Håvard Wiik Returns
I know I wasn’t alone in lamenting the dissolution of the remarkable Scandinavian quintet Atomic a few years ago. The Swedish-Norwegian combo was not only one of the finest jazz bands of the 21st century, but it also helped to facilitate international interest in a new breed of players from the region—double bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, trumpeter Magnus Broo, reedist Fredrik Ljungkvist, and pianist Håvard Wiik. As the group evolved, the writing of Ljungvkist and Wiik grew more adventurous and introspective, particularly as the latter’s interest in contemporary classical music expanded. The quintet’s farewell tour ended in 2022, lengthened a bit due to pandemic restrictions, which included some ridiculous Covid-related action. Its final Berlin shows at KM28 turned into a superspread event, where nearly everyone in the band and audience, myself included, contracted the virus, leading to the pithy term for the engagement, Atomicron, as the omicron variant was just beginning to wreak havoc in Europe. Since then its members, including drummer Hans Hulbækmo, who replaced Nilssen-Love in 2014, have been relatively active in other projects, but pianist Wiik seemed less busy, so I’m happy to discuss his welcome return.
In February a new Wiik-led project called Cimota—read it backwards and you see there’s some continuity in mind—released its superb debut album [ˈkɪmɔtɑː] (Sonic Transmissions). The quintet reunited Wiik with Haker Flaten and Hulbækmo, with the Swedish horn players replaced by two superb Norwegians: trumpeter Eivind Lønning and saxophonist Espen Reinsertsen, who’ve worked together closely for many years as the stellar, shape-shifting improvising duo Streifenjunko. Given the band moniker we shouldn’t be surprised that the quintet definitely retains a lot of Atomic’s qualities, a post-bop soundworld spiked by plenty of contemplative space, refined interaction—particularly from the horn players, who’ve long possessed an almost telepathic improvisational bond—and ruminative melodies. The album opens with “Spirit of ’76 (Scherzo),” as the bassist and drummer sculpt a wonderfully knotty groove to clear space for Wiik’s introductory improvisation, with gritty left-handed figures that hint at early Cecil Taylor kissed by a bit of Bach. The horns add some spare contrapuntal lines behind the pianist, and the full theme blossoms two-and-a-half minutes in, opening up a plangent passage in which no one takes a solo. Instead there’s wonderfully chattery, tension-building interplay within a single chord, the rhythm section almost going silent for the pianist and horn players to form an irregular but tightly woven fabric of splattery, fractured improvisation. That sort of formal experimentation is a prevalent concern for Wiik, who designs his pieces with carefully orchestrated improvisation in mind. His ensemble writing is no less gripping and intricate than the most feverish solos. Check it out below.
I’m particularly fond of the aptly titled “Blues for the End of the World,” a delightfully wobbly mid-tempo swinger that teeters to and from, on the edge of the abyss in the opening passage, before flipping into a series of alternating contemplative, attractively jagged sections. Finally, after more than three minutes the tune opens up with a brash, plunger mute solo from Lønning, a vocalic expression that encourages a kind of reactive scrabbling from his bandmates. “August 23rd, 2023 (Acoustic Version)” is an achingly spare ballad of stunning composure, a poised lament dripping with melancholy. Again, no solos, but plenty of subtle timbral and melodic warping. In the end the pin-drop dynamics and meticulously pitched attack are their own reward. The quintet has played a number of shows in Norway, but here’s hoping that Cimota takes it on the road, or at least brings it to Wiik’s adopted home in Berlin, before too long. It should definitely satisfy listeners missing Atomic, while the presence of Reinertsen and Lønning opens up new vistas.
In other Wiik news, One Brief Cure, a terrific improvised performance recorded last November at Sowieso with Berlin bassist Antonio Borghini—the pianist’s bandmate in the trio Der lange Schatten—and Chicago drummer Tim Daisy, also surfaced in February on the latter’s Relay Recordings imprint. Over three extended pieces we can really bask in the pianist’s introspective splendor, where the bassist and drummer serve up a wide-open but charged foundation for Wiik, providing both space and endless jabs, eddies, and collisions. Of course, this is a three-way collaboration, and while the piano generally takes the foreground, Borghini and Daisy are in constant motion, braiding lines and shifting tempos behind Wiik. Naturally, the music wends through ebb and flow, but the engagement and intensity holds steady. Below you can hear the superb opener “Stay in the Shade.”
Discovering Karoline Wallace
As much as I welcome new formations from veteran Norwegian players, I continue to be flabbergasted by the country’s endless supply of younger talent. Singer and composer Karoline Wallace has been around for a while, with a slew of recordings under her own leadership and as an ensemble member, but I’d never heard of her until her stunning new album Eon (Sauajazz) arrived in my inbox. It’s easily one of the most exciting things I’ve heard this year, an inventive assemblage that knocks down any conventional barriers between jazz, folk, pop-rock, and improvised music. After picking myself off of the floor I checked out the two previous albums she’s made under her own name, both eccentric jazz vocal records that easily stand out, but Eon is in a class unto itself. It certainly helps that she’s joined by a killer band with reedist Signe Emmeluth, guitarist Karl Bjorå, cellist Joel Ring, and drummer Martin Langlie, who together help forge wildly original arrangements for her sometimes whimsical, sometimes mystifying originals. The record’s songs are inspired by different viewpoints on geology and geological time, but since the lyrics are all sung in Norwegian I can’t really say much about their content, but between her gorgeous, elliptical melodies and the band’s stunning attack it hardly matters.
Bjorå might be the secret weapon, except his genius is front-and-center, and the others are no less crucial to the project. The knockout opening track “Tycho” is named for the famed Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, who famously lost his nose in a 1566 duel, replacing it with a custom-made silver schnozz. That sort of inspiration suggests Wallace’s gleeful imagination, which absolutely extends to the way she structures her music. As you can hear below, the tune opens with some multi-tracked guitar arpeggios as well as Wallace’s overdubbed, simultaneously playful and beautiful delivery of a wispy folk melody. After more than three fraught minutes of hovering tension, with Ring playing bass-like arco on the cello, an ogre-like chorus shadows the singer, with the rest of the band improvising lines that flutter and bob through an elusive electronic scrim until Langlie stomps in with a walloping groove. Emmeluth’s feverish overblowing pushing things further into the red. No less strange and alluring is the next track, “Bittelille meg,” which morphs from an ethereal, drifty melody over a calliope-like pattern into a gritty, chunky loper elevated by Bjorå’s psychedelic overdrive. The dichotomy between Wallace’s sweet-toned melodies and the band’s visceral attack is endlessly satisfying, leading to all kinds of incongruous tonal marriages. While Wallace clearly has the chops and training of a genuine jazz singer, she has no interest in maintaining any single traditional practice. In fact, aside from the easy elasticity of her voice and non-annoying feel for wordless improvisation, the music could never be reduced to any single genre.
Each of the album’s eight pieces carve out unique sound worlds. The meditative shimmer that opens “Klokkestein,” with Ring’s cello slowly giving the arrangement shape, congeals with increasing cymbal play from Langlie, skittering electronics, pedal-kissed guitar textures, and, eventually, the resonant scrapes of the titular stones (known as “ringing rocks”), the volume and intensity ratcheting up until the uneasy calm drifts into cantering dance layered with dissonant alto squalls and frenzied, thin-toned drum kit clatter. A new groove is established, steadily pushing toward explosion, but it’s held back even as Wallace’s articulation grows more pointed, sharp, and declamatory. Bjorå is at his most chaotic and frenzied on the maniacally careening “Atlas,” but then he returns with ringing arpeggios that he tunes up and down in the midst of his phrases on the hallucinogenic ballad “Karamellgneis,” accented by aerated flute lines from Emmeluth. While the cute presentation of a childhood audio letter from the singer’s younger sister to a friend on “To Benedikte from Heather” doesn’t really hold up like the rest of the album, Eon is a true knockout that’s pushed Wallace to the top of my watch list.
These Things Happen extend the enduring Chicago-Amsterdam Axis
At the end of February, while I was in Chicago to oversee Frequency Festival, my colleagues over at Corbett vs. Dempsey—who were sadly out of town, themselves—quietly released a new album by a quartet now calling itself These Things Happen. That was the title of its debut album on Astral Spirits, recorded at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam back in 2016 but only released in 2022. The first record featured reedist Keefe Jackson, drummer Mikel Patrick Avery, and bassist Joshua Abrams with the great Dutch pianist Oscar Jan Hoogland tearing it up on a program that mixed originals with a simpatico fit alongside tunes by Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols, key forces on the music of pianist Misha Mengelberg (there was also a tune by Dewey Redman). The vibe was pure ICP, a puckish embrace of two key bebop composers—both central figures of Matthew Shipp’s Black Mystery School—albeit with less of the self-sabotage gestures that kept Mengelberg’s troupe on edge.
A Gentle Reminder, the follow-up, was recorded in Chicago in 2022, with Jason Roebke taking over the bass role, and the immersion in Monk-Nichols sensibilities is even stronger, but this time the quartet makes some choice formal fuckery here and there. The album opens with a Jackson piece titled “20 Years Past 12 O’Clock,” a mad swinger that allows Van Hoogland to hammer away at wonderfully sour chords with a direct rhythmic fury that Mengelberg generally eschewed. Even more jagged and corkscrewing is the pianist’s “Upperclass Underground,” its tricky intervals triggering a few “clinkers,” as Johnny Griffin used to say, from Jackson’s tenor. Like most of the album’s nine tracks, the performance is taut and concise, but within the off-kilter bebop context there’s plenty of weird accents and gambits—underneath the tenor solo, Roebke and Avery produce an intensely roiling motion designed to propel but not intrude, and just before the theme returns all four musicians kind of wind down, masterfully deconstructing the edifice they’d just constructed.
One recurring trick on the album sees one or more musicians doubling down on a single riff or part of a tune, cycling it through multiple repetitions marbled by little inconsistencies. On a version of Monk’s “Green Chimneys” both Jackson and Van Hoogland fixate on stuttering patterns inherent in the composition, drawing them out to create dynamic tension with the rest of the group, especially as the piece concludes, with another disassembling effort before they all realign. A charming account of Mengelberg’s cha-cha flavored “Een Beetje Zenuwachtig”—which astute listeners might know as “A Bit Nervous” from the pianist’s brilliant 1994 trio album Who’s Bridge, with bassist Brad Jones and drummer Joey Baron—features Jackson and Van Hoogland freezing the opening note for about 35 seconds through a deliciously out-of-sync staccato, and it’s not until a minute in that the saxophonist actually plays the melody. Hearing the two dissect and reshape phrases and the whole quartet expand and collapse time is thrilling. The entire band also digs into the gambit on Monk’s “Well You Needn’t,” which plays out as if the needle is stuck in the same groove during the opening phrase for about almost two minutes, generating a needling tension that’s only partially relieved when Jackson does the same thing with a second phrase, as the rest of the band begins to open up ever so slightly, delegating Roebke and Avery to provide the focal point with their manipulation of the groove. Check it out below. The quartet proves how much pleasure and experimentation can still be mined from a template that emerged nearly eight decades ago, expertly revamped by Mengelberg and Han Bennink about thirty years later. It all strikes me as fresh and energizing as anything I’ve heard so far this year.
A Sophisticated, Puzzling Collision of Bass and Electronics From Antti Virtaranta
Antti Virtaranta is Swedish-born Finn well-established as a fixture on Berlin’s improvised music scene. I’ve seen the bassist play a couple of times in some ad hoc settings in recent years, but he first made a real impression on me when I caught a solo set last October as part of Trouble in the East’s annual festival at the Panda Theater, where he delivered a compellingly peculiar mix of muscular double bass abstractions and wonderfully jarring, surprising electronic interventions. On Wednesday, April 1 Trouble in the East releases his solo album J 7 % Q # W 3 * % 9, a document of that practice, and it’s just as beguiling as I remember the live gig being. On the album’s Bandcamp page Virtaranta writes, “The sound is the interaction of non-reactive, live-sample manipulation from the electronics, and improvisational conversation with the bass through subtly varying qualities of the simple sounds of the bass.” Honestly, I’m not sure what that means or how the procedure works, but I know I like it.
Across the album he juggles viscous arco work marked by striated, strained, tightly-coiled patterns and pizzicato that’s no less tangled and visceral, but it’s the ever-changing electronics that sets things apart. His set-up seems to process the live samples beyond recognition, injecting what seems like highly unstable swoops, bloops, and smears into his feverish playing. Sometimes it sounds like computer music, sometimes it’s a battle of feedback and acoustic tones, and sometimes it conjures an impressively dynamic duo. On Friday, April 3 at Richten25 he’ll celebrate the release of the album, sharing the evening with the quintet SORBD. The listing credits Virtaranta with bass and “random electronics,” but they don’t appear totally random to me. He’s been developing this practice for seven years, and there seems to be a clear methodology behind the music, even if there is plenty of unpredictability within the system. I don’t recall him fiddling with the electronics very much when I saw him play in October, which leads me to believe that he’s programmed things in a way that he has some sense of general parameters, but outside of the bassist’s head it sounds as if he’s playing a kind of video game, using his instrument to navigate a steady stream of responses, obstacles, liquid harmonies, and blorpy shapes triggered by his bass playing. The recording offers a strong reminder of the physical exertion demanded from Virtaranta, and the electronics seem to leave him little space for stepping back or taking a pause. I also assume the electronics also help with unrelenting kind of interactivity, providing a steady flow of ideas. While my memory isn’t good enough to place that October performance against the one on this new album, I assume he has a variety of pathways or techniques he draws from each time, but there’s little about J 7 % Q # W 3 * % 9 that feels rote or familiar. Below you can check out the first part of the piece, which fills side 1 of the vinyl.
John Butcher and Growing Web of Collaborators
As with many veteran improvisers, British saxophonist John Butcher has forged a large, global community of collaborators. On his regular visits here he usually fills his calendar with multiple events to allow him to reunite with some of them. When I first arrived in this city in the summer of 2019 I caught parts of an Ausland residency that resulted in a series of strong recordings for the wonderful Ni Vu Ni Connu label, including Induction by a trio with bassist Werner Dafeldecker and percussionist Burkhard Beins, two of the most active and influential practitioners within the echtzeitmusik community. Butcher, of course, contains multitudes, but among those abilities is working within a collective mindset with a focus on gestural interaction, something he did with both of them for years when they all were members of Polwechsel.
The trio is reconvening again this week, but with a promising twist. The trio will helm two evenings of concerts at KM28 on Wednesday and Thursday, April 1 and 2, but it will only play in that original configuration once, the first night. But each program will include a new sextet, with Butcher, Beins, and Dafeldecker joined by trumpeter Liz Allbee, pianist Andrea Neumann, and fiddler Jessie Marino. After the Induction trio kicks off night one, they’ll be followed by a trio of the guest musicians before ending with the sextet, all of which will be strictly acoustic. In fact, Neumann, who’s largely reduced her instrumental arsenal to only electronically-modified “inside piano,” which in her case is the relatively portable innard of a grand piano, will actually play conventional piano on the first night—something I don’t think I’ve ever seen her do. The second night opens with duo sets from Butcher and Albee, Dafeldecker and Marino, and Beins and Neumann, followed by another sextet, but everything will feature amplification or electronics. Below you can check out a piece from the Induction album called “circulation.” (Full disclosure: Jessie Marino is my favorite person in the world.)
Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week
April 1: Liz Allbee, trumpet, Jessie Marino, fiddle, and Andrea Neumann, piano; John Butcher, saxophone, Werner Dafeldecker, double bass, and Burkhard Beins, percussion; Liz Allbee, trumpet, Burkhard Beins, percussion, John Butcher, saxophone, Werner Dafeldecker, double bass, Jessie Marino, fiddle, Andrea Neumann, piano, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
April 1: Mat Maneri, viola, Brandon Lopez, double bass, and Sun-Mi Hong, drums, 8:30 PM, Luisenkirche, Gierkeplatz 4, 10585 Berlin
April 1: Loren Stillman, alto and tenor saxophones, Bruno Bode, alto saxophone, clarinet, Robert Landfermann, double bass, and Oli Steidle, drums, 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin
April 2: John Butcher, amplified saxophone, and Liz Allbee, trumpet, electronics; Andrea Neumann, inside piano, mixer, and Burkhard Beins, amplified percussion; Jessie Marino, fiddle, and Werner Dafeldecker, electronics; Liz Allbee, trumpet, electronics, Burkhard Beins, amplified percussion, John Butcher, amplified saxophone, Werner Dafeldecker, electronics, Jessie Marino, fiddle, Andrea Neumann, inside piano, mixer, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
April 3: Antti Virtaranta, double bass, electronics; SORBD (Edith Steyer, clarinet, Mia Dyberg, alto saxophone, Rieko Okuda, piano, Isabel Rößler, double bass, and Sofia Borges, drums), 8:30 PM, Richten25, Gerichtstraße 25, 13347 Berlin
April 4: CP Unit (Chris Pitsiokos, alto saxophone, Marta Warelis, synthesizer, Dan Peter Sundland, electric bass, and Luca Marini, drums), 8 PM, Peppi Guggenheim, Weichselstrasse 7, 12043 Berlin
April 4: New Schlippenbach Trio (Rudi Mahall, clarinets, Alexander Von Schlippenbach, piano, and Dag Magnus Narvesen, drums), 8:30 PM, Panda Theater, Knaackstraße 97, (i.d. Kulturbrauerei, Gebäude 8) 10435, Berlin
The Wallace "Eon" is really great. Bought that and the Virtaranta for not only its sound, but I'm a big fan of having a large randomization process inside electronics - as a listener and performer - that provides an almost secondary instrumentalist to improvise with. These will definitely find their way onto my show beginning in May.
Welcome back Atomic-ish!! Great to hear that sound again fresh!!!