Here are a pair of releases that will rattle your cage a bit. Maybe for the better, or not, but that’s for you to decide.
John Tchicai (who just recently departed to his eternal reward in Oct 2012) was a rare breed. Of Dutch and African parentage, he got the jazz epiphany from Coltrane’s Ascension release, and lived a jazz life accordingly. This 2 cd set from Storyville shows the vision of the writer/woodwind master in two groups 10 years apart.
The first one from 1977 has Tchicai playing alto sax, soprano and bamboo flute along with Simon Spang-Hanssen/ts, Peter Danstrup/b and Ole Romer/dr in a free flowing pianoless ensemble that mixes the thick reed section of Woody Herman’s Herd with a metric unpredictability akin to the Elvin Jones Jazz Machine. The fascinating thing about this ensemble, both in studio and in concert, is that while the songs like “K.W” and “Gromyko Kik Lak” take you to the ozone, they come back to earth in 4-5 minutes; the trips are always concise though high octane. The ’87 recording simply replaces Bent Clausen/vib-g-synt-perc for Spang, and the team at times sounds like they spent a few sessions with the Average White Band on tracks like “Put Up The Fight.” A bit more funk gets into the feel, making “Calypso Boswell” a must for Armenian weddings and Jobims “Adieu Tristisse” and a couple others sounding like a very hip lounge act. Music that is about as easy to peg down as jello.
Karl 2000 on the cover looks like a Communist Placard having a bad hair day, while the music by Daniel Rovin/sax, Austin White/cello-b and Dave Miller/dr is sonically the same. “Meadowlands,” A Cliff on the Volga” and “A Birch Tree in a Field Did Stand” are Russian folk melodies that have had about 5 shots of Vodka too many. The rest of the material consists of thunderous drum pounding, raucous sax wailing and disjointed rhythms that sound like a jazz version of the Bolshevik revolution.
Storyville Records