Picks and Misc.

One new album, several recommendations

Picks

Makoto Kawashima - arteria (Relative Pitch)

Anyone who has followed my tertiary and social media writing for the past ?? years has likely come across my thoughts on the great and possibly insane visionary saxophonist Kaoru Abe. His solo saxophone albums, specifically, are mind-altering stuff, fierce and brutal, often sounded as brutal to play as to hear, decades after his untimely death. Makoto Kawashima has taken Abe’s playing as a starting point—not unlike how Peter Brötzmann was influenced by and also separate from Albert Ayler.

After releasing a studio album of shorter (though not necessarily short) moments last year, Kawashima has a new album due later this month, arteria. It’s an astonishingly successful solo recording, breaking yet more new ground on the saxophone. Between Kawashima and fellow altoists like Ryoko Ono, Mette Rasmussen, and Patrick Shiroishi, there’s an excitement about the possibilities of the instrument that’s reminiscent of players like Abe, Masayoshi Urabe, and John Zorn.

I first heard Kawashima on his 2015 album Homo Sacer, released by Black Editions just a few years later. On it, Kawashima plays “with a reed he had been given by the mother of the late Japanese saxophone giant Kaoru Abe,” and the music is transcendent. Kawashima’s approach to improvisation, and the saxophone, is influenced by Abe and Masayoshi Urabe, undoubtedly, but his playing has a fine dramatic edge. The narrative arc draws additionally from Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell, both of whom played silence like its own instrument. You can hear all of this in Kawashima, less working things out than drawing clean lines and making concise statements. Writing about improvised music is always challenging, one gets too easily drawn into what John Brackett calls “ an analytical setting as ‘this happens then this happens then…’ ad nauseum.” That approach tells us almost nothing about the artist or music; as listeners, we experience the performance linearly, it’s performed (and recorded) spatially, meaning space and sound, neither of which can be quite properly recreated in the at-home (re-)experience of listening to an album. But a narrative can be spoiled by too much talk, anyway, and the real delight is in hearing Kawashima play.

Masayoshi Urabe - What Hasn’t Come Here, COME! (Relative Pitch)

I’d wager most adventurous listeners have come across Abe’s name from time to time, but it’s possible Urabe has gone slightly less noticed. After appearing on maybe a dozen albums on P.S.F. Records, Urabe crossed over for me when he released What Hasn’t Come Here, COME! a few years ago on Relative Pitch, where Kevin Reilly’s making a habit of releasing top-tier, mind-blowing solo albums by players at the very forefront of their instruments (see also: Dan Blacksberg, Laura Cocks, Michael Foster, Audrey Lauro, Camila Nebbia, Ryoko Ono, Chris Pitsiokos, and Lao Dan). Recorded live in 2017, it’s a breathtaking (literally, I have held my breath multiple times when revisiting this) performance, keenly mastered by David Torn to emphasize the spatial, physical experience as much the aural. This one I enjoy listening to loudly on headphones to immerse myself. None of these records were made for background music, these are albums made for listening.

Misc.

It was Mother’s Day this past weekend, and I spent one day with my mother and sister and one with my wife and kids. Laughing was the thing we did most, laughing and telling stories, some new and surprising, some old and always worth revisiting. It was a brief moment of idyll in the midst of ever worsening storms. Not for the first time, and certainly not the last, consider this (again!) a recommendation to spend time away from machines and with people you love. You’ll probably be surprised, as well, by how far-away things become, which isn’t always such a bad thing.