Kuzu
Kuzu is a powerful American free improvisation trio formed in 2017, featuring Dave Rempis on saxophone, Tashi Dorji on guitar, and Tyler Damon on drums. The band emerged after Rempis collaborated individually with each musician, merging his voice with Dorji and Damon’s pre-existing, highly refined duo dynamic.
Musically, Kuzu blends raw energy and patient exploration. Their sound is a cohesive fusion of free jazz, rock intensity, and broader influences—from Pharoah Sanders to black metal—seamlessly woven together. The trio crafts expansive, narrative-driven improvisations that range from sparse, atmospheric gestures to massive, cathartic waves of sound, all built with logical progression and deep interaction.
With a series of acclaimed albums on labels like Astral Spirits and Aerophonic, Kuzu has established itself as an innovative force, distinguished by its organic synthesis of disparate inspirations into a emotionally resonant and uniquely coherent sonic identity.
Purple Dark Opal
Purple Dark Opal
“As Coltrane drew from jazz, gospel, and Eastern music, Kuzu do too, updating their approach with rock, metal and the tools of free jazz. We hear Rempis’ patented rip, tear, crunch sound, but also there is a tranquility about this music not found in most free jazz.” – Mark Corroto, All About Jazz
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Purple Dark Opal is the second release by the working trio Kuzu, a band whose deep roots in disparate musical traditions delivers a sound that’s not only new, but totally organic. Saxophonist Dave Rempis is best known for his work in the improvised music scene in Chicago, often exploring areas at the farthest edge of the jazz tradition. Guitarist Tashi Dorji, a native of Bhutan, came up through the active noise scene in his home base of Asheville, NC. The last decade has found him deep in that world nationally and internationally, putting out ear-splittingly in-your-face solo records, regularly opening for Godspeed You Black Emperor on their concert tours in the US and Europe, and touring frequently with duo partners Thom Nguyen, Mette Rasmussen, and Kuzu drummer Tyler Damon. That last pairing was the band that caught Rempis’ ear a few years back, and Damon is clearly the musical link here – someone who works comfortably in the avant-garde jazz scene in Chicago, as well as in the rock and noise world holding the drum chair for Circuit Des Yeux, Thee Open Sex, and in his duo with bassist Darin Gray.
After their first concert outing in the fall of September 2017, the three left the stage exhilarated, and knew immediately that this was a BAND. Immediately planning more work together, they released that concert as an Astral Spirits LP titled Hiljaisuus in August 2018, later released on cd by Aerophonic Records. That fall they did twenty dates on the road in the US, rolling up their sleeves to develop a promising union into a real working unit. The results of that effort are documented here on Purple Dark Opal – recorded live in Milwaukee, WI as concert number fifteen of that extended run.
And what do we find after all that work? Rempis’ penchant for pentatonic melodies and rough and tumble timbres combines seamlessly with Dorji’s thick, raw sound and singular approach to intonation, buttressed by Damon’s rapid-fire yet powerful stickwork, to produce a music that’s exquisitely detailed at any one point in time, yet carries the narrative arc of the lengthy piece presented here without ever losing its coordinates. In this music you can hear the many hours together in a van roaming the hills of Tennessee and Pennsylvania, the plains of Texas and Illinois, and the forests of North Carolina and New England, trading playlists ranging from jazz icons like Pharaoh Sanders and Yusef Lateef to Scandinavian black metal bands like Craft and Darkthrone. While this isn’t a new thing in creative music – broad ears are a trademark of musicians in this world – what makes the pairing so unique is the truly organic way in which they string these influences together into a coherent sound. This isn’t a Frankenstein pastiche of bits and pieces held together with duct tape and glue, and a paper-thin conception. This is an emotionally deep and sincere effort to join genuinely disparate influences arrived at only through patient toil. When we ask if Rempis is channeling Coltrane, or a Turkish clarinet player; does Dorji sound like a Delta bluesman, or a southeast Asian rocker from the 70’s; is that Art Blakey or John Bonham rolling out through Damon’s toms; the answer is undoubtedly all of the above. And yet, despite the breadth of the trio’s inspirations, their music never collapses under the weight of its aspirations, fearlessly carving out a new corner in the broader sonic landscape.
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Dave Rempis – alto/tenor/baritone saxophone
Tashi Dorji – guitar
Tyler Damon – drums
Recorded October 14th, 2018 at The Sugar Maple in Milwaukee, WI
Recorded, mixed and mastered by Dave Zuchowski
all compositions by Rempis/Dorji/Damon
Design by Johnathan Crawford
Produced by Dave Rempis
Special thanks to Adrienne Pierluissi and Bob Szocik.
Hiljaisuus
Hiljaisuus
“The music on Hiljaisuus is a game of recurring structures. Harmonic islands consisting of staccato and repetitive patterns are used as springboards and fixed points for further improvisation.” -Martin Schray, Free Jazz Blog
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KUZU is a hard-charging but patient trio that came together in the fall of 2017, after saxophonist Dave Rempis a stalwart of the Chicago improvised music scene, worked with both Tashi Dorji (guitar) and Tyler Damon (drums) individually as part of a lengthy solo tour of the U.S. that he undertook in the spring of that year. Dorji and Damon’s work as a guitar/percussion duo has become well-known, a highly refined and specific language developed through relentless touring and recording over the last few years, with a sound that straddles improvised music, rock, and any number of as-yet-undefined territories. These two provide an incredibly fresh take on the possibilities inherent to spontaneous composition. Superimposing Rempis into this mix was a logical next step after the relationships they’d forged individually.
The trio’s debut record HILJAISUUS (“silence” in Finnish…) features a highly focused pallet of sounds. At times, spacious gestures carve up the canvas with the austerity of a calligrapher, while at others those sparse gestures build into an unstoppable tsunami of energy. Those waves are never impulsive or impetuous though, they ebb and flow logically and patiently out of simple and clearly defined sources. This trio pursues every gesture with tenacity, passing them back and forth until they’ve explored every facet of an idea. Through it all, Kuzu emerges as a unit and not as a meeting of individuals.
This cd release is done in partnership with our friends at Astral Spirits, who released this same material on a limited edition vinyl LP in September 2018. Although the first pressing rapidly sold out, a second pressing is also now available from them.
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Dave Rempis: Reeds
Tashi Dorji: Guitar
Tyler Damon: Drums
Recorded September 13th, 2017 at Elastic Arts, Chicago
Recorded/mixed/mastered by Dave Zuchowski
artwork by id m theft able
Design by Johnathan Crawford
Produced by Dave Rempis and Nate Cross
released in partnership with Astral Spirits Records
All Your Ghosts in One Corner
All Your Ghosts in One Corner
“Their ability to construct musical tension in an almost agonizing way reaches a new peak on All Your Ghosts In One Corner. Drawing on these musicians’ love for a range of weighty musical expression from doom metal to the deeply-rooted spirituality of saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, this record perfectly captures the depth of the abyss into which we faced. And yet this record isn’t about fear. Redemption is found in the life-affirming energy of these performances, which reflect a will to survive in the band’s committed focus and tenacity. These are spontaneous rituals performed to brace an entire community for the upcoming storm.” – Aerophonic Records