Cairo Free Jazz Ensemble Music for Angela Davis LP S/Sided

Cat. No. HOL-135
500 copies, black vinyl

During our long friendship and incredibly prolific collaboration with Hartmut Geerken – who sadly left this planet on October 21, 2021 – he never ceased to surprise us. He lived many lives, traveling the world as an employee of the Goethe Institute, playing with other incredible musicians, and being smart enough to record most of the concerts he did. His archive is in fact full of treasures, and any conversation with him could lead to the rediscovery of unheard master tapes preserving true music gold. It was during one of these conversations we had at his house – while searching for pictures to be used for the 50th anniversary reissue of “Heliopolis” – that he pulled the original score of “Music for Angela Davis No. 2” out of a folder, saying with a smile: “Let’s see… I should have the complete recording of this one”!

Recorded at Nile Hall, Cairo, on December 4, 1971, “Music for Angela Davis” is a 24-minute composition that encounters two full ensembles – respectively conducted by Geerken himself and Hubertus Von Puttkamer – playing simultaneously without listening to each other, rising and falling within a brilliant and structurally complex expression of call and (non) response. Collective improvisation in its most heightened and sophisticated form.

As described by Geerken in the liner notes: «One of my attempts with the Cairo Free Jazz Ensemble was my time-related, but timeless composition “Music for Angela Davis”. I divided the ensemble into two groups of roughly the same size, each with a conductor, and both groups played simultaneously, according to the different hand signals of the conductors, without one group reacting to or considering the other. The only two tone sequences consisted of the musicable notes of the name Angela Davis, i. e. a-g-e-a and d-a s. The composition was an attempt to get together in society through the medium of improvisation and a protest against the racial measurements of the American governments.»