Europe Jazz Media Chart - August 2024

The music is sometimes abstract and complex but the enthusiasm and warmth of both musicians make it an inspiring listen. An album to treasure! (Stephen Godsall)

The Polish violinist Mateusz Smoczyński is best known as the pillar of the Atom String Quartet and at one time – for four years – a member of the Turtle Island Quartet, but he has also pursued a succesful solo career. When pianist Adam Makowicz recorded his first American album back in the 1970s, it came out on CBS under the the title Adam. I remember I suggested it shoud have been called Adam’s Apple to signify his arrival on the New York jazz scene. It was explained to me that such a title had already been used by Wayne Shorter on his Blue Note album some ten years earlier. Historical considerations were obviously not taken into account with Mateusz Smoczyński’s newest album whose title is a bow to the American classical composer John Adams (Smoczyński’s newest discovery and inspiration), but is also a reference to the Bible. Released by Warner Music Poland, the album features two violin concertos:  Mateusz Smoczyński’s  “Adam’s Apple Concerto for Violin and Orchestra” (written in 2018) and Zbigniew Seifert’s “Jazz Concerto for Violin, Rhythm Section, and Symphony Orchestra,” written and performed by Zbiggy 50 years ago for NDR Hannover and never before published. Supported by the Chopin University Chamber Orchestra, Mateusz displays his virtuosity, imagination and improvising  zest. In Seifert’s “Concerto” he is additionally joined by an inspired rhythm section of jazz peers: Dominik Wania - p, Sławomir Kurkiewicz - b and Michał Miśkiewicz – dr. The first concerto is more classical, the second more jazzy. Overall, a powerful performance, a triumph!

Over the past decade, Jessica Ackerley has made her mark on the Canadian and American music scene as a unique and versatile guitarist, composer and bandleader. Born in Alberta, Canada, she now resides in Honolulu after nearly ten years in New York City. She has worked with musicians such as Tyshawn Sorey, Daniel Carter, Marc Edwards, Luke Stewart, Patrick Shiroishi and Jason Nazary, to name a few. And her latest release, All Of the Colors Are Singing, has become a brilliant, exciting, creative and delicious release that will stay with me for a long time.

This is an album having neither horn nor Zorn inside, with one of the best elegant guitar trios since that very Friday Night in San Francisco by Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucía. The trio of Bill Frisell, Gyan Riley, Julian Lage perform as one solo guitar and John Zorn overwhelms even with his absence..."

The music of this new trio i first experienced live a few months ago at the Concertgemaal in Amsterdam, the building of an old steam pumping station from 1875, part of the widespread system of water level management in the Dutch polder landscape and at that time substituting a previous system of 50 windmills. It stands symbol of a long, permanent effort and struggle to keep land and water in balance in North-Holland (and other areas). The location and its history in a remarkable way stood also symbol for the longstanding musical purification process of three exceptional musicians with and on their instruments, namely clarinets, shakuhachi, tuba, serpent and trombone. Their music came forth from a deep layer of their instruments’ sound capacities brought into/onto a sophisticated level of exceptional truly characterful sound creation. There was the magical instrumental sound of their wonderful wind instruments - confluent, spectralizing, underlayering, contrapuntal, doubling back, zigzagging - together with their marvellous kind of musical shorthand in marking directions, ways and trails. Also there was the complete lack of acting weighty. Instead there was the immediacy of a common sound space that allowed to enter and traverse from surprising hooks and make purely enjoyable jumps, jolts and connections with superb transitional qualities from a deeper common fund. It was one of the best concerts in months I experienced. In the album’s nine pieces (eight of it conceived by Ab Baars), they thrive and flourish in a wonderful variety of moods among the pieces as well as in the pieces itself all guided by a unifying steady hand. In short, it is music of an astonishing maturity, elegantly wise sound quality, high palimpsestic quality and all over inspiring persuasiveness. Its music comes forth from familiar rich personal musical histories and performance experiences but is here transformed to a higher level of mutually absorbing momentum. It especially excels by its orchestration virtue. The music is true to the essence of sound(s), is evident as well as original and sounds/feels free and freed in an ultimate way. The album’s music makes that listeners can surrender in deep focus to associations and Anklänge. For example, the bluesy trombone intro in the piece “This nearly was mine” can evoke associations with alto saxophonist Johnny Hedges’ playing. After a while from a remote place a soft silvery clarinet sound comes flying in under the tuba and trombone lines, intoning a perfectly fitting tune from collective memory, the piece of Roger/Hammerstein from the musical “South Pacific” from 1949 (!). But it could also be related to Friedrich Hollaender’s quite identical song “Von Kopf bis Fuss …” , known from its definite version by Marlene Dietrich from the movie “Der Blue Engel” from 1930 (!). The trio’s piece has a new quality of its own flowing into a solo expansion by prudent and waggish tubaist Berlinde Deman. Nothing here is how it was on known ground and the other eight pieces with its rich connections, a.o. to musician as John Carter, Tristan Honsinger and Guillaume de Machaut as well as poet Johnny The Selfkicker, roosters, children rhymes etc., are housing entertaining and inspiring little big treasures to discover and enjoy.

… showcases the raw power and inventiveness of her playing and composition skills” (Jazzfuel) Pernille Bévort (ts / ss), Morten Ankarfeldt (b), Espen Laub von Lillienskjold (d).