Come Sunday #2 - 14/01/2007@deSingel, Antwerpen

Before leaving the house, I was quite saddened to learn of the near-simultaneous deaths of Alice Coltrane and Michael Brecker. Both were unfortunate surprises: I hadn't heard that Coltrane was doing poorly and thought that Brecker was getting better after his transplant and the surprise appearance at a Herbie Hancock concert.

Stéphan Oliva/François Raulin Quintet
Stépha Oliva, François Raulin - p
Laurent Dehors - cl, bcl, contrabass cl
Christophe Monniot - as, bs, sopranino
Sébastien Boisseau - b

Raulin is on the right, Oliva on the left

This quintet, along with guitarist Marc Ducret, did an album of Tristano repertoire a few years ago, and now they're doing something similar to the compositions of stride and ragtime-era pianists such as James P. Johnson, Willie "The Lion" Smith, Fats Waller and Earl Hines, as well as a piece by Bix Beiderbecke. It was inevitable that I be reminded of Air's own take on ragtime standards, even if Destination: Out hadn't posted a couple of tracks from Air Lore recently. In both instances, a fairly direct line was drawn between two nominally different eras: the collective energy of the 30s was always close to exuberant cacophony anyway, which, I guess, makes it a prime candidate for translation to a post-free jazz context. It also helped that the arrangements by Raulin and Oliva were impressively thought-out. Except for one bass solo, the basic material was never left behind, never a mere frame for free playing. In this regard, I found the progression from one era to another more satisfying than at the Dave Burrell concert.

Christophe Monniot provided gutsy, barn-storming r'n'b-inflected solos, while on "Carolina Shout," Laurent Dehors's clarinets linked dixieland whoops to free jazz shrieks. Solos were concise, in keeping with the spirit of the times. Both François Raulin and Stéphan Oliva are fearsome pianists, who, Schlippenbach-like, could slip distant rhythmic echoes into modern, abstract playing. They also knew how to have a good time: on the last piece, Raulin dashed across the stage to join his partner for a 4-handed stride romp.

Recasting old music in this way throws up a lot of questions and establishes connections. While the Beiderbecke piece was more obviously proto-Cool Jazz than the rest of the material, Willie "The Lion" Smith's "Morning Air" and "Echoes Of Spring" (I particularly love the latter, with its introverted-but-intense, stroll-in-the-park joy - check it out) showed that black musicians, too, had developed their own cooler forms (and Bix's "In A Mist" draws its own connections to stride and rag rhythms). The music, often organised into suites of interconnected themes, solos and collective improvisation, betrayed a huge amount of work and might have seemed over-intellectualised had Monniot's over-the-top body language not underlined how much fun the music was, too. I mean, if you can't party with ragtime - you can't party at all. So, rather, it came to seem that they were drawing out the intellectual possibilities already embedded into the music, but perhaps more visible with a few decades' hindsight.

Sal Mosca



I'd barely heard of Sal Mosca, but was intrigued by his past as a Tristano disciple. Despite the occasional brief hesitation (which were, I think, more a matter of remembering how a tune went than of technique), Mosca played a short and wonderful set of standards. His sound, touch and style were decidedly of his era: the under-the-armpits trousers said it all, while the slightly arpeggiated chords he used on the opening number - something you'd never hear a post-60s pianist do - confirmed it. It was a reminder that, when these songs are played by people who actually have them embedded in their DNA, they're still awesome. Ken Vandermark would tell me afterwards that there was no way he could ever play that music the way Mosca had, and this observation applied to the Oliva/Raulin Quintet as well: you didn't get the impression that Mosca really "did" anything to the tunes, the way the Frenchmen had to, to make it interesting even though he actually really personalised each one. So, the next time you get that "not standards again" reaction, blame the interpreter, not the material.

That said, all three pianists applied forms of loving deconstruction to the standards that, in the end, weren't as conceptually distant as might have been expected. What was modern and interesting (or maybe just puzzling) about Mosca's playing way back when was still exciting yesterday. Both Mosca and Raulin/Oliva did "Ain't Misbehavin'," and Mosca's version recognisable than the quintet's, because it decidedly wasn't a romp, but I also kind of suspect that he didn't really play the song's chords.

When Mosca played "Somwhere Over The Rainbow," it was easy to imagine it as a big Hollywood production number, swirling harps and string orchestra included, but he managed not to make it sappy. At the end of most songs, he would use the sustain pedal on the last note, but abruptly cut it off long before it had decayed, as if to ward off any excess sentimentality. On "All Of Me," left and right hands scrambled together, creating a thick but impressively non-dissonant texture.

According to AMG, Mosca is turning 80 this year, so no-one was surprised that the set was fairly short, at just about 40 minutes. That's more than can be said for his 21-year-old saxophonist student who, I learnt after the concert (as it wasn't announced in the program), was meant to accompany him: apparently he fell asleep at the hotel.

Ken Vandermark's The Frame Quartet
Ken Vandermark - ts, cl
Fred Lonberg-Holm - cello
Nate McBride - b, el b
Tim Daisy - d



The posters claimed that this was a world premiere, but in reality this group had already performed once in Chicago, and the members are long-time associates anyway. Regardless, The Frames Quartet is the latest in Ken Vandermark's seemingly endless string of bands. After the concert, I interviewed him (thanks to camera-man extraordinaire Pierre-Michel, who's practically a member of Vandermark's road crew, it seems), and he laid out very clearly what he was trying to do with it. I hope to have a transcript and maybe audio (and even video?) of that up in a few weeks. In short, the compositions for this band are made up of pre-determined modules whose sequence and interactions are determined in real-time through a series of cues. His two aims were to continue delving into the composed/improvised interface and to create structures that could not be learnt, so that the problems the musicians had to solve changed every time, forcing them to come up with new, or at least different, solutions. To me, the results were very interesting, though still raw. The injection of pre-determined forms, cues and strategies gave a sense of external structure, but nonetheless created an overall sound inherited from total improv.



Vandermark hasn't abandoned his tradition of dedicating each one of his pieces to someone. "First Papers"'s dedicatee was James Brown. It started with the tenor's r'n'b-influenced wailing over a 3/4 beat, then arrived at a more peaceful line, accompanied by turbulent free improvisation from the rest of the group, which suggested earthly confusion below and heavenly peace above. It finished with full-blown, aggressive skronk, but not before an unexpected, much quieter section of boppish tenor over a walking bass.

That bass-tenor section, as well as the sequence of unisson themes Fred Lonberg-Holm and Nate McBride played throughout the second piece, exemplified the functional pairs Vandermark divides the quartet into for each composition. While the two string instruments segued from theme to theme at (I imagine) their own discretion, Tim Daisy and Vandermark alternated leading free improvisation over the top.

The third and last piece was "Straw," which was anchored by a percussive loop of what I think was a grating, staccato cello chord. Daisy and McBride struck up a funky back-beat over which Holm could play heavily distorted arco, somewhere between a noisy, textural rock guitarist and computer static.



Due to a misunderstanding, the group played for only about 45 minutes, about half the time that had been allotted to them. This was a shame for the audience, as even an extra half-hour would have been very helpful in really apprehending the music.

In parting, some advice: if you're ever invited to partake of the musicians' post-concert dinner at deSingel, do so, immediately. It's delicious.

Jason Moran - Steve Coleman - Reggie Workman - 13/05/2006, deSingel

We were lucky to have a concert at all: Sam Rivers was originally billed, but dropped out and a Parisian concert was cancelled altogether. At 82 years old, I hope he's doing okay. I was listening to "Fuschia Swing Song" the other day, it's such an amazing album. "Beatrice" has become a jazz standard, but there are other, equally great tunes on FSS. My favourite moment is perhaps the very beginning of the first (and title-) track: tenor and bass alone for a few seconds, Ron Carter walking furiously while Rivers cruises through these magical intervals in a manner that evokes a speeding sleek, obsidian, oblong object. Around the same time, check out his soprano on "Ghetto Lights" (on Bobby Hutcherson's "Dialogue"): it illuminates an already wonderful polyphonic Andrew Hill composition.

Back in the concert hall, Steve Coleman flew in from the USA to save the day. Pianists haven't found much of a place in Coleman's recent work, but on his latest album, "Weaving Symbolics," there are two trio tracks with Moran and young drummer Marcus Gilmore that are somber and mysterious and unexpected (listen to "Tehu Seven") that I love (I love the album as a whole: it's a sprawling two-CD monstrosity that probably triggers the same follow-the-clues neurons in listeners as the "Da Vinci Code" does in readers. I say "probably" because I'm part of the ever-shrinking minority not to have read DVC.) and used to warm up before heading out to Antwerpen. I left the bullet-proof vest at home.

The trio played chamber music that drew on "a menagerie of compositions by (...) a whole bunch of people," according to Moran. The only one I recognised was "Beatrice," although I thought I caught a glimpse of "All The Things You Are," but that was probably the result of my having listened earlier in the day to Monk and Milt Jackson smuggle subversive messages into the song behind whoever was crooning it. Maybe it was where I was sitting, but Moran's attack generally sounded incredibly soft: he depressed the keys like they were pillows. There was none of the Bandwagon's frantic sugar-rush excitement or skittish change-ups: it was all about three musicians, each one a leading member of their generation's re-interpretation of a common heritage, coming together and improvising, quietly.

The music wandered, sometimes fixated on a soulful downwards riff, briefly free-wheeled in a zone somewhere between Sonny Rollins playing cowboy tunes and Jimmy Giuffre's "The Western Suite," once declaimed a series of interconnected unisons, occasionally giving way to sudden eruptions of fury (in a moment of unintentional comedy, Workman's aggressive arco sounded like a cavernous evil leader laugh) and regularly coalesced around duos. With no amplification save the bass amp, everything sounded exquisite, floating, unresolved and thus, liquid, not quite graspable: there were frequent micro-changes in mood, tempo and accompaniment.

Coleman maintained his warm "standards" tone (as opposed to the steely one he generally employs for his own music). When he played alone, on the last song before the encore, the hall's natural resonance was heard to full advantage. Workman shone throughout, but never brighter than when he began the encore alone on bow and intoned a grave quasi-lamentation that almost sounded like something out of the "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" soundtrack.

Afterwards, as Workman was ready to leave deSingel's basement bar, he stopped in front of me and said: "We haven't had a chance to talk." That was precisely the last thing I was expecting, and I only managed to bumblingly assure him of my enjoyment of the concert. We shook hands. I believe it was the first time I had done that with someone who had played with Coltrane. Which brings me back to Sam Rivers. Rivers is actually older than Coltrane and Miles (as are Toots and, I believe, Yusef Lateef), which means that there's no real reason for them not to still be around and playing, apart from the fact they're dead. Just another reminder of how short jazz history actually is.

Cuong Vu Trio & Flat Earth Society - Antwerp, 21/10/2003

Cuong Vu - tp, electronics
Stomu Takeishi - el b
Elliot Kavee - d

I got to the de Singel, a massive arts complex, a tiny bit late, so I had to wait for the end of the first piece to enter the room. I found this totally ridiculous: this isn't classical music. It's electronic, it's loud, it's fairly simple and I didn't even have to disturb anyone to get to my assigned seat. Anyway, on with the show.

I actually listened to Cuong Vu (Come Play With Me) for the first time the morning of the concert and some of the same songs were played that night. Globally, the music sounds like a mix of Miles Davis circa Big Fun and more modern rock and noise influences. Vu also does a fair amount of knob-twiddling to fill out the trio sound with layers of trumpet, as did Stomu Takeishi by looping lines on his bass. Songs tended to follow a general theme-group looseness-theme structure. I say "group looseness" because there weren't really any solos as they are generally conceived in jazz. At its best, the group moved together in a way analoguous to the Esbjorn Svensson Trio or The Bad Plus (but with very different musical results). Less interesting were the moments when the group drifted apart, though they may have served as scene-setting contrasts. The trumpet melodies were calm and pastoral, even when aggressively challenged by bass and drums.

The very last piece abandoned melody for a noisy soundscape underpinned by wildly shifting pulses by Elliot Kavee: from a slow 12/8 to fleet drum'n'bass, from loud to soft in mere instants. Suddenly, a rocking riff would come in, creating a great head-nodding groove, followed by more disintegration. When that riff came back to end the piece and the concert, I was uninterested and I'm not sure why.

Two odd events at the end of the show: first, a lone boo-er amid the applause and second, each of the musicians received a bouquet of white flowers. Maybe it's a tradition at de Singel.

Flat Earth Society
Peter Vermeesch - leader, cl
Too many others to list

I've been greatly enjoying The Armstrong Mutations, which I discussed briefly last month. The Flat Earth Society is "a band of rebels," according to the Toots Thielemans on their website. Certainly, the 17-piece big band is full of humour, fun and clever stylistic mish-mashing. The Armstrong Mutations is about taking music by or associated with Louis Armstrong, along with other pieces such as "Caravan" and original compositions and presenting it all in a quilt that goes from ragtime, stride and dixieland through to r&b and Cecil Taylor.

The concert started great: the two percussionists were on stage doing nearly nothing for about a minute. Then, a clarinettist, trumpeter and trombonist (a dixieland frontline) entered from behind the audience and played some wonderful dixieland counterpoint walking down the aisle. Other highlights included clarinettist Tom Wouters shouting vocals over the powerful "King Ink," a great piano-brass-vocals rendition of "What a Wonderful World," featuring wonderfully soft brass voicings, which was followed by an 5-reed tune over a bass clarinet vamp that had a feeling similar to a slow "Caravan." "Caravan" itself closed the set, the synthesizer (of some sort, looked pretty old and had a sci-fi sound) rendition of the melody shows the kind of irreverence FES does well. The encore consisted of an off-mike trio of vocals, tuba and brushes-on-floor song playing something about "Mr. Monotony." Halfway through the song, the rest of the band members (who were off-stage) suddenly leaned out from behind the side curtains to add some group vocals.

Flowers were also handed out, but only to FES's leader. I guess de Singel is on a budget.