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Mats Gustafsson: Share The Moment
by John Sharpe
Reedman Mats Gustafsson resides at the center of a hurricane of activity: relentlessly touring, curating festivals and begetting record labels. He boasts one of most distinctive sounds in free jazz, combining the extremes of scalp prickling howls with adventurous exploration of minimalist tone and timbre. Although he's come a long way since his early days in a punk rock band in Sweden's Lapland, that anarchic energy is never far away, revealed in collaborations with luminaries from both the Old and ...
Continue ReadingMats Gustafsson/ John Russell/ Raymond Strid: Birds
by Eyal Hareuveni
Recorded live at the 2011 Hagen Festen in Sweden, this meeting of experienced free improvisers--Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson and drummer Raymond Strid, and British guitarist John Russell-- is quite surprising. No muscular, fiery playing of reckless abandon, as is normally expected from the powerful Gustafsson in regular outfits such as The Thing, Fire! or Swedish Radio Jazz Group; instead, Birds is spare, thoughtful, and under commanding control. Maybe it was the naturally relaxed village environment of the ...
Continue ReadingNeneh Cherry & The Thing: The Cherry Thing
by Mark Corroto
The Scandinavian power trio of saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love named their band The Thing in 2000, after the Don Cherry composition from Where's Brooklyn (Blue Note, 1966). In their subsequent dozen or so albums, they have covered Cherry's music and that of Albert Ayler, Joe McPhee, and Duke Ellington. The Thing has also ventured outside the jazz idiom to perform music by The White Stripes, Yeah Yeah Yeah, PJ Harvey, and Cato Salsa ...
Continue ReadingFire!: unreleased?
by John Kelman
Moving from the studio to a live performance at Tokyo's SuperDeluxe club in the fall of 2010, Fire! both pares down and expands the sonic purview of its 2009 Rune Grammofon debut, You Liked Me Five Minutes Ago. Pared down in that saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, while still tripling on Fender Rhodes and live electronics, sticks solely to the deep-bodied baritone saxophone this time around. Bassist Johan Berthling focuses monolithically on electric bass, eschewing the electric guitar and double-bass of the ...
Continue ReadingMats Gustafsson: Needs!
by John Eyles
For anyone who has recently seen Mats Gustafsson live in concert, either with The Thing or in his own right, Needs! is likely be a surprise. In addition to his baritone and slide saxophones, here Gustafsson employs live electronics and “bug treatments." Photographs of him in action indicate that these involve miking the bell of his saxophone and then processing the output. He combines the acoustic sounds of his saxophones with the amplified sounds of the electronic devices, mixing them ...
Continue ReadingPeter Brotzmann Chicago Tentet: 3 Days in Oslo
by Lloyd N. Peterson Jr.
We live during a time when society needs music in boxes, connected with dots; music that can be readily explained and even more readily understood. But Peter Brotzmann tears down the walls, rips apart the boxes and completely shatters any preconceived notions of what music is supposed to be. He understands the necessity of art being able to express from the soul and spirit of the artist, and that is a freedom fought for, one that is intensely fought for. ...
Continue ReadingFire!: You Liked Me Five Minutes Ago
by John Kelman
Mats Gustafsson and the word “accessible" are rarely found in the same sentence. For over two decades, this Swedish reed player has been mining the extreme end of free improvisation and cued composition with like-minded players including Peter Brötzmann, Ken Vandermark, and The Thing, his ongoing collective with bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love. You Liked Me Five Minutes Ago may not exactly be rife for radio play, but its preponderance of potent grooves does temper the more ...
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