Earshot Jazz presents Tord Gustavsen Trio at Town Hall: Feb 18 | "Manfred Eicher: The 'ECM Sound' Man" | The Guardian

The contemporary Scandinavian jazz scene that epitomizes what has become known as the "ECM Sound" is embodied by such players and ensembles as the Mats Eilertsen Trio, Thomas Strønen, the Christian Wallumrød Ensemble, Tord Gustavsen Trio, and Keith Jarrett's Quartet with Jan Garbarek. Next month, Earshot Jazz continues their decades-long tradition of importing these sounds to the west coast with next month's concert at Town Hall, featuring the Tord Gustavsen Trio performing from their most recent set of recordings, "Opening". In Jazz Times' overview, "Tord Gustavsen: Quiet is the New Loud", the magazine maps the journey of his music as it draws listeners into an encompassing atmosphere of rapt contemplation, but this deceptively soothing aspect reveals a more nuanced depth, in the trio's emotional exposure. A sound expressed through the finesse and dynamics of Gustavsen's piano playing, alongside longtime percussionist Jarle Vespestad, and new bassist for this contemporary lineup, Steinar Raknes. By way of introduction to foundational developments of this scene, there is probably no better document than Johannes Rød's, "Free Jazz and Improvisation on Vinyl 1965-1985", published by Norwegian vanguard imprint Rune Grammofon. Tracing independent free jazz and improv labels between 1965 and 1985, from the beginning of ESP-Disk through to the current era of vinyl revival and ascendant digital formats. With some 60 labels covered in the volume, and forewords by Mats Gustafsson and label founder, Rune Kristoffersen, the edition perfectly encapsulates this particular brand of what The Guardian's Richard Williams calls, "Norwegian Blues". 

 

The significance of the ECM label to the extended Scandinavian scene and its embracing of classical, jazz, improvisation, and chamber music experimentation, can't be overstated. Co-founded by producer Manfred Eicher, Manfred Scheffner and Karl Egger in Munich in 1969, the label's prestige has been meticulously constructed over five decades of "The Pristine Empire of ECM", bearing their distinctly refined aesthetic. Dana Jennings "ECM: CDs Know that Ears Have Eyes" for the New York Times mines ECM's ensuing decades following those detailed in Rød's chronicle, focusing specifically on the imprint's meeting of sound, material, image and "Manfred Eicher's Search for the Sublime". ECM's convergence of sound and visual aesthetics was also the focus of the Okwui Enwezor and Markus Müller curated "ECM - A Cultural Archaeology" for the Munich Haus der Kunst in 2013. The objective of the exhibition's presentation of the history of the label, as Okwui Enwezor states in his essay “Big Ears", was that it should be made comprehensible through more than just documents, archival material and artifacts. The major concern was to instead present the work of Eicher and ECM’s relationship to different artistic disciplines. These ranged from the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Theodor Kotullas, Theo Angelopoulos, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Peter Greenaway, to the concerts of Keith Jarrett and The Art Ensemble of Chicago; from the performances by Meredith Monk, Steve Reich, and Arvo Pärt, to the graphic design of Barbara Wojirsch and photographs by Dieter Rehm, Roberto Masotti, and Deborah Feingold. Photo credit: Maarten Mooijman

Lingua Ignota with Chat Pile West Coast Tour: Feb 18 - 25

Next month, The Flenser label artist Chat Pile will be appearing alongside Krtistin Hayter's Lingua Ignota project at the The Crocodile, for a night stradling diametric extremities of the sounds currently issuing from the mutating offshoots of experimental black metal. The related global scene's ongoing and burgeoning development have encompassed melodicism and atmospheres lifted from shoegaze and spacerock, eruptions of heavy psych rock, industrial drumming, synth exploration, electronic atmospheres, and pure experimental noise. The expansiveness of this sound is further detailed in Brad Sanders' essential overview, "Untrue And International: Living in a Post-Black Metal World". Beyond this primer, deeper reading and curation from this spectrum can be found in the past decade of excellent selections in The Quietus' Columnus Metallicus column, covering releases dominantly sourced from labels like, Hydrahead, Ipecac, Deathwish, 20 Buck Spin, Sargent House, Profound Lore, Season of Mist, Roadburn, The Flenser, Neurot and Relapse. Representing the more avant and industrial-spawned facet of this sound, power electronics composer, pianist, and classically trained singer Kristin Hayter's devotional music inspired Lingua Ignota remains an outlier within this culture. In The Quietus' "Fire, Prayer & Curses: Lingua Ignota Interviewed", she plumbs its 12th Century sources of ecstatic inspiration where they meet in an urgent and ferocious record on the subject of the unsayable, the unspeakable, and the traumatic repression of abuse. Yet more than just a "Extreme Music Reckoning with Misogyny", for her third album "Caligula", Hayter adds that Lingua Ignota is not just about catharsis, but also transformation and retribution. Yet this year, the transformative journey of Lingua Ignota's particular vein of cathartic ritual concludes, as Hayter has announced that her "Lingua Ignota Project is Coming to an End", owing to what the artist describes in her statement to Pitchfork; "I have been making a lot of changes in my life, and my music needs to change in tandem. I will be retiring all music I’ve made up till now after my upcoming tour and a few unannounced special performances in spring of 2023. I am proud of what I have accomplished so far and I look forward to what the future holds, I am in no way leaving music behind and will continue to build this world, but this world will look different." Hayter’s (seemingly final) album as Lingua Ignota, "Sinner Get Ready" for the Sargent House label, featured Appalachian instruments and televangelist sermons, and a shift into more explicit tackling of religious fundamentalism and revelation. All of the above factors detailed in her statement, compounded by the difficulties and delays surrounding the pandemic, will make this tour the singular opportunity for many audiences to witness Hayter's music from the album live.

Claire Denis' “Stars at Noon” and “Trouble Every Day” at The Grand Illusion Cinema: Feb 3 - 9

While entries like the Pynchonesque noir science nightmare of "Trouble Every Day" may align with the New French Extremity label, the films of Claire Denis have remained defiantly thematically varied. From explorations of masculine camaraderie, observations on the post-Colonial landscape of both Africa and Paris, neo-noir thrillers, and sharp-edged gender relations, Claire Denis' filmography navigates the spaces between traditional narrative and more structurally adventurous cinema. Her films have consistently fashioned an interplay of the gravitational pulls inherent in each of these corresponding forms. Denis is herself a complex and irreducible intellect, as made clear in recent interviews on both gender representation in Cannes, and the wider field of women artists, "Claire Denis: ‘I Couldn’t Care Less About the Weinstein Affair'", and for the Irish Times, "‘We are Normal People. Even Though We are French’". Recent representations of her craft can be seen in 2008's masterpiece on class, race and urban life, conveyed through light and motion that was "35 Shots of Rum", and 2014's ominous neo-noir crime thriller, "Bastards". The latter brought its audience deep into the nightmare of one family's decomposition from the inside with their brush with power, corruption and an immoral French elite. In a sense all of her work can be seen as, "Family Films of a Very Different Sort". Another constant of her work, one that she shares with the best of her peers, is the elliptical nature of its narrative and visual structure. Looping back on itself, projecting ahead, fusing impression, experience and dream, these structural and thematic signatures are abundantly detailed in Nick Pinkerton's Claire Denis interview for Film Comment and Senses of Cinema's "Dancing Reveals So Much: An Interview with Claire Denis". More recently, in her crowning point from Cannes 2017, she delivered a subtly pointed observation on contemporary French life in, "Let the Sunshine In". This elegant, eccentric relationship comedy of ideas on middle age, expressed itself with an almost inscrutable sophistication, "Un Beau Soleil Interieur: Juliette Binoche Excels". Taking a typically dynamic about-turn, Denis then produced her first explicitly science fiction work to-date with "High Life" featuring a much larger production, special effects, lead stars in Binoche and Robbert Pattinson, and a screenplay by Nick Laird and Zadie Smith, the following year.

In her observation on the diminishing of content in the modern era that might traverse such complex and charged territory, Catherine Shoard selects “The Fearless Cinema of Claire Denis” as the antithesis to these trends. Expressly the depiction of sex, sexual power and psychology in the director’s 2018 entry, "Claire Denis on High Life, Robert Pattinson, and Putting Juliette Binoche in a “F*ckbox”. The film’s sexual and corporeal focus on a unflinching exploration of "The Fleshy Frontier", and past traditions in related is cinema are considered in John Semley's piece for The Baffler. These multifaceted bodily, sexual, and psychological tensions also succinctly delineated in Charles Bramesco’s review, “High Life: Orgasmic Brilliance in Deepest Space with Robert Pattinson”. Which brings us to her two current films of this year and last. Born of the much-delayed adaptation of Denis Johnson's "The Stars at Noon", and the numerous complexities of the film's long gestation, including its star Robert Pattinson having to leave the project over schedule conflicts. "Stars at Noon" finally arrived at Cannes this year, where it was awarded the Grand Prix. This "Languid Tale of Sex, Lies and Intrigue in the Nicaraguan Heat", is in many ways a compelling companion for, "Both Sides of the Blade" her film of 2021. Where that film was born of the limitations of the pandemic and conversations between Denis and its lead actor Vincent Lindon, her most recent utilized the tensions of the pandemic and governmental control in Nicaragua to heighten its pervasive sense of unease and threat. The film is adapted by Denis and co-writers Andrew Litvack and Léa Mysius from the late Denis Johnson's novelization of his years spent endeavoring to become a political reporter in Nicaragua and Costa Rica in the early 1980s. Where Denis' film differs is in that the twentysomething protagonist Trish, as played by Margaret Qualley, presents herself as a modern-day journalist, who finds herself in a deadly bind, as her last published work was about politically motivated kidnappings and murders in Nicaragua related to tensions with Costa Rica. The result of "Stars at Noon: A Not-So-Innocent Abroad", is something like a modern Central American update of Antonioni’s "The Passenger", with its own distinct and oblique tropical reverie. Over which hangs an ominous and subtly oneiric sense of threat, that recalls Anna Seghers' 944 novel, "Transit", another tale of closing borders, and an immanent, seemingly inescapable fate.

:::: FILMS OF 2022 ::::

TOP FILMS OF 2022 IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER

-----------------------------------------------------------

Gaspar Noé  "Vortex"  (France)
Charlotte Wells  "Aftersun"  (United Kingdom)
Brett Morgen  "Moonage Daydream"  (United States)
Luca Guadagnino  "Bones and All"  (Italy)
David Cronenberg  "Crimes of the Future"  (Canada)
Andrew Dominik  "Blonde"  (United States)
Claire Denis  "Stars at Noon"  (France)
Joanna Hogg  "The Eternal Daughter"  (United Kingdom)
Albert Serra  "Pacifiction"  (France/Spain)
Michelangelo Frammartino  "Il Buco"  (Italy)
Alejandro Iñárritu  "BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths"  (Mexico)
Edward Berger  "All Quiet on the Western Front"  (Germany)
Mia Hansen-Løve  "One Fine Morning"  (France)
Bruno Dumont  "France"  (France)
Sebastien Meise "Great Freedom"  (Austria)
Marie Kreutzer  "Corsage"  (Germany)
Jerzy Skolimowski  "EO"  (Poland)
Park Chan-wook  "Decision To Leave"  (South Korea)
Alessio Rigo de Righi & Matteo Zoppis  "The Tale of King Crab"  (Italy)
Mia Zetterling  "Four Films by Mia Zetterling"  Restored Rereleased (Sweden)
Mark Jenkin  "Enys Men"  (United Kingdom)
Todd Field  "TÁR"  (United States)
Lucile Hadžihalilović  "Earwig"  (France)
Olivier Assayas  "Irma Vep 2022"   (France)
Panos Cosmatos  "The Viewing"  Short  (Canada)

 

For decades this annual entry has acted as an overview of music, dance, theatre and performance art attended, films seen in the cinema, visual art exhibitions and fairs, festivals covered, and international and domestic destinations traveled. Due to the ongoing effect of the global coronavirus pandemic, this year's overview will again be somewhat limited in scope. While now in its waning phases, its effect on cultural and social life is still a dominant factor. Businesses and cultural venues have limited hours, close early on weekday and weekend nights, and continue to program with a reduced scale and truncated durations over what we saw in the years preceding the pandemic. Even the most rudimentary of social meeting spaces such as cafes, bars and restaurants continue to have reduced hours. The once essential component of urban social life in the Northwest, the cafe, has been particularly hard hit. With many of them no longer offering evening hours. Regionally, arts venues and cultural institutions returned to in-person programming in fall of 2021, cautiously opening the doors to music stages, galleries and movie houses. After a year and a half of navigating the complexities of the pandemic restrictions and closures, programming returned in August and September to the majority of these Northwest culture spaces. In many cases their future remained uncertain until relief funding became available just earlier that year with the benefits of the Save Our Stages Act, alongside the newly implemented Shuttered Venues Grant. The benefits of the various pandemic relief bills, alongside regional infrastructure like the 4Culture Relief Fund, awareness efforts like the Washington Nightlife Music Association, crowdfunding and philanthropy like the ArtistRelief, ArtsFund grant, and GiveBig Washington, all came in the 11th hour for many of our regional cultural institutions and art venues.

Overseas, the European continent has rebounded in a more decisive and assertive way, with the major festivals and exhibitions returning to both bold, and pandemic conscious, in-person programming. One can clearly see the nature of commerce, and social and cultural life at all the hours that one can imagine them transpiring, have made a more lively and vital recovery from the pandemic. This was evident in traveling overseas for the first time in almost three years to attend the once-a-decade confluence of Germany's Documenta, and the Venice Biennale. This year's particular convergence of the two offered a complex set of groundbreaking firsts, as well as an unexpected set of socio-cultural setbacks. With the initial launch not going to plan, Documenta 15 found itself in a set of novel complexities, being curated by a leaderless collective, there was a "The Bumpy Road to a Group-led Documenta”. In many ways the exhibition was a success, “Welcome to the Fun House! Sharks, Skaters, and Smelters liven up Documenta 15”, yet it found itself at the center of a wider discussion and controversy, "Documenta Was a Whole Vibe. Then a Scandal Killed the Buzz". At the close of September, there was much discussion about the resulting impact, and wider considerations to the exhibition, some even speculating, "The World’s Most Prestigious Art Exhibition Is Over. Maybe Forever.". The 59th Venice Biennale was afflicted by no such troubles. This year’s big group show, "The Milk of Dreams", curated by Cecilia Alemani, took its title from an early 20th century fairytale by the British-born Leonora Carrington. The era was also at the heart of the concurrent surrealism blockbuster at the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation in Venice's Dorsoduro. Including the 56 national pavilions and over 30 collateral events, the resulting citywide exhibition produced a smorgasbord of late-flowering surrealism. In what was being called the women's Biennale, this year's exhibition was an exuberant set of, “Cyborgs, Sirens, and a Singing Murderer: The Thrilling, Oligarch-free Venice Biennale”. In an almost singular historic moment, with the world recovering from the pandemic, and the Ukraine being pummeled by Russian missiles, there was no shortage of, “Looking Inward, and Back, at a Biennale for the History Books”.

Returning home domestically, life was reduced again to grappling with the larger part of one's existence being spent in our homes these past two years. While there are now opportunities again to engage with film, music and visual art, as a culture we are still relying on online resources more than was necessary pre-pandemic. Yet these deliver only a modicum of the sensations, social engagement, and sensory thrills and satisfactions of cultural happenings. The pragmatic response would be to accept the inherent losses and embrace what vestiges of a cultural life that could be salvaged online. Yet these are poor surrogates, even temporarily. So, while its role may be reduced in the age of streaming, the magazine, both print and digital, can still be a defining tastemaker amid the multitude of channels in which to discover new music. For those not finding compelling sounds via their internet trawls, digital retailers like Boomkat, and online institutions like The Quietus, represent the kind of expertise you’ll not find coherently brought together online outside the framework of such vision and curatorial legacy. Evolving right along with the times from a free improv, modern classical and jazz magazine in the 1970s and 1980s, in the following decades The Wire expanded its scope to include every imaginable genre (and some yet invented), becoming all-inclusive by the conclusion of the 20th century. A particular advantage at year's end, is that the magazine offers the opportunity to Listen to The Wire Top 50 Releases of 2022. Similarly, film institutions like those below offer a worldly scope, compiling the life’s work of people who have made watching their enterprise. Year in and year out again, Sight & Sound, Film Comment, Cinema-Scope, Criterion Collection's The Current, and The Guardian's excellent film coverage have brought focus to the year of moving pictures from around the globe.

:::: ALBUMS OF 2022 ::::

TOP ALBUMS OF 2022 IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER
-------------------------------------------------------------
Various Artists "Nyege Nyege Tapes: USB Bomb" (Nyege Nyege Tapes)
Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling & Andreas Werliin "Ghosted" (Drag City)
The Comet Is Coming "Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam" (Impulse!)
Various Artists "Send The Pain Below" (Flenser)
Kali Malone "Living Torch" (GRM)
Lucrecia Dalt "!Ay!" (RVNG)
Nils Frahm "Music For Animals" (Leiter)
Blood Incantation “Timewave Zero” (Century Media)
JK Flesh “Sewer Bait” (Pressure)
Moor Mother “Jazz Codes” (Anti-)
Makaya McCraven "In These Times" (Nonesuch)
Ash Ra Tempel "Schwingunen" & "Join Inn" Reissues (MG.Art)
Alabaster DePlume "Gold: Go Forward in the Courage of Your Love" (International Anthem)
Harold Budd "The Pavilion Of Dreams" Reissue (Superior Viaduct)
David Bowie "Moonage Daydream: A Film by Brett Morgen" Soundtrack (Parlophone)
Alice Coltrane with Pharoah Sanders & Joe Henderson "Ptah, The El Daoud" Reissue (Impulse!)
Igor Stravinsky "Jurowski Conducts Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring" (London Philharmonic Orchestra)
Various Artists "Silberland Vol.1: The Psychedelic Side of Kosmische Musik 1972-1986" (Bureau B)
Charles Koechlin "The Seven Stars Symphony / Vers la Voûte étoilée" (Capriccio)
Heiner Goebbels & Ensemble Modern "A House of Call" (ECM)
The Lovecraft Sextet "Nights Of Lust" (Denovali)
Sarah Davachi "Two Sisters" (Late Music)
Širom "The Liquified Throne of Simplicity" (tak:til)
Drowse "Wane Into It" (Flenser)
Pan Daijing "Tissues" (PAN)

For decades this annual entry has acted as an overview of music, dance, theatre and performance art attended, films seen in the cinema, visual art exhibitions and fairs, festivals covered, and international and domestic destinations traveled. Due to the ongoing effect of the global coronavirus pandemic, this year's overview will again be somewhat limited in scope. While now in its waning phases, its effect on cultural and social life is still a dominant factor. Businesses and cultural venues have limited hours, close early on weekday and weekend nights, and continue to program with a reduced scale and truncated durations over what we saw in the years preceding the pandemic. Even the most rudimentary of social meeting spaces such as cafes, bars and restaurants continue to have reduced hours. The once essential component of urban social life in the Northwest, the cafe, has been particularly hard hit. With many of them no longer offering evening hours. Regionally, arts venues and cultural institutions returned to in-person programming in fall of 2021, cautiously opening the doors to music stages, galleries and movie houses. After a year and a half of navigating the complexities of the pandemic restrictions and closures, programming returned in August and September to the majority of these Northwest culture spaces. In many cases their future remained uncertain until relief funding became available just earlier that year with the benefits of the Save Our Stages Act, alongside the newly implemented Shuttered Venues Grant. The benefits of the various pandemic relief bills, alongside regional infrastructure like the 4Culture Relief Fund, awareness efforts like the Washington Nightlife Music Association, crowdfunding and philanthropy like the ArtistRelief, ArtsFund grant, and GiveBig Washington, all came in the 11th hour for many of our regional cultural institutions and art venues.

Overseas, the European continent has rebounded in a more decisive and assertive way, with the major festivals and exhibitions returning to both bold, and pandemic conscious, in-person programming. One can clearly see the nature of commerce, and social and cultural life at all the hours that one can imagine them transpiring, have made a more lively and vital recovery from the pandemic. This was evident in traveling overseas for the first time in almost three years to attend the once-a-decade confluence of Germany's Documenta, and the Venice Biennale. This year's particular convergence of the two offered a complex set of groundbreaking firsts, as well as an unexpected set of socio-cultural setbacks. With the initial launch not going to plan, Documenta 15 found itself in a set of novel complexities, being curated by a leaderless collective, there was a "The Bumpy Road to a Group-led Documenta”. In many ways the exhibition was a success, “Welcome to the Fun House! Sharks, Skaters, and Smelters liven up Documenta 15”, yet it found itself at the center of a wider discussion and controversy, "Documenta Was a Whole Vibe. Then a Scandal Killed the Buzz". At the close of September, there was much discussion about the resulting impact, and wider considerations to the exhibition, some even speculating, "The World’s Most Prestigious Art Exhibition Is Over. Maybe Forever.". The 59th Venice Biennale was afflicted by no such troubles. This year’s big group show, "The Milk of Dreams", curated by Cecilia Alemani, took its title from an early 20th century fairytale by the British-born Leonora Carrington. The era was also at the heart of the concurrent surrealism blockbuster at the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation in Venice's Dorsoduro. Including the 56 national pavilions and over 30 collateral events, the resulting citywide exhibition produced a smorgasbord of late-flowering surrealism. In what was being called the women's Biennale, this year's exhibition was an exuberant set of, “Cyborgs, Sirens, and a Singing Murderer: The Thrilling, Oligarch-free Venice Biennale”. In an almost singular historic moment, with the world recovering from the pandemic, and the Ukraine being pummeled by Russian missiles, there was no shortage of, “Looking Inward, and Back, at a Biennale for the History Books”.

Returning home domestically, life was reduced again to grappling with the larger part of one's existence being spent in our homes these past two years. While there are now opportunities again to engage with film, music and visual art, as a culture we are still relying on online resources more than was necessary pre-pandemic. Yet these deliver only a modicum of the sensations, social engagement, and sensory thrills and satisfactions of cultural happenings. The pragmatic response would be to accept the inherent losses and embrace what vestiges of a cultural life that could be salvaged online. Yet these are poor surrogates, even temporarily. So, while its role may be reduced in the age of streaming, the magazine, both print and digital, can still be a defining tastemaker amid the multitude of channels in which to discover new music. For those not finding compelling sounds via their internet trawls, digital retailers like Boomkat, and online institutions like The Quietus, represent the kind of expertise you’ll not find coherently brought together online outside the framework of such vision and curatorial legacy. Evolving right along with the times from a free improv, modern classical, and jazz magazine in the 1970s and 1980s, in the following decades The Wire expanded its scope to include every imaginable genre (and some yet invented), becoming all-inclusive by the conclusion of the 20th century. A particular advantage at year's end, is that the magazine offers the opportunity to Listen to The Wire Top 50 Releases of 2022. Similarly, film institutions like those below offer a worldly scope, compiling the life’s work of people who have made watching their enterprise. Year in and year out again, Sight & Sound, Film Comment, Cinema-Scope, Criterion Collection's The Current, and The Guardian's excellent film coverage have brought focus to the year of moving pictures from around the globe.