Getting Back up to Speed for a New Year
Ethan Iverson, Vinnie Sperrazza, Margaux Oswald, Amalie Dahl
Ethan Iverson and Vinnie Sperrazza: Playing Jazz, Writing About Jazz
I was quite pleased with myself for about 30 seconds last week when I realized that both pianist Ethan Iverson and drummer Vinnie Sperrazza had released strong new albums. In the context of music journalism’s fragile state of affairs, both musicians publish their own newsletters. Iverson, whose gifts as a writer are well established, whether from his old blog Do the Math or his recent critique of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue published last week in the New York Times, routinely holds forth in his Transitional Technology for on a wide number of topics, whether he’s explaining his own music or ruminating on jazz history or mystery writers, while Sperrazza’s newsletter tends to analyze and celebrate great improvising drummers across jazz history, such as a recent piece on the late Tony Oxley. Tightening the connection, Sperrazza also plays on a few tunes from Iverson’s new record. Of course, right after patting myself on the back for noticing all of this, I saw that Nate Chinen had already made those connections in his own newsletter, the Gig, interviewing the pianist about his new record and getting his thoughts on jazz journalism.
Iverson’s Technically Acceptable (Blue Note) is like three albums rolled into one. The front half of the collection was made with bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Kush Abadey—the trio that’s currently on a European tour, alas, without a Berlin date—and it captures the pianist’s knack for scooping up the entirety of jazz history within original tunes and making something that feels built for our time. The opening track “Conundrum” is a richly melodic gem that harks back to the hooky pop flair that made his work with the Bad Plus so appealing and influential. In his liner notes he refers to the tune as a “proposed theme for an (as yet un-produced) TV quiz show,” a slice of self-deprecation that’s a crucial part of Iverson’s aesthetic. It clocks in at a mere 1:31—a shame considering how lyric the tune is, which still manages to generate a couple of discrete modes thanks in part to the agile rhythm section. He then moves on to some deeply appealing blues originals, piling up boogie-woogie, swing, and sleek post-bop in delectable combinations, all of them threaded by more of Iverson’s sharp, indelible melodies—there’s no missing the magisterial touch of Duke Ellington on the graceful title track, whether through the left-handed rhythmic stabs or the thrilling right-handed improvisations. Check it out below.
Other tracks with the same trio remake material of surprising provenance into irresistible swingers, such as the Ralph Shapey chord that became the backbone of the slyly titled “The Chicago Style.” Iverson describes “The Way Things Are” as his “version of the Serenity Prayer,” but there’s nothing acquiescent or passive about the refined interplay going on here, particularly the way Morgan and Abadey pull their lines apart like they’re deconstructing a piece of rope into thin, gnarled strands. The next tracks feature several different instrumental contexts, including a second trio with Sperrazza and bassist Simón Willson which hovers over the precipice of sensitivity and schmaltz on a reading of “Killing Me Softly,” the Roberta Flack hit that the Iverson first heard through an account by fellow pianist Hampton Hawes. The overripe melody feels just right, balancing pathos and prettiness. Sperrazza swings, but he also has a keen sense of color, with his cymbal play injecting a sustained metallic cloud beneath the keyboard lines. There’s plenty of woozy emotion on a wild duo reading of Monk’s “Round Midnight,” which stands apart thanks to Rob Schwimmer’s ridiculous theremin playing, sounding as vocalic as any performance I’ve ever heard on the instrument—it’s like Yma Sumac sat down with Iverson. The album concludes with a fully notated three-movement piano sonata, deftly following the compositional form while drawing from the totality of jazz history that’s both fluid and disorienting. Somehow the piece holds together despite a constant shuffle of allusions and dramatic swells.
Like Iverson, Sperrazza is a devoted student of jazz history and practice, working in numerous groups that cover a wide stylistic swath including several strong collectives such as Landline, the Choir Invisible, and PLAY, but I’ve always enjoyed his own band Apocryphal most. That quartet with guitarist/banjoist Brandon Seabrook, bassist Eivind Opsvik, and saxophonist Loren Stillman just released its third album Sunday (Loyal Label), which is designed to track the “the moods and tasks of one person's ordinary Sunday.” Straight out of the gate the quartet conveys a groggy morning, with an unaccompanied Stillman unspooling a patient, beautifully textured, breathy tenor solo. As that fades away Seabrook enters with an unaccompanied solo of his own, his pinched, brittle tone barbed by dissonance and tangled phrases. Finally, after nearly two-and-a-half minutes Opsvik joins in on arco bass, as Stillman revisits the original melody and Seabrook injects a series of tones controlled by a volume pedal that dot the performance and stoke the tension, until it opens up with some splashes of full chordal feedback. It’s indicative of Sperrazza’s musical humility and humor that he’s completely absent from the opening track of his own album—a tune he wrote. But the second track is a wonderfully tense solo that slowly builds energy and complexity: after these pieces, the album veers into relatively more expected terrain, with a series of lustrous post-bop originals marked by stunning melody and group dynamics.
I’m a huge fan of Seabrook’s playing, which guarantees that the quartet never sounds predictable or stale. On “Caffeine Dream,” which seems to slough off the halting fuzziness of the opening tracks, he keeps using his volume control to transform his guitar into a tone generator, gliding along the changes with fluid transitions that erase the usual physicality of strumming or plucking his guitar. “If Only” is a lovely ballad, with Seabrook moving to tenor banjo, while Stillman brings a smoky depth to the melody with its clear debt to the Bill Withers classic “Ain’t No Sunshine” (although that goes out the window when Seabrook uncorks his banjo solo, where the influence of Eugene Chadbourne looms heavy). Check it out below. On “PM Drift” Stillman brings in an airier vibe with the easygoing melody, but Seabrook’s angular lines seem designed to trip things up, running ahead of the beat or slashing against the flow—his own solo almost sounds like it was played backwards, but the leader proudly notes that there is no technical tomfoolery going on. I’m not sure how “Harvey Pekar” plays into the Sunday evening of the average person, but here it’s a rambling ballad with an American injection thanks to the loping groove, Seabrook’s ambling banjo, and a reclining, relaxed melody. If only more listeners would pick up on Sperrazza’s very special music—this album is another winner from one of the strongest, most distinctive working groups—a relative term, natch—over the last decade.
The Heavy Sounds of Pianist Margaux Oswald
French-Filipino pianist Margaux Oswald loves producing massive blocks of sound, frequently subjecting her clusters, chords, and fleet single-note runs to a heavy sustain that transforms those procedures into densely turbulent clouds of sound. That was certainly the case on her ferocious 2022 solo album Dysphotic Zone (Clean Feed), a recording of a live performance that imparts a ritualistic intensity. Oswald, who lives in Copenhagen, modulates her dense onslaught when she works with other players, easing her foot off the piano’s pedals. Still, the bruising left-hand figures she’s drops on a piece like “Huit Bis” from Signals (ILK), her 2022 duo album with trumpeter Kasper Tranberg, make it plain that she doesn’t back down: she’s not afraid of confrontation. She uses shattered-glass clusters, jagged steeplechase phrasing, and post-Cecil Taylor swarms of energy to provide her collaborators with plenty of visceral, weighty stimulus. Tranberg tends to slalom through the din, whether Oswald is summoning monolithic sound objects or crisply articulated up-and-down figures made with her right hand. As you can hear on “Measurable Structure,” one of the album’s more concise, restrained pieces, the musicians are vividly in sync, responding, pushing, and colliding with exploratory surges in which they regularly recalibrate how they are positioned. On “Afskygninger” Tranberg’s tart lines seem to trigger overtones from the piano: Oswald injects some spare chord elongated with that sustain pedal, which allows the trumpet to take on a new life even when her own notes have decayed into silence.
Last year Oswald documented an ongoing collaboration with a another veteran Danish improviser, alto saxophonist Jesper Zeuthen, with the album Magnetite (Clean Feed). Zeuthen’s reedy tone cuts through Oswald’s rolling left-handed figures like a scythe, setting up brilliant contrasts of density, form, and tone while revealing a remarkably agile sense of interplay. Zeuthen moves between delicacy and brute force, and both tacks fit nicely against the pianist’s most extroverted passages. The bulk of the album is occupied by the epic opening piece “Warble,” a marathon dialogue that weaves together different modes of expression and interchange which morph seamlessly from one to the next. Together Oswald and Zeuthen carve out a deep zone, seemingly lost within the sound. Below you can check out “Cheep,” one of the shorter pieces—all three tracks on the album are named for some avian utterance, and the saxophonist’s cover art features a bird drawing—where the duo tones things down a bit, probably requiring to take some space and breath after the opener (the album was recorded live at a Copenhagen church in June of 2022). On Wednesday, January 31 Oswald performs at Sowieso with a new trio featuring trumpeter Oscar Andreas Haug (a member of saxophonist Amalie Dahl’s Dafnie—see below) and drummer Axel Filip—a recording from the group is due later in the year. I’m curious how Oswald’s enveloping darkness and heavy overtones will sound when punctured by percussion, where her authoritative command of dynamics will be tested in a different way.
Amalie Dahl’s Expanding Sound World Reaches a New Peak
This weekend the Oslo-based Danish reedist Amalie Dahl brings her newest project to town—a collective trio called Treen that performs at Sowieso on Friday, February 2—revealing another compelling facet of her rapidly evolving work. I first heard Dahl with her band Dafnie, which she’ll bring to Berlin in April, on its eponymous 2022 debut for Sonic Transmissions, the imprint operated by bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten. That quintet delivered a rambunctious set of post-bop fueled by scalding free jazz intensity and articulate swing-driven arrangements, situating the group within an evolving lineage of Norwegian combos straddling the past and present with livewire interactions. That album opens with the flame-throwing “Don’t Get Me Started,” but as the recording proceeds a less manic energy spreads out through elegant interplay and sturdy, contrapuntal arrangements. Dahl’s solo on that opening track is furious, with upper register alto saxophone screams that remind me of both Mette Rasmussen and Signe Emmeluth, two fellow Danes that studied in Trondheim and have become key forces on the scene, but she switches to baritone sax on the tune’s soulful denouement, hinting at a range that I’ve seen expand since the album was released, a record which sounds even stronger to me now that it did when I first encountered it.
Last year Dahl returned to the label with her impressive solo album Memories, featuring four clear-eyed improvisations, most of which reveal different conceptual explorations. “Here and Now” recalls that opening attack from Dafnie, building a kind of acrobatic collage of tongue slapping, overblowing, key clacking, and screeching harmonics that Mats Gustafsson long ago made a calling card. Still, despite sharing some of those tools, Dahl has her own voice and language, creating something unexpectedly vulnerable and intimate through extended techniques. In fact, during its final minutes she begins to sing through the horn, achieving something more compelling than the usual limning effect when voice is folded into the equation. There’s a kind of melodic weave Dahl brings that suggests a genuinely touching dialog between machine and voice—check it out below. Despite playing alto, the episodic “Soon Will Be” initially recalls Steve Lacy’s sere tone and elliptical phrasing in a measured improvisation that routinely follows passages of airy tenderness with self-rejoinders rippling with tension, but as the piece unspools she turns more toward interiority, using gentle circular breathing to construct a kind of amniotic environment marked by phrases that move between muffled articulation and razor-sharp clarity. In the title piece she literally takes a whisper into a scream over the course of seven gripping minutes.
Treen, the Danish ensemble she brings to town this week, recently dropped a digital ep called Baob_ that captures yet another side of her music. The group, with pianist Gintė Preisaitė and drummer Jan Philipp, doesn’t exactly produce a single mass of sound, but it feels less soloistic than these other pursuits. Her partners carve out gorgeously enigmatic spaces built with sounds that flutter, hydroplane, and dissipate, and while each element is clearly defined and identifiable, the music constantly feels like a collective endeavor, where the communal whole is far more important than any single thread, even if some of those can be riveting. On “Long Song,” which you can hear below, Preisaitė serves up chiming, prepared piano tones that often feel more percussive than the gently rolling patter of Phillipp, although she soon adds clearly voiced pointillistic layers of sound as Dahl contributes delicate flurries, her constricted intervals adding to the taut atmosphere. The way the trio moves together, gradually building density and intensity, indicates some sharp listening skills and a unified vision. “Tchuut'' injects a tender if melancholic melodic sensibility, a kind of elegiac tone poem. I don’t know how long the group has been working together, but there’s some much focus and richness in the music already that I’m eager to hear how it will grow.
Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week
January 30: Hayden Pedigo, 8:30 PM, Gretchen, Obentrautstr. 19-21, 10963 Berlin
January 31: Margaux Oswald, piano, Oscar Andreas Haug (trumpet) & Axel Filip (drums), 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
January 31: Sabiwa; Heinali mit u-matic & telematique, 7 PM, Radialsystem V, Holzmarktstrasse 33, 10243 Berlin
January 31: Yorgos Dimitriadis, solo; Yorgos Dimitriadis & Andrea Parkins, 8:00 PM, Panda Theater, Knaackstraße 97 (i.d. Kulturbrauerei, Gebäude 8) 10435
February 1: IGLU (Carl Ludwig Hübsch,extended voice; Ignaz Schick, voltage controlled sampler), 8 PM, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)
February 2: Treen (Amalie Dahl, alto saxophone, Ginte Preisaite, piano & Jan Philipp, drums); Sofia Borges, 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
February 2: 60 Hz (Boris Boris Hegenbart and Jan Thoben, electronics) with David Moss, 6 PM, Museum Fluxus+, Schiffbauergasse 4f, 14467 Potsdam
February 2: Jaap Blonk, voice, Richard Scott, electronics & Meinrad Kneer, bass, 6 PM, Café Plume, Warthestraße 60, 12051 Berlin
February 2: Kali Malone, organ, Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche, Breitscheidplatz, 10789 Berlin
February 2: John Butcher, saxophones, Mark Wastell, percussion, and Luigi Marino, percussion; performance and discussion moderated by Mathias Maschat, 8 PM, Exploratorium, Zossener Strasse 24, 10961, Berlin