The Free Jazz Collective
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By Eyal Hareuveni
Reza Askari is a German (son of an Iranian-born father and a German mother), Cologne-based double bass player, composer, and educator (he is a professor of jazz bass at the University of Music Wuerzburg). His main band is the Roar trio - with clarinet and tenor sax player Stefan Karl Schmid and drummer Fabian Arend, augmented by vibes player Christopher Dell (who is also an educator who teaches architecture, urban design, and planning) in its last two albums - the self-titled album (QFTF, 2022) and Zen World Cables (Boomslang, 2024). The fifth album of Roar has a cryptic title, xAYb v8v dYAx, and the trio hosts Dell and Canadian trumpeter Lina Allemano (who splits her time between Toronto and Berlin). The album was recorded at Deutschlandfunk Kammermusiksaal in Cologne in April 2026.
Askari was mentored by German double bass players Dieter Manderscheid and Sebastian Gramss, but has played with other innovative double bass players like Barre Philips and Mark Dresser, and is well-versed in the free jazz legacy. But Askari sees the acoustic, unamplified Roar quintet as an improvising modern jazz band that adapts the logic of extreme metal bands with their asymmetrical or symmetrical cycles, collapsing forms, obsessive repetition, abrupt ruptures, and overwhelming physical force. He mentions metal bands like Meshuggah, Car Bomb, the Melvins, and the Dillinger Escape Plan that have a distinct architectural and emotional language that he wanted to transform into a detailed improvisational context.
xAYb v8v dYAx distills the powerful, physical, and constantly shapeshifting rhythmic patterns of metal bands into layered, more nuanced, and spacious yet still restless patterns. Askari, Dell, and Arend sketch complex, polyrhythmic architectures of a modern jazz trio or a chamber music ensemble, while they keep trading leading roles, often reaching surprising reductionist or atonal territories. Schmid and especially Allemano act as free agents who can add disruptive, sometimes even abrasive touches, and they always do so, but thoughtfully and poetically. Allemano’s economic interventions always charge the music with intense, emotional impact. This tension stimulates and enriches the unpredictable, often fragmented rhythmic dynamics of this quintet.
The Roar quintet does not seek to replicate the massive polyrhythmic patterns of Meshuggah or other metal bands, but captures the nervous, punkish rhythmic spirit of such bands. This quintet refuses to subscribe to the common, familiar order and instead challenges itself with shifting contrasts and structural chaos, always questioning, negotiating, negating, and reassembling Askari’s compositions. The code-like, palindromic titles of most pieces intensify that feeling. The outcome is thought-provoking, epic, and makes you return to the album again and again, not to decipher the cryptic titles, but to enjoy its free spirit.
xAYb v8v dYAx by Reza Askari
Fri Jul 17 04:00:00 GMT 2026