★Jazzwerkstatt
Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe - Fragments of Music,
"Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe is a powerful and often ignored recording from the Albert Ayler catalog. It is a prophetic statement dealing with guilt, confusion, sorrow, and hopes of redemption. A powerful rhythm section of Bobby Few on piano, Stafford James and James Folwell on bass, (Folwell on electric fender bass), and Muhammad Ali on drums manage to take a backseat to the prominent vocals of Ayler's business associate and girlfriend Mary Parks, listed on the record as Mary Mar…
Brotzmann Box
"Brotzmann Box" is a beautiful box set containing 3 albums by German free jazz master Peter Brötzmann. The first volume of the album is "Full Blast" (JW 1) with Brötzmann (alto and soprano sax, tárogató) playing in a super Swiss-German trio with Marino Pliakas (electric bass), a member of Swiss Steamboat, and Michael Wertmuller (drums), one of the best musiciand of the Berlin music scene and member of the group Alboth. Together these three musicians create a truly unique musical cosmos that lies…
Live At Jazzwerkstatt Peitz
This performance from May 2014 was the opening concert at Jazzwerkstatt 51, given by Charles Gayle (tenor saxophone, piano), William Parker (double bass) and Hamid Drake (drums) in the Stüler Church, Peitz, Germany. The concert was dedicated “In Memoriam Peter Kowald”, the German bassist who died in 2002 and lived in New York for almost the last two decades of his life. Gayle and Parker were among his earliest musical associates in the city, as seen in the film Rising Tones Cross (full of now fa…
Double Trouble Live
One of the highlights of the EFG London Jazz Festival programme at The Vortex was a late night performance by Double Trouble, a quartet led by the Berlin based saxophonist and composer Peter Ehwald. Ehwald is probably best known to UK jazz audiences as a member of the Anglo-German group Paragon featuring Ehwald’s compatriot Matthias Nowak on double bass plus the British contingent of pianist Arthur Lea and drummer Jon Scott. Both of Paragon’s albums “Quarterlife Crisis” (2010) and “Cerca” (2014)…
Pink Elephant
"Don't think of the pink elephant! One is aware of this phenomenon, the 'pink elephant effect': If one makes an effort not to think of it, he will undoubtedly appear in one's head. This 'ban to think' is doomed to fail. Whenever we play this tune, he immediately pops up in my head. He looks a bit like Dumbo - a surreal, friendly free jazz-elephant, transparent like a soap bubble, happily hooting about, sporting big ears. And he can fly. In a multi-dimensional space a pink elephant is dancing alo…
Die Like a Dog
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 long-running trio with percussion and piano, most of the possible formations have been covered. His Die Like A Dog Quartet was the one entry in this instrumental canon in the late 1990s, and produced five re…
New York Box vol.1
"From New York" is a musical jouney into the street of New York divided into three splendid albums:
DAVID MURRAY - Live at the Lower Manhattan Ocean ClubNew Year's Eve 1977 gig with Lester Bowie, Fred Hopkins and Phillip Wilson, originally released on India Navigation.
JOHN LINDBERG'S TRIPOLAR - (A)Live at Roulette, NYCString Trio of New York bassist Lindberg, with Don Davis (sax) and Kevin Norton (drums), recorded in sparkling form in New York, 2010
LESTER BOWIE - The Great PretenderGospel-dre…
Berlin Box vol.1
"Berlin Box vol. 1 " is a musical journey divided into three splendid volumes that give the listener the best of recordings made by the label Jazzwerkstatt in Berlin. The first cd "Live in Berlin" (JW 22) proposes the fabulous duo of Steve Lacy (soprano sax) and Mal Waldron (piano), immortalized on stage when creating a harmonious interpretation of "A Flower is a Lovesome Thing" by Billy Strayhorn and "Epistrophy" Thelonious Monk together with their own original pieces.
The second album "Live in…
FMP - Free Music Production Box
The first volume of the box "FMP - Free Music Production Box" brings the listener back to the 1977 into the FMP studio in Berlin where Alexander von Schlippenbach recorded the album "Piano Solo '77" (FMP 129): a fascinating album of music improvisation for piano solo. The second volume of the box "No Comment" (FMP 133) is dedicated to the trio of Stefan Keune (sopranino sax, high baritone), Hans Schneiber (bass) and Achim Krämer (percussion) appreciated for their always direct expressiveness wit…
Free and Tremendous
I got to know Joe Sachse's playing through the band Doppelmoppel. The jazz scene in the former GDR created a special music that expressed an independence and pleasure in playing. Our idea of playing together as a duo has now become reality and from the very first moment playing together was easy and inspiring. There happened to be a recording of this first concert and listening to it we wanted to have it published. Thanks to Jazzwerkstatt this wish has now also become reality. - Nils Wogr…
Discography
This discography of musical work by the bassist Peter Kowald, who died in 2002, was compiled in honor of his 70th birthday. It includes an alphabetical catalogue of all 143 published recordings up to 2014 by and with Peter Kowald, as well as the cover designs and additional information relevant to the discography. The 208-page book also contains an index of all the films that Peter Kowald was involved in, texts by Bert Noglik, Floros Floridis, Wolfgang Schmidtke and Günter Baby Sommer, and sever…
Tender Exploration
“Tender Exploration” reminds me of Hayao Miyazaki’s “Howl’s Moving Castle”, it’s an enormous metallic machine on spindly legs, walking like a toddler, but also steaming, mumbling, panting, a creature full of energy, and inhabited by a fire demon. “Drake”, the first track”, starts seeking for a structure almost clumsily, the band members seem to have to find each other. But soon they have a good chemistry and Bauer, who dominates this piece in spite of its name, adds his huge repertoire of tech…
Fur Paul Klee
For Sven-Ake Johansson, the capricious and mercurial character of Paul Klee's texts is not a flaw, but a quality in its own right. His thirteen settings capture precisely this quality of the texts. Johansson's clear diction, his distinct, almost exaggerated elocution, imbues Klee s texts with a lapidary air without stripping them of their personal and intimate nature.
Full Blast
Ass-whooping live set from the Full Blast trio, recorded in Cologne in 2006: Brotzmann’s work with electric bassist Marino Pliakas and drummer Michael Wertmuller extends his work with Last Exit in that it combines an almost metal/No Wave attack with a fluid non-stop dynamic and a feel of electric blues. Brotzmann has always favoured electric bassists – Bill Laswell, Massimo Pupillo – and there’s something about the unyielding aspect of the instrument that acts as a propulsive metal backbone for …
Low Life / Last Exit
Two key 80s moments from Peter Brotzmann – split together here on a heavy LP! First up is material from the album Low Life – hard-handed work from the duo of Peter Brotzmann on reeds and Bill Laswell on bass – a set that's kind of a side project of the Last Exit quartet, and one that comes across with a similar sense of power! Laswell's handling a fair bit of basses here, often with a bit of processing – thanks partly to producer Martin Bisi – and there's a dark, electric undercurrent to the who…
Aoyama Crows
Aoyama Crows is the fifth album by Peter Brötzmann's Die Like a Dog Quartet. Saying the music can still surprise would be a lie. But that doesn't mean it lacks excitement, on the contrary. The performance, recorded at the Berlin Total Music Meeting in November 1999, contains all the elements necessary for an enticing free improv session. The rhythm section formed by Hamid Drake and William Parker is tried, tested, and true. The drummer can oscillate in and out of a pulse with incredible ease. He…
Touchin' On Trane
"This is Charles Gayle's most accessible work. Gayle's mastery of free jazz is blended with a more traditional compositional style of jazz on this disc. Touchin' on Trane is composed of five original songs, and even includes ex-Coltrane drummer Rashied Ali. As the title insists, Coltrane is the influence for the music on this disc. The influence ranges from the upbeat tempo of "Giant Steps" in "Part A," while "Part D" is reminiscent of Coltrane's "Live in Japan" performances. Gayle, bassi…