Ken Waxman
Densités Festival. Fresnes-en-Woëvre, France. October 23-25, 2009. A rural French hamlet in the Lorraine countryside isn’t the setting you would imagine for a world-class festival of unadulterated Electronic and Free Jazz music. Yet the Densités Festival in Fresnes-en-Woëvre—population five hundred—about eighty kilometres[...] Read more
Grutronic. Essex Foam Party. Essex Foam Party sees Grutronic, a free improvising collective, join forces with guests vibraphonist Orphy Robinson and sampler Paul Obermayer. Mixed among the moist pulses and triggered cross textures that characterize much of the music are interludes of keyboard comping and runs from[...] Read more
FURT. Sense. Two methods of creation play out on this disc by FURT, the British electronic composition-performance duo of Richard Barrett and Paul Obermayer. The track Uranus is a forty-six-minute studio composition developed over a two-year period. In contrast, Curtains, the second track on the CD,[...] Read more
Burkhard Beins. Structural Drift. Conceived, created, recorded, and mixed during a three-month residency in Worpswede, Germany, composer-improviser Burkhard Beins’ CD Structural Drift uses found sounds along with custom-made electronics, an e-bow zither, various percussion, and synthesizer to reflect Worpswede[...] Read more
Diane C. Fujino, Editor. Wicked Theory, Naked Practice: A Fred Ho Reader. Composer, bandleader and baritone saxophonist; theorist; revolutionary socialist, and Black-Asian-American, Fred Ho writes essays that are as uncompromising and defiant as his compositions. This wide-ranging collection elucidates the evolution of his philosophy from 1984[...] Read more
Robert Adlington, editor. Sound Commitments: Avant-Garde Music and the Sixties. “If you remember the ’60s, it means you weren’t there” is a cliché with a kernel of truth in it—especially the insistence that rock sounds then subsumed other music. Yet the ’60s also saw mass acceptance of new and electronic music, while jazz[...] Read more
Guelph Jazz Festival. Guelph, Ontario. September 9–13, 2009. The annual Guelph Jazz Festival is always populist. In its sixteenth edition, it extended its support of outdoor improvisation, plus interaction between Third and First World musicians without lessening its commitment to Free Music. Much of the outstanding music making came from the[...] Read more
Birgit Ulher. Radio Silence No More. Hamburg-based trumpeter Birgit Ulher uses her improvisational prowess to shape this program, treating as full partners the extended drones and blurry hisses that emanate from a stand-alone radio and its speaker. On the nine mid-length tracks here—all with the suffixes ‑welle or ‑[...] Read more
Quatuor Qwat Reum Six. Live at Festival NPAI 2007. With textures and timbres often as inscrutable as the band’s name, four of France’s most accomplished improvisers explore non-idiomatic sounds. This continuous, though segmented, performance is not only tonally mesmerizing, it also negates, through the use of extensions and[...] Read more
Olga Neuwirth and the ICI Ensemble. Who am I? No More. Animated with sonic jump-cuts and unexpected timbral juxtapositions, these compositions—described as two audio films—by Austrian Olga Neuwirth, demonstrate that she is young enough to be influenced by John Zorn-styled musical pastiches, as well as by conventional music. That[...] Read more
Marteau Rouge and Evan Parker. Live. Devoting more than forty years to the painstaking development of an individual style doesn’t mean that British tenor saxophonist Evan Parker eschews new challenges and collaborations. Live is notable, however, because Parker manages, without altering his distinctive reed patterns,[...] Read more
Jorge Lima Barreto. Zul Zelub. Melding inside-and-outside piano explorations with the pulsations of a randomly tuned shortwave radio or with pre-recorded ambient sounds issuing from four CD players, Jorge Lima Barreto creates an altogether unique, double-barrelled program here. A veteran Portuguese pianist, academic,[...] Read more
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