Spring Has Sprung
Julian Lage, Ingebrit Håker Flaten's Knarr, Kaluza Quartett, Maya Bennardo, Ahmad Al Jaberi
Guitarist Julian Lage Explores Broader Vistas on his New Album Speak to Me
Julian Lage is an undeniably fantastic guitarist melding astonishing technique with exquisite taste. Since emerging as a sideman with vibist Gary Burton in the early 2010s his versatility, empathy, and virtuosity have been clear even if his own musical personality has generally been secondary to serving whatever context he finds himself within, whether working as one of John Zorn’s favorite musicians or more recently elevating Kris Davis’ Diatom Ribbons. His working trio with bassist Jorge Roeder and drummer Dave King has been an excellent platform for his music thanks in part to its nonchalant flexibility—it can swing gently or unleash deep, hard-rocking grooves without a hiccup, as evinced by a series of superb albums for Mack Avenue and Blue Note. The trio plays a sold out show this week in Berlin at Gretchen on Friday, April 19. While that trio is more than capable of adapting to the guitarist’s stylistic pivots, translating his vision with nimble grace and impressive compactness, Lage recently dropped an impressive new album Speak to Me (Blue Note) where he collaborated closely with producer Joe Henry, not only staking out a more rootsy, Americana vibe but occasionally embracing an edgier side of his music.
Henry, of course, is a sophisticated singer and songwriter who long ago stretched beyond his country-rock roots for a more genre-agnostic duskiness that’s served his poetic inclinations well, and he’s subsequently earned an even greater reputation as a producer, creating new contexts for a wide array of artists including Bettye LaVette, Solomon Burke, Rosanne Cash, Joan Baez, Allen Tousssaint, Meshell Ndegeocello, Mose Allison, and Salif Keita, among others. Henry likes to slow things down in his own music and for those he produces, fostering work of exquisite patience and non-fussy detail. His work on Lage’s record stands among his best. Although the music is all instrumental, much of it emphasizes the guitarist’s storytelling mastery, where his meticulously crafted solos convey a kind of wordless lyricism that’s tough to resist—despite the absence of singers, these all feel like “songs.” Henry deftly underlines that quality through a dizzying variety of contexts, from the blues-rock vibe of “Northern Shuffle,” and Nick Drake-Bob Dylan folk-rock mash-up of “Omission,” or the soulful, slow-burn luxury of “Serenade,” which summons the spirit of Johnny Smith.
The complex, multipartite acoustic solo piece “Myself Around You” blurs lines between the sort of classical-tinged playing he often delves into alongside Gyan Riley and straight-up Americana, building a dazzling fantasia that’s free of any single tradition, while “South Mountain,” which opens with Kris Davis producing some lovely prepared piano clangs before the piece opens up, swaying between a pastoral meditation and a folk-pop gem, all spiked with unusual harmonies and gamelan-like timbres. King and Roeder play on most of the album, but a handful of guests help extend the music’s range, including Davis, LA studio musician Patrick Warren, and Henry’s saxophone-playing son Levon. It’s a lovely album, with just about all of its thirteen Lage originals inhabiting different terrain. The music reinforces Lage’s incredible range, while suggesting that a strong producer like Henry can imagine broader possibilities for his music. I assume the trio will focus on this material while on tour, but without outside help the music is likely to be presented in a more stripped-down, unified context. Below you can check out the official video for the album’s title track, which is, admirably, from a live performance rather than the studio version.
Bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten Finds Inspiration From Within
Norwegian bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten established his remarkable authority as an improviser and rhythmic anchor decades ago, serving as the crucial anchor in many excellent bands including Atomic, I.P.A., the Thing, Free Fall, Scorch Trio, and Element. He’s been a dynamic community figure, especially during the years he spent in Austin, Texas, where he launched the Sonic Transmissions fest and a record label of the same name. Since moving back to Norway in the early days of the pandemic he’s steadfastly supported up-and-coming musicians, especially those living and working in Trondheim, where he now lives. Over the years he’s led a handful of his own bands, including the Ingebrigt Håker Flaten Chicago Sextet and Young Mothers, groups formed during his years in the US. Soon after moving back to Norway he organized a stellar band called Knarr to play a book of profound original tunes that serve as personal reflections on his own life and the people close to him. The bassist has always been exceedingly open-minded and generous, and over the years he’s tended to follow his gut, for better or worse. But he’s reached a point where he’s learned how to translate these personal ups-and-downs into gripping music.
The group’s 2021 debut (Exit) Knarr (Odin) featured the kind of ensemble that seemed unlikely to carry on as a working band considering how in-demand musicians like trumpeter Eivind Lønning and alto saxophonist Mette Rasmussen are. The group also included Håker Flaten’s I.P.A. bandmate Atle Nymo on reeds along with a handful of players that have rapidly ascended in the time since it was made, including drummer Veslemøy Narvesen, guitarist Oddrun Lilja Jonsdottir, and pianist Oscar Grönberg. The album marked a quantum leap in the bassist’s compositional and bandleading abilities, corralling his vast interests into a solid set of tunes that were all expertly arranged to deliver something much more profound and deep than anything he’d ever pulled off before. Each of the album’s six pieces was written for a different city that’s left its mark on the bassist. Below you can hear the album’s opening track “Miles Ave (for Austin),” named for the street he lived on in the titular city.
Knarr has continued with a revolving cast of collaborators ever since, playing in fits and starts, but never really gaining the head of steam it deserved. A version of the group makes its overdue Berlin debut this week with a performance at KM28 on Friday, April 19. The line-up does include some of the original members—Rasmussen and drummer Olaf Olsen—along with a couple of new players: Jonathan Horne, the agile Texas guitarist from Young Mothers who recently made simpatico contributions to the excellent second album by Texas singer-songwriter Jana Horn, and the busy Norwegian saxophonist Karl Hjalmar Nyberg. Grönberg remains a member of the group, but for this show the exceptional Amsterdam-based pianist Marta Warelis rounds out the lineup. The group will release its second album Breezy (Sonic Transmissions)—an homage to trumpeter jaimie branch—in late September. The recording also features the sublime Copenhagen-based Norwegian trumpeter Erik Kimestad Pedersen, and it somehow ups the ante on the ensemble’s killer debut.
Anna Kaluza Pushes Cool Jazz Verities into the Real of Free Improvisation
Although I only gradually became aware of Berlin alto saxophonist Anna Kaluza after moving to the city in 2019, she’s been a quiet force scene for quite some time. Over the course of the last decade she has forged a strong musical bond with veteran bassist Jan Roder—best-known for his work in Die Enttäuschung—the fruits of which were recently shared on a terrific duo album released in 2022. Her playing on Am Frankfurter Tor (Relative Pitch) not only revealed the pair’s strong rapport, but highlighted her ability to apply a buoyancy redolent of Lee Konitz’s lilting attack within a fully improvised setting. Kaluza definitely comes from the jazz camp rather than the more abstract ethos that dominated the improvised music community here, although she can readily veer into more open-ended terrain, as on “sechs,” where Roder’s sour arco striations focus more on texture and Kaluza’s playing pulls apart bebop phrasing into something more jagged and tonally acrid. Below you can check out “vier,” a fairly representative track from the album where the bassist provides drive and shapes form in real-time, giving the saxophonist wide berth for her tuneful, rhythmically adroit improvisations.
The connection with Roder is rooted in her long-running Kaluza Quartett, which dropped its debut album back in 2013. Back then the group’s drummer was Oli Steidle, but at some point Kay Lübke took over in the group, which also features the great trombonist Christof Thewes. Last month the band dropped its belated follow-up record Jack (Aut), which adheres to a similar aesthetic as the duo, with fully improvised music rooted in post-bop sensibilities but free of its formal constraints. The group celebrates the release with a couple of shows this week, performing Wednesday, April 17 at Alter Schwede, and Thursday, April 18 at Sowieso.
The bulk of the new album is occupied by the opening track “Unterseiten,” more than 27 minutes of febrile, ebb-and-flow interaction. Roder and Lübke have plenty of experience working together in Silke Eberhard’s excellent tune-based trio, which provides a vague point of reference to the music here, but in this context the rhythm section ranges more freely, producing a steady churn of rising-and-falling tension, post-swing propulsion and bumpy explorations where fixed time is shattered. Kaluza and Thewes prove to be a dynamic frontline usually engaging in garrulous chatter as they improvise together, abstracting the multilinear expression of vintage cool jazz into something more muscular and probing. The band doesn’t try to overturn the apple cart, but instead it digs deep into a shared language where electric connections, fecund tangents, and collective thrust deliver sustained interest and elusive pleasure. Below you can check out one of the shorter tracks from Jack, “Wieso (So),” a play on the name of the venue hosting the second of the band’s shows this week.
The Touching Fragility of Violinist Maya Bennardo’s Interior Soundworld
The next Nowhere Street concert happens this coming Saturday, April 20 with the solo Berlin debut of the remarkable American violinist Maya Bennardo at KM28. Bennardo is based in Stockholm these days and is probably best-known as a member of the versatile string ensemble Mivos Quartet, which has recorded the complete quartets of Steve Reich and collaborated with jazz artists like Ambrose Akinmusire and Cecile McClorin Salvant. Bennardo is also half to the sublime violin-viola duo andPlay with Hannah Levinson, which performed a remarkable set on this year the opening night of Frequency Festival, the annual gathering of experimental music I organize in Chicago each February.
I haven’t heard any of the music on this weekend's program, which includes “aria,” a brand new piece written for her by the great Canadian composer Linda Catlin Smith. The program also features “dormant gardens 1B.,” a 2022 composition by the violinist herself, and “Så vill jag glömma,” a 2018 piece by Kristofer Svensson, who is emerging a major new voice in Sweden. Below you can check Bennardo performing their extraordinary 2017 work “Duk med broderi och bordets kant,” which appeared on the violinist’s superb 2022 album Four Strings (Kuyin). There’s a folk-like simplicity to some of its grainy lines, which emphasize the friction of her delicate gestures, set within a gorgeously patient landscape distinguished by effective patches of silence and contemplation. I can’t wait to hear all of it.
Song of the Week
I don’t know anything about the San Francisco-based digital imprint ShellacHead, which has been largely inactive of late, with only a couple of compilations in the last seven years, but in my estimation two of its collections are genuinely essential. I love its 2020 release Taarab: Songs of the Swahili Coast, an excellent complement to the heroic work of Werner Graebner—the guy behind the great Zanzibara series through Buda Musique—but the album that I treasure most is the 2015 collection Sudan (ShellacHead Annual 2015), which presents 15 incredible singles dating from much better times in the war-torn land, in the 1960s-1970s. After stumbling upon Mohammed Wardi’s brilliant Live in Addis Ababa, 1994 (Rags Music) decades ago I became mildly obsessed with Sudanese music, most of which remains incredibly difficult to find despite a handful of great collections like Two Niles to Sing a Melody: The Violins & Synths of Sudan (Ostinato) or the seemingly out-of-print The Golden Era of Sudanese Music (Blue Nile). There are clear parallels to the classic era of Ethiopian music in terms of the pentatonic harmony and the often funky grooves, but Sudan had its own style, rich in the strings then popular in Egyptian shaabi. The whole ShellacHead collection is killer, but for this week’s song I’m highlighting “Hawj Erreeh” by a singer named Ahmad Al Jaberi, whose incredible vocal lines are so microtonally sharp that he seems to be aping Autotune software, but his crazy melismatic pitch-bending is all natural. Check it out below.
I’m not the only moved by this song. Vancouver guitarist/oudist Gordon Grdina recorded a version of the tune with his group Haram on its 2022 album Night’s Quietest Hour (AttaBoyGirl).
Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week
April 16: Jason Moran, piano, and Christian McBride, double bass: Celebrating Ellington, 7:30 PM, Pierre Boulez Saal, Französische Straße 33d, 10117 Berlin
April 16: Apparat Plays Hanna Hartman; Ute Wassermann, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
April 17: Kaluza Quartet (Anna Kaluza, alto saxophone, Christof Thewes, trombone, Jan Roder, double bass, and Kay Lübke, drums), 8 PM, Alter Schwede, Schwedenstraße 11a, 13357 Berlin
April 17: Hedvig Mollestad Trio, 8 PM, Urban Spree, Revaler Straße 99, 10245 Berlin
April 17: Tomeka Reid: Celebrating Ellington (Tomeka Reid, cello, Taylor Ho Bynum, trumpet, Paolo Botti, viola, Cristiano Calcagnile, percussion, Anna Webber, saxophone, flute, Mathias Müller, trombone, and Silvia Bolognesi, double bass), 7:30 PM, Pierre Boulez Saal, Französische Straße 33d, 10117 Berlin
April 18: Kaluza Quartet (Anna Kaluza, alto saxophone, Christof Thewes, trombone, Jan Roder, double bass, and Kay Lübke, drums), 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
April 19: Knarr (Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, double bass, Marta Warelis, piano, Mette Rasmussen, saxophone, Karl Hjalmar Nyberg, saxophone, Jonathan Horne, guitar, Olaf Olsen, drums), 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
April 19: Julian Lage Trio (with Dave King, drums and Jorge Roeder, double bass), 8:30 PM, Gretchen, Obentrautstr. 19-21, 10963 Berlin
April 19: Bertrand Denzler, tenor saxophone, Derek Shirley, double bass, and Steve Heather, drums; JR3 (Rudi Mahall, clarinets, Olaf Rupp, guitar, and Jan Roder, double bass), 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
April 20: Maya Bennardo (plays Linda Catlin Smith, Kristofer Svensson, and Bennardo), 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
April 20: Camila Nebbia, tenor saxophone, Michael Formanek, double bass, and Vinnie Sperrazza, drums, 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
April 20: Alexander Tillegreen; Pierre Warnecke, 9 PM, Kantine am Berghain, Am Wriezener Bahnhof, 10243 Berlin
April 21: Axel Dörner, trumpet, electronics, and Beat Keller, guitars, 3 PM, Satellit, Weinstraße 11, 10249 Berlin