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Lacrimosa by WC Anderson & Chad Fowler

Lacrimosa

WC Anderson & Chad Fowler

This record shouldn’t exist.

Jazz improvisation--especially free improvisation--happens as a deep, intimate connection of communication between its players. Improvisers feel what the others are feeling through intuition, inflection, tone, harmony, melody, tempo, facial expression, body language, and many other microscopic untraceable nuances. It happens in the moment--the shared moment--in a shared space and time.

The year 2020 brought to our population an unexpected and unprecedented level of isolation. For musicians, this meant that gigs were canceled, tours were scrapped, and recording sessions were indefinitely postponed. Musicians were suddenly unable to even co-locate to rehearse or collaborate. This new global constraint made the aforementioned constraints around improvisation obsolete.

Some musical genres lend themselves well to long periods of social isolation. Composers can sit alone writing, revising, and even listening to some soulless rendition of their work played by a computer. Electronic music creators typically work on computers, possibly collaborating with others from across the world.

The worst possible fit for social isolation in music is improvised jazz. But, the people of the world didn’t just stop talking to each other because of imposed social isolation, so we decided to try to keep talking musically.

Our first experiment started as the result of a conversation between Chad Fowler and Joel Futterman. Joel and Chad both live in, for most avant-garde jazz fans, would be considered perpetually socially isolated locations. Small towns in the South. In a phone conversation about how to further develop the art of free improvisation while alone, Joel suggested putting on “simulated concerts” at home along with existing records. Joel sent Chad a copy of his solo piano CD Pathways to play along with.

Chad recorded one of these simulated concert practice sessions to send to Joel. Having recorded into multitrack recording software, Chad decided to do an experiment. He sent his saxophone track, minus the original piano recording, to a friend to record a guitar track on. Then he sent that to another friend. Then to another. (One of these was WC Anderson). The final result was surprising. It’s beautiful, reactive, improvised jazz music. The performers seemed to be anticipating each other’s moves, and reacting to each other in real time. All this with the now-tacit influence of an original piece, no longer audible but still present in the essence of the music.

It was beautiful creative music. Why not make more? Chad and WC started recording short pieces for each other to “react” to. With the completion of each new piece, came the inevitable surprise--even elation--over what had happened when the two came together. What starts with just a solo saxophone or a solitary drummer comes together to transform into, as the overused saying goes, more than the sum of its parts. Over the course of a couple of months, an entire record formed.

Below, we list all of the tracks and which instrument formed the source material (i.e. who went first). But, we invite you to play a game with this. Listen and see if you can guess. In fact, see if you forget this is two people geographically separate who didn’t even do so much as talk on the phone once during the recording of these pieces. We think you might. We often forget this is even us when we listen.

With this record we hope to bring you some strange mix of the feelings of isolation, anxiety, anger, fear, and--most important--joy. What started as a heretical experiment, creating music that can only be created in person in the moment with real time communication, asynchronously with only one direction of true interaction. There are no rules in free jazz, but we were pretty sure we were breaking the rules anyway.

Credits:

WC Anderson - Drums and percussion Chad Fowler - Sopranino (#1), saxello (#5), alto (#3,4,6,7,8,11), c melody (#2), tenor (#9), and baritone (#10) saxophones WC Anderson - Cover design Marc Franklin - Mixing and engineering tracks #4, #12

Lacrimosa - Sopranino first Trickster - Drums first Pendulum - Drums first Chess - Alto first Corner - Drums first Deranged - Alto first Inches - Drums first Videshi - Alto first, playing along with Zakir Hussain Matter - Drums first Marker - Baritone first Here - Alto first Signals - Drums first

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A Tribute to Alvin Fielder - Live at Vision Festival XXIV by Edward "Kidd" Jordan, Joel Futterman, William Parker, Hamid Drake

A Tribute to Alvin Fielder - Live at Vision Festival XXIV

Edward "Kidd" Jordan, Joel Futterman, William Parker, Hamid Drake

Pianist Joel Futterman and saxophonist Kidd Jordan salute a fallen comrade on Tribute to Alvin Fielder, an energized and eclectic free improvisation. Joined by bassist William Parker and drummer Hamid Drake, their performance was recorded live at the Brooklyn club Roulette during the 2019 Vision Festival in New York. It includes 45 minutes of continuous—and continuously shifting—music.

Futterman and Jordan were longtime friends and collaborators of Fielder, an explorative drummer and founding member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) who passed away in January of 2019. Parker previously worked with the trio on Jordan’s 1999 New Orleans Festival Suite. With Drake taking the kit, the musicians ably evoke Fielder’s loose, omnivorous approach to rhythm and time and run the gamut of the jazz lineage. From New Orleans tradition to bop to free form, Tribute to Alvin Fielder also pays tribute to the music Fielder loved.

Although the quartet’s improvisation consistently changes shape and approach, it doesn’t easily break down into sections. The twists and turns are organic, each idea a logical extension of the preceding one. Hard-driving paroxysm evolves into earthy spiritual jazz, evolves into inquisitive solo bass. Time compresses, expands, and vanishes all together. Within those developments, however, are moments of complete spontaneity, whether in Futterman’s quote of Thelonious Monk’s “Crepuscule with Nellie” ten minutes into the proceedings, or Jordan and Parker’s ghostly moans in the closing moments.

Still, there are constants in the music. They lie in Parker and Drake’s simmering rhythmic lines—which for all their varying forms and directions, never relent even for an instant—and in the raw intensity of the performance. Fielder’s friends and fellow artists grieve his loss, yet also summon the powers of their imaginations to create sublime, in-the-moment music.

Which is surely the best possible eulogy. Sad though his physical departure (as his onetime employer Sun Ra would say) may be, Tribute to Alvin Fielder makes clear that the creative spirits that inspired and animated the drummer’s 83 years not only live on but thrive. Indeed, they show no sign of fading anytime soon.

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Amalgam by Ivo Perelman & Matthew Shipp

Amalgam

Ivo Perelman & Matthew Shipp

Liner notes: https://medium.com/@MahakalaMusic/ivo-perelman-matthew-shipps-amalgam-a7f02620aa

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More Music for a Free World by Dave Sewelson

More Music for a Free World

Dave Sewelson

This offering was recorded in Brooklyn, New York, the music capital of the world, at Park West Studios on December 17 of 2018 by Jim Clouse, a guy who knows and honors this music with his highly advanced recording methods. The way this came about is somewhat miraculous.

William Parker had included a talk he had with Dave Sewelson, the instigator of these proceedings, in his latest book Conversations III. Chad Fowler was reading the chapter in his kitchen in Arkansas when he read Sewelson mention a recording “tried to put another one out. If anybody out there wants to put that out...” He immediately knew he wanted to release in on Mahakala Music. He knew master recording engineer Jim Clouse had it in the can and was the one to talk to connect him with Sewelson. The results of these synchronous events are a delight to hear.

The music here is completely improvised. Maybe someone was going to tell the musicians to try to make some shorter pieces, less challenging for a casual listener but they didn’t. Perhaps someone said, let the drums kick this one off or “go” but no instruction was given. These sounds come out of the silence that is already swinging. The results show what has been known since 2017, that when these four musicians start playing together the result is exquisite music. Call it chemistry, collaboration, community but it is contagious.

The music is presented as it happened on that December day in Brooklyn.

Track 1. Memories: The fact that Swell and Sewelson have been riffing together for years as part of Parker’s Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra is apparent from the beginning of this session. This track starts with a clearing of the ground as the two partners parallel playing gets more involved as the music moves along. Bustling along from collective blowing to back and forth soloing the bass and drums always having and important dialogue on top and below the thresholds.

Track 2. Dreams: Marvin Bugalu Smith sets the table on this one. He prepares a place where the conversation continues, with everyone free to say anything and everyone listening and respecting every point of view. The dialogue between the bass and drums intensifies and the plates almost fall off the table.

Track 3. and Reflections: This track begins with the baritone sax mixing the air in the room to a warm soup that just gets better with each ingredient that each musician adds. The reflection of the steamy image off the surface of the musical soup as the simmering continues.

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Latest Music

Garden Party by Dopolarians

Garden Party

Dopolarians

Pre-order now on Bandcamp and listen to the first single today! https://dopolarians.bandcamp.com/album/garden-party

Full liner notes here: https://medium.com/@MahakalaMusic/dopolarians-garden-party-c07aa24d0b19

Our first release, coming soon in 2019!

Recorded in New Orleans, Louisiana in 2018 at Marigny Recording Studio.

Features Alvin Fielder, Kidd Jordan, William Parker, Chris Parker, Kelley Hurt

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Studio photography by Marc Pagani. Video by Justin Thompson.

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