A World Upside Down

Radu Malfatti, Santiago Leibson

Later this week I’m headed to Knoxville, Tennessee for this year’s sprawling edition of Big Ears. Even though I was back in the US in mid-February and experienced heartening friendship and conversation about the horrible shifts occurring in my shithole country, I’m once again filled with apprehension. I’m quite sure that seeing colleagues and friends at every performance and walking down every block of the charming city will be wonderful and encouraging, but it’s impossible not to feel total revulsion and depression at the race to the bottom that’s occurring, which seems to be encouraging and strengthening the same sort of disgusting repression all around the globe, such as Erdogan’s blatant criminality in arresting Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, the man likely to win the next election if it was held fairly. It’s hard to see straight with all of the corruption and self-dealing everywhere.

Celebrating Radu Malfatti

Leaving Berlin this week means missing a bunch of promising concerts happening here, including a two-day 80th birthday celebration of the Austrian trombonist and composer Radu Malfatti that Lucio Capece has organized at KM28 on Thursday and Friday, March 27 and 28. A couple of years ago Capece organized a three-day fete for Keith Rowe, which was remarkable, convincing me of the Argentine expat’s curatorial vision. As you can see in recommended show listings below, he enlisted a staggeringly diverse number of figures from Berlin’s experimental music scene to participate, with several of Malfatti’s compositions featured each night, followed by an improvised set. I’ve only heard Malfatti perform live once in my life, back in 1997 when he was still a member of the paradigm-shifting ensemble Polwechsel, which played at the Empty Bottle in Chicago. But his authoritative trombone-playing is featured on some of my favorite recordings of jazz and improvised music, from the 1970s through to the early 1990s, whether Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath, ICP Orchestra, King Übü Orchestrü, London Jazz Composers Orchestra, and News From the Shed, among countless others. That’s not to discount his incredible duo with the late Swiss guitarist Stefan Wittwer, which I wrote about following the latter’s passing last fall.

Radu Malfatti (photo: Cristina Marx/Photomusix)

In the 1990s Malfatti famously grew weary of the free improv scene, disillusioned by how the so-called non-idiomatic practice had calcified into its own genre with an increasingly rigid and doctrinaire playbook. In particular, the trombonist came to abhor its chattery qualities, as many musicians seemed intent to fill up all space with loads of notes at the cost of listening and interacting. He also became increasingly interested in composing music that initially extended some of the timbres and textures of free improv, but over time he gravitated toward the post-Cagean prerogatives of the Wandelweiser Collective, privileging space and silence over busy sound much of the time. I was pretty oblivious to all of this stuff when it was happening, and when I did catch that amazing Polwechsel performance I knew very little about Malfatti’s evolution, even though I was definitely encountering music that embraced similar thinking, such as Bernhard Günter.

Malfatti is a thoughtful contrarian and a couple of superb articles about him published in the Wire in 2001 and 2011 capture his thinking in ways that remain prescient and pertinent, even if his own execution of them veered toward extremes that undercut some of his ideas for me. Malfatti left Polwechsel not long after I saw them, the result of tension between him and the rest of the ensemble—guitarist Burkhard Stangl, bassist Werner Dafeldecker, and cellist Michael Moser—over his growing interest in austerity. In retrospect it’s a bit amusing, as Polwechsel felt radical in how it drew upon reduced materials, but the trombonist was no longer interested in compromising his interests. In the coming years the music I heard from Malfatti, along with those his ideas influenced, challenged me. His 2003 duo album with Japanese guitarist Taku Sugimoto, Futatsu (Improvised Music From Japan), felt like an end-game, with tiny gestural utterances on guitar and trombone occasionally imposing upon vast fields of silence. If all of the sounds were compressed they wouldn’t have totaled more than a minute or two, but splayed out over nearly two-and-half hours of listening, it was a chore. Malfatti was pushing Cage’s ideas to new heights, which was fascinating in theory, but often brutal in reality. In the 2001 Wire story by Dan Warburton he reflected on this sort of activity and how it required a kind of concentration most humans weren’t interested in:

"The more we are aware of things the better,” Malfatti concludes. "Someone once said that we don't use more than 65 percent of our brain capacity, and I'm sure most folk don't even use that. I assume that this is the underlying structure or meaning of the meditational aspect of certain human knowledge: what happens if we elevate the known into the realm of unknown, the unimportant into the realm of important? We sharpen the consciousness and become aware of the acoustic environment surrounding the music...and the music itself.”

It's hard to argue with him on that count, but the music he was making pushed those ideas into the realm of conceptualism. The Philip Clark feature in the Wire a decade later captured a less dogmatic mindset from Malfatti. He softened his stance against artists that settled into a practice over time, choosing refinement over endless reinvention. “I mean Thelonious Monk didn’t change. After a certain point, he stuck with his thing. Every time he played ‘Round Midnight’, it was great.” And that’s acceptable? “Of course!” Later in the same article he recalls, “When I was talking to John [Butcher], after a News From The Shed concert, I said, ‘Man, that unison we played was fantastic!’ We’d played a long note together, but the older generation, they are afraid of unisons. And John said, ‘Yes, it seems they don’t like the obvious.’ With the older generation, it was: ‘This is my note, don’t play my note.’ My! Me! Don’t! They were like moles.”

I couldn’t agree more with the sentiment here, which goes against ideological purity that seemed to occupy him a decade earlier. For me there shouldn’t be any prohibitions in improvised music, and the stuff that’s moved me the most in recent years hasn’t eschewed groove, melody, harmony, or quotation, here and there. Of course, I don’t expect that the improvisations that will occur at KM28 will include a snippet of “Cherokee” or that drummer Hannes Lingens will provide a firm backbeat. Directly or indirectly Malfatti’s music and ideas exerted a huge impact on the Berlin scene, complementing similar activity in Tokyo and London, which laid down the foundation of echtzeitmusik. While that music largely ran its course, as anything too rooted in theory will do, its impact remains crucial to a Berlin aesthetic, and the best musicians from that era continue to use those tools in more expansive ways. I don’t listen to many of Malfatti’s later recordings very often. I find them too austere, even for me, but I have deep respect and admiration of his vision. I haven’t found streaming options for any of the Malfatti compositions on the two-evening program, but you can hear a duo version of his piece “Nariyamu” with Keith Rowe, from the 2011 triple CD Φ (Erstwhile), below—it will be performed in a sextet version on the 28th. More than most music, I don’t think recordings can do Malfatti’s work justice—so if you’re in Berlin this week I highly recommend checking it out in person.

Pianist Santiago Leibson Rolls Into Town to Reunite with Fellow Argentine Camilia Nebbia

I think I first clocked the name of Argentine pianist Santiago Leibson a couple of years ago when he provided deft support to bassist Jeong Lim Yang, alongside drummer Gerald Cleaver, on her 2022 album Zodiac Suite: Reassured (Fresh Sound New Talent), a front-to-back interpretation of the classic Mary Lou Williams album. Filling that role took some guts, but Leibson nailed the task, conveying the singular spirit of the composer-pianist while simultaneously asserting his own personality. Suddenly, it seemed, I was seeing his name over and over. He appears on two superb sessions led by saxophonist/composer Michaël Attias on Out of Your Head Records from last year. He’s made a slew of recordings under his own name, most with fellow Argentine musicians, but also with a New York trio featuring bassist Matt Pavolka and drummer Matt Ferber—Leibson has lived in Brooklyn since 2014, but he’s retained close connections to home. I’ve been checking out a bunch of these older records, and all of them deliver the goods in a big way—compositionally, improvisationally, and arrangement-wise.

Santiago Leibson (photo: Kenneth Jimenez)

Last December he released Prohibido Andar en Sulky (Ears & Eyes), another fantastic trio recording with his Buenos Aires mates— double bassist Maximiliano Kirszner, and drummer Nicolás Politzer—billed as Leiba Trio. Naturally, I lost track of that record in the year-end shuffle, but it’s been bringing me great edification over the last week. The band has been working together in various formats for more than a decade and their rapport and shared vision is clear in the highly interactive playing, digging into the leader’s familiar themes—which sometimes suggest adaptations of standards, as the way “Espejos” carries hints of “Wade in the Water,” while “Mi” has the feeling if not the exactly melody of Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman.” There’s something ineffable about the playing that transmits a profundity that’s often missing even in working bands—I’d call it trust. The rhythm section plays with groove like putty, carving out space that allows the pianist to spill out over the form, knowing that his colleagues always have his back. I can only imagine how exciting this group is live. Below you can check out “Bailongo,” a complex post-bop marvel that constricts and loosens at will, revealing the unit’s astonishing alacrity. But the whole album is worth hearing. Leibson is rolling through Berlin this week, playing in a promising trio with the sensitive Belgian drummer Samuel Ber and the insanely versatile saxophonist Camila Nebbia, a fellow Argentine has logged plenty of hours with the pianist even if they haven’t released any recordings together (that I know of). They perform on Tuesday, March 25 at Kuhlspot Social Club.

Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week

March 25: Steven Schick, percussion, voice, and Les Percussions de Strasbourg, percussion, play Chaya Czernowin’s Poetica, 8 PM, Maerz Musik, Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Schaperstraße, 24, 10719 Berlin

March 25: Camila Nebbia, tenor saxophone, Santiago Leibson, piano, and Samuel Ber, drums, 8:30 PM, Kühlspot Social Club, Lehderstrasse 74-79, 13086 Berlin

March 26: Tobias Delius, tenor saxophone, clarinet; Vinicius Cajado Trio (Joakim Rainer Petersen, piano/synths, Vinicius Cajado, bass, Steve Heather, drums, percussion), 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin

March 26: ZU; Mieko Suzuki, 8 PM, Neue Zukunft, Alt-Stralau 68, 10245 Berlin

March 26: Pamela Z, voice, electronics, and video, 9 PM, Maerz Musik, Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Schaperstraße, 24, 10719 Berlin

March 27: Rudi Mahal, clarinet, bass clarinet, Olaf Rupp, guitar, and Kasper Tom, drums, 7 PM, Curt-Sachs-Saal, Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung, Tiergartenstraße 1, 10785 Berlin

March 27: Joan La Barbara, voice, 7 PM, Maerz Musik, Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Schaperstraße, 24, 10719 Berlin

March 27: Shake Hands (Jan Klare, reeds, Matthias Müller, trombone, Meinrad Kneer, double bass, and Christian Marien, drums), 8:30 PM, Kühlspot Social Club, Lehderstrasse 74-79, 13086 Berlin

March 27: Radu 80 Festival, day 1, with Radu Malfatti, Rasha Ragab, Christoph Nicolaus, Germaine Sjijstermans, Catherine Lamb, Deborah Walker, Michiko Ogawa, Sam Dunscombe, Koen Nutters, Heather Frasch, Rebecca Lane, Biliana Voutchkova, Quentin Tolimieri, Joe Kudirka, Ángeles Rojas, Derek Shirley, Alexander Markvart, Eric Wong, Seiji Morimoto, Bryan Eubanks, Christian Kesten, Hannes Lingens, and Lucio Capece, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin

March 28: Radu 80 Festival, day 2, with Radu Malfatti, Rasha Ragab, Christoph Nicolaus, Germaine Sjijstermans, Catherine Lamb, Deborah Walker, Michiko Ogawa, Sam Dunscombe, Koen Nutters, Heather Frasch, Rebecca Lane, Biliana Voutchkova, Quentin Tolimieri, Joe Kudirka, Ángeles Rojas, Derek Shirley, Alexander Markvart, Eric Wong, Seiji Morimoto, Bryan Eubanks, Christian Kesten, Hannes Lingens, and Lucio Capece, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin

March 29: Cansu Tanrikulu’s Piled Up (Cansu Tanrikulu, vocals / effects, Mona Matbou Riahi, clarinet, Tobias Delius, tenor saxophone, Arne Braun, guitar, Lennart Schandl, bass, Lukas König, drums, effects); ILOG (Ignaz Schick, turntables, sampler, pitch shifter/looper, Oliver Steidle, drums, percussion, sampler, live electronics), 8 PM, Kantine am Berghain, Am Wriezener Bahnhof, 10243 Berlin

March 29: Phil Donkin, bass, Jochen Rueckert, drums, and Julius Gawlik, tenor saxophone, 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin

March 29: Harmonic Space Orchestra (M.O. Abbott, trombone, Sam Dunscombe, clarinets, Michael Griener, percussion, Jonathan Heilbron, contrabass, Catherine Lamb, viola, Rebecca Lane, microtonal flutes, Dina Maccabee, voice, Thomas Nicholson, viola, Michiko Ogawa, clarinets, Fredrik Rasten, guitars, and Marc Sabat, violin, with guest conductor Max Murray) play Thomas Nicholson, Rebecca Lane & Jonathan Heilbron, Marc Sabat, Michiko Ogawa, and Catherine Lamb, 8: 30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin

March 31: Los Pirañas, 8:30 PM, Gretchen, Obentrautstr. 19-21, 10963 Berlin

March 31: Olivia Block, piano, voice, and electronics; Paolo Thorsen-Nagel, guitar and voice; Jan St. Werner, solo electronics, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin