2025 review of John Edwards/ Caroline Kraabel/ Khabat Abas live at Cafe Oto 15 August 2025. By Chris Searle, Morning Star.
JOHN EDWARDS/ CAROLINE KRAABEL/ KHABAT ABAS (England/U.S.A./Kurdistan-Iraq) at Cafe Oto, August 15, 2025
This was the first session of the Cafe Oto residency of the groundbreaking London bassist, John Edwards. With him in a daunting trio were Californian alto saxophonist Caroline Kraabel and the cellist from Kurdistan-Iraq, Khabat Abas, whose life in music includes playing with symphony orchestras as far apart as Iraq and Gothenburg.
On a sweating Dalston night the sounds began with the dark humming of bowed bass and bowed electro-cello as if coming from subterranean places deep below the Cafe Oto’s stone floor, while over it Kraabel’s reed and voice simultaneously made continuous soft and siren-sounding notes.
Soon, Edwards’ bass became an uncanny, thumping drumset while Abas laid a wooden wedge over her cello bridge as her bow sawed on. Kraabel’s sudden saxophone screeches and Abas’ mallet blows on her strings in an instant took my mind to the agony of Gaza, as if horn and strings made harrowing empathy with its mothers and children. Edwards played with a bow in each hand, making powerful dark fire across the lowest regions of his bass.
There was no domination. Each virtuoso was in complete adventurous and inventive accord with their trio-mates, as Abas stroked her strings so gently with her torn and withered bow it was like a lullaby for Gazan infants, until Kraabel’s saxophone made new, optimistic pace to create what sounded like a children’s song.
What processes of music were here! The art of the musician is to make sounds which make meaning: the art of the listeners is to imagine and interpret that meaning in their own lives and the lives of others. Cellist and bassist were two drummers drumming, as strings became surfaces, skins, the bark of trees, while Kraabel’s horn sang, harmonised and told her stories, on and on.
At the end of the performance I told Abas and Kraabel that I thought I had heard and seen Gaza in their sounds in this ex-paints factory in the heart of East London. ‘I must play what I see in the way the world is,’ replied Abas. ‘You heard it too!’ Chris Searle
2025 review of 2024 duo CD with John Edwards, Sparrowdance. By Chris Searle, Morning Star.
Caroline Kraabel/John Edwards
Sparrow Dance
(Crosshatch Records)
★★★★★
HERE’s an extraordinary record. It comes in a home-made, gingham cloth sleeve and a cardboard envelope with an inken, avian design.
The unity of John Edwards’ bouncing, stepping, singing, plunging, sawing, percussive acoustic bass and Caroline Kraabel’s sad, singing, somnolent saxophone somehow expresses the pathos yet resilience of London bird life. Sparrows can’t sing, the songline goes, yet these two musicians give them a multilayered, reveried, throbbing voice which cries, observes and reflects, but never dies.
“The sparrow interaction was a dream I had,” says Kraabel. “We placed our music’s sheets of notes in the garden, on the ground. The sparrows walked over them — in doing so they chose the best music, showing us which parts to discard.”
You don’t hear many albums like this, so close to life and nature. Be quick though, there aren’t many copies. Chris Searle, Morning Star, 17 February 2025
Review of Caroline Kraabel/ Daniel Thompson/ Max Reed trio CD, Still Dancing, 2024. By Mr Olivetti, Frequency.org
Guitarist and Empty Birdcage supremo Daniel Thompson continues his investigations into the improvisational world with a collaboration involving saxophonist Caroline Kraabel and dancer Max Reed. Now, if this sounds intriguing, you are right; because not only does Max bring a certain atmosphere to the proceedings, but his shuffling steps and purring vocal outbursts lend further dimensions to an already tasty sax and guitar interplay. If anything, his appearance gives Caroline and Daniel a further maypole around which they can entwine their subtle insinuations. There is also a lot of silence here and in that silence if you listen closely, you can hear the trio plotting amongst the room tone and random shuffles.
The silence in the opening of the first section is injected with scuffs, strums and scattered honks, a scene setting as the players and Max prepare the room. Staccato bursts, the slide and stomp of bare feel on wood floor; you can imagine Max’s movements, sidestepping the static musical outbursts as they try to finish one another’s sentences with brief interjections. What sounds like breathing moves around the long stretches of silence and the atmosphere builds, drawing the imagination of the listener into the chase. Scraped strings, muffled yelps and the surge of breath and foot increase in intensity at certain moments before a wounded roar from the sax scatters the molecules, rearranging in inexplicable cutting motions and single guitar notes brushed with coarse chords. Is there a voice? Is it the sax? Does it matter?
The second section is far longer, Max’s voice more apparent. There is more motion and the sax coaxed, more inclined to linger, drawing the voice, a distant wail along with it. Max is more animated, warmed up and drawing some angular work from Daniel, caressing and pulling at the strings in equal measure. Caroline joins in and it feels like a tag team, one taking over from the other, waiting for the right moment to pounce. Appearing and dissipating. Sax and voice duet as the guitar circles, sprightly, an awkward mediæval dance with sax and guitar poking one another, sax becoming more outraged before silence descends. Another plotting of the next wave that comes slowly and quietly, moments of semi-structure appearing and dissipating into the room tone. Yips of sax are accompanied by warm, gentle guitar as we descend towards a conclusion, the atmosphere edgy but convivial, the distance covered impressive and engaging.
An unexpected and unusual treat, Still Dancing album pushes the boundaries of improv just that little bit further and keeps Daniel ahead of the game. Mr Olivetti
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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. Chris Searle
Review of 2024 LP, Child Ballads: The Final Six, by London Experimental Ensemble (including Caroline Kraabel)
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. Rigo Dittmann, Bad Alchemy.
Review of 2023 Kraabel/Nicols/Hug Transitions Trio CD, On Dizziness. By Rigo Dittmann, Bad Alchemy.
MAGGIE NICOLS – CAROLINE KRAABEL – CHARLOTTE HUG On Dizziness (Creative Sources, CS 786): The Zurich violist & vocalist tipped me off to this poetic, almost philosophical encounter between three ‘Canailles’, whose devilish and motherly relevance to Bad Alchemy is beyond question. Grand-‘Ma’ Nicols, always within earshot thanks to I Am Three & Me and Siapiau, has two kindred spirits born in the 60s at her side here, with Hug and also with Kraabel, with whom she played in the London Improvisers Orchestra and is very familiar through “For Every Thing that Lives is Holy” as a tribute to William Blake, or in “No Picnics” with John Edwards. Their program includes poetic-philosophical lines from the much-praised poet Jenny Xie, and covers the spectrum from ‘A violent stirring of the interior’ to ‘Unfolding the churns’, ‘Begin with disequilibrium’, ‘Slurred echoing eye’, ‘What gets poured inside is the outside’ and ‘A useful beginning’. Alto sax, viola, taps & three voices recommend dizziness, imbalance and doubt as opportunities. With polyglot magic formulas [their witches’ one-times-one] and, again and again in three voices, shamanic screaming and singing to scratchy, shimmering playing with strings, bow and reed, tinged with hoarfrost. Maggie and her fellow mothers even develop the magic of singing lullabies to dizzying spirits, with gentle glissandos and crow-motherly tenderness, with cooing, rumbling throats, creaky strings, blowing, piping, blissful onomatopoeia. Wispy sliding and cracking sounds up to nibbling and chirping altissimi, popping slap tongue, rough-throated vowels, vulture-tongue consonants, rapturous gibberish, strange birds and Cheshire cats united in beastly beatitude. In ‘Perhaps this is doubt’, a night-birdlike feeling covers up Hebrew sediment. ‘Slippery standard belief’ also overwrites commonplaces in a whirring and xenobird-like manner with other folklore, other AEIOU. So that finally to an elysian flageolet beatific bliss spreads out. [BA 124 rbd]
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.
All tracks by Caroline Kraabel and John Edwards. Photo by Régine Edwards. Artwork design by Oliver Barrett
© and℗2020 John Edwards and Caroline Kraabel, PRS, all rights reserved.
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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“I have never heard anyone play the saxophone like Caroline Kraabel.” Baltimore Sun, entire review of Kraabel solo performance at High Zero Festival, 2004
“Like a cross between Maggie Nicols and Peter Brötzmann.” Bay Area Express review of Now We Are One Two live, 1998
“Caroline Kraabel, a saxophonist and performance artist, was the other act on the bill, and she was extraordinary as well. Her musical attributes are first-rate (imagine, a performance artist who can really play!), and her presentation was imaginative and provocative.” Chris Kelsey, Jazz Now, March 1996
“Caroline Kraabel was in town to give two interesting solo performances. Not all the theatrics worked, but a surprising amount did and very well. What I enjoyed most was her playing, on alto and baritone saxes – she could really project on the bari, and managed a slew of delicious scraping, metallic split tones and multiphonics. And there was the piece where she slap-tongued and popped until my mouth started cramping just thinking about it. All this was mixed in with some terse and pithy relationship humour, stage blood, and a large piece of newspaper. She claimed to be very sick with the flu; I wonder what she’s like healthy?” Beanbenders Review, Berkeley CA, January 1996
“Charles Hayward’s latest creative gathering (the Shock Exchange) powered up like a rock band, with the chameleon saxophone of Caroline Kraabel twanging a bassline as if it was a stringed instrument… afterwards, in complete contrast, sax and double bass spoke to each other in dog words and phrases, panting and coughing, barking and howling they pushed themselves into a frenzied “dogophony” which could not suppress an undertone of musical romance. This allowed Kraabel’s saxophone to trumpet down to earth while John Edwards’s bass buzzed in the air with menacing insect sounds.” Deptford Kite, June 1996
“With the Shock Exchange trio, the festival organisers were very lucky – the members of this newborn unrecorded trio have an impressive history, but how many times have we seen an all-star group and asked ourselves why this gratuitous choice of people, a group in name only? However, in this case the motives are solid, and the conviction of the players even more so. It’s not the music one expects from drum/bass/sax… instead there are large areas of improvisation, a great deal of individuality, suggestions of melody, and little “Kraabel-style” theatrical touches. A great deal of variety in this fresh and promising set, and never a dull moment. The sax-playing of Caroline Kraabel (whose great look is topped with grass-green hair) resists the temptation to co-opt the space in the rhythm and take over a solo role, while fans of God were pleased to hear the big sound of John Edwards’s bass-playing given the prominence it deserves.” Musiche, Italy, February 1996
“Caroline Kraabel’s new CD (Now We Are One Two) lurks behind a strangely beautiful sleeve, handmade out of bright red rubber. Kraabel’s previous X-RAY EYES was a joint effort with Jason Willett – Willett’s drumming and assorted mayhem were a good foil for Kraabel’s anguished, flailing saxophone, and the results were more of a party. This is very much a solo album, a lot of it adapted from Kraabel’s solo performance in which she stages a breakout from walls made of newspaper.
There’s a naked open-heart quality about much of this music. Kraabel has an extended range of saxophone techniques, from lyricism to splitting multiphonics, but she is not concerned with polish either in performance or recording. Some tracks are emotional outbursts, snatches of strident song jammed up against expressionistic playing. Post-modern cool it ain’t. The saxophone wails and laments, while Kraabel re-arranges enough paper to make nests for a zoo-full of small animals. She likes to make you jump, too, kicking over a pile of percussion, or bellowing one word in a quiet line. She places a shrieking voice next to a whispering one, or a distant sax complementing one in close-up. On short, vitriolic songs like “Lying Together”, the vocals are processed ‘til she sounds like a furious toy having its string pulled. I got on best with tracks like “The Wolf from Broken Bone”, where urban environmental recordings of subway trains and people shouting add mystery. “Now We Are One Two” has its gentle moments, but is overall a harsh listening experience. But invigorating. Like opening your window to be unexpectedly lashed by a rainstorm.” Clive Bell, Resonance magazine, June 1997
(Now We Are One Two) “In a ravishing latex skin, Caroline and her double, the extension of her larynx, the brass organ grafted to her lungs, her cherished instrument, her saxophone, distill twelve intimate respiratory atmospheres, twelve interior experiences touched by the outside world of distant urban echoes, twelve landscapes in which breath and song and speech wander and resonate. Caroline is alone here (away from her work with X-RAY EYES and the Shock Exchange) and telling herself tales. She punctuates her space with bubbles, and one begins to follow her on one’s own side of the mirror… something falls, over there… I shake to the rhythm of a crazed fanfare, poum poum poum. And Caroline continues her invocations to Broken Bones… and we continue to wander through this landscape, which compels with its charm.” Manu Holterbach, Revue et Corrigée, December 1997
“This solo release by saxophonist Caroline Kraabel (Now We Are One Two) is fronted by a gummy cover-collage that will undoubtedly make it a collector’s item in next-century Japan. Fuelled by crazy-brained fury, Kraabel rubbishes comparisons to Evan Parker and John Butcher by shouting, duetting with rude noises, and generally upturning all musical etiquette. Yet the results are expressive and winning rather than coarse. “Double Glazing” is the kind of no-budget pop gem unheard since the demise of the Flying Lizards: sex infantilism chafes at the repressions of commerce and art. With so much free music kow-towing to “fund me” solemnity, Kraabel’s raspberry primitivism is a necessary blow.” Ben Watson, Hi-Fi News and Record Review, March 1998
“Mass Producers was the one British group which really undertook something radical. They were intelligent, musical, theatrical, elegant and used technology (saxophones, architecture, non-amplification) in a rigorous, savvy way.” Ed Baxter, review of 1999 for The Wire, December 1999.
“One of my favourite CDs of the 90s came from Caroline Kraabel (Now We Are One Two solo CD, 1997), and she is part of a new scene in London that I find very interesting.” Fred Frith, interviewed in JazzLive, Spring 2000
X-RAY-EYES was originally a duo – UK-based American saxophonist Caroline Kraabel and Baltimore’s finest, Jason Willet, on gutiar, drums, piano, trumpet, stylophone, etc. This duo recorded X-RAY-EYES in an unheated Baltimore warehouse during eight days of very adverse weather conditions (below 0º C). This CD released in 1995 is the sound of two people (and two ducks) doing everything to keep warm.
“This creative action is very monster shocking, like Jad Fair, and also most attractive collapsing sound. They will keep going forever.” (X-Ray Eyes)
Music Magazine, Japan
“The mix of sax and trumpet is good. The songs are always twisted. You will be shocked by its unusualness.” (X-Ray Eyes) Spooky Magazine
“Put this music on and forget yourself in another incongruous universe, guided by your own state of mind.” (X-Ray Eyes) Boule Sheet, Belgium.
“Consider that Willett is a member of Half-Japanese and that their recording studio is an enormous unheated warehouse, and you may get an idea of the frenzy, the tweaked sounds and near-the-bone orchestration that pervade this recording.” (X-Ray Eyes) Musiche, Italy
“At its best a challenging and fascinating array of sounds and surfaces – that you keep listening is due to the music’s powerful and unremitting energy.” (X-Ray Eyes) Rubberneck, UK
“For me, my favourite Megaphone ltd release is X-RAY-EYES, who make thrilling music with sax and pets.” Switch Magazine, Japan