Frequent collaborators also include cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, pianist and synthesist Jim Baker, bassist Kent Kessler, trumpeter Axel Dorner, along with an ever-widening pool of international improvisors.
Zerang has performed and recorded with some of the most adventurous artists of his era, including a fourteen-year stint with The Peter Brotzmann Chicago Tentet, Joe McPhee’s Survival Unit III, and an extended collaboration with drummer and percussionist Hamid Drake. Recorded and mixed by Matt Bordin in the woods at (the new) Outside Inside Studio, the album features a range of approaches to percussion that Zerang has developed over the years, including the use of vibrating drumhead surfaces, expressive friction passages, multiple timbre percussion, and straight up trap-set drumming - all infused with a rich sense of melodic, rhythmic and textural innovation.
This is the first ever authorized repress released under license from Hartmut Geerken.ĥ00 copies on black, 6 page foldout bookletĬhicago-based percussionist Michael Zerang presents his first solo recording after a long career as an exploratory musician and composer. The album is a throbbing, squealing, wild journey through the creative heights of sound channeling swirling, focused artistry that taps future and past in a single blow.Ĭopies of the original pressing are between the rarest and most sought-after records in canon of recorded jazz. Heliopolis is a stunning blend of big band spiritual jazz, the music of the Middle East, and the fire and energy of free jazz, unveiling a deep creative resonance with the contemporaneous efforts of Pharoah Sanders, Phil Cohran, and - of course - Sun Ra, combining jazz instrumentation and musical style with indigenous melodies and instruments to create a musical object with few parallels.
When encountering this recording, issued in 1970, the deep resonance found between the ensemble and its American counterparts becomes startlingly clear.
One of the great projects in Egyptian jazz, the Cairo Free Jazz Ensemble was formed by Salah Ragab and Hartmut Geerken as an avant-garde offshoot of the Cairo Jazz Band - the first jazz big band in the country - formed in 1968 when Ragab was appointed chief of Egypt’s Military Department of Music and had at his disposal a vast staff of musicians (almost three thousand!), an entire military building, and a full range collection of musical instruments.