Maria Merlino / Thollem McDonas – A Letter to Karl
A Letter to Karl is the sophomore album by Italian, Sicily-based sax player Maria Merlino, featuring American prolific and nomadic pianist, composer, and improviser, Thollem McDonas, following Rivelarsi (Setola di Maiale, 2024). Both albums were recorded in Palermo, but A Letter to Karl was recorded live at the Sala Perriera Cantieri Culturali at Zisa, for Curva Minore, as part of the Primavera Contemporanea festival.
The album is a thoughtful and heartfelt tribute to German-American pianist, vibraphonist, conductor, composer, and educator Karl Berger (1935-2023), a key figure in contemporary improvised music and a pioneer of a universal vision of sound. Berger was one of the main performers in Don Cherry’s iconic Symphony For Improvisers (Blue Note, 1967). He was the successor to John Cage at the New School for Social Research, co-founder of the Creative Music Foundation with Ornette Coleman, and founder of the Creative Music Studio at Woodstock with his wife, Ingrid Berger.
A Letter to Karl follows Berger’s genre-defying, free music vision and his transformative artistic journey, blending ideas from classical music, jazz, free improvisation, and experimental music, and balancing discipline and rigor with spontaneous improvisation. Merlino conceived it as expressing Berger’s life through a series of spontaneously created music. The album relies on the deeply intimate, conversational, free improvised dynamics of Merlino, who is well-versed in classical music, jazz, and contemporary improvisation, and McDonnas, with his extensive knowledge of the repertoire of European composers as well as his diverse and versatile musical experiments. Both Merlino and McDonnas have unique, personal voices, but they did not seek to refer to Berger’s music as a nostalgic celebration (but somehow it happened that the album was released on Merlino’s birthday). They emphasize how Berger’s artistic thought continues to live on today and keeps transforming itself through new, unpredictable, irreverent, and wise sonic visions, just like the ones articulated throughout A Letter to Karl.
The album tells Berger’s life story in nine pieces, beginning with “Identity”, exploring the relationship between classical training and jazz spirit; visiting Berger’s birthplace in Heidelberg in “30-03-1935”; paying homage to his lifelong companion and collaborator, Ingrid Sertso; and adding homage to the birth of the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock in “1971 (CMS)”; “World Jazz” reflect Berger’s central ideas that music should be an open and inclusive space, ree from labels and rigid definitions, where different cultures and languages coexist naturally; the bluesy and free improvised “New Era” symbolizes the passage between past and future; “to Karl” is a openly emotional improvisation that mourns Berger; “Independence” represents the conscious choice for authenticity and exploration outside of conventional boundaries; and the last piece, “Sleep Well”, is a delicate yet quite subversive elegy that transforms the memory of Karl Berger into a luminous and suspended presence, with McDonnas’ wordless vocals, far from nostalgia and close instead to gratitude.
Here a teaser of Rivelarsi, Curva Minore, PrimaVera Contemporanea 2025
Lingyun Chen – Phase Fragments
Lingyun Chen is a young Chinese contemporary violinist, fearless improviser, and experimental composer, who is involved in his country’s experimental and free music scene.
Phase Fragments is Lingyun Chen’s debut solo violin (including prepared violin) album, capturing his recent sonic explorations and experiences, from free improvisation, usage of electronics, and expanding the violin’s sonic palette with extended bowing techniques and preparations (including the insertion of metal plates to produce overtones), to pieces corresponding with contemporary music, spectral music, and classical music. Lingyun Chen recorded himself at Lihe Studio in Yangzhou and mixed and mastered the album.
Lingyun Chen is equipped with commanding technique and cleverly uses the studio acoustics on the opening “Notation”, often sounding like employing the resonating space as a sonic partner. He experiments with the most dissonant, noisy range of the violin on the following “Monologue”, transforming his instrument into a disturbing, industrial sound generator that twists elements of Far-Eastern folk music and produces glitch-like, nervous tones. “Prayer Song” uses the reverberating studio to intensify its contemplative, reverent spirit. “The Moment of Sublimation” deepens the mysterious, ritualistic atmosphere by mutating the violin sound into a deep space, minimalist, and repetitive texture with subtle, disorienting variations. Lingyun Chen concludes this adventurous sonic journey with “Jizzcato”, plucking the violin strings as if his instrument was an imaginary, exotic string instrument, and evokes fragments of playful, folk-like melodies.
I Paesani Feat. Giancarlo Schiaffini – But It Is The Nature Of Things To Be Seen Only Once
The Italian I Paesani (The Villagers) ensemble likes to host pioneer, innovative European improvisers in its recordings. It hosted German drummer Günter “Baby” Sommer on its debut album Braastabrà (Setola Di Maiale, 2023), and French tuba and serpent player Michel Godard on its sophomore album We Remember Gianni (Setola Di Maiale, 2024, dedicated to the memory of pianist Gianni Lenoci.
I Paesani’s third album hosts Italian trombonist (and tubaist) Giancarlo Schiaffini (b.1942), known as a student of composers Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Ligeti, and Vinko Globokar, a founder of the contemporary chamber ensemble Nuove Forme Sonore, a member of the Italian Instabile Orchestra, and an educator. The album’s title, But It Is The Nature Of Things To Be Seen Only Once, is a quote from the poem “Syringa” by American poet John Ashbery (1927-2017). The album was recorded at I Paesani’s home base, Niki Intini’s Vinyl Sound Studio in Bari, in December 2027.
The six, untitled, free improvised pieces, sound at first as if Giancarlo Schiaffini attempts to discipline the chaotic, klaidescopic, and restless dynamics of I Paesani sextet – vocalist Loredana Savino, flutist Donato Console, sax players Vittorino Curci (who is also a poet) and Gianni Console, mandolinist Valerio Fusillo, guitarist Adolfo La Volpe, double bass player Pierpaolo Martino, and drummer Walter Forestiere – into loose, free jazz textures, with moderate success. Soon, it turned out that Schiaffini is drawn into I Paesani’s genre-defying, “instabile”, and completely unpredictable sonic vision, and enriches its sonic palette with his singular, commanding trombone voice, with his inventive array of extended breathing techniques. The music navigates seamlessly in a free-associative manner between openly emotional songs, prog-rock musings, anarchistic and Dadaist improvisations, and timbral adventures, but keeps its elusive, subversive coherence. Schiaffini’s trombone is incorporated organically into I Paesani’s free and adventurous sonic celebration.
NEST (Tim Trevor-Briscoe, Simone Faraci, Francois Laurent, Michael Harding)
NEST is an Italian-British, Bologna-based quartet of four friends coming from four different musical and geographical worlds – reed player Tim Trevor-Briscoe (who is also a music therapist and teaches improvisation at the conservatory of Cesena), pianist and electronics player Simone Faraci, bassist Francois Laurent (playing on electric fretless bass), and drummer Michael Harding. NEST was founded in 2023 and recorded its debut album at Fieno Recording Studio in Spilimberto in May 2024.
NEST claims that its music “is more a sound to be shared than music to listen to”. Its free improvised music is rooted in the raw, ecstatic, and powerful free jazz, but with sparks of fusion and prog-rock, as well as restless timbral explorations. The best pieces are the ones that suggest dramatic, loose, story-like narratives like “Ritual” and the last one, the lyrical and melancholic “Dark”.
Here an excerpt from an improvisational set called Therapy #3
