Month: March 2012

Rite On: The Bad Plus Take on Stravinsky and More

| Tyran Grillo

As a reviewer, my job is twofold: 1) to introduce artists to those who may not be familiar, and 2) to wax informative on the art they bring to studio or stage. The latter comes naturally. The former is where my pen begins to drag. Sure, I can mosey on over to any number of online bios and tell you that bassist Reid Anderson, pianist Ethan Iverson, and drummer Dave King—known collectively as The Bad Plus—have been wowing the discerning listener since the group’s 2000 redux. Sprung from the bedrock of Minneapolis (with Iverson’s biographical thread stretching back to neighboring Wisconsin), TBP lay their matches to a wealth of fuses, including a heaping portion of group originals and a smattering of enticing sidelines drawn from the popular canon. TBP now bring their latest project, “On Sacred Ground,” a reimagining of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, to Cornell’s Bailey Hall.

But does any of this tell you who Iverson, Anderson, and King really are? If you weren’t at the show (in a word: invigorating), then what service can these words glowing on your screen possibly bring to transient eyes? We can be thankful, then, that TBP is not the kind of outfit to hide behind publicity in lieu of interacting with fans, other musicians, and the errant reviewer whose starry considerations need not sugarcoat the already inexpressible. Out of graciousness and an abiding interest the spontaneity of open conversation (and what is jazz if not?), TBP participated in a Composer’s Forum on campus the afternoon of.

 

“Where are we in this?” posed King in reference to the band’s initial approach to Stravinsky. The transparency of their trial and error, of their frustration over and acceptance of the music, was refreshing. Of course, many words were spilt over the Classical vs. Jazz question, but by the end of the 90-minute discussion the trio had mopped them all up with one sentiment: “It’s honest to us.” They weren’t acting, King went on to say, but simply “playing our music.” Thus engaged, the band could discard the quibbles of classical expectations in favor of a feeling, of a kick and a smile, and steep both stage and audience in “the obviousness of how good everything is,” which is for them the heart of jazz.

It comes as no surprise that King was so adamant about integrity, for one imagines his challenge in the Stravinsky nexus to be the greatest of all: How does one bring out the rhythmic challenges inherent in Rite without coming across as “square”? Their solution was to approach these challenges from the inside out, laying the piece down before imagining what they could do with it. Working from the piano four hands arrangement, they began to see the Stravinskian tools they’d already been using in their own. Anderson expanded these sentiments by making a case for irreverence. In not being beholden to particulars, they could be true to the piece in a fundamental way. What was there, beyond and within the score at hand? How did their assimilation fit and what could they hear in it? To play a high concept piece like Rite, they realized, one needs to be an improviser. Score one for the away team.

Yet even with the orchestral peel and improvisational feel, how does one bridge the gap? Iverson’s answer: chamber jazz offers the guarantee of always hearing a voice. Consequently, instrumentation was not so much an issue. More important was maintaining faithfulness to a sense of communal spirit through the composer’s art. In this vein, Iverson admitted to a preference for older jazz recordings, which read for him more like folk music. In other words: freely. The goal in taking Rite was to give shape to those notorious rhythms in an attempt to move something forward.

Despite the lore surrounding its shocking 1913 premier, it was less the music and more the choreography (in combination with other social factors) of Stravinsky’s defining opus that induced the infamous riot that ensued. And sure, the structures are complex, the dissonances still formidable, but one would hardly have known it by the sheer exuberance with which TBP played it, for its outside-the-box aesthetic proved to be a smooth fit for the band’s avant-garde proclivities.

The performance was further enhanced by snazzy lighting design from architect Cristina Guadalupe and video from filmmaker Noah Hutton (all of these were cued in real-time response to the musicians). The imagery added an arguable dimension. On the one hand, it provided some moments of illustration, while on the other I found that it distracted from the decidedly acoustic processes unfolding before us. Either way, I appreciated those moments when sound and image fused well—in particular, in the movements of dancer Julie Worden, whose filmed body brought a taste of Nijinsky to “The Sacrifice.” Also effective was the opening sequence, a teetering journey through a melting winter landscape amid a collage of what sounded like manipulated scratchy LPs of Rite’s famous opening bassoon (familiar to anyone who’s seen Disney’s Fantasia and its churning creation sequence). Only now the bassoon line was intoned through the piano’s harp strings, toying with its own galactic edges in a swirl of resonant chains.

All of which made the band’s implosive entrance all the more exhilarating. The boom of that unified hit showed us just how dynamic a piano trio can be. Right off the bat, Anderson’s bass was a clear winner, especially in the distinctive refrains shared with Iverson. His slinking phrasings foreshadowed the more incendiary moments of cohesion, even as Iverson spread his fingers wide to capture every nuance he could. With King their language was even more lucid, and as a unit they translated the muddiness of it all with gritty, tactile clarity. Indeed, the presence of drums proved to be a guiding force in the fusion before us, seeming at once to react to and dictate the goings on.

TBP captured the freshness of a first hearing, such that even (if not especially) those of us familiar with the score could nod anew at the novelties therein. The shadows loomed somehow darker, the exuberances somehow brighter. And when the projection screen rose to bathe the audience in a vivid red light for the final dance, we were fully hooked in to the vibe they’d so diligently communicated.

TBP’s sacred ground was exactly that: a hallowed moment of music history poured into a bed of firewalking coals, still glowing. The playing was as gushing as the season it sought to evoke. The ultimate success, then, was whether or not the listener liked The Rite of Spring to begin with (my wife, for one, does not, but nonetheless appreciated the care and immediacy of the interpretation). One can only hope that those hearing it for the first time will have found doors newly opened.

“Thank you, that was a song by Igor Stravinsky,” said Anderson after this marathon introduction. With the ice of that intensity now broken by laughter, the band was ready to show us a different facet of its honesty, for now it was time to put away the music and dive into some originals.

First on tap was a jog around the memorable bass line of “Giant” (off their 2007 joint, Prog), which enchanted with its leapfrogging tenderness. Now in the absence of film, the cinematic qualities of these three talents came shining through with unstoppable vigor, glittering behind the veneer of Iverson’s downright oceanic pianism, riding a crescent moon’s arc into dreamland. This was the first of three tunes penned by Anderson, whose “Big Eater” (see 2003’s These Are The Vistas) rushed headlong into Iverson’s pointillist cascade, while the title cut off their latest, Never Stop, made for a fitting encore. With its hip lyricism and head-nodding charm, it was the perfect pick-me-up to let us down into the night.

Before the standing O, we were treated to two blasts of energy from King. The newish mosaic of staggered vistas and wild pianism that was “Wolf Out” made for a fitting window into its composer’s art. “1972 Bronze Medalist” (a touchstone of the TBP repertoire) was another colorful groove—machine music for the intelligent programmer.

Iverson’s contribution came in the form of “Re-Elect That.” This skittering romp off the beaten politic was like a tight fist uncurled finger by reluctant finger and sprinkled with gunpowder. It also sported King’s best solo of the night—a delicate, breathy thing of brushes and sensitivity—before ending on a John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt kind of fadeout.

The requisite cover came from the songbook of Aphex Twin, whose masterful “Flim” opened the trio to some of its most exciting territories. Those first notes had not a few gasping with recognition, leading into more of King’s superbly detailed visions, including a notable moment that found him pulling at the snare wires to get that unmistakable card-shuffling effect toward the end.

A house on fire? Hardly. More like a fire that needs no house to gain purchase. The moment is The Bad Plus’s kindling.

Eugène Ysaÿe: Sonates pour violon solo – Zehetmair (ECM New Series 1835)

| Tyran Grillo

 

Eugène Ysaÿe
Sonates pour violon solo

Thomas Zehetmair violin
Recorded September 2002 at Propstei St. Gerold, Austria
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Produced by Manfred Eicher

While I continue to wait—in vain, it seems—for a Thomas Zehetmair redux of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin on ECM, we do have, in this touchstone recording of EugèneYsaÿe’s comparable works for the same, easily one of the most enthralling albums to come from the repertoire in a long while. Composed between 1923 and 1924, Ysaÿe’s constructions emerged from a dearth of provocative solo violin literature to which his contributions were more than ornaments and seem as much predecessors as descendents of Bach (as if Bach had anticipatorily extracted from their less contestable passages a more concentrated form of solitude). If Bach’s is a perfect fruit, gilded by two centuries’ of difference, then Ysaÿe’s is both the soil that feeds it and nourishes its seeds, slumbering beneath a layer of frost in the morning sun.

The Grave of the Sonata No. 1 in G minor opens the set with a calligraphic flourish in reverse, funneling fanciful implications into an originary stroke. From these stirrings one already senses the many layers of historicity at work here. In the Fugato we encounter the sinewy balance of robustness and grace that infuses the performance as a whole, which glides off of Zehetmair’s bow like liquid mercury, those double stops seeming to come from a single string divided, opened rather than paralleled. His flexibility works wonders in the Allegretto, contrasting serrated runs with more amorphous shapes, before unwrapping its sweetest virtuosities in the Finale. This tour de force is on par with any of the Paganini caprices and again showcases the powerful subtleties of Zehetmair’s unparalleled (no pun intended) double stops.

The first movement of the Sonata No. 2 in A minor, appropriately titled “Obsession,” is many things to the Preludio of Bach’s Partita No. 3: fragmentation, recapitulation, homage, and parody, to name a few. Like two galaxies shuffled together, these monumental signatures share more than a few loops and hooks, exhaling nebulae on the muted strings of “Malinconia.” This call from distant shores is an afterlife brought into the continental drift of shadows. A lute-like interlude brings us to the ecstatic exposition that “Les furies,” from which Paul Giger draws (at 0:42) an intertextual marker in Chartres (listen for it in “Crossing”).

This distinct sense of exuberant introversion continues in the Sonata No. 3 in D minor (“Ballade”), the nuances of which we were given a taste alongside Heinz Holliger’s Violinkonzert. Thus do we bridge over into the Sonata No. 4 in E minor, which nods again in Paganini’s direction. Its tripartite structure cradles a languid Sarabande, after which the enthralling Finale—during which there hardly seems a moment when at least two strings are not being engaged—closes the most notoriously demanding piece of the set.

The movements pare down one by one, giving us the diptych of the Sonata No. 5 in G major. Equal parts Debussean ritual and imageless reflection, it concludes in a sensuous dance filled with avian throatedness. So, too, do the flying swoops of the single-movement Sonata No. 6 in E major regale us with songs of clouds and earth alike.

With a tone deferential yet trailblazing, Zehetmair captures and sets free the genetic codes enraptured by and through these sonatas. I cannot imagine a more ideal performer, or more ideal acoustics than the crisp reverberations of Austria’s Propstei St. Gerold. Every finger seems to rotate on its own axis in the grander solar system of Zehetmair’s playing, at the center of which shines the sun of Ysaÿe’s glorious music. Each planet is of such distinct character that as a family they seem to inhabit their own respective universes, meeting only in the aftermath of a binding cataclysm, which necessitates the retelling of their lost cultures. Picking through this referential hall of mirrors, we see exactly what we hear: a spontaneous recreation.

Valentin Silvestrov: Requiem for Larissa (ECM New Series 1778)

| Tyran Grillo

Valentin Silvestrov
Requiem for Larissa

Yevhen Savchuk choirmaster
The National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine
Volodymyr Sirenko conductor
Valentin Silvestrov conductor
Recorded February 2001 in Kiev, Ukraine
Engineers: Arkady Vichorev and Valery Stupnitsky
Produced by Manfred Eicher

“I do not write new music.
My music is a response to and an echo of what already exists.”

The requiem is a curious object: on the one hand it memorializes someone important to the composer, while on the other most listeners will have never known the dedicatee. In that sense the requiem fulfills a transitory function, and a communicative one at that, bringing a sense of relational knowledge to the abyss. In the case of Valentin Silvestrov’s entry into the Requiem ledger, I feel only the mise-en-abyme of love, and the shape of its web after a cold wind has snapped half of its axial threads. Written between 1997 and 1999, it was intended to be the Ukrainian’s last composition—so affected was he by the death of his wife, musicologist Larissa Bondarenko. As with his above sentiments, the sound-world it introduces to us is a churning sea bordered in humility.

The more one listens to Silvestrov, the more one becomes accustomed to the piano’s (omni)presence in his orchestral imagination. It is both center and periphery of an ever-expanding field in which the wool of darkness is spun into light. And thus it is from the piano that the Requiem’s vocality proceeds, the choir sewn into the larger fabric with divided immediacy, such that emotions merely constitute an audible act shrouding an internal need for stillness. Tenor and alto solos shimmer against a reverberant mesh of harp and strings, each a clear path to struggle. In them Silvestrov admirers will recognize a redux of his Shevchenko setting in Silent Songs, and in the Agnus Dei a choral expansion of his Der Bote, the last piece of her husband’s Larissa ever heard. Though cut from a template, they whisper a self-taught language. Winds pressing in at all sides carry us back into the piano’s embrace, in which we realize that heaven is not a space above but one within. Retreating farther inward, morning glories all, we fold in moonlight with a simple bow, finding some respite in the laborious nature of our surroundings. Effervescence balances at the fulcrum of acceptance, only to be dispersed in the swirling pool of the final section, dissolving behind closed eyes.

I know I would not be alone in expressing thankfulness that Silvestrov has since continued to compose, but in doing so I would be missing the point. Aside from the long-distance comforts my meager consolations may or may not provide, such a gesture is as tear-distorted as the sounds that inspired it. I might also praise this recording for its engineering, performances, and packaging, but when reviewing a requiem these concerns are inconsequential. There is no way that such a project could defeat itself, for its heart has already been punctured by the loss from which it continues to grow. It is its own entity now, atrophied and crawling, searching for rest in a landscape without berth.

Larissa was unknown to me, but whenever I listen to this music in her honor, I feel as if that lack of knowledge becomes filled with something vaster, a nourishing remembrance that sustains everything we are once we have been thrown into the center of the universe to slumber whence we came.

<< Dave Holland Big Band: What Goes Around (ECM 1777)
>> Heiner Goebbels: Eislermaterial (ECM 1779 NS)

Between One Embrace and the Next: Ulysses’ Gaze and the Pace of Discovery

| Tyran Grillo

And, if the soul is about to know itself, it must gaze into the soul.
–Plato, Alcibiades 133b

The film

In a quiet arthouse theater one night in May of 1997, a scene from Theo Angelopoulos’s 1995 masterwork Ulysses’ Gaze reached out and holds me still. In it the protagonist, A (Harvey Keitel), is relating a personal story to a curator from Skopje (Maia Morgenstern, who plays every woman Keitel encounters throughout the film’s nearly three-hour duration). As the latter runs alongside the train that threatens to vanquish their transient encounter, A’s story lures her into the clattering comforts of the car, and into the emptiness of his heart. He tells her of stumbling upon the birthplace of Apollo, of seeing there something so vivid that every Polaroid he attempted to take came out only blank, “as if my glance wasn’t working.” In those empty squares, those black holes made tangible, he sees both the past of which his body and mind were formed and the future into which he blindly walks.  Thus does Angelopoulos engage us, finding in this nameless figure an everyman whose quest for origins beyond his self leads only to a hollowing out of that self.

We see a film: Spinning Women by Yannakis and Miltos Manakias. It is perhaps the first film, speculates A’s voiceover. The first gaze. Yet once we are released from its black-and-white confines, the only gaze afforded us is of misty waters, indistinct and close to blanking out. Monochrome pales into color as we witness Yannakis’s last moments, and the single ship upon the sea that is his farewell.

The vessel looms like a face, fills the screen with its expressive pace, and breaks the seal on a filmic letter like no other.


“How many borders must we cross to reach home?”

Yannakis, we learn, left behind three reels of undeveloped film, and it is these A wants like a light bulb hungers for electricity that will one day pop its filament. We contemplate the ship and the three missing reels as A sets out on his personal journey. He hopes a film archivist from Athens may be able to help him, but is instead escorted through crowded streets in which A has not set for 35 years, and which echo with the controversies of his latest film beyond the theater doors it has closed.

A follows the trail into Albania, a land of snow and silence where refugees stare at the mountainous border as if it might speak on their behalf.

A woman who hasn’t seen her sister in 47 years since the civil war asks if A might take her along. His cab driver agrees and drops her off at Korytsa. Only she doesn’t recognize it as the place of her girlhood. She stands in the middle of the street, empty save for the agony of her shattered expectations. Part of us stays with her, knowing that all the comfort in the world will never alleviate the wounds she has endured to get here.

Haunted as much emotionally by the Manakias brothers’ film as we are visually by it, A maps a path of ruin through the Balkan Wars and the First Great War. The turmoil of the region is encoded in every frame of those missing reels. Yet the brothers were interested less in politics and more in people. They recorded “all the ambiguities,” A tells the woman from Skopje, who at first takes no interest in his obsession, which overtakes him to the point where he relives the brothers’ exile by the Bulgarian government as collaborators against the state, feels the confiscation of their archives like an artery ripped from his chest, smells the gunpowder of a mock execution. He wants to find his own first glance, long lost yet always tapping him on the shoulder, and his only way to know where it leads is to take on traumas of which he will never be a part.

His itinerary reads like a litany of destruction. He follows footsteps into a time where his mother can care for him, a substitute in memory for what eludes him in the present. Then again, in this film there is no “present” as such, bearing as it does an eternal trace of that which bore it. A shares a dance with his mother, and in the space of that dance a family is destroyed, dispossessed, and broken before posing for its final group portrait by an illusory photographer who may be the director himself, if not us in his place.

A awakens from that dream, shaken and silent. At the docks of an overcast morning, he bids farewell to Skopje, even as the head of an enormous statue of Lenin is craned onto a barge behind them.

The nameless woman questions his tears. “I’m crying because I can’t love you,” he tells her between sobs, and tears himself away from the only security he may ever know.

“The war’s so close it might as well be far away,” observes an old journalist friend in Belgrade, where the head of its Film Archives has agreed to meet. The man tells A he once had the reels, but after failing to devise the proper chemical formula to develop them, gave them to a colleague in Sarajevo with whom he lost touch during the war. Of course, A insists on going to Sarajevo. He rows a boat into dark waters (an allegory, perhaps, for the toughness of Balkan reality itself) and nearly falls into a double life with a widow in mourning.


“The first thing God created was the journey, then came doubt…and nostalgia.”

Upon arriving in the city, surrounded by bombs and crumbling edifices, he foolishly asks of those fleeing around him, “Is this Sarajevo?” as if his purpose in being there were more important than their demise. It is the deepest moment of denial, and therefore of weakness, in the film, and throws us into the soul of a man whose love for history has blinded him to the visceral impact of its making.

He finds who he is looking for: a film museum curator (the inimitable Erland Josephson) by the name of S. Even as the air explodes with dust and bloodshed, S commends A for his faith in having traveled this far for something believed to be lost.

S, we learn, has been searching for that magic formula for years, and A’s persistence emboldens him to finish his task.


“You have no right to keep it locked away. The gaze…it’s the war, the insanity, the death…”

It is in Sarajevo that we learn the true meaning of the fog, which creeps in like a protective force, a shroud in which one can live without fear, if only for a brief time. In its embrace neighbors can speak without words. In its diffuse glow a youth orchestra made of Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, traveling from city to city during ceasefire, can play its song for all to hear.  But even this screen cannot keep them from harm, for behind its veil children are shot before their parents, thrown to the water from which they took shape. And so, the man who rescued a gaze from certain death now becomes a part of it, but not before leaving the successfully developed reels.

Yet we never see those reels, only their light flitting across A’s weary eyes. Whether or not he finds them is as immaterial as they legend they have grown to be. In those reels lies a dream, “a gaze struggling to emerge from the dark…a kind of birth.” And in birth there is no sight but the glare of strife, no sound but the wail of projection.


“What am I if not a collector of vanished gazes?”

And just what is all this gazing about? Beyond that of the camera, of the eye in reality (and of the soul in non), it is for me the slumber of the centuries, dismembered and left to drift like Lenin’s statue on river’s flow. It is the pathos of pathos, forever unrequited in the blink of a fettered eye.

As a teenager I used to have a recurring dream. In it I was younger still, perhaps 12, and clothed modestly in a tunic and brown leather sandals. I ran through a hilly landscape, dodging brush and fauna to the top of a rocky slope. And there I lay low beneath an olive tree, a quiver of arrows slung across my back, overlooking a landscape of ruins. I like to think that I was also gazing, like A, upon Apollo’s birthplace, of which I can remember nothing but the feeling: an unanswering abyss of rock and overgrowth into which I cast my questioning stones.

The more tangible it is, the more unrecoverable a past becomes, the more easily burned, the more easily dressed in the clothes of the dead.

The music

Among the many sonic cartographies it has innovated, ECM has redefined almost every genre it has touched. This includes the film soundtrack, which, through the work of Angelopoulos’s sonic partner, Eleni Karaindrou, has shown us music that stands alone before reaching toward the images it cradles.

Eleni Karaindrou
Ulysses’ Gaze
(ECM New Series 1570)

Kim Kashkashian viola soloist
Vangelis Christopoulos oboe
Andreas Tsekouras accordion
Sopcratis Anthis trumpet
Vangelis Skouras french horn
Christos Sfetsas cello
Georgia Voulvi voice
Lefteris Chalkiadakis conductor
Recorded December 1994 at Sound Studio, Athens
Engineer: Yannis Smirneos
Produced by Manfred Eicher

This soundtrack introduced me to the Angelopoulos’s cinematic world long before I saw a single frame. It would be two years before I had a chance to see the selfsame film, by which time I had heard the soundtrack and stared at the booklet stills so many times that I felt like I knew every ventricle of Ulysses’ pensively beating heart. Though set against a backdrop of primal discovery, it ends up becoming its own discovery, linking the personal to the political to the universal in one red thread, represented to its fullest by Kashkashian’s gut-wrenching playing. Though mainly driven by the soloist, there are splendid moments of conversation with oboe, as in “Ulysses’ Theme Variation II.” Yet what comes across as an intensely mournful theme can, with just an intensification of speed, turn into an exuberant dance.

Among the more touching moments in both film and soundtrack is “The River.” With its elegiac horn wafting out over the misty waters like a requiem for a fallen past never to be recaptured in the crumbling ruins of an age blinded by innovation, it breathes through our rib cages with voices of passage. The 17-minute spread of “Ulysses’ Gaze – Woman’s Theme, Ulysses’” is the album’s most enchanting encapsulation, the entire narrative telescoped into a single epic mosaic, drawn from the same ink as the tears of its characters. A lilting accordion carries us like a feather on wind into the inner portal of a traditional Byzantine Psalm, from which we emerge with that same thread in our grasp, sinking deeper with every reiteration until the seedlings of our plight become the stuff of myth and melted celluloid.

Ulysses’ Gaze bears dedication to the memory of the great Italian actor Gian Maria Volonté, whose role in the film was cut short by a fatal heart attack and recast to Josephson. In kind, I can only dedicate this review to the memory of Angelopoulos (1935-2012), a director in whose oeuvre everyone seems to find a ghostly double self, whispering at the fringe of conscious imagination.

May his gaze live on.

“I live my life in ever widening circles that rise above things.
I probably won’t come last, but I’ll try. I circle around God.”

<< Alexandr Mosolov: Sonatas for piano Nos. 2 and 5, etc. (ECM 1569 NS)
>> Thomas Demenga: J. S. Bach/B. A. Zimmermann (ECM 1571 NS)

Yelena Eckemoff: FORGET-me-NOT

| Tyran Grillo

Yelena Eckemoff
FORGET-me-NOT

Yelena Eckemoff piano
Mats Eilertsen double-bass
Marilyn Mazur drums and percussion
Recorded August 17 & 18, 2011
STC Recording Studios, Copenhagen, Denmark
Engineer: Andreas Hviid
Mixed by Rich Breen, Burbank, CA
Produced by Yelena Eckemoff

Readers of between sound and space will, I hope, be familiar with Yelena Eckemoff, who has been skirting the ECM fringe for some time now in her working relationships with such artists as Peter Erskine and, most recently, Marilyn Mazur. The latter provides a crisp and delectable palette to the Russian-born pianist’s latest effort, FORGET-me-NOT, which also features Tord Gustavsen recruit Mats Eilertsen on bass. From the breathy clusters of “Resurrection of a Dream” it is clear that Eckemoff has written yet another distinct chapter in the storybook moods of her compositional development. Against a backdrop of twittering percussion and arco haunts she carries us through this slick opener with equal parts style and fortitude, riffing on the ether with her most unbound pianism yet. Mazur is splendid on cymbals amid a bevy of colorful kin, Eilertsen firm yet sensitive, soloing as if in memory of the lullaby that brought us here. Thus set, the album’s tone moves in shades through the child-like wonders of the title track to its densest dramas in “Welcome a New Day.” Along the way Eckemoff treats us to not a few surprises, of which the crumbling edifice of “Maybe” paints perhaps the most intriguing. The punctilious “Sand-Glass” further hones the set’s serrations and leaves us prepared to dissect the delightful little groove that is “Five” (in both title and number). Eckemoff’s classical roots come to the fore in “Schubert’s Code.” Making its timid entrance onto a stage draped with patterns of the nineteenth century, it nevertheless sparkles with clear and present reflections and showcases a real feel for detail. “Quasi Sonata,” on the other hand, rolls out the retro on a smaller scale and feels most like fleeting reminiscence. The pleasant dissonances sprinkled throughout “Seven” (in title but not in number) also bring us into the unexpected, a place where cascades and stepwise chains share a drink and a smile, while the more erratic “Trapped in Time” brings us into a swing to remember, replete with Mazur’s solid rim hits and spiraling energies.


(photo by Nicola Fasano)

FORGET-me-NOT is an album without borders, a gallery of animate snapshots that float on the wind. Its fluid transitions hang like a necklace from the neck of a mother who stares through the window of her past and finds a thousand songs to sing. Let’s hope this is a sign of things to come for an artist who continues to add feathers to her wings with each new release.

Bobo Stenson Trio: Serenity (ECM 1740/41)

| Tyran Grillo

 

Bobo Stenson Trio
Serenity

Bobo Stenson piano
Anders Jormin double-bass
Jon Christensen drums
Recorded April 1999, HageGården Music Center, Brunskog, Sweden
Engineer: Åke Linton
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Serenity is the Bobo Stenson Trio’s night and day. With bassist Anders Jormin and drummer Jon Christensen, pianist Stenson has not only carved a niche for himself but has also redefined the tools with which he carves. With this date the Trio takes itself to yet another level, fashioning anew the very material to which those tools are laid. Something in the opening harmonics of “T.” tells us so. Blossoming against percussive footfalls, Jormin dances a tango of shadow and light into cool slumber, the dreams of which are mapped by the cardinal points of the next four tracks (“West Print,” “North Print,” “East Print,” “South Print”), each a magnetic improvisation which draws its directionality not only from the earth but also from the gravity of our emotions. The surest of these attractions brings us into the exigencies of the “Polska of Despair (II).” This chromatic twist never winds into the legs it needs to stand but only dissolves even as it hoists itself up on crumbling melodic crutches. In “Golden Rain” Jormin’s bass emotes as if a tree might sing, dropping fruit to the tune of Christensen’s cymbals as Stenson’s keys take in their surroundings like chlorophyll to sunlight. The nod to Wayne Shorter (“Swee Pea”) that follows sounds more like the rain that precedes it in title, falling as it does with the rhythm of a weeping cloud. And by the time Jormin redraws those paths with a recognizable surety, we accept it not as a resolution but as an amendment to its scattered beginnings in the piano’s fertile soil. “Simple & Sweet” begins with a protracted intro from Jormin, which after two and a half minutes of brilliance guides Stenson into view against an organic flow from Christensen. This is followed by Hanns Eisler’s “Die Pflaumenbaum,” one of the most reflective turns in the album’s passage. Christensen is brilliant on cymbals along the way, with nary a drum in earshot. “El Mayor” (Silvio Rodriguez) smoothes us out into the comforts of another rainy afternoon, threading itself through every droplet with a grace of a prayer and the immediacy of its answering. Jormin stands out yet again, playing almost pianistically, while Stenson proves that in the sometimes mountainous terrain of the ballad he is our most reliable Sherpa. The haunting group improvisation “Fader V (Father World)” is deep to the last drop, beginning inside the piano (as if in the heart) and drawing from it an array of ribbons around the maypole of memory. Yet the pace is contemplative, filled with bittersweet joy. Jormin’s bass rings true like the voice of the past, at once domineering and loving. “More Cymbals” might as well be Christensen’s middle name, though its results forefront only whispering rolls along with Jormin’s pained arco trails. “Die Nachtigall” (Hanns Eisler) is another foray into smoother territories. It brushes its way through space and time like a street sweeper in the mind, quarantining all the refuse of a varicolored life into the sewers—only we follow it through those corroded pipes, past families of rats and dim reflections and out into the ocean where they are reborn along the waves. The rubato smattering of sticks and strings that is “Rimbaud Gedicht” brings us at last to the most awesome track on the record: “Polska of Despair (I)” embodies the perfect combination of propulsive drumming, buoyant bass work (Jormin even pays brief homage to Andersen’s “305 W 18 St” in his solo), and soaring pianism that every trio aspires to. Finally, “Tonus” is classic Stenson. Around a bass line for the ages he weaves vivacious improvisational lines into a braid from which we may wish never to detangle ourselves.

The topography of Serenity is as varied as that of life, speaking to and from the heart of what this outfit is capable of. This record is first and foremost about clarity, second about a distant storm whose image is its soundtrack. In balancing these two forces—circumstance and memory—Stenson and company forge a shining star whose light illuminates everything that we are. It’s easy to let the spell of its lyricism wash over you like a song, but we are reminded that the Trio speaks as much as it sings, bringing life to a vocabulary that can only be uttered at the keyboard, fingerboard, and drum, each traipsing at the edge where words fail.

<< Ensemble Belcanto: Come un’ombra di luna (ECM 1739 NS)
>> Crispell/Peacock/Motian: Amaryllis (ECM 1742)

Striving for a Perfect Soul: Indonesian Shadow Puppetry Comes to Cornell

| Tyran Grillo


(photo source: Buda Wayang)

Purbo Asmoro
Gamelan Mayangkara
Bailey Hall, Cornell University
March 14, 2012
8:00 pm

“I’m just happy to create,” says Purbo Asmoro, a living treasure of the art of Indonesian shadow puppetry. Born in East Java in 1961, Purbo embodies not only the legacy behind his immense skill—the performances of which are called wayang kulit—but he is also one of the art’s most creative practitioners. As a dhalang, or master of shadows, his duty is threefold: direction of the gamelan ensemble that accompanies his singing and the action it describes, recitation of dialogue and story, and manipulations of the puppets themselves. Not surprisingly, Purbo comes from a long line of puppeteers whose traditions he has expanded. His innovations span the gamut from the practical (he designs some of the sets used during performance, composes, and choreographs) to the political (by, for instance, introducing leading female characters in an attempt to equalize gender relations in this otherwise male-dominated tradition).


Asmoro

Audience members were treated to an overture as they walked into the venue—calls and responses over a drone provided by the Gamelan Mayangkara, an ensemble of gongs, percussion, and voices under the masterful direction of Wakidi Dwidjomartono. The sounds were as lulling as they were exciting, putting us in a frame of mind unlike anything experienced in Bailey Hall this season. Some were perhaps surprised to notice that we were behind the screen where the shadows work their magic. This practice has come about due to spectatorship in Indonesia, where audiences prefer to admire the beauty of the puppets themselves. To compensate, the shadows were shown by a clever projection on the left half of a large screen above the stage. The screen’s right half revealed another surprise in the form of a simultaneous translation by Cornell alumna Kathryn Emerson ’83, who typed in real time as Purbo worked his vocal stylings. Every performance has variations and this method is the only way they can be shared abroad. The fact that Emerson is the sole person in the world qualified to do this underscored the privilege of being there.

A rousing hit of gamelan and drums introduced us to the story proper. Our sorrowful protagonist was Arjuna, one of five brothers featured in the Indian Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata. Banished to a forest for his immoral behaviors, Arjuna finds solace in meditation and reflects on the error of his ways. He rejects his past and desires instead to become of use to the world.


Arjuna
(photo source: Indonesia Impressions)

Meanwhile, Niwatakawaca, a malicious ogre king possessed of arrogance as unwieldy as his name, professes his love for the goddess Supraba. As he repulses us with his dreams of attaining her, he engages in a “generic macho dance that ogres do.” His advisors warn him against this infatuation. “A horse can’t marry a duck,” informs one. “The poor duck. Think about it.” Adds another, in a juxtaposition of bawdy humor and insight characteristic of Purbo’s delivery, “Do you really love her, or do you just want to control her?” Niwatakawaca pays them no heed and vows to accomplish the impossible by conquering the heavens and taking Supraba for himself, yet none other than Arjuna stands in his way. Before sending his troops heavenward, Niwatakawaca demands the mortal be brought to him.


Niwatakawaca

The ensuing battle scenes brought out a wonder in all and were infinitely more thrilling than any clash on screen or stage. To this end, Purbo kept the action sonically rich with the clanging of the keprak, metal plates played by the feet for the sake of emotional punch and as a means of signaling the gamelan players to match his timing.

Facing certain death amid this clamor, the gods call upon Arjuna, but first test him with three temptations, all of which he passes. Arjuna is promised great rewards for his dedication and battles with Niwatakawaca, using Supraba to bring out his weakness: an amulet in the roof of his mouth that becomes exposed when he laughs with pleasure at the seeming success of his conquest, only to fall prey to Arjuna’s arrow.


Supraba

In between all of this was a comic interlude. Utilizing only a fraction of the usual 60+ minutes, Purbo showed off his improvisational flair with a few good-natured jabs at Cornell (“founded on a lonely hill in the middle of nowhere”) and its gorges (“which now have fences”). These, along with a surprise appearance by an Obama puppet (“Look at his shoes,” says a groveler. “Made in Indonesia?”), had us laughing at every turn before Purbo waxed thankful on the efforts of those without whom wayang would never have been “something for the world to own.”


(photo source: Village Voice blog)

In context Purbo’s performances can last for hours, sometimes through the night, and I doubt anyone in attendance would have complained had he done so. In this regard he is clearly a holistic thinker who takes his audience into consideration: everything from the sounds to the visuals must fit like wing to bird, and beyond like bird to sky. And although between performances at home and abroad Purbo teaches at the Indonesian Institute of Arts, I would venture to say that his performances are equally instructive in what they say about life. In his own words: “The mission of wayang is to present moral messages. The entertainment aspect adds spice to the moral aspect, the main values in life: loyalty, heroism, messages for good.”

(See this article in its original form at the Cornell Daily Sun.)

Of Beautiful Boys and Elegant Girls: A Review and Interview with Tessa Souter

| Tyran Grillo

She looked at me with intensity. “It is the gift of the great,” she went on, and the sound of her low voice seemed to have the accompaniment of all the other sounds, full of mystery, desolation, and sorrow, I had ever heard—the ripple of the river, the soughing of the trees swayed by the wind, the murmurs of the crowds, the faint ring of incomprehensible words cried from afar, the whisper of a voice speaking from beyond the threshold of an eternal darkness.”
–Joseph Conrad

(photo by Richard Conde)

Anglo-Trinidadian songstress Tessa Souter has been called a “vocal butterfly.” The comparison stands, but deserves elucidation. It is not simply that words seem to flutter from her lips with all the shimmering delicacy of a Blue Morpho, but also that she spreads sentiments like pollen across a veritable field of musical touch points. Her diction lilts with natural care, as might a windblown leaf or feather, yet her sense of melody reveals such profound commitment to clarity that our meager analogies begin to break down once we let ourselves get carried away. And yet who can help it, when she splits the compass in so many directions that we wish we could chase after them all?

Souter’s career began in writing, through which she established a voice. On paper her words were already singing. She officially dropped that voice in the roiling pond of the New York City music scene in 1999, where she has been beguiling audiences ever since. As a newcomer to said scene and the varicolored jazz it nurses, I came to Souter’s magic in a roundabout way when, after reviewing a performance at which she was also present, she e-mailed me with her compliments. Thus it was through our shared appreciation of the art of live music-making that I first discovered her string of studio pearls. With a kindness and openness that all would do well to follow, she welcomed me into a sound-world where countless others have traveled. These are not journeys from which one returns unchanged, but through which one grows through her singular narrative power.

As you read on to my reviews of her first three albums, I encourage you to click open her website and let its samples wash over you.

Listen Love
Tessa Souter vocals
Mark Berman piano
Freddie Bryant guitar
Miles Okazaki guitar
Essiet Essiet bass
Chembo Cormiel percussion

Souter begins this, her self-produced debut, with a nod to Norma Winstone (one of jazz’s few comparable voices), whose lyrics to Jimmy Rowles’s “The Peacock” only enhance the lushness of a lone voice, swept along by graceful pianism. Like its namesake’s tail fan, aesthetic pleasures provide the practical function of gathering and directing sound, that we might better match its rhythms. Traversing love’s more painful avenues, Souter guides us to Pat Martino’s “Willow,” using her own lyrics to unravel the protection of its shade. Nature and passion tighten, yearning for someone with whom to share its undiscovered vistas. “Caravan” glistens with Sephardic curves as it works its spell somewhere between sleeping and waking, laying its constellation bare, one star at a time. After these darker considerations the title song from Jon Lucien urges us into happier oases, where Souter’s gorgeous ad-libbing lights up the night with dance. Here, as throughout, the sparse arrangements allow her all the sky she needs to unfurl. The album’s tenderest surprise comes with “Fragile.” The Sting tune reconnects with its ancient heart, winding in a slow descent into life’s deepest limitations. Souter then offers her intimate original, “You Don’t Have To Believe.” Its almost conversational language again casts Nature as a force that both brings lovers together and keeps them apart. On a planet where storms comingle with peace, we must remember such things about ourselves. After the voice-and-drum duet of “Daydream,” we are stirred into the cocktail of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Insensatez.” Threaded by the chatter of woodblock and improvisations, it is the memory we hold dear as we step through the waters of “Left Alone” and onto neo-soul shores of Pharoah Sanders’s “The Creator Has A Master Plan.” A positive note, to be sure, on which to end an album of tense ups and downs, tying threads into a unified line, sustained like her final perfect high into that cloud where rainbows hide in the shadows of adoration.

Nights of Key Largo
Tessa Souter vocals
Joel Frahm tenor and soprano sax
Kenny Werner piano
Romero Lubambo guitar
Jay Leonhart bass
Billy Drummond on drums

Nights of Key Largo is a love letter to love letters—in this case, thirteen standards, whose contours tremble with renewal in her breath. From the Braziliana of “The Island” to Souter’s drop-dead gorgeous rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine” (just listen and feel it), this Japan-only release builds upon the instrumental telepathy of its predecessor with even more pronounced solos and interaction between musicians. Bassist Jay Leonhart is especially notable, lending as he does a pure alchemical touch to such cuts as “Moon Dance” and “Close Enough for Love,” the latter a smooth and sultry dip into nocturnal waters, where sleep is as far from those who want to dream as touch is from those wish to love, and yet in which the promise of passion lingers. A breathy rendition of “The Look of Love” finds Souter, accompanied only by Kenny Werner at the keys, mending this fragile melody into something unbreakable. Werner excels further in “All or Nothing at All” and in the title number, which sounds like something that might soundtrack a cruise dining room while also plunging us overboard into a complex ocean of resolute affections. Yet his prettiest vibes emote from “Night of the Carnival,” which contends with “Moon and Sand” as the album’s crowning jewel, made all the more sparkling by Joel Frahm’s soprano. Frahm also solos beautifully on (and with) “Slow Hot Wind,” while guitarist Romero Lubambo adds his patent touches to “You Only Live Twice” and “So Many Stars,” drawing threads in both to every lonely soul looking for escape in a universe that is two parts darkness to every flash in the proverbial pan of love. Not to be forgotten, Billy Drummond is the album’s heartbeat. With a palette as colorful as Souter’s, he brushes his fingers through the hair of songs like “I’m Glad There is You” with a tenderness to match. Like the album as a whole, he paints in swaths of dazzling minutiae.

Obsession
Tessa Souter vocals
Jason Ennis guitar
Gary Wang bass
Conor Meehan drums
Victor Prieto accordion
Todd Reynolds violin
Ansel Matthews backing vocals

As soon as those first licks of “Eleanor Rigby” caress our ears, we know that on Obsession we are in for the most eloquent and mature Souter experience yet. Color me shocked if anyone has turned a Beatles cover into something more enchanting. Once we hit Nick Drake territory on “River Man,” if not already, we begin to see the themes Souter loves so dearly. Its conflation of the organic and the emotional is a meta-statement, a cascade of words as fluid as her fantastic session band. And as the title track twists and turns, carried to awesome fruition by a sure vocal line and the ever-descriptive solos of Jason Ennis (a standout), we realize that sometimes our most life-changing moments are those most bittersweet. Sheila Jordan would be proud. Urged by a propulsive rhythm section, Cream’s “White Room” gets a soaring treatment. A groove for our age, it once again proves Souter’s ability to revitalize the cover. Her honeyed meringue tops Gary Wang’s flowery bass lines in “Afro Blue Footprints” and “Make This City Ours Tonight” as if they were made for one another. Obsession works in contrasts, as between the brooding introspection of “Crystal Rain (Sun Shower) and the heavenward glance of “Empty Faces (Vera Cruz),” but Souter’s originals are reason enough to become familiar with this album.  “Now and Then” floats on Victor Prieto’s watery accordion, laying down a path where the sunlit past and the moonlit present stroll hand in hand toward reconciliation. And let me be the last to undermine “Usha’s Wedding” with my paltry expressions, for however we may choose to characterize that which must be heard to be understood, in the end that naked voice is the angel who promises a vessel waiting to carry every last one of us into loving arms.

(photo by Janis Wilkins)

As of this writing I have yet to experience Souter live, and so for the moment I can only listen from afar. In attempt to bridge that listening gap, she kindly took time out of her busy schedule (having just returned from a successful Russian tour) to answer my questions via e-mail:

Your voice is clearly at the center of every song. How do you combine it so selflessly with other instruments and their players? Is this a relationship of tension? of harmony? of conversation? of painting?

Hmm, well, I really love listening to the other instruments being played by wonderful musicians. And I played the guitar and sang during my formative years, so maybe I like to create a space for the other instruments, too, just naturally.

I remember my art teacher talking about “tension” and how every work of art had to have it. So I guess there is that element, too: the question of, is it going to work out, or will we fall off the tightrope. Holding your breath.

And sometimes it is a conversation. I love to make loose arrangements that give the instrumentalists the space to create within them. I don’t like to say, “It has to go exactly like this.” I want to know what YOU have to say, what YOU feel about it. I want to hear them play what that story—of love lost, of a newborn, of new love, whatever—makes them FEEL. And that will make me hear it differently.

And sometimes it is—as you put it—like painting, but with two of you working on the same canvas, without having to tell each other in words where to put the brushstrokes. I was knocked out when I first started singing jazz at how musicians who have never even laid eyes on each before can get together and make music that sounds like they’ve been a band for years, even sometimes making the same hits in the same places. Like dancing with a stranger perfectly. It means everyone has to be really listening to each other, not playing by rote, but listening and responding.

Not a few of your songs begin with voice alone. I often think I could listen to them unaccompanied, as the expressive power of your voice carries the emotional contents therein with ease. For example, in the track “Daydream,” the single conga drum that accompanies you seems to saunter forth from within the shadows of your voice rather than adding something that was never there. The single guitar in “Left Alone” is the same. In relation to my first question, how do you see your voice as an entity? Is it a fully formed life, or one that is always learning from its surroundings?

Gosh. What a hard question. Well, the unaccompanied thing…I sang a lot unaccompanied when I was a teenager. In my early teen marriage I spent a lot of time alone and singing was my solace. I would spend all day in the house, singing entire songs that I would mean every word of, mostly long folk songs with stories that had beginnings, middles, and endings, about sailors going off to sea never to be seen again, or bereft maidens, or married women falling in love with local young men and it all ending in tears (usually death-by-husband).

As for fully formed or learning from its surroundings, the voice is always learning and absorbing. Every experience you have eventually comes out in your voice. I think I noticed that first about 25 years ago after a friend died, and the very next time I sang, it was a slightly different voice, it seemed to me.

When listening to your music, I hear a range of possible influences. One who comes to mind is Susheela Raman. Has she in any way played a part in your musical path?

Someone else said that to me about eight years ago on a gig in London. I’d never heard of her so I researched online and bought her CD Love Trap. I like it but it was/is not an influence—obviously, because I heard her long after I was singing like that.

But following on a bit from the previous answer, we might be similar people. Sort of foreign (my father was black, and my mother white) in England, where we were vaguely “other.” So perhaps we are drawn to similar expressive styles. But I think she is Tamil and consciously strove to identify musically with that part of herself and had a Tamil singing teacher who taught her that style, whereas my music just seemed to come out of me like that.

That isn’t to say I don’t have influences. I always described my style as kind of jazz with a twist of Middle Eastern and Indian, and then a few years ago I bought some of the music I was listening to in my youth—Pentangle and Fairport Convention—and I REALLY heard the influence of that music. I guess you could call it Celtic folk-rock. I realized that Celtic music has that Middle Eastern influence, using those same Phrygian scales.

I also identified very strongly with Spain for various reasons as a teenager and young adult, so that’s in there, too. And England, where I grew up, is very multicultural, so you hear all these different kinds of music all around you and I guess you absorb it.

I don’t know why I love that Phrygian thing, I just do. Maybe because it is somehow simple, easy to move around in, and yet emotionally complex. But when I hear it in its pure form, it is also a bit one-dimensional for me. It’s not enough somehow to stick to one very distinct style of music. But jazz is so open you can take a myriad of influences, put them all in a big pot with some Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, Soft Machine, and a dash of Carmen Jones, and out comes…you.

When I first started singing in public and learning jazz songs ten years ago, a very good friend of mine, who is a wonderful singer (Mansur Scott), would always say to me, “Tell your story. Don’t worry about it being jazz or not.” That was very good advice. I don’t think you should try to be anything except yourself. People are always telling me at gigs that they feel like they know me, and they actually DO, because that’s what I’m giving them. You can’t copy another singer, because you can never BE that person with that person’s experiences. It will always be fake.

Your songs are intensely evocative. Each is the feeling, the joys and sadness, of a place. When singing, do you feel that you are in those places? Do you wish to put the listener there from a distance, or do you want to share in that experience right there alongside the listener?

I don’t think, “Oh, this song is about this or that.” Not in a conscious way. Not once I know it. It might have been inspired by an experience initially, but once I know it (whether I wrote it or someone else did) I just literally feel it without thoughts. It’s wordless. Evocative more than literal. So even though songs might have words, their job is to, along with the melody, create the mood.

I used to be crazy about the writer Joseph Conrad and I was always amazed by how he could use really beautifully descriptive LANGUAGE to express something WORDLESSLY. The real thing he was saying was there in between the lines. I think that’s what music does. I also like that you can write a lyric or a song about something very specific, and if you don’t tell an audience what it means it will mean something completely different to them.

But yes, I do want listeners to experience the emotion with me, even if it is a different story for them. Definitely not at a distance. When I first started singing I liked that, unlike my former job, writing (which required a certain distance, not to mention having to be alone in a room to do it), music was like injecting yourself into people and getting an instant response.

Growing up always feeling “other” gives you a yearning to connect. And that is one of the things I love about music. It makes you feel connected, both as a listener and a performer.

I feel like I’m hearing about myself when you describe solitary songs as a coping mechanism through trying times, for I have often found that, even at life’s lowest points, the voice can never be contained. What is it, do you feel, about singing that has such restorative power?

I think it is so visceral. Your whole body is engaged, it’s very sensual (as in engages all your senses) and somehow the voice expresses, even without words, feelings that sometimes I don’t know I’ve even been feeling. Feelings that don’t even have names. It gets them out into the open somehow. A great exercise sometimes is to let a feeling be expressed with sounds that you haven’t planned in advance, unlike what happens with a song you already know. In fact, I think that’s how I compose.

The more people come in contact with your music, the more you have been given opportunities to tour in new and unexpected places. What lessons does the act of travel bring to bear upon your musical experiences?

When I had my first concert in Russia—at the Moscow International Performing Arts Center in 2007—I was terrified that no one would understand me and that they would want me to sing all standards. A friend who’d already played in Russia said, “No, they’ll love you as you are! Do your regular stuff.” So I chanced it, and it was actually perfect. In fact, I was shocked that at Cream’s “White Room” people started applauding and shouting “Brava!” pretty much as soon as I had sung the first line. So I suppose the ultimate lesson I’ve learned is that the best thing you can give to an audience, wherever it is, is yourself.

Some might say you are bold in the cover songs you choose, that no one needs yet another version of the tried and true. Yet I find your versions of classics like “Eleanor Rigby” and “White Room” to be spectacular. These are, of course, great songs in their own right, but you turn them into personal statements. What is it about them, first of all, that captures your attention, and how do you decide to pluck these particular jewels from among countless others?

I personally love music that is familiar but different. I think for audiences it can be a doorway to other music. “Eleanor Rigby” came about when I was singing in Japan on a hotel gig for two months. I was walking home from the shops one day in the rain and that ostinato pattern came to me and I ran into my apartment and played it on my toy piano. It was so simple I performed it that night and the Brazilian percussionist I was playing with sang long tones underneath it and it just worked. I cut out some of the lyrics and changed the form to make it tell the story of two people who are in love but never tell each other. I call it my song version of the movie Remains of the Day. For “White Room” I did an arrangement with guitarist John Hart originally. It was kind of Brazilian and I scatted over a simple intro of descending chords and John came up with that fabulous ending that unexpectedly stops dead on the 5. Then just before we recorded Obsession Jason re-did the arrangement so that it had more of an African feeling in the playing, but without changing the chords and keeping John’s ending. I love that song because it reminds me of my brother when we were totally into Cream as teenagers. All my song choices have a reason.

Can you talk about the differences in production between these three albums? There seems to be a progression between them, from the intimacy of Listen Love to the full-blown flower of Obsession. How did the sound of each album emerge?

Listen Love is two demos put together. I made a quick demo in 2000. I had no money so I went in and said, look this is all I have, what can I do with it, and we did four songs, including mixing, in a few hours. It was very organic. I think the reason it sounds intimate is that it was just the two of us in someone’s home studio. Then the other songs were recorded in 2002. Honestly, finances more than anything kept that album sparse. But that is actually one of the things I liked about it. I was the producer so it was very hard work, listening over and over. But all the artistic decisions were entirely mine, which I also like—even though it’s harder physically, in a way.

Nights of Key Largo was recorded in two days with barely any rehearsal, and no band rehearsal. Those songs were mostly chosen because the record label wanted a certain tempo and style. So, working with that, I thought about songs I could mean, learned some new ones, spent about two hours with Kenny Werner upstate to go over some of them and had a separate two-hour rehearsal with Jay Leonhart and Romero Lubambo at my house, and then we all went in and recorded.

Obsession was a bit different because I had been singing the songs for years and just wanted to get it down before I moved on to new material. It was a lot more thought-out than any of my other CDs. We rehearsed, even! And we’d been playing together for a year, so it was more of a band and everyone contributed ideas to the final album.

The most recent CD, Beyond the Blue, which is coming out this May, is different again. Classical songs with my lyrics to nine of them, made into jazz with an incredible band of jazz titans that got together over two days with no rehearsal and made magic happen with repertoire most of which they had never laid eyes on until that day. I think because of that it feels completely fresh to me. And everyone really had to listen to everyone else and maybe that inspired them all the more. Normally I can’t listen to my own CDs but I listen to this one just to marvel at their playing. This is my favorite CD so far.

Before this one, I think I’d always had a special soft spot for Listen Love. Okay, I still have a soft spot for it, partly due to the repertoire. I have to STOP myself singing “The Creator Has A Master Plan” and I still sing “You Don’t Have To Believe” on almost all my gigs.

Love is a very spiritual thing. In what ways do your religious views flow in and out of your songs?

I think everything I am flows in and out of my songs. I just did a tour with a friend and we talked about the fact that who you are is how you play—for good or ill. I don’t think I have any religious views, as such. I am one of those “spiritual but not religious” types. But I am totally inspired by Love, yes.

What was it like working with Mark Murphy? In what ways did that experience leave its mark (no pun intended)? What were his greatest words of wisdom?

He had so many! It was wonderful working with him. He would make me do things I didn’t want to do like scat, to get me off needing to be “Mrs Perfect.” He’d question your motivation for things—like holding a note: was that in the service of the song, or was that just to show off how long you could hold a note? And he was so supportive. He’d come to my gigs with huge bunches of flowers and say I was his “star” and just be like the sun shining on me, really. I love Mark very much and feel absolutely blessed to have been mentored by him. And of course his singing is itself a lesson. You can hear his influence in practically every male singer under 50. He is so in the moment. So connected. His timing is perfect, even on ballads, maybe especially on ballads. And he always gave great advice. Like when I went through this terrible phase of having unbelievable stage fright, which lasted about six months. I finally asked him what to do about it and he said, “Just remember it’s not about you. Your job is to make these people who have come to see you feel good. They just want to have a good time. That’s it!” It cured me instantly.

Has anyone ever told you that s/he started singing because of you?

Some have. Mostly people who have read my book Anything I Can Do You Can Do Better. I still get letters from people who have read it. I’ve no idea how they hear about it. But I love those letters. Then I feel the book did its job.

What has been your most gratifying experience with a fan?

I think what is most gratifying is that so many people who started out as “fans” have become real friends. If I had to pick one thing, it’s that the then four-year-old daughter of a friend was so insistent on Listen Love being played whenever they drove anywhere that the car with the CD player in it was called “the Tessa car.” And a friend in San Francisco just wrote to tell me that her four-year-old has to play Obsession before she goes to sleep every night and the other day just sighed, “I love Tessa!” But I don’t think I could single out one experience. Of course it’s always great when someone comes up in tears and tells you how touched they were. Or, as happened the other day, when a teenage boy in Belarus tells you that they want to play with you one day and that you are “magic” and they “don’t have words to describe.” Or when strangers come back and pay again to hear you the second night, too. Or when people have said that the tone of my voice makes them feel calm. Or that it is healing. I’ve actually had a few people tell me that Listen Love got them through a depression and one woman who loved music until she got hit with depression said it was the only CD she could bear to listen to for six months, until she got better. It’s like Mark Murphy said, that’s your job.

The blossoming of your art is a real testament to the power of music to triumph over adversity. What advice do you have for those facing solitude, who feel there is no one who cares for them?

I have to say I have never felt that there is no one who cares for me. I have a lot of wonderful friends. But I’ve been depressed, of course, and, when I felt in the absolute depths I used to force myself to go to open mics. It always cured me. So sing! Or draw, or write. Anyway, EXPRESS! Or get lost in something else—a movie, a novel, listening to music, supporting a friend, going to a concert. That can be super helpful. I went to hear a friend sing once when I was in a terrible space, and it totally flipped me—lastingly. I don’t sing the blues myself, but listening to Marlena Shaw sing the line about how she put her head on the train track, “and then I thought, hang on, I haven’t paid for the hat!” or BB King sing, “I gave you seven children and now you want to give them back!” never fails to cheer me up. The great thing about the blues is that it’s always got a sense of humor.

Lastly: What is your favorite color and what does it remind you of?

Gold-sequin gold. It’s so warm and sparkly. It’s summer.

(photo by Janis Wilkins)

Keith Jarrett: Paris Concert (ECM 1401)

| Tyran Grillo

Keith Jarrett
Paris Concert

Keith Jarrett piano
Recorded October 17, 1988 at Salle Pleyel, Paris
Engineer: Peter Laenger, Andreas Neubronner
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Arguably the most stunning live recording in Keith Jarrett’s solo archive, the Paris Concert may just surpass its Köln predecessor in the sheer naturalness of its unfolding. The recording consists of three tracks, the first of which is simply dated “October 17, 1988” and clocks in at nearly 40 minutes. The music finds depth in its power to spin a self-contained mythology, in its being a window through which one stares to see bits of self. Over a plodding low F he culls handfuls of nebulae, building towering structures of stone and song, and throwing from them streamers of melodies into the vales below until one of those melodies takes wing by the feathers of sunset. It is soft and pale, able to navigate entire continents with barely a flap, and writes across the sky a message for all: Just listen, and you will see. From a thick octave chain Jarrett hangs heavier and heavier ornaments. The development thereof is rigorous yet caged, seeming to run in place not because it cannot move forward but because it cannot look behind, and blossoms into a sustain-pedaled passage so ineffable that it transcends the boundaries of the concert hall, whispers light into our minds, and holds a finger to the lips of thought—a swansong that begins another life.

Jarrett spins his tapestries as might a skilled filmmaker, at once letting the actors bring their own experience to the project while at the same time guiding their story arc from somewhere off screen. The two epilogues are thus like alternate endings. “The Wind,” by jazz pianist Russ Freeman, opens with a Steve Reichian flourish and glides into a slow and bluesy love affair with shadows. This slow-motion tumble down the rabbit hole of the night ends with the patter of rainfall and leaves us to contemplate what we have just heard. The simply titled “Blues,” on the other hand, takes a standard progression and draws from it colors we never knew it had. It glows at Jarrett’s fingertips, distills the purity of his expressive vision, and gives us the resolution we crave.

A Keith Jarrett solo improvisation is, at its most selfless, a drop into an ocean of feeling far outside the realm of articulation. One feels it in the bones, in the brain, and most importantly in the heart, but always as one part of a thread stretching as far as listeners can see into both the past and the future. We encounter that thread as one might a rainbow: the closer we run toward it, the farther it travels away from us. Only when we look inward do we discover where it begins and ends.

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