JOHN TCHICAI – Solo + Albert Mangelsdorff (1977)

Label: FMP – SAJ-12
Format: Vinyl, LP; CD mastering by Olaf Rupp
Country: Germany - Released: 28 June 1977
Style: Free Jazz, Free Improvisation
Recorded live on February 16th, 1977, during a Free Concert at Townhall Charlottenburg in Berlin.
Design, Photography By – Dagmar Gebers
Artwork and Design (inner pages & 4) by VITKO
Recorded By, Producer – Jost Gebers

If one is entitled by virtue of his musical awareness and technical ability to record a solo album, it's John Tchicai. Tchicai likes to play alone, perhaps because he likes to be alone lives and life and games are not to be separated from him. Solo pieces are not Exercises for Finger & formulas, as unfortunately many, too many solo albums, but improvisations of a mature personality with him. The series of short pieces on the bamboo flute is for me the most impressive, because here the solo character, ie the oneness of musical awareness and the instrument most pristine, is expressed.
_ By HARTMUT GEERKEN


John Tchicai, who had done in the 60 years of working with Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane Outstanding in the enforcement of free jazz , played in February at the Town Hall Charlottenburg three solo pieces on its three different instruments. Soprano, alto saxophone and flute oriental. He built it on the power of repetition, forceful stimulus was reinforced by the cut, crystal-clear tone of his saxophone. On the other hand, he achieved the same effect with starkly contrasting agents: The gently insinuating sequences of its simple wooden flute take a prisoner just to wear a more into the warm summer night on a Central Asian hill. Tchicais thoughtful and meditative solo music - more than subjects con variationi - are marked by a simplicity in jazz who deliberately radically opposes the always perfektionistischeren trends in arrangement, instrumentation, and production technology. Of equal transparency and clarity is also the spontaneous duo between him and Albert Mangelsdorff, both pull here unceremoniously on the same train and play together in a completely natural, as if they would do this every night. It was the first meeting for years.

_ By MICHAEL THIEM, Jazz Podium # 1, Januar 1978



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