Holiday Slowdown

Daunik Lazro/Benjamin Duboc/Mathieu Bec, Lemur, Dogmatics, Weston Olencki

This will be the last installment of the Nowhere Street newsletter for a few weeks. We’ll return to action on Tuesday, January 2, with a few posts running down my favorite new recordings and archival releases of 2023. A new episode of Nowhere Street radio airs on Berlin’s Colaboradio tomorrrow at 4 PM Berlin time (10 AM EST). If you’re in Berlin you can tune in at 88.4 FM, or online anywhere at the same time. Tomorrow’s show features music from Ava Rocha, Isach Skeidsvoll, the Necks, the Dave Bayles Trio, Moussa Tchingou, Aselefech Ashine & Getenesh Kebret, and Leon Keita. For those who want to keep abreast on good experimental shows happening i the next few weeks head to the always indispensable echtzeitmusik.

Also, my year-end column of my favorite contemporary music of 2023 has just been published over at Bandcamp Daily, featuring only titles available on the platform.

Daunik Lazro Blurs the Line Between the New Thing and Stardard Repertoire

I have long respected and enjoyed the playing of veteran French saxophonist Daunik Lazro, but he’s never made a recording that struck such an immediate chord with me like his new trio outing Standards Combustion (Dark Tree). It’s his third trio album for the label since 2011, but unlike the first two with bassist Benjamin Duboc and drummer Didier Lassere—both fully improvised sessions exploring extended abstractions in a way that still feels de rigueur today—the new release features Mathieu Bec on drums and is primarily built around tunes. I can’t say for sure whether it’s Bec—whom I’d never previously heard, but will now be on the lookout for—or the instrumental format that has made the difference, but the recording has really taken me by surprise. Lazro was born in 1945, and this album feels a bit like a reflection on his earliest influences of the 1960s.

Daunik Lazro with Joe McPhee, 2016 (photo: Žiga Koritnik)

The album design deploys a very familiar Blue Note sendup, but what the trio calls “standards” here would still be met with shock by many old-school jazz listeners. In fact, a bunch of the pieces are so connected to the improvisatory fire of the saxophonists that composed them—especially Albert Ayler’s “Ghosts” or John Coltrane’s “Vigil”—that they might seem to repel that assignation. Of course, the braying melody of “Ghosts” feels so eternal and warmly familiar that it would be hard to argue against its elevation to the realm of standard rep. Below you can hear the trio’s elastic take on the Wayne Shorter classic “Nefertiti,” which remains inexorably tied to the version recorded by the Miles Davis Quintet on the 1965 album of the same name, but there are other tunes here that reveal themselves to be enduring, a quality I wouldn’t have randomly attached to Steve Lacy’s genuinely indelible “Deadline,” presented here with elastic grace.

The argument against the standards format getting credit for my connection to the record is undercut by a couple of fully improvised pieces that sound as good and strong as any of the composed material, including Lazro’s own “Line Up for Lacy.” Duboc and Bec make for a fantastic rhythm section, maintaining an undeniable pulse and form while leaving tons of space. Bec sounds like a cross between Sunny Murray, without the persistent cymbal sizzle, and Sven-Åke Johansson, transforming swing into a barely controlled rumble. Duboc’s mastery of space and silence is something else. I don’t mean to sound backhanded when I write that his periods of absence sometimes convey as much power as his most furious sallies. The way they carve out space is perfect for Lazro’s sighing phrases, striated tone, and deliciously careening lines. It’s a superb effort and I sure hope to hear more from the group.

The Complex Calculus of Lemur’s Mobile Soundworlds

Last week I wrote about the music of the Berlin-Vienna quartet Polwechsel, which has been producing ever-changing compositional contexts for improvisation for three decades. While they weren’t the first ensemble to do so, they did create a new paradigm in the early 90s that’s still unfolding. I think the Norwegian ensemble Lemur fit into this legacy, even if their work is also quite different. The quartet—double bassist Michael Francis Duch, flutist Bjørnar Habbestad, cellist Lene Grenager, and French horn player Hild Sofie Tafjord (the latter two have long worked together in Spunk, another ensemble exploring the nexus of composition and improvisation—perform in Berlin this week, collaborating with pianist Reinhold Friedl at Morphine Raum on Thursday, December 14.

Lemur (photo: Anna-Julia Granberg/BLUNDERBUSS)

Earlier this year Lemur released Critical Bands (Aurora), the first documentation of “Critical Band,” a long-running piece built from meticulously detailed instructions and parameters that explore site-specific resonant frequencies. Despite sharing a title with the superb piece by James Tenney, who worked in some overlapping realms, there appears to be no connection between the two works. The scant information in the CD packaging suggests that the six pieces were drawn from nine different performances spanning 2012-2019—most with extended casts of guest musicians including Microtub, Iceland’s Caput Ensemble—but I don’t know if they are composites or if sections were cut from whole cloth. The six pieces are titled after  handful of the 49 compositional modules in the score, including “Impulses,” “Ruptures,” and “Spectres.” The score, which runs 49 pages, including some commentary from the ensemble members, lays out the elaborate directions for the piece, including how the players should be arrayed in the performance space, how they should prepare and rehearse in that space—crucial, as the performance venue is just as important to the end result as the musicians or the compositional idea—and what each of the modules entails. As the ensemble notes in the score, “Fundamentally, the piece investigates how music can relate to the space in which it is performed: turning a composition into a utility to illuminate architecture in sound.”

I haven’t been able to spend enough time with the music to make correlations between the sounds and the score, but I have greatly enjoyed the music, in which terse phrases using a wide array of attacks and timbres unfold in ever-shifting combinations and layers, with tightly arranged passages, often orchestral in nature, imposing some kind of temporal sensibility. Or at least they inject a different sort of drama into the performance, upsetting the staccato/pointillistic motives with massed articulations. ““Openings” serves up brassy swells amid static string tones, a much more unified and seemingly arranged module, but it remains open in its ebbing-and-surging flow. Below you can hear “Ruptures.”

Lemur’s partnership with Berlin pianist Friedl goes back a long way, too, beginning in 2015, and Tafjord has been playing in his ensemble Zeitkratzer for even longer. While Friedl’s group often hews more closely to the score in some of the works they interpret—whether new music staples like Tenney and Karlheinz Stockhausen, or adaptations of rock-adjacent endeavors such as Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music and Kraftwerk’s earliest albums—it has a strong improvisational ethos, and most of its members are devoted members of that community. In 2020 the pianist and Lemur released Alloy (Sofa), a collaborative album whose title spells out the creative process. Over the course of a seven-movement collective improvisation, the musicians glide seamlessly between microscopic explorations of smaller instrumental sub-sections, concentrated melodic evocations, sustained tones, and extended contrapuntally vivid ensemble passages straddling new music tropes and fervid free improv. The results are impressively cogent, bristling with timbral variation and a full-bodied command of color. Below you can check out the opening section of the recording, “Component I.”

Short Takes on Berlin Shows This Week

Australian keyboardist Chris Abrahams, who remains known best for his decades-long participation in the Necks, is making a long overdue visit to Berlin this week, renewing some of his creative partnerships in the city. Few of them are as satisfying as the Dogmatics, his duo with clarinetist Kai Fagaschinski, a collaboration that’s existed in fits and starts since 2007. They perform on Friday, December 15 at KM28, on a bill that also includes Sink, a quartet with Abrahams, Marcello Busato, Andrea Ermke, and Arthur Rother. Abrahams plays a variety of keyboards, but he sticks with unamplified piano in this project, although he mucks around inside the instrument nearly as much as he plays its keys. Fagaschinksi is one of my favorite musicians in Berlin, and his ability to make his instrument express such a staggering variety of minimalist shapes, leaky textures, and harmonic overtones consistently brings genuine depth to a practice that’s often deliberately constricted. To be sure, he works within narrow parameters by design, but within them Fagaschinki is a sonic rainbow. The pair alter strategies from piece to piece, but all of them thrive upon heightened interplay and painstaking listening skills. Below you can listen to “I Am Now Wearing Surgical Gloves”—a title emblematic of their droll sensibility, which is further reinforced by the faux-black metal artwork—which opens the duo’s 2018 album Chop Off the Tops, which I wrote about when it was released. The music was actually recorded back in 2013, so I’m excited to hear where the duo stands a decade later.

Weston Olencki flexes some geeky intellectual/tech muscle in the liner notes of their 2022 album Old Time Music (Tripticks Tapes), laboring over the algorithms behind each work. It’s kind of a drag because it tends to make some of the inspirations here look like mere conceptual fodder. For example, the piece opens with “Tenor Madness,” a knockout tenor saxophone performance by Anna Webber in which her playing triggers a bank of samples of improvised tenor playing made between 1939 and the present. The contextual geekiness of the details tends to cloud the razor-sharp execution and the real-time feedback thrown at the reedist through Olencki’s ambitious programming. On subsequent pieces different algorithms are applied to music fed into a banjo laid flat on a table—used as multi-functional resonator rather than a conventional instrument—processed with additional banks of samples and AI procedures that more explicitly flatten the old-time and country sources as raw material, which is a bit of a shame considering Olencki’s genuine enthusiasm for the music. Olencki has also been joining forces with like-minded banjo experimentation from bassist Nick Dunston in the Hollows, a trio rounded out by Cologne-based extended snare drum maestro Etienne Nillesen, which recently dropped its debut Inner Century on Superpang.

The bulk of Old Time Music is occupied by “a vine that grew over the city and no one noticed”—which I assume means kudzu—the multi-movement work Olencki will play in Berlin for the first time on Tuesday, December 12 at Morphine Raum, part of a double bill with the duo of Jules Reidy and Andrea Belfi. On the opening movement, “Cripple Creek/Pretty Polly,” an extended bluegrass banjo solo is played back while pummeled by an array of mechanical percussion before electronics break apart the fluid arpeggios into garbled digitalia. The remaining movements drift from those country roots into more genre-agnostic experimentation, where the banjo serves as a sonic tool rather than a stylistic thumbprint, and the algorithms push the work into more sound-driven terrain. There are a lot of elements beyond the banjo-as-resonator, but reading about them tends to sully my listening experience, and I’ve really enjoyed occupying that space without thinking about how it was created. Olencki has been playing the shit out of this material over the last year, so I’m excited to hear how it’s developed. Below you can check out the second movement of the piece, “10:23pm through the Saluda Grade/Moonshiner.”

Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week

December 12: Weston Olencki; Jules Reidy & Andrea Belfi, 8:30 PM, Morphine Raum, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)

December 12: AA Special Sessions (Alexander von Schlippenbach & Aki Takase, pianos, Rudi Mahall, bass clarinet, Dag Magnus Narvesen, drums & Toshiko Oka, dance), Kuhlspot Social Club, Lehderstrasse 74-79, 13086 Berlin

December 13: Robert Blatt, guitar; Quartet (Alex Dörner, trumpet, electronics; Koen Nutters, double bass; Byran Eubanks, soprano saxophone, electronics; Gert-Jan Prins, live electronics, percussion); DJ Peter Cusack, 8:30 PM, Petersburg Art Space, Kaiserin-Augusta-Allee 101, 10553 Berlin, entrance in the courtyard, Aufgang II, 1 OG

December 13: Lina Allemano’s Ohrenschmaus (Dan Peter Sundland, electric bass, Michael Griener, drums) with Andrea Parkins, 8 PM, Panda Theater, Knaackstraße 97 (i.d. Kulturbrauerei, Gebäude 8) 10435 

December 14: Kaja Draksler & Tobias Delius; Marcin Masecki, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin  

December 14: Lemur with Reinhold Friedl, 8:30 PM, Morphine Raum, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)

December 15: Serious Series 2023 with Tobias Delius; Ulrike Brand & Olaf Rupp; Frank Gratkowski, Sebi Tramontana & Steve Beresford, 8:30 PM, Uferstudio, Uferstraße, 8/23, 13357, Berlin

December 15: The Dogmatics (Chris Abrahams, piano, and Kai Fagaschinski, clarinet); Sink (Chris Abrahams, Marcelo Busato, Andrea Ermke, Arthur Rother), 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin  

December 16: Serious Series 2023 with Toma Gouband; Michael Moore, Achim Kaufmann & Nick Dunston; Michael Vatcher & Company (with Richard Barrett, electronics, Liat Waysbort, dance, & Balder Hansen, dance), 8:30 PM, Uferstudio, Uferstraße, 8/23, 13357, Berlin

December 16: Flocks (Werner Durand, invented winds; Uli Homann, invented strings & hand drums), 7 PM, oqbo, Brunnenstraße 63, 13355 Berlin

December 17: Lina/Matthias/Ulf (Lina Allemano, trumpet; Matthias Müller, trombone; Ulf Mengersen, bass), 4 PM, Satellit, Weinstraße 11, 10249 Berlin

December 17: Smallest Functional Unit (Ute Wassermann, voice, objects; Tony Buck; percussion, Magda Mayas, piano; Mazen Kerbaj, trumpet, objects), 8 PM, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)

December 17: CCA (Chris Abrahams, dx7; Christian Kesten, voice; Andrea Ermke, minidiscs); Burkhard Beins, percusion; Tree (Chris Abrahams, dx7, Andrea Ermke, minidiscs, Burkhard Beins, electronics), 8:30 PM, Petersburg Art Space, Kaiserin-Augusta-Allee 101, 10553 Berlin, entrance in the courtyard, Aufgang II, 1 OG

December 17: Serious Series 2023 with Katrin Pechlof’s Radical Empathy (Christian Weidner, saxophone, Katrin Pechlof, harp, Achim Kaufman, piano, Elias Stemeseder, synthesizer & harpsichord, Robert Landfermann, bass & Leif Berger, drums); ACM (Anna Kaluza, saxophone, Céline Voccia, piano, & Mathias Bauer, bass); Brique (Bianco Iannuzzi, voice, Eve Risser, piano, Luc Ex, bass & Francesco Pastacaldi, drums), 8:30 PM, Uferstudio, Uferstraße, 8/23, 13357, Berlin

December 19: Das B (Mazen Kerbaj, trumpet; Magda Mayas, piano; Mike Majkowski, double bass; Tony Buck, drums); Mazen Kerbaj (trumpet, crackle synth), 8 PM, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)