Totally beautiful and rare piano performance from Loren Connors, joined on guitar by long time collaborator Alan Licht. Celebrating thirty years of collaboration, Loren Connors and Alan Licht performed for two nights at OTO on May 5 and 6th, 2023. On the second night, with the stage lit in blue, Connors took up a seat on the piano stool whilst Licht picked up the guitar. What followed was the duo’s first ever set with Connors on piano - one of only a few times Connors has played piano live at all - here captured and issued as The Blue Hour. Its spacious warmth came as a total surprise live, but makes complete sense for a duo whose dedicated expressionism takes inspiration from a vast spectrum of emotion. Both opening with single notes to start, it doesn't take long before a surface rises and begins to shimmer. A run up the keys, the drop of a feedback layer on a sustained and bent note. The two begin to exchange notes in tandem and brief touches of melody and chord hover. After a while, Connors picks up the guitar, stands it in his lap and sweeps a wash of colour across Licht’s guitar. Sharp, glassy edges begin to form, open strings and barred frets darkening the space. When his two pedals begin to merge, Licht finds a dramatic organ-like feedback and it’s hard not to imagine Rothko’s Chapel, its varying shades of blue black ascending and descending in the room. When Connors goes back to the piano for the second side, the pair quickly lock into a refrain and light pours in. It’s a kind of sound that Licht says reminds him of what he and Connors would do when the duo first started playing together 30 years ago. It’s certainly more melodic than some of their more recent shows, and the atonal shards of At The Top of the Stairs seem to totally dissolve. What is always remarkable about Licht is that his enormous frame of reference doesn't seem to weigh him down, and instead here he is able to delicately place fractures of a Jackson C Frank song (“Just Like Anything”,) amongst the vast sea of Connors’ blues. Perhaps it's the pleasure of playing two nights in a row together, or the nature of Connor’s piano playing combined with Licht’s careful listening, but the improvisation on The Blue Hour feels remarkably calm and unafraid. There’s nothing to prove and no agenda except the joy of sounding colour together. Totally beautiful. --- Recorded live at Cafe OTO on Saturday 6th May 2023 by Billy SteigerMixed by Oli BarrettMastered by Sean McCannArtwork by Loren Connors Layout by Oli BarrettScreenprint by Tartaruga Manufactured in the UK by Vinyl Press. Edition of 300 standard LPs, 100 LPs with screenprinted artwork by Loren Connors printed as inserts. Also available on a limted run of 200 CDs.
Loren Connors & Alan Licht – The Blue Hour
In 1972, trumpeter Baikida Carroll and some of his colleagues from the Black Artists Group (more precisely saxophonist/flutist Oliver Lake, trombonist Joseph Bowie, drummer Charles "Bobo" Shaw and trumpeter Floyd LeFlore) took the advice of their friends in the Art Ensemble Of Chicago and left their native Missouri to come and discover the bright lights of Paris for themselves. The following year they would even get the chance to record their only album which would rapidly attain mythical status and a collector’s item: “In Paris, Aries 1973”. Therefore, it was not surprising that they crossed paths with Jef Gilson in the capital. He was always on the lookout for new artists for his recently formed Palm label and had been active on many fronts in jazz since the end of the 50s. The French bandleader/pianist/composer/sound engineer had already recorded, in the preceding months other American musicians who would go on to have great careers: Byard Lancaster, Keno Speller, Clint Jackson III, Khan Jamal… Gilson therefore offered Baikida Carroll the chance to record his first album under his own name, which would be the 13th release on the label. Carroll logically asked Oliver Lake to join him. He also recruited Manuel Villaroel, a young Franco-Chilien pianist from the group Matchi-Oul, who had already released an album on Futura in 1971 and would release another on Palm in 1976. The group was completed with the addition of Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos, who had just released a well-received album on the Saravah label. They were ready to enter the studio for the 3rd, 4th and 5th June 1974. The first side of the album is divided into two long tracks which send free jazz back to its long-lost African roots. The opener “Orange Fish Tears” indeed rolls out a jungle of percussion of all sorts and sizes -the whole group is involved- which weave and mix together reaching a point where all bearings are lost, lending a sense of wonder to the majestic entry of the brass and woodwinds, flying suddenly out from the undergrowth. “Forest Scorpion” (sic) is a real voodoo ceremony where a venomous percussive groove backs the fiery solos from keyboards and saxophone in a furious trance. A warning; after these two tracks listeners are physically and emotionally wiped out! The other side is more introspective. Deliberately using dissonance and repetition, “Rue Roger” -the only composition by Oliver Lake- in a long dialogue between trumpet and saxophone, could almost remind us of Terry Riley in his favourite ballpark. “Porte D'Orléans”, the fourth and final track on the album, has the group back to their old tricks in a long hallucinatory jam which owes as much to the contemporary music of György Ligeti as to the most angst-ridden Jerry Goldsmith soundtrack music (remember the heavy chords which beat through “Planet of the Apes»). With these two sides, and in under 45m, Baikida Carroll and his musicians show just what they can do, from cerebral to charnel without ever simplifying things. This is an indispensable album if you are a fan of free-wheeling avant-garde music from the Art Ensemble of Chicago to Sonic Youth and including Shabaka Hutchings and Rob Mazurek. For those with good taste, in other words.
Baikida E.J. Carroll – Orange Fish Tears
The Intercommunal Free Dance Music Orchestra was created in 1971 by an “old hand” of French free jazz, François Tusques. Free Jazz, was also the name of the recording made by the pianist and other like-minded Frenchmen (Michel Portal, François Jeanneau, Bernard Vitet, Beb Guérin and Charles Saudrais) in 1965. But, six years later Tusques had had his fill of free jazz. After having wondered, together with Barney Wilen (Le Nouveau Jazz) or even solo (Piano Dazibao and Dazibao N°2), if free jazz wasn’t a bit of a dead end, Tusques formed the Inter Communal, an association under the banner of which the different communities of the country would come together and compose, quite simply. If at first the structure was made up of professional musicians from the jazz scene it would rapidly seek out talent in the lively world of the MPF (Musique Populaire Française).{French Popular Music, ndlt} Compiled of extracts from concerts given between 1976 and 1978, L’Inter Communal is not the first album from the Intercommunal Free Dance Music Orchestra. But it is the one which shows with the most exuberance the “social function” which inhabited free jazz and popular music at the time. All the more so as, to head up the project, the group (made up of wind instruments: Michel Marre, Jo Maka, Adolf Winkler and Jean Méreu) called upon Spanish singer Carlos Andreu. Andreu, claimed Tusques, was a griot “who created of new genre of popular song improvised with our music, based on events going on at the time”. L’Intercommunal can start the festivities: on “Blues pour Miguel Enriquez”, it is first Thelonious Monk who is invoked in an homage to one of the leading figures of the Chilean revolution, and a victim of Pinochet. The circumstances may be serious, the music, though, is not. The musicians light a bonfire to bring together on the same frequency France and Spain, the Americas and Africa: “L’heure est à la lutte” (the time to fight is here ndlt), is the new song offered by the l’Intercommunal Free Dance Orchestra… As if proof were needed that their music is still more than timely!
Intercommunal Free Dance Music Orchestra – L’Inter Communal