Peter Kowald

Awesome release, beautifully packaged: 1 CD + two DVDs with two documentaries by the anthropologist Laurence Petit-Jouvet tracing the 2000 US tour by German bassist Peter Kowald. The film finds Kowald performing with many of free improvisation's most important contemporary figures, such as the Bronx-born bassist William Parker. In early 2002, not long after this film was made, Kowald achieved a lifelong dream by securing an apartment in Harlem, which he regarded as the capital of black American culture. The joy that Kowald felt as he walked the streets of what he intended as his adopted home was transformed into tragedy when this widely admired musician, seemingly in the prime of health and creative power, suddenly passed away later that same year.