All the music that ever was and ever will be is here now. It exists in a cloud just above our heads and when we play, we pluck it out of the ether for a lil while before sending it back up.
-Jaimie Branch
It’s been a particularly difficult past couple of years, losing some real spiritual warriors in the Jazz world. This week, I’d like to remember three. The first two, a Belgian and a German, were from the old brigade. It was through them I found the third, an American, from the new brigade. Their stories are gently woven together.
On January 13, 2022, we lost the great Belgian pianist Fred Van Hove, one of the original founders of improvised music. He was a pioneer, an explorer, and most of all, he was a warrior.
There was an auction after his passing to raise money for his family. I was able to contribute by buying Van Hove’s copy of Manfred Schoof’s European Echoes, on which he played piano:
This seminal session was recorded in June 1969 in Bremen, Germany. It was the first release from Free Music Production (FMP). You can read more about that label here:
Van Hove also played on a couple other early improv classics with Peter Brötzmann: Nipples on the Calig label; and Machine Gun on Brötzmann's BRÖ label. We’ll spend more time with Van Hove a little further down the river….
On June 22, 2023, we lost the great German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, another original founder of improvised music.
You can read my tribute to him here:
I just love this picture of these two titans together on their last duo album:
Recorded on August 24, 2019, almost 4 years ago now, at the Summer Bummer Festival in Antwerp, Front to Front was released in 2020 on the Antwerp-based label Dropa Disc, run by Koen Vandenhoudt and Christel Kumpen. Van Hove and Brötzmann were free jazz Argonauts. Like Buzz Algren and Neil Armstrong, they were out there walking on the moon.
One of Brötzmann’s final recordings was Naked Nudes, recorded with pedal steel guitarist Heather Leigh and Chicago-born cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm. Lonberg-Holm is an interesting guy, who helped bring to light the third spiritual warrior, Jaimie Branch, who we lost on August 22, 2022, almost one year ago.
Jaimie Branch, an American from the new brigade, was one of the rising stars in contemporary improvised music. Like Van Hove and Brötzmann, she too was a pioneer, an explorer, and a warrior. Although she recorded on many albums with groups in the Chicago area between 2007 and when she left for graduate school in Baltimore in 2012, it took a long time for Branch’s promise to finally manifest itself into her first album as a leader in 2017.
Her journey was long and difficult and really begins in Chicago in 2004, when she met Fred Lonberg-Holm. So let’s back it up a few years and start there.
In July 5, 2000, Lonberg-Holm recorded his John Zorn-like Lightbox Orchestra at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music. His orchestra on that occasion included Brötzmann, Joe McPhee, Mats Gustafsson, Ken Vandermark, and Roy Campbell. Lonberg-Holm didn’t play in the Lightbox Orchestra, rather he conducted the group using a lightbox with a light bulb for each musician that he switched on and off to indicate who should play:
I like this type of thing. It adds some theater to the show, which is straight out of the jazz tradition. From that time on I have followed Lonberg-Holm’s work. Object 1 is one of my favorite Lonberg-Holm albums, originally released in 2003 on the Locust Music album:
This is a duo session with German trumpet player Axel Dörner, who in the late 1990s developed a completely different language for the trumpet using electronics and other innovative techniques.
In 2004, while Dörner was staying with Lonberg-Holm in Chicago, he met 21-year-old trumpeter Jaimie Branch after a show at the Empty Bottle. Branch was on summer break from the New England Conservatory of Music (NEC), where she had discovered Dörner’s recordings. She convinced him to give her private lessons. They met in Lonberg-Holm’s basement and after hearing her play, he invited her to play in his Lightbox Orchestra at the Phrenology Festival at the Hungry Brain. At the show, a bunch of Chicago’s rising stars heard her play and invited her into Chicago’s musical community.
Jaimie Branch was born in Long Island, New York in June 1983 and when she was nine her family moved to Wilmette on the north side of Chicago. She joined a punk-ska band Tusker in high school, but soon got into Jazz and was mentored by the tenor saxophonist and club owner Fred Anderson. Branch recalled, “He’d let me play and hang out at a jazz venue called the Velvet Lounge, on the condition that I couldn’t drink, because I was underage.” After high school, she attended NEC in Boston, but her semester off in Chicago changed her life. After she finished school in 2005, she moved back to Chicago.
However in 2008, she started using heroin and struggled with addiction up until March 2015, when she enrolled in a treatment program in Hampton Bay, Long Island. After the program, she was broke and moved to Red Hook in Brooklyn to try to find her way back into the music scene.
For most of 2016, she curated a music series at the Manhattan Inn in Brooklyn. The first concert she booked for the series was Chicago saxophonist Nick Mazzarella, who was touring as part of his new album with International Anthem. She decided to share the bill with him. She put together a quartet with Chad Taylor on drums, Jason Ajemian on bass, and Tomeka Reid on cello. As it urned out, the owners of International Anthem, Scott McNiece and David Allen, were there and loved it. According to McNiece, “We both damn near jumped out of our seats. It was kind of a no-brainer for us, and from that moment we knew we wanted to do a record with her.”
That record was Fly Or Die, released in 2017:
From that album here is Leaves of Glass:
Branch told Bandcamp Daily that, “I try to write all my music like a suite.” Interestingly, I think Leaves of Glass is the second part of a four-part suite that starts with the end of Theme 002 and runs through Waltzer. Near the end of Theme 002, a trumpet variation is introduced with 3 sets of 3 notes and expands into Leaves of Glass. I think the use of 3 notes is important: 3 is a magical number that combines the unity of 1 with the duality of 2 to create wholeness. It also represents the body, mind, and spirit. Repeating the number 3 three times is a reminder of the cycle of life. Storm sets off a struggle that ends with freedom, as Waltzer takes us on an outer space journey.
This is a dynamic debut album, and what I like most about it is the strange line-up: trumpet with drums, bass, and cello - Tomeka Reid’s playing on Theme 002 is beautiful. Anyone who has followed my journey knows I’m a huge cello fan. An obsession that awoke in the late 1980s when I first heard Oscar Pettiford’s cello solo at the end of Now See How You Are from The Oscar Pettiford Orchestra in Hi-Fi and extended to Ernst Reisinger and the late Tristan Honsinger.
Here’s one more for the road. Branch’s Fly Or Die band gets a lot of credit and deservedly so, but I find her work with Anteloper, a duo band with Jason Nazary, even more interesting. With Branch on trumpet and electronics and Nazary on drums and electronics, the musical possibilities were endless. Anteloper’s Kudu released in 2018 is strong debut. Their second release Pink Dolphins from 2022 is even stronger. Here is Baby Bota Halloceanation - an incredible two-person Bitches Brew:
This music is intense, spirited, and her closest to complete musical freedom. It’s Dörner-like music and seems closest to her heart. I think that’s where she was headed.
It seems absurd and tragic that there’s just five years between her career-defining Fly Or Die and her death. “I mean every note I play,” she told Aquarium Drunkard in a 2019 interview. “When I’m up there, I’m putting it all out on the table. It’s high risk, high reward.” It was that kind of commitment to the music that put her at the forefront of new music and jazz. She has left a void that will be very difficult to fill.
Next week, we’re back on that Big River called Jazz. We’ll dig our paddles in and explore the world of the late cellist Tristan Honsinger.
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Until then, keep on walking….