Music to Drown out the Noise
Liz Pelly, Harmonic Space Orchestra, Oscar Jan Hoogland's LOOT, Kuhn Fu, and Michael Foster, Webb Crawford & Joey Sullivan
For those reading this week’s newlsletter via email be forwarned that this week’s edition is too long to all fit in a single email, so it’s likely that a good chunk of this week’s recommended concerts has been cut off. Click on the Nowhere Street banner above to access the full listings online.
Why are so Many Rich Motherfuckers so Awful?
I had intended to spend a good chunk of this week’s newsletter writing about what I had experienced at Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, but that’s not happening because I didn’t go. About two weeks ago I noticed that I had made a typo when I purchased my flight months ago, erroneously listing my middle initial as M rather than E. I knew the error would be problematic, so I tried to make the correction with the airlines. Although it was technically an American Airlines flight, the first leg of my trip was on British Airways, which updated the ticket without any problems. But American would not make the change, telling me I had to purchase a new ticket. Unfortunately, my original ticket was non-refundable, so I had to suffer the loss of a $600 ticket. I couldn’t justify spending another $1,000, which was the cheapest flight I could find just days before the festival. More of that corporate enshittification!
As I mentioned in last week’s newsletter I was apprehensive about flying to the US in light of the nauseating, inhumane, destructive, and self-enriching actions of the current administration (to say nothing of the acquiescent cogs in the news media, university system, and law firms revealing their fetid, profit-oriented lack of spine), so while I experienced momentary relief of not having to deal with the harrowing travel, I’ve been super bummed for the last week knowing the fun I’ve missed out on. The anger I felt was further torqued by a book. When I was back in the US in February I picked up a copy of Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, which took me longer to read than I expected. Pelly’s intensive reporting revealed endless skeins of depressing data, so I had trouble reading big chunks in one sitting. I hate streaming audio, and apart from dabbling with Spotify when it first launched in the US, so I could access music I didn’t own while researching a specific artist I was writing about, I never used it. Everything I read and heard about Spotify only increased my disdain for it, so Pelly didn’t need to do anything to turn me against the platform. But whether detailing the ins-and-outs of cheaply produced PFC music (“perfect fit content,” not “playing for change,” in which anonymous musicians generate generic material essentially purchased by the platform to eliminate having to pay royalty payments) or explaining the evolving corruption involved with playlist access, she absolutely exacerbated my contempt and disgust at a time when the effects of late capitalism have been laying waste to the world on a rapidly accelerating scale. Pelly has done an incredible job and provided an invaluable service—if only more people would wake the fuck up.
The greed behind Spotify is the same greed that’s ruined almost everything, and as my brother pointed out in one of our gloomy text exchanges the other day, while the US may have supercharged to race to global annihilation of late, all of the western world bears responsibility. This isn’t a topic I’m particularly fluent in, but you’d have to be pretty self-deluded or checked out not to realize that unfettered capitalism has pushed us to the brink. As I finished reading Pelly’s book this week it all became too much to bear, and while I normally balk at positive messages that might appear at the end of such a sobering report, I needed the faint glimmers of hope that surface in the book’s conclusion. I wasn’t aware of the emergence of streaming services focused on regional music made available by public libraries around the US, which certainly provides some optimism—although the way the current US administration is punishing public works as a way to further control its messaging makes me wonder how long libraries will endure. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that Pelly included a good deal of reporting on Catalytic Sound, the improvised music collective that launched while I was still living in Chicago. When it began in 2011 it debuted as an online marketplace selling CDs and vinyl connected to four artists: Ken Vandermark, Peter Brötzmann, Paal Nilssen-Love, and Mats Gustafsson, all prolific recording artists.
Since then the collective launched a Bandcamp page to extend its offerings to digital downloads and its roster has expanded to 33 artists. In 2021 they cooperative launched its own streaming feature, drawn from the sizable catalog of all of those musicians. According to an email Vandermark sent me last summer, it’s “the first musician-run music streaming platform. Representing the creative work of 30 musicians in the collective, the Soundstream was unusual in that music included was curated, not organized by an algorithm, with each artist in the co-op getting an equal share of the subscription revenues, generating hundreds of dollars for each artist a year.” I still don’t care for streaming— by dint of my profession I have access to a ridiculous amount of music, and I don’t have enough listening time to routinely outsource my listening regimen—but this is certainly a model I can get behind because it’s about music, period, and engaging with and supporting its makers directly.
I assume anyone that reads this newsletter regularly probably eschews the sort of playlist culture that’s made so much contemporary music pure and utter garbage. This same sort of thinking has forced a writer like me to scrap and hustle, as paying outlets for anything other than the most mainstream product have pretty much vanished altogether. I don’t know how sustainable it is to produce a weekly newsletter like this—I’m thrilled to have more than 2100 subscribers now, even if only 50 of them pay for my work—but I see these efforts as kin to what Catalytic Sound does, bringing music back to a true community endeavor. (Yes, using a platform like Substack muddies the water, for sure.) As I write this it feels too late for anything to stop this inexorable rot from bringing down the whole planet, but that doesn’t mean we should give up the fight.
Welcome Enlightenment from Harmonic Space Orchestra
I wrote the above section this past Saturday afternoon, and later that evening I ventured over to KM28 to catch the latest installment of the ongoing Prime Time series from Harmonic Space Orchestra. Any sense of FOMO I had for missing Big Ears and my suffocating political malaise evaporated during the stunning concert—the strongest, most consistent performance I’ve heard from this ensemble since they began six years ago. The program included works by ensemble members Michiko Ogawa, Marc Sabat, and Catherine Lamb as well as a kind of exquisite corpse endeavor. Each month an HSO member creates a chord to perform together in rehearsals. This performance blended three chords by Thomas Nicholson, Rebecca Lane and Jonathan Heilbron in seamless fashion. In the past HSO has played works that feel like research, and, unfortunately, they’ve often sounded that way, too, but this experiment worked beautifully. Yet the other works were truly exceptional, filling the space with harmonies that set my ears abuzz, all formed within the context of actual compositions marked by tender melodic wisps and clouds of sound that changed shape in all kinds of different ways. I wasn’t taking notes or trying to analyze what I heard. Instead, I just let music have its way and it was exactly what I needed after a difficult week. That phrase might suggest that the music merely soothed me, but it was far more profound and stimulating than that thinking suggests. There seems to have been a dynamic shift in the group. They’ve always been worth hearing, but this performance radiated a kind of focus and commitment that felt new. I can’t wait for the next installment.
Oscar Jan Hoogland Seizes the Moment
I also want to mention a recording that’s been consistently lifting my spirits all week, the debut album from an Amsterdam quartet led by pianist and composer Oscar Jan Hoogland called LOOT. My ardor for the golden age of Amsterdam free jazz remains undiminished: the world sketched out by Misha Mengelberg, Han Bennink, and Willem Breuker that blossomed into one of the most exciting and distinctive eras in modern music history between the 1970s and 1990s, as masterfully chronicled by Kevin Whitehead in his essential book New Dutch Swing. In the current century the Amsterdam scene has changed significantly, with a new, overwhelmingly international influx of young musicians working to forge its own identity. I’ll never know if the shift was a conscious rejection of the Instant Composer Pool aesthetic, but the effect definitely pushed out that old sound to the margins, leaving it to the post-Mengelberg iteration of the ICP Orchestra to represent. There have been other manifestations of that sound—a prankish attitude that simultaneously embraces a dig love and respect for jazz history, and a generative, tongue-in-cheek irreverence that guaranteed that nothing was sacred—including the Xavier Pamplona Sextet led by bassist Raoul van der Weide, or the excellent Berlin sextet Banquet of Consequences led by Italian bassist Antonio Borghini with resident ICP member Tobias Delius on reeds. But by and large it’s been up to the ICP Orchestra.
When Hoogland first emerged on the Amsterdam scene more than a decade ago I often heard him referred to as Mengelberg’s heir apparent. That’s a heavy weight to throw upon any musician, let alone one who was only in his early 20s and was heavily influenced by Misha, who died in 2017. The connection was obvious in Hoogland’s playing and his devilish performance practice, his own kind of absurdist post-Fluxus circus. He worked in an improvising band called the Ambush Party, which bore little resemblance to ICP, but I had a hunch that Hoogland consciously resisted playing music in Mengelberg’s mold with any frequency. But when he did, as on These Things Happen (Astral Spirits) a fantastic, sadly overlooked quartet album the pianist cut in 2016 with three Chicago musicians—reedist Keefe Jackson, bassist Joshua Abrams, and drummer Mikel Patrick Avery—there was little doubt that he could carry that torch as well as anyone. To be clear Hoogland didn’t hide his love for ICP, and in 2022 he released Goede Reis! (ICP), a fantastic duo album with Bennink that blended improvised pieces with tunes from Monk, Mengelberg, Ellington, and the sadly missed Cor Fuhler. There was no denial of where Hoogland was coming from.
With no advance notice Hoogland released the LOOT debut on De Platenbakkerij/ICP a couple of weeks ago. The band includes veteran reedist Ab Baars—another essential ICP Orchestra member—with the younger rhythm section of drummer Onno Govaert and double bassist Uldis Vitols, a Latvian native I’d never previously heard of. Straight out of the gate with “Krijshaan” we get a furiously bouncing bebop gem redolent of Herbie Nichols, a beloved figure in the Mengelberg pantheon. Baars opens the tune with stuttering phrases voiced simultaneously on clarinet and tenor saxophone (a la Roland Kirk), although he soon dispatches with the licorice stick to uncork a fabulous slaloming tenor solo that weaves through the liquid attack shaped by the rhythm section. I have been a fan of Govaert, and I’m not surprised that he flourishes in this context, but it’s nonetheless a deep pleasure to see him swing with such assurance and grace, something he rarely does in other contexts I’ve heard him in. You can listen below.
The nine superb original tunes that follow don’t feel quite as wedded to a specific voice, apart from Monk, although mostly through the jagged phrasing and tart harmonies. Hoogland has his own sound, whether it emerges through hall-of-mirrors bebop deconstructions or molasses-slow ballads. One of my favorite pieces on the album is “Lamantijn,” a slow motion vehicle where very little occurs on the surface, but beneath a very simple Hoogland sequence there’s an exquisite, gauzy interplay of ghostly arco bass, breathy tenor shadings, and sparse, meticulously executed percussive tattoos. Normally I’d only include a single track, but it’s too good to skip—check it out below. There are two subsequent ballads that are equally stunning, but they follow a more conventional model. Again, Hoogland’s reticence in following Mengelberg is purely conjecture on my part, but now that I have LOOT in my hands, I don’t really care. It’s one of the best things I’ve heard this year.
Kuhn Fu’s Serious Silliness
If it wasn’t clear enough from the goofy photo below and the name of the band, Berlin guitarist Christian Kühn likes to transmit an abiding sense of fun with his group Kuhn Fu. There’s nothing too serious about the music—except the actual playing, of course—on the band’s most recent album Katastrofik Kink Machine (Berthold), which came out this past fall. The group was previously a quartet, but with its blasting four-strong saxophone section it’s nearly doubled in size, with a line-up melding players from the scenes in Berlin and Amsterdam (the latter represented by drummer George Hadow, reedists John Dikeman and Ziv Taubenfeld, and electric bassist Esat Ekincioglu, who actually lives in Groningen). Berlin-based reedists Frank Gratkowski and Sofia Salvo round out the frontline. The group, with Polish reedist Mateusz Rybicki subbing for Dikeman, is belatedly celebrating the new album with a performance at House of Music on Sunday, April 6, the latest concert in Marie Blobel’s jazzexzess series; Berlin-based Ukrainian singer Ganna Gryniva shares the bill.
The theatrical, high-energy music gets a lot of its juice from rock, with a clear penchant for prog-rock that’s closer to Rock in Opposition luminaires or an extended, slowed-down dissection of John Zorn’s Naked City than heavy-handed fusion exercises. The giddy virtuosity is fed into a maw of absurdity, so no matter how over-the-top it gets, humor is always around the corner. That sort of aesthetic isn’t really my jam, personally, but the infectious spirit and energy of the music is appealing, especially when such a strong group of reedists are chewing up the scenery. Despite the unrelenting attack and some of the airless arrangements, Kühn’s writing is marked by an instinct for catchy themes and headbanging grooves, and he sprinkles in all sorts of non-jazz ingredients, tapping into burlesque drama, Morricone-ish twang, andnoir-steeped atmospherics. Below you can check out the album’s opening track “Waffle House,” which will give you a good sense of the music’s funhouse vibe, as it rips through a quicksilver shuffle of disparate sequences and moods.
On another note, Taubenfeld is using the visit as a chance to play with his old Amsterdam colleague Marta Warelis, the excellent Polish pianist whom Berlin is fortunate to have had as a resident over the last year. They’ll perform in a quartet with bassist Antonio Borghini, cellist Julia Biłat, and drummer Axel Fillip on April 1 at Kühlspot Social Club and as a trio with bassist Dan Peter Sunderland on April 2 at Galiläakirche.
The New New York (or Part of It) in Berlin
On Tuesday, April 2 the trio of saxophonist Michael Foster, guitarist/banjoist Webb Crawford, and drummer Joey Sullivan, all New York-based improvisors, turns up at Sowieso, offering some insights into the city’s evolving scene, where different disciplines and aesthetic tendencies keep splintering in the healthiest of ways. Saxophonist Foster has been a prevalent fixture in that community for nearly a decade now, pursuing a decidedly abstract style of free improv that has veered between a visceral, noise-related attack and more measured excursions into sustained sound. I don’t mean to say that there aren’t other places his music goes, as proven by his trio the Ghost with bassist Jared Radichel and drummer Sullivan. On the group’s bracing 2023 album Vanished Pleasures (Relative Pitch) Foster wrote a batch of actual free jazz tunes, with a sizzling pulse propelling his soprano and tenor playing into alternate flights of fury and, dare I say, swing! Listen to “PsychoTwink” below.
More recently I’ve been digging into Carne Vale (Relative Pitch), another fantastic trio recording with trumpeter Jacob Wick and percussionist Ben Bennett. The music fits more into Foster’s sonic research bag, with a series of intersecting, variegated, adroitly shaped lines wielded like objects and set in ever changing counterpoint. There are sections where all of the instruments align, with Bennett seemingly using bows to curl up to the abraded saxophone and trumpet long tones, but most of the time they form elaborate sonic constellations, as if they were translating the moving parts of an Alexander Calder sculpture. One of the most fascinating interactions occurs in “Nother to drinke nor to speake hauyng thy mouth full.” which begins with Wick’s unpitched breaths—weightlessly soft or hard and frictive—Foster’s upper register harmonics and sharply squeaked gestures, and Bennett’s vibratory clatter, all deeply attuned as they roll forward, but then a shift occurs, as the saxophonist and percussionist reset, anticipating something different, which is delivered in a wildly surprising, delicously incongruous trumpet line of militaristic clarity that brings the piece to a brilliant conclusion. It’s both hilarious and sublimely musical. Check it out below.
Webb Crawford also traverses different worlds from an improvisatory perspective. They’re an instrument builder, developing a variety of beautiful, ancient-looking string instruments that put a bespoke spin on the psalteries and tromba marinas, but the playing I’ve heard has been on guitar and banjo. In 2022 Crawford released a riveting solo electric guitar album called Joiners (Tripticks Tapes), its title referencing the carpentry practice of cutting and joining pieces of wood without the need for outside adhesive substances—a technique that’s also part of their instrument building practice. From track to track Crawford engages Piedmont-style guitar picking, metal-grade slabs of distorted tones that bounce around like balls, or a handful of needling two-note chords that run up and down, faster and slower, until a tonal shift transforms only ratchets up the tension—that’s just on a few of the first five tracks. Each track functions like a study of a particular technique or phrase, but the conviction, authority, and fluency suggest that Crawford is never flying blind, even when a piece seems in danger of losing its way. Rather than feeling erratic or random, over the course of the album the individual pieces end up accruing a coherence through Crawford’s predilection for full submersion in sound. Below you can hear “John the Angelic,” a fingerstyle performance clouded with a droning presence.
The trio that’s in Berlin this week will release its debut album Against Proper Objects on Relative Pitch in August, but they'll have copies of the CD with them this week. I’ve had the chance to listen to the album a few times, and over the course of six intense pieces it makes room for several simultaneous procedures. Crawford toggles between post-Derek Bailey splatter, wild banjo machinations that apply the frenetic energy of Brandon Seabrook to the rural twang of Eugene Chadbourne, and more elusive spasms of weighty, tangled murk, Sullivan opts for a metallic clatter that draws upon Tony Oxley and Paul Lovens but carves out its own spacious zone, and Foster moves between tongue slaps, overblown tones, and full-bodied tenor screams. They don’t do all of those things all of the time, but there’s a lot to work with, and they chop it up in exhilarating fashion, demonstrating a keen sense of dynamics.
Sharing the bill is the duo of Mingjia Chen & Linnea Sablosky, American singers who will perform Meara O’Reilly’s Hockets for Two Voices. Chen is a member of the superb new music vocal group Roomful of Teeth, while Sablonsky is a Bay Area native devoted to Eastern European folk traditions, but they’ve been making common cause on this dynamic work that the composer originally recorded using overdubs for a 2019 release. You can see a performance of the work the duo just gave last week below.
And don’t sleep on another concert featuring vocal hocketing two days later at KM28, when Evelyn Saylor and Dina Macabee, two of Berlin’s finest, most agile vocalists, sing a bunch of original works—some duets as well as work performed with a nice crew of additional singers.
Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week
April 1: Dylan Kerr, voice, electronics; Madison Greenstone, clarinet, electronics, 8:30 PM, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)
April 1: Ziv Taubenfeld, bass clarinet, Julia Biłat, cello, Marta Warelis, piano, Antonio Borghini, double bass, Axel Filip, drums, 8:30 PM, Kühlspot Social Club, Lehderstrasse 74-79, 13086 Berlin
April 2: Marta Warelis, piano, Ziv Taubenfeld, bass clarinet, and Dan Peter Sundland, electric bass, 8 PM, Galiläakirche, Rigaer Str. 9, 10247 Berlin
April 2: Michael Foster, saxophone, Webb Crawford, banjo, guitar, and Joey Sullivan drums; Mingjia Chen & Linnea Sablosky perform Meara O’Reilly’s Hockets for Two Voices, 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
April 2: Silberholz (Adam Goodwin, double bass, Chris Heenan, soprano saxophone, contrabass clarinet, Edith Steyer, alto saxophone, clarinet); Seiji Morimoto, electronics, and Andreas Voccia, synthesizer, 8 PM, Zwitscher Maschine, Potsdamer Str. 161, 10783 Berlin
April 2: Anna Kaluza, alto saxophone, Henrik Walsdorff, tenor and alto saxophone, Gerold Genßler, double bass, John Schröder, drums; Megan Jowett, violin, Sofía Salvo, baritone saxophone, 8 PM, Richten25, Gerichtstraße 25, 13347 Berlin
April 2: Gruppo di Improvvisazione Giallo (Hanno Leichtmann, electronics, percusssion, Magda Mayas, prepared piano, clavinet, Sara Persico, voice, electronics, and Valerio Tricoli, revox B77), 8:30 PM, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)
April 3: Andrea Neumann, prepared piano & Alexander Markvart, feedback guitar, objects; JD Zazie, electronics, samples, and Michael Thieke, clarinet, 8 PM, Petersburg Art Space, Kaiserin-Augusta-Allee 101, 10553 Berlin, entrance in the courtyard, Aufgang II, 1 OG
April 3: Lisa Ullén, piano, and Okkyung Lee, cello, 8 PM, Exploratorium, Zossener Strasse 24, 10961, Berlin
April 3: Marie Kruttli, piano, Otis Sandsjö, saxophone, and Thomas Strönen, drums, 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
April 4: Connie Bauer, trombone, Rieko Okuda, piano, 8 PM, Galiläakirche, Rigaer Str. 9, 10247 Berlin
April 4: Evelyn Saylor and Dina Maccabee perform works for vocal duo, mixed vocal ensemble, and accompanied voices with Laurel Pardue, Chris Peck, Marco Wessnigk, Johanna Ackva, Ragnar Ólafsson & Ruby Bilger, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
April 4: Aki Takase, piano, Daniel Erdmann, saxophone, and Rudi Mahall, bass clarinet, 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
April 4: Liv Andrea Hauge Trio (Liv Andrea Hauge, piano, Georgia Wartel Collins, double bass, and August Glännestrand, drums), 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin
April 5: Quantenschaum (Werner Dafeldecker, double bass, Werner Durand, self-made wind instruments, Bryan Eubanks, soprano saxophone), 8:30 PM, Yellow Solo at Ebensperger, Fichtebunker, Fichtestrasse 6, 10967
April 6: Identities Quintett (Roman Stolyar, piano, Mia Dyberg, alto saxophone, Camila Nebbia, tenor saxophone, Horst Nonnenmacher, bass, Sam Hall, drums), 3:30 PM, Industriesalon Schöneweide, Reinbeckstraße 10, 12459 Berlin
April 6: Ganna, voice, loops; Kuhn Fu VII (Christian Kühn, guitar, Frank Gratkowski, flute, alto saxophone, clarinet, Mateusz Rybicki, tenor saxophone, clarinet, Sofia Salvo, baritone saxophone, Ziv Taubenfeld, bass clarinet, Esat Ekincioglu, bass, George Hadow, drums), 8 PM, House of Music, Revalerstr. 99, 10245 Berlin
April 7: Kurt Rosenwinkel—The Brahms Project (Kurt Rosenwinkel, guitar, Jean-Paul Broadbeck, piano, Lukas Traxel, double bass, and Jorge Rossy, drums), 6:30 PM, Zig-Zag Jazz Club, Hauptstraße 89, 12159 Berlin
April 7: Kate Ledger, piano, (Christopher Fox, Lauren Redhead, Linda Catlin Smith, and Christian Wolff), 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
I also have to read mood machine a chapter at a time to manage my fury
Just writing to say I feel your pain about missing Big Ears. I came down with COVID on Wednesday and had to cancel my trip to Knoxville. Such a bummer. Sorry you had to miss it as well!