v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

From The Recent Plena Libre Concert at Creative Alliance

Last Friday we attended the Plena Libre concert at Creative Alliance. Needless to say we had a great time dancing to their positive music. Here are some images from our evening.

Vallejo Nocturno 2023 Copyright

My Latest Playlist

Theory Therapy 15: Suso Saiz

Excellent music series, Low End Theorist, here is a mix by Suso Saiz:

Theory Therapy · Theory Therapy 15: Suso Sáiz

Karl Berger Gone at 88

 

From WRTI and Michael West, news of Karl Berger's passing away and a good review of his accomplishments. A free musician with great musical sensibilities regardless of the genre. A mentor to many:

Karl Berger, a vibraphonist, pianist, composer, and educator who served as a mentor and father figure for generations of improvising avant-garde musicians, died on April 9 at Albany Medical Center in Albany, NY. He was 10 days past his 88th birthday.

His death was confirmed by Chuck ver Straeten, a former student and longtime family friend who was at Berger’s bedside when he passed. Ver Straeten tells WRTI that the cause of death was complications following gastrointestinal surgery.

Born and raised in Germany, Berger was part of the first wave of European musicians to pursue free jazz in the 1960s. His breakthrough came in ‘65, when as a vibraphonist he joined trumpeter Don Cherry’s band in Paris; the following year he traveled to the United States to perform on Cherry’s album Symphony for Improvisers. He recorded his own self-titled debut a few months later, and made his home in the States for the next six decades.

Along with Cherry, his résumé included work with bassist Dave Holland, drummers Jack DeJohnette and Ed Blackwell, and saxophonists Lee Konitz, Ivo Perelman and Ornette Coleman. Coleman was Berger’s primary inspiration (and later his mentor), an influence apparent in his vibraphone style: hard-swinging, informed by the blues, eschewing chords to tell a story in single-note lines that he sometimes doubled with his voice.

Berger was also an accomplished pianist, playing the keys with a more chordal and pensive style — but no less exploratory or melodic. “His musicianship was off the charts,” bassist Michael Bisio, another frequent collaborator, tells WRTI. “He was absolutely one of the most underrated musicians, maybe of all time.”

Berger’s most far-reaching achievement, however, was as an educator. Together with his wife, vocalist Ingrid Sertso, and Coleman, he co-founded the Creative Music Studio, producing workshops and concerts throughout the Woodstock area before purchasing a resort property in the Catskill foothills. CMS, which Berger served as longtime director, focuses on teaching improvising musicians to develop their own aesthetics, and to draw and mesh ideas from across genres, traditions, and international borders. From 1972 to 1984, it offered instructional workshops, master classes, multi-week intensives, and hundreds of live performances. In its prime it was considered a premiere school of contemporary creative music.

The organization’s facility in Woodstock, New York closed in 1984, but CMS survived in the forms of “World Jazz Encounters” workshops held throughout the world; Sertso Recording Studio in Woodstock (which Berger and Sertso founded in 2004); and more than 500 CMS concert recordings that are now archived at Columbia University Library.

Berger also taught at the New School, the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts, and University of Massachusetts Dartmouth for many years before reviving CMS in 2013, with Sertso as his co-artistic director. “What Karl and Ingrid created was such a unique place,” says ver Straeten. “It really brought together people from all over the world, created such a brotherhood and sisterhood. Karl was incredibly encouraging to everyone to just go exploring.”

“It’s a world,” Berger explained of his concept of music in a 2014 interview with Monk Rowe. “And once you go there, you’re in the world of spontaneity, and you’re no longer in the thinking world…. But everybody can go there. Everybody, whether you play or not.”

Karl Hans Berger was born on March 30, 1935, in Heidelberg, Germany. He began playing classical piano when he was 10, though encountering a live jam session by American musicians at age 14 redirected his interests.

In his twenties he landed a gig as house pianist at Heidelberg’s Club 54, where he got lessons in modern jazz from American soldiers. “The surrounding Army and Air Force stations had all bands,” he told Rowe. “In those bands played a few jazz musicians who later became pretty well known, such as Cedar Walton, or Lex Humphries, and Don Ellis. And they would all come to that club … and we would be playing every night ‘til five in the morning.”

After earning a PhD in musicology from the University of Berlin in 1963, Berger played with the likes of multi-reedist Eric Dolphy and saxophonist Steve Lacy before moving to Paris in 1965. After settling in New York with Sertso in 1966, he became a key figure in the avant-garde music scene, working behind Cherry, Roswell Rudd, Carla Bley, and John McLaughlin. He also built his own career as a leader in earnest, putting together multiple ensembles in both the US and Europe.

 

Bright Visions on Display in Shorter's Night Dreamer

Speaking about Wayne Shorter's Night Dreamer album from 1964 the London Jazz Collector:

Shorter shook off his five year apprenticeship with The Jazz Messengers, having set out his stall with some tentative VeeJay albums, now embarked on his own Maiden Voyage as a Blue Note leader, a trajectory that would earn him a place in Davis second quintet, and a bigger place in the canon of Modern Jazz

You might think a first title for Blue Note Shorter would look to showcase his Coltrane-like instrumental virtuosity and improvising skills. Instead, Shorter sets out a different stall, an original composer/ensemble. The bold musical vision presented In Night Dreamer is almost a genre in its own right – not bop not yet post-bop, but bop in transition.

Shorter’s compositions are harmonic explorations outside the bebop idiom, with extended melodic lines, avoiding predictable standard forms. Spare tunes of restrained simplicity, slowly unfold, drifting towards abstraction.  You don’t listen, dance and tap your feet to a Shorter composition, so much as absorb it through the skin.

This languorous soundscape of  varying moods and tempos  is populated with bravura  solo flights. Lee Morgan, represents Messengers continuity, throws in hot pepper driving brass figures, while Shorter sour lower register and angle-grinder burr moves like slow fire, crowned with eagle squawks. Coltrane is never far away, but the voice is his own. The most lyrical is McCoy Tyner, who holds everything together on a misty spiders web of rippling arpeggios and accents.

This is perfect night music. City lights twinkling in the distance, pour yourself a glass of your choice,  settle down on the sofa, wash away the tribulations of the day, and lose yourself in this gorgeous music.

Suso Saiz Mix

Theory Therapy · Theory Therapy 15: Suso Sáiz

Martina Verhoeven Solo Piano

 

A recent discovery as I was previewing music from last year. Piano I enjoy.

Best Music of the Year 2022- Paul Van Nevel

Paul Van Nevel's vocal ensemble has been either on my record player, CD player, or MP3 player for over35 years continuously. The selection of composers and specific compositions is enlightening, year after year. And the quality of the interpretations are always very high. This years album is a wonderful selection of early vocal music that I love. More, Paul.

From BBC Music:

Paul van Nevel has been recording medieval music since 1971. This, his latest project, seems to have two purposes: to give a potted account of the development of Franco-Flemish polyphony c1400-c1550, and to show how the landscape of the local areas from which the composers came is embodied in their music.

The earliest composer here is Johannes Hasprois, who died c1428. His ‘Ma douce amour’ is an intricate work and the resonant acoustic does not help the texture, nor does the slightly lax approach to rhythm. The group is more at home in later pieces such as l’Héritier’s motet ‘Locutus est Dominus’ (c1552) the clamorous sounds of which they bring to a captivating conclusion.

The landscape angle is slightly odd. We are not talking here about how the sounds of a landscape might be replicated (babbling brooks, birdsong etc), or its musical associations quoted (folksong etc), or even how a composer’s emotional attachment might be expressed. Rather (according to van Nevel) the landscape itself replicates ‘the spirit of its culture in a powerful way’. Hence Baston’s ‘Ung souvenir’ embodies ‘misty Artois’ (though the lines are sung with great clarity), Gombert’s ‘O malheureuse journée’ reflects the desolation of the Lele Valley (though it is performed rather stolidly), and Ockeghem’s Sanctus is actually modeled in part on a work by Dufay who grew up elsewhere. Luckily some real landscaping can be heard in Hesdin’s motet ‘Parasti’ where the performers shape the form and contour the dynamics splendidly.

 

From ALL Music:

The general trend in recordings of Renaissance polyphony has been toward typing music to specific surroundings: royal festivities, religious feast days, and the like. This collection by the Huelgas Ensemble goes in the other direction, providing three CDs' worth of music ranging from the medieval era to Anton Bruckner, with most of the pieces falling into some stretch of the High Renaissance. The music was recorded, beautifully, in a Romanesque church near Dijon in 2018, and the program is unified loosely by a set of general guidelines for the selections at that event: the music emphasized "unknown repertoire, undeservedly obscure composers, and experiments that fall outside the scope of the normal concert season." All of those factors are present here, with that undeservedly obscure composer Anonymous heading the list, and the ensemble makes a strong case for the large body of rarely performed Renaissance music that's out there. Listen to the gorgeous Lamentations of Jeremiah of José de Vaquedano at the end of the first disc, or the delicate but serious chanson Que null'étoile sur nous of Claude Le Jeune, otherwise known mostly for a few metrical chanson experiments that turn up in music history classes. Each piece is given a careful and often affecting performance by the veteran Huelgas Ensemble and director Paul van Nevel, and with the extraordinary sound, this release may be just the thing for listeners who want to luxuriate in some unfamiliar Renaissance music for a couple of hours.

From BBC Music:

The Huelgas-Ensemble and director Paul van Nevel celebrated its 35th birthday in 2005 with live concerts of some truly complex, multi-voiced polyphony…including the 40 part work, Ecce beatam lucem by Alessandro Striggio, which was the catalyst for a splendid piece of 40-part retaliation from Thomas Tallis: "Spem in alium", the best-known work here. The Huelgas-Ensemble has recorded both before for Sony, but heard live, these performances are less restrained, perhaps in a way that might not please the purists. But as the many polyphonic strands surround you – and here they do surround you, thanks to this hybrid SACD – you’d have to have a cold heart not to be caught up in the performances. The ingenuity of the composers is extraordinary; there’s one of the strangest and in its way most original works in the Eton Choirbook, by the late 15th century English composer Robert Wylkynson. His setting of "Jesus autem transiens" is a 13 part canon, with every voice moving within the same restricted vocal compass. And before it there’s a 24-voice setting of "Qui habitat" by Josquin in which the singers divide into four choirs, each with its own six-part canon. It has a hypnotic effect...and so does the work which opens the concert, a newly-commissioned piece by Willem Ceuleers (in 35 parts of course, one for each year), which had me fooled until some decidedly modern touches broke through the renaissance texture. It’s ingenious, but it does outstay its welcome, unlike every other work on this astonishing disc.

Best Music of the Year 2022- Marta Sanchez

 

I've always been captivated by Sanchez' music-her compositions, her piano style, and her talented groups. Her groups evolve and her music sinuous pathways elaborate melodies and rhythms I come to associate my on past. Her most recent work continues this fruitful trend into a land that begins to incorporate more solidly the New York roots that have begun to take hold.

From New York Times:

When Marta Sánchez’s mother died unexpectedly in late 2020, the pianist was at a loss. But Sánchez knew, almost instinctively, where she could process her grief: at the piano, pen and paper in hand, sounding out new music for her quintet.

In the decade since she moved to New York from Madrid, the quintet has been Sánchez’s main creative outlet. And since the release of its strong 2015 debut, “Partenika,” it has made itself known as one of the most consistently satisfying bands in contemporary jazz — largely thanks to the well-ordered complexity and openhearted energy of Sánchez’s tunes, which blur the divide between lead melody and accompaniment, steady pulse and unruly drift.

The group’s personnel rotates often, but the format has never shifted: a pair of saxophones out front, often in high contrast with one another; a bassist; a drummer; and the tension-raising technique of Sánchez’s piano.

As a composer, she culls a lot of her inspiration from life experience, and no matter how technical her music gets, it retains an unpretentious, poignant appeal. (On “Partenika” the deftly sculpted tunes often had prosaic names, like “Patella Dislocation” — yes, inspired by a knee injury Sánchez suffered — or simply “Yayyyy.”) So it’s no surprise that the quintet’s fourth album, “SAAM (Spanish American Art Museum),” is both musically complex and emotionally direct, managing to convey the raw, implacable pain of loss.

 

From Downbeat:

A fine pianist who is a particularly inventive arranger-composer, Marta Sanchez has led a quintet since 2015, one that has recorded four albums so far. A constant has been Roman Filiú who played alto on the other quintet recordings but for this project switches to tenor. Altoist Alex LoRe is a major asset, often sounding quite relaxed and laid-back even while improvising over the most dissonant backgrounds.

The opener, “The Unconquered Vulnerable Areas,” has a soothing theme before it builds in suspense and tension. LoRe shows that he can hit high notes with ease while Filiú has a stormy and stirring tradeoff with Sanchez.

“Dear Worthiness” is a thoughtful and dark piece about self-doubt that includes a fluent alto solo and some pretty expressive playing by the leader.

“SAAM” is filled with dissonance and the assertive drums of Allan Mednard, while the harmonized horns on the ballad “The Eternal Stillness” are memorable, as is arguably the best piano playing of the set.

“Marivi” was written as a message to Sanchez’s mother, whom she was not able to visit in Spain during her last days because of COVID-19 travel restrictions. The emotional piece features singer Camila Meza and trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire as guests.

Of Sanchez’s other originals, “If You Could Create It” is relatively playful yet purposeful, Filiú and bassist Rashaan Carter star on a somber “The Hard Balance,” “December 11th” has a tango feel and a sparkling piano solo, and the closer “When Dreaming Is The Only” is highlighted by the interplay of the saxophonists.

From Jazz Trail:

The pianist/composer Marta Sanchez was born in Madrid and works in New York, where she has already demonstrated bold compositional skills with contemporary jazz pieces that adhere to form and structure. The quintet has been her preferred format since 2015, but on this new outing, SAAM (Spanish American Art Museum), she recycles the lineup with new musical partners. She maintains the Cuban saxophonist Roman Filiu in the frontline - here surprisingly playing tenor only - and welcomes Alex LoRe, whose blustery alto statements are an excellent match. The group is complemented by a zestful rhythm section in which Sanchez teams up with bassist Rashaan Carter and drummer Allan Mednard. 

As the title implies, this recording mixes elements of her Spanish and American experiences, but its central piece, “Marivi” - a tribute to Sanchez’s mother who passed during lockdown - falls outside the predominant mood as she abdicates from the saxophone players to feature the guest vocalist/guitarist Camila Meza, who sings in Spanish, and the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, who sails serenely with a mix of keening and brightness.

Most of the pieces have relatively short themes, and “The Unconquered Vulnerable Areas” ushers in a stimulating rhythmic drive, having the expeditious LoRe delivering gracious ideas. After that, there's a shared soloing moment in which Sanchez and Filiu articulate a nice musical conversation. Displaying more reflective tones are the following: “Dear Worthiness”, a ballad with a three time feel in direct relation to an onerous sense of insecurity; “The Eternal Stillness”, a pool of gorgeous effulgence; and “The Hard Balance”, a delicate chamber-like number with horn polyphony and polyrhythmic feel that spotlights the group’s atmospheric strengths. The latter two pieces feature bass improvisations.

Best Music of the Year 2022- Beth Orton

 

A slight revelation for me. Like a jazz album it evolves as the theme is repeated and refined as it progresses. The music changes like the weather but it is the same day. An incredibly capturing set of songs and Orton's voice with her grainy filter makes it just right. Lovely.

From Pop Matters:

Yet Weather Alive is a fascinating creature, one that belies easy categorization. Working with jazz drummer Tom Skinner and sax player Alabaster dePlume, Orton self-produced a record of deep atmosphere and warm tones; it sounds like morning fog receding from a beach aglow in the morning dawn. Its jazz players only give jazzy overtones to songs that don’t quite exist in the realm of folk or pop or rock. The eight tracks on Weather Alive sound like Beth Orton songs, which is a rare treat.

“I was so embarrassed to play these songs to people at first because I know how they are all just kind of strung together,” notes Orton during her interview with The Line of Best Fit. “I know that some of my processes in the editing were really rudimentary. I mean, it was mostly done in my shed.” While the album was born of several stops and false starts, it’s clear that all of Weather Alive‘s songs come from the same relaxed place, all rolling out at their own casual pace (which is why the record’s shortest number clocks in at just under 4:30).

Opening with the atmospheric title track, Orton’s voice is the first thing that jumps out of the mix. Unafraid to represent herself plainly, her ever-distinct pipes are lightly weathered now, a coarseness baked into her inflection with some tones even halting and stuttering. While her last album (the still-underrated electro experiment that was 2016’s Kidsticks) was awash in bedroom electro styles and sounds, her voice was often run through filters and echoes, which makes her so bluntly showing the state of her vocals on Weather Alive that much more pointed. Orton is not hiding behind studio tricks this time out: she’s emotionally naked at every turn. “It was just excruciating to listen to in front of other people,” she says during that Line of Best Fit interview. “Every bit of it was personal and exposing.”

From The Line of Best Fit:

On her eighth and newest album, Weather Alive, Orton sounds freer and more comfortable than she has at any other point in her career. Inspired by a soot-filled, second-hand piano - and aided by the newfound freetime Orton had while her children were in school - it is a warm, immersive LP whose wisdom unfolds gradually over repeat listens. It is her first self-produced album and, through no coincidence, happens to be far and away her best.

The title track is the album’s most definitive statement - a transcendent, percussive, 7+ minute epic grounded by Orton’s cracked, aching voice. Backed up by a full band, Orton’s musings on the everyday beauty of nature take on otherworldly significance. Towards the song’s end, Orton repeats the words “coming alive” almost half-a-dozen times, her voice gradually becoming buried under the song’s sublime arrangements; almost mirroring the feeling of going outside on a wet and windy day and feeling overcome by the elements.

Weather Alive isn’t just Orton’s best album, it’s also one that could have only come at this juncture in her life - as she nears the 26th anniversary of her breakthrough Trailer Park. There’s so much wisdom to be had listening to Orton’s eighth LP. On it, she alternates between mystifying poetry that evokes the bewilderment of the late David Berman’s lyricism (“Thought about living with nothing to lose / With windows to see them before they see you”) and straightforward confessionals and dialogue (“Why I feel like shit for what I didn’t do wrong?”). On “Haunted Satellite”, Orton pens the album’s most incisive line, in the form of a rich, evocative metaphor that speaks to the sense of displacement that swirls throughout Weather Alive (“I have lived as a satellite / I’ve saddled up, I’ve settled up, I don’t sit right”).

Never before have we been gifted with such multidimensional songwriting from Orton. Her parents - who both died when she was a teen - are given voice on the hauntingly desolate “Lonely”. After listing all the reasons she’s supposedly unloveable (“I’m a whore / I’m too exposed”), Orton repeats the titular word a devastating fifteen times - conjuring up all the horror and isolation of grief in the process. The following “Arms Around a Memory”, by contrast, is perhaps the loveliest song Orton has ever recorded. ”Didn’t we make a beautiful life / In your eighth floor walk-up that night”, she declares. Like PJ Harvey’s “You Said Something”, it captures the magic of love’s most intense moments - how it puts the rest of the world on pause and makes even the least remarkable of settings glow. Yet, rather than succumb wholly to nostalgia, Orton reflects with the benefit of hindsight - dissecting both the faulty nature of memories, as well as their ability to immortalise the purest moments of our lives. Here, the song gains real bite, as she snaps back at the song’s other protagonist: “And I've come to questioning my credibility / Like you’re the reliable witness to what I feel”, she snarls.

 

From Uncut:

Stormy psychic and physical weather buffeted Beth Orton as she made this record. When long-standing health issues were correctly diagnosed and medicated in 2014, the ground perversely shifted beneath her feet. Meanwhile, 2016 saw the release of Kidsticks, the most electronic album of a career which has eased between her pioneering ’90s folktronica’s polar extremes. But as this personal flux continued, the organic sound of a battered, stand-up piano in her garden shed became her anchor. Playing this unfamiliar instrument recalled picking up a guitar to write songs in the ’90s, returning Orton to first principles.

Relying on simple, modal patterns, she then began to sculpt homemade soundscapes using her midi setup. In the process, vivid memories rose up, ranging from old affairs in New York to the loss of her friend Andy Weatherall, becoming the nascent album’s flickering heart. “I kept reliving these fragments of past lives,” Orton recalls, “and putting them in music was like putting them in amber. A moment would be there like light on a wall, it didn’t hang around long, and I’d write around that.” These sensual visions were then rigorously honed into songs, as Orton tested if “something so fallible and amorphous” could hold compositional weight.

Eventually, Orton invited The Smile and Sons Of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner to add to her homemade palette. He was joined by other often jazz-minded collaborators, such as the ecstatic poet-saxophonist Alabaster dePlume, suiting Orton’s fascination with Alice Coltrane’s spiritual jazz, alongside ambient vistas from Talk Talk to Springsteen’s stark Nebraska. Thrown further back on her own resources by lockdown, Orton self-produced Weather Alive, a project which began with her identity in crisis ending as her most personal statement.