Ups and downs at the Berlin Jazz Festival, workmanship rich in content at the Total Music Meeting

Musicians who improvise freely took a stubborn bite from the bone of the avant-garde and thereby gained surprisingly a large amount of material. Evan Parker ties his undulating movement more and more to saxophone ballads, surrounded by a growing sovereignty of silence. Pianist Keith Tippet went far in playing the prepared grand piano, and the alternative notes did not sound like a foreign body but rather merged with the piano's flowing resonance.

The highlight was the solo performance of Israeli soprano-saxophonist Ariel Shibolet. With him we find beyond the music an almost infinite richness of sounds and expression possibilities. Based on Evan Parker, he pushes with joyful playing and abounding imagination polyphonic sounds. He actually improvises almost like a lap top artist, who throws the exact notes to the processor, so that his loops and microscopic attention to the sound construction are varied and never-ending, more han any fashionable electronic act. There is life for the soprano-saxophone after Evan Parker. His name is Ariel Shibolet.


Gunther Huesmann

This is the TMM-debut concert of Ariel Shibolet, a key member of the Israeli free jazz and improvising scene and one of the most interesting reed-players of the younger generation worldwide.
Inspired by Evan Parker, Steve Lacy and Anthony Braxton, he has developed his own sound vocabulary "which is the work of a poet" (Joel Pagier, Improjazz 116).

It seems that Steve Lacy and Evan Parker brought the art of soprano saxophone playing to the ultimate heights. What else can be achieved in terms of concept, sound or virtuosity? Apparently, they have not said the last word. Here is a daring young man with a vision who is trying to push the boundaries of multiphonics even further. Of course, as his predecessors, he uses circular breathing, but on top of that his breathing and voice become musical devices.

Revelatory in its concentrated brevity, a new contribution from ARIEL SHIBOLET (UNTITLED 1959, Kadima 9) crosses international boundaries, fusing the best of “new thing” expressionism with European pointillism and hyper-reactive interplay. This is a forty-eight minute series of aphorisms (Untitled [1959] Number 12/ Homage to Matisse/ Number 61/ Yellow, Orange, Red on Orange/ White, Yellow, Red on Yellow/ Light, Earth and Blue/ Ochre and Red on Red/ White Band/ Three Reds/ Blue Cloud/ White Cloud/ Four Reds/ Black, Ochre, Red over Red/ Red, Grey, White on Yellow/ Red, Black, Orange, Yellow on Yellow/ Untitled [1959] and the results are never less than intriguing. Shibolet employs some topdrawer improvisers (Ariel Shibolet, ss; Aurora Josephson, voice; Jen Baker, tbn; Scott R. Looney, p; Damon Smith, b. Oakland, CA, Jan. 8, 2006) and I hope this group will continue on as an active unit, as there is some extremely good playing and interaction here.

Marc Medwin
Cadence magazine

Saxophone soprano solo and improvisation; all of it improvised, the scenario in concrete, the sudden immerging or the shortcut, the daring or the reassuring. It is evidently much more complex that that (cf. Braxton, Doneda, Lacy & Co.).
A little in James Fei’s style a few years ago and in the same label, Ariel Shibolet recorded 16 pieces of saxophone solo.
To each one its scenario (trills, polyphony, harmonious attacks, accelerations, screeching blows, fusing…) and its variations (continuous whistling, spaces, scrambling, sonic interferences). The result is brilliant, the contract is respected (between the scenario and its accomplishment), boredom is avoided. Ariel Shibolet is a soprano performer with a rich vocabulary. He knows how to organize, develop and diversify his music. There is no trace of bad taste, on the contrary a richness of sound and absolute control over the effects. This beautiful architecture would have (perhaps) benefited from a grain of sand, this scratching that would oblige the saxophonist to risk his way on uneven and rebel tracks. But maybe this was not the purpose… to be followed…

Luc Bouquet
Improjazz

A decade younger than Lev, Shibolet is also a member of the Tel Aviv Art Ensemble, a local Free Jazz band. On the first disc here his two short selections are dedicated to the late German bassist Peter Kowald, whose solo work as well as his virtuosity affected him as much as they did Jones. The later may be using piezo pickups to extend the rough edges of his strings so as not to replicate the Kowald style, even though most of his work here encompasses swiped textures. For his part, Shibolet blows pure colored air through his horn, the better to emphasize its metallic qualities. Elsewhere he uses tongue slaps and barking shrills.
Those sorts of actions appear in abundance on Metal Tube & Consciousness, his solo CD, along with other extended techniques such as gravelly throat crackles and whistled watery tones. Those show up on “Field n.1”, along with polyphonic scratched and scraped metal and a short coda of bubbly blowing. Besides patches of circular breathing Shibolet climbs the scale – with a pinched ney-like tone on “For Bach III”; turns a piercing and vibrating arched pitch into a shofar suggestion on “Black Stone On A Plate”; and somehow manages to imply the ruggedness of an atonal Gaelic ballad with dissonant circular breathing on “Slow Irish Circles”.
Metal Tube’s opening track, “Slow Change, Slow Development” is an almost 10- minute tour de force of glottal punctuation with vibrato and tonguing changes. Pushing his output into split tones, midway through, Shibolet’s single horn creates a constant ostinato interrupted at time by higher-pitched trills. It’s as if he had a chanter as well as a reed, expanding on the bagpipe emulations Lev produces on his Kadmina duets. Squeaking and pushing out serpentine lines, Shibolet constructs entire phrases in altissimo without losing the thread of the melody, climaxing by producing two circular-breathed lines which seem to fill all the sound spaces.
“Epilogue”, the 16th and finale tune is just that. Focusing on producing unvarying straight lines that add a certain gravitas to the proceedings, this theme echoes the first track. Both a postlude and a summing up of what went before, it rounds the improvisational circle with a smooth legato conclusion.
On the evidence here, Israeli free musicians seem as advanced sonically as their society as a whole is socially. Shibolet has made his global debut. Now what’s needed is more CDs from him and a few more, widely distributed discs by a selection of the musicians in the Kadima Collective.

Ken Waxsman
All about Jazz
Jazz Word