Right Before Our Eyes
Alden Hellmuth, Yvonne Rogers, Olaf Rupp
Lines Toward the Future in Berlin: Alden Hellmuth & Yvonne Rogers
One of the most impressive new jazz albums I’ve heard this year is Tether (Leiter), the second album from New York alto saxophonist Alden Hellmuth. While I appreciated her widely acclaimed 2025 debut Good Intentions (Fresh Sound New Talent), I didn’t hear an especially unique vision in the music, a super solid slab of contemporary post-bop. The album won the German Jazz Prize in 2025 in the best international newcomer category, if that means something to you. But Tether is a much different beast, recorded near the end of studies at UCLA. She tapped into the local scene, which gave her music a much different complexion. While some of that credit certainly belongs to killer band behind her—drummer Justin Brown, a regular collaborator of trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, and twin double bassists Logan Kane and Miller Wrenn—the album ultimately captures a much more mature leader, one who’s forging a sound of her own.
Rhythmically the music underlines some the funky science taking place on the Los Angeles scene these days, and while the twin double bass feature has been used in the past by the likes of Andrew Hill, Ornette Coleman, and Bill Dixon, among others, there’s a ferociously tactile, insanely interactive attack at work that feels totally fresh, especially in sync with Brown’s marvelous approach. Rather than getting tangled up and cancelling one another out, Kane and Wrenn achieve a febrile bond marked by fat-toned, propulsive action that drives the music inexorably forward, whether reconfiguring John Coltrante’s “Satellite” with a rhythmic invention she credits to hearing Punkt.Vrt.Plastik (the trio of pianist Kaja Draksler, bassist Petter Eldh, and drummer Christian Lillinger), or the jackhammer attack of the album’s Deerhoof-inspired “Face the Wall.” Below you can hear the knockout opener “Microfictions,” where the rubbery basses suggest what Roni Size might’ve gotten into the music was built around human plays instruments rather than programming beats.
Hellmuth leads a quartet at Donau115 on Monday, July 13, with bassist Phil Donkin—a Berlin fixture—drummer Timothy Angulo, and pianist Yvonne Rogers, who played on Hellmuth’s debut, but who’s been attracting loads of attention of on her own. I first heard her a few years ago as part of Ingrid Laubrock’s Lilith, but more recently she’s become an integral part of trumpeter Adam O’Farrill’s quartet Elephant, and she’s replaced vibist Patricia Brennan in Mary Halvorson’s Amaryllis. She certainly seems to be going places.
In May she released her solo debut The Button Jar (Pyroclastic), a gorgeously introspective recording that underlines her gifts both as composer and improviser, where Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans emerge as influences never employed baldly or blandly. Her writing leans toward ornate yet dense vehicles that somehow balance the buoyant rhythmic snap of bebop with the lyric wanderlust of impressionism. Her pieces are packed ideas, as fully formed melodies contract and expand. She doesn’t overwork the material—the two-minute title piece is a marvel of concision, cutting out any trace of fat to fashion a miniature that feels novelistic. The music is distinguished by a vivid imagination that seems to draw from a vast range of sources and inspirations, with a palpable grasp and knowledge of jazz and classical traditions that’s impressive in such a young player. More impressive is how she weaves them together. There’s nothing on this record that lacks purpose, and there’s something admirable about a musician who doesn’t find the need to overload their first major recording with ideas. Her first album Seeds was a quartet session released on Relative Pitch, the invaluable label operated by inveterate improvised music talent scout Kevin Reilly, a guy who’s introduced me to many excellent artists in recent years. It’s a song cycle with Emmanuelle Bonnet singing lyrics written by the pianist, and it also reflects remarkable focus and poise. But The Button Jar feels like a statement. Below you can check out her piece “Mismatch.”
It’s Olaf Rupp Time
Guitarist Olaf Rupp has long been an inseparable part of Berlin’s improvised music scene, a musician so devoted to pursuing his practice without compromise that he tends to be overlooked or taken for granted. There a dozens of recordings documenting his work dating back to the mid-1990s in all sorts of contexts, whether solo or in collaboration with folks like cellist Tristan Honsinger, bass clarinetist Rudi Mahall, reedist Lol Coxhill, and drummer Tony Buck. He’s also become an indispensable audio engineer, mastering countless recordings of improvised music, particularly for the revived FMP label, for which he released a number of albums. Rupp has been getting some overdue attention thanks to his first-ever vinyl release, a reissue of his 2020 digital-only solo album Fuzzy Logic on Bill Orcutt’s Palilalia label. The Bay Area guitarist is emerging as a serious tastemaker, elevating the stature of fellow guitarists Shane Parish, Cyrus Pireh, Chuck Roth, and Kris Gruda through releases on his imprint. Rupp is a worthy candidate for that Orcutt bump.
Rupp’s music is decidedly thorny, consistently steering clear of conventional jazz language in favor of a rigorous exploration of tone, texture, and color. Fuzzy Logic is devoted to his electric guitar practice, where he has the ability to transform all six strings into independent sound generators, some sere and brittle, others awash in humid overtones. He positions the guitar upright, whether unleashing knotty skeins of fingerpicking or viscous bowing. The sui generis quality of his work can be partially explained by his use of custom electronic sound processing tools, whether it’s his manipulation of small amplifiers to produce an oversaturated, in-the-red signal that he heroically grapples with, keeping feedback in abeyance, blowing-up the most delicate sorts of friction into coarse howls, or letting the noises produced by individual strings explode into harmonics supernovas. As you can hear on “Hundsrück Forest,” below, Rupp sculpts sound rather than taming it into narrative lines or riffs. There’s no missing his master of harmonics, as he generates hovering tones scuffed by turbulence and rhythmic interrogation, or runs down a series of chiming chords that hint at beauty only to be derailed by some single string mangling.
Each piece constructs its own universe, and while some of the same techniques and effects haunt those individual improvisations, it’s pretty easy to identify Rupp’s playing after a little while. There is no shortage of Rupp music to delve into, including a deluge of titles from the Scatter Archive label, including Aufsturz, a great archival session with drummer Michael Griener and the brilliant trombonist Johannes Bauer from 2007, or his most recent solo recording Berlin Eiskeller. Rupp plays a solo concert at Kühlspot Social Club on Sunday, July 13, sharing the bill with the duo of Griener and Polish alto saxophonist Paulina Owczarek.
Short Takes
There’s a bunch of impressive touring jazz landing in Berlin over the next week. Trumpeter Jeremy Pelt leads the same seasoned quartet from his recent album Our Community Will Not be Erased (HighNote)—pianist Orrin Evans, drummer Lenny White, and bassist Buster Williams—at Zig-Zag on Thursday, July 9, while the impressive Spanish pianist Álvaro Torres leads a strong Berlin-based band with bassist Jan Roder, drummer Marius Wankel, and clarinetist Eldar Tsalikov at Donau115 on Friday, July 10. I recently reviewed the pianist’s excellent trio album Mareina (Fresh Sound New Talent) for DownBeat Magazine, where the pianist translates his abiding love for flamenco into something all his own, drafting a flow that stops and stutters like the palmas rhythms of the tradition. Check out the title track below.
A couple of years ago I previewed a Berlin concert by the powerful Moroccan ensemble Asmaa Hamzaoui & Bnat Timbouktou that never happened due to visa issues, the second straight summer tour the group had planned that went awry. I’m fairly confident that the third time prove the charm for the band’s scheduled performance at Haus der Kulturen der Welt on Friday, July 10. What I wrote back in 2024 still stands. Below you hear the track “Laâfou” from the group’s terrific 2025 album L’Banat (Ajabu!).
Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week
July 7: Project VO (Antti Virtaranta & Rieko Okuda); Emilio Gordoa; Ignore The Machine (Nils Ostendorf & Hanno Leichtmann), 8 PM, Encounters Bookspace, Prinzenallee 60, 13359 Berlin
July 7: Ginte Preisaite, piano, and Jon Lipscomb, guitar; Penates (JD Zazie, playback devices, mixer, and Mat Pogo, playback devices, mixer, voice, electronics), 8 PM, Richten25, Gerichtstraße 25, 13347 Berlin
July 8: Peter Bernstein Quartet (Peter Bernstein, guitar, Danny Grissett, piano, Doug Weiss, double bass, and Billy Drummond, drums), 6:30 PM, Zig-Zag Jazz Club, Hauptstraße 89, 12159 Berlin
July 8: Able Noise; Dogg Sneeze, 8 PM, West Germany, Skalitzer Straße 133, 10999 Berlin
July 8: Der lange Schatten (Håvard Wiik, piano, Michael Thieke, clarinet, and Antonio Borghini, double bass), 8:30 PM, Panda Theater, Knaackstraße 97, (i.d. Kulturbrauerei, Gebäude 8) 10435, Berlin
July 9: Jeremy Pelt Quartet (Jeremy Pelt, trumpet, Orrin Evans, piano, Buster Williams, double bass, and Lenny White, drums), 6:30 PM, Zig-Zag Jazz Club, Hauptstraße 89, 12159 Berlin
July 10: Asmaa Hamzaoui & Bnat Timbouktou, 7:30 PM, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10, 10557 Berlin
July 10: Tulipa Ruiz, 8:30 PM, Gretchen, Obentrautstr. 19-21, 10963 Berlin
July 10: Álvaro Torres Quartet (Eldar Tsalikov, reeds, Álvaro Torres, piano, Jan Roder, double bass, and Marius Wankel, drums), 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin
July 10: Rubén Blades & Roberto Delgado Big Band, 9 PM, Tempodrom, Möckernstraße 10, 10963 Berlin
July 11: Tizia Zimmermann, accordion, Michael Thieke, clarinet, Brad Henkel, trumpet, Mike Majkowski, double bass, and Emilio Gordoa, vibraphone, 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
July 12: Olaf Rupp, guitar; Paulina Owczarek, saxophone, and Michael Griener, drums, 8:30 PM, Kühlspot Social Club, Lehderstrasse 74-79, 13086 Berlin
July 13: Alden Hellmuth Quartet (Alden Hellmuth, saxophone, Yvonne Rogers, piano, Timothy Angulo, drums, and Phil Donkin, double bass), 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin
Really digging 'Tether' – there's a talent to watch. The Roni Size comparison for 'Microfictions' is very apt