal has even more scope and is a more personal statement from the group. Tony’s «Palpable Clock» is a ten bar blues and Jim’s «Cha» is a melodic essay written in 7/4. Dave’s «Dimi and the Blue Men” reflects his recent trip to Mauritania while «Renewal» is one of his signature deep ballads. Of my own pieces, «The Decider» is a multi-sectioned composition while «Instant Counterpoint« begs the question of whether it is written or completely improvised. Even I don’t know for sure.
hatOLOGY 656
Matthew Shipp Trio
The Multiplication Table
Total time 60:47, DDD, Barcode: 752156065623
Shipp’s music displays his own thought processes, and in trio lays out a physical trail reflecting the way the three players think along with each other. Following those thoughts leads us deep into a new jazz style that has sprung, like Athena from the brow of Zeus, out of the body of jazz preceding it. The new relative in the family looks fine already, and seems likely in the future to astonish us with further mighty feats.
hatOLOGY 657
Clusone 3
Soft Lights And Sweet Music
(Irving Berlin Songbook)
Total time 62:20, DDD, Barcode: 752156065722
Musicians play Irving Berlin because he makes them sound good. The pretty songs make you sound poetic just reading; the tapinflected songs Astaire introduced will bring out your swing if you have any. So what you get with Irving Berlin is melody so strong and self-supporting it keeps its integrity, no matter how stretched or yanked from context. And you get music so common, to America and to jazz at least, musicians may make free with it without losing you. You have, in short, perfect fodder for Clusone 3 – which they knew even before they were approached about doing an unspecified concept album.
While feasting on the individual selections, please note how nicely programmed this disc is. As live, Clusone 3 cut the wide open stuff with tight swingers. You can argue for cosmic implications: the music expands and contracts like the universe. Or you can just say the rhythm’s as natural as breathing: in, out, in, out.
hatOLOGY 658
Anthony Braxton
Seven Compositions (Trio) 1989
Total time 58:24, DDD, Barcode: 752156065821
The resulting music – a step into virtuoso improv within «vibrational space» – sings with a relaxed exhilaration that will make it a certain pleasure for all who listen. Here, I guess (to steal an image from William Blake), is the sound of «Joy as it flies».
hatOLOGY 659
Manuel Mengis Gruppe 6
The Pond
Total time 53:33, DDD, Barcode: 752156065920
When Manuel Mengis’ debut disk Into the Barn came out in late 2005, it took listeners by surprise. Here was a triple storm: strong instrumentalists, killer compositions, and the kind of tight ensemble playing that only comes from loads of time working things out together. Mengis and his Gruppe 6 delivered a combination of post-Bop acumen and rollicking audacity with a wily ability to blur the lines between compositional form and intrepid improvisation ... Two and a half years have gone by, and finally the young Swiss trumpet player and his musical partners are back with a resplendent follow-up. Mengis has never been one to rush things ... So dig in to this arresting follow-up. Let’s hope that we don’t have to wait another three years to hear from Gruppe 6 again. But rest assured that Mengis will take his time, planning out his next moves and executing them with the resolve and inventiveness that stamps this music as truly original. And that sort of measured deliberation is something that is all too rare these days.
hatOLOGY 660
Michael Adkins Quartet
Rotator
Total time 52:55, DDD, Barcode: 752156066026
When one hears Michael Adkins for the first time, there’s a certain shock, not just at the presence of a new voice but that such a musician might arrive fully formed. There’s something unexpected in the sheer weight of his sound and depths of meaning that impinge in his lines. It might be noted that Adkins presents himself here as a tenor saxophonist, without that usual leap to the soprano or something else, a movement almost expected of those setting out to play jazz’s dominant horn. Now that suggests a player very deeply involved in the formation of his own voice, a preoccupation to which this session attests, even to a concern with an authentic sense of speech.
hatOLOGY 661
Westbrook–Rossini
Total time 72:23, DDD, Barcode: 752156066125
Keep in mind that this is not a collection of isolated episodes, but a considerable ensemble work as well, full of relaxed pastoral airs alternating with more tumultuous melees
hatOLOGY 662
Mary Halvorson
Reuben Radding
Nate Wooley
Crackleknob
Total time 48:21, DDD, Barcode: 752156066224
One listen to this CD and that element of trust and synchronicity immediately comes through. This is the kind of music that can only come from musicians who know each other well. It is like dropping in on an intimate conversation. Ideas get launched and then get immediately picked up, morphed, and woven back in. There is also a striking compactness to the pieces. Free improvisation rarely displays the level of succinct structural sensibility at play here. Wooley comments, «In general, we work at making the cleanest, most elegantly simple piece of music that we can. It's not something we've ever been implicit about, but I think that is just the general attitude about improvising that we all share.» Here are three musicians who know how to listen, how to work together to develop a collective arc, and how to tie it all together to create abstract, spontaneous pieces that span the length of a pop song.
hatOLOGY 663
Steve Lantner Quartet
Given – Live In Münster
Total time 47:30, DDD, Barcode: 752156066323
Given – Live In Münster, is the Steve Lantner Quartet’s second effort. Its sax-piano-bass-drums line-up invites weight against the measure of classic albums like Misterioso, Black Fire, Giant Steps, and Saxophone Colossus on the one hand, and thousands of rote quartet recordings on the other. Lantner’s contribution falls on the right end of the spectrum by doing exactly what a jazz album must in order to justify its carbon footprint in the 21st Century; it presents a vivid impression of a singular musician with a strong band moving the music forward. Or as Lantner puts it, «I am trying to play jazz music in a language that I think is a natural evolution past tonal/modal sensibilities.»
hatOLOGY 666
Dave Douglas’ Tiny Bell Trio
Constellations
Total time 58:58, DDD, Barcode: 752156066620
Constellations is a new set of songs written and arranged for the trio. It was recorded in mid tour, and so has a different, perhaps more live, character ... Many thanks go to Brad and Jim for their dedication and commitment to the music. They are two of the finest listeners around, and in our three years as a trio, we’ve deve loped split-second reaction times and true fluidity be tween roles of soloist and accompanist. The main thing is that we’ve integrated our own sound into the many materials presented.
hatOLOGY 668
Lee Konitz & Martial Solal
Star Eyes, 1983
Total time 67:40, DDD, Barcode: 752156066828
In their duo, Solal’s gift to Konitz is a liberation from ..... inherent restrictions.This in turn inspires Konitz to follow his own lyrical impulses to the extreme—listen to how often he stretches his line to the breaking point. This is improvisation that goes far beyond merely altered chords or variations on a theme. Each performance walks an invisible tightrope of harmonic and rhythmic agreement—all the more treacherous for being completely spontaneous.
hatOLOGY 670
Joe Morris Bass Quartet
High Definition
Total time 53:25, DDD, Barcode: 752156067023
Listen to the music of Joe Morris and one is immediately struck by a few things. First, there is his sense of rhythmic and melodic articulation; a sense of phrasing brimming with potent energy and focused resolve. Then there is an uncanny ability to balance freedom and groove. Finally, there is his ability to pull it all together in structures that bring out particularly inspired playing by his collaborators...
With this release, Morris and crew cement their status as musicians from a generation who have fully absorbed a polyglot view of the jazz tradition. They have the commitment, experience, and the innate understanding to seamlessly pull from both inside and outside, from swing to freedom. But they also have the dedication and creativity to make it their own. It is how they pull to gether all these disparate threads into a unified vocabulary indelibly stamped with their own sensibilities and personalities that makes this such a riveting statement.
hatOLOGY 672
Polwechsel & John Tilbury
Field
Total time 42:18, DDD, Barcode: 752156067221
Along the Polwechsel path towards a reflected reintegration of the once excluded musical parameters, the two composers for this CD, Michael Moser and Werner Dafeldecker, have gone one step further while also reflecting Polwechsel’s own history: traditional parameters are reintroduced into the original Polwechsel idiom as disturbances, refractions or inclusions. The invitation extended to guest soloist John Tilbury is also part of the reflected reintegration of traditional elements and the extension of Polwechsel’s concept, which they develop in their cautious and persistent approach: it is a reference to both the tradition of free improvisation and the reductionist currents in modern composition, for Tilbury is not only a proven Feldman specialist, but also long-time pianist for AMM.
hatOLOGY 673
Gerry Hemingway Quintet
Demon Chaser
Total time 53:58, DDD, Barcode: 752156067320
With Demon Chaser, Gerry Hemingway has written himself into the history of this great music with a script that fulfils both the requirements of complete contemporaneousness and absolute legibility. He has signed his name in the Big Book.
hatOLOGY 675
Taylor Ho Bynum Sextet
Asphalt Flowers Forking Paths
Total time 44:15 DDD, Barcode: 75215606758
Here’s a group of musicians who are making a commitment to the long haul. They are creating music for the third millennium that is savvy enough to draw on the forking paths of the tradition while finding room for their own individual voices. Get Bynum started on this group and he responds with his usual enthusiastic eloquence. «Whatever balance I am able to strike between tradition and individuality I really owe to the nurturing community of musicians I came up under.» This set is a tribute to that journey.
hatOLOGY 677
Uwe Oberg
Christof Thewes
Michael Griener
Lacy Pool
Total time 50:14 DDD, Barcode: 752156067726
At every step, Lacy Pool finds new expressive possibilities in Lacy’s innate, albeit curiously tailored, logic. Their personalities replace Lacy’s and change the way we hear this music, which is as it should be. The song may have inspired the players, but the players have become the song.
hatOLOGY 679
Vienna Art Orchestra
A Notion In Perpetual Motion
Total time 76:40, DDD, Barcode: 752156067924
Does the “perpetual motion” of the title refer to life on the road? Or the ongoing continuum of musical tradition, which in the hands of Rüegg can be honored and manipulated at the same time? Hard to say, since in the musical realm of Mathias Rüegg, meanings have multiple choices and anything is possible.
hatOLOGY 683
Ellery Eskelin
with Andrea Parkins and Jim Black
One Great Night...Live
Total time 69:13, DDD, Barcode: 752156068327
Throughout this set, Eskelin, Parkins, and Black are completely at ease with the core materialx Over the years these three have grown into a unit that can bristle and wail; pick up on a melody and swing; or stretch out to whispering textures and scrubbed flutters. The magic is how they string this all together as a seamless whole with careful listening and poised reflexes. That’s been one of the ongoing joys of listening to this trio. It’s all about hearing how they have worked together to forge an ensemble sound and then checking in during each ensuing tour or release to find out how they’ve built on that foundation. That dynamism is in full force here. We’re fortunate that the tapes were rolling this «one great eveningx»
hatOLOGY 684
Manuel Mengis Gruppe 6
Dulcet Crush
Total time 52:02, DDD, Barcode: 752156068426
Is three the magic number? For many jazz musicians it’s an important one. Every record is of course significant, but the third is often more closely scrutinised. In this sense, it’s both a great opportunity and a niggling pressure: the chance to really begin cementing a good name, with a little weight of added expectation.
Manuel Mengis, however, did not feel any of this. He even identifies a more relaxed approach than his two previous releases, partially due to shifting priorities in life. An atmosphere of light, easy contentment shines through the music – Mengis and the Gruppe 6 are really enjoying themselves, free of any kind of external strain. And the pleasure is contagious.
Hat Hut Records Ltd.
P.O.Box 521, 4020 Basel, Switzerland