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Joel Grip
As an energetic double bassist and producer, Joel Grip plays a great role for the new scenes of improvised music in Europe. By founding the label Umlaut Records, he opened up for creative forms of organizing collectives of musicians and promoting their music internationally. Since 2003 he has been one of the main organizers of Hagenfesten in Dala-Floda, Sweden, a stand-alone festival, making people meet. Besides touring with groups like Peeping Tom, Kege Snö, Je Suis! or SNUS, Joel Grip's intense and personal music is heard in solo, duo or larger improvising groups in greater Europe, USA and Asia. Besides work in just musical context, collaborations often include contemporary and Butoh dancers, as well as artists, poets, and filmmakers. With music at arms, Joel Grip amplifies reality by making homeless voices heard through the organization Public Health Music.
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Sven Åke-Johansson: Two Days at Cafe OTO
by Fran Kursztejn
Sven Åke-Johansson's death in 2025 felt distinctly like a chapter closed. There is a cliche in Jazz to characterize players of a certain class and longstanding influence as “youthful" or otherwise endlessly inventive despite multi-decade, multidisciplinary careers. Its excessive use is justified by elements of the medium's own construction and history. Jazz itself appears to be an eternally youthful tradition, a set of lofty and difficult characteristics which coalesce into an incorruptible, universal playground. What results is an often tumultuous ...
Continue ReadingIsm: Maua
by John Sharpe
What would a free jazz group sound like if it stayed within conventional rhythmic and melodic parameters? One possible answer was given by pianist Lennie Tristano's pioneering sides such as “Intuition" and “Digression," extemporized by a sextet including Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh. Ism, the cosmopolitan threesome of British pianist Pat Thomas, Swedish bassist Joel Grip and French drummer Antonin Gerbal, offer another option. On Maua (meaning flowers in Swahili), the outfit's fourth album, they once again ...
Continue Readingاسم [ism]: Maua
by Mike Jurkovic
Where would the world be without the clang and the clamor of sensory heightened free-jazz blowing purposeful and wild throughout the realm and surrounding tenements? This is an unsung understanding understood by fellow wayfarers, handed down by the elders and experienced by all who listen. Pianist Pat Thomas understands all this and reassures you of it on the right rollicking Maua, a tight as a snare drum, free jazz free-for-all that does not get on your nerves halfway ...
Continue ReadingElastic Bricks: Oùat
by Mark Corroto
The Berlin-based piano trio Oùat releases their first album with the seemingly paradoxical title Elastic Bricks. If you listen closely, there is nothing incongruent nor oxymoronic about the music. The studio recording from 2021 by pianist Simon Sieger, bassist Joel Grip, and drummer Michael Griener is an all acoustic instrumental affair with a twist. The vinyl edition comes with individual texts, paragraphs from writer Erin Honeycutt accompanying each of the nine compositions. Although no voice is heard, the written word ...
Continue Readingاسم [Ism]: Japanese Flower
by Mark Corroto
The trio اسم [Ism] is comprised of pianist Pat Thomas, bassist Joel Grip and drummer Antonin Gerbal. Japanese Flower by the trio is the second release from a 2018 recording session from Knuttal House in Tokyo, Japan. It is the trio's third release and it follows Metaphor (2019) and إنتقام الطبيعة اسبب تعقدها = Nature In Its Inscrutability Strikes Back (2015), all three released on Umlaut Records. اسم in Arabic, translates to 'Ism" or in English, 'The Name.' For sure, ...
Continue Reading[Ahmed]: Nights on Saturn (communication)
by Troy Dostert
When [Ahmed] released its debut album, Super Majnoon (Otoroku), in 2019, it provided not only an opportunity to revisit the under-heralded work of pathbreaking bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik. It also offered a bewildering, sometimes intoxicating stew of improvisation that relied equally on minimalist repetition and deeply-rooted grooves. This intrepid team of European musicians, consisting of saxophonist Seymour Wright, pianist Pat Thomas, bassist Joel Grip and drummer Antonin Gerbal, envisioned new ways of continuing Abdul-Malik's quest to find shared connections between jazz ...
Continue Reading[Ahmed]: Super Majnoon (East Meets West)
by John Sharpe
It's well known that artistic constraints can in fact aid creativity, but few have put the theory into such good practice as [Ahmed]. The international co-operative of improvisers, comprising the British pair of pianist Pat Thomas and saxophonist Seymour Wright, Berlin-based Swedish bassist Joel Grip and French drummer Antonin Gerbal, takes as its unlikely premise the pioneering music of American bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik which fused Arabic, East African and jazz modes. Claiming Sudanese descent (although jazz historian ...
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