DÖRNER / ERICSON / HÅKER FLATEN / STRID - The Electrics – Live At Glenn Miller Café (2005)

Label: Ayler Records – aylCD-034

Format: CD, Album; Country: Sweden - Released: 2006

Style: Free Jazz, Free Improvisation

Recorded in concert at Glenn Miller Café, Stockholm, on October 3 and 4, 2005.

Composed By – Dörner, Flaten, Strid, Ericson

Cover – Åke Bjurhamn

Executive-producer – Jan Ström

Mixed By [Cd] – Billström, Strid, Ericson

Photography By – Lars Jönsson

Recorded By, Mastered By – Niklas Billström

Excellent session at Ayler's favorite Glenn Miller Café, free blowing yet tight arrangement with an open-minded approach to improvisation, including the minimal and fascinating "Electrance." Exciting and cutting edge music.

Axel Dörner 

Ayler Records first documented this quartet with Sture Ericson on reeds, Axel Dörner on trumpet, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten on bass, and Raymond Strid on drums during a live set on their first tour back in 2000. This release captures the group five years later during a run at the venerated Glenn Miller Café in Stockholm. In the intervening years, Dörner, Håker Flaten and Strid have gone on to record and perform in a wide variety of contexts (Ericson, a figure from the '80s Swedish jazz scene has still remained elusive based on his scant recorded output.) Like their first outing, this is another free blowing session and it is clear that the four revel in it. While Håker Flaten and Strid are known for this kind of setting, it is a kick to hear Dörner let loose in full free-jazz mode. While many think of him in settings like his trio with John Butcher and Xavier Charles, he's continued to show his passion for jazz-based outings like his recordings with Otomo Yoshihide's New jazz Orchestra or Alex Von Schlippenbach's Monk workouts. Ericson is more of an unfettered firebrand, whether sparring with Dörner or careening over the thundering pulse of the music. Yet he can also drop down to subtle textural abstractions, whispering his clarinet against the quiet shudders and creaks like the start of a piece like "Electroots". Here the four show that they are about more than just brawn and buster, kicking things off with a spare, floating, collective improvisation and slowly ratcheting up the activity level as the piece progresses. On the closing "Electraps", Ericson's bubbling bass clarinet, Dörner's muted trumpet smears, Håker Flaten's scraped arco, and Strid's pin-prick percussion etch out pointillistic interactions that builds with eddies of activity. This is the sort of session that showcases how the Northern Europeans continue to carve out their take on the free jazz tradition.

_ By MICHAEL ROSENSTEIN

Ayler Records:  http://www.ayler.com/cd-catalogue.html

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TRINITY – Breaking The Mold (2009)

 

Label: Clean Feed – CF139CD 

Format: CD, Album; Country: Portugal - Released: 2009 

Style: Free Jazz

Recorded live at Molde International Jazz Festival, Alexandrakjeller'n, July 20, 2006

Mastered By – John Hegre, Kjetil Møster
Mixed By – Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, Thomas Hukkelberg
Photography By – Lars Myrvoll
Recorded By – Thomas Hukkelberg

Packaging: Cardstock Gatefold Sleeve

"With a past in hardcore/metal bands, mostly playing the bass guitar, soon Kjetil Moster changed to the tenor saxophone and became interested in crossing jazz and rock with a strong improvisational approach. Specially interested in the ecstatic music of John Coltrane, his personal signature consists in a renovation of the Coltranean stylings. Involved in many top projects centered in Oslo, like Zanussi Five, Fe-Mail, Ultralyd and Crimetime Orchestra, or in colaboration with musicians like Paal Nilssen-Love, Havard Wiik, Fredrik Ljungqvist, Per "Texas" Johansson, Raymond Strid, Mike Pride, Michael Zerang and Nate Wooley, Moster is also the mentor of the project Trinity. His partners in this quartet couldn't be less notable: keyboardist Morten Qvenild is a former member of the band Jaga Jazzist and the founder of the piano jazz trio In the Country, Ingebrigt Haker Flaten comes from Mats Gustafsson's The Thing and Raoul Bjorkenheim's Scorch Trio, and Thomas Stronen is well known from his drumming with Food and Humcrush. With strong connections to the patrimony of jazz, "Breaking the Mold" is innovative, inventive, spelling and vibrant, with the glitter and strength of the most inspiring music coming nowadays from the North of Europe. Don't miss it."- Clean Feed

Morten Qvenild

Kjetil Møster

 Ingebrigt Håker Flaten

Thomas Strønen

With all the respect I have for the Clean Feed label, when I put on this record, I thought, "no, not again", when listening to violent saxes annex electronics, wondering why all this is necessary, even if the album starts quite slowly and relatively quietly, eery and gloomy. But as you grow accustomed to the band's approach (if that's achievable), the quality of the music increases. Again some Scandinavians doing strong things : led by saxophonist Kjetil Moster, the band further consists of Morten Qvenild on keyboards, Ingebrigt Haker Flaten on bass, and Thomas Stronen on drums. So it starts in an interesting way, with plaintive wailing sax against a background of organ, bass, drums and electronics. Slowly the long piece moves into a more tense mode, with organ and sax reacting to each other in small bursts of sound, with interspersed electronics and then, well... all hell breaks loose, as you might have expected. The second, short piece is driven by the electronics and the arco bass, and if it were not for the sax joining after a while, it would be hard to classify this as jazz, yet it sounds good, like an ocean at night, slight wind, no land to be seen. In contrast, the third piece drops you in the middle of a rock avalanche, a weird unrelenting environment from which you can't escape, wondering whether you would even want to. But all that is just the long introduction to the last, expansive, magnificent piece, that drags you along for half an hour of intense musical joy. It starts with a powerful interaction between sax and accompanying instruments, then the intensity drops for some floating mist created by organ and electronics, a barely tangible sound, a backdrop with no foreground. And when the emotional, fragile sax enters, you know you're in for a treat, because of the intensity and the quality of the sounds created, the slow pacing, and the time taken to make each sound come to full fruition and appreciation, but as it goes with carefully built-up tension, it needs release somehow, ... and it does come, gradually, intensifying the silent moaning, speeding up the tempo, increasing the volume, and the explosion does come, expansive, wild, pounding, crashing, screeching, howling, ... What more do you want?

_ By Stef (FreeJazz)
http://www.freejazzblog.org/2009/03/trinity-breaking-mold-clean-feed-2009.html



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BRADFORD + GJERSTAD + HÅKER FLATEN + NILSSEN-LOVE – Reknes (2009)

Label: Circulasione Totale – CTCD11
Format: CD, Album; Country: Norway - Released: 2009
Style: Free Jazz, Free Improvisation
Recorded live at the Molde International Jazz Festival 2008
Recorded and mixed by Frode Gjerstad
New Design (pages 2,3,4,5,6) by ART&JAZZ Studio; Artwork and Design by VITKO
Produced by Gjerstad / Bradford / Håker Flaten / Nilssen-Love

Of his ten-year relationship as part of the Cecil Taylor Unit, bassist William Parker writes "It is great music, but you have to be a great musician to play it because you are given so much freedom that it can become meaningless...(Jimmy Lyons) knew his horn and he didn't just honk and scream, he had a language...while at the same time he maintained and developed his own identity."

No strangers to the aforementioned free-jazz pitfalls, trumpeter (and sole non-Norwegian of the group) Bobby Bradford (here on cornet), sax / clarinetist Frode Gjerstad, bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love gathered at the 2008 Molde International Jazz Festival. Drawing on their ridiculously extensive experience, you will be happy to know they capably passed Parker's test.

Filling the sonic spectrum with an incredible amount of information, the quartet rips through an hour-long set best described, in the jazz parlance, as smoking: nimble and explosive, bordering on mayhem, but a controlled chaos. Largely eschewing extended techniques and completely forgoing garish instrument supplements (i.e. amplification, electronic manipulation), they attack from their respective corners with virtuosic showmanship and prowess, navigating through tangling rhythmic highways, aggrandized forms and harmonic accord / relocation / dispersion. Nilssen-Love's fleet, multi-armed waves of crashes, pedal taps, rolls and multi-stylistic patterns conjoin with Håker Flaten's lyrical rumble, a rhythm section met with Bradford's tendency to rasp and sway and Gjerstad's ability to go from graceful to squealing like a dog on fire to prolonged, dashing, technically perfect scalar runs.

The group knows how to step aside and let the individual members shine, but glories in nearly stepping on toes — while making the latter gestures seamless and congruent to the global push. During "Reknes 4", Bradford bursts to the front with a lick from Stravinski's regal Ballerina Dance (from Petrushka), reconfiguring and transposing the phrase. Do the other three follow? Håker Flaten digs deep with a wrenching, bowed grind, someone comes close to yodeling, Nilssen-Love adopts a Latin funk groove with someone (possibly the yodeler) calling out the down beats. Dexterously, Gjerstad eludes and instantly takes the work back to a sprint, never missing a beat or breaking the spell.

A note about the mixing: captured in near-mono, the recording lends itself to the bare- knuckles jaunt and inspires nostalgia for records where the fight was the performance, not the display of microphone, EQ and compression techniques.

Reknes, however, is not a one-up competition; nor does its strength lie in an obvious devotion to, as Parker relates, a higher power. It is simply this: fun. This group is fun. Quoth Gjerstad: "Isn't it important to enjoy what you are doing? And if you enjoy what you do, presumably you will do it much better. And if you like what you are doing you will do it with conviction. And then the audience, hopefully, will appreciate an honest performance." Yes, we do appreciate it.

_ Review by DAVE MADDEN, 2010-06-02



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