By Ken Blanchard
Peter Brötzmann/Paal Nilssen-Love- Butterfly Mushroom (Trost
Records 2024)
Somehow I missed the
earlier review of Butterfly Mushroom
by Eyal Hareuveni at this venue. Having written it, I went ahead and sent
it in. Apologies to Eyal.
There are no surprises here for anyone who has listened to more than the
first few minutes of almost any Brötzmann recording. Well, maybe one,
especially if you enjoy his trios and duets as much as I do. I find the
synergetic pacing of those recordings to be woven together as seamlessly as
if a four or six handed demigod were playing it all at once.
Butterfly
Mushroom gives me the feeling that the two musicians are playing
independently, isolated in space and time; and yet somehow the result is
perfect, dynamic, joinery, something like body and soul in Cartesian
theory. As I hear most free jazz, it is the role of percussion to create
the aural space within which the other instruments flicker in and out of
being. On this recording I often seemed to hear this reversed. The horns
make a space within which a range of collisions occur.
That out of my system, most of the pieces present the signature Brötzmann
high-frequency fields of sound. On the first cut, “Boot licking, Boots
kickin,” Brötzmann’s guttural buzz is produced as he drills into one vein of
ore after another. I was reminded near the end of this cut of two cruise
ships passing out of port and playing signature tunes with their
Godzilla-sized horns. On “Ride the Bar,” the horn lines get smeary, as a
pen pressed too hard into parchment, and then gives way to streams of
humming punctuated on both ends by high squeals. Nilssen-Love squeezes out
a wide and dense ribbon with sparkle and humor. “Frozen nose, Melting
Toes” opens with jungle drums at an imaginary distance. The horn sings a
sad, breathy lament and the drums, for once, go quiet. When they come
back in, the percussive vibe has shifted to East Asia. The romance does
survive the next two cuts. However, as the horn goes feral, we still get
traces of Zen temple strikers.
Butterfly Mushroom was recorded in Wuppertal, Germany, in 2015.
Around that same time, I missed a chance to hear Brötzmann live in Chicago.
What a mistake. If you want to hear two extraordinary artists who can
evoke pretty much any human experience out of ear and memory, check this
one out.
Hungry Ghosts – Segaki (Nakama Records, 2024)
Hungry Ghosts is described on the Bandcamp page as “Norwegian-Malaysian
trio.” Try finding that restaurant in Boise. The trio consists of Yong
Yandsen on tenor sax, Christian Meaas Svendsen on double bass, voice, and
shakuhachi, and, tying these two recordings together, Paal Nilssen-Love on
percussion. You can find a review of their first album
by our own Taylor McDowell
here.
The term hungry ghost comes directly from Buddhist mythology. The
idea is that the ravenous, unsatiated appetites of human beings live on
after death. It is less clear whether the ghost is the person herself or
just a particularly toxic fragment from that bundle of passions we call a
person. I believe this idea appears also in Navaho mythology. A large
bit of funerary ritual is designed to detoxify these spirits. The album
title refers to such rituals. The title and cover (I learn from the
Bandcamp page) are from The Scroll of Hungry Ghosts.
The titles of the four cuts suggest that hungry ghosts have bizarre
cravings. “In search of filth like vomit and feces to eat” begins with a
thunderous, chaotic dialogue between the saxophone and drums. If Svendsen
is there, it was hard for me to tell. A little over three minutes in this
intense volume of sound collapses into a moment of silence, into which
Yandsen pours his solo. He replicates the dialogue by alternating between
higher and lower whimpering, descending to a barely audible crackle. About
a third of the way through we get a more explicitly Buddhist vibe. Bells
ring and echo. The drums come in and weave a marvelously textured carpet
of clicks and plunging knocks. The last section of the piece brings back
the jungle drum/soundtrack passion similar to that noted on the previous
recording. All the energy rushes back in and we return to the intensity of
the opening.
If your ghost is hungry for a marriage of bowed base and sax, you get it on
the second cut “Small bits of pus and blood.” The small bits make enough
room for one another here that we can appreciate all three virtuosos, but
it is the bass that steals the show. Svendsen maintains the dominate role
at the beginning of the longest and best cut on the album. “Mountain
valley bowls full of grime” reminds me of a sputtering engine more than
mountains or bowls. There is more narrative here, but it never leaves the
passion for texture that marks free jazz. This one was so good that I had
to carry my JBL speaker into my stairwell, which has the best acoustics in
my home.
Both of these recordings are brilliant. If you had to choose one, go for
Segaki. It’s only Jan 24 as I write this, but if this isn’t the
best thing I hear all year… it’s going to be a wonderful 12 months for free
jazz.