DON CHERRY & IRENE SCHWEIZER: MUSICAL MONSTERS (INTAKT)

 The Guardian - 9th September 2016

Jazz

Don Cherry / Irène Schweizer: Musical Monsters review – technical class and experimental appetite

3 / 5 stars

(Intakt)

Marking history … the Swiss piano virtuoso Irène Schweizer, who called for the release of the Willisau tapes for Musical Monsters. Photograph: Markus di Francesco

By John Fordham

This encounter between world-jazz trumpet legend Don Cherry, Danish-American alto saxophonist John Tchicai, Swiss piano virtuoso Irène Schweizer, bassist Léon Francioli and percussionist Pierre Favre had been buried in the vaults since the original performance at Switzerland’s Willisau festival in 1980. Schweizer recently heard the tapes and called for their release as a unique document in the story of European free jazz. Loosely based on sketchy arrangements the five cooked up in a pre-gig chat, it’s blustery, exhilarating music, in which minimal trumpet patterns become genially wayward Ornette Coleman-like motifs and fast bass-walks spark avant-swing sprints. Over these, Tchicai’s eerie violin-like alto soars, or the horns tussle above Favre’s hustling drums and Schweizer’s streaming runs. There’s a good deal of manically abstract vocalising as well as strutting slow marches like Albert Ayler band numbers. The track Musical Monsters 3 is approximately and unexpectedly danceable, and the unaccompanied solos demonstrate both the technical class and experimental appetites of all the players. It’s one for the free-jazzers, but a rare one.

4 Star Review: Schlippenbach Trio - Features (John Fordham / The Guardian)

The Guardian / John Fordham

Schlippenbach Trio: Features (Intakt)

Improvised by master craftsmen

4 / 5 stars

The trio of Alex von Schlippenbach, saxophonist Evan Parker and drummer Paul Lovens are nowadays that enemy of free-improv purity: an institution (the three have played together for 45 years). But if they can almost unerringly read each other’s minds, their methods have never hardened into habit, and their work over the decades has immense variety. There are 15 numbered Features here, and they are tautly concise, and often defined by improvised openings by one or other participant that shape their developing character. Feature 1 begins very melodically, developing with logical rigour and ends on a haunting multiphonic sustained tone. Some pieces weave Parker’s nimble mid-range tenor sax lines through percussive backdrops of banging chords and Lovens’ light, scuttling patterns; some are soft and ballad-like. Feature 6 highlights Schlippenbach as a brusque romantic; Feature 8 sounds like jazzy call-and-response; Feature 11 is a tone poem for Parker’s remarkable textural palette. It’s unpremeditated music executed by master craftsmen.

4 star review: MARILYN CRISPELL / GERRY HEMINGWAY in THE GUARDIAN

Jazz

Marilyn Crispell/Gerry Hemingway: Table of Changes review – an uncannily attuned jazz duo

4/5stars

    

(Intakt)

 Strength, decisiveness and energy … Marilyn Crispell and Gerry Hemingway

John Fordham

Thursday 25 June 2015 18.15 BSTLast modified on Thursday 25 June 201518.18 BSTShare on Facebook

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With Affinities in 2011, the partnership of former Anthony Braxton players Marilyn Crispell (piano) and Gerry Hemingway (drums) produced improv-duo music of power, precision and lyricism. Table of Changes is another live album, drawn from four dates on their 2013 European tour. The tracks are all originals, highlighting the players’ emotional as well as technical range, with the only cover being Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye – interpreted in solemn, spacey chords and percussion tapestries until the melody coalesces at the end. Crispell’s strength, decisiveness and energy often surface in the turbulent chordwork that rolls and rings against Hemingway’s needling cymbal sounds and pummelling drums, but she’s as likely to float glistening treble tones over the drummer’s vibraphone glow or the pings of finger-cymbals. The dreamy and then darkening Night Passing focuses on Crispell’s use of space and harmonic sophistication; Hemingway’s rubbed-metal sounds and ghostly nasal singing emphasise the title implications of Windy City while Crispell rhapsodises classically. It’s an uncannily attuned partnership.