- Floating Points w/ Pharoah Sanders and LSO: Promises
- Portico Quartet: Terrain
- Pinon Palladino and Blake Mills: Notes with Attachments
- Nik Bärtsch: Entendre
- Marc Johnson: Overpass
- Anthony Joseph: The Rich Are Only Defeated When…
- Trio Tapestry: Garden of Expression*
- Sons of Kemet: Black To The Future**
- Thomas Strønen: Bayou
- Eivind Aarset: Phantasmagoria
- Natural Information Society w/ Evan Parker: Descent
- Andrew Cyrille Quartet: The News
- Shai Maestro: Human
- Carrothers / Courtois: Firebirds
- Christian Walllumrod: Speaksome
- Masabumi Kikuchi: Hanamichi – The Final Studio Recording
- Kari Ikonen: Impressions, Improvisations, and Compositions
The News: das nächste Jahr einige Sendungen und Beiträge für die Jazzredaktion machen, immer wieder gerne die JazzFacts, aber eben ohne die Nächte. Der Fokus richtet sich auf die Welt der improvisierten Musik, und dies hier sind meine Highlights des Jahres, mhmm, vier Solopianoalben dabei, interessant. Am 30.12. stellen Odilo Clausnitzer, Karsten Mützelfeld und ich in den JazzFacts um 21.05 Uhr im DLF unsere Favoriten vor. Meine ersten JazzFacts anno 2022 gibt es am 3. Februar. In einem Beitrag wird es um ein Trio-Album gehen – mit Kid Downes, Petter Eldh und James Maddren.
*Garden of Expression: Trio Tapestry‘s sense of melody, space and letting-go is immaculate. I will always remember their first record, one of the jazz miracles of 2019. For me, it was the best album Joe Lovano ever made, with Manfred Eicher’s perfect sequencing of the tracks. Listen to the vinyl: suspense, sound and silence in perfect union.
It is quite natural that this follow-up lives up to the high standard of the first meeting in New York. Now with a deeper touch of Provence pastel and colours at dusk. You can think of every jazz writing cliche of praise, from „filigree“ to „elemental“, and be sure that Lovano, Crispell and Castaldi are breathing new life into it. After the first three pieces of pure baladry (written by soul, not by the book), the appearances of sound take more and more adventurous side steps, from moments of pianistic unrest and upheaval, to an exploration of metal and sound in Castaldi‘s drum figures.
A zen-like purity‘s bold pairing with an adventurous spirit. The record delivers everything with grace, selflessness and the most nuanced sense of tempo, time standing still and a flow of undercurrents. If this sounds slightly over the top, let the music take over, dim the lights and follow the tapestries!“ (M.E.)
**“I’ve not been listening to albums specifically from this year. I even forgot that Pino Palladino/Blake Mills’s Notes With Attachments came out in 2021. It’s a great album in terms of compositional form. Musically it’s very different, but it reminds me of the place I was in when I started to put together Sons Of Kemet’s Black To The Future. I love its warm, organic atmosphere. Madlib’s Sound Ancestors contains one of my favourite tunes of recent memory – Road Of The Lonely Ones.I’ve listened to that more times than I’d like to admit. The album is such a deep work, I can tell it’ll keep growing on me.“ (Shabaka Hutchings, Sons of Kemet)