Bold Visions, Old and New

Ben LaMar Gay, Marta Warelis, Marilyn Crispell, Noura Mint Seymali, Philip Golub

The action in Berlin usually cools off during summer, but try claiming that considering what’s on offer this week. That also means there’s a chance that if you’re reading the emailed version of this newsletter that some listings will be cut off. If such is the case simply click on the banner on top and you’ll be directed to the web-based version of Nowhere Street.

The latest installment of my contemporary music column for Bandcamp Daily was published last week, with music from Julius Eastman, Chiyoko Szlavnics, Maya Dunietz, Clara Levy, Michael Gordon and more. Check it out here.

Ben LaMar Gay: Global Griot

Chicagoan Ben LaMar Gay is as much a magician as he is a musician. While he’s nominally considered a jazz cornetist, there is simply no string of qualifiers that can convey the full diapason of his work or the elusive way he connects sounds, people, and ideas. He’s wildly charismatic and at ease, and when speaking about his art those traits frequently reduce me to spout Pollyanna-ish wonder. When he works as a collaborator he’s able to find more focused ways to fill needs and elevate proceedings. He’s always felt like a reluctant bandleader because such a position usually brings some degree of definition or vision. I’ve often thought of him as a Don Cherry-like figure for our times, not because of his instrument, but thanks to the way he nonchalantly rejects all kinds of hierarchies: tradition, experience, instrumentation, or genre, among them. He uses music to tell stories, while simultaneously underlining how disparate cultures all draw from shared experiences. Don Cherry may arguably be the inventor of “world music,” but the de rigueur world-in-a-blender marketing aesthetic that has overtaken the world music biz today has nothing to do with the way he drew upon a seemingly incongruous array of traditions. Like Cherry, Gay can see and hear those connections, and rather than flattening, cheapening, or distorting them, he brings them together to forge something genuinely new.

Ben LaMar Gay (photo: Shannon Marks)

While he has genuine jazz roots, my sense of his music has always spilled over any single practice. Over the years I’ve seen him operate in all kinds of contexts and he always finds his way, even when the music he’s making might ultimately fail. He’s not a conventional virtuoso in any sense, but I actually find his virtuosity in creating in the moment—whether it’s initiating something off the dome or his quicksilver knack for pulling ideas from others using nothing but sound and gesture—more astonishing.

In January of 2025 he premiered a new work with a new band at Pierre Boulez Saal here in Berlin. It took some cojones to assemble musicians as disparate as cellist Tomeka Reid, drummer Mikel Patrick Avery, violinist Macie Stewart, bassist Pascal Niggenkemper, cellist Olula Negre, electronics experimenter Sam Pluta, and pianist Sophie Agnel, and there were moments of awkwardness and torpor during the 2-set performance, but Gay someone found a way to seamlessly weave it all together. His antipathy towards bandleading also seems to be reflected by his limited discography, and it’s absolutely true that none of his recordings can accurately represent his art, as it’s much bigger than an album. Still, the music on his 2025 album Yowzers (International Anthem) did manage to codify a good chunk of what that particular band is about. He’s presenting the band in Berlin for the first time since the album was released, playing at 90Mil on Tuesday, July 14. From song to song Gay changes things up while retaining a solid throughline, floating through gospel, blues, funk, and bossa nova in constantly morphing molds that underline the goal of communication more than flashy versatility. He’s a terrific horn player, building beautiful melodies linked by confident contingencies. His ideas never seem to flame out. Whether blowing cornet, forging hypnotic electronic scapes that gird fleeting architectures or project riveting atmosphere, or using his voice —a stentorian presence, an insinuating crooner, or supporting other lines with non-verbal grunts, nasal gestures, or textured harmony—he’s a ringmaster who knows how to bring out the best in his collaborators. And I’ve never witnessed anything less than total commitment to any performance I’ve taken in.

I love the episodic, “there, inside the morning glory,” where he seems to salute the spirit of Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy with only his cornet and the agile tuba lines of Matthew Davis, step into a slinky groove iced by the cooly cascading guitar lines of Will Faber, and the rhythm-shifting propulsion of Tommaso Moretti, including the closing the riotous final sequence. (As is sometimes the case, Edinho Gerber is playing guitar on this tour). The title track is a tone-setting invocation while his tribute the Jaimie Branch “for Breezy” requires no words, only the tender solemnity of its descending shape and his fragile, deeply human tone. My favorite piece is “I am (bells),” which brought down the house when he played a version of it at Jazzfest Berlin in 2022. Following a lengthy a cappella incantation about morning solitude a series of undulating bell tones take over, building asymmetrical waves of overtones, moving from a funeral pace into a frenzied attack of the hand bells rung but largely muted. Eventually the six bells go silent, with one pair of them building an addictive rhythm that’s rooted in the damped tones that occur when each musician presses the opening of the instrument against their chest, a bit of visual ballet that works even without the visuals. Moretti jumps in with a twitchy break and the band plays call-and-response with Gay’s nonsensical chanting, which transmits greater impact than words ever could. Check it out below. The album takes plenty of other gambits, too, but counting them down with a list misses the spirit, which is largely containable.

Preceding Gay’s performance is a set from a Berlin-based Brazilian jazz trio led by keyboardist Mauricio Fleury with drummer Mauricio Takara and bassist Trigo Santana, all joined by Rhea Sode, with an opening solo set by Marta Warelis.

New Facets: Marta Warelis Dips into Composition

Back in May Warelis released Still Life With Lemons (Relative Pitch), her first album as bandleader after a string of all-improvised projects. I actually caught the premiere of the sextet project at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam back in October of 2024, the source of this ravishing recording, which includes Gay alongside drummer Frank Rosaly, double bassist Ingebrit Håker Flaten, and reedists Ab Baars and Karen Ng. The pianist wrote five of the six pieces—along with a loose adaptation of “Atje Te Ura Në Lumë,” a traditional Albanian labë song contained on the essential Ocora album Labë Country: Complaints and Love Songs—but those themes and structures generally seem geared toward inspiring heady improvisations from the top-notch cast. The pianist instills plenty of drama in these pieces, no more vividly than the album opener “Birds,” which you can hear below. It begins with some extreme dynamic leaps, as occasional left-handed jab violently punctuates slowly developing right-handed action, accruing speed, intensity, and density, before locating a cycling pattern that invites the rest of the rhythm section in to initiate a hypnotic groove, followed by the mewling horns. Eventually it all coheres into a brief, pealing horn melody after which the pianist goes to work, building a titanic solo with a topography of rolling melodies, rumbling clusters and frenzied upper register splatters. The piece concludes with a wonderful Gay solo.

Gay also introduces the theme of “There to the Bridge,” the Albanian folk tune, underlining his peerless absorption of disparate folk materials as if they were his own. The sextet reveals an impressive sense of interplay despite playing publicly for the first time, both in the way the horns support one another and how the rhythm section confidently elasticizes the tunes. On “Alternate Endings” Baars unleashes a ferocious tenor solo, rippling with vintage Archie Shepp energy as he slaloms and skates over the jagged rhythms carved out by Rosaly and Håker Flaten, clearing the path for a substantial, astonishingly raucous and clattery Rosaly solo. On the other hand, there’s some lovely harmonic movement and tender chamber-like melody on the brief horn piece “The Sky Blushes Sunset,” while the closer builds organically into a tense chorale, a steady trickle of morphing textures, colors, and melodic shapes. The score is open, but the group improvisation is geared toward a single, unified sound even as it is comprised by disparate lines, attacks, and tensions before it erupts in pure, fiery energy. I’m psyched to hear more from the pianist’s pen.

Marta Warelis (photo: Cristine Marx/Photomusix)

Marilyn Crispell Doesn’t Look Back

In recent years pianist Marilyn Crispell has been awarded a steady stream of prestigious honors, including last year’s Jazz Masters Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. But despite such well-deserved accolades, she remains far less known and celebrated than many of her peers. My guess is that while Crispell certainly appreciates those honors, they’ve never been any sort of motivation for her art. While she’s duly celebrated for higher profile recordings for ECM—including her involvement in saxophonist Joe Lovano’s Trio Tapestry project, which has likely exposed her to lots of new listeners—at the age of 79 Crispell is still open to working with musicians without the reputation and cache of Anthony Braxton, Paul Motian, or Tyshawn Sorey, including much younger artists. Last year she appeared on a searingly intense recording with bass clarinetist Jason Stein, drummer Adam Shead, and bassist Damon Smith, Live at the Hungry Brain (Trost), a terrific document of the quartet’s work together. Crispell is not a featured soloist or guest, but a musician woven into the ensemble’s very fabric, just as she is on A Reflection Distorts Over Water (Relative Pitch), a trio album with tenor saxophonist Camila Nebbia and drummer Lesley Mok for which I had the honor of writing a liner note essay. Both of those recordings capture a more febrile, aggressive side of Crispell, the facet of her work that first attracted me back in the late 1980s through the album Gaia (Leo) with bassist Reggie Workman and drummer Doug James. But there’s never been just one side to her playing, and a post-Coltrane sense of melodic wanderlust has been just as consistently present in her work as the more tempestuous expressions, including on these more out ventures. Her solo performance at Jazzfest Berlin in 2024 was a masterpiece, an improvised recital that came as close to anything I’ve ever heard by her to capture the full spectrum of her vision. Don’t take my word for it: the concert was a key impetus for being given the Instant Award for Improvised Music on the same Berlin stage a year later.

Marilyn Crispell (photo: Caterina Di Perri/ECM Records)

The more gentle, lyric side of her playing is highlighted on Memento (ECM), her recent duo album with veteran Swedish bassist Anders Jormin, a long-time collaborator. The music is decidedly placid, with a series of individual compositions and some jointly-written ones. The album opens with the stunning co-write “For the Children”—an obvious dedication considering the state of the world these days—in which Jormin taps into the upper register of his instrument with an arco solo that sounds closer to a viola than bass. I’m usually not a big fan of such an approach, but given the tenor and touch of the tune, it’s a simpatico tack, and the way the pair trade improvisations with an exquisite emotional control is gorgeous. You can hear it below. It’s a deeply conversational album, a classic ECM touch that suggests that we’re eavesdropping on an intimate exchange between two old friends who can finish one another’s sentences—although they both have the patience and respect to let one another complete their thoughts unimpeded. The context seems to dictate the restraint, but I do wish I felt more sparks; the tempo is unrelentingly slow, and the attack is just as measured, but I have to admit, within those constraints the music-making is sublime.

Crispell has just started a short European tour with two Danish musicians, bassist Thommy Andersson and drummer Michala Østergaard-Nielsen—who wrote most of the music on the 2025 album the trio released, The Cave (ILK). The aesthetic of Memento is present on most of this album, too, which should come as no surprise considering that Østergaard-Nielsen has cited Motian and Jon Christensen as key influences. It’s a beautiful recording, where the drummer’s cymbal and brush work inject a painterly sensibility into the performances, each gesture, phrase, and slowly unfolding melody moving at a crawl, rejecting urgency in favor of a kind of lilting precision, whether it’s the kind of half-time, stuttering bass gesture Andersson occasionally brings to “My Spirit Heart” or the judicious employment of bowed and struck cymbals through “T.B.A.,” which you can hear below. Things heat up on “Nine Tone Story,” a seductively lurching mid-tempo excursion marked by darting feints, surging energy, and spirited alliances. The trio performs in Berlin on Friday, July 17 at the Nordic Embassy as part of an exhibition that celebrates “music and equality” in Nordic countries. I’m not exactly sure what that means, and most of the focus is on pop music. Unfortunately, the concert is fully booked, but it is possible to get on a waiting list should any openings arise.

Noura Mint Seymali & Jeiche Ould Chighaly: Desert Hot

Fans of American experimental rock bands like 75 Dollar Bill and Horse Lords might not have a clue about Mauritanian music, particularly the remarkable guitarist Jeiche Ould Chighaly, but both combos owe some of its identity to him. 75 Dollar Bill guitarist Che Chen studied with him, and while Horse Lords guitarist Owen Gardner has studied with other Mauritanian guitarists who usually ply their trade at wild wedding celebrations in their homeland, they have both adapted that instantly recognizable phaser-drenched sound, for their own means. Chighaly is the husband of arguably the best known living Mauritanian singer Noura Mint Seymali, who performs Thursday, July 16 at the Humboldt Forum as part of Ventilation 2026. Like her legendary stepmother Dimi Mint Abba, she’s a Moorish griot, serving a higher calling than entertainment Together Seymli and Chighaly have released a series of explosive albums that manage to bring a bit of rock polish to an otherwise raw, sinewy sound. Chighaly’s wiry, smoldering lines lace the cyclical grooves that characterize last year’s wonderful Yenbett (Glitterbeat), sharing center stage with Seymali’s piercing vocals.

Noura Mint Seymali

On the most superficial level the music shares some characteristics with so-called desert blues acts like Tinariwen, Mdou Moctar, and Etran de L’Aïr, but the Mauritanian stuff is way rawer and more lacerating, the gurgling guitar lines cutting like a scythe despite their flanged tone. In fact, while the Tuareg groups generally cleave to cooly percolating rhythms and measured, chanted vocals, Seymali’s band is a force of nature, channeling a bracing soulfulness from an oversaturated, striated din, as if pushing everything those other bands well into the red and deep into the ground. Below you can check out “Hagala Geyeul,” a tune of such forceful spirit that even the weird synthetic drum tattoos feel right at home. Other tunes are a bit more chill, embracing huge loping grooves where the blend of Chighaly’s guitar and the singer’s ardine, a kora-like gourd-based instrument unique to Mauritania, collide in a way that calls out the music’s mix of the ancient and modern.

Philip Golub’s Playful, Engrossing Harmonic Trickery

I’ve written about various threads in jazz and improvised music that’s incorporated microtonality or non-standard tuning systems multiple times in this newsletter, so it was nice to see if gaining some broader attention in a recent Bandcamp Daily piece by Stewart Smith. The newest entry in his list is Partisan Ship (Berthold), the latest recording from keyboardist Philip Golub, a musician who spreads his interests and abilities widely. One of the things that I like about improvisers using different tunings is that they usually see it as a vivid tool in a larger practice rather than a rigid system that locks them in, as with some of the more messianic composers in contemporary music who get trapped more than liberated. Golub conceived and constructed the album as a studio endeavor, building the basic architecture using MIDI, but enlisting a slew of remarkable musicians to really bring it to life: trumpeter Amir ElSaffar—arguably the OG of this whole jazz movement—reedists Anna Webber, David Leon, and Yuma Uesaka, fellow keyboardist Elias Stemeseder, bassist Sam Minaie, drummer Jon Starks, and, one tune, 5-string violinist and close collaborator Layale Chaker.

Philip Golub (photo: Tarishi Gupta)

With some technological assistance Golub wrote all ten pieces in different tunings, forming an uninterrupted suite in which every subsequent episode transports the listener to a new sound world. The music is rooted in fusion—there’s a lot of electronic and electronic instruments at work across the board—and there’s a palpable geekiness emanating from the gung ho embrace of unusual harmonies and the elaborate, almost fizzy arrangements. This kind of thing can bog down in theory or sound like an exercise more than a piece of music, but to his credit Golub never lets his interest in harmony derail his ability to make great music. Following a path blazed by Webber in her superb quintet Shimmer Wince—which also includes Stemeseder—Golub doesn’t let the tuning experiment ever pre-empt the musicality in his writing. Beneath all of the weird harmonic interactions are very sturdy jazz tunes that casually survey a good deal of the music’s history and antecedents—swing, bebop, hard bop, gospel, and funk, all of it oddly shaped and deliciously warped. You can’t miss the playfulness in his tunes, so when the group leans into a deep swing on “Mutiny Meeting,” the music splattered by synthesizer blorps, with Golub bringing his deep post-bop chops to a rack of hybrid computer-rooted keyboards, it’s hard not to chuckle a bit. It’s deliberately goofy, but the root of the material is no joke. The more I’ve listened to the album the exoticism of the tuning experiments fades into context, a setting that enhances both the strangeness and the deeply creative writing and improvising across the entire recording. Below you can check out the gloriously off-kilter opening tune, “Loyalty Oath.” If Golub isn’t on your radar, you’d be foolish not to rectify the situation. I’ve seen him excel leading a relatively straight-ahead piano trio here in Berlin where the vitality and wit of his compositions was electric, and while his early attention-grabbing credit was his collaborative role on Wayne Shorter’s opera with Esperanza Spalding, his own work, whether Dream Brigade, his fine duo with drummer Lesley Mok, or his minimalist harmonic experiments for the Grayfade label have all demonstrated an artist of deep curiosity, range, and rigor. But Partisan Ship, one my favorites of 2026, represents a new highwater mark.

Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week

July 14: Ben LaMar Gay Quartet (Ben LaMar Gay, cornet, synth, flute, vocals, Edinho Gerber, guitar, flute, vocals, Matt Davis, sousaphone, flute, vocals, and Tommaso Moretti, drums); Mauricio Fleury Trio with Rhea Sode; Marta Warelis, piano, 7:30 PM, 90mil, Holzmarktstrasse 19-23, 10243 Berlin

July 14: Christof Thewes, trombone, Florian Müller, guitars, and Ben Lehmann, double bass, 8 PM, Alter Schwede, Schwedenstraße 11A, 13357 Berlin

July 15: Anna Kaluza Trio (Anna Kaluza, alto saxophone, Tomas Becket, piano, and Martial Frenzel, drums), 8 PM, Alter Schwede, Schwedenstraße 11A, 13357 Berlin

July 15: Kaja Draksler, piano, and Chris Pitsiokos, alto saxophone; Olaf Rupp, guitar, and James Paul Nadien, drums, 8 PM, Richten25, Gerichtstraße 25, 13347 Berlin

July 16: Noura Mint Seymali; Massa Dembele, 7 PM, Schlueterhof, Humboldt Forum, Museumsinsel, 10178 Berlin

July 16: Kaja Draksler, piano, 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin

July 16: Francesca Marongiu; Peder Simonsen, 9 PM, Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz 4, 10117 Berlin

July 17: Ustad Noor Bakhsh; Muslim Shaggan, 7 PM, Schlueterhof, Humboldt Forum, Museumsinsel, 10178 Berlin

July 17: Michala Østergaard Trio (Marilyn Crispell, piano, Thommy Andersson, double bass, and Michala Østergaard-Nielsen, drums, percussion), 7 PM, Nordische Botschaften, Rauchstraße 1, 10787 Berlin

July 17: Sofia Salvo, baritone saxophone, Megan Jowett, viola, James Banner, double bass, and Dae Bryant, drums, 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin

July 18: Han-earl Park, guitar, Max Arsava, tapes, and James Paul Nadien, drums, 8 PM, Exploratorium, Zossener Strasse 24, 10961, Berlin

July 18: Elisabeth Coudoux, cello, and Chuck Roth, guitar, with Irene Aranda, piano, 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin

July 18: Limpe Fuchs & Grischa Lichtenberger; Cahl Sel, 9 PM, Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz 4, 10117 Berlin

July 18: Nathan Ott Quartet plays John Coltrane (Kit Downes, piano, Jeremy Viner, tenor saxophone, clarinet, Felix Henkelhausen, double bass, and Nathan Ott, drums), 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin