Taking his Bay Area trio with bassist Jason Hoopes and drummer Jordan Glenn on the "Road", guitarist and improviser Fred Frith first presents the trio itself in a wonderfully diverse extended set at the Week-End Fest in Koln, Germany; then invites trumpeter Susana Santos Silva at Old Cabell Hall in University of Virginia; and then saxophonist Lotte Anker at Altes Kino in Ebersberg, Germany.
Format: 2 CDs Condition: New Released: 2021 Country: Switzerland Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold 3 Panels CD 1 recorded at Week-End Fest, at the Stadthalle, in Koln, Germany, on October 18th, 2019.
CD 2 tracks 1 and 4 recorded at Old Cabell Hall, at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, Virgina, on October 4th, 2019.
CD 2 tracks 2 and 3 recorded at Altes Kino, in Ebersberg, Germany, on October 31st, 2019.
"Fred Frith is a multi-instrumentalist and a shrewd outsider who walks the line between rock and jazz, improvisation and composition, and hereby presents a breathtaking live double CD with his long-time Bay Area trio. CD1 documents an inspiring trio concert by these extraordinarily creative musicians at Stadthalle Koln as part of Weekend Fest 2019. CD2 features the trio with guests Lotte Anker and Susana Santos Silva. Both musicians have a long history with the trio - Lotte Anker has played with the trio in San Francisco and New York, and Susana Santos Silva joined them for performances in Brazil in 2018, while both have joined the trio to tour the U.S. East Coast and Europe in 2019. Lotte Anker and Susana Santos Silva fire up the trio. And in turn the trio's inspiration has an effect on Lotte and Susana which feeds back into the group. This creates a unique collective sound that delivers an infectious live energy."-Intakt
"Over the last couple of decades, Fred Frith has honed his extremely inventive solo electric guitar sets, for which he often lays the guitar flat on his lap and stimulates it with various objects including paint brushes and ball bearings, summoning strange and unexpected sonorities. Here, leading his long-standing Bay Area trio, he demonstrates a similar degree of lateral thinking and restless creativity, put to use navigating wide-ranging free-rock that's positively bursting with ideas. The first disc is an uninterrupted, hour-long live performance by the trio, which wanders unhurriedly from lumbering riffage to diaphanous soundscape and mellow rim-shot groove via loping desert blues.
Along the way, Frith works up a dizzying array of effects, from backward swirls and strangulated feedback, to a strange bagpipe bleat and the sound of an angry mosquito trapped under a glass. The second disc finds the trio augmented on two tracks by Danish saxophonist Lotte Anker - who slides from an assured, earthy tone to keening cry - and on two more pieces by Portuguese trumpeter Susana Santos Silva - who unlocks a trove of extended techniques, from liquid ululations to blustery barrages. It's rare indeed that improvised music is simultaneously as accessible and cerebral as this."-Daniel Spicer, JazzWise