#aerophonic

The notion to regather the Outskirts first came up as Rempis and Rosaly considered options for a March 2025 tour of Europe, and Rempis took the opportunity of its reformation to try something he hadn’t done in many years — compose. His main focus as an improviser and bandleader has been on playing totally improvised material that nonetheless attains cohesion, and the three have done just that quite successfully. So, their tour became an opportunity to do something new. They didn’t exactly work out a set of tunes. The material that Rempis brought in was rudimentary and modular, designed to be introduced at any point in a set by any member of the band. This is the system in effect on disc one of Orbital. The track lengths — 36:57, 20:42, and 17:02 — serve notice that this is, as is common for a Rempis release, a selection of large excerpts from concerts during which the ensemble develops ideas at length. But what happens within these expanses of time is a bit different. While Rempis is renowned for his forcefulness, he has always been willing to work a melody, and they materialize with frequency here. But they are worked over, repeatedly tested and tried, rather than simply worked from, as though the collective imagination here is being applied to what to do with something known rather than how to keep going. At a couple points, the same Don Cherry-ish theme pops up; at the beginning of “Cascades / Hover,” Rempis waxes slow and breathy, mining a vein of ballad knowledge that he usually saves for solo concerts. Music’s flex points are easy to recognize.

Hearing the Outskirts now is an opportunity to reflect on how the other participants have changed. Since moving to Europe, Rosaly has developed projects that bring him closer to his Latinx heritage and spent a lot less time freely improvising. Comparing his playing in Outskirts in 2025 to his playing with the trio in 2009 or the Rempis Percussion Quartet, his playing is more streamlined. He’s more inclined to keep an undisrupted beat going, but also more inclined to judiciously color it. Håker Flaten, on the other hand, has simply gotten better at everything he does, whether that’s adding harmonic poetry to a long Rempis line, nailing down the pulse while Rosaly goes exploring, or sculpt dramatic transformation from a big chunk of raw, splintered sound.

The second disc, on the other hand, is both something new and something old. Recorded early in the tour, it captures a night when the band ditched the book and just played. The instigation for this change of tack is the presence of a fourth musician, pianist Marta Warelis, who has worked extensively with both Håker Flaten and Rosaly, but had never shared a stage with Rempis before. On the first piece, which lasts over 41 minutes, the music starts out full-on. While Warelis is quite adept at contributing fragmentary phrases that leave space from everyone else, the music is still more dense. It also changes differently, often shifting when someone stops for a moment instead of when someone advances an idea. The second track, which is still quite generous at 28:14, feels like an ecosystem of coexisting, moving parts. At one point prepared piano and hand percussion bristle pulse-free, pitted by sound-chunks of unaltered piano while Håker Flaten scurries quietly through the action and Rempis hovers above it, winding and unwinding phrases.

One might ask, which system is better? Both yield excellent results that merit documentation. That, and the chance to hear the group with and without Warelis, justify the album’s generous size. Looking beyond methodology, Orbital is a case study in how artists can bring their individual changes into a collective dynamic.

Besides his dogged work as a musician and label proprietor, Rempis is an indefatigable organizer. He’s had a strong hand in the production end of the Hyde Park Jazz Festival and Pitchfork before that, and for 21 years he ran a weekly concert series presenting improvised music for the Elastic Arts Foundation. The latter affiliation came to an end the night that this music was played, when Rempis booked himself to play the final concert of his tenure with Elastic Arts. It fell on the same weekend as the Chicago Jazz Festival, which has often been an occasion when he would choose to play with one of his more enduring ensembles in some smaller venue after the main festival closes for the night. But this time he picked a new combo, albeit one with deep roots. Rempis, Adasiewicz, and Abrams are part of a cohort that came onto Chicago’s jazz scene in the 1990s, and they’ve been appearing on records together in varying combinations for nearly two decades. Damon and Rempis have been frequent collaborators since 2017, when their trio Kuzu (with Tashi Dorji) was first born on Elastic’s stage.

This web of associations is key to the character of the music on Propulsion. Everyone here understands what Rempis is after, and knows how to make it happen. The essence of his aesthetic is a convergence of the micro and macro. He’s committed to total improvisation. The music is made in the moment that is played, and the selection of personnel is his chief compositional decision. But that’s still very much a compositional act, since Rempis wants his improvisations to develop cohesive forms shaped by the imagination of every contributor. Even an unaccompanied passage, such as the incandescent, circular breathing-fueled four-minute line drawn by Rempis’ alto that opens “Egression,” is simply part of a larger, collectively conceived work. While his keening instrumental voice pushes forward, a calmer vibraphone melody wreathes it, and a seething maelstrom of bowed bass and Sisyphean drumming first fuels the progress and then resolves it as the music gently lands night quite fourteen minutes later.

Music like this doesn’t work unless all parties involved are tuned into each other from moment to moment. But it also requires musicians with sufficient recall where the music has recently been to make contributions that make sense as part of a larger developmental arc. While nothing quite matches the experience of being present when such music is being willed into existence, Propulsion comes close enough to deliver the feeling as well of the sound of committed co-creation.

Two pieces are on the first CD. “Everything Happens to You” is a half-hour long piece that presents an interesting reversal. It begins with trills and shrieks, out of which, after considerable free improv, a tune emerges. This setup is the opposite of traditional jazz performances, where the tune begins the proceedings to be followed by solos. The drummers create a welter of polyrhythms, rather than interlocking, complementing and responding to each other. Listening again, one can find scraps of the melody that eventually appears: Crafty construction and passionate execution.

Trumpeter Jean-Luc Cappozzo guests on “The Exuberant Aubergine,” playing high, breathy, glissandos while Rempis once again plays fleet trills. It is a slow tempo piece that is also a slow burner. The percussionists, for the most part, keep their powder and the dynamic level low. Cappozzo unfurls a wide-ranging solo and Rempis responds with bent notes and high glissandos of his own. Håker Flaten contextualizes the harmony with scalar passages and chromatic passagework. Cappozzo and Rempis trade riffs, sometimes imitating one another and at others doing their own thing. Duet becomes a trio with bass notes double-timing, moving through all the registers of the instrument. Solos are exchanged in the next section, with the percussionists pressing the action with muscular playing. Midway through, the surface calms, bass notes repeated instead of the previous scalar movement, misterioso melodies from trumpet and saxophone, and a general slowing down. Pops, clicks and slurps from the winds are responded to by accentuations in the percussion. A gradual accelerando and the return of Rempis’ trills signal a return to the demeanor of the opening volleys. The intensity ratchets up, with the drummers becoming more prominent than the winds, despite their altissimo held notes. Once again, riffs are traded, with a call and response between Rempis and Cappozzo responded to by intense playing from the rhythm section. The conclusion sees the drums move back to a simmer, the bass playing repeated notes against a decrescendo by the winds. Exuberant indeed.

CD 2 chronicles the second set. “Spooky Action” begins with a drum duet that introduces a syncopated rhythmic pattern. Rempis is buoyed by the drumming to soaring solos. Håker Flaten adds yet another layer of metric ambiguity. The rhythm section maintains its energetic performance, Rempis exploring and melding various melodic cells of material, creating flurries of ostinatos. Once again, a soulful melody is saved for late in the piece. At the last, the drums drop out, the bass plays repeated pitches, and Rempis builds the repeating patterns into a caterwauling climax, with the percussionists only then edging back in. Rempis concludes with a bluesy cadenza, punctuated by aphoristic gestures from the other players.

“Little Fascists” begins with Cagean percussion improv. Rempis enters similarly, with disjunct riffs and rasping, sustained pitches. He then builds overtones with perfectly tuned harmonics. Håker Flaten contributes a long high register arco trill, adding to the sense of experimentation. Rempis adds keening wails at the end of the piece. While the free jazz blowing on other tunes is exciting, “Little Fascists” has a distinctive sound world that is fascinating.

The final tune, “Fat Lip” opens with a bass solo in which harmonics are juxtaposed against a pizzicato solo that ranges the whole instrument. Håker Flaten has been a keen collaborator throughout the concert, and his solo brings this style to the fore. Rempis joins him with an undulating melody that begins brawny and slow and proceeds to mercurial runs. The drummers alternate between pulsation and freely constructed fills. Rempis returns to his mid-register melody, embellished with quick scales. The saxophonist savors an intervallic sequence, tweaking it here and there with half step variations. His solo quickens and takes up a stentorian tone. The rest of the group recognizes his intentions, pressing forward and creating a sweltering density. With raucous howls and undulating lines, Rempis fragments “Fat Lip’s” melodic contours. He eventually settles on two short riffs, that he repeats as the drummers add still more fills and Håker Flaten plays a modal ostinato. The conclusion is a decrescendo with a sizzle of cymbal at the end.

One hopes that more of the France tour might be committed to disc. This is Aerophonic’s tenth anniversary, and there are few better ways to celebrate than more of Rempis’s Percussion Quartet.

Feldman ended a decades-long sojourn in New York during the pandemic to move back to Chicago, the city of his birth. Naming a few of the strong connections he left behind — John Zorn, Sylvie Courvoisier, Michael Brecker — gives only a partial accounting of the breadth of his experience as an improviser and sideman in both creative and commercial contexts. With that sort of a cv, he did not come to this encounter as a complete unknown quantity. Additionally, he and Daisy have already made one duo recording. But he brought the qualities of being new to the duo, as well as having a strong musical personality of his own, when he began playing with them in 2022. This combination made him an ideal agent of challenge for Daisy and Rempis. 

The CD is split into two parts, both taken their third concert together, which took place in October, 2022. The location, Elastic Arts, is home turf for Rempis and Daisy, but from the first seconds, Feldman is an equal partner in setting the tone. He and Rempis twist long, microtonal ribbons of sound around each other’s lines while Daisy contributes spare, subdued accents. The drummer and saxophonist are typically quite good at winding each other up, but Feldman seems to steer them towards a more restrained, quizzical mode of interaction. They’re no less agile or engaged than in other contexts, but more light and space gets into the music. It delivers a different charge, but it’s sufficiently electrifying to bring new life and fresh ideas to a venerable partnership. 

But nothing lasts, and sometimes a change for the better brings with it some loss. In 2016 Rosaly fell in love and moved to Amsterdam, and while that did not bring about the Quartet’s demise, it became a primarily European phenomenon and has been on ice for some time. Fortunately, that cool down has not necessitated the termination of the Rempis-Rosaly partnership. It’s easier to get one guy across an ocean than a band, so this duo, which first split off from the RPQ in 2009, has made one previous recording and toured repeatedly in both Europe and the USA.  

Codes / Myths was recorded in concert when Rosaly last visited Chicago in January 2018. The double album reproduces two sets, over which the two men revisited anew the various possibilities present when one guy brings three saxophones (alto, tenor, baritone) and the other sits down at a drum kit and drops a few extra items on top of it. Both musicians have a lot of latitude to move within their personal and shared continuums. Rempis is a famously loud player who can maintain impact when he holds back and plays sparingly; Rosaly can swing a gentle pulse, or create multi-faceted sound sculptures out of apparently accidental events. All of that happens within the first minutes of “Patterns in Distance,” the 29:25 performance that dominates disc one. Rempis’ baritone snuffles and pops, then digs a circular breathing-fueled tunnel of sound that resolves into a soulful wail. Rosaly stacks quick circuits around his kit with the apparent effortlessness of a veteran air traffic controller managing the whole airport’s incoming flights, and then draws back to find just how many sounds one can get out of a single cymbal.  

If that first half hour was all this record contained, it would not be a cheat. But there’s plenty more to hear as each musician switches up implements and attacks. Well into the second half of disc two, they get around to the sort of intricate/aggressive/propulsive amalgam that was one of the RPQ’s strongest suits. If feels like both a re-staked claim and a confirmation that even though it’s just the two of them, they bring a surfeit of artfully unvarnished sound.  

So there’s irony in the fact that their first concert took place in Poland. And while Abrams-Rempis and Reid-Abrams dyads both have history together, the trio is a very occasional affair; you could count on one hand the number of times it convened between that first concert in 2012 and the one where this record was made in 2017. So maybe the real essence of their bond is a shared commitment to improvising music that expresses a unique collective voice that is derived as much from what they don’t do as what they do. Rempis sticks to alto and tenor, leaving his baritone sax at home; likewise Abrams confines himself to contrabass. Rempis rarely plays as delicately as he does here. Listen to how he matches Reid’s bowed harmonics with sighing harmonies on “Sigu Tolo,” and then think about how he roars back at the cello in Ballister, his trio with Fred Lonberg-Holm. They’re as removed from each other as Portland OR is from Portland ME.  

Reid and Abrams use contrasting techniques to broaden the music’s dimensions. When one bows, the other plucks, and while the cellist’s pizzicato attack is brittle and dry, the bassist’s plumbs the depths of resonance. This makes the moments when they melt their tones into one, as on the early passages of “Morphollaxis,” all the more powerful. Later in that same piece they break into an intricate three-way dance that reveals how precisely they tune into each other. One wrong note would make the whole thing collapse, but instead they keep hoisting each other up; it’s like seeing someone erect a perfectly sturdy scaffold blindfolded.