New releases September – October 2008
Sequence of introduction:
654
656
650
652
602
661
141
149
hat(now)ART 141
Chritian Wolff
Early Piano Pieces
Steffen Schleiermacher
Total time 73:06, DDD, Barcode: 752156014126
For Prepared Piano (1951) was my first experiment with John Cage’s invention (putting various objects into the piano strings to produce percussive or non-specifically pitched sounds) and a continuation of interest in percussion as such. I had been a friend of John’s, after a brief time as a student, for about a year. But I’d known about the prepared piano earlier from scores in Henry Cowell’s New Music Publications.
hat(now)ART 149
Transatlantic Swing
John Snijders
Total time 77:30, DDD, Barcode: 752156014928
Transatlantic Swing is a CD of music rich in elusive connections. Some of the music is ‘transatlantic’ because it’s music by Europeans influenced by the Americas, some because it’s music by an American played by a European. In some way all the music ‘swings’, but no two pieces swing in the same way.There’s also a network of friendships between the composers represented here, although together they don’t represent any one tendency in contemporary musical aesthetics. And there’s a network of shared preoccupations in the music here – the balance between process and fantasy in musical form, the dynamics of sound and silence, the reconfiguration of popular music – but not all these preoccupations occur in every piece.
hatOLOGY 602
Joe McPhee, Lisle Ellis, Paul Plimley
Sweet Freedom
Total time 72:31, DDD, Barcode: 752156060222
«A Timeless Protest, Updated» – 14 years have passed since the recording of Sweet Freedom – Now What? Today, the world is a very different and infinitely more dangerous place. The Berlin Wall has fallen, only to have new ones rise up in Israel and along the US southern border with Mexico; to name a few. Physical walls which separate people for what ever reasons are deemed legitimate, pale before psychological walls caused by economics, politics and wars spanning generations. Civil and human rights fall prey to expediency, caught up in a meat grinder of opinion, while the revolution is being televised in full, bloody and horrific color daily...hourly. Ends justify means, with manifesto, bravado and claims of responsibility. The words from Janis Joplin’s song: «Me and my Bobby McGee», «Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose», give pause for reflection. Still, at the end of the day «TOMORROW IS THE QUESTION», and the question is, NOW WHAT? Joe McPhee, August 2007
hatOLOGY 650
John Zorn
George Lewis
Bill Frisell
News For Lulu
Total time 78:12, DDD, Barcode: 752156065029
The trio’s selection of material was not only inspired by musical considerations, but to rattle a few historical perspectives—to introduce, or reacquaint, an audience with distinctive compositions that had undeservedly been lost in the cracks of time. Of course, once chosen, the next, necessary, step was even more difficult and decisive—to play them. And there is a sense of play in the trio’s attack, a joy that emerges from confidence, commitment, and freedom.
hatOLOGY 652
Pandelis Karayorgis
Nate McBride
Curt Newton
Betwixt
Total time 65:45, DDD, Barcode: 752156065227
Over the course of nearly 20 years and approximately that many recordings, Karayorgis has established himself as one of the singular, and significant, pianists of his generation. One of his trademarks has been to examine and illuminate the irregular edges of the jazz piano repertoire, as he does here ... along with original pieces that venture into peripheral terrain. But there’s an unexpected ingredient in the mix of Betwixt—his choice of instrument.
hatOLOGY 654
David Liebman & Ellery Eskelin
Renewal
Total time 62:26, DDD, Barcode: 752156065425
There is a common understanding that we all share of freedom and spontaneity framed within underlying structures accompanied by a loving nod to the jazz legacy. The compositions heard on this CD evidence a diversity of idioms and styles unified by a common aesthetical approach. This is a group where straight ahead and free jazz clearly intersect with a feeling of immediacy and urgency that is palpable. Enjoy the music.
We covered a lot of ground on Different But The Same (hatOLOGY 615) but due to the fact that Tony and Jim are now contributing compositions I think Renewal has even more scope and is a more personal statement from the group. Tony’s «Palpable Clock» is a ten bar blues and Jim’s «Cha» is a melodic essay written in 7/4. Dave’s «Dimi and the Blue Men” reflects his recent trip to Mauritania while «Renewal» is one of his signature deep ballads. Of my own pieces, «The Decider» is a multi-sectioned composition while «Instant Counterpoint« begs the question of whether it is written or completely improvised. Even I don’t know for sure.
hatOLOGY 656
Matthew Shipp Trio
The Multiplication Table
Total time 60:47, DDD, Barcode: 752156065623
Shipp’s music displays his own thought processes, and in trio lays out a physical trail reflecting the way the three players think along with each other. Following those thoughts leads us deep into a new jazz style that has sprung, like Athena from the brow of Zeus, out of the body of jazz preceding it. The new relative in the family looks fine already, and seems likely in the future to astonish us with further mighty feats.
hatOLOGY 661
Westbrook–Rossini
Total time 72:23, DDD, Barcode: 752156066125
Keep in mind that this is not a collection of isolated episodes, but a considerable ensemble work as well, full of relaxed pastoral airs alternating with more tumultuous melees
Recent releases
hat(now)ART 142
Morton Feldman
For Samuel Beckett (1987)
Ensemble Modern
Total time 43:36, ADD, Barcode: 752156014225
For Samuel Beckett is a late (1987) work, rich in detail and lush in sound (especially in relation to so many of his more «austere» pieces, early and late), but troubling, obsessed, claustrophobic in spite of its scope. Given their shared attraction to shadow (Feldman’s music uses chiaroscuro in the way Beckett meticulously exploited darkness and light and the moods in between on the stage and on the page), it’s perhaps surprising that Feldman’s dedication didn’t involve the starker textures of solo piano—an individual surrounded by ... nothing. In any case, this is not dazzling, but muted, orchestration; instrumental timbres and tonal colors emerge as if by chance and quickly disappear.
hat(now)ART 143
Ivan Wyschnegradsky
Quarter-Tone Pieces
Josef Christof & Steffen Schleiermacher
Total time 59:20, DDD, Barcode: 752156014324
Wyschnegradsky saw microtonality as a mystical impulse, a metaphysical method of transcendence; not so for the pragmatic Ives, whose father invented instruments and playfully experimented with twisted tonalities and microtonal singing. For Ives, microtonality was another technique (along with his fistful-of-notes clusters, collisions of keys, out-of-tune quotations, and multiple marching band allusions) toward the ultimate acceptance of all conceivable dissonances. Today, Ives’ and Wyschnegradsky’s time has finally come. For 21 years there has been a Festival of Microtonal Music in New York, attracting ever younger generations of composers; for over a decade now electronic musicians engaged in ambient, trance, dance, and improvisational idioms are using the kind of free frequency sonorities that Wyschnegradsky idealized. In his rare essay «Some ‹Quarter-Tone› Impressions,» Ives wondered «How much of a fight will the ears have to put up?» For more listeners than ever before, the fight is nearly over.
hat(now)ART 145
John Cage (1912–1992)
Imaginary Landscapes
Total time 51:15, DDD, Barcode: 752156014522
Improvising guitarist Derek Bailey has expressed the belief that «If you’re going to explore uncharted territory, it’s okay to carry a compass, but not a map.» It’s obvious; if you know where you’re going and have plotted the most efficient or scenic course to get there, you may arrive without mishap but deprived of much of the drama, the danger, the unpredictable uniqueness of the journey. In the years following 1950, John Cage walked these paths of musical uncertainty, providing performers with a sense of direction but without indicating a final goal or specifying the sights one would encounter along the way. By attempting to emulate Nature in its own manner of operation, Cage sought to erase what he felt were the artificial boundaries of conventional form, escape the clichés of familiarity, and make each musical experience a discovery of detail and destination – for himself, the performer, and listener alike.
hat(now)ART 151
James Tenney (1934)
Pika-Don
Total time 65:30, DDD, Barcode: 752156015123
Tenney has often characterized himself as a kind of «tone scientist», that is, one working on an almost microscopic level with the primary materials of sound in order to expand our knowledge of its properties (what makes it what it is) and perceptual identity (how we respond to it). To do so, he has composed music that isolates the components of sound production into their most basic acoustic phenomena; music that explores and illuminates the subatomic pitch relationships within the harmonic series; music that combines these pitches into complexes motivated by systematic patterns or chance procedures. By thus objectifying music, and consequently rejecting its romanticized «self-expressive» nature, Tenney links composition with phenomenology. «The basic idea in phenomenology», he told Gayle Young, «is making a more strenuous effort to see things as they are, depending upon whatever one is focusing on. I think the best scientists and the best artists are precisely that – phenomenologists». – Art Lange
hat(now)ART 161
Stefan Wolpe (1902–1972)
Enactments
Total time 54:59, DDD, Barcode: 752156016120
The piano was Stefan Wolpe’s instrument, the playground of his imagination, and most of his pieces have a part for at least one piano to play.
hat(now)ART 162
Pierre Boulez (1925)
Notations & Piano Sonatas
Total time 75:20, DDD, Barcode: 752156016229
It is hardly surprising that the significance of the chapters in music history does not depend on their size. But almost never has there been such a concentration of events as in the case of the development, manifestation and overturning of serial music.And what is even more remarkable is that the individual stages of a historical process (post-twelve-tone serialism in our case) can be illustrated with the works of one composer, that is, with the piano pieces of Pierre Boulez. Just one decade passed between the fragile as well as fugitive Douze notations and the prodigious torso of the Third Piano Sonata – between the early work of an unknown composer in his twenties, who was already firm in his resolve not to keep up the tradition he was part of, and the work of the thirty-year-old avant-garde star, who only had to loosen the ties he himself had put on before.
hat(now)ART 166
George Crumb
Vox Balaenae
Ensemble für Neue Musik Zürich
Total time 63:40, DDD, Barcode: 752156016625
George Crumb should be seen not as an isolated, iconoclastic voice who emerged unexpectedly in the ‘60s and continues to follow his own separate path, but as another important historical figure in the long line of American maverick composers... As a composer in search of transcendence, think of Ives, Cowell, Morton, Partch, Ellington, Nancarrow, Carter, Cage, Feldman,Tenney, Monk, among others, each in their own way. It is in this company that George Crumb belongs. A company beyond category.
hat(now)ART 167
Morton Feldman
Ives Ensemble
String Quartett
Total time 76:57, DDD, Barcode: 752156016724
The string quartet has a special place in classical music, second in importance among ensembles only to the orchestra.The string quartet repertoire is rich, ranging from the 18th and 19th century Classicists and Romantics—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert most prominently—to Modernists of the past century—Bartok, Shostakovich, and Milhaud among the most prolific and respected. Even iconoclasts like Schönberg, Berg, Babbitt, and Carter confirmed a connection to the tradition and created works which adhered to the formal logic and dramatic ambience of those of their predecessors while incorporating their own compositional procedures. But there have been exceptions as well, extremist composers who rejected the genre outright, or distorted it beyond recognition. Morton Feldman fits into the latter category...or does he?
hat(now)ART 169
Isaac Babel
The Sin Of Jesus
Total time 55:47, DDD, Barcode: 752156016922
Transcribing Babel’s text into music, Hans-Peter Frehner followed a rigorous system of rules, with the words generating the melodic lines, and the letters the rhythm and harmony, while the action of the story determines the structure and form. It is an arcane system that becomes sound and music here, and which cannot be recognised simply by the ear. For the rules that determine our action and our longing are not visible on the surface, as we all know.They operate in the depths of our instincts, in our longings and passions – and this is the moral of Babel’s frivolous legend of Jesus – dangerous even for frail angels.
hat(now)ART 170
Makrokosmos Quartet
Total time 71:34, DDD, Barcode: 752156017028
The idea of an ensemble composed of pianos and percussion instruments first came about in Stravinsky’s The Wedding. Shortly thereafter, Bartok, who frequently emphasized the percussive aspect of the piano, developed this idea in his orchestral works (Piano Concerto No. 1, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta). In his 1937 Sonata for two pianos and percussion, he established a new instrumental archetype which was taken up by subsequent composers, such as the ones represented in this recording. However, for these composers, it isn’t so much the rhythmic and dynamic elements which link the piano to the various percussion instruments, as was the case for Stravinsky and Bartok, but rather the full range of sound possibilities—the set of different colors—provoking the idea of a fusion between the two entities. One of the characteristics of the huge diversity of percussion instruments that have been adopted from around the world during the past hundred or so years, is indeed the extraordinary variety of specific tonal qualities, in which the kinds of attacks and resonances—the way sounds appear, resonate, and disappear—play an important part. The works of Crumb, Gervasoni, and Haas are built upon such a range of sounds requiring new arrangements and new ways of articulation. Each work has its own range of colors which constitutes the basic material of the composition. Far from the intrinsic structures which reached their peak in serialism, the organization of pitches is here subsumed by the originality and combination of sounds as such. The acoustic quality as a structural and sensitive element is not produced exclusively by a combination of pitches whatever the complexity, but by a very thorough analysis of sound and dynamics. In Makrokosmos, George Crumb uses archaic modal structures and tonal music quotes, which also can be found in Georg Friedrich Haas’ second piece, where tonal chords seem to be lost and found objects.
hatOLOGY 610
Anthony Braxton
Performance (Quartet) 1979
Total time 71:13, AAD, Barcode: 752156061021
The great advantage of having complete live concerts on record is that we can hear also those intriguing spaces between the compositions: the improvisations which take the group from point A to point B are also the areas in which some of Braxton's most radical notions have first been voiced. As we shall see, Performance (Quartet) 1979 is of particular interest in this regard.
hatOLOGY 615
David Liebman & Ellery Eskelin
Different But The Same
Total time 58:25, DDD, Barcode: 752156061526
It should be noted that Liebman is heard on the left channel and Eskelin on the right throughout, as their similarities emerge frequently throughout the program. «I can’t always tell the difference myself,» says Liebman, … Eskelin adds that this was no afterthought, but rather the result of natural musical choices and the joy in speaking a shared language. For this listener, Different but the Same manages the singular feat of living up to its title by not sounding like any previous two-tenor encounter, while relating to all of them.
hatOLOGY 619
Marc Copland Solo
Time Within Time
Total time 62:36, DDD, Barcode: 752156061922
With his solo art, Marc Copland tries to do both. In the metastructure of the CD, in which the standard «Some Other Time» by Leonard Bernstein (a song Bill Evans loved as well) is repeated three times, he suspends time through repetition; actually, in the variation, the increasing evanescence of the piece. In the individual tracks, which follow a sophisticated dramaturgy and besides Bernstein’s tune comprise four compositions by Copland and pieces by Wayne Shorter, John Lewis, Miles Davis and Don Sebesky, he «robs» time from the metre to install his own (most significantly in «All Blues», a little broken waltz, which in the original is characterised by rhythmic rigidity). Time within time.
hatOLOGY 620
John Carter – Bobby Bradford Quartet
Seeking
Total time 46:59, ADD, Barcode: 752156062028
This was the debut on disc of the John Carter – Bobby Bradford Quartet (then under the cooperative name New Art Jazz Ensemble), and captures their marvelous cohesiveness, moral vibrancy, and quiet determination in equal measure. Subsequent recordings (and there were precious few of them) may have widened our view of their talents slightly, but didn’t necessarily alter any early assessment of their unique capabilities. Their music was fresh and vital from the git-go, and remains so.
hatOLOGY 624
Joe McPhee & Survival Unit II
with Clifford Thornton
at WBAI’s Free Music Store,
N.Y. N.Y., October 30, 1971
Total time 56:38, ADD, Barcode: 752156062424
Producer’s note: I first heard these tapes during my visit to the U.S.A. in 1974. The occasion was my first meeting with Joe McPhee and Craig Johnson of CJR Records. That meeting and the impact the music of these and other unreleased tapes had on me, are the reason I became a record producer. Originally this release was planned for 1988 on LP. Due to the rapid rise of the CD medium, the original plan was postponed and was eventually forgotten. 1996, 25 years later, this music/concert has been made available in a limited edition for the collectors of Joe McPhee's creations. 2006, 35 years later, this newly remastered version is the sole release to celebrate the 30th year of Hat
hatOLOGY 625
Steve Lacy
Brion Gysin
Songs
Total time 63:42, AAD, Barcode: 752156062523
Doubtless, Steve Lacy is one of contemporary music’s most prolific practitioners – and certainly one of the most recorded. But even within a catalogue as bulging and varied as his, this sequence of Songs is a singular experience...
Throughout these remarkable Songs the music is inseparable from the words. Extramusical echoes may occur – for example, the melismatic winding of themes in «Gay Paree Bop» and «Somebody Special» may suggest Gysin’s Moroccan excursions. Or they may not. It doesn’t matter. What matters is their emotional resonance and unity of feeling, as urgent and accessible as those of Schubert transported to an age of anxiety.
hatOLOGY 627
Manuel Mengis Gruppe 6
Into The Barn
Total time 56:21, DDD, Barcode: 752156062721
Born in the Swiss canton Wallis in 1972, trumpeter and part-time mountain guide Mengis probably is virtually unknown to most people. It thus comes as a surprise that his first release is for a label that has not pledged itself to promote and encourage local young talents but to track down adventurous and ambitious music of our time. Which, however, is another sign that the world of jazz has been undergoing fundamental changes for the past couple of years. Whoever still believes that New York is the hub of the jazz world is on the wrong track. Unfortunately many influential CD producers, festival organisers and music critics are still barking up the wrong tree (even in Europe), thus it will take some time for innovative impulses from regions which so far have been regarded as the periphery to be duly recognised. Globalisation, which has often been demonised, could turn out to be a truly positive force in this respect.
hatOLOGY 628
David Liebman
The Distance Runner
Total time 54:53, DDD, Barcode: 752156062820
Here’s Dave Liebman with his saxophones and a wooden flute in his very first concert of unaccompanied solos. It didn’t happen until his fourth decade as a working jazz artist, even though he had recorded four solo albums down through the years. Once again we hear his brilliant sound and technique, and there are his devotion to spontaneity combined with his high instinct to shape improvisations. What Liebman offers most of all is a personal quality of adventure, the result of his endless musical curiosity. This music has so much vitality.
hatOLOGY 629
Russ Lossing
All Things Arise
Total time 61:19, DDD, Barcode: 752156062929
For Lossing, improvisation is clearly a special act, a study in transparence and transformation, a creative exchange among the elements. One hears fresh relations of time and space. His acute sense of time connects inevitably to its absence. Space is heard in his sense of density, the room he can make around a note even at high speed, the contrasts between counterpoint and elegant strings of single notes. Space is also vertical in Lossing’s music--in the ways that wide and tight intervals interact in his chords. This solo CD seems almost two-sided, like the LP of tradition. There is a side of free improvisations followed by treatments of largely familiar themes. We might think of it as a voyage inward and a voyage outward; a journey forward followed by one into the past.
hatOLOGY 631
Steve Lacy
New Jazz Meeting Baden-Baden 2002
Total time 60:47, ADD, Barcode: 752156063124
This synthesis of jazz, composition and electronic music was made possible above all by Steve Lacy’s extraordinary openness, which – as he himself said – has often brought him together with musicians whose roots are not in jazz. Steve Lacy was a searcher to the very end. We are going to miss Steve Lacy’s overwhelming passion for sonic exploration.
hatOLOGY 632
Daniel Levin Quartet
Some Trees
Total time 50:01, DDD, Barcode: 752156063223
It's obvious this is not an ordinary jazz quartet. Paul Bley once suggested to me that «one of the ways to get out of a particular era of music that has us locked in is to change the instrumentation.» The traditional jazz ensemble is a functional balance of soloists and rhythm section. But if the instruments that establish the rhythmic foundation – especially the drums – are removed, then each remaining instrument is free to vary the timing, spacing, and emphasis within its own phrasing.... Altering the relationship between instruments forces closer attention to be paid to dynamics, pacing, sound placement, and group interaction. The almost telepathic level of empathy between the quartet members («each joining a neighbor») sustains the music’s creative tension, and defines its singular identity.
hatOLOGY 633
Polwechsel
Archives Of The North
Total time 51:35, DDD, Barcode: 752156063322
The Polwechsel project has been exponential in defining new approaches to the composition/improvisation paradigm and in doing so have created a music that defined, examined and radically reassessed its own genre. Each phase of Polwechsel has been marked by a defining document and the releases of their recordings have frequently book-ended trends and movements in improvisational and experimental music – Polwechsel has had a direct and profound influence on the agenda of a genre coined «electro-acoustic improvisation» for example... On Archives Of The North, Polwechsel has switched again. The unit has transformed itself by adding the two percussionists, and these works all deal the application of percussion as centrifuge. This is a generative music which stems and blooms from a controlled and deliberate structural center. This work ascends from common notions of musicality and sound production, where obliteration, feedback and the extraneous are emancipated into a fully blown dialect which could be defined as expanded technique.
hatOLOGY 634
Christian Weber
3 Suits & A Violin
Total time 49:16, DDD, Barcode: 752156063421
What Christian Weber and Co. have achieved on 3 Suits & A Violin is a music that eschews formulaic approaches and instead temper their group sound in dense laminations of texture and sonic residue. The result is an arresting music which combines elements of group-improvised minimalism, electro-acoustic improvisation and avant-garde chamber music into a texturally rich exploration of detailed noise texture... In Christian Weber’s work noise has become closely connected to the repertoire, that his music sits very comfortably within this, as if to question if, then, noise has such a natural and reflexive occurrence on the instrumental practice, so then, he constructs pieces which are bathed in these static residues and phantom details.
hatOLOGY 635
Mike Westbrook Orchestra
On Duke’s Birthday
Total time 74:34, AAD, Barcode: 752156063520
What’s most remarkable about the music’s resultant structural integrity and intricacy is that it all flows so seamlessly, sounds so spontaneous and organic, without artifice or contrivance. Mike Westbrook seems to share similarities with Gil Evans in this regard – long, slowly evolving pieces built upon a few seemingly static chords or minimal thematic material; initially unassuming background figures or fills growing gradually to major proportions; a sometimes slouching restless, deliberate yet relentless momentum eased along by shifting instrumental colors or intense, integrated solo statements.
hatOLOGY 636
Colin Vallon Trio
Ailleurs
Total time 56:45, DDD, Barcode: 752156063629
The members of this band all share a strong awareness of sound quality and timbre, which sets them apart from other musicians. Three distinct instrumental voices – Vallon's «singing» piano, Pat Moret's «full reverberating» bass and Samuel Rohrer's «polyvalent» drums – blend into a highly complex ensemble sound; here, too, the band has hardly anything in common with the traditional jazz piano trio conventions.
hatOLOGY 637
Nagl
Bernstein
Akchoté
Jones
Big Four Live
Total time 57:44, DDD, Barcode: 752156063726
In Max Nagl's varied jumble of creative activities, Big Four comes nearest to what we traditionally perceive as jazz. Formed at the suggestion of the producer Werner X. Uehlinger, who introduced him to the recordings of the original Big Four (Sidney Bechet, Muggsy Spanier, Carmen Mastren, Wellman Braud) from 1940, the band released its first album in 2002 (hatOLOGY 585). «I wanted to work again with trumpet player Steven Bernstein anyway, and this was an opportunity to do so,» Max Nagl explains. «I knew that he was at home in many genres of traditional jazz. It was clear to me that he, too, should score pieces for this band. I myself was more interested in the instrumentation than in the music of Bechet, actually.» When the adventurous guitarist Noël Akchoté and the agile and equally powerful bassist Bradley Jones teamed up, an exciting mélange of strong, idiosyncratic personalities was born.
hatOLOGY 638
Georg Graewe
Ernst Reijseger
Gerry Hemingway
Sonic Fiction
Total time 68:31, DDD, Barcode: 752156063827
This trio's music is easier characterized than described, since the wealth of colors, moods, textures, and melodies is fluid enough to shift not only from piece to piece, but moment to moment. There is, for me, a European aesthetic at work here, a blend of modern and historic sources with the added bittersweet spice of folk elements from the soil. It's a delicate, demanding juggling act, drawing on past experiences while remaining alert and honest to the immediacy of this particular moment. Their intuitive tactics are frequently mesmerizing, as they simultaneously shadow each other's moves, suggest spontaneous new directions, and sustain individual perspectives; Reijseger etching deft melodic contours out of the merest effects, Hemingway exhorting and embellishing, Graewe – with a crisp clarity of articulation, an ear for piano sonorities, and a resolute insistence on building block foundations – instilling structural support and lyrical alterations.
hatOLOGY 639
Oliver Lake Trio
Zaki
Total time 56:34, AAD, Barcode: 752156063926
Lake’s trio functioned on a democratic basis. «I‘m not the boss. One of our concepts is that we try to have an interplay. It’s not me being accompanied by the others. Pheeroan may start something that I’ll pick up on. From that Michael may add something, and then it will just keep on evolving and changing. We will sound like one flowing thing. It’s me (and sometimes Michael) writing the tunes, but we are all on an equal level in terms of where the music is coming from. We’ve been working together for three and a half years and are very sympathetic to each other. I feel very, very comfortable. We tune into each other and are very open inside. We play a melody and then try to go into other areas. I don’t like to structure the middle part because that’s where improvisation comes in. A preconceived structure would restrict us.»
hatOLOGY 641
Steve Lantner Trio
What You Can Throw
Total time 55:18, DDD, Barcode: 752156064121
I’m still surprised when I hear new jazz, and Steve Lantner plays it, reconstituting and reinventing the tradition. First hearing this trio, you’ll be struck by its sheer kinetic joy, its ability to swing and to drive in ways that are central to jazz, without simply repeating some specific events in that tradition. The opening of Joe Morris’s New Routine has a collective lope rarely achieved, an off-hand and offkilter movement that is immediate and reaches across time.
hatOLOGY 642
David Liebman
Richie Beirach
Ron McClure
Billy Hart
Redemption – Quest Live In Europe
Total time 76:13, DDD, Barcode: 752156064220
To be back on tour with Quest after fifteen years was like going home. We are peers with a common language that traverses the past several decades of music; experience and commonality are intangibles which when present create a sum much greater than the individual parts. What a joy to be back with the brothers...not a step was missed.
The present performances, from two stops on its 2005 European tour, find the band revisiting and extending longstanding concepts with the added conviction of four wiser, and if anything bolder explorers.
hatOLOGY 643
Anthony Ortega
Afternoon in Paris
Total time 55:46, DDD/ADD, Barcode: 752156064329
On first glimpse this recording might seem to be a sequel to the 1966 alto saxophone and acoustic bass duo session which formed one-half of Anthony Ortega's critically acclaimed «New Dance». But for Ortega to try and recreate that once-upon-a-time, now legendary date would be folly. He has not changed his approach to the duo (or solo for that matter) format all that much in the years between then and now. But significant differences occur in the details. Remarkably, we have the previously unreleased performance of «Ornithology» from the earlier session, not for comparison, but like a snapshot of an earlier time which provides us with a renewed perspective on the Ortega of today—the same person with some new ideas, a complementary partner, and an improvisational integrity undiminished over time. Art Lange
