Coffee and Berries is a live, free improvised meeting of German, Berlin-based tenor sax and electronics player, and sound researcher Gebhard Ullmann with three of the finest American improvisers – trombonist Steve Swell, who has collaborated with Ullman in the Ullmann-Swell Quartet and in Ullmann’s Basement Research, and double bass player Joe Morris, and drummer Charles Downs (aka Rashid Bakr, who just celebrated his 82nd birthday), who played with Ullmann for the first time. The quartet was recorded at Park West Studios in Brooklyn in June 2024.
The album features four extended, powerful quartet pieces (including two parts of the title piece), and three short and more lyrical duo pieces of Ullmann with Swell, Downs, and Morris. All these pieces suggest intense, risk-taking, sound searching (especially when Ullmann plays live electronics), and ecstatic dynamics that gravitate the spontaneous improvisations into instant compositions. The album opens with «The Thing» (not Don Cherry’s iconic piece), as a reminder that Downs plays with the titans of the New Thing – Cecil Taylor ensembles, Jemeel Monndoc’s Muntu Ensemble, and as a member of Other Dimensions in Music quartet.
The music flows by its own organic, raw, and urgent power and inner logic, never subscribing to familiar gestures, charted courses, or predictable rhythmic patterns. Ullmann, Swell, Morris, and Downs offer a 73-minute-long, masterful and insightful lesson in free and most creative music, profound camaraderie (obviously, mostly between Ullmann and Swell), and deep listening.
The Downs Quartet – with Cuban sax player Hery Paz, pianist Jamie Saft, and double bass Morris – recorded its debut album at the same studio six months later. Surprisingly, Inner is Downs’ debut album as a bandleader. The quartet plays five untitled, collective, and slow-cooking improvisations, where ideas and sonic conversations are negotiated in an emphatic way, allowing Downs to steer the free-flowing music with his extensive experience and musical wisdom. Inner corresponds with New York’s rich free jazz legacy, and builds on Saft, Morris, and Downs’ previous collaboration on the album Ticonderoga (Clean Feed, 2015), with the great Joe McPhee, that used the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic advances established by John Coltrane.
Eyal Hareuveni
Gebhard Ullmann (tenor saxophone, live electronics), Steve Swell (trombone), Joe Morris (double bass), Charles Downs (drums), Harry Paz (saxophone), Jamie Saft (piano)
