Rabble Without A Cause, April 3: The Next Best/Closest Thing to Silence... from 1971 to 2024
ECM Reissues and recent releases from Ill Considered, Willy Rodriguez and Ariel Kalma, Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer
On this week’s show, I’m featuring some new reissues of ECM classics — Azimuth and the Jan Garbarek Quartet — as well as new 2024 releases from Ill Considered, Willy Rodriguez, and Ariel Kalma, Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer.
ECM once used the catchphrase “The Next Best Sound to Silence” to promote its music. I recently learned that they stole this phrase from the Canadian Jazz magazine Coda who used it to describe the early ECM releases. Ariel Kalma once described his music as “the closest thing to silence” and that is the title of his latest release with Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer.
The show will start with a trumpet voluntary of sorts: Kenny Wheeler playing a short track entitled “Greek Triangle”. This is from the reissue of the first Azimuth self-titled album. We will then hear two tracks from the Jan Garbarek Quartet’s first ECM recording, released in 1971: Afric Pepperbird.
We will then fast forward to 2024 and the new release from Ill Considered, Perspective.
Ill Considered is based in the United Kingdom. They will be playing at the Montreal International Jazz Festival on June 27. Here they are playing “Jellyfish” live:
On this show, we will also hear the new release from Willy Rodriguez, Seeing Sounds.
Willy Rodriguez has played drums and percussion for over twenty years, but this is his first album as a leader. He has played with the Chilean singer Mon Laferte and has also played with the progressive rock band, The Mars Volta. On this album he is exploring the avant garde and two of the tracks feature Dave Liebman on soprano saxophone. I featured Dave Liebman on the show of February 7.
The show will end with two tracks from the album “The Closest Thing to Silence” by Ariel Kalma, Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer. Ariel Kalma, born in France and now based in Australia, participated in a BBC 3 show, Late Junction, in August 2022 that pairs artists who have not previously worked together to create new music cooperatively. He chose Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer. This album grew out of that collaboration. They describe their collective approach as “born in improvisation and realized via collage-based editing”. Here’s a track from the album that there wasn’t time to include in the show:
The album title ("The Closest Thing to Silence") is a quote from Kalma in a 2014 documentary about his music, where he said: “Music is the closest thing to silence”, an echo of the ECM motto, coined over 50-years ago.
You can listen to the April 3 episode live on 93.1 FM or online at 11 p.m. (EST), or on demand shortly after broadcast.
Thanks for listening!