The trio of Niggli, Wogram, and Schaufelberger (Lucas Niggli's Zoom) released an album on Intakt last year that is very nice. Lots of fast, intricate compositions. I think there are some reviews at the Intakt site, www.intaktrec.ch. Niggli and Schaufelberger also play in Pierre Favre's European Chamber Orchestra, who also released a beautiful album on Intakt. I also really like Niggli's work with Steamboat Switzerland. I saw them over a year ago at a very poorly attended show in Chicago, and they were amazing, especially Niggli. The SS disc on Unit is a lot of fun, but I've heard less than positive reviews of the newer ones on Grob.

From: Thierry Raguin <thierryraguin@urbanet.ch> To: zorn-list <zorn-list@mailman.xmission.com> Subject: New New York Art Quartet at Willisau (JZ content) Date: Sun, 01 Sep 2002 21:08:58 +0200

Hi everyone!

I just came back from Willisau where the New New York Art Quartet, featuring John Zorn, was playing.

There were two short concerts in the afternoon (around 1 1/2 hour each).

The first concert was a Swiss band called Lucas Niggli's Big Zoom with Lucas Niggli (drums, percussion), Nils Wogram (trombone), Philipp Schaufelberger (guitar), and Claudio Puntin (clarinet, bass clarinet) and Peter Herbert (double-bass) as special guests. It was trully amazing!!! This band is really really impressing. All musicians were great, especially Nils Wogram (who also played yesterday with Fred Frith and Aki Takase): this young guy is really promissing. Although the two guests were also amazing (at some point, Puntin reminded me of how Zorn is playing), I would have liked to see just the trio: they really know each other very well and the addition of two players to the band was limiting their play. They wrote the whole music down and thus improvised less. They didn't go as far as they would have if they were just three. Too bad... But their performance was still great!

The NNYAQ (Milford Graves: drums and percussion - Roswell Rudd: trombone - Reggie Workman: double-bass - John Zorn: alto sax) started very slowly. They entered on stage one by one. First Workman playing a little bass solo (this guy has extremely long fingers!), then Rudd and Graves... Quite nice but nothing great... Then came Zorn and the whole show started. For old guys, they really kicked ass! And you could really see the chemistry and respect between the musicians: at some point, Zorn was not playing and he was sitting and looking at the others with a giant smile on his face. Later, Graves started to sing something like "Mama John Zorn" (!) and went dancing and crawling at Zorn's feet. Then he jumped out of the scene and started to dance among the audience. At this point, Zorn stopped playing and took pictures of Graves from a camera he took out of his pocket! Really funny to watch! Of course, musically speaking, it was also great, lots of improvisation, technically flawless, with some nice strange ideas (Workman blowing in a big plastic tube stucked behind the strings of his bass, Rudd playing with a towel on his trombone, etc.).

Both concerts were trully great and I'm really glad I was there (and I managed to buy tons of CDs there :') ).

- TR

PS: sorry, this message might arrive twice. I sent it previously with another e-mail address. Ups :')

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