Stumbling into Summer
Nduduzo Makhathini, Ernstalbrecht Stiebler, Ernie & Eddie
South African Pianist Nduduzo Makhathini Brings Actual Jazz to XJazz
The 2024 edition of the XJazz Festival begins tonight with a performance by Nala Sinephro at Huxley’s Neue Welt, but the real action ramps up later in this week. There are a number of excellent artists performing at this year’s edition—including Shabaka Hutchings, whose Wednesday show is sold out—but more than ever “jazz” feels like the most marginal element of the program, despite the name of the festival. Guitarist Bill Frisell plays Thursday, May 9 at Emmauskirche with his excellent trio featuring bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Rudy Royston, although you won’t find such trivial details on the festival’s own website. At the risk of coming off as an old fart, the guitarist’s line-up is valuable information for those invested in improvisation, but this festival always seems more geared to pop and R&B, with jazz entering as classy signifier but a negligible element. Bill Frisell is a multivalent artist exploring many different paths, but the fest treats him as a one-size-fits-all brand.
The superb South African pianist Nduduzo Makhathini brings his current working trio with bassist Zwelakhe-Duma Bell le Pere and drummer Francisco Mela to the festival in advance of an excellent new album arriving next month on Blue Note, uNomkhubulwane. He headlines a double bill with fellow pianist Omer Klein and trumpeter Sebastian Studnitzky on Sunday, May 12 at 6:30 PM at Emmauskirche. I’m still getting my head around Makhathini’s new album, which is totally accessible, yet devotes its three-part structure to deeply traditional South African folklore, spirituality, and language. What I mean is that a listener can easily dive into the music, which is artistically fulfilling even without any sense of context, but there’s a lot more woven into these fluid, soulful grooves than just some toe-tapping pleasure.
The pianist opens his dense liner note essay, writing:
Unlike my previous records which often expressed intention through composition or some form of conceptual paradigm, this offering was born via a kind of prophetic text. In other words, the sonic in this album came as a result of listening-hearing-sensing (ukuzwa) and establishing a relationship with an ‘elsewhere’ (a metaphysical dimension) through some guided-ness. Sound, in this regard, is realized as a manifestation of the word (izwi) via a relationship with supernatural voices. The word, in this sense, can be understood as a form of citation from primordial text, and in this case, Nguni vocabularies/vibrations through ‘prophetic consciousness’.
So, I’m still trying to assimilate those ideas into my listening experience. Still, there’s no education required to enjoy a ballad like “Izinkonjana,” which opens the second part of the suite. Check it out below. The tune is redolent of the sort of South African gospel we’ve been exposed to through the Zulu harmony singing of Ladysmith Black Mambazo or the elegant, paradigm-shifting sounds of pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, while there’s no missing the connection to late Coltrane on “Amanxusa Asemkhathini.” A number of pieces feature the pianist adding vocals, speaking and chanting as much as singing, although it never gets in the way of his keyboard playing. “Uxolo,” a ballad from the first part of the suite, conjures vintage post-bop, with the pianist’s graceful touch gliding over the rhythm section’s elastic grooves. Makhathini’s music has become more diverse and substantive with each new recording, and he’s got the kind of vision that allows him to tackle just about any context or style while making it his own.
Ernstalbrecht Stiebler’s 10th Decade
This morning the first sentence I originally wrote about German composer Ernstalbrecht Stiebler, who celebrated his 90th birthday on March 29, claimed he was in the midst of a renaissance, as interest in his oeuvre has never been stronger, but that term suggests that he had previously enjoyed some degree of notoriety. I’m hardly an expert on his music, but as far as I can tell he’s been composing since the early 1960s, when he studied under Karlheinz Stockhausen at Darmstadt, but he has only experienced sustained interest in his work over the last decade or so, although a pair of recordings featuring his work were issued on the Swiss Hat Art label in the late 1990s. Since the defunct M=minimal imprint released three albums of his work in the early 2010s there has been a relatively steady flow of his music appearing, with Edition Telemark and Another Timbre sharing most of it since 2017. It’s all better late than never, and Stiebler has clearly been taking advantage of the increased interest, as a three-event celebration of his latest birthday this weekend at Theater im Delphi includes plenty of new work.
EA:90, Festival for Ernstalbrecht Stiebler's 90th Birthday begins on Saturday evening concert at 6:30 PM with a program curated by Hauke Harder focusing on rarely heard earlier work, including his 1970 piece “Lines for Piano,” here played by Hartmut Leistritz. Most of the featured compositions have never been recorded, although the 1998 solo piano piece “Quart” was featured on one of the out-of-print M=minimal releases, Mit der Zeit, from 2014. The two programs on Sunday focus on more recent compositions, particularly Stiebler’s fruitful collaborations with violinist Billiana Voutchkova, who will take center stage at the 5 PM concert on Sunday, May 12—titled “Extensions,” which she curated. The program does include one of his best early pieces, Extension für Streichtrio” from 1963, which has enjoyed a revival sparked by an account played Voutchkova, violist Nurit Stark, and cellist Michael Rauter on the 2020 album Für Biliana (Another Timbre). Voutchkova and Rauter will be joined here by violist Grégoire Simon. That same album also features the stunning solo title piece, which the violinist will also perform on Sunday—check it out below—alongside a couple of short solo and duo pieces and a new collaboration between Voutchkova, Stiebler, and bassoonist Dafne-Vicente Sandoval. Finally, the program will also include a new iteration of “Slow Poem for Stiebler,” a dynamic partnership between Voutchkova and Sarah Davachi, on reed organ. A gripping recording of the collaborative piece—which expands some of the most concise gestures from “Für Biliana” into a variable meditation that also includes the violinist's wordless incantations— was released by Another Timbre last year. An extract from that recording follows the audio for the piece from which it was derived.
The final program occurs on Sunday evening, May 12 at 7 PM, with a set dominated by world premieres, Mozart’s Piano Sonata No.12 in F Major, Adagio—highlighting Stiebler’s own piano playing—and a lone older Stiebler work from 1998, Im “Takt für 2 Bongos.” This concert was curated by cellist Timan Kanitz, who has been participating in a slew of improvised duos with the pianist, with releases on both Another Timbre and Edition Telemark. Several of these compositions feature vocalists Christian Kesten and Dylan Kerr.
Song of the Week
Back in the early years of the current century I pretty much picked up nearly every soul and R&B reissue released on England’s Kent label, often at a pace that rarely allowed me to really digest and become intimate with any given title. Soul aficionado Dave Godin was behind many of these efforts, and his mix of research and good ears proved hard to resist. Such was the case with Lost Friends, a killer collection of music billed to Eddie & Ernie, a duo active in Phoenix, Arizona during the 1960s and early 1970s. I had never heard of the duo when I purchased the CD. I definitely listened and enjoyed the music, but somehow the CD only went into heavy rotation after we had relocated to Berlin. Eddie & Ernie cut sides for a variety of small labels, with occasional dalliances on bigger imprints like Chess and Columbia. There are some duds among the 24 tracks, but more often the music connects and a handful of tracks are utterly sublime, including this week’s song, “You Make My Life a Sunny Day,” a tune cut in 1971 when the singers had joined force with a Phoenix school teacher named Peter James, who co-wrote the song with the pair. It was recorded by James’ band Phoenix Express and slated for release on the Loadstone label, but the recording was shelved, and another version cut by Jacqueline Jones was issued instead. Her version is fine, but Godin came across the Phoenix Express version while compiling the Lost Friends CD, where it first appeared. In 2009 it was released as a 7” on Ever-Soul, a subsidiary of Dap-Tone Records. The complementary voices of the two singers elevate the tune to ridiculous heights, starting with the opening whoop as the Hammond B-3 organ swell kicks off the tune, through the soaring twinned chorus, and into a white-hot bridge. I’ve played it dozens of times over the last couple of years and it somehow only gets better, with the killer bass line, compact brass charts, and an indelible set of melodies.
Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week
May 8: Richard Valitutto, piano (Eastman, Smith, Mompou, Finnissy, and Chopin), 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
May 8: Shabaka Hutchings; eX.11, 7 PM, X-Jazz Festival 2024, Emmauskirche, Lausitzer Platz 8 A, 10997 Berlin
May 9: Tobias Delius, tenor saxophone, clarinet, and Christian Lillinger, drums, 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
May 9: Bill Frisell Trio (Bill Frisell, guitar, Thomas Morgan, double bass, and Rudy Royston, drums), 6:30 PM, X-Jazz Festival 2024, Emmauskirche, Lausitzer Platz 8 A, 10997 Berlin
May 9: Moor Mother, 8 PM, Großes Haus, Volksbühne, Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, 10178 Berlin
May 9: The Still (Rico Lee, guitar, Chris Abrahams, piano, Derek Shirley, bass, and Steve Heather, drums), 8:30 PM, Morphine Raum, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)
May 9: Barbara Hannigan, voice, and Bertrand Chamayou, piano (Zorn, Scriabin, Messiaen), 7:30 PM, Pierre Boulez Saal, Französische Straße 33d, 10117 Berlin
May 10: Windisch Guitar Quintet (Julius Windisch, piano, Ronny Graupe, electric guitar, Bertram Burkert, electric guitar, Thorbjørn Stefansson, double bass, and Marius Wankel, drums), 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
May 10: Anne Gillis; Augustė Vickunaitė, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
May 11: EA:90, Festival for Ernstalbrecht Stiebler's 90th birthday: Monochromie, with Tilman Kanitz, cello, Hartmut Leistritz, piano, and Astrid Schmeling, flute (Stiebler, Harder), 6:30 PM, Theater im Delphi, Gustav-Adolf-Strasse2 2, 13086, Berlin
May 11: Gordan (Svetlana Spajić, voice, Andi Stecher, drums, and Guido Möbius, feedback, bass, electronics); Skultura (Cansu Tanrıkulu, voice, electronics, Liz Kosack, synthesizer, Eldar Tsalikov, clarinet, saxophone, Mariá Portugal, drums, and Nick Dunston, double bass), 9 PM, Ausland, Lychener Str. 60, 10437 Berlin
May 11: Danny Brown, 9 PM, Heimathafen Neukölln, Karl-Marx-Straße 141, 12043 Berlin
May 12: EA:90, Festival for Ernstalbrecht Stiebler's 90th birthday: Extension, with Sarah Davachi, organ, Michael Rauter, cello, Grégoire Simon, viola, Dafne Vicente-Sandoval, bassoon, and Biliana Voutchkova, violin (Stiebler, Voutchkova/Davachi), 5 PM, Theater im Delphi, Gustav-Adolf-Strasse2 2, 13086, Berlin
May 12: JACK Quartet (Wulliman, Crawford Seeger, Feldman, Smith, Ergün), 6 PM, Pierre Boulez Saal, Französische Straße 33d, 10117 Berlin
May 12: EA:90, Festival for Ernstalbrecht Stiebler's 90th birthday: Sensitivity, with Werner Dafeldecker, double bass, Tilman Kanitz, cello, Dylan Kerr, voice, Christian Kesten, voice, Rebecca Lane, flute, Sabrina Ma, drums, Michael Rauter, cello, Caleb Salgado, double bass, Ernstalbrecht Stiebler, piano (Mozart, Stiebler) 7 PM, Theater im Delphi, Gustav-Adolf-Strasse2 2, 13086, Berlin
May 12: Ndudzo Makathini Trio; Omer Klein & Studnitzky, 6:30 PM, X-Jazz Festival 2024, Emmauskirche, Lausitzer Platz 8 A, 10997 Berlin
May 13: Brad Mehldau Trio (Brad Mehldau, piano, Felix Mosehome, double bass, and Jorge Rossy, drums), 8 PM, Konzerthaus Berlin, Gendarmenmarkt 2, 10117 Berlin
May 13: Shabazz Palaces, 8 PM, Frannz Club, Schönhauser Allee 36, Kulturbrauerei, 10435 Berlin