hatOLOGY 501 / SOLD OUT
Joe Maneri Quartet
Coming Down The Mountain
The Maneris of Boston—father Joseph, saxophonist, clarinetist, pianist, professor of microtonal music; and son Matthew, improvising violinist and sound engineer—may be related to free-jazz, but have created their own style and family sound. The music of the Joe Maneri quartet is alternately quiet and piercing (in performance, they usually don't use microphones) but never one thing for very long; it's constantly personal, naturally expanding and contracting. That's the mark of a good rhythm section, and yet this is a band that often plays four different rhythms simultaneously.
hatOLOGY 502 / SOLD OUT
Ellery Eskelin with Andrea Parkins & Jim Black
One Great Day
In some ways I think that a recording is the best medium for this music. I can think of a lot of music that speaks better on a recording than it does in a club where the environment and the audience's expectations exert an effect on the music. With this recording we've found a mix between the two. Writing music for this band has been a real breakthrough for me. Andrea and Jim have ears for anything I put in front of them. It's a great feeling to have a band that can realize your ideas and offer its own surprises along the way.
hatOLOGY 503 / SOLD OUT
Paul Dunmall, John Adams, Mark Sanders
Ghostly Thoughts
Paul Dunmall has always asserted his Jazz roots but is the perfect example of a musician who is able to work across areas of improvised music. John Adams is not a name with whom many will be familiar but he has a long pedigree in improvised music and also more popular musical forms. Mark Sanders is perhaps the most versatile of current British drummers. The varied background of these players suggests openness and a willingness to confront their music making head-on. Their music is inventive, disciplined and infinitely varied.
hatOLOGY 504 / SOLD OUT
Misha Mengelberg
The Root Of The Problem
Musical chess master Misha Mengelberg versus four worthy opponents. A German trumpeter and drummer, a French tuba player, and an American-born, French-resident (since 1972) saxophonist. Three nights in Köln, at Loft, matching wits in duets and trios. One can study the Maestro taking on all contestants, approaching the music as a game of strategy, a set of moves and countermoves. Chess is also a suitable metaphor for the Dutchman's approach to instant composition because it has no final or definitive form, no absolute and irrefutable game-plan.
hatOLOGY 505 / SOLD OUT
Ran Blake & Anthony Braxton
A Memory Of Vienna
There had been no plans, no preparation. It was a completely spur-of-the-moment decision. Nine years later, I don't remember whose idea it was—mine? Werner X. Uehlinger's? Ran's or Anthony's? Once we started, enthusiasm was high, everyone jumped into it head-first and hard, perhaps a bit too hard at first. When it was over, we didn't know what we had. Now we know. What you now hold in your hands is the result of fortuitous circumstance, hard work, imagination, talent, trust, and a bit of blind luck. Like all art that survives, and thrives, it is a miracle.
hatOLOGY 506 / SOLD OUT
Matthew Shipp Duo with Joe Morris
Thesis
A journey as perilous and majestic as any in recent jazz history, full of unanswered questions, ellipses, asides, detours, ecstatic shouts and Iyrical prayers. A pas de deux, with a risk-taking so bracing, you find yourself holding your breath at the wonder and beauty of its coherence and cogency and spiritual resonance.
hatOLOGY 507 / LAST CHANCE, SOON SOLD OUT
Myra Melford & Han Bennink
Eleven Ghosts
"The iterating of these lines brings gold; /The framing of this circle on the ground/Brings whirlwinds, tempests, thunder and lightening."
hatOLOGY 508 / SOLD OUT
Jimmy Giuffre & André Jaume
Momentum, Willisau 1988
Strength, harmony and an incredible lightness—something like the two curved lines of the Eiffel Tower that rise up and meet way up in the sky. That's the image I have of our duo. Knowing Jimmy and playing with him is an enormous privilege for me, and one I have come to appreciate more and more over the years and during the time I've spent with him. Thank you Jimmy.
hatOLOGY 509 / SOLD OUT
Urs Leimgruber, Joëlle Léandre, Fritz Hauser
No Try No Fail
As with any other form of music, these sounds and rhythms are born of silence. The "triologue" starts from nowhere, or perhaps from somewhere behind the scenes, the three players making sparse, sensitive attempts to find a common basis of communication. The language used moves from low-volume noise, through pre-linguistic conversations and eloquently handled non-verbal expressions, to voices singing on instruments. Each of the three players has developed his or her own vocabulary for the instruments they play.
hatOLOGY 510 / SOLD OUT
Burkhard Beins, Martin Pfleiderer & Peter Niklas Wilson
Yarbles
Listening to the tapes just after the music was recorded, I thought about the privilege of being one of the first with access to a very intimate process of sound production. As is the case with most improvised music, the cooperation of Burkhard Beins, Martin Pfleiderer, and Peter Niklas Wilson seems to be a private affair of public importance.
hatOLOGY 511 / SOLD OUT
Guillermo Gregorio
Ellipsis
Though music is commonly regarded as the personal expression of the composer, interpreter, or improviser, one seldom meets someone whose personality is in such accordance with his music as Guillermo Gregorio. At first, he impresses with his modesty. But he is much more self-confident than those who believe they need to make an outward showing of their confidence. His music is sparse as well as generous.
hatOLOGY 512 / SOLD OUT
Mat Maneri Quintet
Acceptance
If your exposure to Mat Maneri has been limited to his more frequent sideman and leader projects, then listening to Acceptance may have you doing double, even triple takes. Yes, indeed, Maneri's distinctive, very textural sound is heard throughout, this time on viola as opposed to his usual violin. Even more significant is the way this 28-year old Brooklyn-born bandleader takes his Quintet through the seven selections here, utilizing not only electric guitar and rhythm section but trombone as well.
hatOLOGY 513 / SOLD OUT
Carlos Zingaro & Peggy Lee
Western Front, Vancouver 1996
Here, in this music, improvisation necessitates a spontaneity of details influenced by the personality of the participants, the desire to discover a relationship between previously unrelated voices, and the nature of the process itself. How they do what they do is a secret. It is the soundtrack of becoming.
hatOLOGY 514 / SOLD OUT
Joe McPhee
As Serious As Your Life
For me, 1996 was an important transitional year in which I decided to pursue what I called Project Dream Keeper. The goal, to begin realizing projects which had been shelved for years. One such project was to produce a solo recording in celebration of the 20th anniversary of my first solo release, Tenor. With Tenor began a very important solo period which until now has never been documented on CD. Previous LP releases have long been out of print and difficult to find. I sincerely hope this is a new beginning. I wanted to return to the roots of my solo performances.
hatOLOGY 515 / SOLD OUT
Richard Grossman Trio
Even Your Ears
Richard Grossman, who passed away in 1992, was a pianist who believed in the primacy of the immediate, the spontaneous. He saw creating music as "an existential situation," felt the urgency of improvising without preconceived conditions as a challenge "to make something, some kind of art, out of it."
hatOLOGY 516 / SOLD OUT
Matthew Shipp Trio
The Multiplication Table
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 517 / SOLD OUT
Billy Bang & Dennis Charles
Bangception, Willisau 1982
Billy Bang is the focal point of this performance, and the tough fibre of his phrasing—sometimes audacious, sometimes eloquent—is always articulate. In his hands the violin becomes one of the most impressive instruments of the New Music—or any music.
hatOLOGY 518 / SOLD OUT
Lee Konitz & Martial Solal
Star Eyes, Hamburg 1983
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 519
Lauren Newton
Filigree
Recorded in the early eighties here is already everything which seems to be idiosyncratic about Lauren Newton's singing: the wide range of tones, timbres and emotions, the ability to build up atmospheres, in which others can find themselves taking part, as well as the talent to integrate the voice within a framework of instrumentalists. First released under the title Timbre this CD issue from the original digital master tapes of 1982 includes "Early Piece", which was previously unreleased.
hatOLOGY 520
Bernd Konrad Hans Koller Unit with Didier Lockwood
Phonolith
The meaning of the word "phonolith" is sound stone, and though I've never to my knowledge tried the sound of a phonolith, it seems an apt word to describe the structure of this composition. ... Konrad's composition creates a masterful balance of composed and improvised parts. This is not about the loneliness of the soloist (they are not left alone in their a capella parts, and in the second version, there are duos anyway), it is about the constant change of texture, about construction and decay, about what we used to call deconstruction. The soundness of this stone, if you pardon the pun, is incredible.
hatOLOGY 521 / SOLD OUT
Ellery Eskelin with Andrea Parkins & Jim Black
Kulak, 29 & 30
March 20th, 1994. That date marked our concert debut in New York City. We've been a band for four years now. Even so, we are only just beginning to get to the point where I feel like we have a real past on which we can build. I wrote most of the music on this recording shortly before we began a tour of the States in September of 1997. ... In the process we learn what it means to play music, communicate with an audience and make documents along the way. You, the listener, are an integral and essential part of it all. Thanks for joining us in that process.
hatOLOGY 522 / SOLD OUT
Matthew Shipp Horn Quartet
Strata
M. Shipp, facing the shady forms, plays curves as though the light defines the shadow, but the shadow regenerates the light's absence. Typhonic walnuts in the ear of a barrel of water. Psalm—soft, buoyant, round and tempestuous, like round, perfect, beautiful black walnuts bouncing in an atmosphere of milk. Rain on the mint leaves, cool, sun behind; mint leaves aloft, divine sleep casts the mint leaves across the sea, against the prow of our Ship(p) like hermetic devices. But the sea is metaphor, the divine element (function) of language.
hatOLOGY 523 / SOLD OUT
Clusone 3
Rara Avis
Songs about birds come from every culture—three continents and the West Indies are represented in this set—for reasons you needn't peck far to worm out. Singing is as serious as a bird's life, bearing on almost all that matters: identity, communication, community, territory, family, sex ... We all know how 20th century composers from Messiaen to Ellington to Dolphy cribbed melodies from them—like wannabe-boppers jotting Bird licks down on nightclub napkins—but of course the musically-minded were stealing birds' shit long before that ...
hatOLOGY 524
Rajesh Mehta Solos & Duos
Featuring Paul Lovens
Orka
The Indian-born, currently Amsterdam-based American Mehta has expanded the timbral and textural palette of the trumpet dramatically, by opening up a whole cosmos of unheard-of tone colours, microtonal possibilities and subtly shaded noises. Mehta achieves this not only by unorthodox playing techniques and by incorporating the neglected bass trumpet, but also by making use of the "hybrid trumpet", a self-designed instrument in which up to three trumpets (or cornets) are connected by plastic tubing. ... There's more to come, much more.
hatOLOGY 525 / SOLD OUT
Joe Maneri Quartet
Tenderly
Jazz is a collective enterprise, a give-and-take among musicians that generates a larger, more complete statement than any leader could elicit through a rigid, closed system. This holds true for the breakthrough bands, the Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane quartets, just as surely as it does in the more informal confines of a jam session. No musician, however brilliant, is an island. ... Joe Maneri has accumulated some of this aura as his music has begun to be heard over the past decade, and not simply because the music he creates is so fresh.
hatOLOGY 526 / SOLD OUT
G. Gregorio, M. Gustafsson & K. Nordeson
Background Music
Of course, Background Music isn't straight cool jazz. Gregorio: "I've been trying to combine that sound"—THE sound—"with new musical concepts, not ones from the '40s and '50s." Here instead we find a sort of intersection of certain materials from low-dynamic modern jazz with the methods and certain other materials from European improvised music. Unimagined hybrids of Richie Kamuca and Evan Parker, Shelly Manne and Paul Lovens, Jimmy Giuffre and Floros Floridos. Spontaneous cool, curdling with instant heat. A new, West Coast free improvisation ...
hatOLOGY 527 / SOLD OUT
Ran Blake
Something To Live For
The world of Ran Blake beckons once again in these performances and, once again, we cannot resist being drawn into that world. We dodge through its shadows and its bright, glaring expanses, alert to the caverns and crevices from which the pianist's images emerge—now gentle, now brutal, always unretouched. The cinematic content of Blake's music, its use of montage and dramatic dissolves, has long been acknowledged. ... Extra-musical allusions are unavoidable when music evokes all five senses, as Blake's music inevitably does.
hatOLOGY 528 / SOLD OUT
ICP Orchestra
Jubilee Varia
On first hearing this CD may sound to you like an ill-programmed mess, with the improvisations up front and the catchy numbers buried deep. But with ICP, over the long haul or short, the more you hear it, the more apparent its trajectory becomes, the more orderly and less chaotic it sounds. Or, the more you hear ICP's improvised "instant compositions" and their instant demolitions of Misha's highly whistlable tunes, the less clear it becomes what's order and what's chaos to begin with.
hatOLOGY 529 / SOLD OUT
Mat Maneri Trio
So What?
This latest example of Mat Maneri's music, like its superb predecessor Acceptance, gives cause to celebrate the young violinist as one of today's most commanding improvisers regardless of instrument or musical genre. The program here, a blend of originals and Miles Davis compositions performed by a trio of uncommon shape and talents, conveys the lucidity and spontaneity that are coming to define Maneri's music. What emerges is both skillfully organized and intruigingly provocative.
hatOLOGY 530 / SOLD OUT
Matthew Shipp Duo with Mat Maneri
Gravitational Systems
Shipp conceives of Gravitational Systems as the recording debut of a unique improvising configuration. ... With Gravitational Systems, Shipp steps up a lively conversation that promises to keep listeners occupied well into the next century.
hatOLOGY 531 / SOLD OUT
Guillermo Gregorio Trio
Red Cube(d)
These 1998 performances are part of a continuing process of growth which has gone on over at least ten years, and probably much longer. ... It is necessary to emphasize the progressive integration of these three players because Gregorio's music has over the last several years grown outwardly more fragmented and discontinuous. The result is an altogether individual version of jazz-inflected music while at the same time it makes numerous references, somehow both covert and specific, to the past of jazz.
hatOLOGY 532 / SOLD OUT
Steve Lacy Three
N.Y. Capers & Quirks
We could consider this reissue of a 1979 Steve Lacy Trio concert recording along any of several (conceptual or contextual) lines, from analytical to historical—for example, by simply pointing out that this concert was a reunion between Lacy and drummer Dennis Charles (they worked together in Cecil Taylor's quartet circa 1956
hatOLOGY 533 / SOLD OUT
Ellery Eskelin, Andrea Parkins & Jim Black
Five Other Pieces (+2)
As with One Great Day... (hatOLOGY 502) and Kulak 29 & 30 (hatOLOGY 521) this recording was made upon the culmination of a combined US and European tour lasting about a month. ... It's been a pleasure bringing our music to points far and wide and we look forward to continuing that process. Maybe we'll meet you at a future concert, if so, please say hello ...
hatOLOGY 534 / SOLD OUT
Ellery Eskelin & Han Bennink
Dissonant Characters
Maybe it helps to know that Han and Ellery are both good chess players. Bennink favors an offensive game to be sure, but Eskelin is conspicuously untraumatized, knowing that with Bennink (switched metaphor ahead) the idea is not to steer the bull but to keep from being thrown. And Han, to his audible pleasure, discovers a rare, fully equipped improviser he can't scare off, wear out, bury or give the slip.
hatOLOGY 2-535 / SOLD OUT
Misha Mengelberg
Two Days In Chicago
Misha Mengelberg came to Chicago for two days, made some music with a host of local musicians and visiting Dutch players, and went home. Which leaves us with...what? Memories, certainly, but fortunately there's this stela left behind, these two CDs, containing a timeless message that anyone with ears can hear, now and in the future. Sounds that do not express, they signify, they exist.
hatOLOGY 536 / SOLD OUT
Steve Lacy Seven
Clichés
Here we have an act of transformation, or several. All art, of course, enacts and entertains this process—a perpetual dance of cognition, change, and recognition. ... The surviving pieces have not changed over time but, as listeners, we certainly have, as has Steve Lacy, and so while what we hear may be the same the way we hear it is dramatically different. ... Once a broad Prospectus, now an ironic look at Clichés. But clichéd? Anything but.
hatOLOGY 537
Jon Lloyd
Four And Five
The compositions for this group were designed to be played with less of a pulse-driven approach than my earlier work with the Jon Lloyd Quartet—the ebb and flow of the music takes place organically according to the direction each performer wishes to take. Method maintains a straight pulse almost throughout, but not in a classic free-jazz manner.
hatOLOGY 538 / SOLD OUT
Sven-Åke Johansson
Six Little Pieces For Quintet
Free Jazz at Millenium's end: a historical idiom, sure enough. Subject of musicological analysis and historical resarch, of post-revolutionary nostalgia, of discographical reissues, even of revivalism. ... But why leave retrospection to others? Sven-Åke Johansson has decided to take a look back at the Sixties himself, to re-investigate the time when free jazz was still very much jazz. ... "Early free jazz on period instruments"? In a way, yes. Of course, Sven-Åke Johansson plays his sixties Slingerland drum set.
hatOLOGY 539 / SOLD OUT
Theo Jörgensmann Quartet
Snijbloemen
I am convinced that improvised music is the most modern kind of music, since it has created a completely new kind of musician, an integral musician, who is conductor, composer and performer at the same time. An improvisor has to do everything himself, from production to marketing, he has to think socially when playing with others, i.e. he has to be able to develop common goals, to assume responsibility, but also to step back when necessary.
hatOLOGY 2-540 / SOLD OUT
Horace Tapscott
The Dark Tree 1& 2
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 541
Richard Grossman Trio
Where The Sky Ended
I think of myself as a jazz player, and my music as a natural extension of the jazz tradition. What I'm doing is completely free improvisation ("composing in real time") with nothing predetermined. I've had a lot of experience playing many different kinds of music and several different instruments, and since I tend not to waste anything, it all shows up somewhere in the music I'm playing now.
hatOLOGY 542 / SOLD OUT
Dave Douglas'
Tiny Bell Trio
Constellations
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 developed split-second reaction times and true fluidity between roles of soloist and accompanist. The main thing is that we've integrated our own sound into the many materials presented.
hatOLOGY 543 / SOLD OUT
Franz Koglmann & Lee Konitz
We Thought About Duke
If the music on this disc is any indication, Franz Koglmann understands Ellington as a vortex - a center of energy drawing in inspiration from a wide variety of sources (internal and external) and his compositions flowing out in so many directions. As a composer Koglmann makes use of many of these same sources and resources, including the stability of a regular cast of musicians, which enables him to compose for specific sounds and particular abilities as did Ellington, famously. ... Through intense interaction, Ellington’s music breathes and changes and evolves. Ellington lives.
hatOLOGY 544 / SOLD OUT
Joe McPhee
Tenor & Fallen Angels
For me, Tenor is a marvelous journey in sound through the history of the instrument in jazz. The journey was the motive, the gracious hospitality of Michael Overhage in the use of his home in the Swiss mountains, and the availability of Marc Levin's cassette recorder, provided the opportunity. Round up the usual suspects, and an underground legend is born. For years Tenor, long out of print, remained a kind of mystery, spoken about kindly and fondly by the cognoscenti.
hatOLOGY 545 / SOLD OUT
Anthony Braxton
Quintet (Basel) 1977
I leave the discovery of favorite episodes or events to you. But it's important to remember that despite Braxton's compositional craft—the motivating factors behind the music and the formal glue that holds it together—this is, as Braxton intended all along, music that emerges from the particular combination of musicians. George Lewis is one of Braxton's favorite collaborators, for reasons that should be immediately audible. Muhal Richard Abrams is a rare and fascinating addition to this group. Bassist Mark Helias and drummer Charles "Bobo" Shaw have not often been documented in Braxton's music, yet they were occasional contributors during this period, and their familiarity with and commitment to the music is obvious. Despite the temporary, even fleeting nature of this ensemble, for me, what emanates from these performances is a spirit which exemplifies the life-affirming status of Anthony Braxton's music, reveals new information about the past, and gives us hope for the future.
hatOLOGY 546 / SOLD OUT
Steve Lacy
Clinkers
Only the sixth hat to be released by the emerging record label in the late 70s, the first half of a live concert in Basel (Joe McPhee waited in the wings), Steve Lacy investigates life in the interstices of the internal and external worlds, translated through and narrated by a soprano saxophone.
hatOLOGY 547 / SOLD OUT
Lee Konitz, Don Friedman & Attila Zoller
Thingin
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 momentarily meet, tangle, blend, and dissolve, warm and invisible, in their own sweet way.
hatOLOGY 548 / SOLD OUT
Simon Nabatov Trio
Sneak Preview
Nabatov is not only a pianist, as the pieces on this CD show. Thus, one is tempted to speak, then, about the crossing over of the borders between genres, but one must also ask, which borders are these, because Simon Nabatov has grown up with several different musical forms, he experienced classical music and jazz at the same time, and has come to love both. This experience is not at all new. Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schönberg loved music of many different origins, George Gershwin and Duke Ellington as well. The combination, however, of the various music types on the level of composition and performance, is always and forever new.
hatOLOGY 549 / SOLD OUT
Matthew Shipp Trio
Prism
"There's the same very fast transference of signals. There's the very complex type of pattern action. There's the same mixture of improvisation and discipline...but the unknown is being unfolded at really fast rates." Which certainly holds true for this no-nonsense, cinema verité-live set from New York's Roulette performance space, recorded in March 1993 and originally issued on the small Brinkman Records label. The more obvious references to the free jazz tradition in these two extended pieces have since been sublimated in Shipp's group work, and his compositional impulses have flourished—as may be witnessed on the five discs Shipp has been recording for Hat Hut since 1996, CDs which have strengthened Shipp's position as one of the premier piano improvisors of our day. The piano would like to thank Matthew Shipp.
hatOLOGY 550 / SOLD OUT
Ran Blake
Horace Is Blue: A Silver Noir
The intense feeling that Ran Blake brings to his interpretations determines that each is concise, concentrated, gem-like, as intimate a statement as possible. Of course Blake's is an utterly original vision, and his drama and intensity are obviously different from Horace Silver's passionate swing and romantic lyricism. In the end there's a quality of joy in this album to match the delight that Silver has always sought to convey. That he shares the spirit of Silver's music is surely the highest tribute of all.
hatOLOGY 551 / SOLD OUT
Ellery Eskelin
Ramifications
These seven compositions are my first for a five piece band. Some of them are episodic (overall balance being the key issue) others are cut whole from the same cloth (wherein the cyclical structure becomes obscured as to just where it begins or ends). I'm interested in the effect that each newsection of music (or new piece in the overall order) has on the previous one and how it affects perceptions of the upcoming one, a process that is somewhat more aligned with the technique of filmmaking than with traditional formal development such as theme and variations. This process more accurately reflects the way I see actions in daily life.
hatOLOGY 552 / SOLD OUT
Ellery Eskelin
with Andrea Parkins & Jim Black
The Secret Museum
The Secret Museum refers to both the individual and collective experiences that all of us carry around in our daily lives. We are each a secret museum of experiences and remembrances of events gone by, places that have since changed, people that are no longer with us. Music can be an excellent medium by which to express these lost times and places and bring us to new places as well. It's been very rewarding to present the strange and sometimes conflicting elements of my musical psyche to listeners around the world, opening the door to my own secret museum of the past, present and future
Additional sponsorship by Rolf Fehlbaum/Vitra enables us to initiate a series of recordings with Ellery Eskelin from 1998 to the year 2000. This release, the fifth in this series, is part of a development program which allows the musician to present his musical concepts in a variety of settings.
hatOLOGY 553
Theo Jörgensmann
Eckard Koltermann
Pagine Gialle
Virtues such as these, however, are not to be had easily. It takes the dedication and stamina of dedicated clarinetists to mine these sonic areas with results as stellar as the ones documented on this disc. "Real" clarinet players are a special breed, sharing a specific pride and cameraderie, comparable perhaps to the fraternity rites of the royal trumpet fellowship. Indeed, only very few woodwind players who consider the clarinet to be just one colour amongst others on their sonic palette can rival the mastery so evident in these "yellow pages", a golden hour in the annals of clarinet playing
hatOLOGY 554 / SOLD OUT
Clusone 3
An Hour With ...
Many of Clusone 3's songs are bird songs. Bits and pieces of birds. The feather as both a symbol of the bird and a little chunk of the tweeter itself. Sonorous black magic. Here is the feather, here is the bird song, part of the bird song. Avis interruptus: when the song is ended, what has happened to the bird?
hatOLOGY 555 / SOLD OUT
Anthony Ortega Trio
Scattered Clouds
Spontaneity is the key to Ortega's improvising. His forms sometimes become wild free associations, and other times suggest cycles of alternating inside and outside passages. The unusual setting—it's a bop combo without a bassist to fix tempo and harmony—enhances the daredevil feeling even as pianist Mike Wofford and drummer Joe LaBarbera create close interplay
hatOLOGY 556 / SOLD OUT
Steve Lacy Four
Morning Joy
What we have here is a one-nighter by the Steve Lacy Quartet at Paris' Sunset Club.
hatOLOGY 557 / SOLD OUT
Anthony Braxton
Quartet (Dortmund) 1976
"It was at the first Dortmund Jazz Festival in Germany on October 31, 1976 that this group hit a magic peak."
hatOLOGY 558 / SOLD OUT
Matthew Shipp String Trio
Expansion, Power, Release
Matthew Shipp's roots are firmly planted in a jazz aesthetic, but like other musical geniuses of decades past, his driving vision never stands still, propelling him to break open new frontiers. If the pianist's compositions or performances do not fit established categories, or appear tinged with ragged complexities, they merely reflect his personality, which combines an abstract intellectualism with a healthy, engaging view of life. Shipp knows there are incorporeal qualities that infuse his being, and his music expresses his grasp of truths and complexities not often realized. That the striking performance found on this disk captures this essence is a noteworthy achievement.
hatOLOGY 559
Sven-Åke Johansson
Axel Dörner
Andrea Neumann
Barcelona Series
The ensemble heard on this CD, a group cultivating, as Johansson puts it, "a mechanistic, almost non-expressive playing stance, with the aesthetics of renouncement or of leaving out instead of filling in." Non-expressive improvisation? Aesthetics of reduction? Sounds familiar. ... A music hard to pinpoint and yet occupying a sonic niche of its very own.
hatOLOGY 560 / SOLD OUT
Vienna Art Orchestra
The Minimalism of Erik Satie
Satie's music constitutes the foundation for what Matthias Rüegg calls "Reflections on...". What we have here is a pendant to Stravinsky's "Pulcinella," thoroughly independent compositions using a musical x-ray of the original as their point of departure. According to Satie's intention there is no sticking to the original and no psychological interpretation. The cycle represents a musical environment commenting on the composer Satie, and objectifies what in the original music is so amazing and charming. "Jazz is screaming its sorrow into our faces and we don't give a damn about it," writes Satie. "That is what makes it so beautiful, so real."
hatOLOGY 561
Maneri, Morris, Maneri
Out Right Now
The level of three-way agreement has produced an album that, as well as any in Joe Maneri's growing discography, conveys the affirmative spirit of his live performances.
hatOLOGY 562 / SOLD OUT
Cecil Taylor Unit
It Is In The Brewing Luminous
It Is In The Brewing Luminous is an experience which can never be duplicated.
hatOLOGY 563
Per Henrik Wallin
Proklamation I & Farewell to Sweden
(Duo with Sven-Åke Johansson & Bonus CD Trio Live at Bimhuis Amsterdam)
You wonder why no dictionaries mention Wallin, Per Henrik, one of the great jazz pianists of our time and one of Sweden’s most renowned improvisors. After hearing these recordings, I'm confident you will agree that Mr. Wallin, Per Henrik, deserves a major entry in any jazz dictionary.
This release includes an additional bonus CD. The price sould be for one CD only!
hatOLOGY 564 / SOLD OUT
Paul Bley, Franz Koglmann, Gary Peacock
Annette
Though seldom revealed, feelings this vulnerable and explicit are real, music this honest and open is real, and the inspiration here is palpable and real.
hatOLOGY 565 / SOLD OUT
Anthony Ortega
New Dance
In retrospect, it was this lyricism, plus his restraint and sense of contemplation
hatOLOGY 566
Franz Koglmann
O Moon My Pin-Up
With O Moon My Pin-Up, Koglmann has undoubtedly enriched his multi-facetted oeuvre. Out of the characteristic synthesis of Cool Jazz idiom and Wiener Schule expressionism which had its inception with the founding of the "Pipetet" has grown over the years a microcosm of manifold structural links to the entire (western) world of music ranging from Renaissance to improvised music which transcend the co-ordinates of the historic "Third Stream", not to mention the new dimensions which the tapping of vocal music opens up for Koglmann's soundworld. O Moon My Pin-Up is not a musical "judgement" on Ezra Pound; it is neither a condemnation nor an apology. On the contrary, it's a sensitive reflection of the fragile polyphony of speech levels and inflections in Pound's poetry at the time of an existential crisis which is directly connected with the political events surrounding the end of the war.
hatOLOGY 567
John Law Quartet
Abacus feat. Gerry Hemingway
The word (Abacus) has two meanings, according to the Concise Oxford, it's a frame used for counting or calculation, and -in architectural circles- it's that
flat bit at the top of a column. ...Abacus, subtitled 'Partita for piano, saxophone, bass, drums', is a jazz composition modeled on a baroque suite. Even in an age of global fusions and cultural collisions, this seems a little out of the ordinary. Not so to Law, who insists it's no big deal and says the idea came about quite naturally. "Baroque music is very close to me, I've been playing Bach all my life."
hatOLOGY 568 / SOLD OUT
Sun Ra Arkestra
Sunrise In Different Dimensions
"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?
hatOLOGY 569 / SOLD OUT
Steve Lacy 6
We See
Thelonious Monk Songbook
We See is substantiated by echoes and ideas, that is, the old and the new. The instrumentation is unusual for Lacy; the addition of trumpet and vibes, and the subtraction of piano, violin, and voice, dramatically alters the sound and strategy of Lacy’s familiar group. ... Lacy’s own "Hanky-Panky" assures the final look is to the future, not the past, in light of Lacy’s debt to Monk, so that the view is not onIy Monk, and that, in Lacy’s light, our view of Monk is not the onIy Monk we see.
hatOLOGY 2-570 / SOLD OUT
Myra Melford Trio
Alive In The House Of Saints
Listening, eight years after it was created, to this primary chapter in the recorded legacy of Myra Melford's first trio evokes a rush of feelings. There are warm memories of in-person encounters with Melford, Lindsey Horner and Reggie Nicholson; and satisfaction regarding how the ideas Melford articulated here as both pianist and composer have metamorphosed into the triumphs of her subsequent music. What is absent is the uncertainty one often feels when contemplating the recent past, that feeling of needing more time to take the full measure of a musical statement. Melford has made it easy for us, through the clarity of both these now-historic performances and her subsequent efforts, to hear the present works as both glorious ends in themselves and the foundations of her ongoing creations.
hatOLOGY 571
Franz Koglmann
L'Heure Bleue
All of the music on L'Heure Bleue has aged well. Several jazz critics have cited the album as Koglmann’s best, and while I might disagree with such a ranking (how can there be a "best" that excludes the Pipetet?) I do think it speaks to the rarefied flow that is achieved in these performances, and to the way in which they cross lines (white and otherwise) that musicians from both Europe and the US have attempted to blur with greater frequency in the succeeding years.
hatOLOGY 572 / SOLD OUT
Michel Portal, Léon Francioli, Pierre Favre
Arrivederci Le Chouartse
Ce jour-là, pendant juste un moment, pendant un moment juste, Léon Francioli, Pierre Favre et Michel Portal n'eurent que l'âge d’une jeunesse éternelle - "La jeunesse, c'est quand on ne sait pas ce qui va arriver." (Henri Michaux).
On that particular day, for just a moment -
hatOLOGY 573 / SOLD OUT
Albert Ayler
Lörrach, Paris 1966
The enthusiasm of the Paris audience, the strong following the Aylers had in France does not come as a total surprise. For, as the musician and his brother explained in the Down Beat story: if you really understood the message of Sidney Bechet, you should have no difficulty relating to this new kind of free spiritual music.
hatOLOGY 574
Matthew Shipp String Trio
By The Law Of Music
Matthew Shipp's version of jazz is one that accommodates mysticism, and so a conversation about music with him will always yield the word "puzzle". He talks about his work as math, as formula, as metaphysics...By the Law of Music was conceived as a twelve-part suite, or, in the composer's words, a "kinetic grid"... With unnerving slow-motion, Maneri always seems to be leading somewhere, he makes you anticipate the future. Parker, a reactive player, embodies the immediate present by encompassing different worlds of pitch and rhythm into his playing, collapsing registers to access surprising notes. And Shipp is a naturally reflective musician. I have always come away from hearing him remembering the afterglow of chords more than the attack.
hatOLOGY 575
Max Nagl Ensemble
Ramasuri
Max Nagl's feeling for ambience is undoubtedly connected with his long experience as a composer of stage music for dance performances. Here, too, he creates music that does not exist for itself alone but, functioning as a backdrop, has to supply the emotional framework as well. "He produces music as furniture of the psyche," wrote Christian Scheib about this brilliant assimilator.
hatOLOGY 576
Theo Jörgensmann Quartet
To Ornette - Hybrid Identity
To my ears, this quartet music could well serve as a demonstration of what post-Ornette jazz quartet playing, taken seriously, really implies
hatOLOGY 577 / SOLD OUT
Ellery Eskelin
Vanishing Point
When I listen back to the music perhaps the one feeling I get throughout all of the pieces is best expressed by the title of track number four, "Inquiétante Familiarité". This phrase refers to the phenomenon that Freud described as a "strange nearness" (or "unheimlich" in the German). A strange familiarity or perhaps a familiar strangeness. Improvisation often has this quality for me. Taking what you know into the unknown
Additional sponsorship by Rolf Fehlbaum/Vitra enables us to initiate a series of recordings with Ellery Eskelin from 1998 to the year 2001. This release, the sixth in this series, is part of a development program which allows the musician to present his musical concepts in a variety of settings.
hatOLOGY 578 / SOLD OUT
Steve Lacy
School Days
The seven performances here only sound more like play than work. Really, they are hard-won lessons in economy and complementary interplay. The participants’ seeming ease at handling Monk's stubborn lessons was a test for which the band had "crammed." (“Cram" denotes a preparation period of intense study, during which information in large quantity is “crammed“ or stuffed into the mind.)
hatOLOGY 579 / SOLD OUT
Joe McPhee
Po Music
Oleo
The word PO, as used in Po Music, comes from Dr. Edward de Bono’s concept of Lateral Thinking. Derived from words like possible, positive, poetry and hypothesis, Po is a language indicator to show that the process of provocation is being used to move from a fixed set of ideas in an attempt to discover new ones. Po Music represents ideas as provocation rather than as an accurate description of what things are: a positive, possible, poetic hypothesis.
hatOLOGY 2-580
John Zorn
Cobra
Above all, COBRA is a musical experience. Words cannot convey
hatOLOGY 581 / SOLD OUT
Marc Copland Trio
Haunted Heart & Other Ballads
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 582 / SOLD OUT
François Raulin Trio
Trois Plans Sur La Comète
Un triangle apparemment coopératif s'anime, se développe, voire s'anamorphose, autour, non d'un "leader", mais d'un désir catalyseur, et sans excès ni vains effets d'urgence, ce sont bien trois plans sur la comète qui se recoupent, se recouvrent et s'organisent "naturellement" – tout aussi naturellement du moins qu'est censé s'élever le solo ouvrant le Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune et que Debussy décrivait ainsi: "C'est un berger qui joue de la flûte, le c ... dans l'herbe."
An apparently willing triangle moves into action, develops, or even changes form, not round a leader or a leading figure, the catalyst here is a single, unifying desire that foregoes all excesses or the futile effects of a sense of urgency; here are three blueprints that intersect and overlap with each other in a structure that seems totally natural, or at least every bit as natural as the opening solo to the "Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune" is supposed to be. This was described by Debussy in the following terms: "It's a shepherd sitting on his a ... in the grass, playing his flute."
hatOLOGY 583 / SOLD OUT
Marc Copland - David Liebman Quartet
Lunar
All of this music is deep, and poetic. It cries commitment as well as want, and sings with the affinity of true art.
hatOLOGY 584 / SOLD OUT
Ellery Eskelin with Andrea Parkins & Jim Black
12 (+1) Imaginary Views
Why the word "imaginary" you ask? Because these pieces barely exist, at least on paper. They exist more so in our minds and imaginations at the time we perform them. But of course as documented on this recording they exist in a very real way. As with all improvisation there is an element of indeterminacy that when negotiated in the spur of the moment ultimately results in definitive musical statements. And these pieces rely on improvisation more so than any we've played thus far. Each one is an idea, a concept containing some specific element that characterizes an otherwise open improvisation. These twelve short pieces were conceived of and written as a suite and were developed in performance during our 2001 spring tour of Europe.
Additional sponsorship by Rolf Fehlbaum/Vitra enables us to initiate a series of recordings with Ellery Eskelin from 1998 to the year 2001. This release, the seventh in this series, is part of a development program which allows the musician to present his musical concepts in a variety of settings.
hatOLOGY 585 / SOLD OUT
Nagl, Bernstein, Akchote, Jones
Big Four
This album provides as good an example as any recent memory of how the best jazz music is a renewable resource, a fount of inspiration that leads attentive and sensitive artists to new realms of eloquence. It is not a repertory project, in the sense of recreating classic material, yet it draws upon the manner land, in two instances, the material of a classic body of recordings to fashion something both absolutely contemporary and timeless.
hatOLOGY 586
Brandlmayr, Siewert, Williamson
Highway My Friend
Faith in wide time frames and a preference for self-supporting structures allow the musicians to dispense with fixed patterns or forms. In doing so, they create this hybrid music, which defies explanation in the discourse of both the improvisers, even the free ones, and the composers, even those who stick to open formats. This is a matter of an interwoven three-step. The single steps aren't really new, they are, however, applied without compromise, fragmented further, and questioned not matter what. Thus they throw a new light upon the creation of music: the need to employ an aesthetic filter, the development of supporting structures, and the possibilities of storing and repeating.
hatOLOGY 2-587 / SOLD OUT
David Liebman-Marc Copland Duo
Bookends
The new duo represents a fascinating and exciting aesthetics of contrasts: on the one hand, Liebman, who tends toward expressionist emphasis and surrealist alienation, and, on the other, the impressionist sound poet Copland.
hatOLOGY 588 / SOLD OUT
Ellery Eskelin
with Andrea Parkins & Jim Black
Arcanum Moderne
I don’t know if all explanation and commentary will help or hinder. If it's a hindrance hopefully you've passed it over and are already listening to the music. I realize that what we do may not have universal appeal, at least on the surface, but I think we do have a job to do and I'm always hopeful that while we may not have universal appeal we might have an impact on those who do listen.
hatOLOGY 589 / SOLD OUT
Peter Brötzmann, Joe McPhee,
Kent Kessler, Michael Zerang
Tales Out Of Time
Patience and reserve: two manifestations of self-control. Solitary figures await their joint moment, let it come, don't rush it, don't drown it in small-talk. Then when the time is right grab a hold and don't let it get away. Discipline has been your watchword. You've waited, and when you eat that 2000-year-old egg, it will be utterly scrumptious. For Zerang, Kessler, Brötzmann and McPhee, now's the time: peel back the rind, pop the cork, eat the egg.
hatOLOGY 590
Daniele D’Agaro,
Ernst Glerum & Han Bennink
Strandjutters
What’s a versatile Italian reed player doing in the company of a slam-bang Dutch rhythm section, you ask? D’Agaro spent several years living in Holland, collaborating with the leading lights of the often explosive Amsterdam scene, and though he’s gigged with both, separately, over the years, this is their initial intermingling as a threesome. If the recorded evidence here contrarily suggests a longer, deeper relationship, chalk it up to three canny talents who know how to tap into jazz’s Eternal Present and work it to their advantage.
hatOLOGY 591
Pauline Oliveros
The Roots Of The Moment
For more than 50 years, Pauline Oliveros has been on a continuing mission: “... to explore new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.” If those words bring to mind the voyages of the Starship Enterprise from the television series Star Trek, the parallels are more than coincidental. In fact Pauline would be as able a captain of any Starship in the fleet of the United Federation of Planets. A bit of a difference here though, for Pauline Oliveros, space is not necessarily the final frontier and the barrier at the end of the universe is just another interesting challenge. For Pauline Oliveros, like Sun Ra, Space is the place.
hatOLOGY 592
Ellery Eskelin
Forms
Eskelin's first trio featuring double bassist Drew Gress and drummer Phil Haynes played an important role in his éducation sentimentale.
hatOLOGY 593
Marc Copland And ...
Creating improvised music with others can be a very intimate process. When this process is shared with musicians who are lifelong friends, the personal bond seems to manifest itself in a special kind of musical communication. There is an ease and flow, a delight in mutual trust, exploration, and surprise, which is hard to duplicate in any other way.
hatOLOGY 2-594
Herbert Distel
Railnotes
In Distel’s „Railnotes“, we can never be sure where we cross the threshold between the „real“ sound world and the sonic realms of illusion and imagination. We can never be sure indeed, for this threshold is not defined, it’s undefinable and merely a matter of our own perception, our own imagination. If there is a lesson to be learned from these distinctly non-pedagogical two audio pieces, this might be it.
hatOLOGY 2-595 / SOLD OUT
Jimmy Giuffre, Paul Bley & Steve Swallow
Emphasis & Flight, 1961
It would be wrong to say that this trio was ahead of its time, though their methods have proven invaluable to the musicians who have followed, since they were so much of their time, a time when a breath of fresh air blew through all the arts and created an enthusiasm of energy, an acceptance of new modes of expression. Swallow, Bley, and Giuffre's remarkable musicianship, intellect, invention, and empathy created timeless music of significance and deep feeling.
hatOLOGY 4-596 / SOLD OUT
Mal Waldron & Steve Lacy
Live At Dreher Paris 1981,
Round Midnight
The equality, the almost perfect balance in complement and contrast, of the musical collaboration between Steve Lacy and Mal Waldron was palpable in both its internal and external workings … These four CDs, captured live in Paris in 1981, are notable as the first documentation of their performances as a duo, a particularly felicitous exploration of common interests and uncommon talents, initiating an intermittent series of duo recordings that would span thirteen years, varying repertoire, and several labels, but never venture far from the groundwork that was established here.
hatOLOGY 597 / SOLD OUT
Myra Melford Extended Ensemble
Even The Sounds Shine
The music was recorded about halfway through a three week tour in Europe April/May 1994. We recorded two nights and one afternoon at the same venue in Wuppertal. In putting this project together I was interested in building on what had been established with my trio, the familiarity we had with my music and with each other's playing. By adding horns to the group, I was looking to expand the sonic and structural possibilities while still exploring the uses of improvisation to develop written material. This was especially true in the new pieces which are a series (or string) of musical episodes woven together through improvisation.
hatOLOGY 598
Archie Shepp
I Know About The Life
I Know About The Life is an excellent example of Shepp's methods in this endeavor. They prove to be equally effective whether the vehicle is the jaunty "Well, You Needn't," the athletic "Giant Steps" or the alluring "'Round Midnight." On the uptempo Monk tune, Shepp veers between the bellicose and the gleeful with raspy honks, smeary bent notes, and strategically placed dips and surges in intensity. In running the daunting harmonic gauntlet of the Coltrane classic, Shepp frequently skids across the bar lines with textures that growl and chortle, while his hollers and snorts are crucial to his blistering duo exchange with John Betsch. His sighs and moans on the Monk ballad bring the piece’s sub-text of yearning into bold relief. In each case, Shepp makes the post-modernist concession that nothing is new, even as he reinvigorates decades-old aspects of the tenor tradition.
hatOLOGY 2-599 / SOLD OUT
One Too Many Salty Swift And Not Goodbye
composed by Cecil Taylor, Unit Core Music BMI
This music is about Cecil Taylor and his Unit in Stuttgart one remarkable night in June 1978, but most of all this music is about us and for us. The people who listen, the people whom the dedicated artist does not disappoint ... the anonymous faces that fill the seats at every concert in every city.
hatOLOGY 600
David Liebman
Solo Tenor Saxophone
Colors
This incredible solo saxophone recording is another courageous foray into previously uncharted territories, showcasing David Liebman’s inventiveness, artistry and virtuosity.
So let’s enjoy David Liebman’s personal artistry. I know that I do each and every time I hear his passionate solo unaccompanied as expression and meditation. He is truly one of the masters of all time in this beautiful world of music we live in.
I think of this recording as a complement to a soprano solo CD titled The Tree (Soul Note) recorded in the early 1990s.
hatOLOGY 601
Max Roach
Anthony Braxton
One In Two - Two In One
Willisau, 1979: An intersection of planned chance and fortuitous contrivance. Two scheduled concerts
hatOLOGY 602
Joe McPhee, Lisle Ellis, Paul Plimley
Sweet Freedom
«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 603
Warne Marsh Quartet
Ne Plus Ultra
It’s hard to understand why Warne Marsh was so neglected during his lifetime. It’s harder still to substantiate the charges with which his music was branded – cerebral, cold, unemotional, uninvolving. This album alone, one of his best, should have been enough to put such absurd slurs to rest. The music on Ne Plus Ultra is intimate, warm, passionate, risky. There is much beauty to be shared.
hatOLOGY 2-604
Steve Lacy Five
The Way
The Way is a long story. Based on an old Chinese text, attributed to Lao-Tzu, it reached me 2000 years later, in New York, in Witter Bynner’s sing-song version: The Tao Teh Ching (published by Capricorn Books). That was 1959. By '67 I had already set the melody of "The Way" for Irène and was mulling over the other verses. The rest of the pieces were written in the late sixties. By the early seventies began the elaboration and realization of this music, known as Tao, which is still going on. By now, after hundreds of performances of this cycle (in solo, duo, quintet, orchestra, with dancers, electronics, etc.), the shape and sound is coming clear and the whole work seems destined to become "standard" one day. New wings for old words
hatOLOGY 605
Russ Lossing
Ed Schuller
Paul Motian
As It Grows
Silence, it has been said, is more eloquent than speech. Russ Lossing's music, in this trio setting, grows out of silence
hatOLOGY 2-606
Wolfgang Mitterer
Radio Fractal / Beat Music
Live at Donaueschingen 2002
One hour and fifty-four minutes
hatOLOGY 2-607
<trio x 3>
New Jazz Meeting
Baden-Baden 2002
Moving frontiers and shifting definitions: what has become a common everyday experience to us is also reflected in today’s music. Not only is the artificial borderline separating "serious" and "entertainment" music being atomised, but within the meticulously defined genres the boundaries are becoming blurred as well. Indian sitar sounds set to techno beats, jazzy offbeat rhythms going with Top 40 hits, or rock sounds flickering through tight compositions no longer surprise us. The Southwest German Radio (SWR) also responded to this development in its long-standing New Jazz Meeting in Baden-Baden. Thus, the 2002 festival programme seemed to embody a dictum from Theodor W. Adorno's essay Vers une musique informelle: "To make things though we might not know what they are."
hatOLOGY 608
David Murray Trio
3D Family
It’s been 28 years since David Murray, along with Andrew Cyrille and Johnny Mbizo Dyani, played at the festival in Willisau. After listening for the first time after a quarter of a century, it brings memories—a flashback to the ’70s. It shows us an effervescent world that easily sinks into a melancholic veil of nostalgia. Wasn’t it exciting back then, when those who are fifty now were still dreaming their wild dreams, and when then-fresh alternative life plans were material for public discourse, or when still unspoiled musical views of life found their respective stages, among others in Moers and Willisau? The Woodstock years were not over yet, and Murray’s concert in Willisau is a valuable document of those years. He belonged to the top group of young competitors, a strong voice among the improvisors. New Jazz was still in the process of freeing itself, and had little interest in the patterns of earlier periods. It seached for longlasting meanings, through its choices of musical material and the trend-setting titles for its pieces. Post-modernity was a term that was not yet on everyone’s lips.
hatOLOGY 609
Max Nagl
Otto Lechner
Bradley Jones
Flamingos
When music is so perfume-soaked, marked with such imagery, haunted by history,and pierced through and through with trembling and chills, it lays bare its own humility. And in doing so, enchants us. This is none other than a reflection of our own humanity. A reflection that, at the hand of these gifted musicians, becomes a little more desperate,and at the same time, a little more beautiful too.
hatOLOGY 610
Anthony Braxton
Performance (Quartet) 1979
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 611
Ellery Eskelin
Ten
So what of the ten year anniversary celebration? Well, I take this music as a sign that whatever I may want or think I want there are forces at work beyond my awareness and that improvised music can offer wonderful surprises if one is open to them. As for the band, we've been playing a lot in 2004 celebrating our anniversary. And so our celebration of a decade of music is marked with a project that does not look to the past but to the future. We look forward to celebrating that future with you in another ten years.
hatOLOGY 2-612
Anthony Braxton’s
Charlie Parker Project 1993
Anthony Braxton takes this wonderful legacy of bebop and makes it speak anew. But in doing so, he is only renewing Charlie Parker’s promise – the promise that runs throughout the African-American creative tradition – that now is the time the music can and must address.
hatOLOGY 613
Daniele D’Agaro
Jeb Bishop
Kent Kessler
Robert Barry
Chicago Overtones
For a couple of years, D’Agaro has been regularly boarding planes destined for Chicago – thanks to John Corbett and Art Lange, whose good offices have sprouted collaborations between European musicians and exponents of the Chicago scene, which for about a decade has been bursting with new activities. ... It was Fred Anderson who drew D’Agaro’s attention to drummer Robert Barry ... The other members of D’Agaro’s quartet, trombonist Jeb Bishop and bassist Kent Kessler, are among the heavyweights of the Chicago scene.
hatOLOGY 614
Anthony Braxton
(+ Duke Ellington)
Concept Of Freedom
By constructing a musical reality through the compositional impetus of Braxton and Ellington, these musicians remind us that the “Concept Of Freedom” is an ongoing challenge that requires commitment, sensitivity, creativity, and vigilance, and that Art is not an escape from life, but an experience essential to life's meaning and value.
hatOLOGY 615
David Liebman & Ellery Eskelin
Different But The Same
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 616
Theo Jörgensmann
Fellowship
Recorded in 1998... the three pieces fall comfortably into a long-form, open presentation of thematic improvisation that feels even older – with its roots, say, in the freeing of forms that occurred during the ‘60s – while making allusions to and referencing details to be found throughout the history of jazz. This is neither an act of stylistic appropriation nor conscious postmodern juxtapositioning, but an organic collective response reflecting the individual life experiences of these particular musicians, as artists from different generations, different geographical locations, different musical environments (making even the group name, Fellowship, with its echoes of ‘60s cooperative optimism, all the more apt).
hatOLOGY 618
eRikm & Fennesz
Complementary Contrasts
Donaueschingen 2003
Two different temperaments, the same background – this observation was the basis of the idea of inviting eRikm and Fennesz to form a duo for the first time. A few days before the duo premiered at the Donaueschinger Musiktage 2003 the musicians met in the SWR studio to try out strategies for playing together. This CD captures the two best takes from these studio sessions along with the recording of the festival concert, which lasted about forty minutes. Although they are much more abstract than the rock-like Donaueschinger concert, the studio takes reveal most strikingly that the new duo is united in inner harmony.
hatOLOGY 619
Marc Copland Solo
Time Within Time
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
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 621
Max Nagl Ensemble
Quartier Du Faisan
Quartier du Faisan isn't merely a compilation of stylistic curiosities but a clear stance on modern orchestra music, an eccentric version of an alpine big band. Perhaps this isn't jazz at all — but without the slightest doubt it is a hymn to jazz. Max Nagl says his music comes about intuitively, he listens, and he picks and chooses to structure it into something that has been unheard of so far. To him, all that matters are colours, iridescent exceptions, surprisingsounds. Thus, jazz is a pool of ideas, a stimulus, a source, no more and no less.
hatOLOGY 622
Cecil Taylor Unit
The Eighth
Taylor's art confronts Nature so organically because it embraces the same attitudes, makes the same demands. Rejecting frivolous entertainment, it is ritual—a rite of creation that accepts paradox as it attempts to transcend it.
hatOLOGY 623
efzeg
krom
Many facets blending in a unique sound: if one had to give the recipe for the success of this Vienna band, one would probably have to point to the great variety of the musical perspectives which converge in efzeg; and which, according to founder member Boris Hauf, are a major asset. ”What is important are the different backgrounds the five of us contribute from different musical fields. It was this which finally made me decide to start this experiment. But it could have turned into a complete flop as well.” That it did not is due to the flexibility of the five musicians, whose sound worlds have grown together within a very short time to become this special efzeg sound.
hatOLOGY 624
Joe McPhee & Survival Unit II
with Clifford Thornton
at WBAI’s Free Music Store,
N.Y. N.Y., October 30, 1971
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
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 626
Wiesendanger
Weber
Ulrich
We concentrate.
When a piano trio plays ”Great American Songs”, it is usually like a more or less amusing party with old friends. WWU, however, are different. Their interpretations of standards are actually downright metamorphoses. The compositions by Cole Porter, George Gershwin and Victor Young have been subjected to an extensive, though never malicious transformation process. Nevertheless, the basic substance of the pieces – their DNA, so to speak, or ”intense flavour”, as Ulrich puts it – will always remain intact. With reference to the French philosopher Deleuze, Wiesendanger explains that the point is to create a foreign language out of a mother-tongue. Uncovering the unfamiliar in the well-known, WWU do not content themselves with exploring the songs’ beautiful surface, but delve into the psyche, so to speak, and coax secrets out of them nobody even knew about before: Stella on the couch. Just as much as the three musicians like to explore things they also enjoy playing, so they do a musical backward somersault every now and then, with a big wink of course, and try to outmatch each other in swinging.
hatOLOGY 627
Manuel Mengis Gruppe 6
Into The Barn
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
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
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
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 signif icance 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
The Köln concert shows us these positive vibrations marching through
hatOLOGY 645
Fabian Gisler
Backyard Poets
John Schröder
Colin Vallon
Henrik Walsdorff
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
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
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
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
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 / SOLD OUT
John Zorn
George Lewis
Bill Frisell
News For Lulu
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
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
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
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
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 655
John Zorn
George Lewis
Bill Frisell
More News For Lulu
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 656
Matthew Shipp Trio
The Multiplication Table
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)
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 667
ICP Orchestra Jubilee Varia
On first hearing this CD may sound to you like an ill-programmed mess, with the improvisations up front and the catchy numbers buried deep. But with ICP, over the long haul or short, the more you hear it, the more apparent its trajectory becomes, the more orderly and less chaotic it sounds. Or, the more you hear ICP’s improvised «instant compositions» and their instant demolitions of Misha’s highly whistleable tunes, the less clear it becomes what’s order and what’s chaos to begin with. They rewrite the book on accepted musical practices, just as they rewrite their own book, every precious evening they’re on the bandstand.
hatOLOGY 668
Lee Konitz & Martial Solal
Star Eyes, 1983
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
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 671
Vienna Art Orchestra
The Minimalism Of Erik Satie
Satie’s music constitutes the foundation for what Mathias Rüegg calls «Reflections on ...». What we have here is a pen- dant to Stravinsky’s «Pulcinella,» ... thoroughly independent compositions using a musical x-ray of the original as their point of departure. According to Satie’s intention there is no sticking to the original and no psychological interpretation. The cycle represents a musical environment commenting on the composer Satie, and objectifies what in the original music is so amazing and charming. «Jazz is screaming its sorrow into our faces and we don’t give a damn about it,» writes Satie. «That is what makes
it so beautiful, so real.»
hatOLOGY 672
Polwechsel & John Tilbury
Field
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
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 674
Paul Bley
Franz Koglmann
Gary Peacock
Annette
Though seldom revealed, feelings this vulnerable and explicit are real, music this honest and open is real, and the inspiration here is palpable and real.
hatOLOGY 675
Taylor Ho Bynum Sextet
Asphalt Flowers Forking Paths
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
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
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 681
Russ Lossing Trio
Oracle
Russ Lossing continues to collaborate and create at a voracious pace… Though this disc marks a recording debut, this particular trio has been active for the past six years, operating out of the musical hotbed that exists around a handful of cross-pollinating venues in Brooklyn, New York. As Lossing describes it: “That’s where we developed our particular language as an ensemble in terms of the interdependence, functionality, and expressiveness of each individual within the whole. Each sacrifices something for the sound of the trio and in so doing nothing is lost from the one"…
Testament to the trio’s shared fortitude, spontaneity also supplanted premeditation in the studio. Lossing pulled selections from a stack of pieces they had been working up and allowed the compass of collective experience to take over. The date was recorded without isolation or headphones in an intimate studio space. No second takes were necessary.
hatOLOGY 682
Pandelis Karayorgis Quintet
System Of 5
For this occasion Pandelis Karayorgis fronts a new band and so, drawing upon both his own and a few adapted tactics, System Of 5 is a bit different.... Refocusing our view of tradition from several distinctive contemporary perspectives, the music of System Of 5 seems somehow familiar and surprising at the same time. It’s difficult, but it’s what art is meant to do, and these musicians
do it well.
hatOLOGY 683
Ellery Eskelin
with Andrea Parkins and Jim Black
One Great Night...Live
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
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.
hatOLOGY 685
Anthony Braxton
Town Hall (Trio & Quintet) 1972
By 1972 we still only had a vague and partial knowledge of Braxton’s more formal nature. So Town Hall was a “coming out” in one sense, albeit an atypical one. In some ways, this concert reminds us of Braxton’s roots in the collective experiences of the AACM, and at the same time anticipates the multi-logics and expanded resources of later endeavors.
hatOLOGY 686
Loren Connors & Jim O'Rourke
Are You Going To Stop...In Bern?
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 687
Ran Blake & Anthony Braxton
A Memory Of Vienna
There had been no plans, no preparation. It was a completely spur-of-the-moment decision. Nine years later, I don’t remember whose idea it was—mine? Werner X. Uehlinger’s? Ran’s or Anthony’s? Once we started, enthusiasm was high, everyone jumped into it head-first and hard, perhaps a bit too hard at first. When it was over, we didn’t know what we had. Now we know. What you now hold in your hands is the result of fortuitous circumstance, hard work, imagination, talent, trust, and a bit of blind luck. Like all art that survives, and thrives, it is a miracle.
hatOLOGY 688
Noah Kaplan Quartet
Descendants
The transparency of the quartet’s intent and mode of operation allow hearing inside the music, from which details of descent and association emerge. In response, memory, and imagination, memory’s mirror, suggest familiar analogies – such as the guitar’s Appalachian folk arpeggios in “Pendulum Music,” the tenor saxophone’s vocalization and the raga-like development of “Descent,” the bluesy edge of “Esther,” the multiple meters in “Rat Man.” Or the way “Wolves” comes together – the fluid electric bass fitting hand-in-glove with the guitar’s fluttering modalities, the groove and textural incident of the drums, the soprano saxophone’s shofar cry. As the improvisational mode coheres, everything relates to melody, even the rhythm section, urging without forcing, alert to alternatives in the moment.
hatOLOGY 689
Marc Copland
David Liebman Duo
Impressions
The two may have done little more than talk about the weather before they began playing the largely standards-focused Impressions, but from such mundane chitchat comes a performance that exemplifies the best of what each of these fine musicians does – but also, with the push-and-pull of two different musical personalities, demonstrates the ability and willingness of each to be drawn outside their normal predispositions, to create music that's the best of both, and something a little more, and plenty special.
hatOLOGY 690
Marc Copland Trio
Haunted Heart
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 691
Ellery Eskelin with Andrea Parkins & Jim Black
One Great Day...
In some ways I think that a recording is the best medium for this music. I can think of a lot of music that speaks better on a recording than it does in a club where the environment and the audience’s expectations exert an effect on the music. With this recording we’ve found a mix between the two. Writing music for this band has been a real breakthrough for me. Andrea and Jim have ears for anything I put in front of them. It’s a great feeling to have a band that can realize your ideas and offer its own surprises along the way.
I'm gratified that the rerelease of “One Great Day...” coincides with its inclusion in the Penguin Jazz Guide's “The History of the Music in the 1001 Best Albums”. Of course there are countless recordings deserving of attention and reissue. This group managed to tie together the fractured reality of my musical universe at the time. The acknowledgement is appreciated.
hatOLOGY 692
Lee Konitz,
Don Friedman & Attila Zoller
Thingin
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 693
Bobby Bradford-John Carter Quintet
Comin' On
Though revolutionary for its time, the group’s music does not betray its age; the musical syntax is not so unfa- miliar now – our ears have grown over time to meet it on common ground – and its values have proven time- tested and substantial. All of which combine to make Carter and Bradford’s recorded reunion, here, from 1988, an Event.
hatOLOGY 695
Ray Anderson, Han Bennink & Christy Doran
A B D
Listening to Anderson’s four compositions, Doran’s piece, four free improvisations, and an Ellington tune, from the two sessions strike me as collages of a sort, bringing together very different aesthetics, directions, and mate- rials, for a direct confrontation. Not a confrontational confrontation, mind you. A very amenable comparing, con- trasting, and combining of sensibilities, the very thing that makes creative music tick.
hatOLOGY 696
Matthew Shipp Duos
With Mat Maneri & Joe Morris
If Shipp’s group recordings embody his fluctuating musical-conceptual-social ethos, and his solo discs deliver his keyboard language in concentrated form, duets are his language’s testing ground, and his choices of partner can clue you to what he wants to say. On these recordings with violinist Mat Maneri and electric guitarist Joe Morris, the pianist let it be known that he would no more be bounded by any orthodoxy of ecstatic jazz than by the mainstream variety.
hatOLOGY 697
Steve Lacy Five
Blinks...Zürich Live 1983
On Blinks, the listener hears the Steve Lacy group winning one of these games (kicking ass and taking names, as a friend of mine puts it), caught live 1983 in the big hall at the Rote Fabrik, Zürich. The band plays with such simultaneous togetherness and fire; they've already well-past cleared the ground and taken off as a cohesive ensemble, passed “stiff” period by, able to prod, push, surprise even itself. Just to hear Lacy take over soloing from Potts on “Blinks,” like some Hendrix sharpened tendril of feedback: aggressive, interceptive, but continuous. Model of collectivity, balancing trust and risk.
hatOLOGY 698
Sun Ra Arkestra
Sunrise In Different Dimensions
“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?
hatOLOGY 699
Ran Blake
That Certain Feeling
(George Gershwin Songbook)
Songs – with or without lyrics – being no less than stories, and the best songs of George (and frequently Ira) Gershwin being stories of the first order, any number of these exhilarating moments are to be heard on this disc, a result of the material (Gershwin’s) inspiring the imagination of the improviser, Ran Blake. Blake’s art is wholly a product of his acute attention (to the stories, images, and utterances of his imagination) and integrity (in the formal process of making music, spontaneously). Even with songs as familiar as Gershwin’s, so ingrained in our hearts and our history, we can be sur- prised by the possibilities of expression which Blake (and Ricky Ford, and Steve Lacy) offers us, precisely because of his rejection of the familiar, the literal, the expected, the commonly intended. So stark, evocative, and eloquent is his music that it does sometimes seem that what he is doing is giving shape to smoke in the air.
hatOLOGY 706
Samuel Blaser Quartet
Boundless
Blaser’s tone, articulation and experimental technique have maintained a steady growth since his impressive beginnings as a recording artist just a few short years ago. A young master of multiphonics, he is one of the few artists who have decided to embrace the complex techniques pioneered by Mangelsdorff, albeit with a purity of tone that few of his contemporaries can muster. Presenting his improvisational gifts and wide-ranging interests in the company of like-minded peers, Boundless is a lucid and compelling document of a rising artist whose singular path shares few equals.
hatOLOGY 717
Albert Ayler
Stockholm, Berlin 1966
Albert Ayler's 1966 European tour produced several of the most inspired concerts of his sadly abbreviated career. Of the surviving tapes from that tour, those from the Berlin concert have been the most abused, while those from Stockholm are all but unknown. This is the first release of these performances, in digitally remastered sound, to be approved by and officially and legally licensed from the Ayler Estate and the copyright holders of these tapes.
Hat Hut Records Ltd.
P.O.Box 521, 4020 Basel, Switzerland