Gjerstad / Schlippenbach / Narvesen - Seven Tracks

The Free Jazz Collective 0

By Martin Schray

It’s hard not to compare this band with Alexander von Schlippenbach’s trio with Evan Parker and Paul Lovens, a formation that has existed since 1970 (initially with Michel Pilz on clarinet). However, there was a break after 2018, when Paul Lovens was no longer able to tour (on their famous winter journey), even though Paul Lytton was a more than worthy successor. Recently, Schlippenbach continued go on a winter tour again, with Rudi Mahall on clarinet and Norwegian drummer Dag Navesen. Navesen is also featured on this recording, plus saxophone legend Frode Gjerstad (also from Norway) replacing Evan Parker, so to speak. That being said, expectations were high for Seven Tracks, a recording that came out of the blue for most of the fans of the old trio.

“1“ begins like a typical Schlippenbach Trio piece, with the band immediately hitting its stride. You’re confronted with seemingly isolated, short phrases that nevertheless come together and belong together. After two minutes, there is a first break, set by a piano chord. It becomes clear that Schlippenbach plays more romantically than in the wild years, but he still makes radical statements and creates structure with block chords. Nagesen shows that he’s very much in the tradition of Lovens and Lytton, but of Tony Oxley as well, which proves continuity and a sense of tradition. At the same time, he’s also a very energetic drummer, who has developed a style of his own. The biggest difference to the Schlippenbach Trio, however, is Frode Gjerstad. He hovers above the improvisation as if he was the group’s sound poet, who comments on the action calligraphically. His sound and his playing are rougher and more squeezed compared to Evan Parker, but they are also very varied, as he proves in the second piece. At first, there’s even a short passage that swings, but then the tempo picks up significantly. Gjerstad communicates intensively with the man at the piano, setting clever counterpoints between Nagesen’s elegant figures. In general, between these two warhorses of European improvised music the drummer is an absolutely equal explorer of sound worlds, underlining and initiating areas of discourse with nervous reflexes and a wide range of percussion sounds, most clearly in a short solo in “4”.

The music presented on Seven Tracks is remarkably unsentimental; Schlippenbach avoids the interior of the piano, instead offering dense, dissonant lines at breakneck tempos (the man is 88 years old), but he also likes to invent ballad arrangements without abandoning free tonality. What is more, his sense of form is as incorruptible as ever, and at the end of his career, his love for Thelonious Monk and the influence his music has had on him is becoming increasingly apparent. This can be heard in “5“ for example, where the sublime rhythmic shifts give way to expressive force (as they often did in the old trio), but they determine the improvisations even more obviously, and the control that the musicians have over their interplay seems more light-footed.

Yes, this music is complex, but that’s undoubtedly part of its strength and a reason to hope that this album will not be the last from this band.

Seven Tracks is available as a limited CD and as a download. You can listen to it and buy it here: