It's Jazzfest Berlin Week

Jazzfest Berlin, Stephan Wittwer, Donald Miller, Maria Beraldo & Mariá Portugal, Fay Victor, Kenny Warren

Heads up! This week’s edition runs long, so some of the post will be cut off in the email version of the newsletter. The entirety of the post is accessible online.

On Thursday, October 31 Jazzfest Berlin kicks off its 60^th anniversary with another stellar lineup. I’m biased, of course, as I serve as a programming consultant for artistic director Nadin Deventer. She went above and beyond the call of duty this year, taking upon herself to organize an academic conference on the festival’s rich history as well as an even more ambitious community project, facilitating a huge effort with city’s refugee population in Moabit in which loads of Berlin musicians and a raft of visiting players from Stockholm are participating all week. Please check out the links above for more information on both of those endeavors. Of course, there’s too much good stuff to cover in this modest space, but I’ll try to highlight some of the events I’m most excited about. You can see the entire program at this link, as listing each individual event would eat up half of this week’s newsletter if I included them under the recommended gigs at the bottom of the page. I wrote all of the texts on the fest website, anyway!

Vilhelm Bromander (photo: Peter Bothén)

I’m particularly proud of a focus on new sounds coming from Sweden, represented by three stellar ensembles performing next weekend. The entire festival is launched with the Berlin premiere of bassist and composer Vilhelm Bromander’s Unfolding Orchestra, a dazzling big band that collides the early 70s concepts explored by Charlie Haden, Alice Coltrane, and Carla Bley without sounding remotely retro. The presence of dhrupad singer Marianne Svašek not only  reflects the composer’s personal investment in Indian classical tradition, but proffers a deeper engagement with its fundamentals in the context of a jazz ensemble. The lineup is remarkable, with many of Stockholm's greatest players in one place. I mean, the reed section includes Martin Küchen, Elin Forkelid, Alberto Pinton, and the legendary Christer Bothén, alone! On Friday night the lyrical trumpeter Goran Kajfeš presents the latest iteration of his Tropiques project with keyboardist Alex Zethson, bassist Johan Berthling, and drummer Johan Holmegard enhanced by the presence of violinist Josefin Runsteen and cellist Leo Svensson Sander, who bring a surprisingly orchestral grandeur to the arrangements—somewhere between Philly soul sound of Gamble & Huff and the late Chess sound crafted by Charles Stepney—which impart a Scandinavian perspective on minimalism and sounds as far afield as Ethiopia and Turkey. Earlier this year the project released the majestic Tell Us (We Jazz), a work of sublime beauty, meticulous craftsmanship, and smoldering intensity. Below you can check out the slow burn moodiness of the opening piece, “Unity in Diversity.”

On Saturday night the fiery saxophonist and composer Anna Högberg presents an exciting new iteration of her long-running sextet Attack!, with Extended Attack! doubling the size of the line-up and potentially pushing it into more abstract, sound-oriented realms, although that’s just a guess. Following a performance at the Stockholm Jazz Festival recently, this will only be the new project’s second performance. While most of the Swedish contingent are under 40, there are multiple sets focused on the work of veteran masters. Some are duly celebrated, such as the Sun Ra Arkestra, which touches down Saturday night—alas, without 100-year old Marshall Allen, who can no longer travel long distances, but who bring fire amid the presence of the remarkable singer Tara Middleton—German pianist Joachim Kühn, introducing his new trio with the French rhythm section of drummer Sylvain Darrifourcq and double bassist Thibault Cellier, who both performed at last year’s festival as part of Novembre, and octogenarian Joe McPhee, performing opening night with the mercurial, hard-hitting British trio Decoy (Alexander Hawkins on organ, John Edwards on double bass, and Steve Noble on drums).

Marilyn Crispell (photo: Michael Patrick Kelly)

But don’t sleep on the pianist Marilyn Crispell, 77, one of the greatest and most versatile figures in jazz history, who will play twice. On Friday night she performs in Trio Tapestry, a luminescent trio led by reedist Joe Lovano with Italian drummer Carmen Castaldi, which has elevated and revealed new dimensions to the playing of each member at a time in their careers where others might be winding things down. Crispell will also play a solo set on Thursday night, where her fervent imagination is at its most unbound. You can hear a good cross section of that broad aesthetic on a brand new duo album with drummer Harvey Sorgen titled Forest (Fundacja Słuchaj). The music is fully improvised and definitely veers toward turbulent intensity, but there’s no missing Crispell’s blend of lyric wanderlust and explosive energy. Below you can hear the title piece, which opens the album.

Finally, speaking of elders, on Saturday night the excellent Italian bassist Antonio Borghini has put together a lovely string quartet with cellist Anil Eraslan, and violinists Silvia Tarozzi and Erica Scherl—dubbed the Malacoda String Quartet—to premiere several works written by the singular cellist Tristan Honsinger in the years before his death in 2023 at 73. Honsinger was an American who spent much of his career in Europe; in Amsterdam, Berlin, and Trieste. His weird aesthetic mashed up free jazz, Italianate folk songs, theater, operatic excess, and wry absurdism, and it left a strong impression on the Berlin improv scene.

Farewell to Extreme Guitar Pioneers Stephan Wittwer and Donald Miller

In the last six weeks two of the most radical and uncompromising guitarists of improvised music have died. The Swiss guitarist Stephan Wittwer passed away on September 18, at 71. He wasn’t very well known in the US and even in Europe his talents were often overlooked. I first heard him on the 1990 album World of Strings (Intakt), which remains just as powerful 34 years later—a collection of five gnarly electric guitar improvisations flirting with various styles adjacent and not so adjacent to free improv as evinced by titles like “Rite of String,” which you can hear below, and “Death Jazz.” He employed an often heavy aggression that presaged many experimental music threads that followed him by decades. He worked alongside Phil Wachsmann and Irène Schweizer in Rüdiger Carl’s COWWS Quintet and he also engaged in a classic strain of experimental Euro fusion aesthetics as part of a collective with fellow guitarist Christy Doran and percussionist Fredy Studer that released Red Twist & Tuned Arrow (ECM) back in 1987.

But earlier this year—well before he passed—I’d been revisiting the two duo albums he made with trombonist and unwitting “lowercase improv” pioneer Radu Malfatti for FMP back in the mid-to-late 1970s. They’re both superb, but the second release from 1978, Und? Is the one that’s been blowing my mind. The album was among the elite selection of albums included in the 2011 FMP box Im Rückblick—In Retrospect, for which new liner notes were commissioned from Felix Klopotek. He wrote:

The pieces on Und? are characterized by a kind of intimacy, familiarity, and affinity of sound—by a mutual awareness, that is, of how to shape the sounds, to compress and expand them, to split them up and paste them together, in a way exceptional even for the FMP generation of that time.

And as remarkable as the process was, the way the pair extracts an almost orchestral variety of timbres from their instruments can’t be reduced to their assured grip on extended techniques at the time. They are most assuredly virtuosic in that way, but the manner in which all of those colors, textures, and shapes are assembled in real time is astonishing. This record is as psychedelic as it comes, marked by constant transformation and quick blink development. Below you can listen to the opening piece, “Und?”

Last week Donald Miller—who had played with Wittwer and recently posted an image of him on his Facebook page after learning of his death—died in his adopted home of New Orleans, age 66. He remains known best as one-third of the improvising juggernaut called Borbetomagus, which formed in New York back in 1979. The trio purveyed a brutal strain of free improv in which the musicians pushed their sound deep into the red, amplifying the fuck out of everything in the search for a psychedelic output requiring electricity. I had the pleasure of releasing two 7” singles by the trio on Butt Rag, the regrettably named label that emerged from the zine I published of the same name. I also helped organize the group’s first couple Chicago shows, the first of which occurred in August of 1991 at a subterranean venue called Lower Links. It wasn’t the most ideal space for the group, as the trio’s high volume sounds ricocheted violently around the painted brick walls of the space, subjecting attendees to one of the most ferocious, unrelenting sonic experiences I ever experienced. It wasn’t a particularly great performance. The night before arriving Miller had just broken up with a girlfriend and he was a mess. By the time the trio hit the stage he was in a sorry state; hungover and barely awake due to a lack of sleep. As hard as it is to fathom considering how loud the trio was, he actually fell asleep in the chair he was playing on, his guitar spread across his lap. His bandmates, saxophonists Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich always played rough and tumble with him, and in a particular fit of pique they decided to rouse Miller from his unlikely slumber by sandwiching his head with the bells of their horns, blasting at full tilt. In my memory Miller awoke with the spaced out, confused delirium of Woody Allen when his cryogenically frozen character in the film Sleeper is first brought back to consciousness.

Donald Miller (photo: Dawid Laskowski)

Borbeto were rooted in the free jazz movement—especially saxophone extremists like Peter Brötzmann and early Evan Parker—but they had little patience for delicacy or tunes. They were tough and their performances were notorious for clearing rooms of listeners with the ferocity and amplitude of their music—a phenomenon that quite a few remembrances I read in recent days recounted. The trio was absolutely ahead of its time, forging a nexus between noise, free jazz, and improv that took decades to become a widespread phenomenon. Now I hear the progeny of Borbeto all over the place, yet almost never with the same attention to detail and vision. I went back to the early live album Zurich (Agaric) this weekend, and was reminded how the early material was closer to free jazz than what came later. From the beginning, though, Miller built his own sound world, melding overdriven feedback with weird extended techniques to unleash a viscous rush of noise, by turns fluid and strangulated, that slalomed between the guttural screams of his cohorts. The trio’s later work pushed things even further. The group’s most recent recording, The Eastcote Studio Sessions, was released on Dancing Wayang in 2017, and while the overall din is more intense and electronically-warped than the music on Zurich, you can still deduce what each player is doing and how it functions as a whole. It also smokes most of what the current noise scene churns out. I’m not surprised that Borbeto’s music isn’t available on streaming services, but it is a bit shocking that it’s not on Bandcamp—hopefully that will be rectified eventually. You can check out the group’s 1992 album Buncha Hair That Long (Agaric), with its “cover” of the Beatles’ “Blue Jay Way,” through the youtube video below. I had the honor of writing liner notes for that album.

Miller didn’t make many recordings outside of Borbetomagus, although he did some time with drummer William Hooker and appeared on the 1994 album The Firmament/Fury (Silkheart). And after he left New York he had become a vital member of the improv and experimental scenes in New Orleans, even if there isn’t much documentation of it. His solo album A Little Treatise on Morals was first released on cassette back in 1987, and reissued on vinyl Audible Hiss in 1995. I listened to it a few months ago, and his pursuit of the same palette he explored in Borbetomagus is present, albeit in more long-form blasts where one can zoom in readily to what he was putting down. Miller’s devotion to guitar always made me assume there was more to his practice, and, finally, in 2021 a much different side of his music emerged on the album Transgression!!! when it was released by Steve Lowenthal’s essential VDSQ imprint. The guitarist served up six ravishing fingerstyle excursions on a 12-string Guild acoustic guitar. Some of the music fits snuggly within American Primitive tradition, but naturally Miller pushed and pulled against all strictures, whether unleashing the warped slide fantasia “For I Am A Cat Of The Devil I Am (or Variations upon ‘A Spoonful Blues’ by Charlie Patton)”—check it out below—or toying with the metallic friction he generated with bowing on “A Little Anatomy of the Physical Unconsciousnesses (for Davey Williams),” dedicated to another late pioneer of deep American experimental guitar. I wasn’t close with Miller, but whenever we crossed paths it was always a pleasure. He was a quick thinker with an outlandish, contrarian imagination, and it guaranteed a host of verbal surprises akin to the weird twists of his music.

The Music of Herbie Nichols Through the Creative Lens of Fay Victor

Next week Haus der Kulturen der Welt presents “Always, Already There,” a series of concerts by New York’s International Contemporary Ensemble, with artistic director George Lewis. I’ll write more about those performances next week, but some of its participants are rolling into town early and performing in different contexts, including the vocalist Fay Victor. On Saturday, November 2 she’ll improvise with fellow ICE member and oboist Rebekah Heller at KM28 along with reedist Tobias Delius, pianist Achim Kaufmann, and percussionist Sofia Borges. Victor is a forceful improviser, but I prefer her more song-oriented experiments, and at 3:30 PM on Sunday afternoon, November 3 she’ll lead a stellar crew in the first Berlin iteration of her Herbie Nichols SUNG project at Industriesalon Schöneweide. She’s written lyrics and created new arrangements for a selection of pieces composed by the titular pianist. Nichols remains one of the greatest and most original figures of the bebop era, an overlooked genius and a kindred spirit to pianists like Thelonious Monk, Elmo Hope, and Hasaan.

Fay Victor (photo: Deneka Peniston)

In April Victor released Life is Funny That Way (TAO Forms), a double CD featuring reedist Michaël Attias, pianist Anthony Coleman, bassist Ratzo Harris, and drummer Tom Rainey. In his typically erudite and insightful liner notes Kevin Whitehead traces the singer’s engagement with the music of Nichols, beginning with a record by him she found in the collection of her future husband, bass guitarist Jochem van Dijk, whom she met during her eight-year stay in Amsterdam. Pianist Misha Mengelberg was a huge admirer of Nichols’ music, and many of his tunes had become standards in the city, through various Mengelberg projects, including the great ICP Orchestra. After returning to her native New York in 2003 she continued to research Nichols and she began working with trombonist Roswell Rudd—another Nichols supporter and the liner note author for the crucial Blue Note and Mosaic reissues to the pianist’s work from the 1950s. She formed Herbie Nichols SUNG in 2013, with the same line-up sticking with her along the way save for a revolving cast of drummers. Sunday’s group includes Attias, who spends much of his time in Berlin these days, alongside Delius—a long-time ICP Orchestra member who’s been playing Nichols music for years—Kaufmann, and bassist Nick Dunston. Victor is a dynamic singer and a fearless improviser whose unconventionally creamy-husky timbre reminds me variously of Abbey Lincoln and Betty Carter, and she inhabits the material with uncanny familiarity and nuanced mastery. Below you can check out “Tonight,” which she built upon the Nichols classic “House Party Starting.”

Don’t Call it Genre-Hopping: It’s All Music to Maria Beraldo

I caught another sublime set by the Brazilian quartet Quartabê on Saturday night. The group was without its excellent clarinetist Joana Queiroz, who was temporarily scooped up to play on a joint Caetano Veloso and Maria Bethania tour in Brazil, so her role was ably filled by reedist Felipe Nader, who lives in Bremen but who will return to São Paulo in January. It was the first time I heard the band perform some of its Moacir Santos rep, and coupled with Nader’s own aesthetic, the music was a bit jazzier than the previous sets I caught. Brazilian musicians often have broad sensibilities and the way music courses through daily life in the country seems to allow players to move easily and naturally across different styles and approaches. It’s all music and the best artists there pay little heed to genre strictures. That’s certainly apparent in the work of Quartabê’s other clarinetist, Maria Beraldo, who maintains a pop-oriented solo practice. In that mode she just released her second solo album, Colinho (Selo RISCO).

Maria Beraldo (photo: Ivan Nishita)

The album ricochets wildly but nonchalantly between different styles, a sonic metaphor for Beraldo’s queerness, embodying different modes of being from song to song. The record opens with the taut electro-funk of the title track before toggling to “Baleia,” an unsettled yet gorgeous piano ballad, co-written with Kiko Dinucci and Juçara Marçal, deftly undercut by thudding percussion that seems to push the keyboard playing toward jagged, deliciously incongruous clusters behind the singer’s cool, electronics-kissed delivery. You can hear it below. Quite a few tunes exalt sexual freedom, such as “Ninfomaníaca” and “Matagal,” a duet with Zélia Duncan. My favorite tunes tend to be more jacked-up, like “Truco,” where here agile bass clarinet cascades over the beats, melding seamlessly with synthetic bass tones, while “I Can’t Stand My Father Anymore” gets a lot of its propulsion from a corkscrewing laugh transformed into a slaloming rhythm. The bass clarinet is also featured on the stripped down “Crying Now,” a stuttering dry funk tune where beats pile up in delightfully unkempt flurries while Beraldo breaks up the phrase “I wasn’t crying late, I was crying now,” in a series of ambiguous fragments. The album concludes with a tender duet with Negro Leo and an extended account of the João Nogueira samba “Minha Missão.” Beraldo and Quartabê drummer Mariá Portugal will perform as a duo on Tuesday, October 29 at KM28, playing some of their own songs, improvising, and tackling classic Brazilian tunes–a promisingly low-key evening that should draw on the ease and creativity both artists seem to bring to everything they play.

Kenny Warren Visits Berlin

Over the summer I wrote about a recent album from New York trumpeter Kenny Warren, a consistently engaging musician who’s too often overlooked. He released a terrific trio album called Sweet World (Out of Your Head), with cellist Christopher Hoffman filling in for the group’s original bassist Matthias Pichler. Warren is in Berlin this week and he’s playing Donau115 on Wednesday, October 30 with a European version of the trio, which reunites him with Pichler, while also bringing the bassist’s brother Andreas, on drums, into the fold. You can check out what I wrote about the project here. Warren also performs as part of a trio called Trophy Cousin with reedist Jeremy Viner and drummer Lukas Akintaya at Sowieso on Friday, November 1.

Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week

October 29: Maria Beraldo, clarinets, voice, and Mariá Portugal, drums, voice, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin  

October 30: Kenny Warren Trio (Kenny Warren, trumpet, Matthias Pichler, bass, and
Andreas Pichler, drums), 8:30 PM,  Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin

October 30: The Dogmatics (Chris Abrahams, piano, and Kai Fagaschinski, clarinet), 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin  

October 31: Thuluth (Magda Mayas, piano, Ute Wassermann, voice, objects, Raed Yassin, double bass, objects), 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin

November 1: Tobias Delius, tenor saxophone, clarinet, Mats Äleklint, trombone, Dennis Egberth, drums, Isabel Rößler, bass, and Tyson Naylor, piano, 8:30 PM, Kühlspot Social Club, Lehderstrasse 74-79, 13086 Berlin

November 1: Recoil (Brad Henkel, trumpet, effects, Dustin Carlson, guitar, and Samuel Hall, percussion, electronics); Trophy Cousin (Kenny Warren, trumpet, Jeremy Viner, tenor sax, clarinet, and Lukas Akintaya, drums), 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin

November 1: Donald Harrison Quartet (Donald Harrison, alto saxophone, Dan Kaufman, piano, Nori Naraoka, double bass, and Joe Dyson, drums), 9 PM, Zig-Zag Jazz Club, Hauptstraße 89, 12159 Berlin

November 2: Sheherazaad; Judith Hamann & Sofia Jernberg; and Ben Glas, 8 PM, Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10, 10557 Berlin

November 2: Fay Victor, vocals, Tobias Delius, tenor saxophone, clarinet, Rebekah Heller, bassoon, Achim Kaufmann, piano, and Sofia Borges, drums, percussion,  8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin  

November 2: James Carter Quintet (James Carter, saxophones, Satish Robertson, trumpet, Gerard Gibbs, piano, Hilliard Green, double bass, and Elmar Frey, drums), 9 PM, Zig-Zag Jazz Club, Hauptstraße 89, 12159 Berlin

November 3: Fay Victor’s Herbie Nichols Sung Berlin Edition (Fay Victor, voice, Michaël Attias, alto saxophone, Tobias Delius, tenor saxophone, clarinet, Achim Kaufmann, piano, Nick Dunston, double bass), 3:30 PM, Industriesalon Schöneweide, Reinbeckstraße 10, 12459 Berlin

November 3: Klangforum Wien presents the Tower of Babel (work by Turkar Gasimzada, Anna Romashkova, Oxana Omelchuk, Farangis Nurulla, Maxim Kolomiiets, Vladimir Gorlinsky, Justė Janulytė, Jakhongir Shukurov, and Vladimir Tarnopolski), 5 PM, St. Elisabeth-Kirche, Invalidenstr. 3, 10115, Berlin

November 3: Alvarius B (Alan Bishop), 8:30 PM, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)

November 4: Randy Ingram Trio (Randy Ingram, piano, Drew Gress, double bass, and Jochen Rueckert, drums), 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin

November 4: Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto, 8 PM, SO36, Oranienstraße 190, 10999 Berlin