Fall's Sonic Cornucopia

Sara Serpa & André Matos, Nick Dunston, Erhard Hirt, Les Certitudes, Quartabê, Bruchgold & Koralle

Sara Serpa and André Matos Observe a Collapsing Planet With Beautiful Tension

André Matos & Sara Serpa (photo: Ebru Yildiz)

I tend to be pretty picky when it comes to jazz vocal music, however that term is defined, but Sara Serpa is a singer that consistently impresses me, both with the precision of her instrument and her evolving conception. She routinely develops new projects driven by interesting bodies of research or aesthetic principles, whether delving into colonial legacies as she did on her 2020 album Recognition or embracing the austere aesthetic of pianist Ran Blake on several duo albums. She also works with a superb, ever-expanding cast of collaborators, unafraid of putting her own delicate voice against strong-willed artists like harpist Zeena Parkins, saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, or Nigerian writer Emmanuel Iduma. On Nightbirds, her dazzling new album with her husband, guitarist André Matos, she invited cellist Okkyung Lee and fellow singer Sofia Jernberg to braid their decisive creativity within a dreamy set of songs written by the couple—as well as the Bartok bagatelle that concludes the record.

I’ve been a big fan of the previous albums the couple has made together, but the new one is their most sophisticated and varied project together, and it’s one infused by the impact of having a child together. Their son Lourenço turns up on a couple of tracks, and his presence in their lives clearly collided with the cratering of our environment as the album was made, made apparent through titles like “Melting Ice,” a wordless meditation where Lee’s striated accents suggest something unequivocally bleak, and “Degrowth,” where Serpa intones “Drive less / Fly less / Walk more,” which would seem to be stating the obvious if people actually heeded such advice. An effervescent, melodically brilliant quality connects certain tunes, like “Carlos,” which is cushioned by the empathic drumming of João Pereira and cascading runs of pianist Dov Manski, to the duo’s earlier work, while “Counting” is more propulsive, with Matos complementing his gossamer arpeggios with some chordal stabs and some tender acoustic guitar improvisations that flirt with dissonance. The music feels weightless, filled with delicate motion, as if the musicians are dancers floating in the ether. But most of the album carries a tension that reflects the cognitive dissonance of creating beauty within such an ominous, potentially cataclysmic moment in time.

The nature of Serpa’s crystalline voice can’t help but make even the darkest material sound airy, and that’s where the guest musicians tend to help. On “Underwater,” for example, Jernberg’s imaginative, wordless line instills instability. She possesses the same sort of clarity as Serpa, but she likes to mess with that tonal purity, swooping phrases and abrading her tone in unexpected ways. In fact, Serpa takes the backseat here, shadowing Jernberg while Manski shapes oblique chords, Matos produces acidic abstractions deep in the distance, and Pereira generates sea-like movement with his drum kit. Both Jernberg and Lee provide unobtrusive counterpoint to Serpa’s beautiful articulation on “Degrowth,” providing ballast to the singer’s sunny disposition on a song that warns of impending doom. Check it out below. I don’t know if that internal conflict is deliberate or not, but I find that the album deftly reflects humanity’s increasingly tragic ambivalence to a world that’s disintegrating right before our eyes, and we carry on as if nothing is amiss.

The Rich Sonic Delirium of Nick Dunston’s Skultura

Nick Dunston (photo: Cristina Marx)

Bassist Nick Dunston moved to Berlin nearly three years ago, arriving in the midst of the pandemic, and in that span he’s made himself an indispensable figure on the local scene while maintaining his ties to the US. In the past he’s worked with folks like Tyshawn Sorey and Vijay Iyer, and more recently he’s become an integral member of Mary Halvorson’s Amaryllis, the Dave Douglas Quintet, and he’s formed the elastic Spider Season with trombonist Kalia Vandever and gayageum player DoYeon Kim. Naturally, he’s got a slew of Berlin-based projects, too, where he’s frequently stretched well beyond the adventurous jazz-driven projects in the US. This weekend he celebrates the eponymous debut of his quintet Skultura, one of his first sustained projects on this side of the Atlantic. The album is a co-release between the Berlin label Fun in the Church and the US experimental tape enterprise operated by Nat Baldwin called Tripticks Tapes. The band performs at House of Music on Saturday, October 7, splitting the bill with the trio Deadeye (guitarist Reinier Baas, organist Kit Downes, and drummer Jonas Burgwinkel), with guest saxophonist Otis Sandsjö. It’s another impressive program in Marie Blobel’s Jazzexcess series.

I caught an early quartet iteration of Skultura when they played Jazzfest Berlin in 2021, but the new album captures a quantum leap in terms of vision, imagination, and precision. The current quintet includes vocalist Cansu Tanrikulu, keyboardist Liz Cosack—although for this show Rieko Okuda is subbing—reedist Eldar Tsalikov, and drummer Mariá Portugal . Apart from the prominent use of improvisation there’s little about Skultura that reflects Dunston’s jazz roots. A lot of the group’s basic tenets emerge right out of the gate with “Jane,” with Tanrikulu subverting her elastic, effortlessly virtuosic singing by focusing on a clipped rhythmic delivery. Check it out below. There are few singers I’ve heard that will take a single phrase and chop it up as if she’s a human sampler, stretching tones and stacking up consonants. She does use plenty of electronics on her voice, but she doesn’t need such treatments to splay open sounds like a machine. Dunston plays double bass throughout the record, but his sonic arsenal is much broader here. He deploys a tabletop banjo on this track as if he was playing a hammer dulcimer.

The album contains a liner note essay by trombonist Jacob Garchik—one of his bandmates in Halvorson’s sextet—who waxes poetic about the endless malleability of creation and the ambiguity of a finished work of art, citing Miles Davis, the Beatles, and the Beach Boys as artists who used the studio to transform their ideas. That’s certainly the case with Skultura, where dizzying lines and evocative layers of sound collide, separate, regroup, and sizzle in ever-mutating blends and rhythms. It might be true that Dunston worked over this material in the studio—and Berlin bassist Petter Eldh provided additional production help on a pair of tracks—but even if the music on the album is now permanently memorialized, it certainly won’t be identical when the group plays it live. The ensemble is composed of musicians who possess wide palettes and restless sensibilities, filling Dunston’s loose compositional frameworks with serious variety, jagged edges, and attractively messy harmony, with a timbre that blurs the line between acoustic and electronic.

There are tracks that touch on folk traditions, such as the opening string strums on “Vaquero Negro,” which quickly eliminates any clear references, exploding into a barrage of sliced-and-diced group chants, reverb-soaked alto saxophone smeared with electronic processing, snaking double bass, and blorpy synth. On first blush most of the album’s six tracks provide a sense of aural dislocation and confusion. The first couple of times I heard the album I was confused, unable to get my head around this barrage of fractured information, but over time a warped logic becomes clear. With the help of a strong crew of improvisers he’s constructed a wonderfully twisted and wholly unique sound world. I look forward to encountering the band live next weekend, to have my grip on the music loosened once again.

Getting Hip to Guitar Improviser Erhard Hirt

Earlier this year John Corbett shared his characteristic enthusiasm for a new release on Corbett vs. Dempsey, the label he runs with Jim Dempsey, his partner in the gallery of the same name. Borne on a Whim: Duets, 1981 is a previously unissued recording made by the singular improvising drummer Paul Lytton with a German guitarist named Erhard Hirt The latter’s name rang a faint bell, and I realized I had a late era FMP album with him alongside vocalist Phil Minton and reedist John Butcher called Two Concerts, from 1998. As I dug around to do some research it became clear that Hirt’s 1983 album Zwischen Den Pausen, released on Uhlklang, an FMP subsidiary (belated condolences to friends and family of Jost Gebers). I bought a digital copy from the great Destination: Out Bandcamp page, and the recording more than lives up to the praise. Hirt moves with quicksilver precision, enfolding an impressive command of guitar harmonics, a jagged bite, and rhythmic fluidity into a gripping style that had already transcended a clear Derek Bailey influence, especially the way he manipulated his instrument’s whammy bar to produce visceral vibrato that further transformed his high-velocity machinations. It’s kind of shocking that it’s never been reissued in physical form. Anyway, I am officially playing catch up now.

Erhard Hirt (photo: Hans Tammen)

The music on Borne on a Whim: Duets, 1981 was planned as a release on Po Torch, the drummer’s imprint with fellow percussionist Paul Lovens, but those plans were eventually abandoned until Corbett began housing Lytton’s archives, and this CD represents the first emanation from Corbett vs. Dempsey’s new series drawn from that material. It’s a fantastic session, with Lytton complementing his frictive kit maneuvers with his usual injecting of live electronics, while Hirt occasionally toggles from electric guitar to dobro, better to craft woozy, high-speed glissando. There’s a rough-hewn energy behind these improvisations, with Lytton’s innate sense of motion—coming from jazz roots he never forsake while going totally free—coupled with his mastery of clatter, vibration, and abrasion, while Hirt moves between gnarled single-string runs and barbed chords with electronically-fueled tones that swell, ebb, and splatter, like flesh-eating acid. While this album doesn’t feel like the cogent artistic statement Hirt made on Zwischen Den Pausen, it’s a superb album with a bracing, electric rapport between the protagonists. Below you can check out a piece called “Clip.”

Hirt is a self-taught musician whose attraction to the blues in the 1970s eventually led him to jazz-rock, and eventually improvised music. Around the time the recordings mentioned above were made he formed the group XPACT with Lytton, reedist Wolfgang Fuchs, and bassist Hans Schneider, and he was an early member of the King Übü Orchestrü. He’s never stopped playing, and his work appears on more than two dozen recordings, including many with a guitar-synthesizer set-up he’s now used for many years, including Especially For You, a new recording with an ad hoc lineup of XPACT where and he Lytton were joined by saxophonist Harri Sjöström and violinist Philipp Wachsmann—the latter two were subbing for Schneider and current reedist Stefan Keune, who were unable to make the gig. The album was recorded in Munich in October of 2022, and released a few weeks ago on Wachsmann’s long-running Bead label. While Lytton and Wachsmann continue to use electronics to expand and warp their output, Hirt used a computer to reimagine his guitar sounds, creating something that churns, glides, gargles, and spasms, leaving it difficult to tell where one source ends and where another begins, and how each musician’s contribution impacts the others. The quartet proceeds in potent fits and starts, incorporating plenty of space only to unleash the occasional torrent of jarring noise. You can get a strong sense of these elusive machinations below, with “For You Part Two.”

Hirt, who lives in Amsterdam Münster, comes to Berlin later this week for a series of concerts, including two different events on successive evenings at Kühlspot Social Club. On Saturday, October 8 he’s part of the Coincidences series, playing alongside Els Vanderweyer, Elo Masing, Hui-Chun Lin, Sue Schlotte, and Klaus Kürvers, while on Sunday, October 8 he plays in a trio with trumpeter Lars Rudolf and drummer Willi Kellers. On Monday he turns up at Café Plume with bassist Matthias Bauer and violist Zsolt Sőrés.

Quick Hits of the Week

In the latest edition of the contemporary music column I write for Bandcamp Daily I shared some thoughts on the Construire sur les ruines d’un passé encore fumant (Discreet Editions), a trio recording built around a score by Léo Dupleix, the wonderful French keyboardist who plays harpsichord in Les Certitudes. On the recording he’s joined by clarinetist Juliette Adam and cellist Félice Bazelaire: the latter two shape sensual, patiently evolving long tones that produce a shimmering, sonorous foundation that both soothes and moans, leaving Dupleix the space to splatter chords and arpeggios that activate shifting harmonic arrays both meditative and psychedelic. Across five delicious movements the trio vividly alters its timbre, such as harmonic cellos swirls cascading along fixed clarinet tones during a particular passage of “Part II” where the harpsichord sometimes falls silent in for extended stretches, while elsewhere Dupleix’s cycling patterns remind me of the early experiments of Arnold Dreyblatt’s Orchestra of Excited Strings. The group, which now features Judith Hamman on cello, will perform on Tuesday, October 3 at KM28, sharing the bill with a new project led by Jessica Sligter called the Shapes, a vocal ensemble with Owen Gardner (Horse Lords), Meittam Govreen, and Tom Oldham.

The following evening, Wednesday, October 4 the same venue also hosts the welcome return of the Brazilian foursome Quartabê, which has made recurring trips to Germany thanks to the fact that the group’s superb drummer Mariá Portugal lives in Cologne. Once again the group’s performance will focus on the material from its album Liçao #2: Dorival, which delivers hyper-creative interpretations of music written by the brilliant samba composer Dorival Caymmi. The album, which was originally released in 2018, has just been released on vinyl for the first time by the Berlin imprint Fun in the Church. Portugal, keyboardist Chicão, and especially clarinetists Maria Beraldo and Joana Quieroz, are all wildly agile musicians rooted in jazz and improvisation but possessing much broader aesthetic tendencies, including a whole lot of twisted pop sounds from Brazil. I first heard Beraldo, for example, as a trippy pop singer in 2019 when she released the album Cavala. You can listen to the tune “Maria”  below.

But there’s nothing quite like Quartabê which freely accesses any style that makes sense for its multifaceted arrangements. One need listen no further than its brilliant spin on Caymmi’s masterful ballad “Morena do Mar,” which fuses sparse but driving kick-drum propulsion, kaleidoscopic synth patterns, and slaloming melancholic bass clarinet unisons. A centerpiece of the group’s live shows  is its extended take on “Canto de Nanã,” which you can hear below, a dreamy meditation that reveals itself gradually before moving from clarinets to a communal chant that eventually fades into ether: it also resurfaces as the closing track on the album, “Maré Baixa.”

Last week I wrote about Reduce, the terrific new album by ubiquitous Berlin drummer Max Andrzejewski’s long-running band Hütte, which also includes reedist Johannes Schleiermacher. I noted that the pair work together as Training, but that's not the only project they’re both members of. On Friday, October 6 they’ll take the stage at Donau115 as members of Bruchgold & Koralle, a quartet led by keyboardist Jörg Hochapfel, with James Banner on bass. Hochapfel, who has worked previously as a guest member of Hütte—including on the group’s 2019 Robert Wyatt project—wrote all of the material on the group’s eponymous debut on Klaeng Records, which officially dropped over the weekend. The music is decidedly eclectic, with a strong melodic sensibility and an overt sense of playfulness, both of which are manifested in many different ways across two slabs of vinyl.

Bruchgold & Koralle—Max Andrzejewski, Jörg Hochapfel, Johannes Schleiermacher, and James Banner (photo: Fabiana Striffler))

Many tunes project a pop-like veneer and even when a particular piece might contain its fair share of improvisation, the general timbre and attack sometimes seems quite removed from jazz, such as the buoyant opening track “Uwaga,” who’s lovely melody is fuzzily reprised at the start of “Intersection 69,” where the group does sound like a jazz band, with Hochapfel injecting some vague Afro-Cuban patterns early into the shape-shifting arrangement. The jaunty piece titled “Cadavre Exquis” applies a ripe lyricism to a an arrangement that juggles quasi-exotica, cool jazz, and Latin accents as the song veers between pure schmaltz and absurdity; clearly intentional. I prefer pieces where any kitsch is subservient to group interplay and untethered spontaneity, such as on “Regentiere,” which you can hear below. Sometimes the gimmicks go too hard, as on the treacly closing track “Ihre Freunde haben in letzter Zeit nichts Neues unternommen,” which compounds its numbing repetition with a locked groove that brought me close to throwing a shoe at my turntable. But I imagine it’s a blast watching these four careen through these raucous, often schizophrenic tunes when they play live.

Recommended Berlin Shows This Week

October 3: The Shapes (Jessica Sligter, Owen Gardner, Meittam Govreen, and Tom Oldham), Léo Dupleix and Les Certitudes (with Juliette Adam, clarinet and Judith Hamann, cello), 8 PM, KM28, Karl-Marx-Straße 28, 12043 Berlin

October 4: Quartabê, 8 PM, KM28, Karl-Marx-Straße 28, 12043 Berlin

October 5: Mark Knoop, piano, plays Joanna Bailie, Tim Parkinson, Galina Ustvolskaya, and Peter Ablinger, 8 PM, KM28, Karl-Marx-Straße 28, 12043 Berlin

October 6: Devin Gray Quartet (Camilia Nebbia, tenor saxophone; Jeremy Viner, tenor saxophone, Felix Henkelhausen, bassl Devin Gray, drums), 8 PM, Peppi Guggenheim, Weichselstrasse 7, 12043 Berlin

October 6: Bruchgold & Korale (Johannes Schleiermacher, winds; Jörg Hochapfel, keyboards, guitar; James Banner, bass; Max Andrzejewski, drums), 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin

October 6: Isabelle Duthoit & Biliana Voutchkova; Nabelóse (Elena Kalaliagou & Ingrid Schmoliner), 9 PM, Ausland, Lychener Str. 60, 10437 Berlin

October 7: Arthur Kell Speculation Quartet (Arthur Kell, bass; Nate Radley, guitar; Brad Shepik, guitar; Allan Mednard, drums), Donau115,  8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin

October 7: Dur-Dur Band International, Gretchen, 8:30 PM, Obentrautstr. 19-21, 10963 Berlin

October 7: Tujiko Noriko, Rahma Quartet, Kakuhan, Mieko Suzuki, 9 PM, Kiezsalon, Musikbrauerei, Greifswalder Str. 23 A, 10405 Berlin

October 7: Deadeye with Otis Sandsjö; Nick Dunston’s Skultura, 8 PM, House of Music, Revalerstr. 99, 10245 Berlin

October 7: Kukangendai; Daniel Szwed, 7:30 PM, Arkaoda, Karl-Marx Platz 16, 12043 Berlin

October 7: Erdal Erzincan With Mercan Erzincan, Philharmonie Berlin, chamber music hall, Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße 1, 10785 Berlin

October 8: Lars Rudolph, Erhard Hirt & Willi Kellers, Kühlspot Social Club, Lehderstrasse 74-79, 13086 Berlin

October 9: Zsolt Sőrés, Erhard Hirt & Matthias Bauer, 8 PM, Café Plume, Warthestraße 60, 12051 Berlin