Two day residency for this quartet combining two of Peter Brötzmann's more recent associations - the trio with Steve Noble and John Edwards that started here at OTO in 2010 (as heard on 'The Worse the Better') and has since gone on to reach a heightened level of telepathy and liminal intensity across repeat engagements - and Brötz's duo with the hard-hitting vibes player Jason Adasiewicz which began at the 2011 Vision festival in NYC and resumed for a two week US tour last year.

Photo by Tim Ferguson / encosion.com



PETER BRÖTZMANN / Tenor and Alto Saxophones, Tarogato, Clarinet

Peter Brötzmann is one of the most important and uncompromising figures in free jazz and has been at the forefront of developing a unique, European take on free improvisation since the 1960s.

Brötzmann first trained as a painter and was associated with Fluxus (Participating in various events and working as an assistant to Nam Jun Paik) before dissatisfaction with the art world moved his focus towards music. However he continued to paint and his instantly recognisable visual sensibility has produced some of our favourite LP sleeves as well as a number of gallery shows in recent years.

Self-taught on Clarinet and Saxophone, Brötzmann established himself as one of the most powerful and original players around, releasing a number of now highly sought after sides of musical invention including the epochal 'Machine Gun' session in 1968 - originally released on his own Brö private press and later recordings for FMP (Free Music Production) the label he started with Jost Gebers. Brötzmann's sound is "one of the most distinctive, life-affirming and joyous in all music" and he has performed with almost all of the major players of free music from early associations with Don Cherry and Steve Lacy to regular groupings with Peter Kowald, Alex Von Slippenbach, Han Bennink and Fred Van Hove, the Chicago Tentet (Mats Gustafsson/Joe McPhee/Ken Vandermark and more) and various one-off and ad hoc associations with many others including Keiji Haino, Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Anthony Braxton and Rashied Ali.

www.peterbroetzmann.com

JASON ADASIEWICZ / vibraphone

In those more or less basic musical realms, Jason Adasiewicz, at age 34, seems to me a young master. But let me mention two other closely related matters — dimensionality and timbre. Adasiewicz, of course, plays the vibraphone, and in the past he has emphasized what anyone can hear: “The vibraphone has become very physical for me. I hit the instrument very hard…. An aluminum bar feels like a brick wall, but you can get spring from the cord that is suspending each bar of the instrument. I’ve felt most comfortable with trying to get those bars to resonate to the point of distortion…. I have never put away the drums

Thus the force with which one strikes the instrument’s bars becomes a crucial part of the musical mix, not unlike the blow with which a sculptor’s hammer strikes a chisel. In fact with the use of various means — the damper of course and, on the two solo pieces here, the backs of two violin bows — the results Adasiewicz gets can range from the imposingly gong-like to the dry and delicately skittering.

And timbre? Well, as Adasiewicz said, those forcefully struck bars resonate to a fare-the-well, and, I would say, in a manner that is unique to the mallet percussion family — every note being at once somewhat dissonant (because so many overtones are rubbing against each other) and part of the mallet percussion family’s “rhyming” timbral vocabulary. Here then continual (even seemingly microtonal) gradations of shading can arise — space and shape, dimensionality and timbre, all bedded down and hard at work under the covers. - Larry Kart



JOHN EDWARDS / double bass

John Edwards is a true virtuoso whose staggering range of techniques and boundless musical imagination have redefined the possibility of the double bass and dramatically expanded its role, whether playing solo or with others. Perpetually in demand, he has played with Evan Parker, Sunny Murray, Derek Bailey, Joe McPhee, Lol Coxhill, Peter Brötzmann, Mulatu Astatke and many others.



STEVE NOBLE / drums

Steve Noble is London's leading drummer, a fearless and constantly inventive improviser whose super-precise, ultra-propulsive and hyper-detailed playing has galvanized encounters with Peter Brötzmann, Derek Bailey, Matthew Shipp, Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith, Stephen O'Malley, Joe McPhee, Alex Ward, Rhodri Davies and many, many more.

In the early eighties, Noble played with the Nigerian master drummer Elkan Ogunde, Rip Rig and Panic, Brion Gysin and the Bow Gamelan Ensemble, before going on to work with the pianist Alex Maguire and with Derek Bailey (including Company Weeks 1987, 89 and 90). He was featured in the Bailey's excellent TV series on Improvisation for Channel 4 based on his book ‘Improvisation; its nature and practise’. He has toured and performed throughout Europe, Africa and America and currently leads the groups N.E.W (with John Edwards and Alex Ward) and DECOY (with John Edwards and Alexander Hawkins).

"Unrepeatable moments of collective inspiration and sudden sunlit shafts of modal near melody punctuate the continuing energy blur." Stewart Lee, The Sunday Times