Label: NotTwo, 2008 Catalogue No: MW 801-2 Format: CD
A conglomerate of jazz, electronics and club beats with
unheard cosmos of sounds.
Tracks:
Song for my Mother
Golden Angel
Feed the Hamster
Famous Disappearing Act
Ectoplasmatics
Summer is Far
Before or After?
For Mingus
Restless Apple
Organic Boot
Choose the Mud
Line-up:
Jacek Kochan: drums/laptop (Poland)
Franz Hautzinger: quartertone trumpet (Austria)
Joe Fonda: bass (USA),
Tellef Ogrim: fretless guitar (Norway)
Recorded:
live in Alchemia, Krakow on September 19, 2007
About :
Jacek Kochan - composer, drummer, percussion player, arranger. He
started his artistic career in the 70's in Poland, in January 1981 he went to
the USA and lived two years in New York where he met Jaco Pastorius, Mike Clark
and Robie Gonzalez. Then, in the middle of the 80's he moved to Canada. In this
two countries he was gaining musical experience and contacts with musicians
which has been valuable up to now. He performed in different bands and was a
leader in some of them. His musical interest was satisfied by funk, rhythm &
blues and jazz bands. Since the 90's he has lived in Poland. Although he has
been a leader of his bands since the 80's, his first recordings has appeared at
the beginning of the 90's. He recorded with Pat LaBarbera, John Abercrombie,
Kenny Wheeler and many Polish jazz musicians. At the beginning of the new
century Kochan started penetrating music which was a conglomerate of jazz,
electronics and club beats. His style is easily discernible, dense, full of
explicitness and musical and rhythmic nuances.
Franz Hautzinger is an Austrian quartertone trumpet
player. He studied at the Jazz department of today’s Art University
in Graz from 1981 to 1983 until lip palsy forced him to take a six year total
break from trumpeting. After moving to Vienna in 1986 he started in 1989 to
explore the trumpet in his very own and un-academic way. The conscious decision
to avoid electronic sound sources but to still comprehend the development of
digital music on the the quarter tone trumpet on which he presented this new
until then unheard cosmos of sound that he had developed on his instrument.
Hautzinger positioned himself at the front line of the international
improvisation avant-garde; he is a globetrotter whose unmistakable musical
signature is known from Vienna to Berlin, London to Beirut, or in Tokyo, New
York, and Chicago. Franz Hautzinger has shown that even in times where
postmodernism is history an instrument can still be reinvented.
Joe Fonda is an American jazz bassist. Fonda was born in Amsterdam,
New York to parents who both played jazz. He played guitar as a youth but
switched to bass guitar later on. He studied bass at Berklee College of Music,
where he also began playing upright bass. He played in the New Haven,
Connecticut area in the early 1980s, and recorded with Wadada Leo Smith. In 1994
he began playing with Anthony Braxton, collaborating with him extensively for
the next five years. He and Michael Jefry Stevens co-led an ensemble, the
Fonda-Stevens group, that recorded copiously in the 1990s. Since the late 1990s
Fonda has recorded often as a bandleader.
Tellef Ogrim is Norwegian fretless guitar player. In the 1980s
he played and recorded with various rock and jazz groups and also composed music
for theatre. The last years he has been concentrating on the fretless guitar. In
2004 he released a mini-CD featuring the fretless called “Some Dodos Never Die”.
Wagon 8 is his first recording with this exciting instrument and a band. He has
appeared twice at the International Fretless Guitar Festival in New York. Tellef
also works as a technology columnist for the Norwegian Business Daily.
Review:
This was recorded live at Alchemia in Cracow in September of 2007 and has
excellent sound. I had not heard of Polish drum wiz, Jacek Kochan, before we got
a half dozen discs of his from Not Two & Gowi. After reviewing a few of them I
was impressed with his playing, arranging and the varied personnel on each disc.
This new disc also has an inspired line-up of musicians from Austria (FH),
Norway (TO), Poland (JK) and the US (JF). Each player has contributed two pieces
as well as three great groups improvisations. Starting with Joe Fonda's "Song
for My Mother", the rhythm team hits their stride quickly with some twisted
fretless guitar and Miles-like electric trumpet up front. What is great here is
how well the guitar and electric trumpet play together and sound similar. On
"Golden Angel", the bowed bass, el. guitar and mutant trumpet seem to complete
each other's line as they swerve around one another and bend their notes close.
The band swings hard on "Feed the Hamster" with Franz taking that great Electric
Miles-like tone and squeezing it higher. The ever-incredible Joe Fonda sounds
splendid throughout as his bass buzzes underneath all of the action, creating a
tight connection with Jacek's uplifting drums. All four of these musicians are
play wonderfully throughout, exchanging ideas, tossing riffs back and forth and
consistently surprising us with their tight, interconnected tapestry. Another
outstanding disc from the folks at Not Two. (Bruce Lee Gallanter, Downtown Music
Gallery)
