Jazz Articles about Ivo Perelman

About Ivo Perelman

Album Review

Ivo Perelman's playing is a squall, a storm that suddenly kicks up and moves through your life. Maybe you saw this one coming, but when it hits you're still caught off guard. Like his painting that equally inspires and defines his music, Perelman plays action saxophone, following his instinct up and down the keys, dripping thinly precise lines of notes as if dropped off the end of a brush or splashing long, broad swaths as if hurled straight from the ...

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Album Review

Ivo Perelman: Suite for Helen F.

Read "Suite for Helen F." reviewed by Jeff Stockton

by Jeff Stockton
March 21, 2004

You may have heard that the compact disc is dying, but you wouldn’t know it from this prodigious 2-CD set of over 100 minutes of relentless saxophonic stress-testing and rhythmic sensory overload. From his debut in 1989 through the late ‘90s, Ivo Perelman was wildly prolific and exhaustively documented, with more than 20 recordings appearing on a variety of small labels in barely a decade, an output all the more remarkable when you consider that Perelman’s jazz vocabulary is just ...

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Album Review

Ivo Perelman Double Trio: Suite for Helen F.

Read "Suite for Helen F." reviewed by John Kelman

by John Kelman
March 4, 2004

Free jazz can be a dicey thing. When one is literally pulling everything out of the ether, one runs the risk of creating work that may have visceral impact but has little in the way of a sense of inner logic and inner construction. For fifteen years or so, tenor saxophonist Ivo Perelman has almost exclusively been working in the free jazz arena, and while the success of his output has been mixed, it would be unfair to call him ...

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Album Review

Ivo Perelman Double Trio: Suite for Helen F.

Read "Suite for Helen F." reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
February 11, 2004

My initial encounter with the opening cut of Suite for Helen evoked images of a man blowing saxophone with a nest of small stinging insects busy swarming inside his pants. To carry the image further, this man, though painfully beset, is resolute in a singular pursuit of his sonic mission—blowing the guts and maybe even the soul out of the end of his horn.Having offered up that observation, let me add that I mean none of it derisively. ...

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Album Review

Ivo Perelman: The Ventriloquist

Read "The Ventriloquist" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
February 13, 2003

At times, these five musicians’ collective aura might ring something like heavyweight boxers going toe-to-toe. However, the forceful implications are perhaps a bit more complementary! Saxophonist Ivo Perelman and bass clarinetist Louis Sclavis lead the charge by engaging in a series of jabs, flurries and counter-attacks. Yet the key ingredients reside within mutual understanding, cohesiveness, clarity of ideas and much more. In essence, this release features an all-star lineup, plus the lesser-known but thoroughly imaginative pianist Christina Wodrascka.

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Album Review

Ivo Perelman: The Seven Energies Of The Universe

by Glenn Astarita
May 1, 2001

Hard blowing tenor saxophonist, Ivo Perelman sets The Seven Energies Of The Universe to music on this newly released production. Art critic Eleanor Heartney describes in the liners, “For Perelman, the experience of painting is very similar to the experience of making music”. Furthermore, Ms. Heartney approximates the abstract expressionism art movement with Perelman’s style of free jazz expressionism as the inferences to the “Seven Energies of the Universe” seemingly coalesce. Hence, art encircles life, philosophy, God, cosmic processes and ...

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Album Review

Ivo Perelman and Jay Rosen: The Hammer

by AAJ Staff
March 1, 2001

Make all the comparisons you want: saxophonist Ivo Perelman has his own distinctive sound. At times exercising the split-tone multiphonics of Albert Ayler, at others relentlessly pursuing themes a la Coltrane, Perelman certainly draws heavily upon the free jazz tradition. But what sets his music apart is its personal character. On The Hammer, he further confounds the issue by leaping directly into the free style initiated by Coltrane in his 1967 duets with Rashied Ali. The saxophone/drums combination allows Perelman ...