Nordic Quartet

John Surman soprano saxophone, baritone saxophone, alto clarinet, bass clarinet
Karin Krog voice
Terje Rypdal guitar
Vigleik Storaas piano
Recorded August 1994 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Nordic Quartet bonds an unconventional roster of musicians and conceptual approaches. John Surman reaches into his usual toolkit, favoring the lower range, while vocalist Karin Krog sews her Sheila Jordan-like vibrato into Terje Rypdal’s electric swoons and pianist Vigleik Storaas’s intimate embraces. One can expect Surman to shine above any group he might be a part of, but in “Traces” it is Rypdal and Krog who slink like the wolves of our interest through abandoned factories, such that piano and reeds seem to drop from the ceiling, each a spider invisibly tethered. And indeed, the album is about nothing if not traces, smeared on the windowpanes of childhood homes, one-bedroom apartments, and coffee shops. We hear this most in Surman’s duets: “Unwritten Letter” (w/Krog), “The Illusion” (w/Storaas), and “Double Tripper” (w/Rypdal), the latter a battle-scarred stumble into post-traumatic memory. Rypdal steps up the mood in “Gone To The Dogs,” where his softly rocking chording anchors us in a hammock knotted by soprano (like floss through silver teeth) and lit by a kiss of pianistic sun. It is in these instrumental tracks that the album takes off in more exciting directions—surprising in light of the healthy pathos Krog wove into Such Winters Of Memory. Her most intuitive contributions to this session are wordless, as in the ghostly overtones of “Ved Svørevatn,” which blisters like an underwater volcano. Lost to its own philosophies, it is a voice guided only by (and into) itself. “Wild Bird” is the last breath, a quiet account of dark thoughts and darker thinkers. A heat rash of organ spreads across Krog’s lyrical skin, itself a half-remembered cry, windy and chopped beyond recognition. This is our solitude realized in sound, naked as the moment we are born.

John Surman Quartet
Stranger Than Fiction

John Surman soprano and baritone saxophones, alto and bass clarinets
John Taylor piano
Chris Laurence double-bass
John Marshall drums
Recorded December 1993 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Reedist John Surman has laid much of his ECM path with the polished stones of his solo work. Whatever the setting, he is one who listens to his surroundings, be they atmospheric or human. In the latter vein comes “Canticle With Response,” which opens this wintry quartet date with pianist John Taylor, bassist Chris Laurence, and drummer John Marshall. Its sparse, porous mood is a leitmotif on Stranger Than Fiction. Yet rather than something to which the musicians return, it is something that returns to them, a ghost that finds movement where there is stillness. Like a sage’s hair in twilight, the group’s sound is gray yet aglow, worn to the bone by reflection in “A Distant Spring.” Surman sets his soprano to flight in the watercolors of “Tess,” for which Taylor splashes stories, each a step in river water. Those gray strands continue to bend and stretch, winding around the memorable theme of “Promising Horizons.” This haunting afterimage of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy bows to distillations of baritone and bass.

In this forest, dark with age, one can only travel “Across The Bridge,” guided by Surman’s prowess on the bass clarinet. His improvisations on said unwieldy instrument glisten despite the shadows of which they are composed. “Moonshine Dancer” welcomes us to a nocturnal circus, where performer and spectator number two in the night, their hands and laughter for each other alone, while “Running Sands” flows, like its namesake, at the touch of wind and water. A pliant solo from Laurence lifts us into the clouds, each topped like a sundae with delicious baritone caramel. Everything above funnels into the final “Triptych.” Like a fiber optic cable, it flows through the earth, hidden and dormant until the flick of a creative switch sets its veins thrumming with information—only here, you need nothing more than your ears to cup the light into oblivion.

John Surman
A Biography Of The Rev. Absalom Dawe

John Surman alto and bass clarinets, soprano and baritone saxophones, keyboards
Recorded October 1994 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

I would venture to say that anyone who has dug into the trove of ECM’s 1980s output has a soft spot for John Surman’s lone outings. The English reedman brings a signature sense of purpose to every musical line he touches, whether it’s by mouth through his favored baritone or by hand, laying down tasteful electronic contexts for looser improvisations. Now well into the 1990s, Surman outdid himself with A Biography Of The Rev. Absalom Dawe, treating listeners to his most deeply realized solo experience yet. Named for a cousin of Surman’s great-great grandmother, Biography employs the usual studio trickery for a sound that is wood-grained, born of earth and sky. “First Light” highlights another preferred tool in his kit—the bass clarinet—and grows from it feathers like no one else can. Following this dawn chorus for one, he plucks out yet another, drawing the needle of his soprano—honeyed but never saccharine—through the diaristic airs of “Countless Journeys.” Moods vary thereafter, cycling through the orthodox (“A Monastic Calling”), the pagan (“Druid’s Circle”), the questioning (“The Long Narrow Road”), and back into the unity of “Three Aspects,” which braids a trinity of sopranos, from which one breaks strays like a firefly to the far side of a darkening field. In addition to these evocative poems, “Wayfarer” and “The Far Corners” are among Surman’s best, the one somehow dancing bass clarinet on the head of a pin, the other paying homage to tone in a soprano solo for the ages. This leaves only “An Image,” refracting baritone lines through an echoing prism.

Surman brings out, especially through this album, a distinct sort of programmatic expression, which through its inflections evokes environments so internal they cannot be rendered, except through the gift of his interpretations.

John Surman
Road To Saint Ives

John Surman bass clarinet, soprano and baritone saxophones, keyboards, percussion
Recorded April 1990 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Although we might feel tempted to take Road To Saint Ives, one of John Surman’s most stunning solo albums to date, as a portrait of its titular coastal town, Surman states in his liner notes that such is not the case. Aside from the peppering of folk-inspired melodies in the soprano solos, the music breaks its own ground on the way toward unique improvisatory continents. Among those solos, “Polperro” makes for a transportive opener, while the echo effect of “Perranporth” dances on a cloud of whimsy. These solos are the heart of everything that makes Surman such a listeners’ gift. Their quality of tone and pitch speaks of the supremely nuanced command he has over his instruments. Each has the makings of antiquity blown through its core, as if webs of time were being pulled into all-encompassing songs. Surman is likewise a master of the miniature, as exemplified by the album’s shortest track, “Trethevy Quoit,” in which a crunchy flock of low reeds sounds one of the most memorable congregations in the program. Building up from these are the ensemble pieces in which he overdubs a chain of settings. From Michael Nyman-esque forest walks (“Rame Head”) to flirtations with his favored sequencer (“Mevagissey”), he explores the contours of the most lyrical baritone one can imagine. One moment we are gliding through a classic sci-fi cityscape while the next finds us skirting the edge of a piano-infused drone (“Bodmin Moor”). And one can hardly ignore the multifaceted sound of his bass clarinet, which floats playfully on every ripple of “Piperspool” but which weeps liquid gold against the prayerful organ of “Tintagel.” Surman’s lyricism seems to mourn the extent of its own beauty in this, his deepest nod. So too may we lose ourselves in gamelan feel of “Bedruthan Steps,” where that unmistakable soprano darts in and out of every temple as if the entire complex were but an ocean reef, every note a fish that swims its coves as nature itself must breathe.

Like all of Surman’s solo albums, this is a dream made real.

John Surman
Adventure Playground

John Surman baritone and soprano saxophones, bass clarinet
Paul Bley piano
Gary Peacock bass
Tony Oxley drums
Recorded September 1991 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

John Surman’s Adventure Playground is an appendix to Paul Bley’s previous quartet efforts, only now we find them in the company of bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Tony Oxley. And while the session does drip with the same brooding viscosity one would come to expect, the added colors of Oxley enhance the music’s inner states with endless novelty. Take, for instance, the anthemic frenzy he builds in his sole compositional contribution, “Just For Now,” by which he holds smelling salts under the nose of the listener’s attention. And again in Surman’s “Quadraphonic Question,” a lumbering yet somehow airy thing to which the rules of interpretation can only bow in appreciation of their own dismantling, his talents are especially brilliant, describing a host of people and places in bursts of expansive inquiries while managing to give those delicate soprano lines all the room they need to weep.

Not to be outdone, Surman rustles up a fine set of tunes from his own wellspring. Between the utterly gorgeous strains of “As If We Knew” and the nocturnal visions of “Twisted Roots” there is plenty to return to for future listening, while the baritone of “Duet For One” wanders up a long and teetering ladder until it can see above the clouds and, with a hand over the eyes, pinpoint a new destination on the horizon.

The unfathomable smoothness of that baritone is also a defining voice in “Figfoot,” the first of three tunes from Bley, who casts his own two cents with Oxley into an off-kilter bass line. Its rhythmic way thus shown, the music seems regard us with slogging humor. This is a dark swing of a piece with a characteristic tarnish, weathered like the patina of a familiar instrument. Bley hones his focus in “Twice Said Once,” yet another veil of intense and careful spontaneity through which the opaque visions of Surman’s bass clarinet leave us primed for the bluesy slice of gorgeousness that is “Seven.”

Peacock’s “Only Yesterday” may be the album’s plaintive opener, but it feels just as much like its conclusion. From a pianistic shower and tender reeds, it channels a flowing rivulet stained by the pigment of an unknown land. Peacock and Oxley dance somewhere upstream, bringing to their frolic an abiding sense of melancholy. In this percolating world of dreams and mythologies one finds an ever-visible thread running through it all. From this filament one can gather neither beginning nor end, but only the points one may grasp and allow it to lead one where it may. As with the album as a whole, it is a fully formed sphere even before the first note is played, waiting only for the light of our ears to reveal its more surprising topographies.