December Fades into Silence...But Not Yet
Anna Webber, Camila Nebbia, Dead Leaf Butterfly, Will Guthrie, Sam Dunscombe
I have long been an ardent admirer of reedist and composer Anna Webber, one of the most ceaselessly inquisitive and restless figures in improvised music over the last decade. She has routinely looked beyond jazz for inspiration, repeatedly striking gold with her research into contemporary music. I’ve loved just about everything she’s done, but her 2019 album Clockwise (Pi) convinced me that she was a major figure: that rare breed that’s actually changing the way I take in sound and potentially altering the trajectory of creative music. On that septet album she isolated specific ideas gleaned from composers like Xenakis, Cage, Varese, Feldman, Stockhausen and Babbitt, triangulating those concepts within her own compositional voice to produce one of the decade’s best recordings.
In October she dropped the eponymous debut album from her new-ish quintet Shimmer Wince on Intakt, and it’s a knockout, potentially even dislodging Clockwise as my favorite recording by her. During the height of the pandemic Webber spent a chunk of the winter of 2021 conducting research into just intonation as a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. I interviewed her during that period for a story in Bandcamp Daily, and at the time I was a little surprised that she wasn’t reaching out to figures in the local scene committed to that practice, particularly the composers and musicians involved the Harmonic Space Orchestra, but nearly three years later it’s indisputable that she was charting her own path. She’s applied her studies from that period to the music she wrote for Shimmer Wince—where she’s joined by trumpeter Adam O’Farrill, cellist Mariel Roberts, drummer Lesley Mok, and keyboardist Elias Stemeseder—but as she writes in her liner note essay, “I was primarily considering the ways that JI could practically applicable to my work—i.e., not to assimilate into a pre-existing school of thought, or to write ‘pure JI’ music, but to see how I could use JI as a tool.” And that’s exactly what she’s achieved. Ideas from JI helped infuse the music with new tonal colors and provided a framework to compose the tunes.
She specifically applied the ratios of polyrhythms used here to her intervallic ratios, a parameter or limitation that injects a certain woozy, deliciously wobbly aura into the performances. While this approach might appear to be a recipe for dry, academic music, Webber ended up writing some of the catchiest, most human tunes of her career thus far. She aptly describes these pieces as “almost like a collection of incredibly bizarre standards.” The presence of JI concepts is only partly responsible for the music’s idiosyncratic nature, a quality enhanced by the almost chintzy synthesizer tone deployed by Stemeseder, who’s kind of a double agent, laying down synthetic bass lines and improvising against the dominant harmony with wonderfully askew passages. “Shimmer,” the opening track which you can hear below, opens with mewling lines articulated by Webber, O’Farrill, and Roberts, all moving in and around a series of liquid two-note intervals, with Mok bowing cymbals and rustling their kit to effectively heighten the tension until Stemeseder’s acrid sine tone-like synth enters and the groove opens up nearly halfway into the piece. It’s a tightly-coiled marvel that only offers a touch of release after more than six minutes of see-sawing figures, with a minimal but invitingly warm melody floating over the spare rhythmic attack. The horn players improvise together during the final couple of minutes, with Roberts tracing the structure on cello and Stemeseder circling all around it.
The other six pieces are no less satisfying, with the subdued glow of JI tuning applying a gorgeous veil over the proceedings. But if we listen beneath that element the quintet operates like a high-level jazz group, improvising with rigor and soul, and interplay on a profound scale.. I got to hear this band live in Chicago this past April and it was killer, and that’s where I realized how good Mok is at tackling unconventional grooves and bringing an almost orchestral approach to the music; the depth they bring to “Squirmy,” for example, is astonishing. The thorny harmonic trappings almost seem to liberate Webber. On “Wince” I can hear a needling intensity and slaloming alacrity I find in Henry Threadgill’s alto playing, but Webber has her own thing going on; on “Periodicity” there’s something in her sound that makes me think of Balkan music, evoking the breathless phrasing of Ivo Papasov or Ferus Mustafov. O’Farrill also continues to impress, injecting flashes of extended technique into his highly lyric voice; his solo leaps out of “Fizz” like a lighthouse signal cutting through a dense fog. Webber’s inventive arrangements keep the music in constant motion and give each musician plenty of space to explore and harmonic grist to mill. Roberts, whose background is in contemporary music, probably has the strongest grounding in JI stuff and she thrives whether laying down thick, propulsive comping, as she does function as bassist here and there, or taking elegant solos. There’s no doubt that Webber is widely respected, but this record proves that she needs to be widely listened to: few artists have matched her unrelenting creativity in the current century.
Camila Nebbia’s Multitudes
The Argentine saxophonist Camila Nebbia doesn’t ever seem to have a night off. Firmly ensconced in Berlin but frequently on the road, the composer-improviser works in countless contexts, often playing in ad hoc constellations, while maintaining a variety of working ensembles. One of those ensembles, Fire-Eye, plays Thursday, November 30 at Donau115, the penultimate stop on a brief European tour in which the core members of the ensemble—Nebbia, pianist Paula Shocron, and turntablist/vocalist Barbara Togander—invite assorted locals to join the group. The Berlin stop will include Berlin-based violinist Biliana Voutchkova and the Chilean bassist Amanda Irarrazabal.
The group made a recording of an open graphic score Nebbia wrote during in the first year of the pandemic, in Buenos Aires, with cellist Violeta García, titled Corre el río de la memoria sobre la tierra que arrastra trazos, dejando rastros de alguna huella que hoy es número (“The river of memory flows through the earth leaving traces now numbers”), which was released by the Australian label Ramble in the summer of 2021. Nebbia used a map of Argentina as the form of the open score, translating data about acts of gender violence committed in the country between January and July of 2020 into musical directives. Togander’s spoken word contributions are in Spanish, so I can’t explain their meaning, but given the context, the dark atmosphere they transmit makes complete sense; sometimes it appears as though her own voice is being altered by turntable manipulations, with phrases seeming to go backward and forward, or stopped mid-phrase. The work moves through a variety of moods and attacks, whether ruminative or chaotic. Togander’s turntable sounds tend to be restrained, adding dark textures—both vinyl surface noise and actual sounds embedded in the records— to the already fraught colors produced by the other three musicians. Even if you didn’t know the thematic focus of the work, there’s little doubt you’d miss its alternatingly ominous, sorrowful, and angry vibes. I was going to include a shorter piece from the recording, but to absorb the full scope of the music I think it’s worth checking out the main section, “Corre el río de la memoria,” below.
Just as one short piece can’t convey the full range of the ensemble’s music, neither can any single project or record represent the full diapason of Nebbia’s art. I first heard her music on the 2020 tentet album Aura (ears&eyes), an ambitious suite where the influence of Anthony Braxton was palpable, but across a rapidly expanding discography she’s revealed a staggering range of interests and equally broad abilities. She can nail swing-based jazz and she can wade deep into abstract, sound-oriented terrain. Two recent recordings capture some of that range. La Permanencia De los Ecos (577) is a continuous 34-minute piece recorded in New York last summer that I’ve found more absorbing with each listen. Nebbia is joined by a superb cast— Joanna Mattrey on viola, Lesley Mok on drums, Cecilia Lopez on electronics and synthesizer, and Maya Keren on piano—and they help articulate the saxophonist’s vision with impressive sensitivity and versatility. Slowly rippling lines unfold at a glacial pace, with Mattrey offering fine-grained counterpoint, bowed and plucked, as Mok and Keren serve up running commentary while Lopez operates as a free agent, adding poignant drops of sound that almost function like punctuation marks. She both finishes and interrupts flows with an exceptional sense of timing. As I wrote about Mok in the Anna Webber item above, they work with an orchestral sensibility while retaining a truly elastic sense of time, and it’s integral in subtly propelling this piece. For a work that seems so heavily imbued by improvisation, it holds its shape and focus remarkably well.
A far more visceral and aggressive side of Nebbia’s playing emerges at times over the course of her ambitious new solo album una ofrenda a la ausencia (Relative Pitch). Across 16 disparate pieces she scuffs her muscular, full-bodied tenor with sour abrasions, as sound flows in post-bop flurries and striated long tones. As with much of her work, spoken word is a recurring feature, and that’s no exception here, but as on “Sobre la función del olvido” her speaking voice is embedded within elliptic tenor phrases and a shimmering electronic blanket. But there is also gorgeous balladry where extended technique flourishes don’t trip up a flight of pure beauty. Check out “Ruinas,” below, which is threaded by fragmented bebop phrases—I swear I can hear a hint of “Pannonica” spiked with some sparkling harmonics—even through gliding passages of stillness. Nebbia organically weaves these elements together, constructing a seamless collage manifested from a sense of absence she used as a creative guide for the album. Predictably, Nebbia has a slew of additional local shows before she heads to Argentina later in December. She plays at West Germany on December 3 with Mariá Portugal, Moritz Baumgärtner, Peter Meyer, and Bernard Meyer (the last three comprise Melt Trio), and the following night she’s at Morphine Raum in a new project with Han-earl Park and Yorgos Dimitriadis, with a couple more sideperson gigs at Donau115 next week. Naturally, all of them present wildly different contexts, a situation in which she thrives.
Jazzwerkstatt in Berlin Closes Shop
Ulli Blobel is one of the most well-known and long-time presenters of top-flight jazz and improvised music in Germany, dating back to 1969 in Peitz. In 1973 he co-founded Jazzwerkstatt Peitz, and a few years later he began working as a concert promoter in East Berlin. Despite or because of the festival’s popularity, East German authorities shut it down in 1982. In 1984 he moved to Wuppertal, continuing to book concerts and launching the first of several labels. He’s carried on for decades, and during my years in Berlin he’s consistently brought in some of the bigger names on the touring circuit such as Craig Taborn, Myra Melford, and Julian Lage. In 2007 he launched the Jazzwerkstatt label, which has been one of the most reliable imprints documenting the Berlin jazz scene. Jazzwerkstatt Peitz returned in 2011, but in the last year Blobel has been winding down his activities. This year’s edition of Jazzwerkstatt Peitz was his last at the helm, and while he has a number of other concerts happening around Germany into 2024, on Friday, December 1 he’ll present his final concert under the Jazzwerkstatt moniker in town, with a bill featuring two groups that have recorded for his label: Max Koch’s Ten Bulls with drummer Bill Elgart and the superb collective quartet Dead Leaf Butterfly. The event serves as the latter’s record release celebration.
Canadian Trumpeter Lina Allemano, Belgium vibraphonist Els Vandeweyer, German bassist Maike Hilbig, and Spanish drummer Lucía Martínez all live and work in Berlin. They have played together in various configurations over the years, but they formed this quartet in 2019, its building momentum temporarily quashed by the pandemic. But they felt a connection and we can be grateful that they’ve soldiered on, because the band’s brand-new album Ontmoeting is a delight. All four musicians write for the group and there are also several seriously cogent group improvisations. The music is rooted firmly in post-bop and most of the tunes are distinguished by gorgeous melodies, with Allemano delivering some of the most tuneful, full-bodied playing I’ve ever heard from her. While the attack is generally pretty straight-ahead, there’s frequently some element or quality that pushes each piece away from normalcy, whether it’s the tensile groans and electronic warbling simmering beneath Hilbig’s “Abstract You” or the clanking percussion, strident arco lines, blurting horn blasts, and punk-ish tint of Vandeweyer’s absurdist “Do Ever Think of Me, No?” But the best tunes are marked by melodic elegance, clarity, and boldness, whether the heroic, soulfully imploring solo Allemano takes on the vibist’s ballad “Dèjá Vu” or the sleek sashay of Hilbig’s “Cremant,” which you can hear below.
I’ve mentioned the impressive programming of Blobel’s daughter Marie in this space before. Her presenting endeavor Jazzexzess has been better than ever—its season-closing concert on December 9 will present Dan Peter Sundland’s quartet Home Stretch and the Berlin debut of the working trio of Tomeka Reid, Angelika Niescier, and Savannah Harris. She’s taking over the programming of Jazzwerkstatt Peitz with its next iteration, August 16-18, 2024. Whileher Berlin programming has focused on more up-and-coming artists, only time will tell if she fills the void left by her father’s eventual retirement.
Short Takes on Other Notable Performances
I’ve really enjoyed having my brain shaken by the bruising sounds generated by Will Guthrie and Jean-Luc Guionnet on their recent album Electric Rag Live (Superpang), an even more amped-up, psychotic iteration of their 2021 studio collaboration. The latter toggles between alto saxophone and an overdriven electric organ that functions like a cranial drill in the best possible way. The sounds he produces are so jacked-up that both instruments provide related thrills, even if the timbre is different. Meanwhile, while Guthrie is limited to drums his fury and constantly morphing groove patterns are so dynamic and gut-punching he may as well be an orchestra. The massive sound field is simultaneously crunchy, airless, crushing, and wildly dynamic. Yes, I know those descriptions don’t really parse as a series, but that’s my experience. Check out “B1” below.
Guthrie gives a rare solo performance at KM28 on Friday, December 1—Erell Latimier opens—but there’s an undeniable thread connecting his most electronically-splattered collaborative efforts and his unadorned solo kit playing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone refer to Guthrie as a jazz drummer—although you can certainly hear him swing in the introspective piano trio Designers—but his mutably as an absolutely ferocious, hard-hitting percussionist clearly comes out of jazz tradition. In most contexts he improvises within a seemingly rigid attack, but it doesn’t take much to notice that he’s engaged in an act of non-stop transformation, giving his collaborators a rock-solid canvas, while endlessly provoking them by always tweaking it. Guthrie is working on a new solo acoustic recording, and he says his latest material in this vein is “minimalist and polyrhythmic/polymetric in content, using revolving cyclic phrasing systems that expand and extract.” Below you can hear the extended piece “Timelapse” from his most recent acoustic solo album, Sacrée Obsession (Ideal) from 2015, but I certainly wouldn’t expect the same from Friday’s show.
There are countless layers and orientations within the music of Sam Dunscombe, a virtuosic clarinetist, electronic wizard, and relentless experimenter. Two (or more) of the many sides of Dunscombe’s music will be shared at a concert on Thursday, November 30 at KM28. The first half of the event functions as a release event for Dunscombe’s brand new album Two Forests (Black Truffle) which contains a pair of works blending edited and manipulated field recordings and electronics. The composer created these works as a potential soundtrack for psychedelic-assisted therapy, and while I can’t say I’ve put the music to work in that way, I imagine it would be far more effective and evocative than the new age twaddle that Michael Pollan suggests is the default in most such experiences, in his book How to Change Your Mind. The title composition, which you can hear below, opens with avian-heavy recordings made in a central California sequoia grove, which Dunscombe chopped up and moved around, creating an alternate version of time. As the composer notes, the sounds are stripped of “their linear, documentary character, reframing them in an enchanted web of traces and echoes.” Additionally, Dumscomb analyzed the various pitches from the recordings to create a large pitch set using just intonation, the subsequent tones seeping into the altered soundscapes, a transformation that gives the piece a weird floating cohesion. As those electronic tones fade out towards the end, we undergo a relocation to an Amazon rainforest in Manaus. “Oceanic” features a variety of coastal field recordings, the liquid swells and crashes mediated by other electronic tones produced through different analysis. As Dunscombe writes, “Tones relating in simple ratios to the average rhythm of each beach float over each other, coloring the white noise texture of the field recordings with shifting hues.”
I can’t say much about the second half of the program, but the line-up looks quite promising. Dunscombe will present a quartet of electric guitars played by themself along with Jules Reidy, Fredrik Rasten, and Max Eilbacher, using “responsive plasmatic synthesis.” Sounds good to me.
Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week
November 28: Sawt Out (Mazen Kerbaj, Burkhard Beins, Michael Vorfeld), 8 PM, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)
November 28: Charles Lloyd with Gerald Clayton, Marvin Sewell & Jakob Bro, 7:30 PM, Pierre Boulez Saal, Französische Straße 33d, 10117 Berlin
November 29: Ab Baars, Alexander Riris & Tor Haugerud, 8 PM, Panda Theater, Knaackstraße 97 (i.d. Kulturbrauerei, Gebäude 8) 10435
November 30: Sam Dunscombe (solo; guitar quartet with Max Eilbacher, Fredrik Rasten & Jules Reidy, responsive plasmatic synthesis), 8 PM, KM28, Karl-Marx-Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
November 30: Fire Eye Quintet (Camila Nebbia, Biliana Voutchkova, Barbara Togander, Paula Shocron & Amanda Irarrazabal), 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin
December 1: Max Koch Ten Bulls With Bill Elgart; Dead Leaf Butterly (Els Vandeweyer, Lina Allemano, Maike Hilbig, Lucía Martínez), 8 PM, Institut Francais Berlin, Kurfürstendamm 211, 10719 Berlin
December 1: Will Guthrie; Erell Latimier, 8 PM, KM28, Karl-Marx-Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
December 2: Lisa Ullén, Nina de Heney & Charlotte Hug; Stellari String Quartet (Philip Wachsmann, Charlotte Hug, Marcio Mattos & John Edwards), 8:30 PM, Ausland, Lychener Str. 60, 10437 Berlin
December 3: Lacy Pool (Uwe Oberg, Rudi Mahall, Michael Griener), 3:30 PM, Industriesalon Schöneweide, Reinbeckstraße 10, 12459 Berlin
December 4: Han-earl Park, Yorgos Dimitriadis & Camila Nebbia, 8:30 PM, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)