East First Street Is Positively the Place to Be For Jazz This Sunday

The series of free jazz concerts in Lower East Side parks this fall is an especially good one, and continues into the second week of October. One of the best of the bunch is this Sunday, Sept 25, starting at 1:30 PM with alto saxophonist Aakash Mittal – who’s also scheduled to take a rare turn on clarinet – joined by vocalist Jasmine Wilson and drummer Lesley Mok. Mittal is a beast, a ferociously dynamic improviser who’s immersed himself in both Indian and Middle Eastern music and is not to be missed. At 2:30 bassist William Parker takes a rare turn on sintir, percussion and double reeds alongside Hamid Drake on percussion, which promises to be a good, North African-inspired segue. Alexis Marcelo closes out the night on keys with Adam Lane on bass and Michael Wimberly on drums in the garden at 33 East 1st St.

As you might guess, the artist on the bill who’s most recently appeared on album is Parker: his discography is longer than some books. This could be wrong, but it looks like the latest addition to that body of work is Welcome Adventure Vol. 2, sixty percent of which is streaming at Bandcamp.

The generally august and terse bassist gets off to an unusual racewalking start in the opening number, Sunverified, in tandem with Matthew Shipp’s scampering, sunsplashed piano over drummer Gerald Cleaver’s tumbles and bright cymbals. Daniel Carter’s sax slowly expands from a balmy, anchoring role to biting modalities: lots of outside-the-box playing here.

Track two is Blinking Dawn, Carter blasting through the blinds by himself and having fun with harmonics before Cleaver comes knocking at the door. Shipp punches in hard as Carter’s clarinet floats sepulchrally in Mask Production – a reference to CDC pre-plandemic stockpiling, maybe? Parker’s fluttering and then tiptoeing approach signals Shipp’s equally phantasmagorical stroll. These guys have worked together since forever and this is one of the best things they’ve ever put on cassette (still available at the Bandcamp page!).

The first of the tracks you can only hear on that cassette, at least for now, is Wordwide, which the quartet begin as a lingering nocturnal tableau with Carter on sax, but Shipp is restless and that spreads to Cleaver. The contrast between Carter’s floating sax and Shipp’s elegantly sharp-teethed gearwheels is one of the album’s high points.

The closing number is Da Rest Is Story (good titles here, dudes), Cleaver’s slinky and increasingly animated groove underpinning Carter’s defiant microtonalities as Shipp mines his signature icy, starry modalities. The saxophonist’s mournful circles over the piano’s eerily insistent chime are another of this record’s many attractions – all of which would probably sell more cassettes if everyone could hear them.

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Free Jazz Icon Daniel Carter Releases a Surreal Virginia Woolf-Inspired Album

Daniel Carter‘s latest addition to his epic discography is The Uproar in Bursts of Sound and Silence. It’s yet another one of those albums whose production was wrapped up in 2019, but which are just now seeing the light of day. It’s a highlight among Carter’s hundreds of releases because it features him mostly on vocals. The New York free jazz multi-wind legend has gone on record as saying that he wants to be a rapper by the time he hits ninety. This album – which is mostly up at Bandcamp – validates that objective.

Two numbers feature Carter doing spoken word excerpts from Virginia Woolf’s iconic, haunting novel The Waves. Carter delivers his own lyrics on another, and there are also two extended instrumentals where he plays flute, clarinet, soprano and alto sax.

The brief first track, Hands, at the Bonfire is all foreshadowing: you have to listen closely to catch the creepy ending as the loopy backdrop from Evan Strauss’ synth and Sheridan Riley’s staggered drums fades out. The second number, Gemini Rising is the the real jazz odyssey here. A guitarist who goes by “5-Track” plays icy chorus-box flares and washes as Strauss’ bass moves slowly and judiciously, matched by Riley’s cymbals while Carter’s overdubs float calmly amid the slowly diverging web recorded in Seattle in 2018. It’s sort of the missing link between Metal Box-era Public Image Ltd., Bill Laswell and Dave Fiuczynski’s eerily starry microtonal work.

Strauss – credited as composer on all the tunes here and drawing on his own transcriptions of birdsong – plays bass plus bass clarinets and tenor sax over a skittish, increasingly quavery forward drive on Examination Exanimation, behind Carter’s fragmentary, metaphorically loaded imagery. The final cut is Aquarian Mars, a jaggedly swaying, creepy ba-bump tune spiced with soaring slide guitar.

Carter’s next gig is at 1:30 PM tomorrow, Sept 5 at that afternoon free jazz extravaganza at the community garden at 129 Stanton St near Essex with soprano saxophonist Sam Newsome and flutist Laura Cocks. Drummer TA Thompson’s Sonic Matters with bassist Ken Filiano and brilliant jazz bassoonist Sara Schoenbeck follows on the bill; the similar and potentially haunting Andrew Lamb Trio close out the afternoon starting at 4.

A Pensive, Evocative Album by Jessica Ackerley and Daniel Carter

Guitarist Jessica Ackerley and multi-instrumentalist Daniel Carter‘s duo album Friendship: Lucid Shared Dreams and Time Travel is testament to fearlessness under duress. While music venues were shuttered in the 2020 totalitarian takeover, these two fixtures of the New York improvisational scene were keeping hope alive and playing outdoor shows. Convening in a Williamsburg studio late that summer, they recorded eight thoughtful rainy-day improvisations, streaming at Bandcamp.

Ackerley plays acoustic guitar here, with Carter on his usual mix of saxes, trumpet, flute, clarinet and occasional percussion. On the record, Ackerley is typically the acerbic one, stubbornly resisting any distinct major or minor resolutions while Carter generally serves as calm voice of reason.

To open, Ackerley plays opaquely lingering, trebly chords as Carter’s sax wafts gently overhead. Track two begins more spare and wintry, Carter maintaining a balmy presence punctuated by a few wary trills until Ackerley shifts into more emphatic territory.

The third track begins sparsely, Ackerley’s strumming rising with hints of flamenco. She backs away, then returns with a spikier, more precise attack in the aptly titled Dream State: Carter’s sax descends from the clouds to goose his bandmate’s phrasing and pull her toward more frenetic and then immersive territory

Lucid Dreamer features spaciously strolling guitar underpinning wafting flute, then grows with waves of energy and descends to lullaby ambience. Hidden Truths is another aptly titled number, Carter picking up with an occcasionaly microtone-fueled edge as Ackerley runs an insistent, mysterious percussive riff, then follows a squirrelly, somewhat furtive trail. A hazy thicket of sound ensues, as does the persistent comforting/disquieting dichotomy that permeates the album.

Carter develops a fond sax ballad as Ackerley scrambles to find her footing in Foreknowledge, He switches to clarinet for a woodsy intro to the final number, Awakening, Ackerley building quickly to a hypnotic, hammering pulse. It ends decidedly unresolved.

There’s no telling where Carter could be next – maybe several places on a single evening. Ackerley’s next gig is on May 31 at 6:30 PM at Downtown Music Gallery as part of an intriguing, potentially pyrotechnic trio with saxophonist Erin Rogers and drummer Henry Mermer, followed by the duo of trumpeter Darren Johnston and drummer Ches Smith.

Surreal, Individualistic Music For Sitar and Bass From the Travis Duo

Just the idea of a bass-and-sitar duo is enticing. The two players in the Travis Duo. ubiquitous bassist Trevor Dunn and sitarist Jarvis Earnshaw, join with some first-class special guests who make colorful contributions to their utterly surreal new album Hypnagogia, streaming at Bandcamp. It seems completely improvised, it’s often invitingly enveloping and psychedelic to the nth degree.

Much of the music is akin to a palimpsest painted wet: the undercoats bleed through, sometimes when least expected. To open the album, Dunn’s wryly warping, bowed lines linger below the judicious, warmly spare sitar lines, then the bassist adds more emphatic layers and dissociative loops. The sparse/busy dichotomy is a recurrent trope throughout the album. Earnshaw’s big payoff – a false ending of sorts – is worth the wait.

Daniel Carter and Devin Brahja Waldman’s saxes waft in to introduce the second track, FAQ, then there’s a steel pan-like xylophone line, Earnshaw a distant gleam behind the gently percolating upper-register textures. Dunn punctures the bubbles and joins with guest drummer Niko Wood to introduce a pulse as the sitar grows more prominent, then recedes.

Orchid Hoodwink has Earnshaw’s stream-of-consciousness vocals over a mingled web of sitar, xylophone and metal percussion. Is there a sense of betrayal in Fair Weather Friend? It doesn’t seem so; the washes of bass beneath the resonance of the sitar and Earnshaw’s earnest tenor vocals give the song a warmly rustic feel.

Carter floats in on flute over the hypnotic, sustained textural contrasts of Hitherto. He brings an unhurried, exploratory vibe on sax over increasingly bracing chaos in Uncanny Valley…and then gets pulled into the vortex. Meanwhile, Dunn is having tongue-in-cheek fun at the bottom of a waterslide.

The closest thing to a raga here, and the most contiguous piece, is Folie a Deux, Dunn bowing astringent harmonics and then taking over a very minimalist tabla role as Earnshaw chooses his spots. It’s very Brooklyn Raga Massive, and quite beautiful. There’s also a bonus track, Lollop, which could be a Sanskrit pun. Xylophone and sitar ripple and ping, the horns hover and flutter while Dunn pulses tersely in the midrange. The keening overtones emanating from the bass strings as the group wind out slowly are the icing on this strange and beguiling sonic cake.

Playfully Conversational Improvisation From an Allstar New York Crew

The new Playfield Vol. 3: After Life album – streaming at Bandcamp – is just out. The eight-piece improvisational band’s single, drifting, roughly half-hour track here is a tantalizing snapshot of the kind of multi-generational alchemy that was ubiquitous in this city before the lockdown.

Hearing Luisa Muhr launch the record all by herself with her lustrous vocalese is a trip: the irrepressible multimedia artist’s dance improvisations often turn archetypes inside out and can be spellbinding. A playful bit of an exchange with sax player Daniel Carter lures in Eric Plaks’ drifting electric piano, followed by Ayumi Ishito’s similarly resonant sax and the stark textures of guitarists Aron Namenwirth and Yutaka Takahashi. Bassist Zach Swanson maintains a steadily looming, terse presence, drummer Jon Panikkar taking his time on the way in.

Wah-wah and skronk spice the cloud, Carter in erudite bluesy mode. A decay to austere, wary chromatics gets pulled back up gingerly by chucka-chucka from one of the guitars while the other lingers. The saxes waft as the guitars veer from icy ambience to more jagged incisions, Swanson strolling contentedly by himself, occasionally with a triumphant leap.

Muhr returns briefly to set up a deep-space interlude, Carter shadowing Ishito’s balmy lines, which take on a desolate late-night streetcorner melancholy. The guitars build an increasingly spiky thicket, Muhr chilling back in the mix and then suddenly picking up with a bit of achingly frenetic scatting.

Plaks wryly introduces a familiar New York theme at just after the 25-minute mark, and the whole crew can’t resist messing around with it: obvious as it may be, the joke is too good to give away. Swanson tries to drag the whole crew into swing while Muhr spaces out her distant arioso riffs and the group flutter their way out. The group play the album release show outdoors at 166 N 12th St in Williamsburg this afternoon, May 16 at 3 PM.

An Auspicious Live Improvisational Series in Prospect Park

As musicians are busting out all over the place to play, there’s an intriguing new series of early Tuesday night shows in Prospect Park, close to the 11th St. entrance at the top of the slope. The theme is conversational improvisation. This isn’t free jazz for people who like awkward bursts of spastic noise: this is for people who want to see tunes being pulled out of thin air. On April 14 at 5:30, the series features the cross-generational trio Becoming and Return with veteran Daniel Carter, most likely on sax, trumpet and maybe clarinet too, with Roshni Samlal on tabla and Dan Kurfirst on drums. It’s a good lineup because Samlal is just as much about subtlety as she is about fire, and Kurfirst is a colorist with a mystical, Middle Eastern side. There may be a point where the whole band turns into a quietly shamanic drum circle.

Carter has appeared on a million albums over the years. The most recent one, it seems (although you never know) is Telepathic Mysteries Vol. 1, by the aptly named Telepathic Band, streaming at Bandcamp. This group is similarly cross-generational, with Patrick Holmes on clarinet, Matthew Putman on piano and electric piano, Hilliard Greene on bass and Federico Ughi on drums. The level of interplay and calm imagination here is stunning, the group slowly conjuring a vast panorama of tunes.

They open the record with Nun Zero, a steady, swinging ballad that begins springing leaks and then the center gives way. The effect is irresistibly funny, too good to give away. The rhythm drops out for brooding piano and a pensive twin-clarinet interlude before an impatient pulse returns. There are swirls and ripples and a quasi-qawwali groove with spacy keys as Carter gently holds fort. Holmes’ clarinet returns to shadow Carter’s sax, then heads skyward, falling away for waves from the drums washing the shore. The creepy, tinkly, echoey electric piano makes a comeback, Carter a morose microtonal ghost in the background, until a long, bell-like, minimalistically insistent interlude with a relentless chill, Carter switching to trumpet. They take it out with calm echoes and flutters. Wow!

Track two, SignGhost Theatre, opens with what sounds like a lustrous allusion to Mood Indigo. Holmes leading the way, Carter’s trumpet shadowing him, the harmonies follow a lingering, rubato descent: that slow clarinet glissando over Ughi’s cautious tumbles will take your breath away.

Greene’s sly bends contrast with Putnam’s glittery piano and soaring clarinet in the barely two-minute While You Snap. The band go back to epic mode for S-Cape Cinemagic, opening with desolate twin clarinets over Ughi’s misterioso toms and Greene’s spare, solemn bass. Putnam’s steady, echoey Rhodes enhances the mystical, kaleidoscopic ambience, Holmes fueling a big rise to a steady, enveloping sway. The way Greene brings back the rhythm is just plain hilarious.

They close on a more hypnotic note with Lore Levels, clarinets wafting with the keys, bass and toms looming quietly in the distance. Putnam’s piano springs into action as Holmes leaps around, Carter’s trumpet signaling a clustering forward drive that goes out in a shimmering sunset. Who needs compositions when you have a crew who can improvise like this?

Improvisational Sorcery From XNN

“Can we remain curious and open to new perspectives while standing firm in the principles that make us who we are? To what extent can we sincerely consider an idea that challenges everything we think we believe?

What better training to play improvised music than to deal with these questions!”

That’s drummer Dan Kurfirst, on the new recording by free jazz collective XNN, whose new album Dance Chaos Magic is streaming at Bandcamp. The bandname is a variant on CNN, referring to how the group would reinterpret the news, real or fake, after convening in the rehearsal room. Ben Cohen plays sax, as does Daniel Carter, who quadruples (is “quadruples” a word? It is with this guy) on flute, clarinet and trumpet. Eli Wallace gets seemingly every texture and timbre that can be struck from a piano: it is a percussion instrument, after all.

The album is a single, roughly 39-minute improvisation that hits a genuinely spellbinding point at about the 25-minute mark. Ghosts flit playfully amid Cohen’s overtone-laced sustain as Carter begins the jam on flute. Wallace has muted, strangely zither-like fun under the piano lid (or else he’s prepared it). Kurfirst moves from his hardware and climbs steadily from a muted thud.

Carter’s shift to distant, regally muted trumpet is matched by a seemingly qawwali-influenced, subtly circling groove from Kurfirst. A move to sax by Carter – the elder statesman here – signals a bubbling interweave that brings the group together with what comes across as a deviously implied, floating swing.

Wallace playing popcorn on the muted upper strings, inside the lid, is a hoot, and eventually lures Cohen down the rabbit hole as Carter’s trumpet hovers pensively. Kurfirst lowers the anchor and then raises it, drawing spare, somber modalities from Wallace and similarly uneasy, microtonal tectonic shifts from Cohen. The transformation to balmy lyricism and then a triumphantly clustering bustle seems easier than it probably was to play, testament to the depth of the group’s repartee. May this be an omen for what the world has to face the rest of this year and beyond.

A Volcanic Harlem Jam Rescued From the Archives

Considering what happened to live music in this city this year, it’s heartbreaking to think back on the free improvisation scene here in 1999. CB’s Gallery was still open. So was Tonic, along with a Harlem loft space called the Hint House, where the quartet TEST joined with trumpeter Roy Campbell for a pyrotechnic jam on April 16 of that year. The Hint House is long gone – as seemingly every music venue in town may also be at this point – but the band had the good sense to record the show that night. And in keeping with the vast deluge of rare archival material being released this year, this uninterrupted, roughly 47-minute improvisation is streaming at Bandcamp.

The energy is through the roof, rising and falling, with individual horn solos drawing the rest of the lineup back in. Much of the time the rhythm section keeps a rapidfire swing going, more or less, in a Sam Rivers vein; other times the drums drop out for more spare, looming bass, even while the horns keep the cauldron blazing.

Campbell generously shares the spotlight with Daniel Carter on alto and tenor sax, trumpet and flute, Sabir Mateen on those same reeds and also clarinet, Matthew Heyner on bass and Tom Bruno on drums. A fanfare quickly coalesces – Bruno’s thump signals the rest of the horns to chill while Campbell plays a wildfire, trilling, thrilling solo. “God!” exclaims an audience member (or bandmate).

The rhythm section takes a momentary lull but in a flash they’re back out of it. It seems Carter takes the next solo as the bass bubbles upward and the drums cluster, then Campbell squalls and shrieks his way in and the crazed triangulation begins again. Is that Mateen taking that valve-torturing, squealing break?

Subtle shadowing, counterrythms and as much calm as could possibly exist under the circumstances follow in turn, well past the halfway mark. The murk clears a bit for resonance and lyricism, particularly from Carter and Campbell: Heyner’s spaciousness and use of spare chords make a good foil to Bruno’s smackdown riffs. There’s a sudden fade downward to haze and wisps instigated by the bass, Bruno deciding to get the show back on the road while the reeds play baroque-tinged spirals. The chugging, rumbling inferno that follows is the high point of the set: obviously, none of this was planned.

New York’s Hottest New Music Venue: The Cube at Astor Place

As concertgoers are going to find out more and more this year, one of the very few good things to come out of the lockdown is that it provided a very fertile – if completely unwanted – opportunity for artists to create new material.This blog is long overdue to get back to spreading the word about upcoming concerts: one of the first to officially hit the calendar this month is an outdoor show at the cube at Astor Place this Weds, July 8 at 7 PM where Concerts From Cars  have been scheduling a series of improvisational lineups. This one includes but is probably not limited to drummer Dan Kurfirst, multi-reedman/trumpeter Daniel Carter and trumpeter Matt Lavelle. Once again, it bears mentioning that New York’s most forward-thinking improvisers are doing more than improvise with just their instruments. Obviously, we need to reopen all our music venues at full capacity, yesterday, but at least this is a start.

Of all the guys on this particular bill, Carter has appeared on more albums than everybody else combined. And he keeps popping up on new ones. The latest is Welcome Adventure, Volume 1 – streaming at Bandcamp – with pianist Matthew Shipp, bassist William Parker and drummer Gerald Cleaver.

In keeping with these guys’ most expansive, improvisational esthetic, it’s just three tracks ranging from about four and a half to a full twenty minutes. The first is Majestic Travel Agency, which clocks in at thirteen. If you didn’t know all this was completely made up on the spot, you might easily assume it’s just a tight postbop quartet going out on a limb with some inspired interplay and solos. Cleaver’s beat is closer to trip-hop than straight up funk or swing as it unfolds from Parker’s catchy variations playing off a central tone. Shipp jabs at the edges; Carter’s balmy initial tenor sax solo alludes to the Middle East.

From there they swing it in more of a trad postbop mode, loosen and hit a more murky haze even as Cleaver refuses to quit. Shipp’s bad cop versus Carter’s good one is another amusing touch; after the piano cedes centerstage to the bass, they take it out surprisingly calmly.

Carter opens Scintillate with restrained muted trumpet: from a loose-limbed swing, they take it into brooding, vintage Miles Davis-ish jazz waltz territory. The closing epic,  Ear-regularities – probably not a reference to Matt Munisteri’s legendary Ear Inn residency – is where everybody gets to diverge. Parker and Cleaver prowl, Shipp’s incisions and Carter’s airy flute holding the center more or less. Restless, gleaming piano chromatics and saturnine muted trumpet draw the bass and drums into contrasting, funky swing. The unselfconsciously resonant, allusively haunting ambience afterward is completely unexpected and genuinely breathtaking.

Carter, Parker and Shipp go back to the jazz loft days of the 80s, and Cleaver fits right in, so it’s both a trip forward and backward in time.

How Free Jazz Is Saving New York

We are at a very interesting moment in New York music history. Some of the artists who have existed at the furthest fringes of our culture are stepping up to save it.

Is that a great irony, or has that always been the case? Aren’t the greatest innovators in any field, from politics to science, always viewed as heretics?

Sure, there’s been plenty of live music across the five boroughs since the lockdown was first instituted. But most of those shows were intimate house concerts, by invite only, promoted by word of mouth rather than on social media in order to stay under the radar. It’s been heartwarming to witness how many of the prime movers in New York’s improvised music community have recently managed to find a way around the lockdowners’ paranoid regulations to bring back live music for the general public in this city.

Maybe that should come as no surprise. Before the lockdown, very few profit-driven venues in this city would have been willing to book a single creative jazz act, let alone a whole night of free jazz, so creative musicians have always had to improvise (sorry – couldn’t resist that one).

The latest series of shows staged by the innovators behind the Concerts From Cars series are continuing over the next few days at the cube at Astor Place, at 7 PM. Tonight, July 5, drummer Dan Kurfirst jams with with multi-reedman and trumpeter Daniel Carter, Rodney “Godfather Don” Chapman on sax and other artists tba. And then on July 8 at 7 Kurfirst and Carter return to the cube with fearless, politically woke trumpeter Matt Lavelle and supporting cast tba.

Carter has played on a gazillion records over the years: one of the most entrancing and unusual recent ones is the Harbinger album with Jarvis Earnshaw on sitar, vocals and loops and Zach Swanson on bass. It’s a thoughtful, conversational forty-eight minute suite, more or less, recorded and mixed at Martin Bisi’s legendary, sonically rich Gowanus basement space, BC Studio and streaming at Bandcamp.

Foghorn trumpet from Carter anchored by Swanson’s long, low, bowed tones and Earnshaw’s terse, incisive lines echo kaleidescopically through the mix as the three get underway. Earnshaw introduces a lyrical, descending raga riff shadowed by Swanson, Carter switching to balmy tenor sax. Then he moves to flute, Swanson picks up his bow and the theme continues.

They loosen, expand and grow more desolate, Earnshaw’s steely phrases holding the center. Close harmonies between the spacious sitar and echoing trumpet add a bracing edge; Earnshaw also plays chords and unearthly plucked harmonics. Carter looms over a sitar drone, then a broodingly triangulated conversation emerges. A break in the clouds doesn’t last; Earnshaw vocalizes while shifting toward a more rock-oriented, chordal attack.

A lull for solo sitar introduces a warmly hazy nocturnal raga of sorts: it’s here where Carter – back on sax – cuts loose to the extent that he can here. They bring it full circle at the end. There’s as much listening going on as actual playing, resulting in a project that’s as envelopingly enjoyable to hear as it obviously must have been to record.