Say What?

Oùat, Minimalism, Jana Horn, Immerweiter, Chris Potter

Oùat Bring the Heat, Over and Over Again

I chatted with drummer Michael Griener following a terrific gig by Monk’s Casino last weekend, mentioning how excited I was to finally catch a full club show by Oùat, the sublime trio he has with bassist Joel Grip and pianist Simon Sieger. They perform at Sowieso on Saturday, February 10. I’ve written frequently about the group, which bookended 2022 with a pair of fantastic recordings on the Umlaut label. Elastic Bricks was a set of original tunes by Grip and Sieger, while The Strange Adventures of Jesper Klint was a total remake of Coyote, an overlooked classic from the mid-80s by Swedish pianist Per Henrik Wallin. I adore both recordings, which bristle with an infectiously buoyant, joyful strain of bebop of the sort defined by the likes of Thelonious Monk, Elmo Hope, Herbie Nichols, and Hasaan Ibn Ali, all key members of what Matthew Shipp has called the Black Mystery School.

Oùat—Joel Grip, Michael Griener, Simon Sieger (photo: Carina Khorkhordina)

I finally heard Oùat live in December, when they played hourly sets in the decidedly informal setting of Grip’s cozy studio space. The set I caught featured clarinetist Rudi Mahall, and with his sensibilities the music didn’t veer too far from the style essayed on the trio’s two albums. In December they posted a new track every day on its Bandcamp page until Christmas, creating a musical advent calendar–all for free (donations encouraged!). I enthusiastically wrote about the effort, but, honestly, I had only enough time to listen to a few of the tracks. When I spoke with Griener he mentioned another show the trio was playing the night before the Sowieso gig: Friday, February 9 at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, where Oùat will support a durational reading/performance by Will Holder, a British writer, editor, and typographer. The drummer almost seemed more excited about that event than the two sets they’ll at Sowieso. My encounter with Griener, where he explained that the trio has been in the midst of a deep creative spell, sent me back to the advent calendar collection, Trial of Future Animals. In December I posted a track featuring Mahall called “Instable Mates,” a subversion of “Stable Mates,” the Benny Golson standard. But in some ways that piece isn’t very representative of the 24-track collection, which includes some four-and-half hours of music, each piece with its own illustration, and in most cases, a text by Sam Langer. “Praise Machine” itself is a continuous 43-minute piece!

The stylistic sprawl is breathtaking, and while a handful of pieces are merely good, the collection as a whole is one of the most amazing things I’ve heard in a long while. It’s almost like an improvised analog to the hothouse fecundity of Bob Dylan and the Band’s The Basement Tapes spiked with the global aesthetic of Don Cherry’s Organic Music Society, where Grip, Sieger, and Griener take the space and time to forge quicksilver collisions of their collective interests and knowledge. The collection must be judged on its awesome sweep more than any single performance, as stunning as some of them are. The virtuosity here is manifested numerous ways, but none more meaningful and electrifying than the way the trio uses improvisation to shape a structure or sequence in real-time. The sleek bebop that initially identified the trio is still in the mix, but it’s now smeared and transformed by fascinating engagements with minimalism, some undefined stew of traditional music from around the globe, and bits of Sun Ra. There are many more elements at play, but they’re all funneled through the trio’s communal aesthetic. The combo’s current practice is a powerful manifestation of an improvisational mindset liberated from any particular genre or discipline. Such excursions can be fun to witness firsthand, but much of the time they don’t hold up as a sonic document. With Oùat most of the recordings stand up to repeated listening.

At times the relentless churn of Grip’s bass playing makes me think of the role he fills as a member of the quartet [Ahmed], but Oùat juggles scores of ideas rather than adhering to that other band’s singular focus. There are a handful of tunes where Sieger sings or chants lyrics he and Grip wrote shortly before they were recorded, which follows the trio’s modus operandi for this project: conceiving skeletal themes in the rehearsal space and quickly realizing them. Griener recorded all of the sessions, most of which occurred last October in Berlin, with some as early as the trio’s first recording date in March of 2021. That recent Berlin meeting—Sieger lives in France—was a turning point.

In an email exchange this past week Griener wrote, “As for the change in our attitude since the October meeting, it certainly has a lot to do with the fact that, on the one hand, the intensive study of Per Henrik Wallin's music has brought us even closer together as a trio and, on the other hand, we wanted to finally escape the idea of a conventional piano trio. We wanted to reflect all our musical influences in our music and not limit ourselves artificially. We didn't want to have a preconceived idea of what the band would sound like, we really wanted to develop the sound together as we were inventing the music. At best, we would have some brief agreements and sometimes a lyric beforehand, but everything else would fall into place as we played.” From track-to-track the musicians fold in different instruments, including organ, a variety of flutes, Grip’s guimbri and krakeb—both prominently featured elements of Gnawan music—and even the overtone singing Sieger deploys on the first part of the ritualistic “It’s Hard to Sing the Blues,” a reflection of a world gone so mad that even traditional lamentations are insufficient.

The group’s aesthetic makes it very difficult to share a track that remotely conveys the full range of its music, but below you can experience a smidgen of Oùat’s multitudes in “Bridge the Gap,” which leaps over stylistic chasms for fifteen charged minutes. For Saturday’s show at Sowieso the group will be joined in the second set by percussionist Bex Burch, who also makes a guest appearance on the track from the advent calendar project.

Exploding the Minimalist Canon

Last year I tried to find an outlet to review On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Moment (University of California Press), an exciting- looking book put together by two excellent scholars on contemporary music: Kerry O’Brien and William Robin. I had no luck landing an assignment. I bought a copy last fall, but it fell outside of the pressing queue for work-related stuff. When I had some downtime over the holidays, though, I dug in. There’s little question that the book is a much-needed corrective to the four giants myth—that musical minimalism begins and ends with La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich—and its vision of what the music is about, how it started, and where it’s gone is admirably broad. O’Brien and Robin assembled the volume as more of minimalism reader, with a selection of primary texts and historically concurrent essays by critics, journalists, and artists.

I devoured the first-half of the book, which carves out a space for the Black jazz artists—the Coltranes, McCoy Tyner, etc.—who were exploring adjacent pathways without embracing the nomenclature of minimalism, and it includes plenty of compelling writing from the likes of Joan LaBarbara, Carman Moore, Tony Conrad, and Tom Johnson, with reportage and opinon that really takes the reader back in time. The editors wrote introductions to each section, but they generally let their selections tell the story, which works very well in the music’s early history, but as the influence of minimalism spreads, adapted in countless ways over the coming decades things get deliciously unkempt. The book makes room for the increasing sprawl, and while I generally favor the dismantling of hierarchies in music, I do wish O’Brien and Robin had stepped in more as the book proceeds to offer greater context: not all minimalism is created equally. Plus, as the book progresses in time, the nature of the writing changes, too. A long profile by Robert Schwarz on John Adams is marked by dry, academic analysis that sees the composer’s early connection to minimalism almost as a silly dalliance.

The energy and almost messianic passion of the earliest writing here gets to the heart of why so much minimalism could be so life-changing. There’s an incredible Tom Johnson review of a 1973 performance of Éliane Radigue’s “Psi 847,” published in the Village Voice, that deftly zeroes in of the experiential transformation the best minimalism can proffer: “Perhaps the most interesting thing about  ‘Psi 847’ is the way its motifs seem to come from different places. They were all produced by the same loudspeakers, and many of them seem to come directly out of the loudspeakers. But some of the sounds seem to ooze out of the side wall, and others seem to emanate from specific points near the ceiling.” Naturally, there’s always been more to Radigue’s music, and minimalism in general, than this kind of psychoacoustic phenomenon, but it's a quality that explains a certain devotion to the practice. As time passed and the music establishment got involved, the fire was often extinguished in favor of bland formal influences. 

There’s also a kind of myopia in the perspectives of more recent writing on minimalism. Composer Randy Gibson is clearly obsessed with his practice and how sound can be radically transportive, but his writing is so insular and aimed at the math-driven concepts of tuning that the real joy and ecstasy of the music is lost. Such writing demands a context that’s not supplied, and while I respect the hands-off refusal to micromanage the reader’s experience, I believe more context would have been useful. Still, I’m super happy that this book exists and that people like Maryanne Amacher, Jürg Frey, and Julius Eastman—among many others—are given the space and respect they deserve, and we’re lucky to have so many divergent points of view collected under the same, unruly rubric.

The Punch of Jana Horn’s Wispy Sound

Singer-songwriter Jana Horn—a Texas native now living in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she teaches fiction writing—opens her gorgeous tune “Days Go By,” with the seemingly anodyne line, “Days go by, they don’t have time.” But those words are remarkably biting, peering into our cluttered, hectic times in which even a “day” no longer has time for reflection. The song comes from her stunning second album The Window is the Dream (No Quarter), a muted collection in which tightly-coiled emotions seem perpetually ready to spring. Horn’s voice is fragile and bit thin, and its range limited, but she knows how to use it, adapting some of bossa nova’s sibilant hush and the contours of Nico’s singing on the Velvet Underground gem “I’ll Be Your Mirror” with a sense of time and phrasing that packs a serious punch. When it comes to her lyrics, her sense of economy extends beyond phrasing—expertly adding weighty pauses to emphasize a specific image or feeling by sandwiching them with silence. It’s in the lyrics, too. Horn’s delicate voice might blunt the impact of a series of lines in the lullaby-like “The Way It Was,” in which the narrator is trapped in an unhappy relationship, but the way they linger leaves little to the imagination: “If it wasn’t love / What was I thinking of? / When I said unto death /For all the nights / I begged for it / Didn't know how to stop my heart.”

Jana Horn (photo: Ebru Yildiz)

She’s supported by an agile band that underlines the wispiness of her voice with an impressively subtle attack. They carve out plenty of space while gently pushing things along with ambling grooves and the judicious, lyric embroidery of guitarist Jonathan Horne—perhaps known to regular readers of this newsletter as a member of Ingebrigt Håker Flaten’s Young Mothers—which stings and soothes in equal measure. “Song for Even,” which you can hear below, adds some electronics into the equation, a choice that doesn’t make a lot of sense on paper, but proves highly effective in reality. The music feels very intimate, perfect for listening up close, so I’m not sure how it comes across live. But I also have no reason to doubt her impressive focus. She rolls into Berlin this week, playing with a trio at Schokoladen on Thursday, February 8.

Julius Windisch Orchestrates Exquisite Internal Tension With Immerweiter

Meandering is the title keyboardist and composer Julius Windisch gave to the second album by his group Windisch Quartet, explaining in an interview that he saw that term applying to how the music veered between different styles, but also how it moved between “control and control and detachment, freedom and responsibility within the band.” For me the titular word usually suggests a lack of focus, describing music that can’t really figure out where it’s going, but the musician’s explanation does make a different kind of sense. Still, I found that 2022 album a bit toothless and I actually think his use of the word can be applied more effectively to the music on In Its Own Pace (Boomslang), an album released in November by a newer quartet he calls Immerweiter, which performs on Wednesday, February 7 at the Panda Theater.

Immerweiter (photo: Nasia Papavasiliou)

The recording reinforces the impact that Tim Berne’s music continues to have in Europe, although I think Windisch has been influenced more specifically by the drumming of Jim Black, the timekeeper in Berne’s quartet Bloodcount. Immerweiter applies Black’s herky-jerk flow—an imperturbable sense of propulsion marked by hiccups, displacements, and sudden explosions that fail to disrupt the groove even while they make it bumpy and lumpy—to the full band arrangements. Windisch, who composed all of the music, alternates between piano, synthesizer, and Fender-Rhodes, and through his arrangements the grooves meted out with drummer Markus Wankel and bassist Sofia Eftychidou follow a similar path. Trumpeter Pascal Klewer is the crucial melodic voice, seeming to ride freely over the halting arrangements. His muscular tone, sleek smears, and tart flurries bring extra friction, but they’re inextricably braided to melody.  

Immerweiter’s music swings and grooves, but it’s constantly destabilized from within, imparting a delicious tension, a quality further heightened by the episodic nature of the tunes. The quartet never sounds untethered from the compositions regardless of how lopsided it might seem at certain points—the musicians never lose their place. The group is joined on four tracks by Maria Reich, doubling on viola and violin, and her playing ratchets up the counterpoint and pressure. The arrangements bring an air of confusion and uncertainty that could be considered “meandering,” but in this case the lulls, redirections, and tangle-ups are by design, keeping the players from getting lazy or resorting to pet licks. The album is bisected by a ballad called “I Feel Like I Know You,” a tender pop song featuring Windisch’s elastic singing and a drum-free chamber-like arrangement. Elsewhere he sticks to a selfless ensemble-oriented ethos, where his keyboard playing is just part of a whole; in fact, the entire quartet achieves this democratic ethos without canceling each other out. Below you can check out “Is It Too Dull,” which features a wonderfully off-kilter groove that seems to be tracing the movement of someone crossing a stream by hopping from one exposed stone to the next.

Chris Potter Brings His Mad Chops and Craig Taborn to Berlin

There was a time earlier this century when reedist Chris Potter was the artistic ideal for countless saxophonists studying jazz, just as Michael Brecker once served the same role in the 90s. The adoration and awe was understandable, as Potter was and remains a technical marvel embodying, if not helping to define, a modern mainstream sound. Over the years Potter has tinkered with his bands, whether embracing a contemporary fusion/R&B tilt on his overdub-heavy 2019 album Circuits or forging a new jazz-Indian classical sound with Dave Holland and Zakir Hussain, but he’s never abandoned his deep post-bop core over a fruitful three-decade career. While only a grump would deny Potter’s mad chops, I’ll admit that his playing has never consistently engaged me on an emotional level. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t enjoyed some of it, especially when he brings in Craig Taborn, a recurring collaborator over the years.

Chris Potter (photo: Dave Stapleton)

Next month Potter is dropping a new quartet album called Eagle’s Point that’s certain to garner plenty of attention and plaudits. He’s joined by a killer band—pianist Brad Mehldau, drummer Brian Blade, and bassist John Patitucci—and the performances are uniformly exceptional, but as is frequently the case with Potter’s music, my enthusiasm is lukewarm. The music often feels like an exercise, a complex puzzle addressed with a complete technical command and harmonic mastery that feels hermetically sealed-in at times, even when his colleagues achieve an incredible vibe as a trio, as on “Málaga Moon.” You can check out the opening track, “Dream of Home,” below.

Maybe I’m being too harsh, but when Potter plays with Taborn, drummer Marcus Gilmore, and bassist Scott Colley, as on last year’s Got the Keys to the Kingdom: Live at the Village Vanguard, the whole equation shifts for me. Taborn fits into Potter’s mainstream mode effortlessly, but he’s still Taborn, which means his solos are ridiculous and he pushes those around him to greater heights. All six tracks are either standards or traditional songs, beginning with a sleek adaptation of “You Gotta Move,” the classic blues made famous by Mississippi Fred McDowell, and the band immediately digs deep into it, marking a different vibe from the other quartet. Naturally, Potter chews up the scenery, running through the changes with a Coltrane-worthy agility, but the closing solo from Gilmore, riding an imperturbable groove laid out by Colley sparks more heat in two minutes than anything on the upcoming album. Granted, they are different bands with different goals. The way Taborn’s  solo on “Nozani Na,” an Amazonian folk tune collected by Edgar Roquette-Pinto and Heitor Villa-Lobos, veers from coolly sashaying groove into an explosive torrent of sound via the chording of Ahmad Jamal still leaves me shaking my head. I’m not saying that Potter couldn’t generate the same depth of feeling and nuanced phrases he imparts on a devastating take on Billy Strayhorn’s “Bloodcount,” but there was something in the air on this night—hear it for yourself, below. All of this is to say that Potter his playing a rare small club gig in Berlin on Monday, February 12 at Zig-Zag—a trio with Taborn and powerhouse drummer Eric Harland. There’s never a good reason to miss any chance to hearing Taborn play, and we should feel lucky that  an artist as singular as Taborn still takes on sideman work—although really, this are all groups of peers.

Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week

February 6: Ambrose Akinmusire, trumpet, with Matilda Abraham, voice; Joe Sanders, double bass; Gian Slater, voice; Savannah Harris, drums; Kristin Beradi, voice, and Jakob Bro, guitar; Gregory Hutchinson, drums, 7:30 PM, Pierre Boulez Saal, Französische Straße 33d, 10117 Berlin

February 7: Deerhoof, Curse All Kings, 8 PM, SO36, Oranienstraße 190, 10999 Berlin

February 7: Immerweiter (Pascal Klewer, trumpet; Sofia Eftychidou, double bass; Marius Wankel, drums; Julius Windisch, piano, synthesizer), 8 PM, Panda Theater, Knaackstraße 97 (i.d. Kulturbrauerei, Gebäude 8) 10435 

February 8: Judith Hamman, 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin

February 8: Jana Horn, Baby Smith, 8 PM, Schokoladen, Ackerstraße 169, 10115 Berlin

February 9: Will Holder with Oùat (Simon Sieger, piano; Joel Grip, double bass; Michael Griener, drums), 7 PM, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Auguststraße 69
10117 Berlin

February 10: Name Change (Neo Hülcker, Stellan Veloce); Lucio Capece, 8:30 PM, Ausland, Lychener Str. 60, 10437 Berlin

February 10: Diana Miron & Raed Yassin, 8:30 PM, Morphine Raum, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)

February 10: Oùat (Simon Sieger, piano; Joel Grip, double bass; Michael Griener, drums) with Bex Burch, percussion, 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin

February 11: Diana Miron & Raed Yassin, 8:30 PM, Morphine Raum, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)

February 11: Achim Kaufmann & Rieko Okuda, piano duo, 8 PM, studioboerne45, Börnestr. 45, 13086 Berlin

February 11: Mulatu Astatke, 8:30 PM, Metropol, Nollendorfpl. 5, 10777 Berlin

February 11: Identities (Mia Dyberg, alto saxophone; Camila Nebbia, tenor saxophone; Roman Stolyar, piano; Horst Nonnenmacher, double bass; Samuel Hall, drums), 8 PM, Kuhlspot Social Club, Lehderstrasse 74-79, 13086 Berlin

February 12: Chris Potter Trio with Craig Taborn, piano, and Eric Harland, drums, 9 PM, Zig-Zag Jazz Club, Hauptstraße 89, 12159 Berlin

February 12: Aki Takase & Alexander von Schlippenbach, piano duo, 8 PM, studioboerne45, Börnestr. 45, 13086 Berlin