Things we like: Yvonne Rogers, Myra Melford/Satoko Fujii, Cecil Taylor Unit

I simply adore jazz piano records. And I have three new ones to edify and amaze me this month.

Like Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and Heather Cox Richardson, pianist-composer Yvonne Rogers hails from the state of Maine. Since landing in Brooklyn a few years back after studies at the Eastman School of Music and University of Rochester, she's garnered awards and commissions, led her own quartet, and performed regularly in ensembles led by Ingrid Laubrock, Adam O'Farrill, and Alden Hellmuth. 

Her new album, The Button Jar on Pyroclastic, was produced by the estimable Kris Davis before she stepped away from helming the label to concentrate on her own composing and performing. It's Rogers' first solo recording, named, she writes, for her mother's button jar, which taught her "to balance fair play with craft, and to find magic in the process."

Perhaps influenced by its creator's bio, The Button Jar's meditative and spiritual qualities put me in mind of Ives' Concord Sonata, while my wife said the lightness of Rogers' touch reminded her of Tin Hat Trio/Sleepytime Gorilla Museum founder Karla Kihlstedt's voice -- it's "conversational, rather than performative." As a composer, Rogers is a clear thinker, has good command of her materials, and shows lots of promise for the future.

Myra Melford and Satoko Fujii's history as a piano duo goes back to 2007 and the all-improv duet album Under the Water on Fujii's Libra label. Katarahi, on leading edge French indie RogueArt, features compositions by both performers (four by Melford, three by Fujii). Melford recently wowed Texas audiences with her all-star Fire and Water Quintet, while Fujii produces a steady stream of releases in a variety of contexts.

The pairing of the two artists is galvanic. Both are dynamic, assertive performers, wielding ample expressive technique, unafraid of space or dissonance. They play contrasting dynamics, intertwine swirling melodic lines, and churn up roiling waves of emotion. Overall, I haven't enjoyed a piano duo this much since I caught Kris Davis and Craig Taborn's Octopus for two memorable nights back in 2022. 

At times, Melford and Fujii's intensity put me in mind of Marilyn Crispell, back when she was in Anthony Braxton's quartet, the two of them sounding for all the world like the meeting of Cecil Taylor and Eric Dolphy that never took place, but should have because both musicians remain such perennial influences on their respective instruments. For me, it always comes back to CT -- my pick for the musician of my lifetime on days when Ornette isn't -- and lucky me, some new-to-me music from him just arrived the other day.

I owned the Prestige Great Concert of Cecil Taylor (the US issue of Shandar's multi-volume Nuits de la Fondation Maeght) back in the '70s, and in the pre-Record Store Day hoopla, was intrigued to see that Elemental Music, one of the labels for which reissue producer extraordinaire Zev Feldman works his magic, was releasing two other concerts from that famous tour. 

Now Fragments: The Complete 1969 Salle Pleyel Concerts is here, and it's stupendous. On CD, the relatively succinct, 50-minute evening set is sequenced first, with the slightly more diffuse, 90-minute afternoon set split at the 20 minute mark. In recent years, video of these concerts -- which were recorded for French radio and television -- has surfaced on YouTube, but because the sounds of the instruments are so distinctive, I actually find myself better able to focus on this audio-only document.

By this time, Taylor's appropriately named Unit with altoist Jimmy Lyons and drummer Andrew Cyrille had been together for three years, and their onstage telepathy shows it. They were in between their classic Blue Note albums and a sojourn in academia, Cecil's compositional concept was fully developed, and his accomplices knew their way around its contours well. Multi-reedist Sam Rivers, who'd joined them for the tour in between stints with Blue Note and Miles Davis and his own apotheosis on Impulse and at the helm of Studio Rivbea, sounds better integrated here than I remember, picking his spots to add tenor and flute interjections. Cecil's a force of nature, as he would remain to the end of his life, but this performance represents an early peak in his trajectory.

As Feldman's productions tend to be, Fragments is sumptuously packaged, with photographs from the concerts, an essay by Taylor biographer Phil Freeman, and reminiscences from Cyrille, Lyons' widow the bassoonist Karen Borca, Rivers' daughter Monique, drummer Jack DeJohnette (who was a member of Miles Davis' band that shared the bill with Taylor's Unit on the '69 tour), and pianist Matthew Shipp. But enough of this. Time to fire up the CD player and let those 88 tuned drums rip.

Things we like: Lisa Cameron, Sleeping Beast

Lisa Cameron is one of my favorite musicians on Earth, one whose work exemplifies electroacoustic improvisation at its finest. With a style steeped in psychedelic rock (she kicks traps with venerable Austin space rockers ST-37) as well as free jazz and Euro free improv, she's the leading practitioner of drum feedback extant.

Like her frequent collaborator, prepared guitar specialist Sandy Ewen, Cameron has a highly tactile approach to sound sculpture. At a recent appearance at Fort Worth's Grackle Art Gallery in duo with violinist Alex Cunningham, she demonstrated a propensity for sympathetic listening and responding that only the finest improvisers possess. Her tools include contact mics on drum heads, singing bowls, cymbals, a mixer, and an array of beaters and small objects. Observing at close range, one could only be amazed at the way she was able to electronically transmute the confluence of sound waves from Cunningham's bow and strings and vibrating objects on her drum heads into a veritable aural tsunami. The ease with which she and the violinist were able to follow each other's dynamic shifts entered the realm of the magical.

Cameron's part of a cohort of musicians -- others include her fellow Austinites, guitarist Jonathan F. Horne, saxophonist Joshua Thomson, and Norwegian expat bassist Ingebrigt Haker-Flaten; North Texas siblings, bassist Aaron and drummer-vibraphonist Stefan Gonzalez; and Houston-based trombonist Dave Dove, trumpeter Jawwaad Taylor, and saxophonists Jason Jackson and Danny Kamins -- who connect Texas to the wider world of improvised music. Last year's Live at Love Wheel Records with Thomson and Haker-Flaten was a good vinyl representation of this tribe. Now Kamins' label Musical Eschatology has released Sleeping Beast, a 2023 recording of Kamins and Cameron in a trio with bassist Thomas Helton, and it's quite stupendous.

One of the shortcomings of a lot of improvised music one hears these days is a tendency toward bombast -- a more art-tastic take on the old rockaroll saw "When all else fails, kick over the amps." Texan improvisers benefit from the ongoing influence of pioneering Tejana experimentalist and Deep Listening founder Pauline Oliveros, whose eponymous foundation gave birth to Dove's Nameless Sound organization, in which musicians like Kamins, Ewen, and Horne cut their improvising teeth. While Sleeping Beast includes ample opportunity for Kamins to flaunt his circular breathing fluency and seemingly endless melodic invention over Helton and Cameron's turbulent sprung rhythm, much of the real action here takes place in the quietest passages. All three musicians are virtuosi, but it's in the confluence of their imaginations that true wizardry occurs. Get you some of this.

Vocamov Rites' "Live at They, Who Sound"

Improvisation is ephemeral, and attempts to document it often fail because they neglect to take this into account. When what is presented is a total sensory experience, including not only the sounds being produced but the way they interact with the space and the audience, a mere audio recording cannot suffice. When physical movement ("spontaneous choreography") is added to the performance, a visual record becomes necessary. One thinks of the collaboration between guitarist Derek Bailey and dancer Min Tanaka, released as an LP record titled Music and Dance. The audio document is evocative, capturing the sounds of rain as it causes the roof of a building to partially collapse, but it is by its nature incomplete.

The three performers in Vocamov Rites -- vocalists and multi-instrumentalists Esin Gunduz and Justin Rodriguez-Jones and dancer Paty Lorena Solorzano -- attempt to address this by releasing the record of their March 2025 performance at Houston's Lawndale Arts Center (under the auspices of curator David Dove and his creative music organization, Nameless Sound) as a digital download with accompanying video. Live at They, Who Sound -- out April 9 via Bandcamp -- provides a vibrant and engaging model of how such documentation can be effectively accomplished.

Vocamov Rites' set begins with the disembodied voices of all three performers reverberating in the space. On the video, you can see the curious and somewhat disquieted responses of the audience to this first encounter. Gradually, Gunduz and Rodriguez-Jones make their way to their instruments, vocalizing wordlessly as they go, creating passing harmonies and counterpoint, like ghosts moving through resonant space. Gunduz uses air to activate her instruments -- breath to move the reeds on her tremelo and bass harmonicas, a strap attached to her leg to operate the bellows on her harmonium. Rodriguez-Jones balances his synthesizer atop a toy piano and uses it to create drones, pulse, and oscillation, along with snippets of melody.

Solorzano enters the space up the aisle between the rows of seated audience members, exploring boundaries, "rotating the body in all its planes" (to paraphrase the injunction in a Harry Partch title), moving like a marionette riding waves of sound, now stiff and mechanical, now balletic or acrobatic. She mirrors the sound of voices and instruments, even interacts with Gunduz's harmonium at one point. By the time the three performers begin to wind down their conversation, the viewer/listener feels centered and satiated. There's no substitute for being in the room when such an event takes place, but this representation is as close as we can get without traveling back in time and space.

Simon Hanes' "Gargantua"

Photo by Jacob Garchik.

The cognitive scientist David Huron has written that people's emotional reactions to music are driven by our expectations, which in turn are based on our knowledge of music in general, as well as a particular genre or piece of music. Composers can create tension, release, and surprise by toying with these expectations. On his new album Gargantua -- out March 27 on Pyroclastic -- the composer Simon Hanes (a familiar of Lower Manhattan eminences John Zorn and Hal Wilner) confounds our expectations masterfully, but with a more graceful arc than other masters of the collage and quick cut like Zorn and Frank Zappa.

The pieces that make up Gargantua are inspired by the scatological satirical novels of 16th century French author Francois Rabelais, the daunting beauty of the Nordic wilderness, and the primordial myth and potential violence of Hawaii's volcanoes. They are realized by a large ensemble of strong elements: three drum sets, three electric basses, three trombones, three French horns, and three soprano voices. 

The result is a music that fuses the influences of Hildegarde von Bingen and Tibetan Buddhist choral singing, baroque music and edgy modernism, alpine horns and heavy rock. The combination of vocal polyphony (those harmonized glissandos!), low brass, and rock rhythm becomes a whole that is totally unique and deeply spiritual. You can hear the confluence of these elements in the opening "A Series of Waves Tremble in a Sea of Blood," where Tibetan Buddhist texts translated into Italian bump up against texts from Dante's Inferno.

In "Gigantes," a heavy riff and simple major key melody struggle for dominance, finally dissolving into chaos. "The Number of the Beast is 666" is a stately march reminiscent of Zappa during his Grand Wazoo big band period, while on "Submit to the Fabulosity," the singers (later echoed by the horns) scream imprecations at the composer over a disco beat, giving way to the best aural simulacrum of an erupting volcano since Trane's Meditations. "Moirai" has the singers, representing the Fates of Greek myth, singing texts from Dante, Pliny, and Petronius on phenomena -- Hell, volcanoes, and war -- that defy human conception.

The percussion-heavy trance music that begins "Lucifer/Aureum Chaos" has a majestic ritual quality that becomes otherworldly as the voices and horns alternate passages of staccato and long tones. The album closes with a study in contrasts: the simplicity of "I Am" (an old piece re-orchestrated) and the serial complexity of "Hekla 1970." Hanes' brilliantly realized compositions bring us to the brink of an abyss of wonder and terror. Yet another triumph for producer David Breskin, and for the ever-exploratory Pyroclastic label.

Max Kutner's "Rogue Lash"

I first encountered NYC-based guitarist Max Kutner playing with the Grandmothers of Invention at the Kessler back in...was it 2014? Since then, he's toured with the last incarnation of Captain Beefheart's Magic Band and released a handful of recordings that got a lot of spins around mi casa: two pandemic era albums with Android Trio (featuring fellow Magic Band alumni Andy Niven and Eric Klerks), and two on his own -- 2022's High Flavors and 2024's Partial Custody. Discerning listeners in Dallas and Houston were fortunate to get to hear the material from the latter release live, on a mini-tour of Texas.

Kutner's latest, Rogue Lash -- a digital-only release, out February 27 on Orenda -- comes on the heels of a long break from performing. Recorded, mixed, and mastered at home, the album recalls Frank Zappa's late masterwork Civilization, Phaze III in the way it foregrounds Kutner-the-composer's intent, as well as its icy, synthetic sound. Drawing on influences from industrial, EDM, and hip-hop as well as metal and prog, the one-man-band/composer-producer creates a different sound world for each track, seamlessly incorporating elements of sound design that reflect his critique of contemporary society in general and life in the Big Apple in particular, and organic elements that include the contributions of a platoon of collaborators from LA, Oakland, Portland, Boston, and NYC.

Rogue Lash is a testament to the level of musical complexity that can be documented in a home recording, and titles like "Waves of Middle Managers (Marching)" and "Navigating the Nepomatrix" show Kutner continuing the kind of scabrous social commentary Zappa was known for throughout his career. But the album revels in repetition and deep groove, and can be fully enjoyed without reference to its programmatic content. Perhaps the best example of this is "Pency Tracer," which features Colin Woodford on drums and metal objects, and left me with an inexplicable desire to re-watch old B&W films like Keeper of the Flame and Bad Day at Black Rock. "The Flying Lesson" is a dense, doom-laden crash-and-thump fest that reunites Kutner with his Evil Genius bandmate Mike Lockwood. 

The "single," "Stardust Apes," mocks Muskian off-world ambitions with mechanistic melody, replete with strings, horns (including a cameo by Partial Custody tubist Ben Stapp), and drums (by Magic Band/Android Trio veteran Andy Niven). While Kutner's six-string prowess is muted for most of Rogue Lash, "Wonder, TM" gives him a chance to flash his chops in a gorgeous, late Zappa-esque modal whammy bar/feedback solo, accompanied by former Cecil Taylor/David S. Ware drummer Marc Edwards and Kutner's current Corset Lore bandmate Tamara Yadao on synth. The aforementioned "Navigating the Nepomatrix" is nasty cybernetic funk, flaunting a ten-piece horn section and another blazing Kutner solo which distills every good note Adrian Belew played in the '80s.

The bleak post-apocalyptic soundscape "A Brighter Nowhere" conjures a world devoid of hope, but gives way to the gentle valediction of "Safe Travels," the oldest track here, with a choir of overdubbed soprano saxophones all played by Michael Eaton. You won't hear another record like Rogue Lash this or any year. At 76 minutes, its sonic singularity would fit on a single CD. How about it, Orenda? A little physical media crumb for an old man who's geeked on The Romance of the Artifact?

Brandon Seabrook's "Hellbent Daydream"

Around my house, the producer David Breskin's is a name to conjure with. Breskin cut his teeth working with the titanic drummer-composer Ronald Shannon Jackson in the '80s, and I first met him at Jackson's memorial service in Fort Worth in 2013. Since 2010, he's produced some of my favorite recordings of this century, working with artists like Nels Cline, Ben Goldberg, Kris Davis, Mary Halvorson, Ches Smith, Dan Weiss, and Patricia Brennan, always guiding them to greater heights of compositional and conceptual achievement. 

Breskin's collaboration with guitarist-banjoist-composer Brandon Seabrook began with the octet album brutalovechamp in 2023, and continued the following year with the overdubbed solo outing Object of Unknown Function. While Seabrook continues to work in other contexts (notably a trio with Cooper-Moore and Gerald Cleaver, and Three Layer Cake with Mike Watt and Mike Pride), his latest offering, the Breskin-produced Hellbent Daydream -- out February 20 on Pyroclastic -- is the most accessible gateway yet into his world of surreal and subversive storytelling. 

Like a lot of the most interesting creative music currently on offer, Hellbent Daydream exists at the intersection of genres. It makes sense for musicians to be able to use everything they know in a given musical situation, and that's definitely the case here. The lineup here expands a trio Seabrook's had for years with his longtime collaborator, bassist Henry Fraser, and violinist Erica Dicker (who's also worked with Anthony Braxton, Ingrid Laubrock,  and Jen Shyu) by adding Austrian Elias Stemeseder on piano and synths. While Seabrook's known as a madcap improviser of great physicality, his last couple of albums have highlighted his strength as a composer, and Hellbent Daydream continues along that path. 

What we have here is a sort of electric chamber music, replete with rich harmonies, juiced with improvisation. "Name Dropping is the Lowest Form of Conversation (Waltz)" opens the proceedings with a skewed cinematic sweep, like a Tim Burton movie theme appended with a slashing fuzz guitar solo. "Bespattered Bygones" begins by juxtaposing Appalachian banjo with chamber violin, before the synth weaves strands of sinuous melody around the rhythm and Seabrook solos with some of the abandon that won him the sobriquet "the heavy metal banjo player." 

The title track explores some of the same sonic turf Pat Metheny inhabited during his years of collaboration with Lyle Mays, evoking rustic open skies, but with an ominous undercurrent, leading into the self-explanatory "It's a Nightmare and You Know It." Award for best title here goes to the somber tone poem "Existential Banger Infinity Ceiling." Perhaps the most fully realized track here is "The Arkansas Tattler," which weaves together its threads of rustic Americana and European art music most seamlessly. And the closing "Autopsied Cloudburst" features Seabrook's guitaring at both its most pointillistic and noise-tastic. Under Breskin's aegis, this improvising composer continues to move from strength to strength.

Things we like: Moon Ha, Amorsima Trio

I'm an old school listener, which means I'm still geeked on The Romance of the Artifact. That said, in our post-Covid techno-world, I've learned to write record reviews from digital downloads and view concerts via livestreams. While I miss the immediacy of analog warmth and the intimacy of being in the room, I'll take my musical kicks where I find 'em. So I'm writing this piece based on listening to a download and viewing a livestream.

By his own admission (in the liner notes to the new album String Works), the New York-based composer-musical technologist Moon Ha is a frustrated violinist who remains fascinated by the sounds of strings. String Works, released last November on Stradivarius, contains pieces he composed between 2011 and 2023 for string octet, quartet, trio, duo, and solo (with electronics). Opener Illusive, the earliest work here, combines the forces of the JACK Quartet and Mivos Quartet. To these feedback scorched ears, it conjures images of raindrops falling, icicles forming, and descending shafts of light. It's followed by "Until That Time May Come...," played by the Momenta Quartet, which uses arcing and collapsing harmonics against an ascending pizzicato figure to evoke an awakening Earth. 

Now to the real reason I'm here: The last three tracks on String Works are performed by Amorsima Trio, in whole or in part. Violinist Mia Detwiler, cellist Kourtney Newton, and violist Mike Capone got together during graduate studies at the University of North Texas, performing in the new music-focused Nova Ensemble under Elizabeth McNutt's direction. They formed Amorsima in 2016 with an eye towards performing music by living composers, and expanding the string trio repertoire by commissioning new works. All three of them have performed at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth as part of the Sounds Modern series that McNutt directs, and Newton is a regular on the improvised music scene in Denton, including the feminist improv trio Bitches Set Traps (with McNutt and Sarah Ruth Alexander). 

On Moon Ha's Artless Beauty in Pursuit of Theory, Op. 2, they explore texture and timbre, then play a section of almost Romantic lyricism, albeit with some very modern sounding chromaticism and false harmonics. A repeating figure that burbles like a flowing stream is interrupted by some patches of dissonance. The piece ends with gentle harmonies. On Resonance is played solo by Detwiler, who uses samples and loops, echo and delay to overlay parts, making herself sound like a complete string section. I've seen her do this live with another piece and the effect is quite stunning. Finally, Moon Ha's elegiac Artless Beauty in Pursuit of Theory, Op. 3, is played by a duo of Detwiler and Capone. 

The Moon Ha album is, thus far, the only studio recording of Amorsima I've been able to find besides a single track on composer Adam Mirza's Bandcamp-available album Partial Knowledge. The trio does have a YouTube channel documenting many more performances. They recently performed a program of six challenging pieces composed by faculty members from the University of Miami's Frost School of Music. Sadly, a planned concert of the same program in Austin had to be cancelled due to weather, but the livestream of the Miami event is archived and viewable on the Frost School's YouTube.

Shawn Crouch's Krasner Canvases consists of three vignettes, each inspired by a painting of Abstract Expressionist icon and Jackson Pollock familiar Lee Krasner. The first two, White Squares, 1948 and Milkweed, 1955, are taut, tense constructions, replete with glisses, tremeloes, and aggressive snaps of the strings. The third, Self Portrait, 1924, trembles with poignant melody. Scott Stinson's Raised By Wolves III (Music in Time of Chaos) starts tentatively, with tension building via the juxtaposition of turbulent bowing with percussive pizzicatos, emblematic of a creeping sense of dread. 

Composer Lansing McCloskey introduced his No Sugar, which includes scordatura (retuning of the instruments) and audience participation in the form of playing back sound samples on their cellphones during the second movement when cued by Detwiler. First movement No artificial sweeteners added opens with harmonized long tones which allow the listener to luxuriate in the richness of the instruments' timbres, giving way to more rhythmically complex lines and rapidly ascending scales. My favorite piece of the evening. 

The second movement, It's fine, I'm fine, everything's fine (a title reminiscent of Fred Frith's "It's Fine" with Skeleton Crew) begins in similar fashion, with Detwiler playing false harmonics as a cacophony of voices from audients' phones begins to encroach. The strings play lush harmonies as the sampled sounds of bells and chimes create a kind of music of the spheres. The piece ends with Newton breaking sheets of glass with a hammer into an aluminum tub (wearing eye protection, with a mesh screen) -- a bit of business that recalls the theatrical aspects of her work with Bitches Set Traps. Because of her onstage position, seated between her trio mates, Newton becomes the visual fulcrum of Amorsima, seeming to direct the group at times with the tilt of her head or the raising of an eyebrow.

After a brief intermission, the program resumed with Dorothy Hindman's Untitled VIII. Capone introduced the piece as a kind of Extreme Close Up view of the sonorities in an oboe solo from Beethoven. (I've often thought of the entire doom metal genre as an ECU view of a fragment from a Black Sabbath song.) If the pieces in the first part of the concert were cinematic in scope, Hindman's piece was more microscopic in its examination of sound in fine detail, with the musicians exploring all the sonic possibilities of their instruments.

For Juraj Kojs' On 386 Bows J, the musicians moved their chairs so they were seated far apart on the stage, then commenced with a furious torrent of notes, lifting their bows theatrically above their instruments, and playing spectrally minimalist long tones that recalled the serene passages from Anthony Braxton's Composition 96. Newton's solo near the end of the piece, which alternated busy passages with "floating" bow, was particularly compelling, leading into a delicately placid finish.

The concert concluded with Charles Norman Mason's Aphelocoma (named after a genus of scrub jays, as every bird watcher knows). The piece opened with a pulsing bass note over which Detwiler and Capone played chromatically gliding dissonances that gradually morphed into vibrato-laden harmonies. An episode of darkly spirited bowing and a brief recapitulation brought the piece and the concert to a close. Would that there were more opportunities to hear music like this in DFW beyond Sounds Modern's now-semiannual performances. Amorsima Trio is my new favorite group that I have yet to hear in person.