Jazz breaking news: Lotte Anker, Craig Taborn and Gerald Cleaver conjure up a night of the abstract blues
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Danish saxophonist Lotte Anker has made a name for herself largely in the free jazz and improv borderlands, which has seen her keep fast company for some years with the likes of the great percussionist Marilyn Mazur and influential free improviser pianist Marilyn Crispell.
Her soprano sax-playing has a sloping slippery style to it, gutsy, sideways on, scrabbling with crucial intent. She picks away almost forensically at ideas to find an intensity that is at times overwhelming but very controlled in nature. Anker has been playing with drummer Gerald Cleaver over the past 10 years, and at the Vortex last night was performing with Cleaver and pianist Craig Taborn. Their understanding shows. Cleaver is about to go into the studio with Taborn and bassist Thomas Morgan for their latest ECM record, and speaking during the break said that he’s also going to be gigging with Tomasz Stanko.
Taborn, who has one of the most individualistic piano sounds anywhere, opens up new avenues with meta-improvised runs, and coiled understated washes of beautiful atonality seemingly spontaneously conceived, the abstract blues at its best. It was no wonder quite a number of musicians including composer Django Bates and Troyka’s Kit Downes, turned out at a comfortably full Vortex to hear him in such fine company.
Improvised music can be like a blank sheet of paper and when there’s no set list because it’s totally improvised, the challenge is on. Tunes can each sprawl out to 20 minutes or more at a canter. The narrative is the improvisation, but yet you somehow know there’s a logic to it and that loose sketches have been meticulously prepared in advance paving the way. This gig was a true co-operative, as all the best creative jazz tends to be, a collective conversation with egos checked at the door and forgotten about. These three had come to play.
– Stephen Graham