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A cavallo tra gli anni Settanta e Ottanta, quando nella scena jazz norvegese la presenza dell'etichetta germanica Ecm stimolava e indirizzava le scelte di tanti musicisti, il sassofonista Frode Gjerstad si volgeva a un altro panorama, cercando il contatto con le odissee procellose dell'improvvisazione storica europea, volgendosi soprattutto all'area britannica. Qui collaborò con grandi maestri che ...
read moreThe bones of Norwegian saxophonist Frode Gjerstad's Trio go back a long way. He first co-opted drummer Paal Nilssen-Love into his Circulasione Totale Orchestra when he was still a teenager. Although bassist Jon Rune Strøm is a more recent recruit, he has still been on board since 2011. As such the consistently high quality interplay they ...
read more23rd Annual Vision Festival
Roulette
New York, NY
May 23-28, 2018
Introduction The Vision Festival somewhat surprisingly but reassuringly stands proud as the longest-lived annually produced jazz festival in New York. While the central plank remains what the Festival terms avant jazz, it's interspersed with poetry, dance, art, and ...
Since it's inception in 2002, Lisbon, Portugal's Clean Feed Records has released nearly 500 recordings. Last year the total was 64. Keeping up with their output might be the best way to follow innovative jazz and improvised music in the 21st century. Besides releasing music by masters such as Peter Brotzmann, Joe McPhee, Ivo Perelman, Elliott ...
read moreNorwegian bassist Jon Rune Strøm, subscribes to none of the self-effacement which sometimes manifests itself on dates led by rhythm section mainstays. That is signaled straight away on the first cut of Fragments, where no other instrument is heard for the first six minutes. With bow in hand, he initially duets with fellow bassist Christian Meaas ...
read moreLeft brings together a particularly uncompromising triumvirate of veterans in pianist Borah Bergman (who died in 2012), German saxophone icon Peter Brötzmann and Norwegian reedman Frode Gjerstad. Although all three recorded after this date in various combinations, this performance from the 1996 Molde International Jazz Festival was the threesome's first and only appearance together on disc. ...
read moreFrode Gjerstad has been a key figure of Norway's free jazz scene since the 1970s. In 1981 he started a fruitful collaboration with John Stevens, who encouraged him to pursue his interests in free improvisation, eventually connecting him with a diverse range of important international musicians. A few years later he started working with a younger ...
read moreThere is probably no way to avoid the parochial mindset of the American jazz listener. Take the release Revolution Before Lunch by the Scandinavian trio of Thomas Johansson, Øyvind Storesund, and Paal Nilssen-Love. You might listen to a few notes of Johansson's trumpet as Close As Hail" opens the affair and think, oh yeah, it's Magnus ...
read moreCan the entire history of a musical genre be encoded in one man's DNA? If that is possible, then reading the DeoxyriboNucleic Acid molecules in saxophonist Peter Brötzmann's body would yield all the information a musical scientist studying the development of free jazz would require. Since the 1960s, he has been in the center of the ...
read moreSono più di trent'anni che le strade di Bobby Bradford e Frode Gjerstad si incrociano continuamente, dall'esordio nei Details di John Stevens per arrivare alla manciata di ottimi CD incisi in trio o in quartetto. Risulta così del tutto normale l'alto grado di intesa che si percepisce tra i due lungo i quaranta minuti scarsi di ...
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