#avreeayl ra

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[thoregil]

2023-05-15 FRI FORM #85: Nick Mazzarella / Ingebrigt Håker Flaten / Avreeayl Ra - Moskus Bar

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[dustedmagazine]

Rempis / Abrams / Ra + Baker — Scylla (Aerophonic)

Scylla by Rempis/Abrams/Ra + Baker

The Dusted review of Dave Rempis, Joshua Abrams, and Avreeayl Ra’s first album, Aphelion, closes on an anticipatory note: “This is an enormously satisfying record, but it also implies potentialities that make this a band worth watching in years to come.” I can’t claim any great gift of prescience, since all of the participants were already known both for their individual gifts. Alto, tenor and baritone saxophonist Rempis, the trio’s instigator, has a particular knack for keeping his ensembles going and growing. But I will gladly claim that I was right.

Rempis first convened the group at a time when certain of his long-standing local partnerships had come to an end or were getting harder to sustain, since they had members who were either leaving Chicago or getting busy leading their own projects. This group wasn’t an obvious solution to such problems, since Abrams and Ra were already in high demand. But it was an open door into an AACM-informed method of music-making that Rempis hadn’t spent much time pursuing. His early responses to his bandmates’ non-North American percussion and stringed instruments was to play melodies that seemed to look eastward without explicitly enacting any particular ethnic approach. But since then, the ensemble has grown into its own rhythm and identity. They play a couple times a year at Elastic Arts, the venue that hosts the long-standing weekly improvisational music concert that Rempis has booked for a couple decades. Abrams tends to leave his harp, guembri and clarinet at home now, sticking mostly to double bass, and the group’s pan-cultural intimations have been absorbed into a distinct group dynamic that contains stormy episodes within a predominantly patient approach to long-form improvisation. While Ra and Rempis are both quite at home playing at high volume, they often turn things down a notch in each other’s presence. And a fourth member, piano and synthesizer player Jim Baker, has become an integral member of the group. 

Scylla, the group’s fourth recording, was recorded in July, 2021. It documents their first post-lockdown concert, and also the first performance that Elastic Arts had opened to the public since March 2020. The album actually starts with a finale, a brief dedication that Ra had originally intoned as he gently plucked his mbira at the concert’s end: “This is for the survivors.” The rest comprises two pieces, one nearly 35 minutes long, the other a bit over 27, each collectively improvised in a fashion that applies the quartet’s vocabulary to the gravity of the moment. Baker plays piano on “Between A Rock,” and his swirling chords mesh with Ra’s cymbals and Abrams arco passages to suggest a particularly oceanic surge of sound. Rempis rides their swells, switching between horns to signal a transition from pensive solemnity to purgative emotion, and finally engagement with an uncommonly bop-like closing passage. “Viscosity,” with Baker on burbling synthesizer, feels simultaneously diffuse and purposeful, as each musician carefully steers a path forward. It’s easy to project all sorts of metaphorical meaning to the music, but you’ll get just as much benefit from simply sinking into its meandering flow and savoring the common understanding that permits the collective generation of something simultaneously loose and cohesive, lyrical yet quite unforced.  

Bill Meyer

[diyeipetea]

JazzX5#355. Dave Rempis - Avreeayl Ra: "Fire And Ash" [Bennu (Aerophonic Records, 2021)] [Minipodcast de jazz] Por Pachi Tapiz

JazzX5#355. Dave Rempis – Avreeayl Ra: “Fire And Ash” [Bennu (Aerophonic Records, 2021)] [Minipodcast de jazz] Por Pachi Tapiz

“Fire and Ash” Dave Rempis – Avreeayl Ra: Bennu (Aerophonic Records, 2021) El tema es una creación de Rempis y Ra. © Pachi Tapiz, 2021 Más información acerca de Dave Rempis y Aerophonic Records https://aerophonicrecords.com/ https://www.tomajazz.com/web/?s=dave+rempis&submit=Search Más información sobre JazzX5 JazzX5 es un minipodcast de HDO de la Factoría Tomajazz presentado, editado y producido…

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[dustedmagazine]

Mazzarella / Håker Flaten / Ra — What You Seek Is Seeking You (Astral Spirits)

Photo by Bob Palmieri

Mazzarella / Håker Flaten / Ra - What You Seek is Seeking You by Nick Mazzarella Trio

The trio seems to be alto saxophonist Nick Mazzarella’s favorite setting. He has led a couple of them, and the tunes he composes unfurl handily when propelled by a swinging rhythm section and unconfined by the harmonic requirements of chordal instruments or additional horns. This assembly might be similarly configured, but its method is quite different. The saxophonist leaves his book at home, and the trio collectively improvises the music.

Between them, double bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten and drummer Avreeayl Ra have played a myriad of jazz variations with ensembles such as The Thing, Sun Ra’s Arkestra, Atomic and the AACM Great Black Music Ensemble. Each plays with an assertiveness that shapes the ensemble sound, making this a band of equals. Håker Flaten reckons with his instrument’s core role as a low-end foundation, but he also stirs up maelstroms of activity and transmits meter-less bursts of sound that transform whatever is happening nearby without trying to complement it. Ra isn’t shy about resorting to volume to stoke excitement, but he’s also a colorist; witness the atmospheric rustling he wraps around Mazzarella’s closing phrases on “Recollection” and his patient exploration of his kit’s resources during his slow-burning introduction to “Firekeepers.” 

At some points, Håker Flaten and Ra transform Mazzarella’s playing by reframing him. If you’ve heard him in other contexts, you’ve heard him play something similar to the leaping, exuberant phrases that he opens with on “Recollection.” But since he’s weaving through rough ground rather than riding a groove, his playing exudes greater tension. Elsewhere he pushes further into abstraction, building from aggressive stutters to coarse cries on “Debris,” and substituting textural smears for his usual integrity of line on “Firekeepers.” He also digs deep into the emotional fundamentals, waxing tender on “Longing” and uncommonly stern on “Latter Day Protest Song.” Whichever way this group pushes him, it brings out his best. 

Bill Meyer

[dustedmagazine]

Rempis/Abrams/Ra+Baker — Perihelion (Aerophonic)

<a href="http://aerophonicrecords.bandcamp.com/album/perihelion">Perihelion by Rempis/Abrams/Ra + Baker</a>

Dave Rempis knows the score — you don’t put a band like this together just to stand in front of it. You won’t even hear the saxophonist for the first minute of the first disc, which is saying something when you’re talking about a trio without a chordal instrument. But when the other two musicians on stage are Joshua Abrams (acoustic bass, clarinet) and Avreeayl Ra (drums, wooden flute), it makes sense to heed them before you bull on in. Abrams’ quivering arco strikes a repeating phrase that sounds like an echo of an old work song, and Ra’s drums rumble low, so Rempis starts with a long blue wail that digs deep into their proposed sentiment.

But since Rempis is both restless and agile, he doesn’t stay in that spot long, and as he picks up the pace Abrams pushes past with a sprinting line punctuated by brief rests, the better to hear Ra’s obstreperous snare bursts. These guys feed each other both ideas and energy, and one of the notions that’s always on the table is what one might not play that’ll give someone else an opening. That ensures that “Enceladus,” Perihelion’s first disc, engages throughout its 43 waxing and waning minutes. 

And it also creates plenty of space for a fourth man. The second disc features two selections from a performance recorded half a year later with keyboardist Jim Baker on board. He finds his place quickly, playing quick staccato runs on a defiantly artificial-sounding electronic piano that wrap around Rempis’s tenor lines and pull into a close-braided formation with the rhythm section. But it doesn’t stay that way for long; the quartet set contains some of the saxophonist’s most reflective playing as well as sections where he rises to roar and goad his accompanists into frenzied activity. Baker moves to synthesizer on the record’s shorter final track, playing squelchy bursts that cue some pointillist plucking from Abrams. Once more, close listening and considered reaction keep the music gripping and satisfyingly restless.

Bill Meyer

[pennygreenshard-blog]

IMPASSE INVADERS 2015 // GRIM

IMPASSE INVADERS // RENDEZ-VOUS MENSUEL // GRIM // 2015 Les rendez-vous musicaux mensuels du GRIM, scène musicale de Montévideo

// Live Video AVREEAYL RA, AYMERIC AVICE, BERNARD SANTACRUZ, JEAN-MARC MONTERA, LIONEL GARCIN, Cremer, WHITE FENCE, QUETZAL SNAKES, MURMUR(S) 

[lesbeteslumineuses]

Les bêtes lumineuses (Épisode 035 : 24 avril 2015 : "Autour de Avreeayl Ra") by Les Bêtes Lumineuses on Mixcloud

Saison 02, épisode 17 (Autour de Avreeayl Ra) : vendredi 24 avril 2015 (18h à 19h) 1. Ari Brown (avec Avreeayl Ra, Joseph Ben Israel, Kirk Brown, Thadeus Expose, Art Burton, Enoch) :: Rahsaan in The Serengeti :: Venus (Delmark, 1998) 2. Active Ingredients (Avreeayl Ra, Jemeel Moondoc, Tom Abbs, Chad Taylor, Rob Mazurek, Steve Swell) :: Modern Mythology :: Titration (Delmark, 2003) 3. Frequency (Avreeayl Ra, Harrison Bankhead, Edward Wilkinson, Nicole Mitchell) :: Satya :: Frequency (Thrill Jockey, 2006) 4. Dave Rempis, Josuha Abrams, Avreeayl Ra :: Ruah :: Aphelion (Aerophonic, 2014) 5. Harrison Bankhead Sextet (Harrison Bankhead, Ed Wilkerson, Mars Williams, James Sanders, Avreeayl Ra, Ernie Adams) :: Chicago Senorita :: Morning Sun, Harvest Moon (Engine Records, 2011) 6. James Sanders, Harrison Bankhead, Avreeayl Ra :: Chant :: Live at the Velvet Lounge (Amadeo, 2014) 7. Nicole Mitchell Black Earth Ensemble (Nicole Mitchell, Avreeayl Ra, Joshua Abrams, Tomeka Reid, Tim Jones, Art Burton, Edie Armstrong, Brian Nichols, David Boykin, Tony Herrera, Cory Wilkes, Savoir Faire, Aquilla Sadalla, Glenda Zahra Baker) :: Journey for 3 Blue Stones :: Hope, Future and Destiny (Dreamtime, 2004)