When the great African American pianist Cecil Taylor spent a month with some of Europe’s most inventive experimenters in Berlin in the summer of 1988, it felt like a free-jazz milestone. The event seemed to symbolise the ways that Taylor’s, John Coltrane’s and Ornette Coleman’s escapes from traditional song-forms in the 1950s had opened up a stunning international soundworld – in which Coltrane could be segued with John Cage, or Anthony Braxton with funk, mingling 20th-century classical ideas, folk music and free-improv, electronics, avant-rock and more.
The Polish-born German alto and soprano saxophonist Angelika Niescier grew up with that transformative swirl around her, and found an illustrious career in it. This Chicago-recorded set with the prodigious cello and drums pairing of Tomeka Reid and Savannah Harris is the latest to swell Niescier’s packed discography, a list that since the millennium has joined trailblazing European and American partners on sharp-end original music, film soundtracks, nods to Coleman, Braxton and other pioneers, and sometimes all-out freefall.
The seven Niescier originals here span fast, jagged pieces with abruptly interval-vaulting themes, voice-like tone poems of quiet sax exhalations or key-fluttering sounds like beating wings, looping repeat patterns that build to percussive thrashes. The 11-minute Hic Svnt Dracones passes through whooping fast alto lines to dark, atonal, skidding cello figures, and on to a pounding finale, while Oscillating Madness is almost choral in its shivery-bowed cello chords and barely breathed sax tones.
A Dance, to Never End, a repeating horn line picked up and harmonised by the cello, winds up in a storm of tumultuous drumming. Free jazz and immense improv expertise from these three drive the urgent clamour of this music, but a composer’s ear gives it shape, drama and contrast that hold the attention tight.
Also out this month
John Scofield, that most catchily blues-boppish of jazz guitarists, leads Uncle John’s Band (ECM), an artfully hip trio set including a harmonically delicious Mr Tambourine Man, plenty of bass-walking fast bop like Scofield’s own How Deep, and Birth of the Cool’s Budo, plus several originals infused with the guitarist’s telltale laconic lyricism. 4 Wheel Drive, the German/Swedish supergroup including trombonist/vocalist Nils Landgren and the cliffhanging improvisational pianist Michael Wollny release 4 Wheel Drive II (ACT), an amalgam of originals and classic pop covers with dreamy instrumental accounts of The Sound of Silence and Sting’s Fields of Gold, and Wollny’s jubilantly hurtling Spring Dance among the engrossing highlights. Lila, the sixth album from Austrian global-jazz band Shake Stew, features characteristically languid bass, vampy dance grooves and Pharoah Sanders-like sax thrashes over headlong polyrhythms, enriched here by the quietly impassioned poetry of Nigerian/Austrian lyricist Precious Nnebedum.
