#steve baczkowski

[silocityreadingseries]

Silo City Reading Series, 2021

[musicmakesyousmart]

[musicmakesyousmart]

Steve Baczkowski / Bill Nace - Success

Notice

2020

[dustedmagazine]

Chris Corsano / Bill Nace / Steve Baczkowski — Mystic Beings (Open Mouth)

Right out of the gate, Steve Baczkowski raises the question — what IS he playing? He works and reworks the contents of a single trill, sometimes lingering on one note, sometimes racing through the whole sequence, sometimes picking it apart. The determination is terrifying. Then comes a second question — WHAT is he playing? It might be a soprano saxophone pushed into pitches higher than it’s supposed to reach, or a sopranino going low, or maybe he’s gotten his hands on a taragato. Whatever it is, it sounds like it’s being whittled away from the inside by the sheer force of his implacable gusting.

After a spell Baczkowski sets to making his high horn dance, and as he does so one registers the extent to which electric guitarist Bill Nace has been doing the same thing. Not playing the same notes, but extracting maximum ore from a single patch of earth. He leans into a note, splinters it, chips around it before flying off into some wild yet coolly focused frenzy. Faced with two such single-minded companions, drummer Chris Corsano takes different tacks, the better to ratchet up the tension. His barrages buck like a mustang motivated by too much coca chaw, and his encircling movements hug the other two musicians like a cosmic cloud giant cradling the moment of invention. But you can’t hug this stuff for too long without it burrowing under your arms and then gnawing into your ribcage, so as side one rolls along and Baczkowski switches to a bigger, lower horn, Corsano toggles between solid approximations of surf (the wet stuff, not the music) and attentive silence. Silence does not beget quietness, though; Baczkowski and Nace both know how to fill available space with a single tone.  

The presence of careening drums and overblown saxophone might tempt you to label this stuff free jazz. Resist — while it contains loads of freedom and plenty of jazz knowledge, this music adheres to different discipline than jazz. What they’ve learned from Ayler, but also from punk and noise and minimalism, is that if you apply yourself to simple material, all manner of complexity will result.  

Bill Meyer

[merzbow-derek]

POST-SCRIPTUM 39

À PROPOS DE NATURES ÉRUPTIVES

Il s’agit là d’une série de huit lathe-cuts flexis monofaces tirés à huit exemplaires chacun et numérotés, exclusivement dédiée aux saxophonistes s’exprimant en solo, et apparemment mise sur pied par David Vanzan du Jooklo Duo. Les six premiers me sont passés par les mains, via David Vanzan justement, au cours du premier concert du Jooklo Duo au DOJO à Nice (il y en eut un second et même un troisième, impromptu, en quintette avec France). Une série collector consacrée à Virgina Genta, Johns Lunds, Steve Baczkowski, Arthur Doyle, Marko Karlovcec, Don Dietrich, Dror Feiler et Tamio Shiraishi. Épuisé à la source (va sans dire).

[augrisliclandestin]

I Can Repay You

[noahfalck]

[augrisliclandestin]