Joe McPhee , Mikolaj Trzaska, Jay Rosen - Intimate Conversations

Label: NotTwo (2007)
Catalogue No: MW 790-02
Format: CD

Tracks:

1. Was It Something I Said?
2. Maybe Not
3. I Would If I Could
4. Did God Forget Darfur/What God?
5. An Intimate Conversation #1
6. An Intimate Conversation #2
7. North Star (for Max Roach)
8. An Intimate Conversation #3
9. Dom's Matrix
10. Snowflakes On Flowers
11. And Then
12. King to King's Bishop 3

Line-up:

Joe McPhee – tenor sax
Mikolaj Trzaska – alto & C-melody saxes, bass clarinet
Jay Rosen – drums

Recorded:

Recorded at Alchemia, Krakow, Poland, November 1, 2006 by Michal Rosicki

Mixed and mastered by Michal Rosicki at MAQ Studio
Produced by Marek Winiarski
Photos by Krzysztof Penarski
Cover design by Andrzej Wojnowski

About:

The title of this recording, INTIMATE CONVERSATIONS, refers to the process which helped to generate the music. This is a series of dialogues, intimate in the sense that they involve shared and/or familiar experiences expressed in musical terms. It is a music of the moment; improvisations created in free space, in a first meeting. Like a drawing in ink on rice paper, it is what it is with out pretense, without correction, without apology.

The titles of the pieces are suggestions for further conversations rather than descriptions. The music is a journey of discovery for the musicians and we hope for the listener as well. Labels like “free jazz “and “avant garde” are boxes which limits ones ability to experience discovery on its own terms. “Free jazz” has become and oxymoron and the “avant garde” a throwback style. We hope that the listener will find this simply art in its own time.

The center piece of the session is Jay Rosen’s solo tribute NORTH STAR, honoring master percussionist Max Roach. It is elegant in its simplicity, strength and ability to conger so many elements of Mr. Roach’s magic.

In American history, the North Star was a coded symbol used by slaves to guide them on their journey to freedom. In automotive circles, Cadillac chose North Star as a name for a new engine design representing the standard of excellence. Of course the North Star has historically been the guide for sailors and travelers. Max Roach embodies a stabndard of excellance and elegance, and has been our guide on our journey to freedom.

(Joe McPhee)

Review:

Intimacy permeates many kinds of relationships. It is rare that in one context, several can be examined simultaneously. But the language of music coupled with the poetry of viewpoint can cover descriptive territory without too much hardship to demonstrate that intimacy requires depth of connection and can stretch the parameters for gaining insight and paying attention.

On Intimate Conversations a trio of musicians, convened by saxophonist Joe McPhee in a Krakow, Poland studio in 2006, have seized twelve opportunities to illuminate how intimate conversations work. The three use music as their muse to translate into a stream of sounds, moments that pose questions.

The titles of the pieces direct the listener to focus on a range of considerations from the insecurity between couples to the universality of God. The syntactical gestures that signify the subject matter dwell in the music from the outset. It is crucial to the listening, however, as written in the liner notes in no uncertain terms, to discern how clearly one musician communicates to another.

McPhee uses his tenor to create textures of confusion and wonder, embarking on sonic searches for answers which arrive only in stark, inconclusive resolutions. These ends become bridges to other deeper inquiries. He pushes his instrument to extremes within pitch register as well as within lines that speak dissonance and tunefulness, thinness and thickness, harshness and gentleness, furor and compassion.

How McPhee moves and stresses the chords, how quickly he exercises his fingers on the valves in trills, tremolos, or simple tapping determines how either drummer Jay Rosen or woodwind multi-instrumentalist Mikolaj Trzaska responds, especially on "Intimate Conversations #1-3," where all three musicians play together. On "Intimate Conversations #3 and "Snowflakes on Flowers, McPhee's breathtaking, pervasive pulsations provide a basis for a vast array of commentary from Rosen and Trzaska.

Trzaska's sound is distinctive because he plays a variety of horns, adding fire and light to the mix when heard in contrast to the low tones of the tenor on "Dom's Matrix." On other tracks he lays a diversified ground on which McPhee can build and the two can come together eventually, in both a narrow call-and-response mode as well as contrapuntally—except for "And Then, the two are seldom in sync.

Rosen's display of responsiveness is unquestionably accurate. He reflects the overt tensions and subtle demeanor of the tenor. He drops behind the horns, expanding every detail the reedmen utter. He paints a continuous cyclorama in front of which the sonorities can perform and explodes with force when the time beckons. But, his tour-de-force is "North Star," a tribute to Max Roach. It is tight, thorough, fast-paced and inhabits the same non-resonant zones in which the late drummer Roach spent a lifetime.

The questions raised on this recording have no specific decipherable answers. The response, instead, becomes generic... Where do I go? What do I do? How do I make the world a better place? Attend to the heart.

(Lyn Horton, AllAboutJazz)

Bios:

Since his emergence on the creative jazz and new music scene in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Joe McPhee has been a deeply emotional composer, improviser, and multi-instrumentalist, as well as a thoughtful conceptualist and theoretician. Born on November 3, 1939, in Miami, FL, McPhee first began playing the trumpet at age eight. McPhee continued on that instrument through high school and then in a U.S. Army band stationed in Germany; during his Army stint, he was first introduced to traditional jazz. Clifford Thornton ’s Freedom and Unity , recorded in 1967 and released in 1969 on the Third World label, is the first recording on which McPhee appears. In 1968, he began playing the saxophone and since then has investigated a wide range of instruments (including pocket trumpet, clarinet, valve trombone, and piano), with active involvement in both acoustic and electronic music.

McPhee’s first recordings as leader appeared on the CjR label, founded in 1969 by painter Craig Johnson . These include Underground Railroad by the Joe McPhee Quartet in 1969, Nation Time by Joe McPhee in 1970, and Trinity by Joe McPhee, Harold E. Smith and Mike Kull in 1971. By 1974, Swiss entrepreneur Werner X. Uehlinger had become aware of McPhee’s recordings and unreleased tapes. Uehlinger was so impressed that he decided to form the Hat Hut label as a vehicle to release McPhee’s work. The label’s first LP was Black Magic Man , which had been recorded by McPhee in 1970. Black Magic Man was followed by The Willisau Concert and the landmark solo recording Tenor , released by Hat Hut in 1976. The earliest recordings by McPhee are often informed by the revolutionary movements of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s; for example, Nation Time is a tribute to poet Amiri Baraka and Joe McPhee & Survival Unit II at WBAI’s Free Music Store, 1971 (finally released as a Hat Art CD in 1996) is a sometimes anguished post- Coltrane cry for freedom and liberation.

As the 1980s began and with a number of Hat Art recordings under his belt, McPhee met composer, accordionist, performer, and educator Pauline Oliveros , whose theories of “deep listening” strengthened his interests in extended instrumental and electronic techniques. McPhee also read Edward de Bono ’s book Lateral Thinking: A Textbook of Creativity, which presents concepts for solving problems by “disrupting an apparent sequence and arriving at the solution from another angle.” de Bono ’s theories inspired McPhee to apply this “sideways thinking” to his own work in creative improvisation, resulting in the concept of “Po Music.” McPhee describes “Po Music” as a “process of provocation” that can be used to “move from one fixed set of ideas in an attempt to discover new ones.” He concludes “It is a Positive, Possible, Poetic Hypothesis.” The results of McPhee’s application of Po principles to creative improvisation can be heard on several Hat Art recordings, including Topology , Linear B , and Oleo & a Future Retrospective .

Although his work was well documented on Hat Hut, McPhee remained a relative unknown in his home country. During the 1990’s, McPhee finally began to attract wider attention from the North American creative jazz community. He has since been performing and recording prodigiously as both leader and collaborator, appearing on such labels as CIMP, Okkadisk, Music & Arts, and Victo. In 1996, 20 years after Tenor , Hatology released As Serious As Your Life , another solo recording (this time featuring McPhee performing on various instruments). McPhee also began a fruitful relationship with Chicago reedman Ken Vandermark , engaging in a set of improvisational dialogues with Vandermark and bassist Kent Kessler on the 1998 Okkadisk CD A Meeting in Chicago . The Vandermark connection also led to McPhee’s appearance on the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Octet/Tentet three-CD box set released by Okkadisk that same year. As the 1990s drew to a close, McPhee discovered two like-minded improvisers in bassist Dominic Duval and drummer Jay Rosen . The trio premiered at the Vision Jazz Festival, but the concert went unnoticed by the press; McPhee, Duval , and Rosen therefore decided that an apt title for the group would be Trio X . A number of Trio X recordings, have since been released on the CIMP and CADENCE JAZZ RECORDS labels, and the band has received favorable critical notice for these, as well as for its live concert and festival appearances.

With a career now spanning over 37 years and more than 60 recordings, Joe McPhee has shown that emotional content and theoretical underpinnings are thoroughly compatible — and in fact, a critically important pairing — in the world of creative improvised music.

Joe McPhee biography courtesy of David Lynch and joemcphee.com. All rights reserved.

Mikolaj Trzaska is a musician - saxophonist, bass clarinettist and composer. He is one of the founders of the yass scene in Poland (yass is an improvised avant-garde of jazz music). He works together with many recognized musicians and plays in different line-ups. His solo career is an unceasing journey and concert.
"Once in everybody's life there is a time when one has a chance and duty to be revolutionary." This is a statement made by Trzaska himself and it applies to his life to a great extent. He admits that you have to learn from others but there is a point when you say no' and do something against the canon. Building tradition means questioning the canon all the time. Although Trzaska is a mature artist following a chosen path he still feels like a warrior and claims that warriors create Great Culture by observing the reality in a critical way and by trying to influence it.

He is inspired by European jazz - he admires Sclavis - the great personality of French jazz. Thanks to cooperation with Peter Friis Nielsen, Peter Ole Jorgensen and and Peeter Uuskyla he feels closer to Scandinavia as well. Mikolaj Trzaska is a seeker. He can't play with one line-up only. He wants to meet and work with new people and in this way find inspiration for his own music. He claims that it is when you play with interesting musicians and not when you imitate them that you create your own, original music.

When he improvises he listens to the space even if the only thing he hears is silence. It's most important to maintain a certain frame of mind - be a listener and performer at the same time' - he says. Every place is appropriate to play; he has performed on streets, in shops, on fields, in woods, in small clubs and in big concert halls, during weddings and funerals. He likes experimenting with other artists and artistic genres. He has performed together with writers Andrzej Stasiuk and Yuri Andrukhovych.

Up till now he has collaborated with Lester Bowie, Peter Brötzmann, Tomasz Stanko, John Tchikai, Noel Akchote, Joe Giardullo, Peter Ole Jorgensen, Clementine Gasser, Jan Luc Cappozzo, Adam Pieronczyk, Leszek Mozdzer. He has recorded more than 30 albums, half of them are his own, self composed projects. Considered one of the best Polish jazz musicians he performs all over Europe.

Mikolaj Trzaska was born on 7 April 1966 in Gdansk. Already in high school he played the guitar and flute in a band called "REGAL" connected with Gdansk alternative music scene. In 1987 he started studies at the Academy of Fine Arts. At that time he met Ryszard Tymon Tymanski who invited him to play together in the group "Sni Sredstwom Zauklanianie" which was transformed into "Milosc" (Love). Fascinated by the life and music of John Coltrane he started playing the alto saxophone and does it until now. "Milosc" absorbed him completely and he left the Academy after two years of studies. In 1993 he founded the group "Loskot" (Clatter) which had its debut at Gdynia Summer Jazz Days Festival. The following year he formed a duet "Maslo" (Butter) together with Tymanski. In 2001 he left "Milosc" and concentrated on work with "Loskot" and solo projects. He also formed a trio Oles/Trzaska/Oles together with Marcin Oles - double bass and Bartlomiej Oles - percussion. Recently Trzaska's music image has changed. He has become a composer of theatre music and concentrates on solo music projects. Since 2001 together with his wife Ola he runs an independent recording company "Kilogram Records".

Mikolaj Trzaska biography courtesy of trzaska.art.pl. All rights reserved.

Jay Rosen was born in 1961 in Philadelphia. His family moved to Long Island, N.Y. in 1964. Jay's musical interest took shape from recorded music that was played around the house as well as two aunts and a brother that were all musicians. Musical vibrations affected Jay in deep, profound ways. Jay began music lessons at age eight on guitar and then piano. However, after seeing (and hearing) Tony Williams (with Sonny Rollins) at Carnegie Hall in 1971, Jay switched to the drums exclusively.
Upon hearing Charlie Parker and John Coltrane at the age of 13, Jay decided to pursue jazz as a serious course of study. Jay has studied with Barry Altschul, Kenwood Dennard, Marvin "Smitty" Smith, and Joe Morello among others. Jay has been an active member of the New York jazz scene since 1990. Since then he has been deeply involved in the creative improvised and new music scenes in New York City and beyond.

Jay Rosen has earned a considerable reputation as a first-rate drummer, lending his talents to diverse musical projects.

He has performed throughout Europe, Canada and the U.S. and/or recorded with Dr. Lonnie Smith, Mark Whitecage, Perry Robinson,Paul Smoker,Herb Robertson,James Carter, Anthony Braxton, Dave Taylor, Michael Marcus, Jaco Pastorius, Ivo Perelman, Steve Swell, Kenny Werner, Michael Bisio,William Parker, Roy Campbell, Sonny Simmons, Howard Johnson, Mike Stern, Dominic Duval, Joe McPhee, Matt Shipp, Charles Gayle among many others.

Jay Rosen biography courtesy of jay-rosen.com. All rights reserved.