The Bryant Park Accordion Festival – Pure Sonic Bliss

Wednesday night, the four corners of Bryant Park were awash in the blissful, plaintive, bittersweet and sometimes boisterously pulsing tones of many of New York’s most captivating accordionists. Booked by Ariana Hellerman, publisher of the irreplaceable free events and concert guide Ariana’s List – a primary source for a lot of what you find on the monthly NYC concert calendar here – opening night of this year’s Bryant Park Accordion Festival featured music from France, Russia, Colombia, Ireland, Brazil, many other countries and all over the US as well. Hellerman’s setup – a single accordionist or small group situated in every corner of the park, as well as over by the fountain on the west side, works out perfectly since each act is far enough away from the others to ensure that there’s no sonic competition.

Performances are staggered, Golden Fest style, with brief fifteen minute sets and virtually no time lost between acts. Some of the accordionists rotate, so that you can catch more of them if fifteen minutes isn’t enough for you  – seriously, is fifteen minutes of accordion music ever enough?

A tour of the festival’s first hour was as rapturously good as expected. It was tempting to pull up a seat in the shade to be serenaded by the Wisterians’ poignant French musettes, or the great Ismail Butera’s edgy, supersonic take on Middle Eastern and Mediterranean sounds, or Phil Passantino‘s wildly spiraling Cajun songs. But just like Golden Fest, it’s like being a kid in a candy store here, a great way to discover dozens of new artists. For starters, Mindra Sahadeo played calmly lustrousIndian carnatic music, singing in a sonorous baritone and accompanied by his mom on mridangam, another woman to his right adding vocals. He was a ringer, considering that he was playing harmonium (there were also a couple of others on the bill playing the concertina).

Next, in the northeast corner, the charismatic Alan Morrow entertained the crowd. Is there anything this guy can’t play? Segueing breathlessly between styles, he fired off bits and pieces of songs across pretty much every conceivable genre. About a minute after Dave Brubeck, we got James Brown: “Say it loud, I’m a New Yorker and I’m proud,” Morrow grinned, and the audience agreed. By then he’d already made his way through classical, ragtime, jazz, hints of klezmer and finally the longest number of his set, the Moody Blues’ Nights in White Satin, which turned out perfect for the accordion – and for a second seemed that he was going to do the whole album version, complete with hazy string-and-poetry interlude.

The highlight of the hour – at least from this perspective – turned out to be Guillermo Vaisman, who played a tantalizingly brief set of chamame tunes. It’s a popular folk style that’s common on the Uruguay-Brazil border, like tango but less classically-tinged, or a more lively counterpart to candombe. And it’s hard to find in New York. Vaisman’s elegance and dynamics throughout a mix of waltzes and more upbeat material put him on the map as someone who would be even more enjoyable to see stretching out with a longer set.

The festival continues for the next two Wednesdays, starting at 6 PM. The July 5 show features, among others, the haunting and amazingly eclectic Melissa Elledge, playful avant garde jazz and Romany accordionist Shoko Nagai, and Jordan Shapiro, better known as the organist in Choban Elektrik, the Balkan Doors. Closing night is Friday, July 21 at 8, hosted by the mesmerizing Rachelle Garniez, featuring Middle Eastern, Brazilian and Colombian music, to name just three styles. And it’s free.      

The Maureen Choi Quartet Bring Their Dynamic Flamenco String Sounds to Queen

Violinist Maureen Choi began her career as a singer; as the story goes, she switched to violin after a brush with death. She lives in Spain now, where she and her quartet play a passionate, dynamic blend of Andalucian, flamenco, Romany and South American sounds. The band’s latest album Ida y Vuelta (Round Trip) is streaming at Spotify; they’ve got a show coming up tomorrow night, July 1 at 8 at Terrazza 7, 40-19 Gleane St. just off Baxter in Elmhurst; cover is $10.  Take the 7 to 82nd St.

Choi plays the album’s Django-influenced opening, title track with a lingering restraint echoed by pianist Daniel Garcia Diego’s elegantly climbing lines until drummer Michael Olivera picks up the pace, and they wind their way up to a big crescendo….then they’re off again,

Bassist Mario Carrillo grounds the neoromantically biting waltz Vals O Vienes with a gritty pulse, Diego glimmering uneasily and then adding a little blues, Choi growing starker and more kinetic as the band takes it deeper into flamenco. The catchy, folk-tinged tango Valentia grows both more lush and propusive as Choi leaps and bounds, with a playful salsa interlude midway through, Choi’s plaintively sailing melody contasts with the low-key but balletesque elegance of Bolero Del Alba. A tightly wound remake of Besame Mucho, Elizabeth eventually diverges into flamenco jazz, Diego gracefully handing off to Choi’s achingly melismatic attack.

Choi’s remake of Mercedes Sosa’s Alfonsina y El Mar is a sweepingly dancing duet with guest bassist Javier Colina. Choi’s steely resonance and Carrillo’s growling, prowling drive pair off in Negra Presuntuosa, a trickily rhythmic Peruvian lando. Pianist Pepe Rivero gives the bolero Dama De Noche and understated bounce while Choi digs in hard, up to a wry trick ending that’s 180 degrees from the rest of the song

The album’s most lighthearted cut is Bilongo, a cha-cha. The quartet reinvent Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol as a martial shuffle and then fllamenco jazz;. They close the album with Gracias A La Vida, the Violeta Parra ballad made famous by Sosa, Choi’s spare, prayerful lead paired with Diego’s delicate, wistful piano. If flamenco fire, south-of-the-border melancholy or Romany rambunctiousness are your thing, you can’t go wrong with this band.

Art-Rock Multi-Instrumentalist and Keyboard Wizard Jack Spann Plays the Nation’s Best Outdoor Music Festival

Art-rock multi-instrumentalist Jack Spann’s connection to David Bowie is bittersweet. It started out as a hired-gun gig, laying down some rough guide tracks for the songs on what would become Bowie’s final album. The Thin White Duke was so impressed by Spann’s work that he lined up Spann to be the keyboardist on the following tour that sadly never happened. So it’s hardly a shock that Spann’s soon-to-be-released Beautiful Man From Mars would be a Bowie homage – although, characteristically, it’s very eclectic. The next big gig for Spann – who was iconic New York noir rocker LJ Murphy’s pianist for a time – is at the nation’s largest and arguably best outdoor festival, Milwaukee Summerfest at 8 PM at the Briggs & Stratton Backyard Stage (that’s how they name them there). Cover is $20, or you can get in before 6 PM, grab a Leinie and a brat and check out the other stages for $13.

As he did on his most recent release, Spann plays all the instruments, bolstered by producer Gary Tanin on keys. The opening title track, a lush, glamrock-influenced waltz, salutes Bowie with a crescendoing grandeur. Time isn’t an Alan Parsons Project cover but a kinetic, stiletto baroque rock number. Lies has a more towering angst, and interestingly recalls that British band at their most anthemic and ornate.

Songman comes across as a cynical update on Billy Joel’s Piano Man narrative: drunks badgering the band for more even though “The music is too busy, they’re not leaving any space.”

She Makes Pornography isn’t a snarky punk song, but instead a bitter Trump-era gig-economy anthem: pity the single mom who has nothing more to fall back on than this. Fear or Loyalty opens with hints of dub reggae but quickly rises to an angst-fueled waltz, a challenge to take a leap of faith and get the hell out. Then Spann blends Orbison noir and Alan Parsons grandeur in Deep Inside:

Hard to tell the difference
Living on the surface
Going about my business
And missing out on purpose

The soul-inspired I’m a Bird is a lot more lighthearted. The album’s best and funniest song is Snooty Acres – “where your elbows should not rub with the kitchen help” – a ragtime-infused sendup of suburban status-grubbing. Spann takes Just Another Version of You in a sardonically loungey direction before hitting the kind of wildfire barrelhouse piano interlude he’s been thrilling New York audiences with for years. The album closes with the blithely funky, suspiciously deadpan instrumental Jack Around and a wistful instrumental reprise of the title cut.

Iconic, Haunting Jazz Guitarist Bill Frisell Plays a Rare Duo Show in Brooklyn

Bill Frisell’s first album as a bandleader was just guitar and bass (and lots of overdubs). Who knew that this era’s preeminent jazz guitarist would ever revisit that format? Almost thirty-five years later, the bassist is Thomas Morgan, and the album, Small Town, is a live recording from the Village Vanguard from just a few months ago It’s hard to hear online, but you can catch the two when they make a relatively rare Brooklyn appearance at Roulette on June 30 at 8. Advance tix are just $20, and having seen Frisell in this particular borough, it’s not a safe bet to assume that the show won’t sell out.

The first track is an eleven-minute version of Paul Motian’s Should’ve Happened a Long Time Ago. Resonant, starry, minimalist motives give way to a distantly ominous big-sky theme spiced with wispy harmonics and Morgan’s lurking presence. A wistful waltz develops and is then subsumed by  brooding pedalpoint with stark gospel allusions as Frisell builds a hypnotic web of contrapuntal loops. If this doesn’t end up in a Twin Peaks episode, that would be criminal.

The two make a briskly caravanning stroll out of Lee Konitz’s Subconscious Lee, threatening to take it down into the depths but never completely submerging. Morgan hangs back and punches in gingerly throughout most of the spacious, uneasy ballad Song for Andrew No. 1 (an Andrew Cyrille shout-out). Referneces to a famously infirm New Orleans funeral tune flicker amidst Frisell’s lingering single-note lines as he waits til the very end to go for the macabre.

He does Wildwood Flower a lot – this one offers genially blithe, bluegrassy contrast and some neatly understated counterpoint between the two musicians. 

The title track expands on the old Scottish folk tune Wild Mountain Thyme, Frisell finally flinging some noir and some wryly muted surf riffs into the purposeful, steady walk as Morgan straddles the same thin grey line. After that, the two pulse their way mutedly through Fats Domino’s What a Party; which sounds a lot more like the old folk song Shortnin’ Bread. Ironically, it’s the most pastoral track here – hearing Morgan toss off a handful of C&W guitar licks on his bass is a trip.

Poet – Pearl is a diptych. Morgan shifts around with a pensive incisiveness in the upper midrange, as he usually does throughout the set while Frisell plays a gently tremoloing lullaby of sorts. then the two follow the night’s most divergent courses, segueing into the lone Morgan composition here, a bittersweetly catchy jazz waltz where the bassist finally gets to carry the melody. The last song of the set is a spare, lowlit, increasingly desolate take of the Goldfinger theme that leaves no doubt that it’s about a spy. At the end, Frisell turns it into the old blues lament Baby Please Don’t Go.

Where does this rank in the Frisell pantheon? Maybe not on the towering, harrowing noir pinnacle with, say, 2007’s History, Mystery but it’s close. You’ll see this on a whole lot of best-of-2017 lists, not just here, at the end of the year.

The World’s Funniest Jazz Band Return to Their Favorite Brooklyn Spot

What makes Mostly Other People Do the Killing so damn funny? They do their homework, they really know their source material and they can spot a cliche a mile away. Over the course of their dozen-album career, the world’s most consistently amusing jazz band have pilloried styles from hot 20s swing to post-Ornette obsessiveness. They also did a pretty much note-for-note recreation of Kind of Blue (that was their “serious” album). Their latest release, Loafer’s Hollow – streaming at Spotify – lampoons 1930s swing, Count Basie in particular. There’s an additional layer of satire here: ostensibly each track salutes a novelist, among them Vonnegut, Pynchon, Joyce, Cormac McCarthy and David Foster Wallace. The band return to their favorite Brooklyn haunt, Shapeshifter Lab on June 29 at around 8:15, with an opening duo set at 7 from their pianist Ron Stabinsky with adventurous baritone saxophonist Charles Evans. Cover is $10.

The band keeps growing. This time out the three remaining original members – bassist Moppa Elliott, multi-saxophonist Jon Irabagon and drummer Kevin Shea – join forces with Stabinsky, banjo player Brandon Seabrook, trombonist Dave Taylor and Sexmob trumpeter/bandeader Steven Bernstein, an obvious choice for these merry pranksters.

This is  a cautionary tale, one negative example after another. Respect for bandmates’ space? Appropriateness of intros, lead-ins, choice of places to solo or finish one? Huh?  For anyone who’s ever wanted to take their instrument and smash it over the head of an egocentric bandmate, this is joyous revenge. It also happens to be a long launching pad for every band member’s extended technique: theses guys get sounds that nobody’s supposed to.

It’s not easy to explain these songs without giving away the jokes. Let’s say the satire is somewhat muted on the first track, at least when it comes to what Seabrook is up to, Bernstein on the other hand being his usual self.

Honey Hole – a droll ballad, duh – is where the horns bust out their mutes, along with the first of the chaotic breakdowns the band are known for. Can anybody in this crew croon a little? We could really use a “Oh, dawwwwling” right about here.

A strutting midtempo number, Bloomsburg (For James Joyce) takes the mute buffoonery to Spike Jones levels. Kilgore (For Kurt Vonnegut) its where the band drops all pretense of keeping a straight face, from the cartoonish noir of the intro (Seabrook’s the instigator) to the bridge (not clear who’s who – it’s too much), to Stabinsky’s player piano gone berserk.

Stabinsky’s enigmatic, Messiaenic solo intro for Mason & Dixon (For Thomas Pynchon) is no less gorgeous for being completely un-idiomatic; later on, the band goes into another completely different idiom that’s just plain brutally funny. Likewise, Seabrook’s mosquito picking and Taylor’s long, lyrical solo in Meridian (For Cormac McCarthy) are attractive despite themselves. Maybe that’s the point – Blood Meridian’s a grim story.

The band returns to a more subtle satire – such that it exists here – with Glen Riddle (For David Foster Wallace), in many respects a doppelganger with the album’s opening track. They wind it up with Five (Corners, Points, Forks), which gives the gasface to Louis Armstrong – and reminds how many other genres other than jazz this band loves to spoof. As usual, there are tons of quotes from tunes both iconic and obscure:  this is the rare album of funny songs that stands up to repeated listening.

Not to be a bad influence, but these catchy, jaunty tunes reaffirm that if the band  really wanted, they could just edit out the jokes and then they’d be able to get a gig at any respectable swing dance hall in the world  Another fun fact: this album was originally titled Library (all MOPDtK albums are named after towns in Elliott’s native Pennsylvania). In researching the area, Elliott discovered that before it was Library, it was Loafer’s Hollow. The more things change, right?

Guitarist Derek Gripper Builds a Magical Sonic Constellation at Lincoln Center

Thursday night at Lincoln Center, guitarist Derek Gripper played a show that was as impressive a display of daunting technique and irrepressible individuality as it was an immersion in celestially kaleidoscopic glimmers and ripples. Gripper got his start as a classical guitarist and plays with the requisite precision and steely focus. But he also has an outside-the-box sensibility, not to mention a sense of humor, that transcend the limitations – at least the usual ones -in that demimonde. His claim to fame is reinventing centuries-old Malian kora music for the acoustic guitar.

Sending a shout out to a major influence, pioneering Malian kora virtuoso Toumani Diabate, Gripper opened with a steady, spiky, liltingly circling theme and closed with a jaunty, allusively tongue-in-cheek cover of fellow South African kora player Madosini’s I Like a Motorcar. In between, there were moments that echoed John Fahey, and Adrian Legg, and maybe Michael Hedges, but Gripper’s sound is unique. His dry sense of humor became apparent early on, when he explained to the crowd how he’d developed a new appreciation for an old guy named J.S. Bach, particularly that composer’s work for a “European ethnic instrument, the violin.” And then launched into a well-known diptych from that guy’s catalog, the first part reinvented with an idiosyncratically kinetic approach, the concluding fugue with an edge and bite to match Gripper’s emphatic attack on the strings. More guitarists should take chances like that.

The most fascinating of all the pieces on the bill was a number for two koras that he’d arranged for solo guitar. Employing carefree but minutely nuanced five-finger technique, he alternated between calm, minimalistically anchoring phrases on the low strings and subtly crescendoing flickers and pings on the higher ones. For a couple of other numbers, he tuned the two lowest strings to the same note – was that just a double low E? – for extra ballast,amplified by his relentless hammering, which sent overtones wafting throughout the space.

The most challenging number of the evening was a mashup of enigmatic indie classical tonalities, Steve Reich, the baroque, and West Africa. Solo gigs are always harder than playing with a group, and it’s harder still to hold a crowd’s attention, especially on an acoustic instrument. But a diverse, multi-generational crowd, most of them most likely not particularly versed in Gripper’s source material, remained fixated throughout his hour onstage. It was a subtle reminder that music, no matter where it’s from, belongs to all of us: where we take it is the challenge, and Gripper gave a clinic in how to d o it.

The next free early-evening concert at Lincoln Center’s atrium space just north of 62nd St. on Broadway is this Thursday, June 29 at 7:30 PM with Marc Anthony Thompson, a.k..a Chocolate Genius, who’s sort of the Gil Scott-Heron of newschool retro soul music. Show up early if you want a seat.

Orkesta Mendoza Bring Their Slinky Cumbias and Noir Desert Rock to Prospect Park

Tucson-based bandleader and multi-instrumentalist Sergio Mendoza leads Orkesta Mendoza, who might be the most epic psychedelic cumbia band on the planet. When they’re firing on all 24 cylinders – the cast of characters varies, but this is a BIG band – they come across as a slinky, brass-spiced mashup of Chicha Libre and Cab Calloway. They’re connoisseurs of noir, and they do a whole bunch of other styles as well: serpentine mambos, haunting boleros, and latin soul among them. Their latest album ¡Vamos A Guarachar! is streaming at Spotify (with a couple of tracks up at Bandcamp). They’re opening what will be a wildly attended twinbill at Prospect Park Bandshell on June 29 at 7:30 PM; populiat Mexican-American songstress Lila Downs headlines at around 9. You’d better get there early.

The album opens with, Cumbia Volcadora, which perfectly capsulizes why this band is so popular. Mendoza’s creepy roller-rink organ flickers and bends and Marco Rosano’s blazing multitracked horn section punches in over Sean Rogers’ fat chicha bassline, Salvador Duran’s irrepressible vocals out in front. Mendoza plays pretty much everything else.

Then the band immediately filps the script with Redoble, an uneasily scampering mashup of Morricone spaghetti western and Ventures spacerock, the band’s not-so-secret weapon, steel guitarist Joe Novelli’s keening lines floating uneasily as the song rises to fever pitch.

Awash in an ocean of strings, Misterio majestically validates its title, Mendoza’s Lynchian guitar glimmering behind Duran’s angst-fueled baritone and the Calexics rhythm section: bassist John Convertino and drummer Joey Burns. Wryly spacy 80s organ contrasts with burning guitars and brass in Mapache, a bouncy chicha tune with a tongue-in-cheek Ventures reference. Duran’s wounded vocals add extra longing to the angst throughout Cumbia Amor De Lejos over a web of accordion, funereal strings and ominous tremolo guitar.

The band switches back and forth between a frantic pulse and lingering noir in Mambo A La Rosano, which wouldn’t be out of place in the Gato Loco songbook. By contrast, the big audience hit Caramelos keeps the red-neon intensity going at full gas; Mendoza sets up a tantalizingly brief guitar solo with a more enigmatic one on organ.Then they follow the clip-clip folk-rock miniature No Volvere (Not Going Back) with the album’s centerpiece, Contra La Marea (Against the Tide), a briskly strutting noir showstopper, Rosano’s brooding baritone sax and clarinet alongside Mendoza’s reverberating guitar layers.

Mutedly twinkling vibraphone – most likely Convertino – infuses the enigmatically lilting Igual Que Ayer (Same as Yesterday). Mendoza’s insistent wah-wah guitar takes centerstage in the trippy, moody Nada Te Debo (I Don’t Owe You Anything) Rogers sings the album’s final cut, the psychedelic latin soul anthem Shadows of the Mind. Best darkly glimmering party album of the year – and maybe the only one. Hopefully they’ll get the chance to stretch some of these out and get really psychedelic at the Brooklyn show.

The World’s Most Popular Surf Band Cover a New Wave Cult Hero

Los Straitjackets are hardly known as a cover band  Sure, every surf group does a version of Duke Ellington’s Caravan, just like the Ventures. But what’s made Los Straitjackets one of the best-loved (and by now, best-covered) surf bands ever is their originals. That’s why their new album What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Los Straitjackets – streaming at Spotify –  is such a radical departure for them. Still, in keeping with the band’s signature originality, they chose an odd source: the Nick Lowe catalog. Then they redo the songs like probably no one ever imagined.

Lowe is well-loved by an aging new wave era crowd (a New Yorker might cynically say that he’s a WFMU guy). But a lot of people, especially those who haven’t seen him live, might not realize what a good guitarist the self-described Jesus of Cool is. So his first-wave retro rock is a lot better suited to a fast 2/4 beat, and twang and clang and lots of reverb than might first seem apparent. The band are making a quick New York stop tomorrow night, June 25 at 9 PM at City Winery; cover is $30 for standing room. Be aware that there is a headlining act and that he is not worth seeing – unless you go for dorky guys who steal their fashion sense from early Elvis Costello, but forget to rip off Costello’s catchy tunes and edgy lyrics.

Another cool thing about the new album is that it isn’t all just the popular or the uptempo stuff: these guys really went through Lowe’s repertoire to find material that makes the most waves, whether whitecaps or gentle ripples across the pond. The A-side opens with Shake and Pop, bassist Pete Curry anchoring it with a little grit in his tone over Chris Sprague’s drums. Is that Eddie Angel or Danny Amis taking that nasty tremolo-picked solo? Everybody’s wearing masks, so it’s impossible to tell.

By contrast, they give All Men Are Liars a cheery, conversational early 60s Joe Meek bounce. Then they turn a relatively more recent tune, Lately I’ve Let Things Slide into resonant midtempo Ventures with a little Tex-Mex and Hank Williams thrown in. After that, a balmy take of You Inspire Me throws a fond nod back to Theme From a Summer Place

Rollers Show – Lowe’s snarky swipe at wildly popular 70s British teenybopper rock band the Bay City Rollers – gets an aptly swaying sock-hop beat and a deviously cruel quote or two from other songs. The first side closes with (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding, which a million bands have covered, none of them remotely as well as Costello did. Los Straitjackets opt for reinventing it as a loping Lee Hazlewood desert-rock theme.

The B-side begins with I Read a Lot, slow and shadowy, drums drenched in reverb for extra noir, along with some wry siren effects. Half a Boy and Half a Man is the first number that isn’t really surf: it’s pretty close to the British pub rock that Lowe got his start in. Likewise, Checkout Time is a mashup of early Shadows skiffle and the Mexican side of the Ventures: the tongue-in-cheek medley of riffs from classic surf tracks at the end is LOL funny.

The Lowe tune that turns out to make the best surf song of all of these is I Live on a Battlefield, yet even with all the wry historical references – DAMN, these guys know their surf – they don’t add a chord change in the verse that would totally Venturize it.

Sprague’s Wipeout drums add a droll touch to the cover of Raging Eyes. The band saves the most obvious stuff for last, Cruel to Be Kind recast as a melancholy, swaying ballad and Heart of the City as a mashup of Buck Owens and the Modern Lovers (you know the song – the Sex Pistols covered it). If you always wanted to be in a surf band, get this album and learn it cover to cover. Someday somebody will pay you good money to play this stuff.

A Tantalizingly Dynamic Taste of One of Europe’s Most Enticing Jazz Festivals

The booking agent at New York’s most popular jazz club spent ten days at the Jazztopad Festival in Poland last year. After it was over, he confided to the organizer that he was determined to bring some Polish jazz to New York. Consider: there are a hundred jazz festivals in Poland every year, and this one’s not in one of the major cities, but in the southwest corner of the country. Yet in the course of its fifteen year history, the festival has become a magnet for top-tier talent, and also commissions a lot of adventurous new works – Charles Lloyd will premiere a new orchestral suite there this year.

And for the second year in a row, the Jazztopad Festival has booked a series of shows, including many American premieres, around New York. Last night’s late show at Jazz at Lincoln Center featured tantalizingly brief sets from two intriguing and individualistic Polish groups, improvisational piano trio STRYJO along with the Wójciński/Szmańda Quartet.

Playfully and methodically, STRYJO constructed a series of songs without words, part Sam Rivers and part Angelo Badalamenti, maybe. Pianist Nikola Kołodziejczyk, who is very much the leader of the trio, would introduce a minimalistic, cell-like phrase or rhythm, then bassist Maciej Szczyciński and drummer Michał Bryndal would enter the picture. Were they going to take the cheery, practically trip-hop groove they opened with to its bouncy, bright conclusion? NOOOOO. With just the flicker of a couple of subtle tonal shifts, Kołodziejczyk shifted it deeper and deeper into the shadows, matched by Bryndal’s muted palms-on-the-toms shuffle and Szczyciński’s slinky, terse pulse. Then Kołodziejczyk’s chords and ripples grew more expansive, a Twin Peaks title theme in Chopin’s native tongue.

The night’s most riveting moment was trumpeter Maurycy Wójciński’s long, plaintive, hauntingly allusive solo during the dynamically shapeshifting second number by the Wójciński/Szmańda Quartet. Pianist Szymon Wójciński also favored several cell-like themes, building out of them to stark rumbles, flurries of hardbop and neoromatic glimmer in tandem with the muscular drive of bassist Ksawery Wójciński and drummer Krzysztof Szmańda. The robust four-string guy showcased a Henry Grimes-like, glissandoing-and-pirouetting intensity during a long solo of his own later in the set – it would have been a treat to have heard him on a bass with a built-in mic rather than having to lean in to pick up on how much the floor mic was catching. Their elegant, enigmatic, sometimes austere focus made an apt segue with the opening trio, and speaks well to how the Jazztopad folks program a bill.

The Manhattan edition of this year’s Jazztopad Festival continues tonight, June 23 at 7:30 PM at Joe’s Pub with pianist Marcin Masecki and drummer Jerzy Rogiewicz playing stride and ragtime. Then tomorrow night, June 24 at 8 PM the Wójciński/Szmańda Quartet make another appearance, at the Jazz Gallery with cellist Erik Friedlander. The festival concludes at National Sawdust on June 25 at 4 PM with first-class improvisational string ensemble the Lutosławski Quartet joined by the darkly conversational duo of violinist Mark Feldman and pianist Sylvie Courvoisier.

Trouble Kaze Celebrate Deviously Fun Improvisation Tomorrow Night in Gowanus

Japanese-French quintet Trouble Kaze’s new album June is the antithesis of what you’d probably expect from a two-drummer ensemble (i.e. the careening new Brandon Seabrook record). It’s also probably not what most people would think a band with two pianos would sound like. It’s a medieval Shinto temple gone down the rabbit hole, a Calder mobile on steroids, and a very deviously playful excuse for some of the world’s great improvisers to have fun making their instruments sound like something other than what they are. That, or simply coaxing (or scraping, banging, pounding or blowing) sounds out of them that under usual circumstance they either aren’t supposed to produce, or aren’t exactly known to make.

It’s downright impossible to figure out who’s playing what throughout this five-part, completely improvised suite recorded just over a year ago, which explains the album title. Sounds roughly comparable to temple bells mingle with the occasional portentously muted piano chord way down under the lid, produced by either Satoko Fujii or Sophie Agnel. A disgruntled snort from a trumpet (Natsuki Tamura? Christian Pruvost?) interrupts squirrelly textures from somebody (probably Tamura, the shogun of extended technique trumpet) but also maybe either drummer Peter Orins or Didier Lasserre.

A motorik rhythm develops as the group coalesces a little – is that a woodblock? A trumpet valve? White noise and waterfalling percussion build a frantic, horrified web (that has GOT to be Tamura screaming through his horn…or is it Pruvost blowing into his through a plastic tube?). Who’s spinning the vacuum cleaner tubing through the air? Maybe nobody, but that’s what it sounds like in a few places.

What does it sound like otherwise? Looping train-track rhythms, dopplers, whistling sepulchral figures, frantically bustling trumpets, a church belltower gone berserk. a very stealthy helicopter, a kitten stuck in the back of David Gilmour’s amp, and Federico Mompou cleaning out his attic are all part of the sonic picture. The train goes through the tunnel…all of a sudden it’s out of the tunnel! Next stop is 4th Ave., which is where you get off the F or the R to go to I-Beam, where the band are playing the album release show tomorrow night, June 23 at 8:30 PM. Cover is $15.

The album – bits and pieces of which are up at Soundcloud and youtube –  is not for everybody, and Fujii’s signature lyricism is largely (and surprisingly) absent from this defiant celebration of joyful noise. For her symphonic take on improvisation, you need to hear her rapturously intricate, conversational Duet album with bassist Joe Fonda.