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Marion Brown: Why Not?
by Clifford Allen
Marion Brown Why Not? ESP-Disk 2009 (1966) While the term “fire music" has held sway as a descriptor of the music of post-John Coltrane/Albert Ayler saxophonists from the 1960s onward, it's long been an incomplete summation of the work of most of these musicians. Alto saxophonist Marion Brown ...
Alone, Again (Naturally): Peter Brotzmann, Olaf Rupp, Henry Kaiser, John Butcher, Woody Sullender and Frank Rosaly
by Clifford Allen
For this writer, solo playing and solo concerts have a special place. A few years before I began writing about jazz, and while living in New York at the beginning of the 2000s, I ran into the late violinist Leroy Jenkins in the East Village. I didn't know him personally, but he was instantly recognizable, and ...
FMP Records: A Snapshot of German Jazz History
by Clifford Allen
Much like in the United States, the jazz revolution in Europe was at the hands of not only a group of very forward thinking musicians, but also some incredibly vanguard record labels. One crucial difference, however, is that in Europe, some of the most important labels were collectives partly instituted by the musicians themselves, as well ...
Peter Brotzmann: Die Like A Dog
by Clifford Allen
Peter Brotzmann Die Like a Dog Jazzwerkstatt 2008 German reedman-composer Peter Brotzmann is, despite an immense catalog spanning over forty years of activity in free music, criminally underrepresented in the format of a “standard" piano-less quartet. From reed-heavy octets and orchestras to the winds-bass-drums power trio, not to mention a ...
Bengt Nordstrom: Creative Addition
by Clifford Allen
Reedman Bengt “Frippe" Nordstrom (1936-2000) was both a sort of “enfant terrible" of Swedish jazz and one of the movers and shakers in the early years of Scandinavian jazz. In addition to the reedman's own LPs, his Bird Notes imprint, while virtually unknown outside of Sweden, released tiny batches of recordings by Albert Ayler (Something Different!!!, ...
Revolutionary Ensemble: Vietnam and Beyond the Boundary of Time
by Clifford Allen
It could easily be argued that the “loft jazz" era of the '70s was a direct product of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), both in its moral structure and its eventual fragmentation. Loft spaces, artist-produced concerts and artist-owned labels were self-reliance projects, a cornerstone of the AACM. Furthermore, the relocation of many ...
Transit: Quadrologues & Nate Wooley: The Seven Storey Mountain
by Clifford Allen
The work of trumpeter Nate Wooley falls into a number of camps: free improvisation, experimental noise or restructuralist post-bop. It would be easy to lump him in with a young trumpeters/ extended techniques setting but Wooley is decidedly an individual. And while brass players tend to elicit an expected bravura, Wooley is very much at home ...
Bobby Bradford: Self-Determination in the Great Basin
by Clifford Allen
Born in Cleveland, Mississippi in 1934 and raised between Dallas and Los Angeles, trumpeter Bobby Bradford began playing with Ornette Coleman in Los Angeles in the 1950s, and replaced Don Cherry in an unrecorded Coleman quartet during the early 1960s. However, the most significant partnership in Bradford's musical life was with the clarinetist and composer John ...
Bobby Bradford: With John Stevens and the Spontaneous Music Ensemble
by Clifford Allen
Bobby Bradford With John Stevens and the Spontaneous Music Ensemble Nessa Records 2009 In the instances that European and American improvisers have commingled and produced concerts and recordings, especially in the halcyon days of European free improvisation (the 1970s), a significant number of these situations resulted from expatriation. And it's ...
David S. Ware Quartet: Live in Vilnius
by Clifford Allen
David S. Ware Live in Vilnius No Business 2009 The year 2009 could be a rather big year for tenor saxophonist and improvising composer David S. Ware, and that's saying a lot. After all, Ware has long been one of the most celebrated figures in free jazz, owing not only ...
