Another Berlin Week of Too Much
Marthe Lea Band, Sol Sol, Katelyn Clark & Mitch Renaud, FMP Records, Enemy, d'incise, Internet Archive
Another week, another newsletter that won’t all fit into a single email. If you’re reading this as an email and want to access the full complement of recommended shows click on the title above to open the web-based version.
The Unbound Beauty and Soundworld of the Marthe Lea Band
In December of 2022 I caught the Marthe Lea Band at the We Jazz Festival in Helsinki, and that performance remains one of the most unforgettable concerts I’ve seen since moving to Berlin in 2019. Polymath leader, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Lea is a remarkable musician, a virtual sponge who sops up the essence of many different traditions and reimagines them in her own peculiar vision. The group has made two fantastic albums that jump all over the place, but compared with the live show they feel more like reductions of the wild sprawl achieved on stage, which is not to criticize them in any way. They’re both vibrant and a joy to listen to, but the band contains infinitely more than a studio recording can capture. It helps that the ensemble includes five of Scandinavia’s most accomplished and versatile musicians—reedist Andreas Røysum, violinist Hans P. Kjorstad, bassist/modular synth player Egil Kalman, and drummer Hans Hulbækmo—all of whom pursue a wide range of practices. They’re also part of the mighty Motvind collective, a musical guild, record label, and festival that’s deftly corralled a shared interest in jazz, folk, free improv, and contemporary music into something genuinely original and endlessly exciting.
I lobbied hard to have the band perform at Jazzfest Berlin in 2023, but due to other fest responsibilities I wasn’t able to catch their live set at A-Trane, but I only heard glowing reports. You can check out the entire performance below. The group makes its overdue return to Berlin this weekend, with a performance at KM28 on Saturday, April 26.
I’ve been mainlining the group’s second album Herlighetene Vei, which was released during the holiday void in December of 2023. Each of its nine sterling tunes transmit radically varied moods and vibes, all of them beautiful, hand-crafted, and unique. The band’s sensibility definitely comes out of jazz, but it’s no way limited by that or any other style. Rather, Lea and company play music, and take it anywhere they feel it makes sense. When I first heard them play “Ayumi” at the We Jazz Fest I assumed the group was singing in some language I didn’t know—they all sing and double or triple on different instruments—but it turned out the lyrics were the result of a spontaneous little wordplay game derived in a recording studio by Lea and the Oslo-based Japanese pianist Ayumi Tanaka, breaking down syllables from her name into a kind of musical-linguistic exercise. Honestly, it’s very difficult to choose just one tune from the album—in fact, even the entire album can’t convey the totality of Lea’s remarkable musicality—but check it out below.
It would take far more space and time than I have to get into all of the different stuff this group of musicians are involved with, but I am going to mention Unit of Time, the recent duo album from Kalman and Hulbækmo. The pair cites the great 2001 Hamid Drake-William Parker album Piercing the Veil (Aum Fidelity) as a point of reference for bass-drum duos, but they extend far beyond the boundaries that classification might suggest. Kalman is a great double bassist, possessing a rich, full-bodied tone, great time, and quicksilver impulses that allow him to adjust and shift to changes without a hiccup, but he’s also a master of modular synthesizer, devoting much of his time to translating Scandinavian folk material to the instrument on albums like Kingdom of Bells and Forest of Tines. He deploys both, along with some mouth harp, on this duo project. Meanwhile, Hulbækmo, who is the son of folk music parents, plays a zillion instruments. I just saw a video he posted of himself playing the Hardanger fiddle. He’s probably known best to readers of this newsletter as the drummer in the great quintet Atomic, ably replacing the great Paal Nilssen-Love, but he’s active in many other contexts, too. Together their improvised bass-percussion dialogues move easily between heady groove science, trippy ambient jams, and meditative trance, all of them with a more rigorous, interactive, and shape-shifting quality than any of those descriptors may suggest. Below you can listen to “Turns Purple,”in which Kalman’s woody ostinato cuts a deep, hypnotizing furrow, cushioned by a mewling synth drone and endlessly morphing patterns Hulbækmo extracts from his drum kit.
A Welcome Swedish Incursion
I’ve been quite open about my enthusiasm for the creative music scene in Stockholm, where artists affiliated with jazz, improvised, experimental, and contemporary music routinely elide stylistic lines through collaboration and composition. Despite a dearth of venues the city keeps producing some very compelling music. I’m very excited to head to the city next month to catch a new festival organized by pianist Alex Zethson built around the dynamic roster of artists he works with through his Thanatosis imprint. Sadly, Swedish artists don’t make it to Berlin very often, but this week we get a relative bounty. Pianist Lisa Ullén, who’s been living here since September, will perform with the Stockholm-based violinist Maya Bennardo (ex-Mivos Quartet, andPlay) at KM28 on Thursday, April 24, with an opening set from Weston Olencki. Ullén and Bennardo have actually played here with some regularity, but one of Stockholm’s best jazz bands—Sol Sol, a quartet co-led by saxophonist Elin Forkelid and guitarist David Stackenäs—makes its long overdue Berlin debut when it plays at Donau115 on Friday, April 25.
In my role as artistic consultant to Jazzfest Berlin I was thrilled that I helped facilitate the appearance of three excellent Swedish groups here last fall. Two of them—Anna Högberg’s Extended Attack! and the Vilhelm Bromander Unfolding Orchestra—were both strengthened by the presence of Forkelid, a fiery dynamo with a holistic grasp on jazz tradition, a musician equally at home as a free jazz firebreather and a post-bop narrator. I’ve been listening to Stackenäs for decades, and while I know him best for his deeply experimental practice—whether working in the distinctive improv trio Tri-Dim with saxophonist Hakon Kornstad and percussionist Ingar Zach, Fred Lonberg-Holm’s singular Seval with vocalist Sofia Jernberg and bassist Patric Thorman, or a sideman to the great Christer Bothén—he’s gradually embraced a more melody-driven sound in a number of projects, including Sol Sol, which released its third and best album Almost All Things Considered (Sail Cabin) last year. The saxophonist and guitarist each wrote half of the album’s six tunes, all of which transmit beautifully considered, often flinty melodies abraded by Forkelid’s edgy tone on alto, tenor, and baritone saxophones and Stackenäs’ rock-informed riffing and tonal flavor. Until more recently the rhythm section has remained bassist Mauritz Agnas and drummer Anna Lund, including on this album, but the drum chair is now occupied by Nils Agnas.
On first glimpse the music can feel relatively conventional, embracing a post-bop model, but the more I’ve dug in, the more I’ve savored the quartet’s fiery yet sympathetic rapport and the unalloyed strength of the improvisations. I’m still getting used to the sound Stackenäs deploys, as you can hear on the album’s brisk opener “Elena,” a tune by the saxophonist that features an extended guitar solo that I assume uses an e-bow to generate it's weightless, snaking tunefulness, with a timbre that feels much closer to rock than jazz. Check it out below. Each of the album’s tunes projects a different vibe, such as the noir-ish cast of the guitarist’s mid-tempo groover “If Not, Marbles,” where a clear Bill Frisell influence is palpable, or the sunny bounce of the saxophonist’s “First Days of Spring” which could sound corny if the Agnas bass solo didn’t bust things open with its endless rhythmic snap, followed by a deftly slashing, soulful alto solo from the composer. Focusing on how Sol Sol tweaks conventions from within the tradition makes it clear how terrific the band has become. I’ve heard a couple of newer studio recordings from the band with Nils Agnas, and while the quartet’s sound hasn’t changed appreciably, the music does suggest a more wide-open, less measured attack, a quality that I’m certain will be even more amplified when the group plays live.
Canadian Keyboardist Katelyn Clark Embraces the Ancient for the Future
According to its press materials Ouroboros (Hallow Ground), the recent duo album from Canadian experimentalists Katelyn Clark and Mitch Renaud, looks to “astronomical and astrological phenomena, concepts and symbols such as the Great Year or the Eternal Return serve as the starting points for sonic explorations and experimentations.” Who am I to dispute such a claim? On the other hand, I don’t particularly care what motivated this pair to develop such a stunning set of meditations—all that matters to me is what those sounds have achieved, consistently opening up hypnotic pathways with every listen.
I’ve previously been taken with Clark’s playing on the 2022 album Landmarks (Another Timbre), a similarly inclined exhibition of her intensive studies of obscure keyboards of early music like the continuo organ and the portative organ (aka organetto) undertaken with the equally inventive percussionist Isaiah Ceccarelli. On that recording her collaborator stuck primarily to bowed and frictive percussion, while a pinch of analog synth creeps into the mix, but on Ouroboros Renaud sticks exclusively to modular synthesizer, and together he and Clark have developed and refined five extended drones marbled with exquisite acoustic beating, shimmering harmonies, and subtle feedback effects. Compared to the swelling ranks for the pipe organ brigade, the instruments used by Clark are decidedly modest, transmitting a more limited sound that aides in winnowing the harmonies down and giving the music a rustic flair.
On the surface these extended pieces seem to levitate, drifting weightlessly upon subtly fluttering tones, yet what elevates this material above the endless profusion of static, unimaginative drones churned out these days is an unceasing array of hushed variation, with one figure or the other shifting pitch or attack. I’ve yet to tire of deducing what’s electronic and what’s acoustic as these pieces patiently unfold, although at certain moments there’s no question where the sounds are coming from. There’s an almost rustic charm to the wheezing organ tones that flit through the beginning of “Turns,” as if the instrument has just awoken from a slumber and is struggling to keep a steady pitch, but it soon becomes clear that the instability is purposeful, sparking thrilling little collisions between a bent organ note and the coolly simmering constancy of a single synth tone. As you can hear on the title piece, below, at its best the duo unleash a steady churn of wobbly harmonies and shifting timbre, pulling the listener along as if under a spell.
FMP Records Rises Again
No record label is more closely associated with the European free jazz movement than Germany’s FMP Records, which launched in 1967 and released some of the most important and enduring work from a wide array of figures including Peter Brötzmann, Alexander von Schlippenbach, Peter Kowald, Hans Reichel, Irène Schweizer, Sven-Åke Johansson, and countless others. For most of its history the label was overseen by Jost Gebers, who died in 2023. By that point FMP (or Free Music Productions) had stopped releasing new albums, instead licensing its catalog to newer imprints like Trost’s Cien Fuegos or Corbett vs. Dempsey. A year before Gebers’ passing art curator and writer Markus Müller published his monumental book Free Music Production FMP – The Living Music, a photo-packed coffee table edition that brought the label’s tumultuous history back to life. The project cemented a bond between Gebers and Müller, and the latter has not only taken over the label’s operations, but he’s been revitalizing its legacy with an eye toward the future.
Since 2014 a huge trove of FMP releases have been available digitally through the Destination Out Bandcamp page, established through an agreement with Gebers. Under Müller a mounting number of those classics have been painstakingly remastered by Berlin guitarist and FMP alum Olaf Rupp, and while reissues continue apace—including two great albums by American saxophonist Noah Howard originally issued on the FMP subsidiary SAJ in the late 1970s, released early this year by Trost—Müller has big plans for new albums, whether unreleased material from the vast FMP archives and new recordings that extend the label’s aesthetic into the present. This weekend, April 25-27, Müller celebrates the opening of a new Berlin office for the label with three days of live music and discussions at several spaces in the building housing the office, which just so happens to be emblazoned with FMP on the side of the edifice—it’s address is Franz-Mehring-Platz 1—so the location seems preordained. Sharing the office space will be Wolke Verlag, a German publishing house that’s issued loads of excellent music books, including Müller’s FMP work. The imprint’s founder Peter Mischung is retiring, handing the reins of the operation to Patrick Becker and Bastian Zimmermann, the latter of which edits the German language new music journal Positionen, which helped program this weekend’s events: plenty of new music content is included over the weekend. The whole shebang is crazy, but Saturday’s lineup is especially germane to the FMP revival, with performances from Schlippenbach, Aki Takase, Johansson, Georg Gräwe, Burkhard Beins, Andrea Neumann, and Erhard Hirt, among others. Check out echtzeitmusik for complete schedule.
Quick Hits
Enemy
I wouldn’t usually assign a case of mistaken identity to a jazz group, but Enemy—the trio of pianist Kit Downes, bassist Petter Eldh, and drummer James Maddren—have functioned like a different combo with every record they release. In fact, when they dropped Vermillion on ECM in 2022 they didn’t even use the moniker Enemy, opting for their individual names, one would assume, to strengthen the keyboardist’s brand as an ECM artist. That record captured the trio in ultra-contemplative mode, transmitting a reverb-drenched, moody sound right at home with the label. They followed this album with a record called The Betrayal on We Jazz, its title alluding to the sudden imprint jump. But the music clung to an aesthetic more closely associated with Eldh’s work as a musician and producer—more rhythmically ferocious than anything they’d made, with short track durations closer to a hip-hop mixtape than a jazz album. Earlier this month Enemy returned to the British label Edition—which released the trio’s eponymous debut in 2018—for a live album called Fiend, capturing performances from a two-day residency at the Bird’s Eye in Basel last year. I have a hunch that the real Enemy has stood up; if not I can easily declare that this is the best documentation of the band’s sound and aesthetic. There’s a feverish energy to the performances, with the gritty interplay between Eldh and Maddren consistently pushing the performances toward the breaking point, splintering the grooves and deviously impinging on Downes’ lyric sensibilities to foster a delicious, exciting tension. These recordings also reinforce the quality of the tunes the trio has written or co-written together; the melody of Eldh’s “Neglecting Number One,” which you can hear below, easily survives various permutations and a rude battering from the rhythm section. Enemy plays in Berlin this Friday, April 25 at Zig-Zag.
d’incise
Speaking of multiple personas, this Friday, April 25 d’incise performs at Richten25, playing music from his recent solo album Incendies (Insub.). The Frenchman Laurent Peter has his hands in a lot of different pots. He calls himself Tresque when making dub-related work, but he’s d’incise in the superb post-folk group La Tène. He also runs the excellent Insub. label, which routinely presents minimalist excursions through reduced materials, which explains why Incendies fits right in on the label. In a description of the new recording he writes, “The piece is based on analog signals, recorded over and over through various circuits (filters mostly) in order to create subtle stereo differences, movements and depths.” The album’s four pieces sound mostly electronic, with washed-out pings, swells, and shimmies shape-shifting in patiently organized sequences, a kind of denatured electro-dub with no reference to reggae, looped patterns, or syncopation. He sculpts sound through an electronic set-up, creating something simultaneously hypnotic and unsettling. You can hear “Incendies (2)” below.
Major Labels May be More Irrelevant Than Ever, but They Keep Royally Sucking
It’s no secret that the corporate mentality behind major record labels is hostile toward creativity and fairness, but the allied campaign they’re waging against the Internet Archive—for having the temerity to preserve 78 RPM recordings!—is particularly egregious. Sharing copyrighted material is a complicated subject, but in this case it’s hard to understand why these labels would direct their destructive energies against an effort to preserve music that has fallen into the public domain and would be on the path toward extinction if not for the endeavor undertaken by a handful of enthusiasts to digitize and preserve a huge trove of early recordings. It’s not as if the major labels haven’t repeatedly shown their disrespect and disinterest, if not disdain, for these commercially marginal recordings. Through corporate takeovers and mergers over the last century, these labels have routinely lost master recordings and source material, demonstrating that they don’t give a fuck about this fascinating part of history, not just in the US but around the globe. The major labels have shown no interest in either preserving this music nor making it available to the general public, so we should be thankful for the work and generosity of engineers and collectors like George Blood, Alex Saify, and Bowling Green State University, among others, for providing us with this essential bounty.
While this particular lawsuit is guided toward the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project, it threatens the entire enterprise, which remains invaluable. The site’s Wayback Machine, for example, has served as a crucial repository for information and writing that would’ve otherwise vanished, as publications and websites come and go, their contents following them off the cliff. This legal maneuver—which seems more concerned with bullying and maintaining total control of cultural assets, with no intention of sharing—is reprehensible. The world in which we live seems pretty hopeless at this point and there are no shortage of campaigns seeking to administer justice or at least to roll back such unmitigated greed, but this one is striking a particular chord with me. Please consider signing this petition or contributing to the cause.
Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week
April 23: Anouar Brahem Quartet (Anouar Brahem, oud, Dave Holland, double bass, Django Bates, piano, and Anja Lechner, cello), 8 PM, main auditorium, Philharmonie Berlin, Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße 1, 10785 Berlin
April 24: Kai Fagaschinski, clarinet, Fredrik Rasten, guitar, Mike Majkowski, double bass, and Steve Heather, drums, 8 PM, Richten25, Gerichtstraße 25, 13347 Berlin
April 24: Maya Bennardo, violin, and Lisa Ullén, piano; Weston Olencki performs all my father's clocks for extended autoharp, electronics, vibration motors, bells and chimes, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
April 24: Julius Windisch, piano, James Banner, double bass, Nick Dunston, double bass, and Mariá Portugal, drums, 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
April 24: Camila Nebbia’s the Hanged One (Camila Nebbia, tenor saxophone, Julia Biłat, cello, Arne Braun, guitar, Andres Marino, electronics, Vinicius Cajado, double bass, and Lukas Akintaya, drums), 8:30 PM, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)
April 25: FMP – Free Music Production x Wolke Verlag Springfest with Harri Sjöström, saxophone; Michael Lentz, voice, saxophone, Marino Pliakas, electric bass, and Michael Wertmüller, drums; and more, 6:30 PM, FMP1, Franz-Mehring-Platz 1, 10243 Berlin
April 25: Quatuor Diotima (Britten, Saariaho, Schoenberg), 7:30 PM, Pierre Boulez Saal, Französische Straße 33d, 10117 Berlin
April 25: Clara Vetter Trio with Ronny Graupe, guitar (Clara Vetter, piano, Mario Angelov, double bass, and Lucas Klein, drums), 8 PM, Piano Salon Christophori, Uferhallen, Uferstr. 8, 13357 Berlin
April 25: d’incise, electronics; Peter Cusack and JD Zazie, field recordings, 8 PM, Richten25, Gerichtstraße 25, 13347 Berlin
April 25: Theo Kentros, solo electronics; Andrew Bernstein, saxophone, electronics, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
April 25: Sol Sol (Elin Forkelid, saxophones, David Stackenäs, guitar, Mauritz Agnas, double bass, Nils Agnas, drums), 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin
April 25: Enemy (Kit Downes, piano, Petter Eldh, double bass, and James Maddren, drums), 9 PM, Zig-Zag Jazz Club, Hauptstraße 89, 12159 Berlin
April 26: FMP – Free Music Production x Wolke Verlag Springfest with Alexander von Schlippenbach, piano; Aki Takase, piano; Sven-Åke Johansson: Paternoster for 9 dancers and drums; Erhard Hirt, Stefan Keune and Olaf Rupp, guitars; Georg Gräwe, piano; Burkhard Beins, synthesizer, percussion, and Andrea Neumann, inside piano; and more, 3 PM, FMP1, Franz-Mehring-Platz 1, 10243 Berlin
April 26: Marthe Lea Band (Marthe Lea, tenor saxophone, flutes, piano, vocals, udungu, Andreas Røysum, clarinet, bass clarinet, Hans P. Kjorstad, fiddle, Egil Kalman, double bass, modular synthesizer, Hans Hulbækmo, drums, percussion), 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
April 27: FMP – Free Music Production x Wolke Verlag Springfest with Georg Gräwe, piano, and Harri Sjöström, saxophone; Erhard Hirt, guitar, Stefan Keune, saxophone, Olaf Rupp, guitar, and Harri Sjöström, saxophone; Silke Eberhard, alto saxophone, and Nikolaus Neuser, trumpet; and more, 11:30 AM, FMP1, Franz-Mehring-Platz 1, 10243 Berlin