At the start of the concert saxophonist and bandleader Xhosa Cole announced “We’re gonna be abstracting these melodies.” These are standards but the material is more freely deployed with the discipline of using Monk fragments to create a kind of musical sliding puzzle. The key thing about these proceedings that could decide them for you is this: you might see it as a brave bricolage of the best of that remarkable composer, or you might see it as a self-indulgent assemblage of quotations and riffs.

Perhaps perversely the album FreeMonk (released 25 January 2025) features no piano; the guitar of Steve Saunders, with Josh Vadiveloo on double bass and Nathan England Jones on drums, plus Heidi Vogel and a tap dancer. Its eight substantial tracks include Trinkle-Tinkle, Rhythm-a-ning, Mysterio mashed with Straight, No Chaser, Cross Cross and ‘Round Midnight. 

The concert was wildly different sonically, and more expansive, more fun, more ribald and abundant. Generally more. As a listener you’ll get lost, then familiar motifs will recur from out of the maelstrom and the band will pivot briefly. It’s no mere covers exercise: it’s playful and interrogatory. It’s Monk, or Monkish, for sure, but it kind of became its own thing.

In the first set Tim Giles on drums and Josh Vadiveloo on bass were at the forefront, endlessly listenable and intimately involved in a quartet conversation, before stepping back in the second set: supportive, retaining their quality, but more invisibly. The second set brought on Byron Wallen on trumpet, Tom Challenger on tenor, and Hans Koller on euphonium. Koller once showed the young jazz student Cole his first Monk tune and set him a class assessment on Monk and Parker. The modernists have taken over the asylum… 

The chop n’ screw / remix approach works so well because of the tunes’ memorableness and familiarity. Monk’s catalogue only extends to seventy numbers, some unrecorded. His striking and influential style in composing and improvising on the piano features characteristic use of whole tone scales, parallel sixths, and silence. Monk once said, “The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.” Monk is individualistic and weird and sometimes when players play to the weirdness it fails, whereas when you try and play it straight you can let its own sweet freak flag fly by itself.

The trick is it’s not so much about just spiky angular modernism, Monk’s also lyrical, and so in this combination of impulses Xhosa is perfectly poised. Xhosa has at times such overflowing creativity that I remember him wondering out loud on a solo livestyream about a betraying maybe a lack of taste and overplaying. His abundance is one fitting way to approach the implications of monk’s work. You could do equally well go more skeletal, more monkish, but no-one does that.

The four of them on the horns was a ridiculous and joyous thing; Hans Koller particularly mischievous on the euphonium off to one side acting as Devils Advocate or Fool For A Day to Byron’s structural approach to the material, with Tom Challenger’s extrapolatory approach adding color and relief, and Xhosa holding it all together like a boss while Pat Thomas on piano gave the steer for much of the time. Pat Thomas is the perfect man for the piano here; I don’t actually recall hearing him play with anything like such a sense of structure before but there we were; it was loose and bold and very Pat Thomas to answer Monk’s idiosyncrasy with more idiosyncrasy.

Possibly in other hands it would be a case of the band having too much fun. There’s an overall impression of organised chaos but they stick closely to the famous melodic lines, but they play them at different times in different ways overlaid all over each other so the individual parts are comprehensible but all together becomes raucous, with sections in which they freely mash up different themes to each other as if to see if they are simpatico. It wasn’t until thirty minutes into the second set that I heard any “Round Midnight”, and not seven minutes after that until they all conspicuously played a theme together simultaneously in harmony and time. 

By the end of the second set it was a free – and visibly carefree – blowing session, which nevertheless felt epochal in manifesting what everyone in the game aspires to, that perfect confidence in freedom within structure. All four horns simultaneously blasting the themes at the very end, almost gloriously out tune, and why not. It was everything Monkish, with nothing monkish about it.

Xhosa Cole (tenor), Pat Thomas (piano), Josh Vadiveloo (bass), and Tim Giles (drums), with guests Byron Wallen (trumpet), Tom Challenger (tenor), and Hans Koller (euphonium). (Photos from first set)

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The orchestra and group performed in between two five-movement symphonic works, Beethoven’s Symphony No 6 (Pastoral) and the world premiere of Cassie Kinoshi’s HEART, marking thematic continuity from pastoral to environmental concerns. Pretty bold to put it up against the Sixth, but the newbie convinced for sheer volume, if nothing else, and there was plenty else. It was pretty full on. The 30-minute work opened with maximum bombast before sitting on a throbbing vamp in a weaving texture of improvised guitar and scored strings. 

Kinoshi has form for orchestral collaboration, having worked with the Aurora Orchestra in 2021 on her Three Suns Suite. The overall impression of HEART was energetic and full of life and hope. The notes say it “aims to convey sonically both the fragility and resilience of our planet”; the first movement, “indolence”, felt more conveyant of its spectacle and grandeur.  The second and fourth movements (“dream and dream”, and “beauty of a tree”) each opened more ambiguously before piling into decisive thematic writing for the horns in the third and firth (“golden horns”, and “wild flames”). 

In their 22-minute band set, seed. played three three selections, “tides”, “ivy”, and “neptune”, which had a nice 1960s wigout vibe. The music was good original new Big Band-adjacent jazz of no fixed vintage played by the young octet with passion.

While the LSO orchestra by itself was fine in the Beethoven, if you thought the sound of jazz at the Royal Albert Hall was bad, the notoriously fickle Barbican Main Hall smashed it with levels all over the shop: harsh trumpet and battering drums splitting ears over the murky of the overall sound, drowning out the orchestral detail and clarity. I moved seats twice. Even if the orchestration was lost in the poor mix, Cassie Kinoshi and the band blew with power and energy, and the orchestral collaboration felt organic.

Overall the concert felt like a tremendous achievement for Cassie Kinoshi and seed., and in HEART a welcome addition to third stream repertoire, with a strong message of global community, diversity, compassion and understanding. 

The post Nature’s Heart – LSO x Cassie Kinoshi’s seed. first appeared on UK Jazz News.

In the end, alas, the city didn’t permit the planned performance of Piano Burning (1968), in which a piano is, er, set on fire. The cinematic programme at the Filmhuis included Sam Green’s A Film About Listening which is a great introduction to Lockwood’s life and work, such as the artistic-musical intersections of her ‘sound maps’ of the rivers Hudson, the Housatonic, and the Danube. In the gleaming stone of the Lutherse Kerk the small group electroacoustic MAZE Ensemble presented some of their collaborations in a concert of subtle shimmering chamber ambient music read from Lockwood’s abstract graphical notation of marine life. MAZE’s ensemble textures are most compelling when more tonally indeterminate piano and guitar pieces give way to a sonorous 360-degree sound testifying to their freedom and camaraderie as musicians. Their second concert at the Conservatoriumzaal in a sense began at this point but with less of a creative sense in a more minimalistic ambient drone soundscape. Another concert by Yarn/Wire at the National Theater (where Lockwood was sitting there in front of me in the audience) was more about silence and minimal gestures with lots of prepared solo piano doing the non-tonal Cagean stuff. Perhaps setting the piano on fire would have been a lively climax, though that’s not really what Piano Burning was about; but the gestures are perhaps at their most interesting when artistically rather than more directly musically inspired.

I must admit that in order to deal with some of the bitterly tragic gig-clash that led to me missing the Necks, Gazelle Twin, Julia Holter and Jenny Hval (un-trucking-believable), I found myself, during MAZE’s more ambient wallow, sticking on in one ear the WORM radio feed from the festival hub the Grey Space In The Middle to listen to the Guardian’s Laura Snapes in a panel discussion about the history and importance or otherwise of music journalism. The skinny is there’s no money but still a lot of passion, even from readers as well as writers. My own passion for trying to capture everything I can also led to me, because there’s never time to eat anything, chowing down hidden underneath retractable seating during Annea Lockwood’s listening session where she memorialised her late partner the composer Ruth Anderson, presenting a moving album of their tape pieces, Tête-à-tête.

The most bruising result of my gig clash was choosing to squeeze my way in on Friday for the legendary English electronic music duo Autechre at the massive Grote Kerk. I love Autechre’s pioneering contribution to the epochal Warp Records sound, but I found it an uncomfortable and depressing experience standing there in a church with so much other stuff vying for attention. It seemed miserable to me but I gather people found it rewarding. I ducked out to catch as much as I could of Alabaster DePlume, who was better than expected refining his breakthrough GOLD album sound with his stalwart band including Ruth Goller on bass. In the same venue on Saturday, fellow Brits Speakers Corner Quartet brought an absorbing ethno-fusion sound, filmic and atmospheric, sitting on one- or two-chord vamps and taking the more downbeat and ethnicky side of Electric Miles for a ride with violin and flutes over rumbling double bass, locked-in grooves, compound time signatures and energetic improvisation, with judicious use of dissonance and attack.

Keeley Forsyth I want to call Oldham’s answer to Diamanda Galás. Making better use of the Grote Kerk than Autechre did, debuting a majestic AV presentation of her forthcoming album The Hollow, the arresting singer sounded amazing filling the cavernous space with blissful darkness: chamber chanson lit by the light of dead stars, her voice so rich and velveteen, accompanied by strings and longstanding collaborator Matthew Bourne on piano and synths.

Another Brit, Andrew PM Hunt out of Ex-Easter Island Head presented his solo venture Dialect in the intimate basement of GR8. It was a masterclass in how solo loop music doesn’t have to be just repetition and layering in a linear fashion. Even more so than with the hard minimalism of his band, Hunt uses fairly basic equipment including a Nord Stage, multi fx and a tape 4-track to build intricate forms and structures that have more dynamic movement between crescendi and wonky chillwave vibes. With some deliberate or collateral glitch owing to the physical live means through which he generates the music, it was a lot more accessible and felt less ribaldly weird than the album Under-Between (2021), with the touch of a melodic directness and emotional ache that reminded me — now hear me out— of pop-minimalist Mike Oldfield.

If repetition is really your bag, goat (jp) were as popular here as they were at the London Jazz Festival. Doomy and danceable, they’re often aligned with jazz because of an explosive open form approach but the language doesn’t really evoke any particular genre. It’s almost pure rhythm and noise, intense and unrelenting dark ultra-minimalism. The drummer is a true Jaki Liebezeit for motor machine facility. Just when you think the beat has run its course they introduce another level of intensity. For a full hour of 48 minutes it’s hypnotic but if you yearn for melody or most of the customary architecture of music then you might find it a bit monotonous or even gruelling.

In which case SUNN O))) are probably definitely not your thing. You’ve gotta admire the purity of the iconic noise bath of guitarists Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson— a singular vision of never-ending guitar noise. In billows of smoke and razing light, ten stacks of amps on stage are arranged like a primitive stone circle; to continue the not-so undeliberate Spinal Tap reference they wear black cloaks. It’s monolithic but the roaring guitar drones and feedback does go through discernible movements as different frequencies predominate and shift. Within the deafening but edifying noise there are subtleties shimmering. It’s also impressive to do it for so long without succumbing to the temptation to throw in a few licks or some Sabbath riffs. The final phase dials it up from low drones and power chords to earsplitting piercing feedback then back to black, then more involved plectrummy noise where they’re playing rather than just holding notes. There is some kind of modulation that happens 46-minutes in that can only be described as RIGHTEOUS and the chap in front of me did raise his fist in the air. The guitars and the fists are raised vertically and so the righteousness abides. It has to be long. You have to go through it. It’s quite relaxing really.

As well as conventional performances (if any of that is exactly conventional) there’s an amazing programme of Proximity Music with installations and durational art music performances in galleries and fringe venues, with Myra-Ida Van der Veer’s Second Breath performances in the dark, and Marco Fusinato playing noise guitar for eight hours a day in the Pulchri Studio gallery whose permanent collection looked like an essential visit, one which I didn’t have time to visit. I did catch Henk Shut’s Lost Sound installation in the Paleiskerk, where the physicality of sound was artfully enacted by turrets of speaker cones filled with leaves, water and plantlife, hypnotically brewing then violently vibrating.

Rewire can wrap you in layers of intellectualism with its day programmes of panels and discussions, so it’s always a blessed moment when you feel like someone rescues you. In the same hall at the Koorenhuis where I was once replenished by my first encounter with the mighty Irreversible Entanglements, the same tonic was brung by The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, a group derived from composer, turntablist, and performer Mariam Rezaei’s residency at Cafe Oto last year, with Mette Rasmussen on alto saxophone, Gabriele Mitelli on piccolo trumpet and electronics, and Lukas Koenig on drums. Horn and sax play scraps of melodies as the bass pounds like an alarm going off, at one point evoking one of those Ivesian country fair jazz bands blown up with postmodern humour and craziness, and a thick dark electronic sound from the turntables. Chugging industrial rhythms make you wanna pick up your feet for the four to the floor but it suddenly spasms back to glitchy dysrhythmia. They’re a monster party band with a sense of total having it, a raucous and rapacious bricolage of jazz history and arty ideas in a mad bundle of vital chaotic energy.

AJ Dehany writes independently about music, art and stuff

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Each year a small cohort of outstanding classical musicians is selected by the member venues of the European Concert Hall Organisation (ECHO) and named their ECHO Rising Stars for support and development. What a treat it was to enjoy three of them each performing a concert and a mini-concert each over a full day’s programme in the Northern Rock Foundation Hall, Sage Two and concourse of the Glasshouse International Centre for Music (formerly Sage Gateshead).

All three are outstanding, dazzlingly technical, intellectually inquisitive and sensitive to delicate micro-shifts in nuance and feeling. Hungarian violinist Júlia Pusker, German bassoonist Mathis Stier, and Scottish-born Anglo-Japanese guitarist Sean Shibe may be nominated Rising Stars but their stars have already risen to some giddy heights. Each is an arbiter of taste and range, radical inclusivity in repertoire, and blurring boundaries. Each concert was a self-portrait of the player, expressing their taste and personality through eclectic selections from established and even conservative repertoire, and newer more challenging directions including pieces commissioned especially for them as ECHO Rising Stars. 

Some of the leaps could be disorienting: in Munich-born Mathis Stier’s concert, it’s quite a leap from Philipp Friedrich Böddecker’s Sonata Sopra ‘La Monica’ from 1651, the first piece ever written for the Baroque bassoon (and harpsichord!), to the newest, the harrowing bassoon and tape soundscape of Maria Sigfúsdóttir’s ECHO commission Remembering. Following that the relative conservatism of Camille Saint-Saens’s 1921 Sonata was palate cleansing. Heinz Holliger’s “Klaus-Ur” from 2002 is possibly the most demanding piece in bassoon repertoire, written as a competition piece, with “billions of notes” and the gamut of extended techniques: flurrying arpeggios as if someone had transcribed an Evan Parker sax wig-out, and actually involving improvisation in the combination of two systems in the composition. It’s quite full-on, but good-humoured. Stier’s full-bodied tone on the bassoon and dextrous handling of its range and demands makes him a stunningly impressive player who reveals under-regarded versatilities of the bassoon.

Another challengingly versatile musician, guitarist Sean Shibe is notorious for a 2020 Wigmore Hall concert when his “painfully loud” electric guitar of Georges Lentz’s Ingwe brought unprecedented walkouts. The massive open space of the Glasshouse’s concourse can be distracting for concert music but it was the ideal venue for the expansive minimalist structures of Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, performed as twelve pre-recorded simultaneous guitar parts and thirteenth performed live. Born of its own diverse influences of jazz, Bach and West African drumming it’s most familiar from Pat Metheny recording back in 1987, and in Shibe’s new transcription it has never sounded more exciting and euphoric. His main concert in Sage Two was a more intimate affair with guitar works by hector Villa-Lobos, Agustin Barrios Mangoré and transcriptions of Bach, and Thomas Ades’s ECHO Commission Forgotten Dances, a substantial work that looks back to influences from the overtures of Berlioz, back to Purcell and forward to Satie and the visual art of Max Ernst. Through connected but disconnected individual pieces synthesise a unique musical language, perfectly suited to Shibe’s intense dynamic detail of almost psychedelic coloration from moment to moment. 

While bassoon and electric guitar might benefit from a bit of good PR, the expressive qualities of the violin are known to all, and Júlia Pusker has her own exquisite sensitivity with the catgut (playing a beautiful Matteo Gofriller violin from 1690, as it happens). The prize-winning Hungarian’s concert resisted the postmodern disorientations of Stier and Shibe in favour of some superior chamber music pieces, sonatas and dances from Lili Boulanger, Debussy, Brahms, Jeno Hubay’s fantasia on Carmen, and Eric Tanguy’s ECHO Commission Trois Pièces. La Libre called her a true “artistocrat” of the violin, possibly a reference to her birth into a musical family in Hungary, but she’s certainly a class act.

Former ECHO Rising Star saxophonist Jess Gillam performed among the concerts last year, and this year introduced each concert, and conducted a panel with the musicians that further rounded out our portraits of each player. The panel was completed by Glasshouse artist-in-residence Faye MacCalman, familiar to jazzbos as one third of Archipelago, a key soloist in John Pope’s Quintet, and more recently a solo multimedia artist working at intersections between electronic installations and song forms. She is currently reconvening her moving performance installation Invisible Real, exploring our difficulty in acknowledging mental health issues using the responses from an anonymous survey. It’s important and worth looking forward to. I enjoyed these installation performances in Cheltenham in 2022, but this weekend’s headline solo concert in Sage Two felt a little self-limiting after a day of the classical soloists. Electronic looping is ubiquitous and fine, but it narrows the scope for melodic writing and expressive improvisation. 

Jess Gillam returned on the following afternoon, this time with soprano and alto saxes, and the Royal Northern Sinfonia standing rather than seated on the floor of the ten-sided auditorium of Sage Two with director Maria Włoszczowska, who matches Gillam for flamboyant bodily expressivity in performance. This concluding concert On The Nature of Daylight expanded on the postmodern approach of the day before with an equally eclectic programme of works ranging through Britten, CPE Bach, Max Richter, more Saint-Saens, Kurt Weill, David Heath, Elgar, Telemann, Boulanger, Bowie Ysaye, Dvorak and John Harle’s carnivalesque fantasia on Cumberland reels and jigs, RANT! requiring some dextrous playing. The concert really had something for everyone, and outstanding virtuosity from Jess Gillam herself who, like the other Rising Stars, can seemingly play anything and make it sound fresh and vital.

The European Concert Hall Organisation (ECHO) includes twenty-two European concert halls (including the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Concerthes Stockholm, Vienna Concerthaus, Cologne Philharmonie, El Philharmonic Hamburg, and the Glasshouse) so it’s a great opportunity for them as touring musicians to bring something special to a wide audience.

AJ Dehany writes independently about music, art and stuff. 

The post ECHO Rising Stars / Faye MacCalman… at the Glasshouse (formerly Sage Gateshead) first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Eighty-six years young, with over two thousand collaborations and sixty albums as a bandleader, he’s such an effortlessly cool guy, and a sense of friendship underpins the “Foursight” Quartet of drummer Payton Crossley, tenor saxophonist Jimmy Green, and pianist Renee Rosnes. Their mutual respect extends to the audience, and what they do has a sense of hard bop nostalgia that tends to leave boundaries unbent but delivers a really tasteful (definitely in a good way) and satisfying experience for all. The superiority of the musicianship is understated and only by comparing it to any number of ‘straight ahead’ jazz gigs you might have endured can you really realise how good it is. Carter himself traces the philosophy back to Miles, whose second Quintet Carter helped to define: Simply, “Play the music well.”

It’s all warmly collegial on the first of two sold out dates at Cadogan Hall, on date ten of a twelve night tour. The set is fluid but settled and familiar from the double sets of the Stockholm Tapes recorded live in 2018, opening with the softly meditative “595”, and seguing smoothly through stalwarts including “Flamenco Sketches”, “Seven Steps to Heaven”, and “Joshua”. Even Ron Carter’s softly spoken addresses and dedications are largely word for word, with the same enduring dedication to Richard Davis, a friend who “made the bass do something different.” Carter’s main solo bass spot still begins with “You Are My Sunshine” and takes in a bit of the Bach cello preludes that are the beginning of his musical career back in childhood as a young cellist. He got into bass because classical music was slyly segregationist but a transfer to the bass meant they had to call him up.

“Christmas is not too far away,” he says. “I have a gift for you.” Letter by letter he spells out roncarteruniverse.com, a new immersive online discography. It’s a fantastic legacy to explore. The Foursight Quartet perfects a particular strand in that legacy, but I’m glad there’s more. And not just in the past. This weekend the quartet plays Monte-Carlo Jazz Festival with a special appearance from Marcus Miller, which is an arresting and confusing thought: how would that work? Ron Carter is one of the most complete bass players that has ever lived; and he doesn’t even particularly stretch out on extended techniques, pedals and soundboards, or the grandstanding of a Jaco Pastorius for example. 

For all its tastefulness, the Foursight Quartet are not risk averse players, and in their collegiality they can thrillingly mix up fast playing on the slows and slow playing on the fasts, and dive between tempos between walking bops and luminous and lovely ballad playing with complete assurance. “My Funny Valentine”, derived from and often associated with Carter’s time with Miles, is exemplary: simple and melodic, accumulating colour and richness until it almost melts. The philosophical definition of “Play the music well.”

AJ Dehany writes independently about music, art and stuff

The post Ron Carter Foursight Quartet at Cadogan Hall first appeared on UK Jazz News.

A theatrical realisation of the album, resequenced among the ornate cornices of the restored Edwardian dance hall of the Bush Hall, might have helped to win over some of those who found the Black Dog album comparatively downbeat after the battering directness of her epochal breakthrough third album Pastoral. In 2019 she performed as a red-clad folk devil out of Psychoville, part bouffon, part football hooligan, riding the hobby horse of English nationalism. For Black Dog she is white and gaunt and spectral in a shimmering blue suit, sculpturally poised alone with the microphone, or channelling a nineteenth-century medium perched on a chair lit by a standing lamp, or stirring up unsettling glitches from a reel-to-reel tape recorder in an unnerving but absorbing sound world of classic Moog and EMS synths, VE20 vocal processors, spooky loops of piano and cello, and the inexplicable noises of occult presences and unseen intelligences.

Gazelle Twin makes electronic music that intersects between her parallel careers as a commercial film and TV composer for shows like “The Walking Dead” and as a producer working in the electronic avant garde— but the primary power of Gazelle Twin is in the astonishing range of her voice: from eerie whispers to bellowing roar, from resonating countertenor to shattering soprano, often warped with electronic processing. Black Dog is in between the electronic of Pastoral and her choral reworking of the album with NXG Choir, Deep England. Her voice is foregrounded more than ever, ringing with power, then exposed and vulnerable— Annie Lennox at her most beguilingly vampiric, Bowie at his most pallidly Duchal, but mostly the very ghost of Scott Walker. The haunted programme of the set was complete in itself, but “Unstoppable Force” reprised as a strident encore was not really enough to appease those who were hoping for a longer set thrashing through the clattering immediacy of four-to-the-floor bangers like “Hobby Horse” and “Better In My Day”. But to revel in Black Dog’s eldritch stangeness is to confirm Gazelle Twin’s status as one of the most captivating artists of New Weird Britain, and to assert Black Dog in performance as one of the most spellbinding documents of contemporary dread and anxiety. 

AJ Dehany writes independently about music, art and spooky stuff.

The post Gazelle Twin at Bush Hall first appeared on UK Jazz News.

 A haunting and unsettling sound world describes a spare sonic landscape of electronics and acoustic bass manipulated in real time into unrecognizable and uncanny forms on eponymous duo album Everything Falls Apart, recalling the inscrutable intensity of bands like Supersilent at the prettier end of noise and the darker end of contemporary electronic classical directions. The closing track of the album takes its title “Wonderfully Desolate” from Rookhope, a village in Weardale described by the poet W. H. Auden as “the most wonderfully desolate of all the dales.”

Originally from Weardale, Ross Tones lived in London, then Bristol, and now lives in Donegal in a place of similarly ‘wonderfully desolate’ evocations: “It’s very similar to where I grew up with lots of peat bogs and moorland and rivers and streams and lakes,” he says. The sense of a personification through setting similarly reminds me of Christine Tobin’s most recent album Returning Weather, an explicit musical historiography of the Irish landscape.

“That’s one of the reasons we went to Donegal as well,” he says, “because the folklore and history are really linked: all the place names are ancient, and you can almost see them like song lines.  And yet the improvised sound world of Everything Falls Apart eludes a recognisable topography, and furthermore resists recognisable instrumentation. At times you can hear the bowing of the bass very strongly, but mostly it’s hard to identify what’s going on in the dark soundscapes of the album. Ross explains, “Everything is originally the bass. It’s kind of like a conversation between us on the record with Otto Lindholm. He plays sounds to me, then I record and manipulate them, play them back. Then he then plays over that, and then I process that in a different way and capture that. You’ve got to let it go places, and it’s totally improvised, which is slightly terrifying at times, because we don’t really know where it’s going. We just look at each other and breathe deeply, and then start, and it normally lasts about half an hour. On my side, there’s various effects boxes, and a sampler, and then on his side, he bows, but then he also augments it— he puts pegs and things on the strings, detunes, retunes, and we tend to go from something long to something percussive, and kind of have a conversation like that. You just completely zone out, you don’t really remember that much about it.”

From these long improvisations, shorter pieces are hewn from unedited sections that seem to find their own meaning as spontaneous composition… and decomposition. ”That’s what “Everything falls apart” means,” he says. “It’s quite descriptive of music, because it finds a point, and then it falls apart, and then it’s rebuilt again. I do think unconsciously you become more empathetic with the other person and you kind of read each other and what they might do at that point. But it’s always the most exciting when you don’t really know.”

The phrase “Everything falls apart” is taken from Mark Z. Danielewski’s Y2K meta-novel House of Leaves, a text that inspires and describes the exploratory approach of the duo’s collaboration. “That’s my favourite book. it kind of relates to you just in normal life walking around. It feels like it lives with you, it’s like a presence, if you know what I mean. I can’t quite describe it, it’s otherworldly, unheimlich (Freud’s term for the uncanny located in the strangeness of the ordinary).”

Ross Tones is surprised when I describe my own listening to the album as kind of soothing, if in an eldritch, unheimlich way. “Wonderfully Desolate” in particular has a very moving emotionality at the end of the journey of the track and the album as a whole… but the duo’s relationship to an audience is unconventional. He notes that the very first words of the book House of Leaves, taking up a single page, are simply the warning “This is not for you.” 

He applies this to the music: “It’s almost like, I don’t know, the music can be quite scary. At the live shows we’re seeing a kind of shock on people’s faces; it’s quite an intense, full-on hour. We zone out completely, but the audience would have also gone through that too. You’re not meant to enjoy it. You know what I mean? It’s not necessary. You’ve got to kind of go through periods of anxiousness and slight horror to appreciate the moments of calmness. You have to live through it to appreciate this call that comes out. If you heard it by itself, you’d be like ‘Oh, that’s not particularly pleasant.’ But in the context of everything else, it’s like it’s a breakdown.”

House of Leaves is described as ‘ergodic’ literature, which requires effort from the reader, taken from ergon meaning work and hodos meaning path: the reader has to piece things together. There’s so many different setups that we work with, and then often there’s just beautiful accidents. It’s trying to find people on purpose. I think that’s so often the trajectory to get you there. It’s like: ‘I don’t actually know how we got there, but we did’. It’s always a surprise.”

Release party in Brussels 4 Nov 2023 at Les Ateliers Claus featuring Richard Skelton & Everything Falls Apart.

AJ Dehany writes independently about music, art and stuff.

The post ‘Everything Falls Apart’ – Interview with Ross Tones first appeared on UK Jazz News.

It takes a special force of personality to command two Proms in one evening, and these were not even Rufus Wainwright’s first Proms. That was in 2014. “My piano playing is terrible,” he said back then; by 2023 he now claims he’s “a fairly good pianist.” Well okay. Let’s face it. Root-Fifth and Rachmaninov, that’s 90% of piano playing, and the rest is Chopin. The new arrangements are hard to distinguish from the old ones. If they’d removed the central piano or guitar then that would be different, as they do in “The One You Love” where the spiky guitar figure introduction is transferred to the strings, which is more interesting. 

There is a sense of carefully cultivated spontaneity to Rufus’s songwriting: those throwaway lyrical aperçus, the why-not chord changes and swift alterations of emotional tenor and timbre that stand in ironic juxtaposition to the efforts of arrangement and production in settings. The self-injunction on “Pretty Things”, “don’t overspill!”, is ironic but not. His schtick isn’t directly overspill but designed to appear like camp confessional, full of bon mots, with a vivid eye for detail. The real raw emotion comes from play with the personal idiom of the writing rather than literal truth. In “Poses”, he’s not really drunk and wearing flipflops on Fifth avenue (unless he is). “God knows what all these new drugs do” is like a Noel Cowardisation of his very real problem at the time with actual crystal meth.

“Oh What A World” is the strongest of openings, Rufus’s encapsulation of his folkocratic family background, personal outlook and his abiding folie de grandeur. But with no other vocalists present, there is a problem with the negotiation between layers of interlocking vocals and orchestral chaos as the song incorporates motifs from Ravel’s “Bolero” and bulges spectacularly out of control. It’s go big or go home but the new over-faithful arrangement by Chris Elliott slightly bottles it. Plus, time wears all heels: it was cheeky fun back then, but quite honestly it gets more irritating as the years go by. 

And the urge of Rufus and the team around him to call absolutely everything “Symphonic” – rather than *merely* orchestral – is born of a harkening for grandeur, cute in its own way, but at the same time never knowingly underblown. You feel arranger Josh Hickin gave Rufus exactly what he wanted in the Want Symphonic Overture that opens each concert, but the cloying MGM cinematic schmaltz is kind of hideous.

“Crumb by Crumb” receives a sparkling jazzy throwaway feel from Sally Herbert, and Michael P Atkinson’s orchestral writing for “Old Whore’s Life” gives it some sass and a suggestion of Gloria Gaynor. “What” is an anarchic art piece, almost a collage, benefits hugely from the imbued sense of focus. “Go Or Go Ahead” loses a lot: those tweeting backing vocal parts are really important, and aren’t quite the same replicated orchestrally. Less powerful, less brutal, the otherwise heartstopping “Look in her eyes” refrain loses so much. I listened to that song the same afternoon and it destroyed me as much as ever, but a slightly mangled performance sadly didn’t really do it for me.

Want Two opens with a touch of the avant-garde, sounding like a circuit breaker scratching the violin strings, before plunging into the full might and majesty of Agnus Dei, probably the closest we’ll ever get to Rufus going full-on Scott Walker, with dark chordal clusters and a breathtaking vocal in Latin. It’s enough to convince any naysayers, but alas it’s pretty much a one-off.

Want One is full of greatest hits. Want Two middles off a bit, and it seems like a less satisfying album, but its greater weirdness made for a better Prom. The redeeming song on Want Two is “The Art Teacher”, performed solo with a boomingly Baroque piano. The song works so well because Rufus’s references to art and culture are built into the story, a narrative of a young girl, a remembrance separated by gender and time, “years ago”. There’s a pleasing ambiguity about whether it is she or he who is “starting to lose my mind” that makes it especially resonant. It makes you wish that he would step outside himself more often. 

FULL SET LIST COURTESY OF BBC

Want Symphonic Overture arranged by Josh Hickin

Want One:

Oh What a World – symphonic version arranged by Chris Elliott with additional orchestration by Ron Goldstein

I don’t know what it is – symphonic version arranged by Max Mostin

Vicious World – symphonic version arranged by Sally Herbert

Movies of Myself – symphonic version arranged by Sally Herbert

Pretty Things arrangement by Rufus Wainwright (solo piano)

Go or Go Ahead – symphonic version arranged by Sally Herbert

Vibrate – symphonic version arranged by Marius de Vries, additional ` orchestration by Ron Goldstein

14th Street – symphonic version arranged by Max Mostin

Natasha – symphonic version arranged by Max Mostin

Harvester of Hearts – symphonic version arranged by Michael P Atkinson

Beautiful Child – symphonic version arranged by Sally Herbert

Want – symphonic version arranged by Max Mostin

11:11 – symphonic version arranged by Sally Herbert

Dinner at Eight – symphonic version arranged by Chris Elliott with additional orchestration by Ron Goldstein

Want Two

Agnus Dei – symphonic version arranged by Michael P Atkinson

The One you Love – symphonic version arranged by Sally Herbert

Peach Trees – symphonic version arranged by Sally Herbert

Little Sister – symphonic version arranged by Van Dyke Parks

The Art Teacher arranged by Rufus Wainwright (solo piano)

Hometown Waltz – symphonic version arranged by Michael P Atkinson

This Love Affair – symphonic version arranged by Max Mostin

Gay Messiah – symphonic version arranged by Morris Kliphuis

Memphis Skyline – symphonic version arranged by Max Mostin

Waiting for a Dream – symphonic version arranged by Max Mostin

Crumb by Crumb – symphonic version arranged by Sally Herbert

Old Whore’s Diet – symphonic version arranged by Michael P Atkinson

Encore: Going to a Town arranged by Max Mostin

AJ Dehany writes independently about music, art and stuff.

The post Rufus Wainwright – ‘Want Symphonic first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Supersonic Festival is a sign of the times in a time of signs. A radical, diverse, inclusive, empowering mindset drives Birmingham’s celebration of heavy music in eclectic forms— the mostly uncategorizable fare beloved of people who read the Wire and the Quietus, listen to Stewart Maconie’s Freak Zone, and go to gigs organised by Cafe Oto and Baba Yaga’s Hut— but it also attracts heads young and old who just want to hear something different. 

Supersonic 2023 brought an intensive programme to keep you on your feet bouncing between the bigger 7SVN warehouse venue round the corner from The Mill with its smaller mainstage, Market Place areas and Roof Top Bar, from which at one point someone turned off Tropical Wreck DJs on the native PA speaker so we could watch and hear, without irony, an unrelated festival happening next door at which pop-reggae legend Maxi Priest was playing: a sunshine set of a different kind to Tropical Wreck’s chaotic spin on desert island disc-spinning. 

Indeed, while many of the most interest angles were extrapolated from the smaller corners of the festival. Agathe Max and Jessica Moss each played distinctively different sets involving densely layered violin loops, two sides of a Venn of intensive nervous activity and vast glacial soundscapes. These were further extrapolated in Agathe Max’s involvment in Ondata Rossa, a kind of supergroup of improvising composers with a messy loopy incantatory eschatological imperative, while Jessica Moss with trio Big |Brave recall the repetition at scale of Michael Gera’s pioneering group SWANS.

Repetition is the mainstay of US duo 75 Dollar Bill; their bass-and-rhythm-and-lead guitar and insistent polyrhythmic cajon sounds like no-wave afrobeat. People seem to revere them. It is technically better than it sounds but I think I’m the only one who didn’t feel rewarded by the endlessness of it all. For repetition I was much better served by Ex-Easter Island Head, the brilliant Liverpudlian quartet who play their guitars mounted on keyboard stands, tapping and whacking them with sticks. The group’s outstanding angular modernism is achieved by a range of unusual means, sustained over a set that held the main excitement for the last five minutes, but which held the attention throughout. They are the Kraftwerk of musical tactility.

At Supersonic, even the headliners have distinctively skewed takes on the already skewed genres they invoke. Dublin quartet Lankum’s music gave us the deep dark drones common to both contemporary electronica and traditional Irish folk, which made for an alternately spellbinding and visceral reflowing of several mainstreams at once. Similarly, Birmingham duo Godflesh work in the intersection between industrial and metal. Deerhoof, Hey Colossus, and Oxbow, are all stalwart rock bands unafraid to pursue change and difference, who continue to receive rapturous reception at these things. 

When I lived in London I often got a cheap train (can you still do that?) up to Birmingham (where Soweto Kinch and Xhosa Cole were formed as musicians) to explore the city’s strong improvisation scene, with gigs ranging from the back room of the Spotted Dog to the plush Town Hall, many organised by legend Tony Dudley-Evans, whose TDE Promotions alongside Fizzle are still packing schedules with first rate art. The redoubtable TDE wrote thoughtfully about Day 1 and Days 2 and 3 of Supersonic. He reflects on a paucity of improvisation, and admittedly it is striking that the pursuit of freedom through making it up as you go along might not be as vital as it was in the Radical Sixties. Maybe the language of improvisation was overwhelmed by the oxymoronic nature of becoming a non-idiomatic idiom.

We love improvisation, but that’s not exactly why you go to Supersonic. You go for the ridiculous feeling of the very air moving during Divide & Dissolve, which is only a duo, but with such a vast sound and such volume that they initiated a raid on earplugs at the bar. Glaswegian anti-fascist anarchist post-black metal group Ashenspire add in saxophone and a captivating frontman, though not as captivating as Backxwash, one of the most impressive rappers I’ve ever seen, with the flamboyance of A$AP Rocky and the artistic credibility and intensity of JPEGMAFIA, wrapped up in a Pierrot-like visual style that emphasises the horror, the horror.

My highlight for improvised music was un.procedure, a Birmingham trio formed in 2021 of Piera Onacko on walls of synths, Cassie Kinoshi on electronically enhanced saxophone, and Nathan England-Jones on drums. Space rock in mode of The Comet Is Coming, they welcomed us along to “the birthplace of this band” performing an intense set drawn from their two EPs un.proecedure and Themory, which has only just been made available on bandcamp. Clearly at this level of volume subtleties and nuances of playing are not in contention, but the new EP is the soundtrack to an audiovisual installation that premiered at Manchester Jazz Festival, and its use of field recordings and abrupt changes of pace might hold they key to how they differentiate themselves in future from the Comet model. 

The biggest draw from a creative perspective music, however, was sadly absent from the programme. Just ahead of the release of the fifth instalment of Matana Roberts’ COIN COIN series, Matana was due to bring an AV show of COIN COIN Chapter Three: river run thee but had to cancel at almost literally the last minute following a positive COVID test. I can’t vouch for the venues they had been playing before they arrived, but at 2.06pm the very same day Matana had tweeted about how “[…] performing in room w/ zero ventilation, of mostly unmasked ppl, is still kinda terrifying” and then at 6.53pm (27 minutes before stage time) a photo of a positive COVID test. 

Deerhoof had already reminded us of the reality of the risk on Friday, with signs requesting that audience members “mask up”. As well as free ear protectors, free masks had been offered at the wristband exchange, so I could join a minority who actually had a mask to hand at all. We all know it’s real, but we’re all complacent. It’s a whole headache to psychoanalyze. 

It’s such a shame because everything about Matana Roberts’ COIN COIN series fits Supersonic so perfectly, intersecting sound art, literature, music, history, and visual material with a vital seriousness. Supersonic 2023 celebrated the festival’s twentieth year, and it is remarkable to look back now in the time of signs, when in an Orwellian stage of enforced arbitrary culture wars, and see how Supersonic was ahead of the game on many fronts. The female-founded festival was up on gender representation long before the Keychange initiative drew attention to ways of trying to achieve gender parity in the music industry. Gender and sexuality find a safe space here. Even such things as metal being taken seriously by electronic musicians, and electronics coming to rock, and the now preponderant but still under-regarded creative economy of solo artists and DJs using electronics to create a huge sound. For organisational problems arising from gentrification, Supersonic is the test case for how to deal with it, and how to do it right. In society and culture, the ongoing backlash against progressivism has made us all suffer. But before the backlash even began, the backlash to the backlash started here— and it started in Birmingham.

AJ Dehany writes independently about music, art and stuff.

The post Supersonic Festival 2023 first appeared on UK Jazz News.

He has already shone as a complete artist: perhaps most credited as a “flutes and synths” guy, he is a virtuoso multi-instrumentalist, producer, turntablist, 22a Music label boss, and literal explorer whose interest in Indian music led him to record his most recent album Ragas from Lahore on location in one day. He recorded THE SHAKEDOWN featuring The 22archestra at Abbey Road, again in a day. The new album was also recorded in one day, at Crescent Studios— 10 March 2023… a Friday… 

The album is a committed embrace of the modernism of the 1960s paradigm of hard bop and modal directions. There are six selections from some legendary but less familiar sixties Blue Note albums by Jackie McLean, Clifford Jordan, Wayne Shorter and Duke Pearson. It might not be what his background or his band Ruby Rushton might have led you to expect. He says, “With Ruby I’m on synths. We have effects on the horns, it’s a bit more electronic-fused music. With Tenderlonious it’s not that, we’re playing more modal and hard-bop inspired jazz.”

In Black Music in Britain in the Twenty-First Century, Monique Charles says “Some musicians, like flautist Tenderlonious, have expressed frustration at the lumping together of a wide range of musicians and styles into a ‘new London jazz thing’ which erases difference and prioritises only those elements which fit this narrative.” Whether in making a traditional modernist jazz album he’s being deliberately uncool or way cooler than cool, I’m actually glad they haven’t done pointless dismantling, reharmonization or surgery to these tunes. It’s a bold move that places the interest squarely on the band and on the bandleader—so without anywhere to hide, how did they do? 

Wayne Shorter’s “Infant Eyes” is a perfect vehicle for “cool modernist” Hamish Balfour with the composition’s tonal ambiguity and multiple key centres, a complex sound that Shorter and Miles regularly employed during that period of jazz history (1966 and all that). There’s an audible gusto in the left hand movement through the changes but the flute is kept simple. This album does share that tasteful slightly mystical atmosphere of the Speak No Evil album. “Poor Eric” is a ballad from Jackie McLean’s 1965 album Right Now! Yep, right then it was right now. Tenderlonious uses more vibrato than Jackie McLean, which I like very much: the very long notes of the theme to “Poor Eric” have more articulation to enjoy, more shape, more swell and growth and decay, subtle pitching with a slight bluesy bend. The improvisation gets very excited, almost paid by the note, but with crisp phrasing. 

The renderings are impressively faithful but don’t obliterate personality. The themes are presented with an understated tenderness and the improvisations are where they raise the temperature significantly and really let go, before relaxing it up again in reprises. The playing is energetic and, as standards-playing, perfectly realised, with a little extra. It feels like it has feeling in it, and not just the dazzling intent. 

Pete Martin on bass and Tim Carnegie on drums are given plenty to do in the most upbeat selections, but there is a tendency for the drums to be placed in the mix in a way that gives space for the woodwinds and piano, so some of the wonderful fine detail of the playing is pushed back – notably in “On The Nile” (written by Charles Tolliver but brought home by Jackie McLean) and “John Coltrane” (heard from Clifford Jordan).

Two selections are taken from Clifford Jordan Quartet’s 1973 Glass Bead Games album. “Maimoun” (by Stanley Cowell) doesn’t stray far, but the improvisations are confident and fairly busy. They go in, which forms a nice contrast with the tasteful restraint in the melodic themes, as the gears shift. The Coltranesque composition “John Coltrane” is kept lively. They omit the reflective moment of sixties chanting “John Coltrane/ first to go”, which would have stuck out, though I miss it as an affecting moment that in turn recalls that moment in A Love Supreme. The presence of its omission here points to the album’s awareness of the heavy shadow of Coltrane over all of this music, and reflects the decision that for now it’s maybe a bit beyond the scope.

Duke Pearson’s sumptuous ballad “You Know I Care” is given shades of classical colour; the flute gives the ballad a bit of a chamber music feel. It doesn’t sound like he’s trying to carbon copy soundalike his heroes, though there is of course palpable channelling and due tribute. It’s highly impressive to come to alto saxophone so late and play it with such facility. His flute is more familiar but has the same vibrato signature and command of bop language. As an album designed to show off their chops it admittedly delivers. If Tenderlonious has proved his mettle, maybe now’s a great chance to push back the frontiers. He’s already pushed them back to the sixties… who knows where he’ll go next…

Release date: 25 Aug 2023 on CD / Vinyl / Download.

AJ Dehany writes independently about music, art and stuff.

SHOWS
16 Sep: Ninety One Living RoomLondon, UK
15 Nov: OsloLondon, UK

The post Tenderlonious – ‘You Know I Care’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.