Gordon Grdina, Mat Maneri & Christian Lillinger - Live at the Armoury

The GLM trio brings together three world class improvisers from North America and Europe. The album was recorded live at the Armoury Studios and It captures the unedited intensity and excitement of the band playing live with the flawless audio expected from the studio experience.

Gordon Grdina is a JUNO Award (Canadian Grammy) winning oud/guitarist whose career has spanned continents, decades and constant genre exploration throughout avant-garde jazz, free form improvisation, contemporary indie rock and Arabic music. He leads many ensembles including Nomad Trio with Matt Mitchell and Jim Black, 10-piece Arabic/Avant-garde ensemble Haram and the Persian Inspired The Marrow with Mark Helias, Hank Roberts, and Hamin Honari.

Berlin based Christian Lillinger is the Artist of the Year Award at the inaugural 2021 Deutscher Jazzpreis and of prizes from broadcaster SWR and the German Record Critics, there is nobody else who plays the drums like Lillinger. He is "a drummer of remarkable skill and vision." (Downbeat); "the man taking drumming to a higher level" (Die Zeit); "a completely new type of jazz drummer" (Der Spiegel) . With astonishing technical prowess, he builds polyrhythmic, multi-dimensional structures and incorporates his own concepts of time and metre into a unique coalescence.

Mat Maneri, a leading improvisational voice of his generation, was born in Brooklyn in 1969. He began studying the violin at the age of five, but since borrowing a viola for a jam session at the 1998 ECM festival in Badenweiler, he has made the viola his instrument of choice. He's the son of the late seminal reeds player Joe Maneri.

Jazz writer Jon Garelick has written of Maneri’s distinctive style: “Maneri’s virtuosity is everywhere apparent – in his beautiful control of tone, in the moment-to-moment details that unfold in his playing, in the compositional integrity of each of his pieces, in what visual artists might call the variety of his ‘mark-making’: spidery multi-note runs, rhythmically charged double-stops and plucking, subtle and dramatic dynamic shifts.” He has a massive discography that touches every corner of the jazz and improvisational landscape.

This is the first meeting of the trio recorded in 2018. The music is filled with intense exploration to the wide ranges of the improvisers. They are able to invoke within the confines of the smallest gesture large sound worlds of historical significance. Statements are rooted in the American jazz tradition, European improvisation and Arabic Taqasim while not remaining confined to either genre or stylistic concerns. It is a group constantly searching and reaching a unified statement different from each of their substantial recorded output.
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