May Flowering

Elaine Mitchener, Shane Parish, Jim Elkington & Nathan Salsburg, Nisse Sandström Group, Roberta Settels

British Vocalist Elaine Mitchener Busts it Wide Open on Solo Throat

Over the last five years or so I’ve heard and seen the British singer and improviser Elaine Mitchener in various contexts, whether in a quartet with pianist Alexander Hawkins, guesting with Black Top, the shape-shifting project of Pat Thomas and Orphy Robinson, or performing an experimental solo work like “the then + the now = now time,” which I caught at MaerzMusik back in 2018. She has regularly impressed me, but I wasn’t prepared for the remarkable focus, ingenuity, and invention behind her incredible new album Solo Throat (Otoroku), in which her vast oeuvre of extended techniques, literary inspiration, and improvisational thinking come together into something far more profound and jaw-dropping than the sum of its parts.

Elaine Mitchener (photo: D. Djuric)

The recording opens one of several overdubbed excursions that blend fragmented melodic lines with jarring techniques that flirt with decidedly ugly, visceral, and unsettling gestures that occasionally invoke racist or sexist violence and oppression. In particular, “unknown tongue” blends a vast catalog of sounds and techniques, including the clicking one often encounters in Kiswahili language, choking or asphyxiation sounds, and almost lullaby-like melodic fragments. It’s not easy to listen to, but Mitchener does more than just collect difficult sounds—some of which have blown my mind—instead layering them into a dense collage that smudges any easy polarities. Throughout the entire album she embraces complexity. If Mitchener continued down this path for the remainder of the record she would already claim a spot as one of today’s most original vocal improvisers, but she pivots to other equally gripping and powerful methods, adapting or interpreting texts by a variety of Black writers that I’d never heard of, but who are now on my list of interests. No single piece has knocked me out as much as “Gyre’s Galax,” a sound poem written by N.H. Pritchard—a member of New York’s Umbra group who specialized in visual poetry, writing works featuring fascinating designs on the page. Pritchard himself read the poem on the 1967 Folkways album called New Jazz Poets, and he does a fine job at bringing out the intense musicality in its phrasing, but Mitchener serious ups the ante with her account, inhabiting its jagged, craggy lines with total commitment, pushing the sound of language in a way that’s consistently floored me, and this all achieved with one voice. Check it out below.

Mitchener’s overdubbing allows her to formulate almost orchestral arrangements of her voice, which can transmit all kinds of methods and sounds. In some ways the recording allows her to collate her arsenal in a single unified document, in relatively bite-sized pieces. But that comment shouldn’t suggest that these piece are somehow slighter than her long-form work. The stunning “stretchedwouldspeaks,” which draws on the writing of Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite, feels like four or five pieced reduced into a detail-packed six-minute suite in which diverse gambits are meticulously layered and edited into a emotionally-dense marvel. In 2022 Mitchener was a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Fellow, and the institution is welcoming her back this week for five-day residency beginning Wednesday, May 15 at the daadgallerie, with a varied program of performances, talks, readings, dance, and film screenings, all of it admission-free. On the opening day she’ll perform in various constellations with a variety of Berlin-based improvisers: Nick Dunston, Audrey Chen, Cedrik Fermont and Nina Guo. You can find the full program here.

Guitars, Guitars, and More Guitars

Shane Parish

The technical facility and versatility of guitarist Shane Parish has been clear for many years. I first encountered his work through his long-running Ahleuchatistas, a proggy rock vehicle that’s alternated between duo and trio configurations for more than two decades, including the lineup that produced last year’s Expansion, with bassist Trevor Dunn. For a while Parish was making regular excursions to Chicago, playing with locals like drummer Frank Rosaly on the 2016 album Labrys, and eventually dropping an album on International Anthem—one of numerous outliers on the imprint, along with the debut of contrabass clarinetist John McCowen. He also developed a dazzling acoustic fingerstyle practice, which can be heard at its best on his brand new solo album Repertoire, a collection released by Bill Orcutt on his Palilalia imprint last Friday. Orcutt enlisted Parish to be a member of his guitar quartet alongside Eva Mendoza and Wendy Eisenberg, but he was also charged with notating and creating arrangements for the music featured on the original iteration of the project Music for Four Guitars, on which Orcutt instinctually played everything. As heard on the group’s recent live album the endeavor has taken on a vibrant new life since it was adapted by four disparate players who’ve established a palpable rapport after playing the repertoire for more than a year now. I’m excited to hear the group this summer as part of Jazz em Agosto in Lisbon.

Shane Parish (photo: Jim Hensley)

Parish’s work on the project was essential, and it underlined his knack for arranging, a skill I’d never really previously paid much attention to. That talent couldn’t be clearer on Repertoire, in which Parish adapts a wide variety of tunes to solo acoustic guitar. While this is hardly new terrain for the guitarist—his excellent 2017 collection Undertaker Please Drive Slow (Tzadik) tackled a variety of American folk and blues tunes in a post-Fahey mode—but his ability to parse complex tunes played by bands for a single guitar is often astonishing. In his liner notes he explains his tuning adjustments and inspirations. The album opens with his take on Ornette Coleman’s ubiquitous “Lonely Woman,” where he maintains the indelible bass figure with one finger, while shaping the melody with his others. He writes that his take on the bridge is informed by the “Preludes” of Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, but such background info is irrelevant if you simply want to bask in the beauty of his performances.

His catholic sensibilities are reflected in the richly varied selections, which underline the album title both as a kind of proposed new standard repertoire or a body of work that’s potentially raw material for a skilled interpreter. Both notions work. He plays “Cohesion,” the faux-flamenco gem D. Boon wrote for the classic Minutemen album Double Nickels on the Dime, which is probably the most straight-forward selection here, with no noticeable alteration from the original version, as far as I can tell. It’s great, but the jaw-dropping stuff happens on a variety of jazz tunes, including three Charles Mingus compositions that he splits wide open, deftly assigning different parts of the multi-partite tunes and orchestral arrangements of the originals for his two hands. Below you can check out his stunning version of “Pithecanthropus Erectus,” where he somehow conveys the rich splendor of the original in miniature. He works similar magic on “Better Get Hit in Your Soul” and “Reincarnation of a Love Bird.” He also tackles Eric Dolphy’s “Out to Lunch,” creating a fascinating harmonic scaffolding for a tune with no fixed chords. He tackles pieces by John Cage, Roland Kirk, Captain Beefheart, Kraftwerk, Sun Ra, Aphex Twin, Fred (Mr.) Rogers, and Alice Coltrane, giving “Journey into Satchidananda” a fresh new perspective. Parish is a tinkerer, the kind of musician who wonders what’s possible and finds ways to make his imagination become real.

James Elkington & Nathan Salsburg

Chicago’s James Elkington is another fantastic guitarist who has plied his broad knowledge and abilities to varied contexts, but he’s never fit neatly into any single niche. That might be why his most recent solo album Me Neither (No Quarter) feels like the most comprehensive portrait of his talents. Released last December—which could help explain why the instrumental recording hasn’t attracted more attention—the 29-track effort chronicled a recent practice of waking up each morning and recording what was in his head. He considers it a kind of library music: “If you’re writing library music, you don’t have to know what it’s for—that can be someone else’s job." The collection closes with a cover of Abba’s “The Winner Takes it All,” but the previous 28 tunes, most of which clock in around or under two minutes, cast a remarkably wide net. The pieces project a certain mood or vibe, with a gentle melody rippling through them, and then they conclude. Nearly all of them would work beautifully on a film soundtrack, which is why the library music appellation fits.

James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg (photo: Joan Shelley)

Elkington has tastes just as eclectic as Parish, and although I know he’s got an abiding love for 70s prog-rock—I mean, he is British despite having lived in Chicago since the late 1990s—his own output tends toward delicate folk-rock. I’d love to read annotations of these ditties a la Parish, but Elkington lets the music speak for itself, occupying various approaches and traditions without laying down deep roots. Most of the tracks feature several layers of guitar, both acoustic and electric, and despite all of the variety the sprawl feels of a piece. Below you can check out one of my favorites, a tender meditation called “A Round, a Bout.” The music may not be as developed as the song-driven music Elkington has featured on a record like his 2020 album Ever-Roving Eye. Instead Me Neither feels like a sophisticated sketchbook of ideas that sparkle on their own merits.

Last month Elkington renewed his long-running partnership with Louisville guitarist Nathan Salsburg with their third album All Gist (Paradise of Bachelors), although their connections are more substantive than just this duo, whether through production or sideman work. Both musicians love British and American folk traditions, which provide a backbone to the collaboration but hardly limit its possibilities. I mean, the album concludes with a gorgeous cover of the Neneh Cherry classic “Buffalo Stance.” 

They wrote and recorded the music in a few concentrated get-togethers, and a handful of guest musicians make some choice contributions, such as Jean Cook who adds some lovely violin to the opening piece “Death Wishes to Kill.’ Bassist Nick Macri turns up on numerous tracks, and there’s some gently percolating percussion courtesy of Wanees Zarour, to say nothing of brass and winds provided here and here by Wednesday Knudsen and Anna Jacobson. But the focus is on the delicately braided acoustic guitars of Elkington and Salsburg, together transmitting a relaxed, collegial vibe that draws little attention to the hushed virtuosity. Instead the pair evoke an old-school pastoralism where all kinds of traditions are weathered and worn into a mod of their own. The connection to old England is further defined by a gorgeous interpretation of Howard Skempton’s salute to Cornelius Cardew, “Well, Well Cornelius,” previously recorded by AMM pianist John Tilbury. Check it out below.

Sweden’s Caprice Records Digs Into its Weird Past

Sweden’s Caprice Records, which was established in 1971, often reflected the rich progressive potential of socialist models. Originally an imprint operated by the state-run concert series Rikskonserter, during its prime it released dozens of classical, folk, jazz, and experimental music from Sweden. Of course, the activities of Rikskonserter and its output on Caprice was often questioned: who made such curatorial decisions and who earned the right to do so. Obviously such an endeavor is a divisive prospect: do you try to capture and support an artistic vanguard, or should the effort only chronicle an established and agreed upon culture? Time is often the judge, and there are plenty of items in the catalog that failed to endure. But I’m not here to discuss them.

When Rikskonserter ended in 2010 control of Caprice was ceded to its loose replacement organization Statens musikverk, and its mission shifted from releasing new recordings to reissuing material from Statens musikverk’s vast archives, including old Caprice titles. These days most Caprice titles focus on Swedish classical and contemporary classical music, but since the transition there has been a sporadic stream of less classifiable work, much of it brilliant, such as Don Cherry’s increasingly essential Organic Music Society album, which was reissued in 2012, or a box set devoted to the group Sevda a year earlier, to say nothing of an ongoing series of international music titles. Yet in recent months Caprice has unleashed some of the most extreme and strange music in its history, releasing archival material that was either previously unissued or independently released.

Nisse Sandström Group

Last fall reedist Mats Gustafsson started a new series on the label called Öppet (Swedish for open), which “focuses on creative and experimental music from Sweden, 1965-75.” That rather bland description was smashed apart with its inaugural title by the Nisse Sandström Group, collecting three wildly diverse and unhinged pieces recorded in Stockholm between 1965-1967. When I got a copy of this record the sole album I possessed by reedist Sandström was Live at Crescendo, a solid collection of post-bop tunes released by Jonas Kullhammar’s always great Moserobie imprint, released in 2015. I’ve since caught up with his later work, made by a saxophonist who had become an esteemed figure in the country’s mainstream jazz community, but the music he was forging in the mid-1960s tells a much different story.

“Vår I Danmark,” from 1965, was previously issued on volume 10 of Caprice’s massive series of box sets documenting Swedish jazz history, but the other two pieces had been collecting dust. From the opening seconds of the album you can readily imagine why it had remained in the vaults for nearly five decades, as the decidedly crude, confrontational performances nonchalantly smash together intense free jazz, proto noise-rock, Dadaist insanity, and free improvisation, channeling a visceral, exploratory spirit where rules were meant to be broken and trampled upon. The opening piece “Partita per pianoforte”—a graphic score credited to Anre Ericsson, who would soon be a key member of the great experimental rock band Pärson Sound, but who was not a part of Sandström’s group—is a delightfully raw mindfuck that would still ruffle feathers today. It opens with a horn-led call-to-order (or maybe madness), as the wildly squawking tenor saxophone of the leader and the tart trumpet blurts of Mats Hagström ring out amid attention-grabbing beats from drummer Eric Dahlbäck, but before it can find a groove the performance is interrupted by harsh screams and post-Dada warbling. The piece slowly morphs into a rising-and-falling pattern of free jazz clearly influenced by Albert Ayler—whose “Bells” is quoted as the piece winds down—but unbeholden to its gospelized roots. There’s a tension-building uncertainty, a kind of mix between burgeoning free improvisation and a lunatic jam session. Check it out below. The extensive liner notes—an essay from Gustafsson and a long conversation between Sandström and Dahlbäck discussing the music in a 2021 interview not long before the reedist died—make it clear that these guys were coming out of the jazz tradition, but they were absorbing all kinds of experimental art, whether John Cage, free jazz, or psychedelia. 

The lengthy intro to “Vår I Danmark,” a piece written by Nordström, suggests the little instrument fuckery of the AACM, particularly the warped bamboo flutes and slide whistles that underline Hagström’s beautifully fragile, probing solo, but soon the band kicks in with C-melody saxophonist Björn J:son Lindh banging away at the piano and Dahlbäck ushering in more chaotic grooves, but the performance soon ebbs away, much like the way it started. Even more maniacal is the side-long improvisation “Bränn Fläsket” from 1967. The 22-minute psychodrama anticipates the weirdness of krautrock by five years, led by Dahlbäck’s furious playing. Sandström unleashes some gnarly bass clarinet while Lindh uncorks more piano and blows some flute, but most of the sound is built from the drums and fuzzed-out electric bass playing of Bengt “Bella” Linnarsson, who isn’t a part of the earlier material, all amid howled, reverb-drenched shouts, chants, and cries. The members soon embarked on varied paths, with the leader embracing a straight-ahead sound, Lindh moving into fusion, and drummer Dahlbäck going on to play rock music in bands like Fläsket Brinner. The music here is insanely raw and weird, even in 2024—I can’t imagine what it sounded like when it was being made. Next up in the series is a release from fellow saxophonist Lars-Göran Ulander.

Roberta Settels

More recently Caprice issued an even stranger record, Music in Crisis, by expat American electro-acoustic composer Roberta Settels. There’s very little information about Settels, who studied at Julliard before moving to Europe in 1950s, spending most of her years in Stockholm, although she lived in Paris for a spell. She created work at both EMS in Stockholm as well as IRCAM in Paris, but very little of her work has been heard. A number of pieces she created in the mid-1980s were slated for a Caprice release, but the label balked at the proposed album title: Isolation! Meinhof in Memoriam.

Isolation! Meinhof in Memoriam/Music in Crisis

The album included the title work which was an abstract meditation on what German journalist and Red Army Faction member Ulrike Meinhof endured during years in solitary confinement. She ended up releasing the album herself on her own Music in Crisis imprint, which featured a heavy transparent plastic sleeve with a bright red blood-like splatter on the front, which obscured the newspaper-like design of the actual album art. Settels eventually drifted away from music and devoting herself to designing leather sandals, a craft she developed when she was much younger—she died in 2014. I actually found an old shopping guide to Stockholm published online by Time Magazine that recommends her wares, although the busted code prevented me from figuring out when that guide was published.

Mats Lindström, long-time studio director at EMS, penned some helpful liner notes which explain the circumstances of her overlooked work. She suffered from bad luck, unflinching conviction, and sexism. The new reissue enhances the four original pieces on the album with another four works—one of which, “P4,” was previously released on Text-Sound Compositions 11: Stockholm 1974 (Fylkingen). There’s not much explanation of her working methods, but Settles used feedback, found sound, and tape, creating elusive meditations both haunting and harrowing. Her notes about the controversial title track should have dispelled anything scandalous: “It is dedicated to her memory because she symbolizes by her life, her imprisonment, her death, the destiny of countless intellectuals who in one way or another offer their lives for their convictions.”

She goes on to write, “Out of nothing comes silence and out of the silence, near and distant sounds expand. Unnoticeable at first, the drone grows to an almost intolerable din, culminating in voices from a forgotten dream.” Working with tape means that in a Cagean sense there is anything but silence, but Settels achieves her point and whether or not one can share the composer’s empathy for the titular subject there is an undeniable power to that crushing absence or negation in the work, which you can hear below.

I’m no expert when it comes to this era of electro-acoustic music, so I can’t say where Settles sits within the pantheon, but the work is strong. It’s tragic that she experienced such indifference during her lifetime, and I can’t help but wonder what else she might have accomplished with greater resources and a pinch of genuine recognition. I’m grateful that Caprice has belatedly recognized the merits of this music.

Miscellany

I have been meaning to mention the great exit interview Nate Chinen conducted with writer Kevin Whitehead over at the former’s newsletter The Gig a few weeks back. I got to know Kevin personally when he spent several years living in Chicago, but I had been reading his work for much longer. He’s stepping down from his regular spot as Fresh Air’s long-time jazz critic, where his razor-sharp precision, wit, and lucid analysis reinforced his brilliance as a listener-thinker-historian. Last fall his long out-of-print, masterful 1998 book New Dutch Swing was put back into circulation as an e-book, with several new chapters, and the late Cor Fuhler as the new cover subject. I’ve regularly celebrated this effort as one of the greatest jazz books I’ve ever read, and a peerless model of a scene study from the ground-up. If you haven’t read it, what are you waiting for?

Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week

May 14: Anna Kaluza-Henrik Walsforff Quartett (Anna Kaluza, alto saxophone, Henrik Walsdorff, tenor saxophone, Jan Roder, double bass, and Christian Marien, drums), 8 PM, Jugend[widerstands]museum Galiläakirche, Rigaer Str. 9/10, 10247 Berlin

May 14: Jessica Moss, Tony Buck & Franceso Donadello, 8:30 PP, Morphine Raum, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)

May 14: Danish String Quartet (Adès, Haydn, Shostakovich, Scandinavian folk songs), 7:30 PM, Pierre Boulez Saal, Französische Straße 33d, 10117 Berlin

May 15: Elaine Mitchener With Audrey Chen, Nick Dunston, Cedrik Fermont, and Nina Guo, 7 PM, daadgallerie, Oranienstraße 161, 10969 Berlin

May 15: Banquet of Consequences (Antonio Borghini, double bass, Pierre Borel, alto saxophone, Tobias Delius, tenor saxophone, Anil Eraslan, cello, Reiko Okuda, piano, and Steve Heather, drums), 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin

May 15: Sabine Vogel, amplified flutes, objects; Pip (Torstein Lavik Larsen, trumpet, electronics & Fredrik Rasten, guitars), 8:30 PM, Experimentik, tik nord, Rigaerstraße 77, 10247 Berlin

May 15: Camila Nebbia, tenor saxophone, James Banner, double bass, and Max Andrzejewski, drums, 8 PM, Panda Theater, Knaackstraße 97 (i.d. Kulturbrauerei, Gebäude 8) 10435 

May 16: Bruno Berle; Alici, 8 PM, Startbahn Church, Herrfurthpl. 14, 12049 Berlin

May 16: Aki Takase’s Japanic (Daniel Erdmann, saxophone, Aki Takase, piano, DJ Illvibe, turntables, Carlos Bica, double bass, and Dag Magnus Narvesen, drums), 9 PM, Zig-Zag Jazz Club, Hauptstraße 89, 12159 Berlin

May 16: Banquet of Consequences (Antonio Borghini, double bass, Pierre Borel, alto saxophone, Tobias Delius, tenor saxophone, Anil Eraslan, cello, Reiko Okuda, piano, and Steve Heather, drums), 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin

May 17: Elaine Mitchener With Jacob Greenberg, Paul Hübner, Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø, and Cansu Tanrıkulu, 7 PM, daadgallerie, Oranienstraße 161, 10969 Berlin

May 17: Hayden Chisolm Group (Hayden Chisolm, saxophone, Achim Kaufmann, piano, Petter Eldh, double bass, and Jonas Burgenwinkel, drums), 8 PM, Panda Theater, Knaackstraße 97 (i.d. Kulturbrauerei, Gebäude 8) 10435