As of this month, the content of between sound and space has surpassed half a million words.
Month: August 2013
Bobby Naughton Units: Understanding (JAPO 60006)
Bobby Naughton Units
Understanding
Perry Robinson clarinet
Mark Whitecage flute, basset born
Richard Yongstein or Mario Pavone bass
Randy Kaye or Laurence Cook percussion
Bobby Naughton vibraphone, piano, clavinet
Recorded October 30, 1971 in concert at Yale University and at Blue Rock Studio, New York
Engineer Eddie Korvin
Originally produced in USA by Otic Records, a musicians’ cooperative
Self-taught composer-performer Bobby Naughton has been playing the vibraphone professionally since 1966. From silent film scoring to a stint with the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, not to mention a regular spot alongside Leo Smith (see 1979’s Divine Love), Naughton has since developed his craft by way of a unique, eclectic career. In 1971, Naughton and a handful of trusted musicians took a dip into the JAPO pool with Understanding. Recorded both in studio and in concert (with a slight change in roster between each), it documents a singular shuffle of original tunes and those of Carla Bley.
Bley and Naughton’s styles could hardly be more different, making their combination on this album all the more appropriate. Comparing the former’s title track with the latter’s follow-up, “Austin Who,” one finds a shift from the charcoal strokes of drummer Randy Kaye and Naughton’s own balance of melody and affect to a haunting look inward to places of delicate unrest. It is a fascinating diptych. Of the remaining Bley selections, the popular “Ictus” gets a gargling treatment, finding chaos and color in the tactile playing of clarinetist Perry Robinson. In it one can taste sunset and the excitement of evening’s promise. “Gloria” is the glistening heart of the set, a tender and questioning act of impression which, much like the opener, brushes its way into the ear, catching hair cells unawares with its jaggedness, pausing as if inhaling.
Naughton’s compositions unfurl a uniquely uplifting spread of descriptive moods. Sleigh bells, for instance, let us know that “Snow” is on the way. What ensues is not a song of winter’s dread, however, but of its thaw, each touch of percussion another clump rattling from the branches. Laurence Cook’s beautiful cymbal work in “V.A.” sparks an unusual conversation of wind and water, while for “Nital Rock” Naughton breaks out the clavinet for some electric throwback. Mark Whitecage does phenomenal things with the basset horn here, running a hundred errands at once.
This is a pot of water ever on the verge of boiling.
… . …
In an effort to better understand the context in which this album took shape, I interviewed Mr. Naughton, who kindly offered his succinct wisdom. Below is what transpired.
Tyran Grillo: Can you tell me a little about how you came to the vibraphone? Or did it come to you?
Bobby Naughton: I had been playing a lot of funky and out-of-tune pianos. The clarity of the vibraphone was appealing. And the keyboard was familiar. I went for it.
TG: As a self-taught musician, do you find that you approach performance in any way different from those with strictly formal training?
BN: I have no idea. As a child I had years of piano lessons, but am self-taught on the vibraphone. My formal education is in the liberal arts. My approach to performance? Prepare to lay it all on the line. Every time.
TG: How did Understanding come to fruition?
BN: I don’t know. Not by plan. It evolved.
TG: What was behind your decision to focus on the music of Carla Bley? Was she involved in the project in any way?
BN: No decision. Investigations led me to Carla’s compositions. Incredibly meaty and detailed stuff. No, Carla had no involvement.
TG: Looking back at your recorded output, how does Understanding fit into the sounds you have forged in, say, The Haunt or Zoar? What does the album mean for you?
BN: Each album covers quite a different area. Understanding is broader in scope and personnel. For example, the title composition is a tone row, a twelve tone piece, and “V.A.” is a graphic score.
TG: What were the circumstances that led you to work with Leo Smith?
BN: In the early 70s a JAPO employee wrote to me that Leo lived a few towns away in Connecticut. I called him and we met.
TG: Can you sketch me a picture of how the Divine Love recording session went down?
BN: A happening at the highest level.
TG: How would you describe your own compositions to those who haven’t heard them?
BN: Melodic and suggestive. Structures for improvisation.
TG: What would you say has been the most fulfilling aspect of your career thus far?
BN: Survival. It’s been musically rewarding but tempered by resources. You have to love it to do it.
Trygve Seim: Different Rivers (ECM 1744)
Trygve Seim
Different Rivers
Trygve Seim tenor and soprano saxophones
Arve Henriksen trumpet, trumpophone, vocals
Håvard Lund clarinet, bass clarinet
Nils Jansen bass and sopranino saxophones, contrabass clarinet
Hild Sofie Tafjord french horn
David Gald tuba
Stian Carstensen accordion
Bernt Simen Lund cello
Morten Hannisdal cello
Per Oddvar Johansen drums
Paal Nilssen-Love drums
Øyvind Brække trombone
Sidsel Endresen recitation
Recorded December 1998, January and December 1999 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Trygve Seim, Christian Wallumrød, and Øyvind Brække
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Breathe, and you know that you are the world.
Different Rivers marks Norwegian saxophonist Trygve Seim’s emergence from the ECM wings as a leader in his own right. Well versed in the label’s vital documentation of European improvising (not least of all through his life-changing tenure with Finnish drummer Edward Vesala), Seim draws upon those influences to pool his talents for the present disc, which deepens the free spirit of his so-called Trondheim Kunstorkester. Trumpeter Arve Henriksen—notably, a close associate of Christian Wallumrød—and a host of Scandinavian talents round out an ensemble of remarkable depth and poise.
Seim’s three duets with Henriksen are the album’s acupuncture points, each a vitalization of the whole. The breathy meditations of “Bhavana” and the flutter-tongued percussiveness of “Between” both spin on fluid axes, but it is “For Edward” that breaks its gravitational ties and flows outward into the universe. Seim’s shakuhachi tone reveals superb control of his reed, a sound honed by oneness with its source. Like two cranes calling to one another in the night, never able to find a way across the Milky Way between them, he and Henriksen paint bridges of artful listening in lieu of earthly travel. Even when they are surrounded, as in the title track, they are ever swimming toward something galactic.
The trumpeter reveals his vocal skills in opener “Sorrows.” In wispy arpeggios he lurks, stranger among a crowd of consenting instruments. The effect is ghostly, sirened by keening higher reeds. With the exception of “Search Silence” (a curious little flicker of geometry), the album’s remainder samples a likeminded palette. The subconscious beats of “Ulrikas Dans” brush on a light gesso for bolder horn strokes. Seim’s piercing harmonics lend an angelic touch, and his tenoring on “The Aftermath” spins a charm bracelet of wispy melodic cells. This life further into the sun-swept plains of “African Sunrise,” giving name to the aching land. Drummer Per Oddvar Johansen’s flint-strikes incite a conflagration in Seim’s playing, ending on scream. I daresay this and “Breathe” are two of the finest tracks in the ECM catalogue. The latter is a mission statement, a parable on the profundity of simplicity. Amid the band’s resonant atmospheres, vocalist Sidsel Endresen recites a powerful wakeup call. She finds a process in every wing-flap, every sprout and blossom, as blurry horn textures translate word into life.
The strengths of Seim’s compositions, and of those interpreting them, lie in their control and dynamic range. Their roots are as deep as their branches are tall, softly aflame with autumnal themes. Case in point: “Intangible Waltz,” which follows Henriksen’s patterns through thick forest and barren field alike. Its central whisperings between drums, accordion, and trumpet work wonders under the microscope. No matter how calm and thin its layers become, it allows visions of a dancing light to seep through.
Seim’s is a viscous music; don’t expect to swing. Meditative and ashen, every track of Different Rivers feels as if it was recovered from the archives of a lost culture, of which only this music remains to represent it. Let the rebuilding begin.
<< Ralph Towner: Anthem (ECM 1743)
>> Heino Eller: Neenia (ECM 1745 NS)
Ralph Towner: Anthem (ECM 1743)
Ralph Towner
Anthem
Ralph Towner classical and 12-string guitars
Recorded February 2000 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Once the luminescent 12-string of Ralph Towner opens the ears to the thoughts of “Solitary Woman” (aka “Alia’s Theme,” composed for the 1992 film Un’altra vita), there’s no turning away from the guitarist’s captivation. Towner’s ability to tell a story is uncanny: we know his characters as if they were ourselves but are at pains to describe them in retrospect. His is a music that must be lived, and relived, to be known. The modal approach of the album’s opening gambit proves revelatory in its percussive and emotive variety and compresses so much of what marks Towner’s mastery into one piece. Like nearly the rest of the album, it looks back also to an adroit compositional mind, one that recognizes the equal value of improvisation as a tool of expression.
Most the album features classical guitar. The title track gives solemn praise to the musical act itself. The sweep of Towner’s evocative sensibility is compass-like. Down the helical twirl of love and loss that is “Haunted,” he slides into “The Lutemaker.” Something of a sonic equivalent to James Cowan’s novel A Mapmaker’s Dream, it is a concise yet somehow beautifully varicose embodiment of its subject matter. It feels so real one can almost smell the workspace, hear the luthier’s plane singing. “Simone” is another of the album’s mysterious figures, her face familial yet also obscured by the ripple of shadow that she wears like the night. “Gloria’s Step,” by the tragically short-lived Scott LaFaro, is yet another and links Towner back to the Bill Evans circle in which he trained. It receives a studious and impassioned rendering at Towner’s fingertips and leads into the gallery of “Four Comets,” which along with “Three Comments” comprises one of two handfuls of sparkling miniatures. The former’s six-stringed sky becomes the latter’s 12-stringed loom, both spaces through which creative shuttles weave their constellations for others to decipher.
“Raffish” is a perfect example of Towner’s crystalline brand of jazz, at once deferential to past masters (hence the album’s title) and overtly countercultural in its sometimes-overwhelming optimism. The angularity here is refreshing. “Very Late” is another architecturally sound track. Its title bleeds from the music and reaches a steadying hand toward “The Prowler,” a programmatic gem. “Goodbye, Pork-Pie Hat” reprises the 12-string one last time, bringing the album back to its resonant beginnings in an especially intimate rendering of this classic Charles Mingus tune.
There is a depth of refrain in Towner’s music, and on Anthem it is alive with a direct philosophy that feeds also into the engineering. It is, quite simply, one of the finest solo guitar recordings to come out of ECM’s studios. Its balance of distance, finger action, and breath control is as erudite as that of the artist it documents. When medium and message are so well unified, who could ask for more?
<< Crispell/Peacock/Motian: Amaryllis (ECM 1742)
>> Trygve Seim: Different Rivers (ECM 1744)
Crispell/Peacock/Motian: Amaryllis (ECM 1742)
Marilyn Crispell piano
Gary Peacock bass
Paul Motian drums
Recorded February 2000 at Avatar Studios, New York
Engineer: James Farber
Produced by Manfred Eicher
With Nothing ever way, anyway, the trio of pianist Marilyn Crispell, bassist Gary Peacock, and drummer Paul Motian degaussed the sonic landscape. With this, its follow-up, the trio redefines itself. If in that debut Crispell proved the sonority of her craft as an improviser, here she proves the craft of her sonority. Whether evoking river’s flow or faucet’s drip, there is such palpable structure to her playing that one can almost live in it.
“Voice from the Past” gazes back to Gary Peacock’s 1982 album of the same name while also trudging forward in anticipation of what sigils it might inscribe by virtue of its fresh passage. Even the composer seems compelled to drown in his own creation, allowing Crispell’s porpoises to shake their bottlenoses in slow motion to the rhythm of Motian’s tide. Conversely, Peacock stands out in the pianist’s title track, which for all its prettiness cages a lonesome heart. There is a feeling of nature as entity, as if it were somehow able to brush away the veneer of our sadness and flow resolutely into its cause. “Requiem” is another dip into classic Peacock, this off his 1987 effort Guamba, again played here as if for the first time. Peacock takes the foreground as an artist grabs a paintbrush: which is to say, swiftly but respectfully. Yet even when composer and process sync with expectation, as they do also in “December Greenwings” (referencing 1979’s December Poems), Crispell is not to be overshadowed, for she brings a tree’s worth of blossoms into full view. As a melodic first responder, she unpacks Peacock’s compact phrases with obvious delight, and in her own “Rounds”—which connects the dots back to her 1983 album for Cadence, Spirit Music—she blankets our vision with flurries of brilliance. Strong as his drumming is in this track, Motian’s own compositional voice grabs even more attention in the trio’s slippery rendition of “Conception Vessel” (which titles his 1973 album) in conjunction with “Circle Dance.” The latter in particular elicits some of Crispell’s profoundest atmospheres, channeling Keith Jarrett at his most sacred. Motian’s “Morpion” solidifies the triangle by muscling its wide mane down connecting avenues of shine.
During sessions, producer Manfred Eicher further bid the musicians to improvise in the spirit of seeing what might take shape. Striking is how distinct the results are from their surroundings. “Voices” lays out a bed of bass and drums, one resonating and the other in a state of decay, and gives the piano an amorphous tree up which to climb. “Silence” is an album highlight, a real stunner that leaves us hanging from a branch of Zen-like irresolution. “M.E.” naturally pays tribute to Eicher, without whom it would not have taken shape and whose miraculous influence echoes through every touch of finger and brush, here and beyond. Another flask of inspiration drained and refilled to the last drop. “Avatar” is similarly gauze, fecund, and free. Pure magic, but with the bonus of “Prayer” (by clarinetist Mitchell Weiss) providing the final kiss to ensure the spell’s completion.
The most significant revelation of Amaryllis for ECM devotees is Crispell, who underscores the fortuitousness of having “crisp” in her surname with a string of performances that are exactly that. She is an expert at deep listening, and can provoke only the same in we who listen in turn.
<< Bobo Stenson Trio: Serenity (ECM 1740/41)
>> Ralph Towner: Anthem (ECM 1743)
Michael Mantler: Hide and Seek (ECM 1738)
Michael Mantler
Hide and Seek
Robert Wyatt voice
Susi Hyldgaard voice, accordion
Roger Jannotta flute, oboe, clarinets
Michael Mantler trumpets
Martin Cholewa French horn
Vincent Nilsson trombone
Bjarne Roupé guitars
Tineke Noordhoek vibraphone, marimba
Per Salo piano
Marianne Sørensen violins
Mette Winther violas
Helle Sørensen cellos
Recorded and mixed February-Septemer 2000 at Danish Radio Studios, Copenhagen
Engineer: Lars Palsig
Vocals recorded April 2000 at Gallery Studios, London
Engineer: Jamie Johnson
Electronic percussion programmed by Michael Mantler, sounds realized at Subzonique
Produced by Michael Mantler
Michael Mantler is a force: not to be reckoned with, per se, but of reckoning itself. He is an artist of voices, one who, as the title of this operatic jewel attests, seeks them out from hiding. One of those, Robert Wyatt (long since found), is a singer with whom this album furthers a 25-year collaboration. Another is Susi Hyldgaard (also an accomplished accordionist), who first rose from within the Mantler fold in his masterwork The School of Understanding. Accompanying them is an expanded version of the composer’s loosely termed Chamber Music and Songs Ensemble, which opens its wings to include, on winds, Roger Jannotta (of Tom van der Geld’s elusive Children At Play) and Danish pianist Per Salo. Also (omni)present is Bjarne Roupé, a guitarist who has become an integral player in Mantler’s soundings. The most vital instrument of all, however, is the text by Paul Auster, an author on Mantler’s mind for years and whose eponymous short play lends itself starkly to the composer’s unmistakable brand of telepathy. The result is no mere setting, as Mantler takes his scissors (with the author’s approval) to its language with surgical care.
Holograms are constructed in such a way that if you cut them into pieces, each retains the entire image on a smaller scale. Such is the dynamic of Hide and Seek’s seventeen miniatures. Not one is fragmentary but rather contains elements of the whole. The purely instrumental “Unsaid” dots the program in six parts, the first of which opens. In them one encounters swarms of commentary, some more modest than others, around the guitar’s queen bee. In them are the agitations into which the play’s two characters are so reluctant to give. The balance is meticulous. It allows Wyatt and Hyldgaard to dance in their circles of comfort, breaking even in their seesawing between resignation and martyrdom even as the strings paint cracks in the glass above. Unsaid, yes, but not un-voiced.
“What did you say?”
These words introduce us to a drama of elliptical conversational elements. They cradle in their hands steaming plates of indecision, miscommunication, and vulnerability, which take the piece’s full duration to consume. Voices get caught up in their own vices, and in that process also take advantage of a few loopholes. Statements become facing mirrors lost in a mise-en-abyme of their own making. In their net the accordion occupies stage center, emotes without semantic limitations, while Mantler’s trumpet drips with guidance.
“What do you see?”
“Absolutely nothing”
Question and answer. Cloud and rain. Strings and footsteps. These comprise the core of Hide and Seek, their refrain a powerful marker of identity, or lack thereof, in which all traction is gilded, amplified. The tangled web of “What can we do?” features Mantler’s electronically programmed drums in a whirl of self-realization. It also poses the album’s most pertinent question, for which it has no answer but the melody of its asking.
“It all has to end sometime”
Closure by conjuring. An impending doom, so dark it is beautiful. In its shadows Wyatt and Hyldgaard make an emotionally foiled pair, especially in the final leg. They braid acceptance, parrying and thrusting their way toward the simple resolution of “I’m glad you’re glad.”
All of which culminates in two of Mantler’s most perfect shapes. The circling electric guitar of “Do you think we’ll ever find it?” marks a standout denouement, while “It makes no difference to me” sets speech atop a fulcrum of rocking strings. A return to the game, the accordion’s song passes through the door and on to the next chapter, as yet unwritten.
<< Vassilis Tsabropoulos: Akroasis (ECM 1737)
>> Ensemble Belcanto: Come un’ombra di luna (ECM 1739 NS)
Vassilis Tsabropoulos: Akroasis (ECM 1737)
Vassilis Tsabropoulos
Akroasis
Vassilis Tsabropoulos piano
Recorded March 28, 2002 at Megaron, Dmitri Mitropoulos Hall, Athens
Engineer: Nikos Espialidis
Executive Producer: Manfred Eicher
Akroasis confirms Vassilis Tsabropoulos as a pianist whose talent is as deep as the ocean but who is content exploring single drops of it. Of those drops we get eight in Akroasis, which follows his intriguing ECM debut as jazz artist with a collection of improvisations built around, and in response to, five Byzantine hymns. The latter are Orthodox staples, and in their re-imaginings here chart new plains with a feeling of eternity. The first three, and in particular “Axion Esti,” gently showcase Tsabropoulos’s knack for evocation. Shifting from emerald to topaz, they bring a lofty yet intimate architecture into being. Cascading as they do from such great heights, the melodies quaver behind veils of their own mist, folding and refolding into increasingly visual arrangements. Certain others (namely: “Anastasis”) brim with optimism under cover of low-grade fever, dances of molecules and light that yield songs of ethereal cast. Their gifts flow like Sunday morning into a vestry which, though empty, nevertheless sings with the pregnancy of its shelter. Like the music reverberating between its walls, it cares not for fleeting objects or soundings but for the prism of heavenly care into which they feed.
Tsabropoulos’s own compositions flush the ears of toxins via rolling currents, gazing upon the shapes of their divine interest as if they were impressed with icons in relief. “The Secret Garden” best shows his rigorous classical roots, evoking Ravel, Mompou, and de Falla in a blush of twilight. Don’t let the title mislead, however. Although the temptation to link these billowing streams to some invisible mystery is strong, they are firmly rooted in the realities of their creation: a coming together of body, instrument, and element. “Interlude” further illuminates the detail of Tsabropoulos’s artistry and shows a player starkly attuned to the value of spacious play. Its waves of pause and reflection are overwhelming in their subtlety, rendered all the more honest against an occasional sprinkle of dew in the higher register. The beauty of this album can hardly be overstated, if only because it is so understated, and nowhere more so than in the concluding “Prayer,” which like all that comes before it glistens with the innocence of its birth. We can feel Tsabropoulos thinking out loud, as if with an arm around us in brotherhood and peace.
Although comparisons to, for one, his duo project with Anja Lechner would seem inevitable, and despite the album’s decidedly sacred slant, to my ears it is more closely analogous to The River. That latter effort between pianist Ketil Bjørnstad (perhaps as close an analogue as one can find at the keyboard) and cellist David Darling brims with the same aquatic grace and expresses that grace through likeminded depth of production, clearly mapped even in the most heavily pedaled regions. Tsabropoulos’s relationship to this music is that of cloud and lake: one creates the other and, in being created, reflects the creator in kind. Thus, the album cover, in both incarnations, becomes an icon unto itself. Neither is positive and neither is negative. Both are nothing without the breath of life to be seen and, above all, heard.
<< András Schiff: Leoš Janáček – A Recollection (ECM 1736 NS)
>> Michael Mantler: Hide and Seek (ECM 1738)
Annette Peacock: an acrobat’s heart (ECM 1733)
Annette Peacock
an acrobat’s heart
Annette Peacock vocal, piano
The Cikada String Quartet
Henrik Hannisdal violin
Odd Hannisdal violin
Marek Konstantynowicz viola
Morten Hannisdal cello
Recorded January and April, 2000 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher
we play our own music
we sing our own song
I make my own music
for right or for wrong
With these words, Annette Peacock reveals the shape of an acrobat’s heart, a portrait of a consummate artist. In her voice of voices is a world of wisdom, poised like a golf ball atop a tee—only instead of soaring down the fairway it sinks deep into the earth and marks its passage with remainders of relationships, dreams, travels. Previously represented on ECM as a ghostly compositional force to be reckoned with (viz: Paul Bley’s Ballads and Marilyn Crispell’s tribute record Nothing ever was, anyway), after years of preparation in response to a label commission Peacock at last spread her fan, nestling her voice and pianism in a bed softened by the presence of the Cikada String Quartet.
(Photo by Alastair Thain)
The bed metaphor proves apt, for in her plush, if sometimes distant, textures Peacock invites the listener into a space canopied by sheets. With an imploring yet never desperate tone, she turns experience into diary and diary into melody. More than personal, these songs are personified, each a character on a stage whose name is love. In this respect, piano and string quartet work like a giant heart, translating blood into life as might the poet turn breath into light. The instruments churn soil for every vocal flower, piano loosing handfuls of descriptive raindrops to water them. Some of those flowers are supple (“Over.”), while others are fallible (“u slide”); some liberated (“b 4 u said”), others wedded to time (“ways it isn’t”). More often, however, Peacocok is content mining the interstices of indecision for valuable emotional ore, unraveling a genuinely honest songcraft along the way. Heaviness of subject matter aside, there is an ethereal quality to her framework that turns questions into reality by shrouding them in fulfillment.
The lyrics say only what they need to say. Be they the open communications of “weightless” or the fresh wounds of “Free the memory,” one can expect a minimum of dress, for indeed the more one listens, and in spite of an intense physicality, the more the body becomes immaterial and passion reigns as emptiness. Peacock’s distinctly lilting cadences draw upon a stark cinema, thrown onto the screen by a projector of innocence. With a single utterance she can gut your expectations and fill them with conversations, at once profuse and fragmentary with age. Against these, “Camille” is a relatively mysterious turning of the mirror, catching just enough luminescence to clarify what is under the microscope.
The comet tails of Peacock’s surroundings are laden with affect. They turn like a mobile above a crib, connecting one galaxy to another with a rug weaver’s eye. The Cikadas brush lithely across her paper, erasing as much as they inscribe. For the most part, their gestures are bowed, although the rare pizzicato bloom (“The heart keeps”) lets its fragrance be known. Such moments take the album’s stream back to its course like an unsure lover back to the skin, to the warmth and closeness in which this music so wholeheartedly believes. The quartet also provides reprieve (in relation to the density of its surroundings) in “Unspoken,” floats us into “Safe” (the pianism of which becomes a speech act), and haunts again in “Lost at Last,” colored in lapsed time.
ECM has done quiet and significant work in extolling the virtues of jazz’s most intriguing songstresses, among them Sidsel Endresen, Norma Winstone, and most recently Judith Berkson. Yet with this release the label has unwrapped a significant gift indeed, one that keeps on giving the more you let it in.
<< Robin Williamson: The Seed-at-zero (ECM 1732)
>> Charles Lloyd: The Water Is Wide (ECM 1734)
Arild Andersen w/Vassilis Tsabropoulos and John Marshall: The Triangle (ECM 1752)
Vassilis Tsabropoulos piano
Arild Andersen double-bass
John Marshall drums
Recorded January 2003 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Classical pianist and late jazz bloomer Vassilis Tsabropoulos turned heads with his ECM debut, Achirana, for which he redefined the piano trio under the leadership of bassist Arild Andersen and guidance of drummer John Marshall, both improvisers of proven stamina and invention. Whereas Tsabropoulos’s playing felt at times muddied and inattentive to negative space on that nevertheless enchanting record, this sophomore effort ushers us into a new and vibrant chapter with “Straight.” Immediately one can tell in this Tsabropoulos original that its composer has already tapped into the qualities of a fine improviser, treating his hands more like feet engaged in dance, leaping and bounding their way through turns of phrase. The transformation is obvious in the way he listens, in Andersen’s duly spirited soloing, in Marshall’s vintage sound. That feeling of metamorphosis is even more palpable in “Choral” and in “Simple Thoughts,” both rustling, leafy scenes, picturesque yet open to darkness. And in “Cinderella Song,” Tsabropoulos elicits gobs of soul from the rhythm section, carrying the night with all the resignation of one who is sure in life and in love. His development as a jazz artist manifests itself further in the album’s intertextual variety, evoking Bill Evans, Vince Guaraldi, and French impressionism in short chains of keystrokes. In the latter regard, his arrangement of Ravel’s “Pavane” proves that his architectural awareness has indeed bloomed in the four-year gap between trio albums. Here he balances guidance and recession, thinking out loud in real time before our ears and brushing away the leaves to reveal the ground in all its promises of life.
Although on paper Tsabropoulos headlined Achirana, which was irrefutably an Andersen showcase, this time the opposite holds true. Still, Andersen muscles his way through some soft territories without so much as a blemish in his wake. He contributes three tunes, rendering a puff of cloud for every patch of sky. “Saturday” invokes a proper and delicate swing and finds Tsabropoulos going for a more linear approach, which bodes well for everyone involved. There is a nostalgic, quasi-urban energy in this one that sits on the cusp of swimming and drowning, opting to jump before finding out which will prevail. “Prism” offers a velvety ballad—the album’s only in the truest sense—and sets us up for the groovier “Lines,” in which the trio hits its stride.
By far the most interesting portion of this album, however, comes in the form of “European Triangle,” an unusual group improvisation that hints at broader undercurrents begging for exploration.
This is simpatico done right.
<< John Taylor Trio: Rosslyn (ECM 1751)
>> Trio Mediaeval: Words of the Angel (ECM 1753 NS)
Between Sound and Space: ECM Records and Beyond 