Kalle Kalima and K-18, Bunuel de Jour

Avant cafe folk thrash? I don't know if that quite covers what I hear on guitarist Kalle Kalima & K-18's album Bunuel de Jour (TUM CDE 038), but it's a start. Kalle has done tributes with this band to other seminal film auteurs--Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch (type Kalle's name in the search box for a review of the latter)--and now he and the band turn to the surrealist icon.

The band thrives from a mixture of Kalle's ever-probing skronkish and pre-skronkish guitar, the quartet-tone avant folkisms of accordionist Veli Kujawa, acid-etched alto saxist Mikko Innanen, the ever-present woody sense of bassist Teppo Hauta-Aho, and Kalle's original compositional stance.

The oil and water contrasts of these musicians make the music vibrate and oscillate like a gestalt rabbit-or-vase foreground-background optically moving drawing. The music is this and that in rapid turns, simultaneously, or within a longer time field.

The ensemble sound and the distinctive personalities of the band members make for both a vivid whole and a caustic series of parts. You can profit just by listening to Kalle's guitar work, but it's meant to be a part of the unusual whole. The avant jazz, rock and cosmopolitan urban folk qualities intermingle in ways that intrigue and keep your attention from flagging.

Hear this one and you'll be challenged and pleasured all at once. Worth your ear-time for sure.

Hugo Carvalhais, Particula

Now that (one hopes) the hurricanes and storms that disconnected me from the internet are a thing of the past, I can begin to catch up with recordings that I do not want to neglect for all the right reasons.

Portuguese bassist-composer Hugo Carvalhais and his album Particula (Clean Feed 253) is one of those. Hugo has been coming into his own for some time now. This album most definitely constitutes an arrival.

It's a quintet of interesting players on display: Hugo on contrabass and electronics, Emile Parisien, soprano, Gabriel Pinto, keys, Dominique Pifarely, violin, and Mario Costa, drums.

The compositions set up beautifully the sort of long-form contemporary avant improvisational excursions that make great use of instrumental colors and soloists' personalities. But they do not do so as more conventional "head" structures usually do. They go a long way in providing the motifs and moods that recur in the ensemble during solos. Hugo sounds great and the rest of the ensemble make worthy sounds as well.

This is innovative, electronically expanded ensemble jazz of a high order. Check it out by all means.