Good Energy: Gordon Grdina/Christian Lillinger Duo

Hot on the heels of presenting The Tokyo Trio, Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares hosted the Canadian guitarist Gordon Grdina and the German drummer Christian Lillinger in concert. Most U.S. jazz audiences are unfamiliar with musicians from other countries, and despite their international reputations, it’s safe to say very few local patrons had heard of Satoko Fujii’s threesome or our latest guests. The onerous cost of a work visa and a lack of decent paying gigs, paired with Trump’s America First rhetoric and a provincial jazz audience, all make it increasingly difficult to get international artists to our country.

So we felt ourselves fortunate that Grdina and Lillinger brought their talents to the Blue Room in Easthampton’s Old Town Hall on April 6. Seeing them for the first time was a revelation and a unique sonic experience. The music was dense and driving, but not overly loud. For the first time, we provided ear plugs at the front table, but none were needed. In addition to Grdina’s guitar, midi-guitar and oud, and Lillinger’s drums, they each commanded electronics, reaping heaps of vibrations. Not sheets of sound, but an oscillating wall.

Grdina began and ended the show playing oud, the ancient, Middle Eastern lute. While he played abstractly with electronics in the first instance, he concluded the evening showcasing his deep understanding of traditional Arabic music. Although he has not performed publicly in western Massachusetts, Grdina has been part of several Arabic Music Retreats, held annually at Mt. Holyoke College each August.

Grdina’s career has been distinguished by a restless energy. Since Think Like the Waves, his 2006 debut with Paul Motian and his mentor, Gary Peacock, the 48 year old Vancouver resident has produced north of 30 albums, including ensembles exploring Middle Eastern repertoire, as well as with jazz titans like Mark Helias, Matthew Shipp, Matt Mitchell, Jim Black, Mat Maneri, Shahzad Ismally and Christian Lillinger.  

Sunday’s Grdina/Lillinger concert had the same rock/punk vibe as their 2024 release, Duo Work, and although the program differed, we heard the same precision amidst the mass of sound. The melodies were embedded in the aural landscape and passed without song breaks or attribution. Closed eyed listening freed us from the futile attempt to identify who/what was producing a particular reverberation, allowing us to revel in what felt like a wordless rock opera.

Closed eyed listening, however, would have robbed us of the thrill of watching Christian Lillinger. The 40 year old drummer moved like a dancer over his instrument, making large, inflated gestures with his arms, torso and face. It was wonderful to watch him move with, and reflect the music. Aside from his animated percussion attacks he manipulated an iPad propped on his music stand, and occasionally reached far to his side to hit a small, thin cymbal with holes in it. The spectacle was not only visually engaging, but his approach: rigorous, exacting, abrupt, jagged, served as engine and architecture.

Lillinger was born in the East German city of Lübben, and has lived in Berlin since 2003. His 25+ recordings as a leader for Clean Feed, Intakt and his own Plaist label, feature artists like Peter Evans, Mat Maneri, Elias Stemeseder, and lots of European musicians we’ve never heard of. When I would mention Lillinger’s name to visiting musicians, they would just laugh. It was the same reaction I got years ago when Tyshawn Sorey’s name would come up. Just a unique and crazy talented artist.

We are so happy to expose Valley audiences to world-class musicians from faraway places. Everyone everywhere deserves to experience the work of artists who have been nurtured in different environments. That’s how fertility works and cross-pollination happens. In such a world Gordon Grdina and Christian Lillinger would not be strangers.

Dream addendum: Jazz has thrived because of talented local musicians who mentor others and enrich their community. What if every region throughout the world had their own all-star ensemble that would travel (with support) to other locales, creating work and raising the profile of their music scenes? The Denver Dream Team, the Berlin Blasters, and so on. A grand international exchange of creatives, on loan to other cities for a couple of weeks. Why not include visual artists and galleries as part of the plan?

Satoko Fujii's Tokyo Trio Comes to Goshen

Although she is humble, soft spoken and stands barely over 5 feet, it’s easy to be impressed with pianist Satoko Fujii. Over her recording career, which began in 1996 with a two-piano effort with Paul Bley, she has produced over 100 recordings  as a leader. She regularly crisscrosses oceans, performing constantly  in Japan, Europe and North America where her fiercely creative work in settings from solo to big band has been uniformly celebrated by critics and audiences.

On March 31, Fujii made quite the impression on 55 listeners at the Institute For the Musical Arts in Goshen, MA, as she led her Tokyo Trio in an engrossing recital of brand new originals. This concert, part of the Trio’s first North American tour, included stops in Minneapolis, Chicago, Boston, New York, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver. The band, featuring Takashi Sugawa on bass and Ittetsu Takemura on drums, has been together for seven years and has three recordings to date, including Dream a Dream, which came out last week. But rather than highlighting music from the new disc, (they played only one piece, “Aruku”), Fujii chose to concentrate on even newer music they’ll record next week in New York. Such is life for the forward thinking, boundlessly energetic 66 year old pianist.

Monday’s concert covered considerable territory, all of it rugged, untamed and breath taking. Delicate moments of calm repose, eerie sounds from inside the piano, and volcanic eruptions of cacophonous energy filled the barn (and those of us in it), with a sense of wonder at the Trio’s virtuosity and spirit of collaboration.

Sections of compositional material featured expectation-defying, pointillistic tutti bursts that crackled and popped.  We moved to the edge of our seats wondering if they could keep the angles together. They nailed endings with the precision of an Olympic gymnast. Other times the threesome floated in a loose configuration that begged the question: written or improvised? They tossed around the spotlight, allowing everybody ample time for unaccompanied soloing. Most of the evening was spent with the musicians in deep, improvised conversation, providing accents, color and commentary. Their confidence in themselves and each other meant we could sit back and marvel at their ease of execution, which translated into what every band aspires to: a true simpatico.

Sugawa and Takemura are more than a generation younger than Fujii. They were clearly thrilled to be sharing the bandstand with her. But she told us how lucky she felt to be playing with them. They are in demand sidemen in Japan.

Takashi Sugawa, 45, is a member of bands led by Terumasa Hino and Sadao Watanabe. Hino, the 82 year old trumpeter, and Watanabe, the 92 year old saxophonist, are among the most celebrated jazz musicians in Japan. Educated at Berklee and mentored by Masabumi Kikuchi, Sugawa lives in Tokyo where he leads his Banksia Trio. His technique, both pizzicato and with bow, was impeccable, and at times produced sounds that resembled a human voice or an electronic instrument. Saxophonist Jason Robinson, who recently returned from a tour of Japan, mentioned how most bass players he encountered had the same long hair as Sugawa. What does that mean?

Born in Sapporo in 1989, Ittetsu Takemura has been a professional musician since he graduated junior high school. Like Sugawa, he is also a veteran of Sadao Watanabe’s band, as well as a member of ensembles led by Kosuke Mine and Fumio Itabashi. Wearing a suit, polo shirt and sneakers without socks, Takemura cut a cool figure. His precise and expansive drumming was equally striking. He played with great dynamic range while never overplaying. Like his rhythm mate, he was intimate with the material and it showed in the execution.

Utilizing the entire keyboard (inside and out), Fujii’s playing was magnificent. She used an e-bow, typically used to vibrate guitar strings, to create synth-like sounds, and used what looked like fishing line to “floss” the strings. She used her forearms on the keys to create density, and played repeated high notes with bell-like effect. She led the band with a light touch, using eye contact and slight head nods to move the music along. In explaining how the music was put together to IMA co-founder June Millington, Sugawa showed her the sheet music. Following Fujii’s lead, they could play the complicated piece through as written, or start at any of its four sections, improvising all the way. For Millington, it was a very different way of organizing music.

I first met Satoko Fujii in 2012, when she performed solo as part of A World of Piano, and then in a memorable Solos & Duos Series concert featuring two couples (Fujii/Natsuki Tamura and Carla Kihlstedt/Matthias Bossi) in a series of four duos. Fujii performed a Jazz Shares concert in Northampton with Joe Fonda in February, 2020, and Priscilla Page and I were witness to the recording of her 100th album,  Hyaku, One Hundred Dreams, at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in New York in 2022. Fujii is an unassuming master, largely unknown among U.S. audiences, but revered by those in the know. She is the right kind of restless and I’m grateful to be in her orbit.  

Possible Sounds : Aaron Shragge Whispering Worlds

Just as the group of blind men drew divergent conclusions about elephants after touching particular parts of the animal, jazz means different things to different people, depending on one’s taste and experience. We heard a particular sliver of the diverse world of jazz on March 8, as 35 of us gathered at Holyoke Media to listen to Aaron Shragge Whispering Worlds. The quartet: Shragge (trumpet, shakuhachi, effects), Luke Schwartz, (guitar, effects), Deric Dickens (drums) and Damon Banks (bass guitar), took us on an ethereal, 75-minute journey through a sound world inspired by the late Jon Hassell.

Although the music was written by Shragge, the compositions were animated by his love of Hassell’s other-worldly oeuvre. Like Hassell’s vision, Shragge’s music unfurled on a new age wave of electronics. Using two Ableton enabled laptops, beds of synthetic sound made it possible to float easily into a meditative state.

The world of Armstrong, Ellington, Parker and Ornette felt very far away.

Shragge’s unique Dragon Mouth trumpet, patterned after Maynard Ferguson’s 70s-era prototype called the “Firebird”, is basically a regular valve trumpet with a soprano trombone slide. The slide enables Shragge to emulate bent notes commonly used in North Indian classical vocal music. When combined with the echo, loops and distortions made possible by his electronics, the sound was at once amorphous and enveloping.

Shragge, who has lived in Amherst since 2020, has had an interesting career in music. He has played extensively with guitarist Ben Monder (now part of The Bad Plus), is part of the boundary busting ensemble Brooklyn Raga Massive, was active in the big-tented Festival of New Trumpet, and leads a band that plays the music of Tom Waits. He’s also a licensed music therapist. Shragge’s long-time Zen practice led him to the shakuhachi, an ancient Japanese bamboo flute. Soon after getting to New York, he was handed a shakuhachi by the esteemed teacher, Ronnie Nyogetsu Reishin Seldin, founder and director of the Ki-Sui-An Shakuhachi Dojo. Shragge is now expert on the instrument.

Shragge got to play with Hassell, whose career as a trumpeter and composer intersected with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Terry Riley, Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, David Byrne and Carl Craig, among many others. This Jazz Shares concert with Whispering Worlds motivated me to pull out my two Jon Hassell records: his 1980 debut, Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics, and Flash of the Spirit, his 1987 recording with Farafina, an ensemble of musicians from Burkina Faso. Hassell’s integration of percussion and electronics (Possible Musics featured the brilliant Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos), was mirrored in the work of Whispering Worlds’ Deric Dickens.

Amidst all the swirling, ambient sounds, Dickens acoustic drumming was a grounding force, providing drive and forward momentum. The Brooklyn-based percussionist augmented our Jazz Shares Gretsch Catalina Club kit with a variety of bells and other metal instruments to produce a welcome scaffolding for the atmospherics of the rest of the band. Dickens can be found on stage and recordings with Daniel Carter, Russ Lossing, Caroline Davis and Sara Schoenbeck. His 2011 release, Speed Date, where he invited collaborators like Kirk Knuffke, Matt Wilson, Jeff Lederer and Jeremy Udden to perform with him in duos, is a good place to dive into Dickens work.

Like Dickens, I was meeting guitarist Luke Schwartz for the first time. Both were generous, gracious and extremely talented. Schwartz integrated his articulate guitar lines with his laptop-infused output, resulting in a constant reweaving of the band’s tonal fabric. With its emphasis on layered textures and the engrossing sound environment, Saturday’s concert had the feel of a soundtrack. Schwartz, who was part of guitarist and composer Glenn Branca’s world, has extensive experience in sound design and film scoring. His work with Rick Cox, led to collaboration with the influential Hollywood film composer Thomas Newman, and through them he met and worked with Jon Hassell to help compose a 30-minute piece for sculptor Charles Long that was released on Hassell’s label, Ndeya.

I first crossed paths with electric bassist Damon Banks when Adam Rudolph’s Go: Organic Orchestra and Arun Ramamurthy’s Trio performed in the Valley. I also got to spend time with him when he accompanied his wife, violinist Gwen Laster, when she headlined a Jazz Shares concert in January. He has stayed at our home and become a friend. Banks has a flexible musical mind, ready to provide whatever the moment demands. Although an outsider to Hassell’s world, he certainly is familiar with drones and non-western music through work with Hassan Hakmoun, Arto Lindsay, Angelique Kidjo and Karsh Kale. The Bronx-born, Fisk University educated, Banks has also collaborated with artists as diverse as George Benson, Sekou Sundiata, Wadada Leo Smith and Angela Bofill.

After the gig in Holyoke, Whispering Worlds performed in North Adams, MA and Beacon, NY  celebrating the release of their new recording, Cosmic Cliffs, (Adhyaropa Records). The results, available digitally and on CD, was expertly mixed by Luke Schwartz. It is a fantastic listening experience and an important part of the jazz elephant.