It’s rather appropriate that the new subsidiary of Lisbon’s Clean Feed Records has chosen to call itself European Echoes. After all, it’s also the title of German trumpeter Manfred Schoof’s all-star 1969 orchestra date, the auspicious call-to-creative-arms that launched the FMP label. Not only did it herald one of the European jazz world’s most venerated imprints, but the date itself brought together improvisers from Germany, England, Holland, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, Denmark and Poland for a thirty-minute act of improvisational artistic NOW. The European Echoes label debut is a somewhat more reigned-in affair that nevertheless echoes what Schoof and the FMP stable wielded so heavily in the 1970s: a sense of improvisational community between countries and even continents.
Teatro was recorded on Valentine’s Day 2004 at the Spectrum Festival in Oporto, Portugal, and joins Portuguese saxophonist Rodrigo Amado, American bassist Kent Kessler and Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love in four rousing improvisations. Amado is no stranger to intercontinental meetings – indeed he belongs to the cooperative Lisbon Improvisation Players, which has brought American improvisers into contact with their Portuguese brethren. Like fellow Iberian, tenorman Jesus Santandreu, Amado displays an affinity for Newk-derived freebop (albeit without the ribaldry), and while the initial palette might smack of the Surman/Phillips/Martin trio (check “Chasin’ Pirandello” for that), the baritone-bass-drums flights here offer subtler midrange wringing and a barrage of flecks rather than bricks. Nilssen-Love’s towel-damped hub of cross-rhythms and the pliant groove he and Kessler set up in tandem on “The Iconoclast” are a shift from the metallic surge he puts forth in The Thing, and fits Amado’s breathy keens perfectly.
Switching to tenor on “Pandora’s Box” (and indeed for much of the rest of the disc), Amado is full of wide vibrato, folksy lilt, velvety purrs and worried skronk in a solo that solidifies his status as a saxophonist to watch. Though the loping swing Kessler and Nilssen-Love provide is somewhat unadorned and doesn’t double back and reinvent itself as some other juggernauts have of late, it’s a springboard to a loft-worthy tenor improvisation somewhere in the annals of Garzone and Rivers, albeit with Mediterranean vibrations.
Concentric offers another international symposium on free improvisation, this time between Nilssen-Love and English saxophonist John Butcher, whose hard-edged facility has graced recordings as diverse as SME and EAI. Putting Butcher next to Amado in a review is perhaps a bit of a disservice, as their approaches are like oil and water. Butcher’s directed logic of serially-altered forms and sounds turns growls and multiphonics into so much rolled lead. In this sense, on a piece like “Pipestone,” Butcher is a post-minimalist, a process-saxophonist using minimal means to express material ends. “Mono Lake” mates nearly electro-acoustic trills with Lacy-esque quacks and chirps into a study of free soprano simultaneity. The second part of the piece offers an austere meditation on phrase abstraction, as though viewing flocks of birds through refracted sunlight.
It’s a testament to Nilssen-Love’s democratic approach that he can adjust his chatter of rhythm-assemblage to very different improvisational contexts – freebop and, well, Butcher’s world. On Concentric, his language is a dense piling of fragments, a perfectly-rotating scrap-heap of sounds, not so much “swinging” but constantly active. His bowed and scraped accoutrements match wits with Butcher’s soprano on both “Mono Lake” and “Point Lobos;” nothing we haven’t heard before from Parker and Lovens, but even without the heel-digging punch, clarity and directness make for tones one can’t ignore. However, the earthy, Sunny Murray-like field he builds up underneath the saxophonist on “The Stob” is worth waiting for – somewhere in that metallic sheen is some good, old-fashioned free blowing. It just takes a few spins to find it.
Posted by clifford on March 6, 2007 11:38 PM.................................................. © 2003 - 2006 bagatellen ..................................................