The stand-up comic begins, "I went to a day of rage riot the other day, and a Moppa Elliott concert broke out." He might continue with, "Take my jazz canon, please." That is just what the bassist's quartet, Mostly Other People Do The Killing, does—seize the jazz standard and demolish it. The Coimbra Concert is the first live recording by the group, following its fourth studio record, Forty Fort (Hot Cup, 2009).
Momentum. Just one word is enough to explain the philosophy of this trio coming from Norway. A musical manifestation of the phenomenon. In the beginning it is sparse, gradually building until it overflows with force, eventually descending into nothing. It’s spontaneous, intuitive, crude, raw and as potent and powerful as it is fleeting and ephemeral. Each time Jørgen Mathisen, Christian Meaas Svendsen and Andreas Wildhagen play together is different from the previous one and the other following, changing with the circumstances, the states of mind at the time and the ambient of the performance.
Like Axel Dörner in Germany and Ernesto Rodrigues in Portugal, among others, Swedish alto (and sometimes baritone) saxophonist Martin Küchen spans the artificial divisions imposed between the “new” and the “old” improvising schools. His radical extended techniques, such as in the sonic use of saliva, are fundamental for the abstract, textural constructions on his solo album “Homo Sacer.” Although these techniques address sound itself rather than music as conventionally considered, Küchen is first of all a free jazz player. Küchen the free jazz artist is in fact what we find on “Every Woman is a Tree.”