#dave rempis percussion quartet

[dustedmagazine]

Dave Rempis Percussion Quartet — Harvesters (Aerophonic)

Harvesters by Rempis Percussion Quartet

Saxophonist Dave Rempis is joined on Harvesters by bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten and two drummers, Tim Daisy and Frank Rosaly. The group last recorded in 2013, and the double CD is from their first tour of France in March 2023, a live evening at Le Petit Faucheux in Tours (The English translation of the venue’s name is “Little Daddy Long Legs”—Harvester is another name for the spider). Rempis and company spent a week visiting five venues in France. The set from Tours, their first night in the country, is extraordinary music-making.

Two pieces are on the first CD. “Everything Happens to You” is a half-hour long piece that presents an interesting reversal. It begins with trills and shrieks, out of which, after considerable free improv, a tune emerges. This setup is the opposite of traditional jazz performances, where the tune begins the proceedings to be followed by solos. The drummers create a welter of polyrhythms, rather than interlocking, complementing and responding to each other. Listening again, one can find scraps of the melody that eventually appears: Crafty construction and passionate execution.

Trumpeter Jean-Luc Cappozzo guests on “The Exuberant Aubergine,” playing high, breathy, glissandos while Rempis once again plays fleet trills. It is a slow tempo piece that is also a slow burner. The percussionists, for the most part, keep their powder and the dynamic level low. Cappozzo unfurls a wide-ranging solo and Rempis responds with bent notes and high glissandos of his own. Håker Flaten contextualizes the harmony with scalar passages and chromatic passagework. Cappozzo and Rempis trade riffs, sometimes imitating one another and at others doing their own thing. Duet becomes a trio with bass notes double-timing, moving through all the registers of the instrument. Solos are exchanged in the next section, with the percussionists pressing the action with muscular playing. Midway through, the surface calms, bass notes repeated instead of the previous scalar movement, misterioso melodies from trumpet and saxophone, and a general slowing down. Pops, clicks and slurps from the winds are responded to by accentuations in the percussion. A gradual accelerando and the return of Rempis’ trills signal a return to the demeanor of the opening volleys. The intensity ratchets up, with the drummers becoming more prominent than the winds, despite their altissimo held notes. Once again, riffs are traded, with a call and response between Rempis and Cappozzo responded to by intense playing from the rhythm section. The conclusion sees the drums move back to a simmer, the bass playing repeated notes against a decrescendo by the winds. Exuberant indeed.

CD 2 chronicles the second set. “Spooky Action” begins with a drum duet that introduces a syncopated rhythmic pattern. Rempis is buoyed by the drumming to soaring solos. Håker Flaten adds yet another layer of metric ambiguity. The rhythm section maintains its energetic performance, Rempis exploring and melding various melodic cells of material, creating flurries of ostinatos. Once again, a soulful melody is saved for late in the piece. At the last, the drums drop out, the bass plays repeated pitches, and Rempis builds the repeating patterns into a caterwauling climax, with the percussionists only then edging back in. Rempis concludes with a bluesy cadenza, punctuated by aphoristic gestures from the other players.

“Little Fascists” begins with Cagean percussion improv. Rempis enters similarly, with disjunct riffs and rasping, sustained pitches. He then builds overtones with perfectly tuned harmonics. Håker Flaten contributes a long high register arco trill, adding to the sense of experimentation. Rempis adds keening wails at the end of the piece. While the free jazz blowing on other tunes is exciting, “Little Fascists” has a distinctive sound world that is fascinating.

The final tune, “Fat Lip” opens with a bass solo in which harmonics are juxtaposed against a pizzicato solo that ranges the whole instrument. Håker Flaten has been a keen collaborator throughout the concert, and his solo brings this style to the fore. Rempis joins him with an undulating melody that begins brawny and slow and proceeds to mercurial runs. The drummers alternate between pulsation and freely constructed fills. Rempis returns to his mid-register melody, embellished with quick scales. The saxophonist savors an intervallic sequence, tweaking it here and there with half step variations. His solo quickens and takes up a stentorian tone. The rest of the group recognizes his intentions, pressing forward and creating a sweltering density. With raucous howls and undulating lines, Rempis fragments “Fat Lip’s” melodic contours. He eventually settles on two short riffs, that he repeats as the drummers add still more fills and Håker Flaten plays a modal ostinato. The conclusion is a decrescendo with a sizzle of cymbal at the end.

One hopes that more of the France tour might be committed to disc. This is Aerophonic’s tenth anniversary, and there are few better ways to celebrate than more of Rempis’s Percussion Quartet.

Christian Carey

[diyeipetea]

HDO 323. Dave Rempis por partida doble: Lattice - Cochonnerie (The Rempis Percussion Quartet) [Podcast]

HDO 323. Dave Rempis por partida doble: Lattice – Cochonnerie (The Rempis Percussion Quartet) [Podcast]

El saxofonista Dave Rempis publica en su sello Aerophonic dos nuevas grabaciones. Lattice (en solitario, con temas propios y versiones de Eric Dolphy y Billy Strayhorn), y Cochonnerie al frente de The Rempis Percussion Quartet (junto a Ingebrigt Haker Flaten, Frank Rosaly y Tim Daisy). En HDO 323 suenan dos temas de la grabación en solitario, y una larga pieza de la grabación en cuarteto, en…

[sclarkrva]

I am very excited to have a string of great concerts coming up in the next week and a half. First, Thursday 4/20 at Vagabond in RVA.  My great friend and amazing musician Scott Burton has put together a night of music he’s calling Small Talk.  He describes it as follows: “Small Talk is a new free musical improvisation series from Scott Burton featuring chance encounters between creatives. The idea is simple: 2 short sets of musical small talk, and 1 set where all the players come together for a longer conversation. You get to eavesdrop!” Small Talk #1 will be: Set 1: Guitarists Scott Burton and Toby Summerfield Set 2: Drummer Scott Clark and Guitarist Alan Parker Set 3: All of the Above (more info here https://www.facebook.com/events/1404305372965670/) (Vagabond 700 E. Broad St. 10pm Free)

Then on Friday 4/21 Cary Street Cafe presents RVA Jazz Night.  This show will feature 3 amazing groups in one night.  First Scott Burton’s new Kessel Quartet will be performing the music of guitarist Barney Kessel.  Next, my group the ScottClarkEnsemble will be performing some new music fresh to everyone.  Finally, Charles Owens will have his quartet performing music from his new release “As One” (https://charlesowens.bandcamp.com/album/as-one).  Special thanks to Jeremy Simmons for helping set up this great night of music at one of Richmond’s staple music venues.  (more info here https://www.facebook.com/events/255989714809070/) (Cary St. Cafe 2631 W. Cary St. 10pm $10)

Finally, Thursday 4/27 the great Chicago saxophonist Dave Rempis will be in town performing two sets at Candela Books and Gallery in Richmond (214 W. Broad St. 7pm $10).  The first set will be of Dave’s work for solo saxophone, followed by a collaboration of a trio featuring Dave, myself and the great guitarist/composer Toby Summerfield. Dave is on a tour that he describes as follows: “Prolific Chicago-based saxophonist Dave Rempis (Rempis Percussion Quartet, Ballister, Rempis/Abrams/Ra, The Engines) will undertake a sprawling solo journey around the United States this spring, developing repertoire for his first solo release scheduled on Aerophonic Records this fall, while also working to strengthen the informal networks that connect, inform, and sustain the improvised music scene throughout the U.S. Each concert on the trip will involve a solo set, as well as a collaboration with one or more locally-based musicians in every city he visits.  The working title of this ambitious project is Lattice.”

More about Dave Rempis can be found below or at http://daverempis.com

Saxophonist, improviser, and composer Dave Rempis has been an integral part of the thriving Chicago jazz and improvised music scene since 1997.  With a background in ethnomusicology and African studies at Northwestern University, including a year spent at the University of Ghana, Rempis burst onto the creative music scene at the age of 22 when he joined the well-known Chicago jazz outfit The Vandermark Five. This opportunity catapulted him to notoriety as he began to tour regularly throughout the US and Europe, an active schedule that he still maintains to the present day.  At the same time, Rempis began to develop the many Chicago-based groups for which he’s currently known, including The Rempis Percussion Quartet, The Engines, Ballister, Rempis/Abrams/Ra, Wheelhouse, Triage, The Rempis/Rosaly Duo, and  The Rempis/Daisy Duo.  Other collaborations have included work with Paul Lytton, Axel Dörner, Fred Anderson, Peter Brötzmann, C. Spencer Yeh, Hamid Drake, Steve Swell, John Tchicai, Roscoe Mitchell, Kevin Drumm, Paal Nilssen-Love, Nels Cline, and Joe McPhee.  Rempis has been named regularly since 2006 in the annual Downbeat Critics’s Poll as a “rising star” on alto saxophone, and as a “rising star” and “established talent” on baritone saxophone.  In 2013, he started his own record label, Aerophonic Records, to document this ongoing work. 

Rempis’ musical expression draws on a number of touchstones.  While heavily improvisational in nature, his Greek ethnicity, studies in jazz and ethnomusicology, an appreciation for the philosophical underpinnings of contempory composition, and a love for unforgivingly strident yelps, screeches, and squeals that can encompass the ever-evolving state of human depravity all inform his work. 

Aside from his role as a musician and composer, Rempis has worked tirelessly as a presenter.  Since 2002, he’s organized and produced a weekly series of improvised music at Chicago’s Elastic Arts Foundation.  He was a founding member of Umbrella Music, and one of the lead producers and curators of its annual festival in Chicago from 2006-2014, and served as the business manager of the Pitchfork Music Festival from 2005-2016.  He currently works with the Hyde Park Jazz Festival.

Thanks for your support and more soon……

  Upcoming RVA Shows I am very excited to have a string of great concerts coming up in the next week and a half.

[dustedmagazine]

Russ Johnson Quartet — Reveal (Calligram)

Reveal by Russ Johnson

Four seems to be an auspicious number for Russ Johnson. While the complement of the trumpeter’s combos may change, they usually number four musicians.  Reveal is also part of another quartet, since that’s how many records Calligram, the musician-run label that is issuing it, offered in its inaugural release. The artist and company are well matched, since they share a disregard for the boundary between modern jazz and more avant-garde variants. One might even say that the album’s apparent mission is to show how much space really lies between inside and out.

The musicians accompanying Johnson are up to the task. They are all Chicagoans, which attests to the Johnson’s status as a not-just-honorary member of the city’s jazz scene even though his day job and abode are both situated north of the Illinois/Wisconsin state line. He’s put in the miles since 2010, when he accepted a position as the director of jazz studies at University of Wisconsin/Parkside, coming south to lead his own bands and play with others. The casting of this quartet is inspired. Ethan Philion is a young bassist with undeniable chops and a documented affinity for the music of Charles Mingus; he’s Johnson’s philosophical second on this date. Drummer Tim Daisy is a multi-decade veteran of Chicago’s improvised music scene, where he’s worked as an enduring associate of Ken Vandermark and Dave Rempis, and led his own projects, which have sometimes included Johnson. Violinist Mark Feldman is a longtime New Yorker with a yards-long cv. and the sort of versatility that you only get when you’ve put in time with George Jones, John Zorn and Sylvie Courvoisier.

Feldman relocated to Chicago during the pandemic and in short order kindled an initially private working relationship with Daisy. They’ve gone on to work together in mainly improvised settings, and their partnerhsip places the drummer at the apex of a relationship triangle that gives the performances on Reveal an essential zing. On one side, there’s a camaraderie developed by passing back-and-forth leadership roles and books of tunes. On the other, there’s a rapport forged in the real-time furnace of free improvisation. This breadth of understanding puffs stylistic and emotional oxygen into the diverse and intricate frameworks that Johnson has devised for the quartet. His writing shuttles between classical forms and blues sonorities in ways that’ll get the history-minded listener thinking about Julius Hemphill. While the forms and emotional arcs of the material feel pretty defined, there’s plenty of room for Johnson’s fellow travelers to adorn, comment, and maybe wiggle the steering wheel a little bit. “The Slow Reveal” starts out with a slow stir of timbres, which gradually resolve into a mournful horn melody that is pricked by vinegary strings. As Johnson persists, the rest of the ensemble shifts between challenging and supportive stances before joining him in a percussion-driven whirlwind that remains reflective and melancholy at its core.

But if Daisy was the relational focal point of this band going in, the emerging connection between Feldman and Johnson is what the material cultivates. The compositions guide them to commingled slurs, execute cascading lines, and offer commentary upon one another’s solos while Philion and Daisy either shade the action or set up rhythms sturdy enough to contain it. Feldman’s an old pro, so it goes without saying that he finds a way to make this music work. But this album feels like a beginning. Johnson tends to shake up the personnel of his quartets, not all of which make it to the recording studio even once. Here’s hoping he breaks his own rule and keeps this combo going for a while.

Bill Meyer

[dustedmagazine]

Feldman / Rempis / Daisy—Sirocco (Aerophonic)

Saxophonist Dave Rempis and drummer Tim Daisy have been playing together since 1997. Their evolving collaboration in Triage, the Vandermark 5, Rempis Percussion Quartet and Earscratcher (among others) has been sufficiently documented by various Dusted scribes that we’ll spare you the history here; just start typing names into the search engine on the right if you feel the need for background information. Suffice to say that the Chicago-based duo have worked together enough to have developed both an intimate familiarity with each other’s potentialities, and some ways to keep things from getting stale. Sirocco, a live recording with violinist Mark Feldman, provides examples of both phenomena.

Feldman ended a decades-long sojourn in New York during the pandemic to move back to Chicago, the city of his birth. Naming a few of the strong connections he left behind — John Zorn, Sylvie Courvoisier, Michael Brecker — gives only a partial accounting of the breadth of his experience as an improviser and sideman in both creative and commercial contexts. With that sort of a cv, he did not come to this encounter as a complete unknown quantity. Additionally, he and Daisy have already made one duo recording. But he brought the qualities of being new to the duo, as well as having a strong musical personality of his own, when he began playing with them in 2022. This combination made him an ideal agent of challenge for Daisy and Rempis. 

The CD is split into two parts, both taken their third concert together, which took place in October, 2022. The location, Elastic Arts, is home turf for Rempis and Daisy, but from the first seconds, Feldman is an equal partner in setting the tone. He and Rempis twist long, microtonal ribbons of sound around each other’s lines while Daisy contributes spare, subdued accents. The drummer and saxophonist are typically quite good at winding each other up, but Feldman seems to steer them towards a more restrained, quizzical mode of interaction. They’re no less agile or engaged than in other contexts, but more light and space gets into the music. It delivers a different charge, but it’s sufficiently electrifying to bring new life and fresh ideas to a venerable partnership. 

Bill Meyer

[dustedmagazine]

Rempis / Harnik / Lonberg-Holm / Daisy — Earscratcher (Aerophonic)

Earscratcher by Earscratcher

You could call this record a late, late birthday present. In 2019, Austrian pianist Elisabeth Harnik first played with saxophonist Dave Rempis, drummer Tim Daisy and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm. The encounter was sufficiently satisfying for her to plan a tour with them in May, 2020 in celebration of her 50th birthday. Of course, that tour didn’t happen; it took two full years and a couple postponements before the quartet finally commenced it on May 2, 2022, with the concert preserved on this CD.

You can hear pent-up anticipation being dispersed, but that’s not all you hear. When she first convened the quartet, Harnik undertook a gambit sufficiently familiar that someone else named their band after it — The Chicago Plan. The city’s creative music scene has sufficient mass that an outsider can have a pick of partnerships that permit them to tap into both geographic and group dynamics, and Europeans have been taking that route ever since Brigitte Fontaine recorded with the Art Ensemble of Chicago in 1970. Daisy, Rempis, and Lonberg-Holm have been performing all together or in subsets since the late 1990s in Triage, the Vandermark 5, Rempis Percussion Quartet, Klang and Ballister, so Harnik dialed up both a thoroughly tested collective compatibility and a breadth of sonic-stylistic possibilities when she made the calls that assembled this group. 

One quality that prolonged practice can cultivate is mature judgment, and it’s in ample evidence here. No one feels the need to bring the full breadth of their sound into play. Instead, they contribute what the situation at hand requires. Sometimes that means being subliminal or silent, but even when an individual is playing full-on, they astutely balance whatever they play with everything else around them. Consequently, the album’s three lengthy (between 16 and 20 minutes) collective improvisations sustain cohesion despite a prevailing dynamic of rapid change. Rempis, who plays several horns, confines himself to alto sax, on which he plays darting, discrete phrases that coil and stretch around Lonberg-Holm’s just-distorted-enough shudders and scrapes like a serpent wrapped around a broken physician’s staff. Daisy is like a turbulent weather system, shifting suddenly from gusty vectors to stormy sound-bursts that imbue the music with motion and shape, but never add too much weight. 

Harnik often places herself within this group dynamic, playing more sparsely than I’ve heard in other settings. Sometimes, a strum across the piano’s strings or a quick, isolated phrase completes the music happening around her, such as when she draws bright, thin arcs of sound through a thicket of similar gestures near the end of “Penggaruk Telinga.” But in other passages, her playing adds ballast and intricacy. She has a percussive attack that melds especially well with Daisy’s drumming, creating by turns a complex field of discrete strikes and a tidal surge of aggregated sound during “Ohrenkratzer” (all three tracks translate from another language into English as “Earscratcher”). For better or worse, as long as you’re alive, you keep having birthdays. If this quartet found a way to play music this engage on an annual basis, that would definitely be for the better.  

Bill Meyer

[dustedmagazine]

The Rempis Percussion Quartet — Cochonnerie  (Aerophonic)

Cochonnerie by The Rempis Percussion Quartet

The Rempis Percussion Quartet had been around for 11 years when it recorded this album in October 2015. As ever, the group’s specialty is long-form improvisation; the shortest track is eight minutes long, the longest 33. You can’t deny the unfolding quality of the music that saxophonist Dave Rempis, bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, and drummers Frank Rosaly and Tim Daisy play.

And yet, it happens in an instant. Its development is as fractal as it is linear. Take “Enzymes,” the final track. It opens with a keening phrase from Rempis, followed by several elaborations upon it. But at the same time that he’s forging ahead, the bassist forges ahead at a tangent, one-drummer cycles around him, and the other works proposes an a-metric counterpoint. Later in the same improvisation Rempis drops out while Håker Flaten’s double bass and scat singing engages in a one-man dialogue and the drums trace patterns like Saturnian rings around him. And then they fall into an intersection of churning grooves. They’re listening to each other every second, figuring out what to add that’ll keep the music not only moving, but changing.

At the same time that the musicians are renegotiating their positions of mutual assistance or challenge from second to second, they’re doing the same thing with the audience. There are moments where you can just let this stuff wash over you, but then it’ll drop you into a free-fall of uncertainty. The closer you listen, the harder it is to find the point where it all joins, because that point shifts every second and sometimes it only exists as a notion, not a fixed location. And yet, the music kicks ass. Every second of interaction contains the potential for both solid connection and collectively realized abstraction. 

Circumstances require that the quartet operate within the moment. Nowadays only half the band lives in Chicago. Rosaly lives in Holland, Håker Flaten in Texas, and they’re likely to work together mainly on the road. But since this music is nourished by challenge, problems aren’t really problems, they’re instigations.  

Bill Meyer 

[dustedmagazine]

Rempis / Abrams / Ra + Baker — Scylla (Aerophonic)

Scylla by Rempis/Abrams/Ra + Baker

The Dusted review of Dave Rempis, Joshua Abrams, and Avreeayl Ra’s first album, Aphelion, closes on an anticipatory note: “This is an enormously satisfying record, but it also implies potentialities that make this a band worth watching in years to come.” I can’t claim any great gift of prescience, since all of the participants were already known both for their individual gifts. Alto, tenor and baritone saxophonist Rempis, the trio’s instigator, has a particular knack for keeping his ensembles going and growing. But I will gladly claim that I was right.

Rempis first convened the group at a time when certain of his long-standing local partnerships had come to an end or were getting harder to sustain, since they had members who were either leaving Chicago or getting busy leading their own projects. This group wasn’t an obvious solution to such problems, since Abrams and Ra were already in high demand. But it was an open door into an AACM-informed method of music-making that Rempis hadn’t spent much time pursuing. His early responses to his bandmates’ non-North American percussion and stringed instruments was to play melodies that seemed to look eastward without explicitly enacting any particular ethnic approach. But since then, the ensemble has grown into its own rhythm and identity. They play a couple times a year at Elastic Arts, the venue that hosts the long-standing weekly improvisational music concert that Rempis has booked for a couple decades. Abrams tends to leave his harp, guembri and clarinet at home now, sticking mostly to double bass, and the group’s pan-cultural intimations have been absorbed into a distinct group dynamic that contains stormy episodes within a predominantly patient approach to long-form improvisation. While Ra and Rempis are both quite at home playing at high volume, they often turn things down a notch in each other’s presence. And a fourth member, piano and synthesizer player Jim Baker, has become an integral member of the group. 

Scylla, the group’s fourth recording, was recorded in July, 2021. It documents their first post-lockdown concert, and also the first performance that Elastic Arts had opened to the public since March 2020. The album actually starts with a finale, a brief dedication that Ra had originally intoned as he gently plucked his mbira at the concert’s end: “This is for the survivors.” The rest comprises two pieces, one nearly 35 minutes long, the other a bit over 27, each collectively improvised in a fashion that applies the quartet’s vocabulary to the gravity of the moment. Baker plays piano on “Between A Rock,” and his swirling chords mesh with Ra’s cymbals and Abrams arco passages to suggest a particularly oceanic surge of sound. Rempis rides their swells, switching between horns to signal a transition from pensive solemnity to purgative emotion, and finally engagement with an uncommonly bop-like closing passage. “Viscosity,” with Baker on burbling synthesizer, feels simultaneously diffuse and purposeful, as each musician carefully steers a path forward. It’s easy to project all sorts of metaphorical meaning to the music, but you’ll get just as much benefit from simply sinking into its meandering flow and savoring the common understanding that permits the collective generation of something simultaneously loose and cohesive, lyrical yet quite unforced.  

Bill Meyer

[dustedmagazine]

Bill Meyer: Year In Review 2017

Dusted’s writers bid 2016 farewell with a mixture of sadness and revulsion. We grieved the many great musicians who died, but the sense that the countries we live in were collectively embracing paths that might make us mourn the toppling of fundamental principals weighed even heavier. And 2017 has shown that our dismay was not misplaced. There’s no need to recount the shit show of USA politics here, except to say that it’s fucking embarrassing to know that a sizable portion of your country is swallowing scams so transparent that if your teenager pulled that crap on you, you’d ground them an extra week just for thinking you were that dumb. But while compassion, justice, and reality contact seem to have gone out the window, I’ve never found music more sustaining. So let’s talk about what gives a guy hope.  

Bill Orcutt

Bill Orcutt by Bill Orcutt

This year, like every year, I listened to a lot of solo guitar music. Bill Orcutt’s self-titled LP twisted all the lies out of the old American songbook and made it sing his song; Richard Osborn’s Endless kept up the tradition of transcendence; and newcomers Rob Noyes and Alexander delivered strong debut LPs. Elkhorn is a duo and not quite new, but their first full-length record, The Black River, nails that feeling of knowing that things have been lost but that can’t stop you.  

 Elkhorn

The Black River by Elkhorn

In 2017 I was privileged to hear many improvisers repeatedly, in different contexts and sometimes on different continents. It has felt like a privilege to hear them negotiate a balance between the articulation of personal concerns and group values, night after night, in ways that build things up. If Jim Baker, Steve Hunt, Mars Williams, Brian Sandstrom, Ikue Mori, Paal Nilssen-Love, Pascal Niggenkemper, John Butcher, Ståle Liavik Solberg, Anton Hatwich, Tony Buck, Dave Rempis, Andrew Clinkman, Macie Stewart, Steve Marquette, Phil Sudderberg, Ken Vandermark, Rafael Toral, Carol Genetti, Jaimie Branch, Joe McPhee, Tomeka Reid, John Edwards, Nick Mazzarella, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Tim Daisy, Jason Stein, Jason Roebke, Jason Adasiewicz, Paul Giallorenzo, Joshua Abrams, Hamid Drake, Michael Zerang and Chad Taylor (as well as the others I saw more than once, but am forgetting to name here) can do it, the rest of us can too.

 Butcher/Buck/Mori at Café Mir, Oslo  

p>It’s the end of the year, so lists are obligatory. Here are two that I compiled for other publications.

 The Wire top ten

1 Jaimie Branch, Fly or Die (International Anthem)

2 Bill Orcutt, Bill Orcutt (Palilalia)

3 Sarah Davachi, All My Circles Run (SOD)

4 Keiji Haino/John Butcher Haino, Light Never Bright Enough (Otoroku)

5 Evan Caminiti, Toxic City Music (Dust Editions)

6 Les Filles de Illighadad, Eghass Malan (Sahel Sounds)

7 Shelter, Shelter (Audiographic)

8 Anthony Pasquarosa, Abbandonato Da Dio Nazione (VDSQ/Thin Wrist)

9 Richard Osborn, Endless (Tompkins Square)

10 Anahita, Tourmaline (Three Four)

 2017 Magnet Magazine Jazz and Improvised Music top 10

1 Jaimie Branch, Fly or Die (International Anthem)

2 Bill Orcutt, Bill Orcutt (Palilalia)

3 Shelter, Shelter (Audiographic)

4 Keiji Haino/John Butcher Haino, Light Never Bright Enough (Otoroku)

5 Rempis Percussion Quartet, Cochonerie (Aerophonic)

6 Paal Nilssen-Love/Frode Gjerstad, Nearby Faraway (PNL)

7 Tomas Fujiwara, Triple Double (Firehouse 12)

8 Keith Rowe The Room Extended (Erstwhile Records)

9 Rob Mazurek, Rome (Clean Feed)

10 The Necks, Unfold (Ideologic Organ)

 Both were done too soon to acknowledge some great music I heard late in the year, so let’s just say that Olivia Block and Ulaan Passerine made records very much worth your time. But these lists convey this point; in 2017, sound felt truer than words.  Most of the music on these lists is instrumental, and of the records with singing, one bypasses linguistic meaning by being in a language I don’t know and a couple others obliterate it altogether. So how about it, 2018, what do you have to say for yourself?

[dustedmagazine]

Rempis / Rosaly Duo — Codes / Myths (Aerophonic)

Codes/Myths by Rempis/Rosaly Duo

Dave Rempis and Frank Rosaly have a history together. Between 2001 and 2016, the saxophonist and drummer played together in innumerable bands and one-off situations, but one looms especially large. The Rempis Percussion Quartet, which also included drummer Tim Daisy and (serially) bassists Anton Hatwich and Ingebrigt Håker Flaten. When Hatwich was in the band, Rempis surfed a rhythmic maelstrom. After Håker Flaten took over, the sound became variously more atomized and electric. Either way, the RPQ was one of Chicago’s most reliably thrilling musical units of the past two decades.

But nothing lasts, and sometimes a change for the better brings with it some loss. In 2016 Rosaly fell in love and moved to Amsterdam, and while that did not bring about the Quartet’s demise, it became a primarily European phenomenon and has been on ice for some time. Fortunately, that cool down has not necessitated the termination of the Rempis-Rosaly partnership. It’s easier to get one guy across an ocean than a band, so this duo, which first split off from the RPQ in 2009, has made one previous recording and toured repeatedly in both Europe and the USA.  

Codes / Myths was recorded in concert when Rosaly last visited Chicago in January 2018. The double album reproduces two sets, over which the two men revisited anew the various possibilities present when one guy brings three saxophones (alto, tenor, baritone) and the other sits down at a drum kit and drops a few extra items on top of it. Both musicians have a lot of latitude to move within their personal and shared continuums. Rempis is a famously loud player who can maintain impact when he holds back and plays sparingly; Rosaly can swing a gentle pulse, or create multi-faceted sound sculptures out of apparently accidental events. All of that happens within the first minutes of “Patterns in Distance,” the 29:25 performance that dominates disc one. Rempis’ baritone snuffles and pops, then digs a circular breathing-fueled tunnel of sound that resolves into a soulful wail. Rosaly stacks quick circuits around his kit with the apparent effortlessness of a veteran air traffic controller managing the whole airport’s incoming flights, and then draws back to find just how many sounds one can get out of a single cymbal.  

If that first half hour was all this record contained, it would not be a cheat. But there’s plenty more to hear as each musician switches up implements and attacks. Well into the second half of disc two, they get around to the sort of intricate/aggressive/propulsive amalgam that was one of the RPQ’s strongest suits. If feels like both a re-staked claim and a confirmation that even though it’s just the two of them, they bring a surfeit of artfully unvarnished sound.  

Bill Meyer