Reuben Radding

Although trumpeter Kirk Knuffke is a fresh face to the international jazz scene, he has been remarkable active in the last few years.

“Udentity” by the Denman Maroney Quintet has the “hyperpiano” as main focus. The title is a word coined by Harry Partch meaning undertone identity. In the tradition of Henry Cowell, John Cage and George Crumb, Maroney offers here a new and very convincing opus of his always imaginative attempts, in a jazz context, to extend the possibilities of the instrument invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori.

If having a balletic sense of time made percussionist Jeff Arnal very requested among choreographers, his hability to deploy a wide range of colors and dynamics turned him into a composer, even when he’s just improvising.

Free improvisation isn’t only a European thing. The alto saxophonist Wally Shoup is one of the few American representatives of the musical praxis that dropped the jazz part of the “free jazz” equation and started improvising without idiomatic parameters.