Let’s Prego: AngelicA Secondi

By Andrew Choate This is the second part of a three-part review of the full 35th edition of the AngelicA festival in Bologna. The first part can be read here ; the third part will arrive after the festival ends May 31, 2025Unless indicated otherwise, photos are by author May 12, 2025 Centro di Ricerca Musicale/ Teatro San Leonardo – Bologna ...

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Stef.in – Icterus II (Barnyard Records, 2025)

By Nick Ostrum
Stef.in is a quartet led by Toronto drummer Stefan Hegerat. Joining him hereare Mark Godfrey on bass and Robyn Gray and Patrick O’Reilly, both on guitar. As the accompanying notes indicate, Icterus II, their second album, is electric fusion inspired by 70’s Miles that doesn’t really sound like 70’s Miles and isn’t really fusion! Maybe we can just call this non-dogmatic music for the 21 st century...

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Victoria Jordanova & Jérôme Descamps - A Second Orb (Aut Records, 2025)

By Stef Gijssels
GijsselsThe joy of being a reviewer is to get exposed to both known and unknown musicians, to be enthralled by novelty and totally different sonic universes. This album offers such a unique experience. Serbian classical harpist Victoria Jordanova and French jazz trombonist Jérôme Descamps meet for a minimalist conversation, a dialogue between two seemingly unrelated instruments. The music is calm, slowly moving forward in a strange...

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Ava Mendoza, gabby fluke-mogul & Carolina Pérez

The trio of guitarist Ava Mendoza, violinist gabby fluke-mogul, and drummer Carolina Pérez are releasing what seems to be a promising gut punching, ass-kicking, hard-riffing album this summer called Mama Killa. This (sort of) video of the first track appeared in the Free Jazz Blog in-box a couple of days ago and shook us out of a mid-week stupor. Not sure if it fits so neatly in the category "free jazz" but if it were a slice of pizza, it would burn the roof of your mouth -- and you'd like that it did....

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The Hemphill Stringtet - Plays the Music of Julius Hemphill (Out Of Your Head Records, 2025)

By Gary Chapin
It’s amazing to me that this is the first string quartet to record a set of Hemphill compositions. I may be reading too much into his friendship with Abdul Wadud, but Hemphill’s writing and affinity for cello make this idea feel natural. Also, instrument-family quartet’s are exactly in his pocket, if we’re to judge by his tenure with the World Saxophone Quartet. The quartet—Curtis Stewart, violin,...

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Cosmic Ear - TRACES (We Jazz, 2025)

By Eyal Hareuveni
Cosmic Ear is a new Swedish supergroup that follows the traces of legendary trumpeter-multi-instrumentalist Don Cherry (1936-1995), who in the late 1960s settled inSweden with his wife, Swedish visual and textile artist Moki Cherry, and collaborated and recorded with many local musicians, among them clarinetist-multi-instrumentalist Christer Bothén, now 85 years old. Bothén played in Cherry’s albums...

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Zwei aus Berlin

Berlin Art Quartet - live at MIM (uniSono, 2025) By Paul Acquaro
This review picks up, a few years later, from where my colleague Martin Schray's review of the Berlin Art Quartet's Live from B-flat, released and reviewed in 2020, leaves off. The band is the same, though a couple years more experienced, and the creativity and spontaneity that marked the first release is just as delightfully present in this recording...

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The Word Itself Interrogated: Two duos

By Stuart Broomer If free improvisers are the bravest of musicians, then free improvising vocalists may be the bravest of all, confronting both the blank slate and the audience without the comforting intercession of a musical instrument. Most of the best will have some special background or capacity. Sainkho Namchylak has centuries of Tuvan throat-singing/shamanic mysticism in her background. Lauren Neuton, who...

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LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN, 577 RECORDS (2/2)

Dawn After Dawn - Home is Where You Are (577 Records, 2025) Here we have the Maestro (saxophones, trumpet and piano) along with Aron Namenwirth (guitar, flute, percussion) and Jon Rosenberg (loops, effects), under the banner Dawn After Dawn. Aron and Jon have been friends since 2020 and played as a duo, Hall of Mirrors. How the duo became a trio is clearly explained on Bandcamp notes by Aron Namenwirth: “Find yourself lucky...

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LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN, 577 RECORDS (1/2)

By Ferruccio Martinotti
Founded in 2001 by the italian musician Federico Ughi along with the legendary Daniel Carter, 577 Records (named after Ughi’s apartment at 577 Fifth Ave. Brooklyn, where he was living at the time) is one of the most interesting independent labels around, including in its roster the likes of Amba, Amado, Cleaver, Dunmall, Genovese, Greene, Holmes, Ishito, Jones, Mela, Moore, Musson, Parker,...

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