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CD
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TROST 180CD
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Sparrow Nights is the first studio album from the furious duo of pedal steel player Heather Leigh and saxophone legend Peter Brötzmann. Their collaboration has quickly gained a well-earned reputation for their cutting-edge music and frenetic but sensuous playing. Recorded and mastered in Vienna by Martin Siewert. Features artwork by Brötzmann; LP version comes in a heavy, '60s style tip-on cover.
"There is complexity in simplicity, and Sparrow Nights is Brötzmann and Leigh's most enduring record to date. A series of emotionally rich and boldly elucidated tonal and timbral exchanges played like compositions on pedal steel and reeds, the tracks (released as a six-track LP and ten- track CD) are cold-forged minimalist blues motifs dragged from instrumental laments. After three years playing together Brötzmann and Leigh's connection and understanding is by now both cerebral and deeply invested in the physical and sensory possibilities of their combined sound, while retaining a melancholic distance. Within this duo there is fluidity - neither is the anchor - and these recordings sound with as much variety as the sea. At times Sparrow Nights carries the clarity and poeticism of still water and open horizon ("This Word Love"), and at others it contains the elemental and ferocious roar of white water breakers on black rocks ("This Time Around"). On their previous three live albums (Ears Are Filled With Wonder (TROST 147LP, 2016), Sex Tape (TROST 163CD, 2017), and Crowmoon (2018)), the duo have developed an intimate and intense language that manifests here as a focus on power and control, where figures blasted of unnecessary decoration are drawn from the shadows and smoke of collapse. The studio setting also allows Brötzmann to bring a broader range of reeds than in live scenarios: where previously he has played primarily tenor, clarinet and tarogato with Leigh, here he delivers the heat of alto and the low pressure of bass saxophone and clarinet. Brötzmann's duo with Leigh continues to trace a fresh new arc in his trajectory, and this release also falls at a time when Leigh releases Throne (EMEGO 257CD/LP), her most song-based record to date. Here as a studio duo they play a new-old blues for times of complexity, noise and chaos, continuing to redefine and re-sound possibilities for improvised music."--JLA.
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LP
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TROST 180LP
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[sold out, no scheduled repress] LP version; Comes in a heavy, '60s style tip-on cover. Sparrow Nights is the first studio album from the furious duo of pedal steel player Heather Leigh and saxophone legend Peter Brötzmann. Their collaboration has quickly gained a well-earned reputation for their cutting-edge music and frenetic but sensuous playing. Recorded and mastered in Vienna by Martin Siewert. Features artwork by Brötzmann.
"There is complexity in simplicity, and Sparrow Nights is Brötzmann and Leigh's most enduring record to date. A series of emotionally rich and boldly elucidated tonal and timbral exchanges played like compositions on pedal steel and reeds, the tracks (released as a six-track LP and ten- track CD) are cold-forged minimalist blues motifs dragged from instrumental laments. After three years playing together Brötzmann and Leigh's connection and understanding is by now both cerebral and deeply invested in the physical and sensory possibilities of their combined sound, while retaining a melancholic distance. Within this duo there is fluidity - neither is the anchor - and these recordings sound with as much variety as the sea. At times Sparrow Nights carries the clarity and poeticism of still water and open horizon ("This Word Love"), and at others it contains the elemental and ferocious roar of white water breakers on black rocks ("This Time Around"). On their previous three live albums (Ears Are Filled With Wonder (TROST 147LP, 2016), Sex Tape (TROST 163CD, 2017), and Crowmoon (2018)), the duo have developed an intimate and intense language that manifests here as a focus on power and control, where figures blasted of unnecessary decoration are drawn from the shadows and smoke of collapse. The studio setting also allows Brötzmann to bring a broader range of reeds than in live scenarios: where previously he has played primarily tenor, clarinet and tarogato with Leigh, here he delivers the heat of alto and the low pressure of bass saxophone and clarinet. Brötzmann's duo with Leigh continues to trace a fresh new arc in his trajectory, and this release also falls at a time when Leigh releases Throne (EMEGO 257CD/LP), her most song-based record to date. Here as a studio duo they play a new-old blues for times of complexity, noise and chaos, continuing to redefine and re-sound possibilities for improvised music."--JLA.
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CD
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TROST 163CD
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Recording of Heather Leigh and Peter Brötzmann's great set at Unlimited Festival, Wels, 2016. Personnel: Heather Leigh - pedal steel guitar; Peter Brötzmann - tenor saxophone.
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LP
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TROST 147LP
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"Ears Are Filled With Wonder, the debut release from the duo of pedal steel player Heather Leigh and reedist Peter Brötzmann, blows the old adage about improvised music somehow not being best appreciated via the recordings to beautiful pieces. This is a music that demands re-visiting, that seems to alter, slightly, every time it is played, with new details emerging, new relationships of tone and style, new romance, even. Recorded during a mammoth stint in Kraków, Poland, where Brötzmann and Leigh played as part of big bands, trios, quartets, and duos, this duo performance represents the diamond heart of the sessions, an improvised set that bears little relation to what either of the players has achieved outside of its prodigious gravity. We mentioned romance and really Ears Are Filled With Wonder, a play on a line from the poet Kenneth Patchen, showcases the full reach of Brötzmann's rebel lyricism, his lover man style, now smoky, seductive, late night, now roaring and vibrating with energy. Leigh plays it extremely subtly, sometimes fixing on the most suggestive detail and from there spinning luscious webs of repeat-time bliss that make for some of the most psychedelic and otherworldly settings of strings and horn. Elsewhere the two of them tear the roof off with tactile fuzz and horn ascensions. It's a music of organic depth, of endlessly evocative unfolding, as themes bloom and sigh and disappear and arise and it feels curiously out of time, even as both players push their instruments into futuristic configurations. As such it doesn't sit neatly in either players' extensive catalogs. . . . Ears Are Filled With Wonder is a coming together of two of the most original voices on their respective instruments and the title reflects the joyful uncovering of a whole new way of listening and relating. Indeed, it might well be the first ever freely improvised electric pedal steel and saxophone duet ever put to tape. Either way it is one of the most startlingly beautiful combinations of players and temperaments to orbit the European jazz scene in years. And this is only the beginning. So hold tight." --Moshe Idel, Ronda, Spain, February 2016
Heather Leigh: pedal steel guitar. Peter Brötzmann: tenor saxophone, bass and B-flat clarinet, tárogató. Recorded November 8, 2015, in Kraków, Poland.
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