Reviews

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Greek pianist Pandelis Karayorgis moved to Boston in 1985, and he's been there ever since.

Not long after, Dave Rempis left the area to begin the journey that has established him as one of Chicago's foremost saxophonists, band-leaders and concert organizers. They've sustained a musical association for a quarter century, with each man visiting the other's town to play in a series of bands and make a handful of records.

When Karayorgis resumed visiting Chicago after a COVID-induced layoff of several years, Rempis arranged for the pianist to join him in playing with improvisers of a younger generation: bassist Jakob Heinemann and drummer Bill Harris. Truss documents the quartet's first encounter, and it's a fascinating study in the development of understanding and rapport.

The younger musicians share with Rempis an attraction to timbral explorations and a readiness to treat interrupted rhythms as opportunities. The pianist initially parallels the Chicagoans' interactions with a dense layer of sound, but as the action progresses, his play-ing opens up and complements them. This adjustment reveals the essence of Karayorgis and Rempis partnership. Even in a completely improvised setting, they interact like co-com-posers, each offering the other ideas for further elaboration. Heinemann takes a complementary stance, putting power behind Rempis' wind-ing forays and space into Karayorgis' harmonies. Harris keeps the door open to change by either leaving out parts of a rhythm or sustain-ing two at once.

It's fascinating to hear these musicians cohere into a unit; here's hoping that they keep the process going.

Bill Meyer, Downbeat, June 2024

Truss documents a new American quartet in its first performances – Chicagoan sax hero Dave Rempis, who plays on the alto, tenor and baritone saxes, and the younger rhythm section of double bass player Jakob Heinemann and drummer Bill Harris, plus Bostonian pianist and Rempis’ long-time collaborator, pianist Pandelis Karayorgis, in one of his first visits back to Chicago since the pandemic. The quartet was recorded at Elastic Arts in Chicago in June 2023.

Rempis claims that the way this new quartet made Truss speaks volumes about the high quality of the music played together on its first meeting. Rempis and Karayorgis share a lot of history as Rempis is a native Bostonian, Karayorgis was born in Greece and Rempis’ father is Greek, and both played in the longstanding Boston-based quartet Construction Party and in the Karayorgis Quintet. Rempis describes Heinemann and Harris as the best improvisers and instrumentalists of their generation on the Chicago scene.

The interplay of this quartet feels organic from the first downbeat of the first, 43-minute «Stone Fruit», stressing great sensitivity to space, tempo and group dynamics as if the quartet has been playing together for years. The quartet patiently sketches a nuanced and complex texture that develops in its own course, adding more and more layers of dramatic and energetic interplay. This piece allows Rempis and Karayorgis to offer contrasting and unpredictable readings of it, always challenging each other, and at the same time, Heinemann and Harris keep both of them on their toes with their powerful, free pulses. The second, 10-minute «Burning Bush» explores the lyrical sides of this promising quartet, introduced beautifully by Rempis and Heinemann, before Karayorgis and Harris joined. This auspicious debut performance and album begs for many more by this fine quartet.

Eyal Hareuveni, salt peanuts, March 29, 2024

Viable Traditions: Roots Revisioned
“Is this the greatest photo in jazz history?” asked the New York Times on March 8, 2019, the image, one captured by Bob Parent at New York’s Open Door in 1953, of a standard jazz quartet of the time, idealized and memorialized for the band’s constituents: Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus and Roy Haynes, playing – emblematically and respectively -- alto saxophone, piano, bass and drums.

We’re now separated from that band by just about double the years that separate it from the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s “Tiger Rag” and “Livery Stable Blues”, yet little from 1917 (or far more authentic music waiting to be recorded) persisted in the music of Parker, Monk, et al. One is nascent art or novelty, the other high art, specifically evolved. Turning to the subjects in hand, Wood Blues by أحمد [Ahmed], the quartet of saxophonist Seymour Wright, pianist Pat Thomas, bassist Joel Grip and drummer Antonin Gerbal, and Truss by saxophonist Dave Rempis, pianist Pandelis Karayorgis, bassist Jakob Heinemann and drummer Bill Harris, we encounter music that is at once at certain cutting edges and at the same time deeply traditioned in both bop and blues. Both bands are in it for the long haul and I don’t just mean their commitment: Wood Blues is a single track running close to an hour, Truss has a 43-minute “Stone Fruit” and a 10-minute “Burning Bush” a brief envoi. Each has nearly identical instrumentation to that estimable photograph. أحمد [Ahmed]’s Seymour Wright plays alto saxophone, as did Parker; Rempis switches it up between saxophones, but that’s the sole difference on that front. Both are “free” bands, in a sense, but each also acknowledges certain degrees of harmonic agreement and strong suggestions of cadence, أحمد [Ahmed] is literally referencing a previous composition, Karayorgis’ approach acknowledges Monk and a broad tradition, as does Pat Thomas.

Everyone is anchored deep in the blues, as transfigured in bop and hard bop. This is, in a sense, the ethos of “free jazz”, a distinction to be made between that term and an umbrella notion of “improvised music”. Each has a rhythm section that functions to a degree as architecture, though that of Truss isn’t strict, rather a continuous sonic dialogue among partners. One of Pandelis Karayorgis’ recent recordings was The Hasaan, Hope & Monk Project , an homage to that special stream of modern jazz piano, while Pat Thomas has recorded masterful tributes to Duke Ellington and Paul Bley. Monk compositions have recently appeared in أحمد [Ahmed] performances.

[Ahmed - Wood Blues review]

Rempis/ Karayorgis/ Heinemann/ Harris – Truss (Aerophonic/ Driff 2024)
This Chicago studio recording is a spontaneous collaboration with Boston-based pianist Pandelis Karayorgis joining three Chicagoans, saxophonist Dave Rempis and the emerging team of bassist Jakob Heinemann and drummer Bill Harris. There’s significant musical history between Rempis and Karayorgis: the pianist led a Chicago quintet on two CDs about a decade ago that included Rempis and they share Boston origins. More significantly, they’re two of America’s most deeply rooted free improvisers, consistently making music that’s thoughtful and spontaneous, passionate and organized.

The CD consists of two group improvisations, each in constant motion. “Stone Fruit” is a sequence of episodes, each evolving from the preceding, the dialogue shifting constantly. It begins, remarkably, in a miasma of voices that are both perfectly ambient and almost perfectly unidentifiable – bowed bass, saxophones, percussion – until Karayorgis’s piano rises quietly, slowly out of the compound drone. It is the immediate sense that the music is unhurried that initially defines it. Rempis’s baritone is conjoined to Heinemann’s light pizzicato flurries and Harris’s welling percussion, but the music’s miracle is hard to describe, the way in which the light and tentative can suddenly grow, somehow organically, into compound squall, swirling lower register saxophone with meaningful bleats, rapidly expanding percussive flurries … then sudden unaccompanied Bartok-dense unaccompanied piano, soon joined by storms of arco bass and metallic percussion knitwork.

It’s always free jazz, but it removes any sense that the form might carry any limitations. Around the fifteen-minute mark, Rempis launches an alto performance that might epitomize free jazz, constructed on the liberated expansions of Charlie Parker initially practiced by Ornette Coleman, Jimmy Lyons and Marshall Allen. An extended passage by the younger “rhythm section” has Heinemann suggesting the radical and fleet abstraction of Scott La Faro’s appearances with Ornette Coleman, while Harris constructs fascinating patterns with resonant clicks. In an extended foray on baritone, Rempis further demonstrates a poetic gift for complexities of mood, intent and control, including the strange combination of hard-edged, even harsh timbres with phrases that communicate great complexity, including warmth and delicacy.

Just ten-minutes long, “Burning Bush” begins with Rempis’s foregrounded tenor initially accompanied by Heinemann alone. It’s almost a cadenza in free time, from blasts and blues reverie to an occasional run, a series of suggestions of the tough tenor tradition, with perhaps an emphasis on Sonny Rollins; eventually Harris joins in, Karayorgis arriving shortly thereafter. The music never settles into a strong form, but is rather a dialogue of moving parts, Rempis and Karayorgis moving through a series of individual viewpoints, sometimes holding for only a couple of seconds, covering a tremendous amount of territory in relatively little time.

Stuart Broomer, Saturday, August 03, 2024, (link)