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Archives: Thomas Morgan

The first time I’ve been in the Village Vanguard, as a teenager, was when Keith Jarrett had been playing there with his American quartet adding another percussionist. A rather small space, historic value tends to make places bigger. Of course I had only been there with my ears listening to Jarrett’s fantastic Fort Yawuh. Every jazz lover has a collection of records that had been recorded there, a jazz power spot of sorts. Paul Motian was part of the Fort Yawuh-performance, and memories of the late drummer were lingering through the space with its warm acoustics when Bill Frisell and Thomas Morgan entered the club and started playing Motian’s composition „It Should Have Happenend A Long Time Ago“. Only guitar and bass, and the way they evoke these sepia-tinged colour fields, immediately haunts you. There is nothing radical about their playing, no wild gestures Frisell used to offer on Andrew Cyrille’s beautiful ECM album, no rocking the field like Frisell did on Lucinda Williams‘ recent Highway trip, and then again, I can be easily mistaken here. Though this gorgeous young bass player and the whitehaired sixtysomething move through history with peace at heart and, as Germans say, „grosser Seelenruhe“, this is not an oldfashioned affair about glorious days. This is exciting in all its quietness, you don’t wanna miss a single note. Small Town is a perfect late evening record. Candlelight ist no cliche here, it’s part of the instruction manual.

Da sitzt ein Typ jahrzehntelang am Rande irgendeines Nestes auf dem Lande in England. Am Rande von grünen Weiden. Büsche, Feld und Wald. Enturbanisiert oder zumindest urbandistanziert. Singt und spielt da vor sich hin, und die ganze Welt hört gespannt zu. Ab und zu muss er von Leuten wie Carla Bley (inzwischen auch ländlich geworden) oder Michael Mantler (dies Jahr zu sehen in Moers) angespornt werden, und der alte Kommunist singt sich aus der Welt in die Welt. Es gibt viele Weisen des Älterwerdens …
 
Soup Songs, soup sings: The music of Robert Wyatt (on BBC) HIER. Nicht taufrisch, aber nichtsdesto …
 
Und dann einige sehr schön treffende Beobachtungen über den Musiker Thomas Morgan und sein Bassspiel HIER
 
Richard Williams hat übrigens ein sehr gutes, aufschlussreiches Buch über einen der einflussreichsten musikalischen Impulse der 60er Jahre geschrieben. Darüber ein ander Mal!
 

After last week’s wonderful, magical concert-tour in The Netherlands
with Thomas Morgan and Joey Baron …
 
 
get ready for GEFION
 
 
 

 
 
 
GODDESS FROM THE NORTH
 
A I R V I T A L
 
 
GEFION featuring Thomas Morgan & Jon Christensen.

It will be out on ECM Records the following dates in 2015:
 
6th of February – Denmark & Germany
9th of February – United Kingdom
3rd of March – USA

 

Danes are fond of vinyl with carefully designed sleeves and boxes. Vinyl is not an exception but on the contrary in some circles it seems to be considered as the essential part of an album release. It has become a philosophy and an artistic must. Vinyl with a carefully designed sleeve as an artifact is the real thing. It tells how much the musician(s) believe in it, it is a way of wooing listeners and it gives way to a special kind of perceiving music.

On vinyl an album is presented as a present. And in case you receive a copy by an artist you feel really honored. It makes a lot of difference thus. As a consequence I had to continue my travel from Copenhagen to Norway and back to Holland with a bunch of vinyls what also makes a nice difference. I brought them all home safely and enjoyed every piece of it.

I already introduced Simon Toldam’s black trio-album with Nils Bo Davidsen and Knut Finsrud as well as the new Eggs Laid By Tigers album with its perceptual reversible picture on the sleeve. A tiger-face is recognizable and also the physiognomy of Dylan Thomas.
 
 
 

 
 
 
What makes the Toldam album so distinguished is its sound quality which is true to the place where the music happened. That is reflected and framed by the beautiful sleeve noir and its salient typography. It differs all through aurally and visually from the hyperbolic, hypernatural stylization of contemporary piano-trio recordings. Its switching, shifting and jumping characteristics with its moments of finding, connecting and diverging is not presented as fireworks but as down to earth be here playfulness.
 
 
 

 
 
 
Many albums on ILK are released as vinyl only which means it is primarily perceived in that format and identified with it.

One of it is the upcoming new vinyl-album of Peter Bruun, Unintended Consequences.
BruunUI
It features pianist Søren Kjærgaard, reed-player Torben Snekkestad, trumpet-player Eivind Lønning and bassist Jonas Westergaard. The sleeve shows some old school, old fashioned filing features: a name-badge plus, similar to a an old studio sheet of recordings, handwritten information on track-titles, musicians and some additional info. All (mis)guiding allusions – common in these days – are eliminated, expectations are downplayed. No mysteries are evoked besides one: there will be some unpredictable, creative music. That may help to decondition listeners’ minds. Each copy of the Unintended Consequences vinyl is numbered and has some additional handwritten info on the back of the album on the making of the music:

„The consequences of an act may be unintended or intended. A state of affairs is an unintended consequence of an act if it results from the act, although it was not the aim of the act to bring about this state of affairs. An intended consequence of an act, on the other hand, reflects a will, plan, or desire to make a particular state of affairs obtain. Only conscious beings with complex mental states can have aims in this way. Tables and avalanches, for example, do not.”

A thorough review soon.

Different aesthetics are manifestated by the releases of HIATUS, a label run by composer/saxophonist Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard. There are vinyl only releases as well as releases on more than one storage medium.

Løkkegaard himself has released his extraordinary opus Vesper last year. Vesper features Jakob Buchanan, flugelhorn, Jakob Bro, guitar, Marilyn Mazur, percussion and four clarinets (Ole Visby, Tine Vitkov, Birgit Bøgh Sønderiis, Mette Alrø Stoktoft) on the label. For a review see HERE and HERE.
 
 
 

 
 
 
Recently Hiatus has released two remarkable and very different piano-albums. First the highly idiosyncratic solo-album of pianist Johannes Richter titled 13 Pieces:
 
 
 

 
 
 
and Heights by pianist August Rosenbaum, featuring eminent bassist Thomas Morgan, the guitarists Joel Gjærsbøl and Jakob Bro, the saxophonists Lars Greve and Otis Sandsjö as well as percussionsts Mads Forsby and Victor Dybbroe. It is Lostinadream/Dreamlost music from the rushing ether with a very quiet form of electronics. Part of it a masterful solo passage by Thomas Morgan. And more. A wonderful ballad on side B – stopping time passing for a fraction of a second, then catch up with it again …
 
 
 

 


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