Pilz, Reis, Dahm, Martiny
Their music is a fusion, not of musical styles but of musicians' temperaments and experiences. Their interaction is a role-playing game, where players exploit their playful intelligence to write a scenario giving rise to situations where each musician freely deploys their musical language. The sonic adventure that unfolds throughout the 10 tracks is the natural communion of freely exposed musical contexts and memorable melodies subtly and intensely punctuated by a twin-skins section.
A twin-skins record
Twin-skin recordings are famous but are rare these days, remember Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman or outside the framework of Jazz, the JBs of James Brown, The Melvins, King Crimson or Grateful Dead. With Benoît Martiny and Pit Dahm, on the one hand a drummer nourished bythe rhythms of John Bonham who is also at ease with his drumsticks on jazz, world music, hip-hop and even metal, from another, a drummer raised in the tradition and discipline of jazz drumming, the opportunity was too good, they seized it to offer the listener hot chops and expressive drummings.
It's amazing how good bass clarinetist Michel Pilz (1945) sounds. Beautiful sound and endless ideas. However, he died on November 6, 2023, two and a half years after recording the album Mayhem in Dudelange (L) with this spectacular quartet. It has just been released and therefore acquires the status of a posthumous production, a tribute to this great man of European free jazz. He played with “our” Jasper van 't Hof in the group of German trumpeter Manfred Schoof. “Mayhem” can be translated as waste, waste and chaos. Many people happily use these terms to refer to free jazz, but as is often the case, this is completely unjustified. The phenomenal pianist Michel Reis offers the guarantee of a skillfully mastered freedom and the percussionists Benoit Martiny and Pit Dahm (on tenor sax in his own Lullaby For Leo) demonstrate a high school of contrasts. Ten pieces that leave your ears constantly open.
Coen de Jonge - Jazzism