American Chicagoan sax hero Dave Rempis and North Carolina-based guitarist Tashi Dorji come from remarkably different backgrounds. Rempis explores the outer edges of the jazz world while being inspired by his Greek ethnicity and a longstanding interest in folk music from around the globe. Dorji combines his Bhutanese ethnicity with a love for metal, punk, American blues and folk, and anarchist political theory. But Rempis and Dorji already collaborated in the trio Kuzu (with drummer Tyler Damon), which has toured extensively, and released five outstanding records since 2018.
Gnash was recorded at Milwaukee’s beloved Sugar Maple, their homebase where the two have recorded twice before, on a cold midwestern Friday evening in front of a packed-out house in January 2024, and offers the genre-less and open-minded sonic vision of these musicians-improvisers. Rempis plays on soprano, alto, tenor and baritone saxes. Still, Gnash is Rempis’ recorded debut on soprano saxophone, an instrument left to him by friend and mentor Mars Williams when he passed in November 2023. He regards this new sax as a homework assignment that needs to give Williams, the consummate prankster, a hearty laugh each time he hears Rempis struggle through some of the many challenges this beast of a horn presents.
Rempis and Dorji channeled the energy and anticipation from the audience into two sets of patient, deliberate, and focused creativity. The opening piece, «Forms», with Rempis on the soprano sax, offers the distinct approaches of these gifted improvisers where Rempis sketches cyclical, melodic lines. At the same time, Dorji opts for thorny, raw collisions, or brief sonic bites with grinding teeth, as the title of the album suggests. Dorji explores on the following, extended «Orphic Hymn» an abstract version of electric blues, and when Rempis joins him he sounds like a soulful, ecstatic preacher who serenades the uplifting hymn. The next extended piece, «Ask For The Impossible», is an arresting and quite acrobatic collision between Rempis’ extended breathing techniques and powerful blows and Dorji’s mean and equally intense usage of effects and feedback. The last piece «Zilch» adds a playful sensibility to the tense and stimulating collisions, stressing that Rempis and Dorji always searching for new sonic adventures.
Eyal Hareuveni
Dave Rempis (soprano saxophone, alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, baritone saxophone), Tashi Dorji (guitar)
