Too Much Music, Not Enough Time
Russ Johnson, Bill Dixon, Die Enttäuschung, Enemy, Max Andrzejewski
Russ Johnson Chronicles
I have been pretty damn satisfied with my life in Berlin over these last four years, but I still miss the improvised music community in Chicago, where I lived for 35 years. I’m always reminded of its ineffable qualities on trips back for the festival I still organize every February, Frequency. When I was back last year I got to hear a new quartet led by trumpeter Russ Johnson, a remarkably great and versatile musician who should be famous, playing the Hungry Brain. The band included violinist Mark Feldman, bassist Ethan Philion, and drummer Tim Daisy, and it was incredible, bristling with energy and rhythmic snap. I still remember learning that the trumpeter had moved to Milwaukee from New York back in 2011, when he turned up a sub for reedist Keefe Jackson in a quartet led by bass clarinetist Jason Stein. Johnson moved to the Midwest for a teaching gig at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, and ever since he’s made the 90-minute commute to Chicago countless times. Despite his geographic distance he’s become a crucial part of the Chicago scene. He’s made a bunch of records both as leader and sideman with Chicago folks, but the quartet I saw that February is arguably the best of them, and its debut album might represent a high water mark of his entire discography.
Reveal was released as part of an initial batch of titles on Calligram Records, a label operated by saxophonist Geof Bradfield and trumpeter Chad McCullough, and it delivers on the fiery promise of that gig I caught. It’s just one seven recordings with Johnson coming out during the second half of 2023, and because I’m such an admirer of his playing and I feel like he deserves extra attention I’m going to look at this output in an ongoing series within this newsletter. As Johnson told John Corbett in a terrific story about the trumpeter published in the Chicago Reader in 2019:
“There’s a saying: ‘Too in for the out crowd, too out for the in crowd.’ In some respects, this describes my career.”
Johnson is rooted in post-bop fundamentals, but he also loves to take the music out. There’s never any dividing line between these two elements of his voice. Instead, he follows where the music takes him. The tunes he wrote for Reveal are rock solid, marked by attractive melodies and muscular arrangements played by an incredible band. Feldman is a more recent transplant to Chicago—although he grew up there, before heading to Nashville and establishing himself as one of the most sophisticated improvisers in New York. He arrived back in Chicago during the pandemic and from the recordings I’ve heard in Chicago his playing has been jolted by a thrilling energy and sense of adventure. In his New York years he seemed to veer decidedly toward a more classical music attack, and while he’s lost of his precision and technique, his playing is imbued with a genuine immediacy. His ongoing adjustment to the city was captured in a great performance he gave with drummer Daisy in October of 2021, at the Catalytic Sound Festival. Daisy released the 37-minute improvisation titled “Elasticity” on an album called Circle Back (Relay Recordings). The duo demonstrates exactly that, generating sparks as they lock in, push against one another, and ultimately conjure an febrile dialogue that’s able to withstand all kinds of fascinating digressions. Not take away the focus on Johnson, but you can hear it below.
Daisy, of course, has long been a mainstay of Chicago’s scene for nearly two decades, a musician of serious rigor committed to constant growth. His bond with Feldman helped fuel Johnson’s new quartet. When I saw the band this year it was the first time I had ever heard of Philion, who is also a marvel. He subsequently released his own album as a leader, an inspired and original homage to Charles Mingus titled Meditations on Mingus (Sunnyside), released last year. He comes from a more straight-ahead practice than his bandmates in the Johnson quartet, but his sense of time, warm woody tone, and a muscular drive distinguish him. He seems to give every group he’s involved with a furious rhythmic thrust while holding down the changes with imperturbable clarity, and that’s certainly the case with Johnson’s band.
The quartet crackles right out of the gate with “Skips,” a tune with a slashing unison line that cleaves open the hiccupping groove indicated by the title. The trumpeter and violinist improvise simultaneously, interweaving and playing off one another’s lines during the first chorus, while in the next one they initially trade phrases before momentum takes over. The rhythm section brings a relentless push while also injecting unceasing bounce. The quartet’s malleability is made plain on “The Slow Reveal,” in which frictive whispers and gentle pings conjure the natural world in a lead up to the trumpeter’s romantic theme, which enters slowly, voiced only by him in a measured, silence-heavy elucidation, flanked by extended violin cries and pizz plucks, as the whole band steadily builds into roiling beauty. Check it out below. The group moves from strength to strength as the record unfolds, with the delicate “Long Branch,” an homage to fellow trumpeter jaimie branch marked by slow burn intensity and molten lyricism, followed by “REM Unit,” a brooding churn of texture and spontaneous interplay that savors its fuzzy contours. Elsewhere there’s a full improvised encounter between Daisy, Johnson, and Feldman on “TRM,” and the spirit of Abdul Wadud on the Julius Hemphill classic “Dogon A.D.” is transferred to Philion’s rope-thick grind on the hypnotic “Dog Gone It.” Do not sleep on this one. If you happen to be reading this from Chicago, the group celebrates the new release with a concert on Saturday, September 30 at Constellation.
Bill Dixon’s Early Legacy Back in Circulation
It seems unlikely that trumpeter Bill Dixon will ever receive his due, whether planting the seeds for the Jazz Composers Orchestra, carving out an unusual education practice, or developing a radical new language for his instrument. There’s lots more to his legacy, of course. When Dixon devoted himself to something he didn’t mess around, he went all in, so making records wasn’t ever his focus. Sadly, his scant discography is certainly one of the reasons he isn’t known better, and an important chunk of his slim output has often been impossible to find. That makes the appearance of Bill Dixon With Archie Shepp, 7-Tette & Orchestra Revisited (ezz-thetics) so welcome. Thanks to Swiss public domain law the label has been reissuing loads of essential 60s free jazz—to say nothing of key bebop and post-bop work from the likes of Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Bill Evans—in recent years, most of it readily available. The miraculous remastering of engineer Michael Brändli has improved the fidelity of just about everything I’ve heard in the Revisited series, and this title is no exception. But none of this music is currently in-print, nor does it appear to be on any streaming services, so it’s hard to argue against the need for this release.
In typical fashion the reissue breaks up material from several albums for this CD, excising tracks from two collaborative/split albums with Archie Shepp, while the entirety of his 1967 masterpiece Intents and Purposes (RCA) is included. All of the material is incredible, and it remains astonishing to hear how rapidly Dixon’s vision advanced over four years. The CD opens with the two Dixon compositions featured on his debut album—Archie Shepp-Bill Dixon Quartet—released by Savoy in 1962, right after the band, with bassist Don Moore and drummer Paul Cohen, had played in Europe. The original album also featured takes on Ornette Coleman’s “Peace” and “Somewhere” from West Side Story, both of which are fantastic. These two tracks probably represent Dixon’s most conventional playing on record, but it remains striking. As detailed by Bill Shoemaker’s typically erudite liner note essay, “Trio” rides on a monster bass ostinato that wouldn’t have been out of place on a Coltrane session at the time—his playing is fiery, marked by slashing phrases and unmistakable forward propulsion—while “Quartet” sounds more Ornette-ish. The whole quartet is smoking hot, here, with Shepp taking no prisoners.
Dixon and Shepp would stop working together soon after the album was made, so when they had to deliver a second album to fulfill the Savoy contract they simply split the record, with Shepp occupying his side with three pieces from his New York Contemporary 5, none of which are included on the ezz-thetics reissue. Dixon’s side was made with a septet that captured a massive leap, both compositionally and in regard to his own trumpet sound. The two pieces are still grounded in swing, but the ensemble—distinguished by the oboe playing of Ken McIntrye, the tuba colors of Howard Johnson, and the presence of both David Izenzon and Hal Dodson on double bass—possesses a very unusual timbre, and the leader’s own playing began to show signs of his more elliptical style, with a tone characterized by breathy elusiveness, shifting away from brassy drive in favor of something far more aerated and mercurial—although in certain passages he’s also incredibly visceral.
Dixon’s Intents and Purposes felt like a holy grail when I lived in Chicago, discussed in reverent tones by cornetist Rob Mazurek. I finally managed to borrow copy and while I was impressed with the music, I didn’t fully understand its peculiar genius. In 2011 the album got a proper reissue from the Chicago label International Phonograph, the imprint run by Revelation Records co-founder Jonathan Horwich. By that point I had figured out what was remarkable about the music. It picked up on the chamber-like tonality of the septet, but Dixon was no longer concerned with the swing impulse of jazz, creating a dense weave of sound as radical as anything going on either in the US or Europe, although it owed inspiration to both places. The sounds seem to levitate in lucid tangles, with splintery percussion and mournful strings that reside closer to classical music than free jazz. The album not only foreshadowed Dixon’s future work, where his trumpet tone grew increasingly febrile yet stark, often fed through electric reverb, and forecast a generation of European players who would blow much different sounds with the instrument, but it predicted possibilities for “jazz” composers to reinvent their language and approach in subsequent decades. While none of the music now sounds quite as a radical as it surely did when it was first released, it remains powerful and fresh. Below you can check out the album’s opening piece “Metamorphosis 1962-1966,” although this youtube clip lacks the clarity and bite the sound exhibits on this reissue.
Has the Real Enemy Stood Up?
Based on its three-album discography one might think that Enemy, the trio of pianist Kit Downes, bassist Petter Eldh, and drummer James Maddren, is actually three different bands. The group’s eponymous debut for Edition Records in 2018 introduced a mainstream piano trio loosely in the mold of the Bad Plus without the pop covers but with flashes of retro-80s synthesizer. The group’s melodically generous tunes updated the sound of introspective, lyric post-bop pianists like Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett with a fizzy energy, driving rhythm, and compressed production handled by the trio itself. It didn’t impress me then, and relistening to it now my opinion hasn’t changed. Not long after the album was issued Downes was signed by ECM Records, which has released several disparate recordings by him, including Vermillion in 2022. That album was billed collectively to the members of Enemy—conceivably an effort to develop the Downes brand with continuity—but the modus operandi was more or less the same, but the production and timbre were totally different. It was a fully acoustic outing, ballad-heavy, and suffused with Manfred Eicher’s love for reverb. I enjoyed the album much more than Enemy’s debut, even if it was a bit sleepy and washed out at times.
On Friday Enemy released its third album, The Betrayal (We Jazz), and introduced yet another new sonic iteration of itself. To be honest, the group occupies a sound in between those first two records, but everything about them is better: the production, the tunes, and the arrangements. We Jazz Magazine just published a cover story I wrote about Eldh, which discusses his talent as a producer: his thumbprints are all over the new record, which fattens up his bass playing, underlining its woody propulsion, while Madden’s drums sound like they were designed for a hip-hop session. The rhythmic ferocity is unmistakable, and Eldh often fades out tracks after just a few minutes, reflecting his twitchy impatience and mixtape aesthetics. Indeed, some of the tunes contain disparate sections that the group toggles between as if a DJ was switching between tracks. Apart from two collective compositions Downes and Eldh individually wrote all of the tunes, which are still catchy as hell, but shorn of the excessive treacle that sometimes crept in on the first record. The playing remains super nimble, with Downes expertly threading the forceful grooves without surrendering his innately sentimental touch, as if Oscar Peterson had grown-up listening to hip-hop. On the other hand, a tune like the pianist’s “Sun,” which you can listen to below, serves up high velocity bebop, with the rhythm section swinging at warp speed. The biggest difference I sense is that Enemy is now fully trusting their own instincts, and while most of the tools and concepts aren’t now, they appear to be embracing them with a fresh degree of fun and freedom. I expect those qualities will both be amped up when they play at KM28 on Wednesday, September 27.
Die Enttäuschung Has Still Got It
With little fanfare Berlin’s singular Die Enttäuschung released its first new studio album in six years, Music Minus One (Two Nineteen), this past July, and it’s as fantastic, fun, and buoyant as anything the band has ever done. It can be easy to take this quartet for granted now that I live in the same city, but they actually don’t play that often, and after listening to this new transmission I should never take such excellence as a given. Riding the effervescently swinging grooves of bassist Jan Roder and drummer Michael Greiner the spectacular frontline of trumpeter Axel Dörner and bass clarinetist Rudi Mahall essays a new batch of indelible tunes with a deep rapport fortified by decades of collaboration. Once again I’m reminded that there may be no better post-bop band in the game over the last two decades. The band doesn’t pull out any new tricks on the new album, which is packed with 17 pithy originals marked by melodic concision, tart harmony, and unassailable yin-yang elasticity—why should it? Within its well-oiled approach Die Enttäuschung continues to wed artistic exploration to deep creative pleasure.
From track to track the group toys with bebop tropes (to say nothing of the touches of classic swing that turn up, too) with a mixture of adoration and wry humor, pushing and pulling the sturdy compositions with playing that acknowledges no boundary between swing tradition and pure freedom. The degree of trust and playfulness on display can’t be faked—it’s a benefit of deep collaboration over time. I’m still becoming familiar with the new album, and there are so many catchy tunes it's hard to pick just one, but below you can check out “Ich bin nicht dazu gekommen.” The group is playing a last minute gig to belatedly mark the album’s release on Wednesday, September 27 at Neue Zukunft, now located at the former Stralau 68, which Greiner informs me was once an important Berlin spot for music.
Max Andrzejewski’s Hütte Pares Down on Reduce
Drummer and composer Max Andrzejewski has to be one of the busiest figures on Berlin’s creative music scene, working in plenty of bands and increasingly writing music for classical ensembles including Ensemble Resonanz and Neue Lausitzer Philharmonie, among others. In recent years much of his improvisation work has involved his duo Training with reedist and long-time creative partner Johannes Schleiermacher, which has frequently worked with guest musicians to create ever-changing bodies of work. The quartet Hütte is one of his oldest bands but even that project has been subject to his expanding artistic vision—in 2019 the ensemble featured singer Cansu Tanrikulu for an album featuring the songs of Robert Wyatt. In fact, the group, which also includes Schleiermacher, guitarist Tobias Hoffmann, and bassist Andreas Lang, has just dropped a terrific new album that pares things down to the core ensemble for the first time since its 2012 debut album.
In the press materials for the recording Andrzejewski says of the new material, "The pieces arose from a need to enter intermediate or floating states, for loops, for less material—from the listener's own need, ideally to be slowed down a little and ‘immersed’ in a present state.” I’m not exactly sure what he means, but there is a truth to the title of the album, Reduce. It’s not just the lack of guests, but a built-in formal constriction to the compositions, which tend to levitate in place. In a way this quality could be an indirect legacy of the time-freezing of Bill Dixon, mentioned above. The drummer is very active, creating a generous flow of shifting detail, quicksilver accents, and, most of all, fractal time, but his playing never draws attention to itself. Instead it does what it needs to do, offering a bubbling cauldron of rhythm for his bandmates to work with.
His tightly-coiled tunes emit a gentle optimism, with subtle hooks burrowing quickly into the memory. The grooves he carves with Lang are marvels of exploratory concision, as the musicians seek out every possible rhythmic permutation. The music references rock more than jazz, calling to mind expansive combos like Radian and Talk Talk in their measured experimentation, with Andrzejewski applying some of Martin Bradlmayr’s language to the slack drag of Jim Black. Hoffmann gets some solo space, but his greatest achievement is the placement and articulation of written parts, especially on a piece “Risse,” where clean chordal strums move around the stereo field in woozy syncopation, and thanks to overdubbing he ads zigzagging unison accompaniment to Schleiermacher’s sax lines before they break apart for simultaneous solos. Check it out below.
Hütte deftly uses the studio as a compositional tool here and there without ever making a fuss about it, with certain tracks constructed like pop tunes. Still within those taut parameters the group does plenty. In some ways the group reminds me of an instrumental, acoustic adaptation of U.S. Maple, especially on a track like the deliciously lurching “Gemini,” where the drummer brings a wonderfully draggy sense of masterfully plotted chaos. With pinched intervals Andrzejewski manages to write melodies both tender and catchy, often a missing element in bands so immersed in polyrhythmic deconstruction. There’s so much going on here, deceptively though it is, I hope that Hütte sticks with this core for a while—they don’t need anything else. The group celebrates the release of the album with a performance on Friday, September 29 at Kantine am Berghain, sharing the bill with Switzerland’s Julie Campiche Quartet. The concert also inaugurates an impressive new series programmed by Marie Blobel as jazzexzess, which will present groups like Skultura, Die Hochstapler, and Niescier-Reid-Harris later in the forthcoming months.
Recommended Berlin shows this week
September 26: This is the Kit, 7 PM, Franz Club, Schönhauser Allee 36, Kulturbrauerei 36, 10435 Berlin
September 27: Enemy (Kit Downes, Petter Eldh, James Maddren), 8 PM, KM28, Karl-Marx-Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
September 27: Die Enttauschung (Rudi Mahall, Axel Dörner, Jan Roder, Michael Griener), 9 PM, Neue Zukunft, Alt-Stralau 68, 10245 Berlin
September 28: Uli Kempendorff’s Field (with Peter Bruun, Christopher Dell, and Jonas Westergaard), 7 PM, Musikinstrumenten-Museum, Tiergartenstrasse 1, 10785 Berlin (Curt Sachs Hall)
Septemer 28: Anna Kaluza, Jason Roebke, Isabel Rößler & Samuel Hall, 8 PM, REH, Kopenhagener Straße 17, 10437 Berlin
Septemember 29: Julie Campiche Quartet, Max Andrzejewski’s Hütte, Kantine am Berghain, Am Wriezener Bahnhof, 10243 Berlin
Septemer 29: Nina Guo sings Morton Feldman’s Three Voices, 8 PM, KM28, Karl-Marx-Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
September 30: Amir ElSaffar (with Ole Mathisen, Tomas Fujiwara, Tania Giannouli, and Lorenzo Bianchi Hoesch), 7 PM, Pierre Boulez Saal, Französische Straße 33d, 10117 Berlin
September 30: Charlotte Greve’s Wood River, 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin
October 2: Pressure Chords (John McCowen, Lucy Railton, Weston Olencki); Michiko Ogawa, 8:30 PM, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)