Midweek pick, June 19th, 2024: Okka Disk

By the mid 1990s, Chicago’s adventurous jazz scene was in full bloom. Veterans like Fred Anderson had kept the flame burning for decades, but a group of up and coming musicians, among them Ken Vandermark, were adding fresh spins and renewed sense of energy to fire music.

Around the same time, legendary German multi-reedist Peter Brötzmann had been hooking up with then Chicago residing drummer and percussionist Hamid Drake, and a few years later, musicians from what was then a burgeoning Scandinavian new jazz scene, were discovering common ground with the music coming out of the Windy City. This eventually lead to some truly amazing cross-Atlantic associations, among them Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet and Atomic / School Days, both of which I’ve been lucky to see live.

From 1995 to 2014, Okka Disk, a small record label then based in Milwaukee, documented and released a several of these exciting musical meetings, both the strictly Chicago based as well as collaborations with European musicians. They even ran a festival for a few years, Okkafest, the final edition of which happened almost exactly 10 years ago.

As far as I am aware, Okka Disk never went away. Their delightfully old school web site is still up. But ordering form there seems a bit clunky, if indeed it still works at all. So I was pleased to see the label put up their releases on Bandcamp recently, a collection they have been steadily adding to over the last few weeks. Moreover, they still seem to have CD copies of at least some of the albums available. I’m happy to say I have some already, and happier still to know that I can add to that collection.

Okka Disk released so much great stuff over their 15 or so years of activity, and perhaps a deep dive into their output would be in order at a later date. But for a start, Baraka by DKV (Ken Vandermark, Kent Kessler and Hamid Drake), and Cuts by FME (Vandermark, Nate McBride and Paal Nilssen-Love) are long standing faves that burned even brighter then I remembered when I revisited them recently. The Brötzmann Chicago Tentet albums Images and Signs are both excellent, as are Nuclear Assembly Hall and Distil by Atomic / School Days.