Jaume, who’s based in Marseilles, is perhaps best known to American audiences as a collaborator of Joe McPhee. Floridis will be joined by Kowald and German percussionist Günter “Baby” Sommer (see Critic’s Choice) on Friday night, and on Saturday afternoon he’ll play in an all-reed trio with Jaume and Ken Vandermark at the Cultural Center. On Pyrichia (released on his own Ano Kato label in 1991), with German bassist Peter Kowald and Greek lyrist Ilias Papadopoulos, he plays with muscular authority and acrobatic flexibility he can uncork a choked, raspy blurt one minute and unspool a long, elegant line the next. Floridis has also recorded rembetika (the guttural “Greek blues”) and lightning-fast Macedonian brass-band music, and brings a rough-hewn microtonality and thick, sensuous tone to collaborations with his northern counterparts. In the first three years the lineups included musicians from Japan, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, England, Germany, Belgium, Austria, and Switzerland this year, Greece and France get thrown into the melting pot as clarinetist Floros Floridis and reedist Andre Jaume perform in Chicago for the first time.įloridis is from the northern city of Thessaloniki, where Greek and Balkan cultures mingle freely–and where the clarinet plays a more prominent role in music than it does in western Europe. Next year the Empty Bottle Festival of Jazz and Improvised Music should add the word international to the name: in its brief history it has presented the local–and sometimes national–debuts of some of the most important and interesting players in Europe and Asia.

Peter brotzmann tell a green man