Reflected Free Jazz: Angelika Niescier’s “Chicago Tapes” | EUROtoday

No different American metropolis – other than New York – has given jazz as a lot impetus in latest many years as Chicago. With the founding of the AACM – the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians – within the Nineteen Sixties, the metropolis on Lake Michigan turned a stronghold of free jazz. Several generations of remarkable avant-garde musicians, proper as much as the current day, have been influenced by the AACM, and its affect even spilled over into neighboring areas – consider the post-rock that emanated from Chicago, which was triggered no less than as a lot by jazz as by Krautrock and electronics.

Chicago has a music scene, stated jazz guitarist Jeff Parker in a latest interview, that thrives utterly independently. And but it prospers far past the town and nationwide borders: there have all the time been connections between the free improvisation scene in Chicago and Europe, significantly shut ones with Peter Brötzmann. His Chicago Tentet, which included improvisers corresponding to Ken Vandermark, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Kent Kessler and Hamid Drake, was a selected instance of this.

With the much-celebrated Cologne alto saxophonist Angelika Niescier, born in Stettin in 1970 and raised in Germany since 1981, the transatlantic interplay is now persevering with in a brand new technology: She was already a visitor at a pageant in Chicago in 2012, carried out with the bassist Nate McBride and the drummer Frank Rosaly, and met the saxophonist Dave Rempis and the drummer Mike Reed on the event and over beer know.

You can simply think about it: Anyone who has ever seen Angelika Niescier stay or off stage is aware of about her thrilling liveliness, her exuberant enthusiasm and her undisguised appeal. After assembly her, one suspects that she might persuade even the dullest sofa potato to undertake probably the most adventurous undertakings.

But she hardly wants persuasion for her tasks: her status as one of the vital achieved and on the similar time most experimental saxophonists of at the moment has unfold for a very long time, and he or she finds her musical companions on the high addresses in New York and now additionally in Chicago. The sensible album “Beyond Dragons” was created in 2023 with cellist Tomeka Reid and drummer Savannah Harris; Now one other collaboration with the native scene follows: “Chicago Tapes” consists of 9 Niescier compositions that go away loads of room for improvisation, every recorded with a quartet. Mike Reed sits on the drums for each, Dave Rempis and vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz full one formation, bassist Luke Stewart and flautist Nicole Mitchell the opposite formation, typically diminished to a trio.

How are you able to describe what occurs in an hour? Perhaps as a celebration of free jazz knowledgeable by numerous traditions, which has lengthy since handed into its enlightened, extremely reflective part. The sensible opening piece has the programmatic title “Rejoice, Disrupt, Resist”, an anthemic manifesto that not solely honors the metropolis of Chicago, but additionally breathes the spirit of resistance to which no less than elements of the free improvisation scene have all the time been dedicated.

Inevitably you have to go to the currently highly charged ones state of the union think under King Trump. In any case, the title of the opener does what it promises: in the wonderfully sleepy, wistfully painful unison by Niescier and Rempis there is a memory of Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman”; It is a beguilingly elegiac theme, however it’s rapidly exploded and results in extreme cascades of improvisation by the 2 saxophonists – pushed by Reed’s pressing drumming and Adasiewicz’s pointed chordal vibraphone accents.

As in all items, whereas the highlight is on the soloists, the rhythm part performs a elementary position. The loopy runs, complicated duets, the ensnaring, entwining melodic strains, the lyrical motifs and offended outbursts of Niescier, Rempis and Mitchell appear to emerge from the groove; it’s from this that they develop their thrust.

At occasions it has one thing exhausting bop-like, typically one thing playfully experimental. You can hear Niescier and Rempis rework right into a swarm of bees throughout the music “Great Horned Owl”; in “E Randolph Street” a mysteriously spherical environment is created via respiration, blowing and clattering. “Bouncing the Ledge” is a high-energy, contrasting interaction of trill sequences by Mitchell, which underpin virtually your complete piece, and fleeting arabesques by Niescier, that are repeatedly interrupted by small interludes by Reed and Stewart. Incidentally, the contribution of bassist Luke Stewart can’t be overestimated; his delicate, highly effective pizzicato contributes enormously to the depth of an album that develops new colours, sides and centrifugal forces with each pay attention. If anybody desires to know the place the way forward for German jazz lies: past all borders and in each single be aware by Angelika Niescier.

Angelika Niescier: „Chicago Tapes“. Intact Records