Plushmusic3 Festival - 6-9 October, Cologne

For the third year running Hayden Chisholm will curate a festival at the Loft in Cologne with a program featuring an eclectic mix of some of the world’s finest improvisers. This year the Austrian pianist Philip Zoubek will be featured in radically different settings and the spirit of the Plushmusic series will continue with unusual formations and music cutting across genres.

Featuring some of the finest improvisers and musicians from Cologne and further afield, this promises to be as an incredible tour of the new musical landscape as we have come to expect from Hayden and the Loft.

6th October 2011 - 8pm
Michael Moore – clarinet & alto saxophone, Paul Lovens – drums
Michael Moore and Paul Lovens are without doubt two of Europe’s most important improvisors. Both of them are profoundly uncompromising in their music and have been featured in numerous now legendary formations (think Schlippenbach Trio or Trio Clusone). Moore’s own label Ramboy has continued to release the finest of improvised music. This is a highly anticipated meeting of two veritable lions who  play for the first time tonight as a duo.

Philip Zoubek – piano, Michael Moore – clarinet & alto saxophone, Franz Hautzinger – trumpet
Franz Hautzinger has over the years developed an extremely personal language for the trumpet with his use of air sounds, microtones, and a fine attention to form. Zoubek’s music also contains an extreme attention to timbre and so we can expect a work of austere elegance tonight. The two Austrians will be joined by none other than Michael Moore in this premiere. All of these musicians have succeeded in marrying the spirit of jazz and improvisation with the subtile sound worlds of new and ethnic musics.

7th October 2011 - 8pm
Zoran Dukic - guitar
In the strange and secluded world of Classical guitar, Zoran Dukic is considered one of the living greats. After winning virtually every possible competition on planet earth he has continued to champion new works for the instrument and will tonight perform new works from the Balkans, his place of origin. It will be his first concert in Cologne in over a decade.

Philip Zoubek – piano, Marcus Schmickler – electronics, Hayden Chisholm – alto saxophone.
Hayden Chisholm and Marcus Schmickler have been pivotal in the Cologne music scene for some time now and have worked together in numerous formations. Their debut duo recording on Haepna “Amazing Daze” was met with critical acclaim and they continue to push the boundaries of acoustic-electric forms. Both of them share a fascination with mathematics in music and using numbers to forge new forms. Both of them enjoy martial arts, Schmickler Karate, and Chisholm Taiji. Tonight their respective hard and soft art forms meet up with Zoubek for the first time and we can expect a soundcloud full of austere beauty and surprises.

8th October 2011 - 8pm
Franz Hautzinger’s “Third Eye”
Franz Hautzinger – trumpet, Hayden Chisholm – alto saxophone, Hilary Jefferey – trombone, Christian Weber – bass, Achim Krämer - drums
Tonightʼs formation is a variation on the one which was the highlight of the Saalfelden festival 2010 and since been broadcast worldwide to critical acclaim. The finely interwoven brass lines utilizing the microtonal skills of the winds which sail over the rhythmic fireworks from behind. The three wind players became familiar as the wind section of acclaimed ensemble “Zeitkratzer” and in this project Hautzinger has united the horns in a more jazz-based group- a kind of homecoming to his roots after many years of concentration on solo trumpet and pure improvisation.

Philip Zoubek – prepared piano
The Solo piano music of Philip Zoubek reveals the artist at his purest. With nothing but a piano and a host of objects Zoubek creates fascinating sound worlds and complex structures. He brings to his solo work a deep aura of composed concentration and the music is given ample time to unfold on it’s own. Every performance is different; this is not a musician to fall back on licks he has practised and he possesses an astounding ability to retain the larger form in his head whilst delving into the minutest of details inside the piano, forging new structures with every performance.

Music at Plush festival

It’s May, the pews are being polished and bats evicted from the rafters of St Johns in preparation for another smashing series of concerts at Plush.

Situated in the heart of Dorset, Plush plays host to world class musicians and friendly audiences every summer. Concerts take place over three weekends from June to September, with a new Festival Day on Saturday 2 July offering a feast of music and events.

This season the focus is on chamber music and new collaborations, with an original and broad ranging programme devised by cellist Adrian Brendel. Classical and Romantic masterpieces, such as Beethoven’s ‘Ghost’ Trio and Mozart’s Oboe Quartet, appear alongside more obscure works, from Charles Loeffler’s Rhapsodies to Ligeti’s intriguing 100 metronomes, Poeme Symphonique and the UK premiere of a new work for cello and piano by York Hoeller.

Musicians taking to the stage this season include Edward Dusinberre (leader of the Takacs Quartet), Thomas Gould (leader of the Aurora Orchestra & Britten Sinfonia), Amihai Grosz and Matthew Mcdonald (both Berlin Phil), Nicholas Daniel, Charles Owen, Corey Cerovsek, Alasdair Beatson, Katharine Gowers, a collaboration with Wye Valley festival performers and many more.

Booking is now open at www.musicatplush.net

Aurora Orchestra - Seeing is Believing live stream

Saturday is shaping up to be a rather special evening for the RPS nominated Aurora Orchestra. They’re finishing off their mini-residency at Kings Place with a concert featuring a piece Nico Muhly wrote especially for them and their leader, Thomas Gould. The concert also launches their new CD for Decca. 

The last few tickets are probably being snapped up as I type this, but if you can’t make it, we at Plushmusic are helping to stream it live. You can watch it on the Guardian newspaper’s site - making it the first live stream the paper has published. From 1830 BST, you can watch the pre-concert talk with Sara Mohr-Pietsch and Nico Muhly, and then the concert from 1930. 

During the interval Nico will be answering questions tweeted over the #auroramuhly hashtag. If you have any burning questions, get them in now!

We’re really pleased to be working with such a smashing orchestra in this wonderful venue. Join us on Saturday from 1830, when you can watch it on the Guardian site.

Merel Quartet - Janacek, Beethoven and Schumann in Plush

High on our agenda at Plushmusic is capturing the concerts at our spiritual home - the Music at Plush festival in Dorset. The church there is such an intimate venue that it’s hard to film there without disturbing the atmosphere, so it’s a relief when most of the feedback from the audience is one of excitement, and even appreciation - apparently people cough less when we’re there! 

The acoustic is perfect for a small string ensemble and just to prove it, the Merel Quartet gave a breathtaking performance of three string quartets there in July 2010. Janacek’s dramatic “Kreutzer Sonata” and Schumann’s inspired first stab at string quartet writing formed the first half, with Beethoven’s Op.74 Harp quartet rounding off the concert. 

Watch the rest of the clips in the Merel Quartet’s channel, and you can buy and download the whole concert there too. If you do, watch out for the huge spider in the slow movement of Schumann - one of the perils of church concerts! 

New release: Moods and Modes

When recording their latest duo CD, Nils Wogram and Simon Nabatov chose to film it as well. What appears on Plushmusic is the same session, recorded live at Radio Studio Zuerich by Andy Neresheimer. Here’s the title track, “Moods and Modes”, which shows just what these two hugely talented musicians can pull off together. 

Check out the release page of Moods and Modes to download the whole session

Review of Simon Nabatov playing Herbie Nichols

We’ve spotted this complimentary review of Simon Nabatov’s set in Cologne at Loft. The film “masterfully shifts the focus from the artist’s physical and technical expressions to the insides of the instrument, finely emphasizing the character of Nabatov’s logically zealous renditions while giving us a chance of watching the soul of a sensitive musician exposed”. See for youself in the sample: 

BBC Music Magazine feature Sep 2010

Rebecca Franks joined us at the Music at Plush festival in Dorset earlier this season to discover the origins and inspiration behind the Plush project.

View the full article in pdf quality.

Feeds - contemporary opera from Germany premières 18th Sept 2010

Plushmusic brings you the premiere of a fascinating new opera by German composer Johannes Kreidler. Set in a TV studio, it explores the theme of hearing. Catch the opera, complete with lie detectors, Twitter and Isolde, karaoke and Angela Merkel, live from Gelsenkirchen at 2000 CEST / 1900 BST on www.plushmusic.tv.

Classical Music Magazine Feature July 2010

Ring carbons

The ring carbon atoms in substituted benzenes exert a larger attraction on the valency electron cloud of the hydrogen atom resulting in an increase in the C-H force constant and a decrease in the corresponding bond length. I’m on the train, and that’s how it reads on the laptop of my next-seat neighbor. I thought you wanted to know.

I’m also sure that you’d want to know who you’re dealing with, so I’ve done a self portrait in the mirror of my hotel room.

Time to think back. The Moers Festival does state that it attempts to show the state of improvised music today, and though of course it necessarily has its leanings, and you cannot get more than a narrow slice of what actually is out there, how does the stuff I saw hold together?

Brötz won. I mean that’s clear as the sky. You just have to watch him backstage, he seems completely focused like all of the time, he’s, what? 69 years and again making some of the best music in all of his career. He will have staid family folk clapping wildly live who would run screaming if they had to listen to a record of his in their safe homes. Brötz totally rules, and I’m so glad I’ve witnessed him twice in his prime.

In not so good news, there is a lack of voices. There’s a lot of great ensemble play, but the excentric individual doesn’t seem currently in vogue. Some of those who did show a distinct voice somehow didn’t fare well on their repeat appearance, Tyshawn Sorey disappeared behind his music with his own group, Bill Frisell was shockingly clueless as to how to make music out of the duo gig with Henriksen, although his trio has been one of the highlights of the festival.

Overblowing your horn has become sort of the jazz lingua franca. Or make that esperanto. I find that somewhat lame, because the greatest of the screamers, like Sanders or Shepp or Brötzmann (or today Gustafsson) were never about blowing your top to create climax while the rhythm shuffles along. (Eg. listen to Don Cherry’s Symphony for Improvisers. It has Sanders weaving circles around tenor Gato Barbieri on piccolo flute. Then for the finale Sanders picks up the tenor too. While Barbieri is sure that emotion will translate into the listener’s ear whenever he honks, Sanders eats the sound from inside out. He’s not about projecting stuff, he’s deep into his medium. And that’s the difference, really, and if I stress this so much, it’s also because of the morning sessions I haven’t mentioned on the blog, which threw together the younger talent in free improvisations that were completely predictable, honking and hustling their way to a dutiful climax. There were a lot of third-generation Barbieris.)

More plusses: my childhood heroes are still going strong. (Does that mean I’ve now officially had a happy childhood?) And there’s such intelligence in the music, the last day sort of had the only drummers who would just hit on the kit without any scruples. Composition is the new improvisation (except for John Wall, where it’s the reverse, but I don’t think shuffling that around will change the meaning in any way).

Well, this time I’m really out for the unforeseeable future. Maybe some Plush folks can send me a CD now and then which I can officially, spontaneously, and unanimously embrace. Folks?

Until then, Lutz Eitel

Meticulously written down spontaneous folk music

Is prog a dirty word for you?

Ok, I will try not to bore you with childhood reminiscences again. But here we have one more guy who meant a lot to me when I was little. My favorite record is Gravity from 1980, and as I’ve made you buy no more than four or five records while writing this blog, get that and we’re cool.

Since then, Fred Frith has done a lot of stuff. He has become a legit composer. He is the one out of the whole festival roster whom I will have heard most often: he once lived near Stuttgart, where I grew up. Whoever has seen the rather popular film Step across the Border will know that he had no trouble mixing with the natives there.

Today’s music actually harkens back to Gravity times. You have all the melody that would come with a Breton folk-rock combo (I actually heard one on a summer holiday many years ago, so this is not just something I made up). You have wildly uneven measures. The band are great, Shahzad Ismaily, the brooding drummer, is on electric bass and hesitant percussion today, Zeena Parkins on accordeon and synth, but the real frontman is Carla Kihlstedt on violin. And she has a tough fight, one foot pedal going belly up and starting to do its own hum in mid-concert …

She’s at the center of the pic above. You can see that everybody has a music stand before them, and that is actually where things do not quite gel, since not everybody manages to translate notes meticulously written down into spontaneous folk music as well as Kihlstedt does. Now and then stuff is a little on the mechanistic side.

But I love that Frith revisits my favorite music from him for me, I love his Frenchified cap, and really this is the last concert before I go back into hibernation mode, with less concerts per year than I’ve now enjoyed over four days, so I don’t want it to stop …

Hypnagogic jazz

This morning I rode a shuttle with Andy Hamilton of The Wire. I wasn’t quite there yet, else I’d have brought up a serious subject you’d all be very interested in. Instead we mostly discussed the toad in the hotel pond which is quite the discovery of the festival. I mean, he croaks in tongues. He’s just so happy to have conquered a kingdom that I suspect it hasn’t really sunk down yet he’s the only one in it. See the pic above.

Seconds after I had wished Andy that he’d be kind, it suddenly struck me: we should have discussed hypnagogic jazz. Obviously. How close do you get to the theoretical motor behind the ruling trend in contemporary music? I was privileged to get that close, I blew it all. I discussed a toad instead.

For those of you not in the know, a Wire analysis of today’s music has coughed up the undisputable fact that the most exciting stuff these days is hypnagogic. The other catchphrase they have is hauntology. Now religious readers of this blog will prick up their ears. I mean, I have mentioned ghost harmonies here, right? I mentioned how Miles Davis resurrects in select Scandinavians (actually that was something Hamilton didn’t at all enjoy). But maybe I should try to explain the concept first. I think it says that you sleep through your adolescent years and then all the bad taste that you’ve snored over hits you back at the exact point in life when you accidently publish a record of your music. And that’s cool. You better sample Chris de Burgh to be on the safe side.

The fact is, that once reality has been structured by leading journalists, it cannot escape back into the chaos it came from. All music is now doomed to become hypnagogic by the sheer power of the word. And frankly I prefer that to musicians being under the influence. Also this should put a stop to all rumors of jazz being a dead art form. It’s maybe more thoroughly asleep than some other musics, but that, by the authority of The Wire, is now a virtue.

Not a single straight note

I’m sorry, I’ll have to take you deep into my past.

I’m the kind of guy that has A Taste of DNA on vinyl. That’s Lindsay’s no wave band from a long time ago. Can’t say I enjoyed it much, but when I was little, it was an important statement for me to have it. By the time I was aware enough to follow his moves, Lindsay played with the Golden Palominos and his own Ambitious Lovers with Peter Scherer, music that was too firmly sounded within the 80s for me to enjoy it then, maybe the productions would be easier to tolerate now.

Then, in 1996, Lindsay brought out O Corpo Sutil. He had incorporated his Brasilian thing while still not playing a single straight note on the guitar. Actually I was late to the game, because that record didn’t convince me then, I fell prey to Mundo Civilizado the year after. Still, Lindsay had started a stretch of four genius song records in a row, heavily informed by his part Brasilian roots, all of them potential fodder for desert island negotiations. It’s a strange thing about songsters, almost nobody can keep it up for more than three records, and four in a row is tied world victory with the select best of them.

The fourth, Prize, actually has two stupid songs, but also the tracks that make you dance on the kitchen table. Get them all.

Today, he was a little too ironic. He should take his heritage more seriously and play it straight. Then again, maybe he should work out choreographies and dance more. Of course his gig easily proved that pop music is still alive, despite some of the main acts here. And he still doesn’t play a single straight note, even though he surrounds himself with no-nonsense ability players, I love that. He enjoys every accident that happens on stage, but by disposition, his band is on the heavy side of things, and he jumps off them happily.

I’m glad to have seen him, and he remains a hero. Greetings, Lutz

We want our Tyshawn back

Strange gig from Tyshawn Sorey so far. Well, not really strange. It’s good music, Ingrid Laubrock and Kris Davis are on form, most of the material is written by Sorey and sounds distinct, they don’t just play stuff, they are a band, but … Tyshawn Sorey does not play like Tyshawn Sorey. I mean like I think he should. That static groove thing, that Steve Coleman thing with the jittery snare, where it would take you a week to just program him over four measures. He doesn’t do that. That surely is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We want our Tyshawn back! Please sign the petition below.

A sense of privacy

Back on the big stage a set from Mari Kvien Brunvoll. She sits alone on stage, with a loopstation and some small instruments, and plays music with herself that depends on a certain sense of privacy. Tough enough in such packed house even without cameramen bustling about, which is why she didn’t want a stream. That’s unfortunate, but it makes sense.