Month: March 2012

Gidon Kremer/Kremerata Baltica: Schubert – String Quartet G major (ECM New Series 1883)

| Tyran Grillo

 

Gidon Kremer
Kremerata Baltica
Franz Schubert
String Quartet G major

Kremerata Baltica
Gidon Kremer violin and conductor
Victor Kissine orchestration
Recorded July 2003, Pfarrkirche St. Nikolaus, Lockenhaus
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

As a tireless champion of new interpretations of the old, the ever-adventurous Gidon Kremer has over the years forged a lasting relationship with, above most others, the music of Franz Schubert. One can only imagine, then, the excitement he must have felt when he learned of composer Victor Kissine’s having finished a string orchestral version of Schubert’s G-major String Quartet (op. posth. 161, D 887). The arrangement of this notorious masterpiece at first seems to embody a curious double bind, for while it certainly enhances the music’s dramaturgical spectrum, it simultaneously softens the edges thereof. The result is a rounded idol of the original. And yet, like a piece of glass that has been worn down by river’s flow or ocean’s tide, it takes on a new shape, becomes a jewel in the hands of a child, a glint of light noticeable even in an already vast and glowing population.

From the five seconds of silence that begin every ECM album made in the last 20 years, the orchestra emerges with a mounting proclamation that immediately justifies the means. Amid the dance of major and minor that ensues, the occasional soliloquy, like that of the pizzicato-ornamented cello in the opening movement, rings all the clearer. Here one must also note the Kremerata Baltica’s honed dynamic control, by which, despite the youthful magnitude of its combined forces, the music’s ruptures are allowed to sing with all the philosophy of their emptiness. Magisterial tempos give greater lift to the score and throw us into its spirals with swooning regard. The Andante enacts a veritable play of shadows, comporting its thematic actors with Beethovenian stagecraft. The cello reemerges as a voice with one foot behind closed eyes and one outside of them, and fades tear-like into the relatively brief Scherzo, where skittering motives place many a deft footstep through an agitated waltz before reworking the flames, only now more scintillating, in the final Allegro, which gallops its way through pages of light and shadow, leaving us to ride its ripple effect back into the open silence from which it awakened.

This project has Kremer written all over it. From his never-superfluous gildings to even the cover photograph (entitled “Heading for the North Pole” and taken by the man himself in 1990), Kremer has given his all to the finished product. This has nothing to do with ego, but with a reverence for Schubert, whose heart he and his entourage draw with the care of an anatomist. Kissine’s arrangement likewise allows us to hear the beating of this heart through a steady flow of melodic blood. And the sound? Wondrous. A sequins without the kitsch.

As I listen to this album it is snowing outside, yet the ground is warm enough to melt the snow on contact, giving the illusion that every flake continues to fall through the earth. I cannot help but map this sensation onto what I am hearing, for even as this music touches us it continues to fall through our skin and into a place in our minds where footsteps will never mar its confection.

Charles Lloyd Quartet: Mirror (ECM 2176)

| Tyran Grillo

 

Charles Lloyd Quartet
Mirror

Charles Lloyd tenor, alto saxophone, voice
Jason Moran piano
Reuben Rogers double bass
Eric Harland drums
Recorded December 2009 at Santa Barbara Sound Design
Engineer: Dominic Camardella
Produced by Charles Lloyd, Dorothy Darr, and Manfred Eicher

Charles Lloyd is that rare artist who one can say truly grows with every recording, and I would venture that Mirror finds him at one of many pinnacles in a career that thankfully shows no signs of abating. As part of the same quartet that wowed us on the live recording Rabo de Nube, Lloyd is joined by Jason Moran on piano, Rueben Rogers on double bass, and Eric Harland on drums for the outfit’s first studio session.

The title of this latest studio effort is no accident. As Lloyd himself once said in an interview with Greg Burk of his musical break between 1969 and 1989, “I went to work on myself, so that I would be more equipped to serve the Creator and music and mankind, and I had to face the mirror of my own inadequacies.” And indeed on this date we hear him contemplating his own reflection, the ways in which it speaks back to him with the unmistakable voice of that Tennessee tenor.

As has become increasingly clear through the years, Lloyd’s heart lies in tradition. We hear this not only in the affect of his presence, but also in his interpretation of standard repertoire. Beyond the obvious technical abilities required to pull this off with the consistency that he does, he also posses the uncanny talent to compress every tune into his marrow and live it before ever putting reed to lips. And through this handful of traditions he carries us from the mosaic of beautiful fragments in “Lift Every Voice And Sing,” where Moran’s stained glass solo glows by Harland’s feathered light, and into “The Water Is Wide,” where Moran shines again in a fully loaded groove: the exuberance of a gospel singer with head thrown back in glory, stitching the pathos of faith one patch at a time. Lloyd’s delicacy in “Go Down Moses” is duly inspiring and leaps into well-trodden arenas of stratospheric wisdom as the quartet achieves an enviable coalescence, the percussion especially colorful. Yet for me the session’s jewel drops into our hands in “La Llorona,” a stepwise lament in which Lloyd allows himself to falter at carefully placed expectorations, cracking like a tear-ridden voice in prayer. Stunning.

“I Fall in Love Too Easily” opens the doors widest to a field planted by Moran’s petal-by-petal profusion, and leaves us well primed for two Thelonious Monk joints. Where Lloyd flits like a butterfly possessed in “Monk’s Mood” (against the smoothest pianism of the set, no less), he turns like an oblong waterwheel through a river of affection in “Ruby, My Dear,” a more rubato affair in which Moran’s octave splits ring heartfelt and true. “Caroline, No” gives us a taste of the Beach Boys years, drawing its motif at an angle while Lloyd soliloquizes on the pleasures of contortion. And let us not forget the wellspring of his own pen. From the depths of “Desolation Sound” to the magic of “Being And Becoming, Road To Dakshineswar With Sangeeta,” Lloyd the composer regales us with wordless incantations—that is, until the the nine-minute “Tagi,” for which he blesses the studio with a retelling of Bhagavad Gita scripture (the title is “Gita” reversed and means “sacrifice”) before tracing a line up to the sun.

Lloyd always begins and ends with the breath, tracing a circle of life. His is energy classic, wood-grained yet with a fine metallic sheen. Like the cover photograph, this is music that has nothing to hide regarding the means of its creation, lays it all out in the oneness of things, where light and shadow share a thematic dance. Let this album be your mirror, and your story will begin the moment you open your soul and look.

Bobo Stenson Trio: Reflections (ECM 1516)

| Tyran Grillo

Bobo Stenson Trio
Reflections

Bobo Stenson piano
Anders Jormin bass
Jon Christensen drums
Recorded May 1993 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

While not every cover photo necessarily gives insight into its album, the sleeve of the Bobo Stenson Trio’s Reflections reveals something at the heart of this music: light. The first time I laid eyes upon it, I swore I was looking at a flock of birds in the clouds. Closer inspection revealed, of course, one of the title’s more obvious meanings. If this little guessing game revealed anything to me, it was that what I was about to hear would feel the same: at once sky below and earth above.

And where better to begin than in the leader-penned “The Enlightener,” which paints an aerial view of territories he will soon explore with long-lost brothers Anders Jormin (bass) and Jon Christensen (drums). Stenson keeps his left hand entrenched in a haunting monotone here, giving ample ground for the right’s erratic yet ever-purposeful flights, achieving somewhere along the way a transcendence one hears perhaps only in the Keith Jarrett Trio at its best.

George Gershwin’s “My Man’s Gone Now” provides our first dip into the pool of standards. Like a bird jumping from branch to branch before finally settling where it will make its nest, Stenson binds drumsticks with bass strings and makes a home. His playing can thus be very dense at times, and to ensure that we don’t get pulled under, Jormin gives us a refreshing change of bass in two compositions. “NOT” opens with a lyrical gesture from Jormin against mere tracings of piano and cymbals before locking into a lumbering groove, which is mixed to bold consistency by a wider pianistic embrace. The agitated reverie of “Q,” however, sports the finest moment in the set in Jormin’s flowering solo.

After the frothy runs of Stenson’s “Dörrmattan,” we are treated to a breathtaking rendition of Duke Ellington’s “Reflections in D.” Stenson treads almost stealthily here down a path of Tord Gustavsen-like balance, taking the tune to a cosmic level before closing with two more of his own: “12 Tones Old” (another bass vehicle in which notes crawl like spiders content in their webs) and “Mindiatyr.” This last is one of his most impressionistic, beginning in cascades supported by some lovely arco bass, which then hones itself into the buzzing exuberance of a spirit setting out on its first journey. Christensen’s enviable rhythm work plays us out alongside a Byzantine flourish from the keys. 

Listening to Stenson’s navigations is, I imagine, what a magician feels when fooled by another magician—which is to say that just when you think you know all the ins and outs of the craft, someone comes along and brings you back to the youthful joy that first lured you into it. One feels so much in everyone’s playing on Reflections, as if it were already living inside us and needed only six hands to give it voice.

This date is a dream come true. Thank your lucky stars you can hear while awake.

<< Garbarek/Brahem/Hussain: Madar (ECM 1515)
>> Jon Balke w/Magnetic North Orchestra: Further (ECM 1517)

Tigran Mansurian/Kim Kashkashian: Monodia (ECM New Series 1850/51)

| Tyran Grillo

 

Tigran Mansurian
Kim Kashkashian
Monodia

Kim Kashkashian viola
Leonidas Kavakos violin
Münchener Kammerorchester
Christoph Poppen conductor
Jan Garbarek soprano saxophone
The Hilliard Ensemble
David James counter-tenor
Rogers Covey-Crump tenor
Andreas Hirtreiter tenor
Gordon Jones baritone
Recorded November 2001, Himmelfahrtskirche Sendling, München and January 2002, Propstei St. Gerold
Engineers: Stephan Schellmann and Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire…
–William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

Monodia represents the invaluable efforts of violist Kim Kashkashian to bring Armenian composer Tigran Mansurian onto the world stage. During this journey of discovery she was fortunate enough to have found in Manfred Eicher the ideal partner to ensure that this exposure be done properly and with the utmost respect. The composer’s homeland may not be visible in the flow of information that saturates mainstream media, but it is intensely audible in this landmark recording of a music and a culture that demands to be heard by virtue of the fact that it demands nothing at all.

Kashkashian brings her inimitable talents to bear upon “…and then I was in time again,” a viola concerto written in 1995. The title comes from Faulkner, whose inky nooks harbor shades of meaning whereby the light of experience comes to be similarly refracted through the prism of the mind. Kashkashian’s harmonic whispers usher us into a world in which the viola not only sings, but also speaks. Through a sometimes-tortured narrative, Kashkashian externalizes the music’s inner life through her fearless translational abilities. The orchestra’s lower registers are favored here, so that the violas echo Kashkashian en masse, thereby drawing a genealogical thread from Allegro to Lento in a twin birth of lament and knowledge. As throughout, peace is hard to come by even in the absence of the occasional high-pitched interjections, each a sketch of histories long atrophied.

If we began rooted in time, in the Concerto for violin and orchestra (1981) we are left to fend far outside of it. After the earthy tones of the viola, the violin hangs from a much thinner thread, ever poised on the brink of a sudden fall. The soloist here is Leonidas Kavakos, who begins, as violin concertos are wont to do, somewhere above our heads. Kavakos underscores the solitude that permeates the score, emerging like an orphaned cub taking his first tentative steps across the forest floor. Sunlight works its way through the mists, spreading its fingers wide between the branches and coaxing the world back to life. The opening motive, while inaugural in its first appearance, is a powerfully disruptive force when it returns halfway through the piece. Its violence and fear spawn a thousand voices singing with agitated lyricism. Low strings sweep us under a watery carpet before spitting us out onto the shores of something oddly familial.

This sense of lineage continues in the 1999 Lachrymae for soprano saxophone (played here by Jan Garbarek) and viola. The patterns traced here are not unlike those on the CD’s cover, meeting as they do in a rosette of mystical curves through human rendering. Like an incantation, the music’s implications far exceed its means, for in the lingering echoes of this piece we can hear our own tears hoping for the curing touch of moonlight. A quintessential New Series piece from two of ECM’s finest musicians.

Lastly is Confessing with Faith (1998), for which Kashkashian is joined by the Hilliard Ensemble in evoking texts by St. Nerses the Graceful (1102-1173). The gut-wrenching depth of her playing here must be heard to be appreciated, and with the Hilliards its secrets become even more complex. One can’t help but feel that the voices are being spun from the same threads, as if to more fully flesh out that which already resides in the instrument. Once countertenor David James breaks from the gloomy waves, he dances with the viola in a lithe display of melodic inertia. Agitated tremolos enlarge the feeling of solitude, letting in a spirited round: one river overtaking another in a bed of tenors. James is resplendent in his delicate high lines from which hang the piece’s final mobiles. The viola is given the final word, which feels more like the first, drawing out a double stop as if it were a pair of lungs about to pray.

Sing a new song to Him who rose,
First fruits of life of them that sleep.

 

Alexander Lonquich: Plainte calme (ECM New Series 1821)

| Tyran Grillo

 

Plainte calme

Alexander Lonquich piano
Recorded January 2002, Radio Studio DRS, Zurich
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

A year and a half after debuting with the label on Odradek, German pianist Alexander Lonquich stepped into the studio to record Plainte Calme, his first solo recital for ECM. Lonquich is a player of dialogues: between himself and the music, between himself and himself, between the music and itself. Balancing a remarkably delicate touch with a strong attack when needed, his playing throughout this all-French program bodes well in the session’s rounded engineering.

The Impromptusof Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) provide listeners with the most earthbound motifs on which to train their ears. Written between 1882 and 1909, these were never conceived of as a set, a fact underscored by their being scattered throughout the program. Although they incorporate influences from Chopin and from mentor Saint-Saëns, these pieces bear echoes in a chamber very much their own. Beyond the obligatory descriptor of “impressionistic” I am wont to attach to such music, there is an undeniably filmic energy therein. One can almost hear horse carriages and lovers’ talk, unaccompanied but for the whisper of their own song. Affection pours through every section with the temerity of a field mouse, while at the same time rolling itself down hills of youth into some of the composer’s most unadulterated expressions of joie de vivre on record—Lonquich’s performances thereof punctilious and perfect.

The 1929 Huit Préludes pour piano of Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) was a discovery for me. This treasure was his first published work, written during his student days at the Paris Conservatoire. Already the synaesthetic composer was experimenting with color, which he splashes almost Pollock-like into a monochromatic world. One encounters a more weathered feel in comparison to the surrounding works, each a fresco in a monument which, though scarred by the passage of time, in its own way has become more beautiful, more like itself. Even at this early stage Messiaen folds every pleat with a reverence and sensitivity beyond his years. Yet there is far more than shadows and contemplation going on in this tapestry. There is also animation, the twisting and turning of life itself in all of its dramatic changes, though always ending as if to undermine that drama as but an illusory skin to stillness.

In light of these denouements, the formidable Gaspard de la Nuit of Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) feels like a bucket of dreams poured into the mind’s eye. This early work was written in 1908 after poems by Aloysius Bertrand and reflects the persistence of a composer who, as a student of Fauré at the Conservatoire in 1896, was famously expelled due to his inability to write an “adequate fugue.” Unfazed, he continued to sit in on Fauré’s class and honed what would become his hallmarks, which one notices to hardly greater effect than here. “Ondine” takes the most transcendent approach to the medium, seeming to stitch with an angel’s hair atmospheres of such rippling grace that one can only feel them below the skin, trembles of anticipation that are their own rewards. We find ourselves knee-deep in an inimitable sort of magic, growing into a quicksand of caresses in “Le Gibet,” while in “Scarbo” we are thrown into a new journey that leads us up the spiral staircase of the final Fauré Impromptu, at the top of which waits the destiny living inside all of this music: namely, the need to close eyes, spread wings, and jump.

Lonquich treats every note like its own voice in the grander unity of the choir, as it were, and brings an almost philosophical edge to his painterly renditions. He can sound like two musicians, one the light of the sun and the other its warmth. His sound bounces off the lockets of maidens in distant tower windows, their dreams of music suspended from the forests through which many a knight has traveled. Their voices come to us only now, at last requited in the body of an instrument that has never quite sung like this before.

One of the finest solo piano records on the New Series thus far.

Ingrid Karlen: Variations (ECM New Series 1606)

| Tyran Grillo

Ingrid Karlen
Variations

Ingrid Karlen piano
Recorded January 1996, Schloßbergsaal, Freiburg
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Swiss pianist Ingrid Karlen makes her ECM debut with Variations, of which the program is as provocative as the title is vague. Beyond variations in the traditional sense, these are, rather, mise-en-abymes of abstractions. Or so they might at first aural glance seem, for within these sometimes troubling clusters of false starts breathes a unity at once organic and contrived. Anton Webern’s Variations for Piano, op. 27 (1935/36) is the primary example, for the only variations they seem to engender stem from that which cannot be notated. These pieces behave as might a solo violin sonata, jumping fluidly and bow-like through their ephemeral 12-tone links. They are the anti-motif, a stretch of childhood unable to be sifted.

If these constitute the program’s foundation, then Valentin Silvestrov’s Elegy (1967) is its hollow keystone. Dedicated to ECM regular Alexei Lubimov, this sonic egg is just that: indestructible when pushed from both ends, yet vulnerable to the slightest variation of pressure at its middle. Not unlike the program as a whole, its open spaces are there for us to project our desires and expectations in a space where they will not be judged.

Petrograd-born composer Galina Ustvolskaya is channeled to us via two pieces which, though they make up more than half of the album’s playing time, are selfless constructions. In both the Sonata No. 3 (1952) and the Sonata No. 5 (1986), the sheen of declaration quickly fades in interrupted washes of high/low contrasts hugging a forlorn middle register. Karlen stretches both like freshly dyed cloth in a stream, occasionally beating them against a rock for emphasis. Only at such moments do we realize the heights to which we have ascended. The gentility leading up to these thrashings is all the more swooning for its being whittled at by a blade of intense virtuosity. Ustvolskaya’s music inhabits a fascinating middle ground, neither melodic nor indecipherable, lying somewhere between the permanence of the scar and the ephemerality of the suture.

Where else to end but at the beginning? Pierre Boulez’s Douze notations pour piano (1945) is the composer’s Opus One and reason enough to experience this recital. The sheer depth of dramaturgical whimsy in these little sketches makes for a thoroughly engaging experience, which I can only imagine blossoms a hundredfold at the keyboard.

This daring recital is not the first I would recommend among the growing number available on ECM. This is not a critique, but simply a word of caution to the faint of heart. Still, no matter how convoluted the music becomes, it is never cloudy or obscure. The brilliance of Karlen’s program is to be found in her shaping of negative space, in precisely what is not being played. It is into this extra-musical aspect where I believe she wants to draw our ears. And if we are willing to join her, we might very well find sunlight where only shadows seem to roam.

<< Charles Ives: Sonatas for Violin and Piano (ECM 1605 NS)
>> Wheeler/Konitz/Holland/Frisell: Angel Song (ECM 1607)

Thomas Demenga plays J. S. Bach/B. A. Zimmermann (ECM New Series 1571)

| Tyran Grillo

Thomas Demenga
J. S. Bach/B. A. Zimmerman

Thomas Demenga cello
Thomas Zehetmair violin
Christoph Schiller viola
Recorded February/July 1995
Engineer: Terje van Geest
Produced by Manfred Eicher

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under heaven.

Cellist Thomas Demenga continues his Bach project by juxtaposing the Baroque master’s d-minor Suite No. 2 with the work of Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1918-1970), one of the most important non-Darmstadters after World War II. As ever, Demenga makes a convincing argument for the pairing (interestingly enough, most of the criticism of Demenga’s project sees the Bach as filler). In this case, Zimmermann is something of an effortless choice, for his fondness of quotation and respect for tradition were at the heart of his artistry. His approach to time in this regard was particularly significant, drawing on intersections of influence through a wide range of trends and idioms.

Thus do we find ourselves in the comforting waters of Bach’s generative whispers from the moment we dive in. For this performance Demenga adopts the approach of a viola da gamba player (to greatest effect in his raspily inflected Courante). This sound draws out the music’s inherent gaseousness, in which one feels something dark and cosmic taking shape. Demenga’s notecraft ensures that every molecule feels connected through a legato of silence. He digs as deep as he can for those distinct Bach lows, plows double stops as if they were fertile fields, and maintains subtle independence of line in the Sarabande. He bows the Menuets as if with shadows, then elicits one of the finer renderings of the Gigue I’ve yet heard, striking a fine balance between jubilation and regret.

The boldness of this architecture may seem an ill fit to Zimmermann’s sonatas, which despite their meticulous scoring also call for an improvisatory approach. This puts the musician in a potentially compromising space, though if anyone is up to the challenge, it’s Demenga. Many of Zimmermann’s works were considered unplayable when first written, the Cello Sonata of 1960 not least of all. Drawing from his usual pool of spatial and temporal concerns, the piece moves beyond the Romantic notion of cello as vox humana and into the realm of speech, action, and embodiment. In his liners, Demenga notes a particularly difficult passage in the first movement, which encompasses three distinct time-layers: “while the upper voice, played on the bridge, produces a continuous ritardando, the middle one is the most striking, because of its very large range and numbers of notes played pizzicato, and then the lowest, played on the nut of the bow, sounds like a scarcely perceptible accelerando.” Despite its brevity, unpacking the finer implications thereof took Demenga weeks to perfect.

That said, like all walls it can be, and is, overcome in such a way as to render those difficulties invisible and meaningless. It is a testament to his playing that the potentially distracting technicalities of this music become vital mechanisms to their own forgetting. In addition, the more the music progresses, the more one realizes that its virtuosity stems not only from the obvious difficulties, but more importantly from the way the performer must treat every cell as its own motivic entity while maintaining a sense of continuity (as in the “Fase” movement). Between the boldly intoned opening and the ethereal resolutions of “Versetto” we feel the cellist walking the edge of our Umwelt, stitching a morpheme for every step like a bead into patchwork.

Before this we are treated to two nearly intriguing sonatas. The Violin Sonata of 1951 was written after the composer’s concerto for the same. Demenga’s conceit is strengthened by a B-A-C-H cipher and likeminded spirit (notably in the Toccata). From the Paganini-esque heartbeat to the dramatic pizzicato slap that closes it, this is a tapestry of musical lines that is sure to delight. Christoph Schiller makes delicate work of the 1955 Viola Sonata thereafter and undoes a few of the frays left dangling. Subtitled “To the song of an angel,” the one-movement sonata was written in memory of the composer’s daughter Barbara, who died soon after her birth. This self-characterized “chorale prelude” is based on Gelobet seist Du Jesu Christ and tracks a pseudo-scientific journey of private inquiries. At times the instrument duets with its own implications, while at others it shatters itself into a hundred pieces.

This program is about nothing if not intimacy. Not only by virtue of the solo repertoire—Zimmermann himself believes the solo to be the only way by which one may access an instrument’s “almost inexhaustible power”—but also because of the way in which that repertoire speaks through the hands of such capable musicians. This is no-frills playing of music that, while at times distorted, rings forever crystalline in our memory of it.

<< Eleni Karaindrou: Ulysses’ Gaze (ECM 1570 NS)
>> Dave Holland Quartet: Dream Of The Elders (ECM 1572)

AM 4: …and she answered: (ECM 1394)

| Tyran Grillo

 

AM 4
…and she answered:

Wolfgang Puschnig alto saxophone, alto flute, hojak, shakuhachi
Linda Sharrock vocals
Uli Scherer piano, prepared piano, keyboards
Recorded April 1989 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Four years before stepping into the studio to record the Korean crossover project Then Comes The White Tiger alongside the influential SamulNori, saxophonist and flutist Wolgang Puschnig and vocalist Linda Sharrock stepped into ECM’s Rainbow Studio with pianist Uli Scherer as AM 4 for an equally unusual project. Blending poetry and Nordic folk roots with jazz and subtle instrumentation, …and she answered: is as open-ended as the colon of its title. Sharrock captivates wherever she is featured in this project, though perhaps nowhere more so than in the opening “Streets And Rivers” (am I the only one who is reminded of Ani DiFranco’s “Buildings and Bridges”?), which parallels the pathos of life and the literatures through which we seek to divide it. Its synthesizer undercurrent and Jon Hassell-like blips unfurl a pathway for Pushcnig’s breathy alto, both matched by Sharrock’s languorous diction. The following track is as haunting as its title. “And She Answered: ‘When You Return To Me, I will Open Quick The Cage Door, I Will Let The Red Bird Flee’” paints a wide landscape populated with Puschnig’s animal cries. Through these horns a muted piano string drops its heavy footfalls and spins from its wool a yarn of darkness. All of this time in the field, as it were, leaves us open to a wrenching interpretation of Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman.” Here Sharrock is like a catalyst for instrumental change, leaving Puschnig and Scherer to navigate the channels of her words with a cartographer’s exactitude (the two likewise shine in the duo cut “Bhagavad” and in “Far Horizon”). This is one of two standards to creep into the mix, the other being a pointillist rendition of “Over The Rainbow,” which enchants with wisps of the familiar in an otherwise distant wash of flute and echo. Puschnig turns inward with “The Sadness Of Yuki.” The lipped strains of the shakuhachi thread the piano like time itself. We catch only flashes of imagery: a girl’s face, a bleak and oppressive house, an existence destined for ghostly things, as might be spoken through the aphasia of “Oh!” The latter brings the most rhythmic elements to bear on this eclectic set, and speaks to us through the shawm of its gamelan-encrusted interior. All of which leaves us alone with the intoned question in “One T’une,” of which gongs and air are a way of life.

ECM has thankfully made this overlooked release available through digital download, and it bears seeking out for those wanting to step off the label’s beaten path.

<< First House: Cantilena (ECM 1393)
>> Bach: Goldberg Variations – Jarrett (ECM 1395 NS)

Misha Alperin/Arkady Shilkloper: Wave Of Sorrow (ECM 1396)

| Tyran Grillo

Misha Alperin
Arkady Shilkloper
Wave Of Sorrow

Misha Alperin piano, melodica, voice
Arkady Shilkloper French horn, jagdhorn, fluegelhorn, voice
Recorded July 1989 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

With Wave Of Sorrow, Misha (then Mikhail) Alperin began what has proven to be a fruitful relationship with ECM. Though the Ukraine-born pianist has but a modest discography on the label, each recording brims with the folklore of his sensitivity. Since this date he has spun a telepathic relationship with trumpeter Arkady Shilkloper, and the results on this duo album are as unique as their players. Alperin offers a set of ten original compositions, each, in spite of the intimate arrangement, a grand and sweeping thing. Not unlike label mate Richie Beirach, his architecture is ambitious in its scope and clarity yet rarely deviates from the warm embrace that births it. One hears this in the opening “Song,” to which Shilkloper adds the bay of a hunting horn. Like many of the pieces that follow, it smacks of tradition even as it shines with modern interpretation. Yet this is also a world of shadows, for in the title piece (one of the most affecting melodica solos you will ever hear) we can intuit a web of tortured histories and only hints of the happiness that may unravel it. Shilkloper arrives toward the end bathed in ECM’s plush reverb, seeming to hang from the tail of Alperin’s breathy comet like a child of the night. Still, this date is not without its fun. “Unisons,” for example, casts the two musicians in a decidedly vocal mold as they rap and tap their way through a cathartic romp. “Poem” similarly allows Shilkloper to come out of his lyrical shell into a full-blown dance. Alperin also offers up a few piano solos, of which “Prelude in Bb minor” is the most evocative—a shaft of moonlight through which the dust of a wanderer’s journey casts its sparkle. Other highlights include the simple yet ingenious motivic arcs of “Short Story” and Shilkloper’s distant mutes in “Miniature.”

The contradiction of the album’s title is that so much of the music springs to its feet, all the while harboring a matrix of oppression and exile. We hear this especially in the solo “Epilogue.” The atmosphere is dim yet also sparkling, as if it were a harsh present slumbering behind the illusory veil of a memory, fond and forever lost.

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