mywhere.it
KnCurrent: New Album Coming Soon
Gian Paolo Galasso
April, 2025
New York – The new work by a quartet of virtuosos of their instruments will be released on May 1, 2025. It would be an album destined to cause a stir, if it weren’t a work already destined for a niche. A violin, a guitar, a saxophone, an invented string instrument. Even this would make the ears of the most refined palates perk up (sorry for the synesthesia). If we add that among the musicians involved are Cooper-Moore and Jason Kao Hwang…
The new artistic project by Hwang, brennan, Cooper-Moore and Davis will be released on May 1, 2025. The album KnCurrent is destined to get people talking about it, even if it doesn’t belong to what is commonly defined as mainstream. Between violins, guitars, saxophones and invented instruments, the four musicians will delight fans of this complex but engaging musical genre.
KnCurrent is the name of this new recording project. An album under the banner of the most ‘radical’ improvisation, if this were not a historicized term to indicate very precise coordinates. But let’s proceed in order. More than ten years ago, philosophy professor Davide Sparti published a series of magnificent books in which he interpreted jazz improvisation in the light of Michel Foucault’s technologies of the self.
This wasn’t some bizarre intellectualism. The fact is that every musician who improvises starts from safe ground. That of one’s own identity. To embrace an unknown land: that constituted by the recognition of the public ex post. In the middle, the question of sound. And then, as you read these reflections, you hear Roscoe Mitchell who, with his post-Art Ensemble of Chicago compositions, is beyond becoming, somewhere close to Zen.
It is difficult to talk about being or essence in a world, ours, the Western world, that has co-opted these words to throw them, like stones, against diversity. Let us say then that, eighty years after its birth, African-American jazz has managed to become a timeless music. Without becoming metaphysical. Sooner or later, this new element of the continuum will have to be historicized. And many concerns about swinging or scat, still proposed without fear of a logical sense, will be definitively abandoned. Or maybe not.
But that’s not the point. The point is that KnCurrent is a work that, even if it is not a step above or simply ‘beyond’. Although it doesn’t have the value of the last solo album from one of the quartet members, Jason Kao Hwang’s Soliloquies released last year. Even if it doesn’t trace any new lines of escape, KnCurrent is an album that puts the immature listener to the test – we wouldn’t say “unsuspecting”, we don’t care.
slip apophatica begins with a filtered and distorted violin that once again takes forward what has been theorized and practiced by musicians like Leroy Jenkins. Who said that sound matter cannot be excavated deeper? It would be enough to see how, faced with the saxophone of patrick brennan – the artist who shared with me the audio files for this upcoming album – the sound adapts, becoming more fragmented and distorted.
But we cannot forget the Diddley-Bo (a stringed instrument invented by Cooper-Moore that pays homage to the famous rock pioneer in its name) that constitutes Dné Wol and opens, still wrapped in the electric violin, must be “Who Say”. Or On Ka’a Davis’ electric guitar on the final micro circus, which somehow brings to mind the Wurlitzer detours of the more spacey Sun Ra.
As expected, an album like KnCurrent contains references to all the sound worlds traversed, not only as active musicians, but also as listeners, by its protagonists. Jason Kao Hwang, a Chinese-American violinist, began his musical journey with Commitment alongside William Parker. To then cross his violin with the instruments of Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, Joelle Léandre and ‘Butch’ Morris. Cooper-Moore, a composer and instrument designer, was a key figure in American free jazz through his collaboration with Apogee alongside saxophonist David S. Ware.
Ka’a Davis, a veteran of Sun Ra’s Arkestra and the septet of trumpeter Donald Ayler — brother of the more famous and unfortunate Albert — is a guitarist of great skill who is not content to play what others have done before him. And finally, patrick brennan, saxophonist, composer and bandleader, has projects as diverse as s0nic 0penings and the Moroccan Sudani Project.
The music contained in the grooves of this soon-to-be-released album is made of pulsating matter, lived life, piercing abstractions and atoms of beauty stripped down but present in abundance. It is not background music or for distracted listening. Instead, it requires dedication. Try turning off your cell phones and starting your, as they say today, listening experience. And let it be a genuine one.