Jazz /
March 1970
The earliest live recording of this Japanese free jazz saxophonist/loner catches him at an incendiary peak across two long, fully-gospelised/heavy tremolo wall-destroyers. Abe at his most Ayler/Wright-inspired. Liners list the backing as bass and drums, but it's actually piano and drums. Keiichi Chida on piano has a weird watery/cluster sound that's a little like Burton Greene's 60s recordings, while Kazunori Nitta's drumming is all splats and weights of blurry punctuation. Sounds fucking great.…
Winter 1972
Alongside noise guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi, the late saxophonist Kaoru Abe was in the vanguard of Japan's new music, articulating an approach to the saxophone that matched extreme velocity with an elastic facility with the instrument's most phantom registers and a sculptural approach to instant composition that saw him carve poignant shapes from massive blocks of silence. Abe died of a heroin overdose on September 9th, 1978 at the age of 29, making 2004 the 27th anniversary of his passing, on…
Solo thursday evening 1972
This is another beautiful live document from the late starcrossed free saxophonist Kaoru Abe's peak period, three solo alto improvisations from '72 that work echoes of weird popular song and folk ghosts into some torrential throat action. Abe was always at his most exploratory when he was all alone in space and this is a thrilling document of a man liberated from any interactive concerns and free to follow the gush of his own muse. Highly recommended.
Solo 1972
Beautiful collection of early solo work from this amazing Japanese saxophonist who can burn personal co-ordinates into cold, black space with alla the harrowing force of Ayler, Haino, Brotz et al. Performances on alto and bass clarinet that combine an intimate, lyrical style with ferocious phantom register evisceration. Highly recommended.
Absence
Then onto the trios, of which the first one has the well-known Axel Dörner (trumpet), Leonel Kaplan (trumpet) and Diego Chamy (percussion). As this was recorded (in 2003) in Buenos Aires, Argentinia, I have reasons to believe that Kaplan and Chamy are from Argentina. This is top of new improvisation. Dörner continues to explore his techniques of trumpet playing, which has nothing to do with the trumpet as such, but everything with the instrument as an object and Leonel Kaplan proofs to be a good…