★Intakt Records
Piano Interpretations
2023 Stock. Kukuruz Quartet started 2014 their involvement with Julius Eastman and his musical works. In 2017, their performance at documenta 14 in the Megaro Mousikis concert hall in Athens earned a standing ovation. They performed works by Julius Eastman: 'Evil Nigger', 'Gay Guerrilla', 'Buddha' and 'Fugue No. 7'. The recording of these compositions followed in November 2017 on four Steinway D pianos in the main hall of the historic Radiostudio Zürich. Composer, trombonist and scholar George E…
Music Delivery/Percussion
Andrew Cyrille’s longtime companion Oliver Lake praises the master of African-American rhythms in his poem The Real Cyrille – “making the real magic … the real rhythms … the real sounds … expanding his African/Haitian roots … surfing the drums for masterful lyrical snippets … a master of color … painting coloring riffing always stretchin’ searchin’lookin’ for that next sound color sound!” Lake’s words astutely describe the artistry of Andrew Cyrille and the music that he makes on this record. Un…
Two For Two
Aki Takase and Han Bennink love the art of dialogue. Bennink is paired for life in a duo with the pianist Misha Mengelberg. Intakt Record also offers a duo recording of Han Bennink with the Zurich pianist Irène Schweizer. After having released five duo CDs at Intakt Records with Silke Eberhard, Lauren Newton, Rudi Mahall, Alexander von Schlippenbach and Louis Sclavis, Aki Takase is now presenting a breathtaking and very entertaining recording with Han Bennink.
Every tone reveals enjoyment and de…
Kasumi
Jazz as the art of dialogue: two of the great musicians of today's jazz from different continents and generations make music sparkle. Born in Osaka in 1948, Aki Takase moved to Berlin where her musical partners included Han Bennink, Evan Parker, Rudi Mahall, David Murray, Louis Sclavis and Fred Frith as well as her husband and pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach. Ingrid Laubrock, born in 1970 in Stadlohn in North Rhine-Westphalia, moved to London at the age of 19 where she studied with the saxop…
Hokusai - Piano Solo
Aki Takase, the Berlin-based pianist, is one of the great personalities of modern jazz. Moments of freedom, form and humour characterize this stylistically versatile avant-gardist, the stubborn virtuoso who toys with jazz traditions. In the year of her 70th birthday, Aki Takase was honoured with The Berlin Jazz Prize. Recorded over two days at the Sendesaal Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg, the album includes some pieces captured live during the award ceremony, and some recorded in a studio setting i…
Crepuscule In Nickelsdorf
A dream-like aura surrounds these recordings by Evan Parker and Mathew Wright - Trance Map+ from the Jazz Festival Nickelsdorf: Crepuscule in Nickelsdorf. “Filtered through the silicon of the hard drive, birds and insects often sound electronically generated and some of the synthesized sounds, designed in software, sound like birds and insects with wings of their own,” writes American journalist Bill Shoemaker. The real seems virtual; the virtual seems real – it is the ambiguity essential to the…
MSM Molecular Systematic Music - Live
Over the last half-decade Saxophonist and composer James Brandon Lewis has emerged as one of the most exciting figures in jazz and improvised music, a voracious listener who rejects stylistic hierarchies and one that has feverishly explored new ideas and embraced fresh motivations with every new project. Inspired by molecular biology, he develops a special system for a surprising and beautiful music with his Quartet with drummer Chad Taylor, pianist Aruán Ortiz, and bassist Brad Jones. He has ta…
Celebration
Piano-Drums Duos are the preferred playing arrangement of pianist Irène Schweizer. Her mastery of duets with important drummers of contemporary jazz are documented on numerous Intakt CDs. Han Bennink, Pierre Favre, Louis Moholo, Günter Baby Sommer, Andrew Cyrille and Joey Baron among them.
The Chicago drummer Hamid Drake, born in 1955, and Irène Schweizer, born in 1941, have performed together on numerous occasions both in Europe and Chicago. Together they have appeared on the Intakt CD "Irè…
Slow Pieces for Aki – Piano Solo
The pianist, two days in the studio, alone at the piano. A retreat in Zurich. Focus is on the now, the recording is running. Preparation time for the new compositions: about a year. Getting attuned to the music: a lifetime. Alexander von Schlippenbach, Slow Pieces For Aki, the emphasis being on the word “slow,” not on rediscovering slowness but discovering slowness anew - dedicated to his wife Aki Takase. with slow pieces, short pieces, compositions in which every single note demands the highest…
All Is Always Now (Fred Frith Live at The Stone) 3CD
Between 2006 and 2016, Fred Frith played 80 concerts at New York's unique space for experimental music 'The Stone'. A selection of his encounters with such powerful and creative personalities as Laurie Anderson, Pauline Oliveros, Sylvie Courvoisier, Evan Parker, Nate Wooley, Ikue Mori has been combined in this 3-CD box set comprising 23 fascinating tracks which cover a decade-long adventure in improvisation.The musician Theresa Wong was quite impressed with this collection: "I was struck by the …
Miller's Tale
Miller's Tale is the high point of the collaboration of the distinctive musicians Sylvie Courvoisier, Mark Feldmann, Evan Parker and Ikue Mori. In September 2015, they recorded the fully improvised pieces for this album. The album's track sequencing of first four whole group pieces followed by five duo pieces offer multifaced aural impressions and a rich listening experience. Henning Bolte writes in the liner notes: "Our ears usually first adhere to the known, the familiar. But they 'squint' to …
Another Day In Fucking Paradise
Frith returns to his deep roots in this improvising trio with the classic lineup of guitar, bass and drums. Playful, intimate, and bound together by a dark and delicate interplay, the group reminds us what listening is all about. After a lifetime of experience across almost every field of musical endeavor, Fred stretches out in the company of two stalwarts of the vibrant Bay Area music scene who have their own stories to tell. Fred Frith writes about his Trio: "When I proposed this trio I had no…
Blue Shroud
After his great compositions for the London Jazz Composers Orchestra and the Barry Guy New Orchestra, Barry Guy has written a large scale work for a new international ensemble. Guy's work The Blue Shroud is an hommage to the painting Guernica by Pablo Picasso. It is for the people of the Spanish town, who were victims of the Nazi German air force bombardment during the Spanish Civil War. Guy also wants us to remember the occasion in 2003, when the Guernica-tapestry at the UN Security Council was…
Features
Schlippenbach Trio's magic chemistry is founded on years of working together, both on intuitive listening and interaction – the ability to respond in an instant – andon the match between their characters, each adding to the whole as well as challenging each other – a stroke of fortune. Alexander von Schlippenbach likes to talk about the 'impetus of music making'. Impetus means drive, initiative, force, momentum, temperament. Three 'travelling fellows' on a Winterreise. The motto is: never …
Texture Time
Texture Time” is the third album by Dense Band and quite possibly the best. It signals a further development of Moss' use of live sampling and electronics to magnify the impact of that already dramatic vocal delivery, showcasing Moss' astonishing leaps from register to register and his ability to shape time like an origami master folds paper. No other improvising vocalist that I know of has created such an intense, idiosyncratic vocabulary. Texture Time is indispensable.
Portraits
Portraits is a sprawling, ambitious work composed by bassist Barry Guy that brings together musicians from across the British jazz/improv spectrum, from free music luminaries Evan Parker, Paul Rutherford, and Phil Wachsmann to somewhat more jazz-based players such as Paul Dunmall and Trevor Watts. The album contains seven main "portraits," each distinct from the next, which are tailored to spotlight the various soloists as well as the different smaller working units contained within the larger 1…
Plie
The problem that besets British jazz - from Ray Noble and Ronnie Scott to Barbara Thompson and Andy Sheppard - is light-music, 'Radio 2' gentility; in Germany it is what Michael Kator (describing the results of the Nazi ban on "hot Jewish music") called "the bane of German jazz, the dreaded 'um-papa' sound". Here, four free music veterans from East Berlin (Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky, alto; Ulrich Gumpert, piano; Connie Bauer, trombone; Günter Sommer, percussion) have decided to ease up, let some 'da…
World of Strings
Stephan Wittwer Intakt solo album, World of Strings has him all over the guitar. Live recordings.
Five Voices
International consortium of freaky vocal talent culled together here represent some of the finest exponents of extemporaneous jibber jabber extant. From the U.S., we have the zany N.Y. avant chanteuse Shelley Hirsch and her equally flipped out N.Y. compatriot in extended vocal technique David Moss as well as the L.A.-based Anna Homler, whose approach emerges from her personal zone of invented language generation as heard on her gorgeous Do Ya Sa Di Do CD, which I posted a while back. To that, ad…
Uluru
Solo work by one great saxophone player, founder of the Butch Morris' X-Communication and of the Cecil Taylor's European Big Band.