Reviews – Caroline Kraabel

Review of 2023 Pat Thomas/ Caroline Kraabel CD whats wrong, by Chris Searle, Morning Star

Caroline Kraabel and Pat Thomas
whats wrong
(crosshatch records)
★★★★★

THIS is an album of two loving sleeves: one of cardboard, one of patterned cloth. Inside them is a musical story by two revolutionary musicians from two continents: US-born saxophonist Caroline Kraabel and British pianist of Antiguan roots, Pat Thomas.

To describe their album as audacious is sheer understatement. Powerful sounds from the innards of percussive piano and multi-voiced horn peal out from its grooves as if both musicians are in a birthing room of sound, which is in fact Dalston’s Vortex, where it was recorded.

whats wrong takes very careful, internalised listening. Its sounds speak critically of our world and its crimes and suffering, while showing in its compelling artistry the creativity and freedom urge needed to heal them. Not easy, but nonetheless beautiful, it cries out for hearing.

It is an album for all senses and seasons, and a vital prod for imagination and consciousness too.

Review of 2023 Pat Thomas/ Caroline Kraabel CD whats wrong, by Phil Freeman, The Wire

whats wrong is a set of four improvised duos between [Pat] Thomas and saxophonist Caroline Kraabel. Despite the force and volume they achieve at certain moments there’s also a deep intimacy to their interactions. At one point, about four minutes into the first track, Kraabel pulls the horn from her mouth and emits a deep, pleasurable sigh, like a smoker after a deep drag. It’s one of the most human moments I’ve encountered, in what is already a deeply human form of music. Hearing it feels like eavesdropping. Kraabel shifts throughout the disc from deep, rawboned phrases to gentle hissing flaps of the valves [sic]. Thomas’s playing, meanwhile, is sparse and dark-toned, seeming to recall the work of Matthew Shipp at times with its percussive single-note strikes.

Review of Abas/Kraabel, 5 Communiqués, by Stewart Lee for The Idler

American saxophonist Caroline Kraabel has recorded with [Maggie] Nicols. But on 5 Communiqués she partners Khabat Abas, and it’s difficult to unhear suggestions of silenced voices in the Kurdish Iraqi cellist’s furtive responses to Kraabel’s breathy, whispered work, the horn a living sound source rather than a stagnant repertoire receptacle. Sudden chittering suggests hasty communication of vital information, in snatched un-surveilled moments, as panic sets in.

Review of Chris Corsano/ Caroline Kraabel/ John Edwards live at Cafe Oto, spring 2022, by Chris Searle, Morning Star, June 2022

… The next night it was Corsano, Edwards and the alto saxophone of Caroline Kraabel and the heaving breathiness of her sound, its squawks, squalls and groans fused with her wordless vocal chuntering, filling this one Dalston chamber like the sounds of tomorrow already heard tonight, with Corsano the sorcerer of percussion and Edwards’ heart of strings setting all ears afire.

Review of John Edwards/ Caroline Kraabel Takuroku digital release Day/Night, by Stephen Chase

Sparks of ignition as grinding then shimmering tones abut each other glinting and hovering. Shades of Xenakis and Scelsi at their most earthy loom out from the bass. The saxophone, increasingly aided by vocalisations, makes tiny melodic ululations before the bass lurches into plucked riffing (is that a glimpse of John Paul Young’s ‘Love is in the Air’?), then freefalling into a searching slo-mo lacuna of feather-like movements. Gloves off, as the track title states

Caroline Kraabel and John Edwards have been mainstays of the London improvising scene since at least the late 1980s: Kraabel known especially via her Resonance FM programmes, pacing London’s streets with saxophone (and at times, baby & buggy) in tow, and her 20-piece assemblage of saxophones and voices, the Mass Producers. Edwards has long been a ‘go-to’ bassist for touring musicians, featuring in numerous groups assembled by the likes of Evan Parker, Peter Brötzmann, and Steve Noble, to name a few. Both have collaborated from time to time in groups such as The Remote Viewers and the London Improvisers Orchestra.

Kraabel and Edwards are also a couple and, confined to quarters like the rest of us during the Covid-19 restrictions, made this engaging album of two halves: gloves off, and masks off, recorded at midday and midnight respectively. “…we face things, including sound”, they state in the liner notes. Free improvisation is very much about placing oneself in a situation without apparent recourse to reliable conventions; it’s a precarious music (and it’s tempting to add, for precarious times).

This is music heard in close-up. The four walls of a home establishing a dry but warm acoustic. But to call it a response to confinement feels wrong somehow – here, especially on gloves off, there are worlds opening up and a sense of limitless possibility as each player ups the ante.

Masks off, made at the witching hour, is correspondingly crepuscular, like unsettled sleep. Though the dynamic level is a little lower the intensity of the music-making isn’t any the less. The sax is even more than before a conduit for vocal tones and respiratory sounds. Respiration and intimacy are to the fore in this music, shaping the emergent phrasing in irregular micro-patterns. Edwards’ bass is as much scraped and rubbed as plucked with both players moving towards the other’s variegated timbres, whistling, whispering, rattling as trees bend and clouds billow and scud.

Kraabel and Edwards create a music of constant freewheeling invention but with a sharp weather eye open to navigate the twists and turns. The musicians not so much laying down paths as fell running together through thickets. Who knows what the neighbours thought?

You can buy the record here – 50% of profits support the artist and 50% support Cafe Oto.

Oh hear us when we cry to thee/For those in peril on the sea
Chris Searle speaks with saxophonist CAROLINE KRAABEL about her album LAST 1 LAST 2 and the contribution of Robert Wyatt, Morning Star 2018

“BOTH versions of the piece were recorded live. Audiences and musicians felt a powerful solidarity and connection, both with the material and Robert Wyatt’s beautiful performance of the song, ringing out like the final precious traces of a beloved voice played again and again to try to assuage the heartache of absence. I think we all believed in the work.”
So declared alto-saxophonist, improviser and composer Caroline Kraabel about the recording of her album Last 1 Last 2 at London’s Cafe Oto in March 2016, with the proceeds of every record sold donated to refugee charities care4calais.org and utopia56.org.
Kraabel, born in California in 1961, the daughter of an engineer and university librarian, came to London as a teenager “because of punk. I started on saxophone in London, my first inspirations being Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman.”
She explained to me the genesis of Last 1 Last 2. “That’s also the title of the song featured on both pieces of the album. The song starts and ends with the word “last” in two different meanings: “Last time I saw you I didn’t think to ask you to remember this time and this smile. Our number I still recall – I even went to call it the other day. If I hadn’t hung up, feeling foolish, I might have spoken to my old self. I might have spoken to one of you at last.”
She continues: “The song refers to the irrevocability of uprootedness, the yearning of displaced people for those whom they have left behind in another space, and/or in the past.”
I asked her why she used a large group of 16 musicians in Last 1 and just four in Last 2. “They seemed different enough to justify the repeated use of the song. The large group improvises under special instruction mostly, whereas the small group is much freer.”
Why did she ask Robert Wyatt to sing the repeated verse? “We’d met in a non-musical context when my children were small. After we’d chatted he asked to hear my music. He liked it, and I asked him if I could write a song for him, to be part of a larger improvised or semi-improvised piece, and he said yes.
“Robert is a musician I feel very close to. There may be other musicians who would have been as kind and open-minded as he, as well as being artists close to my heart, but I can’t think of any off-hand. I wrote the song for his voice, his range and register, his way of singing.”
I told her that I thought that Last 1 has the sound of a secular hymn, bringing back the words we used to sing in school assemblies in the 1950s: “Oh hear us when we cry to thee/For those in peril on the sea.” It has the sound of loneliness and jeopardy, akin to the blues but not the blues. You can feel the menacing sea and the dangers of a small, tossing, crowded dinghy. I ask her, what soundscape was she seeking to create?
“This is very difficult to answer. I wanted the musicians to improvise genuinely, but also to give them instructions that would lead to them FEELING certain things, or in certain ways, so that some of the sorrow and danger of migration would come through, without any LITERAL description.
“None of the musicians heard Robert’s recording until we were actually performing the piece live. I asked them to respond to it so they were listening to it carefully and fresh for the first time yet I also asked them to drown it out at first.
“And I asked each of them to prepare BEFORE the performance or at the single rehearsal a very short phrase they could remember and repeat exactly. The piece begins with all these pre-prepared phrases, each its own world and clashing with the others.
“It’s true that thoughts of water, the sea, swimming, the fine line between its joys and dangers, the way it can connect people or separate them, or kill them, were very present in my mind then.”
In Last 2, Richard Harrison’s drums, John Edwards’s bass and Kraabel’s saxophone and the astonishing voice of Maggie Nicols add to Wyatt’s defiantly vulnerable and disarming vocal: “For this piece I asked the musicians to listen to the song until they knew it well. Maggie is drawing on her immense skill and emotional connection, and specifically on her Scottish heritage.”
Last 1 Last 2 is music unlike all other; the sound of utmost surprise and solidarity with the repressed and abused whether in Syria, Yemen or Ukraine. It’s a challenge to the mind and spirit. Hear it, internalise it! Think hard, deep and wide about it!

LAST 1 LAST 2 is released by Emanem Records, and available here.

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