Sbatax, Josten Myburgh, Soko Steidle
French fury and probing improvisations in Berlin
Back in 2014 the French duo of tenor saxophonist Bertrand Denzler and drummer Antonin Gerbal released Heretofore, a single 34-minute improvisation that maintained a simmering back-and-forth energy that occasionally boiled over into screaming free jazz. The two musicians revealed an obvious rapport, engaging in a conversational exchange built upon careful listening and focused but polite prodding. It was a recording of the sort of congenial free improvisation that has long been the bread-and-butter of the practice. It was solid, but there was nothing especially unique about it. The studio album still feels like a nice document of developing partnership launched in 2011.
It would be another six years until the duo released another recording, but by the time they dropped Sbatax—which they’ve since embraced as the name of the project—they had transformed their attack into something much more furious. Unsurprisingly that recording was made at a club— Berlin’s sadly defunct Au Topsi Pohl—in October of 2019. Once again the album contained a single piece, but a new intensity was unmistakable, arriving as an aesthetic choice as much as a product of spontaneity fueled by receptive listener—some wild howling from the crowd 32 minutes in suggests it was as all as wild as it seems. This new attitude gave the music a much stronger sense of purpose, with Denzler and Gerbal unleashing unmediated power. Denzler’s acerbic tone slashes and seethes, cutting sharp lines relentlessly driven by the drummer, who demonstrates the sort of unflagging force that’s helped to make [Ahmed], his collective quartet with pianist Pat Thomas, bassist Joel Grip, and alto saxophonist Seymour Wright, one of the greatest improvising units on the planet. He’s a goddamned bulldozer, albeit one with the agility of a dancer.
A couple of weeks Sbatax returned with the same focus and fire on Spires, a studio session recorded last summer. As with the two earlier albums, it was issued on Umlaut Records. The performances make clear that the duo are so locked in that they can unleash unrelenting vigor with an audience egging them on. The album contains two pieces, each more than 20 minutes, although there’s not a huge difference between the two tracks stylistically. In fact, the album feels like a continuation of its predecessor. Beyond the firepower is a feverish investment in pulling terse, repetitive patterns apart, deliver subtle motific variations that risks getting lost in the sonic tumult. On the one hand I think some moments of repose might make it all go down easier, where space and restraint might allow the explosiveness to hit harder, but on the other hand that lack is clearly a deliberate choice. You can check out the wild title track below.
Josten Myburgh visits Berlin
I don’t know a whole lot about the Perth, Australia saxophonist Josten Myburgh, but from the handful of recordings I’ve heard from him my interest has been piqued over the last year or two. His music first crossed my path about two years ago when Another Timbre released a recording of his piece Sculthorpe Studies in 2021. Myburgh’s discomfort with his homeland’s colonial past enters into much of his work, and this album-length ensemble work takes some of its compositional material from the work of Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe, who I had never previously heard of. In an interview about the piece with Another Timbre’s Simon Reynell Myburgh acknowledges that Sculthorpe was one of the nation’s first composer’s to look beyond European tradition, drawing ideas from native traditions, even if they were facile and somewhat exploitive in their exotic appropriation:
Sculthorpe is guilty of exactly the same “exotica” and cultural theft in a number of his works, but he bends and twists his musical ideas to meet an idea of the sound world of Australia. What we end up with is quite a distinct harmonic language which is dry and bitonal, and a sense of contour that reflects a flat ongoing-ness that changes suddenly rather than gradually. Sculthorpe believed in using contour and atmosphere to reflect his vision of Australia's geography and climate, and in restraining his interest in European music to find something that better belonged to this part of the world.
Despite that, and whilst I have no interest in defending Sculthorpe on these fronts, I’m interested in honouring this clumsy gesture of taking it seriously that imported musics might have to transform drastically if it is to make sense here.
Myburgh’s episodic work blends field recordings made in Wiilman Noongar, Mandjoogoordap Binjareb Noongar, Palawa and Bidawal country—environmental sounds dominated by birdsong—with original composed material that borrows harmonies from Sculthorpe’s music. I can’t say how Myburgh applied the harmonic material, but his writing, articulated by a six-member chamber ensemble, unfurls patiently, whether gauzy, gently voiced chords that both hang, isolated, in the air, and unfold with tones produced in shifting combinations by the ensemble—a mix of percussion, electric guitar, piano, double bass, flute, electronics, and the leader’s alto saxophone—separated by chunks of silence. The sounds, and the way the blend with the field recordings, are lovely and usually quite tender, but they don’t always add up to something more meaningful to me. It’s clear that he’s chipping away at some symbolic collisions, but it all feels a bit too elliptical and sparse. Below you can listen to an eleven-minute excerpt from the piece.
Field recordings also play a key role on Two Scrolls From Western Australia (Edition Wandelweiser), which collects a pair of compositions by Michael Pisaro-Liu written for the saxophonist and guitarist Jameson Feakes. Both musicians were asked to make field recordings in in specific locales in the titular region at several times during the course of a day. In a program note Pisaro-Liu writes, “As with scroll paintings made in China from the Song Dynasty onward, poetic characters (here represented by music for the two instruments) are placed above the landscape.” Once again, I’m not sure how this all came together, but I do find the results more engaging even though the sounds played by Myburgh and Feakes are still quite elliptical. The field recordings are significantly edited and treated for delicate compositional effect, and the written material, while very lean, contains some lovely melodic shapes and more gauzy interplay between the instruments than with Sculthorpe Studies. You can check out the often gorgeous “o2” below.
Most recently Myburgh has released the eponymous debut of Land’s Air, an improvising duo with Eduardo Cossio on zither and harmonica, on Tone List, a label and concert presenting collective that the former is a key part of. Myburgh’s gifts as an improviser are made palpable here, where fragile saxophone melodies float and shimmy through his partner’s hushed metallic resonance. Both musicians created a quiet, texture-rich carpet of abstract sound from field recordings and electronics—which often render the boundaries between improvisation and prepared ambience moot—but the interplay is impressive in its tender sensitivity. Rather than simply present live improv over those prepared soundscapes, the pair manipulated and then reduced over ten hours of recordings into the 42 minutes contained on the album.
Myburgh is in Berlin this week, but sadly (for me) I’m unable to make the gig. He performs at 8 PM on Wednesday, March 22 at Kühlspot Social Club (Lehderstraße 74-79, (Hinterhof, left) 13086 Berlin, playing two sets: a duo with trombonist Matthias Müller and a trio with tenor saxophonist Chris Heenan and drummer Christian Marien.
SoKo Steidle with the great Alexander von Schlippenbach
Drummer Oliver Steidle moved to Berlin back in 2000, quickly inserting himself into three city’s vibrant jazz scene through a versatile approach that’s made room for post-bop, free jazz, and groove-oriented projects. He straddles numerous divides, and while I haven’t always dug all of his work, there’s no questioning his talent and drive. My favorite ensemble of his is also one of the longest running combos, SoKo Steidle, a free jazz quartet that deftly explores post-bop verities through a wry, widescreen lens. The group includes bass clarinetist Rudi Mahall, bassist Jan Roder (both of whom have worked together for decades in the mighty Die Enttäuschung), and alto saxophonist Henrik Walsdorff, a too-often overlooked stalwart of the Berlin jazz scene. Last year the band celebrated its 20th anniversary by collaborating with one of its biggest collective influences, pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, and this past November the group released a recording of that meeting at the X-Jazz Festival in May of 2022 on the Jazzwerkstatt imprint. On Thursday they’ll finally reunite with a performance at Zig Zag Jazz Club (Hauptstr. 89, 12159 Berlin), part of a short German-Austrian tour.
The performance captured on Live in Berlin is fantastic, leaping out of the gate with a contrapuntal feast that conveys a nice west coast vibe before the temperature heats up and the quintet takes off into the stratosphere. Steidle stirs the pot superbly, locking in with Roder to push the frontline while holding down a lively, imperturbable pulse. It’s hardly surprising that the pianist fits right in, toggling between a keen swing sensibility and knotty interplay between left and right hands. On the lengthy opening track “So,” below, the musicians are in constant motion, darting in-and-out, tossing in collective asides and accents, with concise solo statements arriving in an unrelenting but measured barrage. The vibe, tempo, and attack regularly morphs, with each player deftly picking up on and adapting to new gauntlets spontaneously thrown down by this member or that. There are all kinds of quicksilver references and quotations across the album—the Mahall/Walsdorff duet that enters around 12:30 in “So” seems inspired by the indelible arpeggio in Monk’s “Tinkle Trinkle”—all of which is part of a shared fluency. It’s readily apparent that the core band possesses a deep connection, and although it’s performed in fits and starts over two decades, sometimes with long breaks in between meetings, they’re able to jump right back in.
This week’s recommended shows
March 21: Juliet Fraser (voice) and Mark Knoop (piano) play Øyvind Torvund: Plans for Future Operas, 7:30 PM, Maerz Musik, Berliner Festspiele, Schaperstraße 24, 10719 Berlin
March 22, asamisimasa plays Mathias Spahlinger’s asamisimasa cycle, 8 PM, Maerz Musik, Philharmonie Berlin, chamber music hall, Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße 1, 10785 Berlin
March 24: Splitter Orchestra, 8 PM StudioBoerne, Börnestraße 43, 13086 Berlin
March 24: GAHLMM (George Kentros, violin; Mattias Petersson, electronics; My Hellgren, cello; Anna Svensdotter, flutes; Lisa Ullén, piano; Henrik Olsson, percussion)/Vinyl-terror & horror (Camilla Sørensen and Greta Christensen, turntables) 8 PM, KM28, Karl-Marx-Straße 28 12043 Berlin
March 25: Riot Ensemble play Bára Gísladóttir/Oliver Thurley /Bethan Morgan-Williams/Alex Paxton, Maerz Musik, 8 PM, Radial System, Holzmarktstrasse 33, Berlin
March 26: Gong Mountain Galaxy (David Moss, voice, effects, texts; Tilo Weber, drums, percussion) 3:30 PM, Industrisalon Schöneweide, Reinbeckstr. 10, 12459 Berlin