Year: 2014

Kosi: One More Cup of Coffee

| Tyran Grillo

One More Cup of Coffee

ever been kidnapped
by a poet
if i were a poet
i’d kidnap you
put you in my phrases and meter
you to jones beach
or maybe coney island
or maybe just to my house
–from “kidnap poem,” by Nikki Giovanni

Kosi is Akosua Gyebi Sorensen, a child of New York who has grown into her own on a bold, reflective debut album. One Cup of Coffee makes no excuses, pulls no punches, and leaves the mirror streaked with experience. Raised by hardworking immigrants in Southeast Queens, Kosi took to her own musical formations early on, despite her household tastes. “My parents played records of Jimmy Cliff and Shirley Caesar,” she muses, “but I always preferred to borrow Billy Holiday albums from the library. I don’t know what drew me to her as a seven- or eight-year-old child, as I couldn’t possibly have understood what I was hearing.” Yet it’s clear from her words and her sounds that a deeper understanding was just waiting for the ideal moment to emerge.

Kosi would go on to study at Brooklyn College, by which time her love of singing had already been instilled through participation in her local church choir. Outside the congregation, life had its way. As any musician knows, the City can be an unforgiving sea of voices vying to be heard, as attested by the fact that Kosi’s uncompromising talents are these days more often heard echoing through subway tunnels—a gig she’s owned since around Thanksgiving of 2013. And certainly we can give thanks that One More Cup of Coffee has materialized for those unable to ride the rails, for it shows just how those cavernous transportation portals have honed her art into something at once inviting and aloof.

Accompanied by guitarist Aron Marchak, she weaves a spell that is as much a portrait of her environment as of the contradictions of her own urbanity. To these ears, the relationship between voice and guitar is tight as yin and yang—so attuned, in fact, that one who didn’t know any better could be forgiven in thinking that Kosi was accompanying herself. The artist tells a different story.

“I’ve only been working with Aron for about a year. He works with many different artists in a variety of different styles (jazz, gospel, r&b, rock, etc.), and so he’s usually prepared to do whatever I ask him to do, provided I can articulate clearly what I want from him. Also, contrary to popular belief about singers, I’m not exactly the most demanding human being, and I’m ready and willing to work with whatever I’m given. The combination of his adaptability and my adaptability gives the illusion of ‘tightness’ when in fact, it’s the loosest of all possible partnerships.”

To that effect, Kosi sings with heart, about heart, and allows the disjointedness of lived experience to voice itself as memory. Her diction crinkles like a windblown shopping bag, in which rattles a variety of reference points. From jazz to blues to neo-soul: it’s all there, pre-tapped and ready to be heard, but with such freshness of vision that it could be from no other singer. This is Kosi’s strength, a raw yet elegant presentation that explodes with originality, as is especially the case when one considers the album’s only two standards alongside the intensities of her own songcraft. Of those tunes, she notes “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” as something of a random choice:

“In a rehearsal with Aron one day, while I was searching through my folder for something or other, he started playing it and, recognizing it, I sang along with him. I liked how it sounded, so I suggested that we perform it at the show for which we were rehearsing. The inclusion of one wordless standard became a habit for us after that. Actually, maybe more of a ritual than a habit. I like the idea of singing wordless tunes because it makes me a part of the ensemble rather than just being a feature to be accompanied.”

The Mingus classic proves a fitting introduction, easing us into the album’s nocturnal universe without betraying the emotional rollercoaster about to ensue. Kosi’s instrumentality applies a smooth appliqué to Aron’s rich picking, carrying the tune in gracious slings of honor. Of the album’s other standard, “Autumn in New York,” Kosi says the following: “The album was released in autumn in New York. I was also born in autumn in New York. Autumn is my favorite season, and New York is the only city with which I identify. If I had to choose only one standard to identify with, that would have to be it.” In the duo’s purview, this song lovingly connects indoors to outdoors, nature to nurture. A leisurely stroll through Central Park. A counting of blessings on ten fingers. A romantic vision of a city ravished yet perseverant.

Kosi

Yet what makes One More Cup of Coffee such a memorable experience is its multifaceted exploration of womanhood, which in Kosi’s diaristic originals comes across as both impervious and vulnerable. The singer cites “Need Your Love” as a prime example of the latter, for what appears on the surface to be a sensual, self-assured song, comes with a price. “It may be the most anti-feminist thing I’ve ever written,” she avers.

“It is about a woman putting on masculine bravado, or in other words, completely compromising her womanhood, so much that she’s willing to degrade, objectify, and overextend herself because she needs to feel ‘loved’ without ever even defining what that love would look or feel like. I am not glorifying this mentality; the narrator of this song is a pitiable creature who has (perhaps momentarily) lost all her strength but is still clinging to a false front. I am admitting to it, though. The narrator is me, or was me at the time when I wrote the song, proving that feminists are not immune to feelings of complete weakness.”

These sentiments bear echoes of third-wave feminist politics, which challenge essentialist (read: popular) notions of gender by owning up to, and learning from, moments of breakdown—as must we all, from time to time. Kosi is unafraid to perform her past as a means of re-creation. The end effect is a song set that de-mythologizes femininity and gets real for an hour. It’s a message touted by such visionaries as Audre Lorde, whose subscription to the erotic over romance reclaimed the former’s vilified spectrum as a levee against the tide of despair. As Lorde once wrote, “There is a difference between painting a back fence and writing a poem, but only one of quantity.”

With this in mind, we hear songs like “Karen” in more nuanced light—not as professions but obsessions of self-image, refracted through the soul and body of another, succumbing to love’s illusions all the same. Likewise, “Marlene” walks the cracks of heartbreak between suspicion and bodily trust, the infection of affection held under the microscope, and erupts into the album’s most cathartic moment: a grunt that plays like some visceral, operatic win. A verbal takedown of mind over matter, to be sure. Such expectorations are tempered by inhalations of resolve, as in the inebriated haze of “The Last Shot,” which is all about losing faith but also gaining trust in others when the chips are down. The bluesy perseverance of “Once and Future” negotiates even harder-won affirmations.

The relationships portrayed on the album are all the more realistic for being so fleeting. Whether the compromises of the title track (“One guitar string missing—I think that one’s the G? / One knight in tarnished armor come to rescue me”) or the brokenness of “Little Miss Generous,” there is a genuine recognition that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. All of which funnels into “I Wrote you a Song,” the album’s unlisted bonus track, which finds beauty in solitude and refuses the need of another body to define self-worth, confirming that love must start with the self before it can ever trickle into another’s waters. “I wrote you a song that you’ll never hear,” she sings, “cuz I’ll only sing it when I know you’re not near.” Hearing these words, we cannot deny them knowing that we are their substitute targets.

Although Kosi lays no claims to an overarching theme, the album deals with gargantuan questions of love and loss all the same, and does so with unabashed honesty. At times confrontational, at others lyrical, her personality hits you with all it has to offer. If you can’t handle it, don’t run away. Just listen more.

Songs of Fire and Ice: OCO and Tetzlaff Dance with the Gypsies

| Tyran Grillo

OCO

Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
with Christian Tetzlaff, violin
March 26, 2014
Bailey Hall, Cornell University
8:00pm

When the first stirrings of the Hungarian Rondo resounded from the bows of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, time and space collapsed. Zoltán Kodály’s transcription and embellishment of Magyar (old Hungarian) soldier’s songs began an intimate night of music making at Cornell University’s Bailey Hall, where light struck prism in a program of gypsy refractions. Impressive though this rarely heard music was, so too was the musicianship fronting it. The OCO worked by turns smoothly and jaggedly, bringing warmth and coolth where needed. Through it all, a pastoral clarinet crept in and out of frame, troubling the waters here and breaking surface there. However far the scales tipped, a central theme brought assurance with its periodic balance.

Such dynamic brazenness carried over into Béla Bartók’s 1939 Divertimento for string orchestra. Among the composer’s most beloved works, it was given a robust interpretation. Between the insistence of its underlying pulse and the violins spiraling above and beyond it, artful contrasts ensued. As throughout the Kodály, a core of soloists emerged and receded, morphing between concert hall elegance and fireside rusticity. Remarkable about the performance was its clarity of voices, each cutting a strong thematic figure. As the orchestra moved from pen & ink to the charcoal of the second movement, one could feel a cinematic charge arising from the dust, so that by the gilded final Allegro the light was that much clearer for having passed through darkness.

Christian Tetzlaff

Following intermission, violinist Christian Tetzlaff took to the stage to unravel the Violin Concerto No. 2 in D minor of Joseph Joachim. Composed between 1854 and 1860, it remains one of the most notorious pieces in the repertoire. Tetzlaff was more than prepared to overcome its maze of double stops and chromatic fingerwork, the latter of which enacted a dance in and of itself not unlike the folk tunes that had inspired it. Aside from being a technical tempest, the composing drew on a range of influences, from the Beethovenian drama of its introduction to the Paganini-like finish. Yet the closest analogue was undoubtedly Dvořák, whose own violin concerto was duly inspired by Joachim’s ways with bow and pen. The OCO accordingly showed a retroactive side, one more subdued, that it might allow Tetzlaff to express himself without obstruction. The violinist’s interpretive prowess soared, especially in a cadenza that was, as the kids say, off the chain. The bird-like slow movement at concerto center presaged more of Dvořák’s later work, although the spirit of the dance was never far away, as if we were catching snatches of some revelry just beyond the pastures. And revelry we got in the joyful finale, which put Tetzlaff in the unenviable position of tying a plethora of loose ends—a feat he accomplished with tact.

Following suit of the orchestra half-circled around him, Tetzlaff emoted effortlessly and with controlled passion, so that even the encore (Hungarian Dance No. 19 by Brahms) went down like a delicate confection at the end of a five-star meal.

Jacob Young: Evening Falls (ECM 1876)

| Tyran Grillo

Evening Falls

Jacob Young
Evening Falls

Jacob Young guitar
Mathias Eick trumpet
Vidar Johansen bass clarinet, tenor saxophone (track 6)
Mats Eilertsen double-bass
Jon Christensen drums
Recorded December 2002 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Considering the legion of Norwegian talents with whom Jacob Young has played, and of which he is one star in a constellation of them, it was perhaps inevitable that his sound should migrate over to ECM. Enter Evening Falls, the guitarist’s sensuous international debut for the German powerhouse following four albums on local labels. The Jacob Young Group, as it has come to be styled, finds him in the enviable company of trumpeter Mathias Eick, reedman Vidar Johansen (primarily on bass clarinet), bassist Mats Eilertsen, and drummer Jon Christensen. This who’s who of northern talent brings a wealth of history to the table, so that the lyrical results are not merely intuitive, but comfortable like worn-in denim.

That Young studied under Jim Hall and John Abercrombie is apparent in “Blue,” although one may also hear a bit of Bill Connors glinting off his rural edge. Young’s composing also spans territories, sounding one moment like a Tomasz Stanko ballad (check the brilliant, trumpet-driven “Minor Peace”) and for all at others like a dulcet etude (cf. “Falling”). The fluidity of his teachers shines through music that, although weighing little, is emotionally robust. There is warmth here, a love for life in all its colors seeping like rain through soil into all that follows. Eick connects the dots to another satellite reference—Kenny Wheeler, whose insightful laddering can be heard in the trumpeter’s nonetheless distinct soloing.

No one on this record, however, is as distinct as Young, who navigates ever-changing currents with the skill of an ancient mariner. Despite his acoustic penchant, he does plug in for a few tunes, notably “Looking for Jon” and “Sky.” The former skips by virtue of Christensen’s brilliant drumming and Eick’s clarion fluency, while the latter tune flies not like a bird but lilts as would a paper airplane thrown from a tall building. The effect is nothing short of profound. Even in the acoustic tracks, such as “Formerly,” Young’s playing shines with its own electricity. Either way, the dynamic checks and balances continue in “Evening Air,” in which Young draws bass clarinet and trumpet from hiding in a beauteous thematic braid. Guitar and bass play especially well off one another. Eick’s trumpet likewise flowers, while Christensen’s cymbals trickle in with the last rays of sunset.

In trio with Eilertsen and Christensen, Young carries the full weight of his compositions with the effortlessness of respiration. This nexus works in elastic, tactile fashion throughout, seesawing between Mediterranean reveries (“The Promise”) and slick turns of phrase. So synergistic is this core unit that it bears an album’s worth of weight in the web of its interplay. In light of this, Johansen’s contributions are more enigmatic but no less integral, although with one exception. His bass clarinet does wonders whenever it appears, charting the tailwinds of that which has preceded it, but on tenor saxophone he proves superfluous on “Presence of Descant,” of which Eick’s trumpeting leaves little room for embellishment. What this track lacks in a melodic frontline Christensen makes up for with masterful color, laying down a mood as few drummers can.

In the end, we are gifted a superbly listenable album with all the qualities of an old friend.

Miroslav Vitous: Universal Syncopations (ECM 1863)

| Tyran Grillo

Universal Syncopations

Miroslav Vitous
Universal Syncopations

Jan Garbarek soprano and tenor saxophones
Chick Corea piano
John McLaughlin guitar
Miroslav Vitous double-bass
Jack DeJohnette drums
Isaac Smith trombone (tracks 2 to 4)
Wayne Bergeron trumpet (tracks 2 to 4)
Valery Ponomarev trumpet, flugelhorn (tracks 2 to 4)
Recorded at Universal Syncopation and Rainbow Studios, Oslo
Edited and mixed March 2003 by Miroslav Vitous, Manfred Eicher, and Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher and Miroslav Vitous

Miroslav Vitous’s Universal Syncopations is an ode to many things. To the late 60s, when he laid down the seminal album Infinite Search with guitarist John McLaughlin and drummer Jack DeJohnette, both featured on the present disc. To the purity of improvisation as a game of thrones over which melodic integrity forever reigns. To the joys of making music in fine company. Indeed, the Czech bassist could hardly ask for better session mates with whom to share the infinite search that is jazz. To that end, he is further joined by pianist Chick Corea and saxophonist Jan Garbarek, the latter of whom produces some of his liveliest playing yet. For ECM fans, it should be especially poignant to hear Garbarek and DeJohnette reunited in the studio, a planetary alignment not heard on the label since 1982’s Voice from the Past – PARADIGM.

Although Vitous has never been one for predictability, he is a poster child for reliability. One catch of “Bamboo Forest,” and it’s obvious: he is a musician’s musician, whose muscling ranges from powerful to miniscule (note, for example, his acrobatics in the penultimate track, “Medium”). Spurred along by a Brazilian vibe, the joyous sweep of this album opener finds Garbarek ticking off a smooth list of errands, adding depth to the gloss with every lick of his reed. And really, it’s the Vitous-Garbarek-DeJohnette nexus that holds the molecule together throughout, flexing with especial limberness in “Univoyage.” Here DeJohnette holds down the fort while the rest flit about with all the freedom of the world at their wingtips. McLaughlin and Corea provide spectral flashes in the brightness of their playing, painting the stardust to Garbarek’s eagle-eyed navigation. The swanky “Tramp Blues” finds the same trio walking a tightrope of expression toward more playful destinations.

Other configurations, however, do arise organically from the mix. There is the bass-drums-guitar grouping of “Faith Run,” which deposits DeJohnette’s propulsion at the center of it all, now gilded by McLaughlin’s sparkling ringlets (it’s also the last of three tracks featuring light brass accompaniment). Yet another coloration introduces itself in “Sun Flower,” which brings Corea back into the mix alongside the dynamic rhythm section. Pianist, drummer, and bassist dance and divine by turns, Garbarek hanging low to bring earthier hues to canvas. Corea hangs around for “Miro Bop.” This swinging piece of prosody lights its fair share of fireworks from DeJohnette, while Garbarek again proves his chops and strategic deployment as a jazzman. The saxophonist joins Vitous in “Beethoven,” a slick lesson in translation with DeJohnette acting as interpreter. What goes around comes around as “Brazil Waves” ends the album in the same vein with which it began: an atmospheric ride through surging beats and melodic treats.

Universal Syncopations is a tapestry of sound woven by steady, practiced hands. Each musician knows when to make way for another’s pass of thread and to contribute his own color when appropriate. The overall effect is unanimous and gifts us with a chunk of unforgettable, life-affirming jazz, its heart in all the right places.

Exploding the Sandbox: A Moment with TOTEM>

| Tyran Grillo

Voices of Grain In his seminal essay “The Grain of the Voice,” French philosopher Roland Barthes asserts the failure of language to interpret music for the precise reason that language and music are one in the same. Needing no self-projection to justify its existence, music is a signifier without identity that expresses its materiality by what he calls the “grain.” During a recent interview with between sound and space, guitarist Bruce Eisenbeil, who alongside bassist Tom Blancarte and drummer Andrew Drury is part of the free improvisation triangle known as TOTEM>, explains the importance of the grain in a mode of sonic production that may seem far afield of its roots but which in fact burrows past them: “The history of what I’ve been involved with, which is jazz-based, brought me to these sounds. When I look at the music of, for instance, of Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, and Albert Ayler, and how each had his own musical influence—for Taylor it was classical; for Coltrane, world music; and for Ayler, folk—as a springboard for improvisation, I see those same influences in my own evolution. All of this and more, including contemporary classical music from the second half of the twentieth century (Xenakis, Reich, Lachenmann, etc.), has made me realize that playing guitar is in large part about imitating my own environment. It’s not unlike a child who acquires language just by being around family members and learning to communicate. For me, it’s as simple as that. I take everything I’ve ever heard or experienced and pass it through my filter, using my guitar as an instrument for the exploration of that sound by way of communication. So concepts of music, noise, or sound—really, all of these things are part of the same thing.” We may easily connect this way of thinking to Barthes, who avers that music, “by natural bent, is that which receives an adjective,” an assertion that renders moot any question of genre. Subjecting music to the violence of nominalization precludes the lived experience of its descriptive realities. In less uncertain terms: adjectives are active, while nouns are dead matter. The creation and absorption of sound functions as an act of translation, a way to experience the afterlife of sonic production through another form, be it in words or in reverberations.

TOTEM

To be sure, the matter-makers of TOTEM> know a thing or two about adjectives. Voices of Grain, which comes five years after their 2008 debut Solar Forge, brims with them. Although thoroughly established on the lunatic fringe of New York’s jazz scene, their presence is mappable by no coordinates, save the curtain behind which an ancestral Oz beats his drum. The virtuosity of each member is formidable, but when standing in the center of their galactic fury we needn’t understand any means of execution. We are more likely to find strange comfort in the mystery behind every utterance. Despite the frenzy, there is hardly a trace of urgency to the sounds, which come to us through noose-outlined ovals of sky, each a window into another, ad infinitum. And where does all of this leave the hapless writer, who struggles with words as if severed from the music they entail? Eisenbeil has an answer for that, too: “A vast majority of sound is created in the world and how that sound is used in situations is predicated on people being engaged in one form or another. Writings by those who sit removed just expecting to be fed say more about the writer’s environment than about the music’s. Musicians will tell you that the more the audience is involved, the better the experience is. It turns into something larger than everyone and everything involved. It’s an ancient process.” As indeed the free qualities of “Genosong” take shape, and in my own attempts to participate in the conversation, I initially struggle for reference points. To wit, possibilities include the Laswell/Haino/Ali joint Decided … Already The Motionless Heart Of Tranquility, Tangling The Prayer Called “I” (1999, Tzadik) and the pioneering work of Derek Bailey. Yet the confluence of signatures that is TOTEM> discloses another genealogy entirely, one quoted above yet also expressed by spontaneous architectures. The result is a hulking vessel that becomes indistinguishable from the waters it plows. Between the breakers of Drury’s drumming, Blancarte’s thick knot-work, and the guitar’s ever-fractal song, the trio trades shine for brine in a pirated helix of comportment. One can almost feel the mitochondria warming up. There’s a sense here of tentacles grasping on to something, of suction and underbellies barnacled by nocturnal passage. What seems a maritime nightmare is in fact a jazz dream, each strand of braid taking a solo while the others lock into supporting grooves. Such moments are brief, although periodic enough to prove TOTEM>’s three-dimensional locution. From oceans eternal to motions internal, from ship to submarine, creaks and water pressures abound in the claustrophobic symphony of “Written in the Body.” What appears to be a dive inward marks its clip by friction of strings and osmosis of skins. Chronology, then, becomes not an ordering of events but an event of orderings, each strand one possible pathway through the mind’s eye, a constant breaking and reconnecting of bare life. Further tensions ravel in “Toward Jouissance,” which stretches and rubs a balloon to the brink of rupture, and in “Counter Memory,” which draws a whirlpool of collective becoming. The latter is more explicitly layered as guitar elicits a frantic cartography across insectile spectrums. “Message Without a Code” not only names the next track, but might as well be the band’s slogan: despite the seemingly cryptic methods (extended techniques, and so on) of execution, the sounds produced are stark naked. Acceptance of that nakedness, molecular it may be, are the listener’s only entrance fee to a full experience of these goings on. More than that, it’s an awareness of one’s physical universe and the planetary alignments of performance. No mere analogy, this image reaches back to Eisenbeil’s genealogy of forms, which taps into a decidedly Foucauldian sense of biopower, that elusive yet pervasive technology of physical management: “Noise is the grain of the voice, and with the grain expresses power,” the guitarist goes on to say. “The idea is that all of the leading exponents of jazz have always had this kind of noise in their sound. Whether it was Ornette Coleman or Charlie Parker, or Evan Parker, or William Parker…many of these musicians were criticized early on for this grain that comes through their sound, which people initially perceived as noise because their emotional filter didn’t allow it to penetrate their being. Yet now that noise is accepted. It must be heard.” Perhaps this is the message of “Post-Repeating,” the album’s most outward statement by far. It cuts a vast horizontal plane, a frozen ocean cracking in the sun with meditative cause, and paves our way toward the final “Silence On Its Road.” In the end, there is only the beginning, a gesture that resounds with every possibility at its fingertips. All explosions look like implosions with enough mirrors around. “Music,” says Eisenbeil, “is best when formed when people have an open heart.” It need be nothing more or less. Like the arrowhead that ends the band’s name, it points forward, no more knowing of the future than the rest of us. And so, while the album does proceed in an extremely physical manner, it orbits us at such a rate that the distinction between the body and its environment collapses in endless porosity. Eisenbeil agrees: “I love playing with Tom and Andrew. It’s a fantastic experience for being completely natural. Every single time we get together, whether in public performance or in the studio, it’s a transcendental experience that is much bigger than the three of us. The sound is an entity in and of itself, a universal life force that the three of us are part of.” To that life force will be added the curious who, with open ears and hearts, find themselves drowning in the sandbox of TOTEM>’s sound-world, swallowing every last grain until it screams.

David Torn: Prezens (ECM 1877)

| Tyran Grillo

Prezens

David Torn
Prezens

David Torn guitars, live-sampling and manipulation
Tim Berne alto saxophone
Craig Taborn Fender Rhodes, Hammond B3, mellotron, bent circuits
Tom Rainey drums
Matt Chamberlain drums
Recorded March 2005 at Clubhouse Studios, Rhinebeck, New York
Engineer: Hector Castillo
Produced by David Torn

Prezens marks David Torn’s return to ECM after a long hiatus since cloud about mercury. Here the guitarist joins altoist Tim Berne, keyboardist Craig Taborn, and drummer Tom Rainey for a combustible tangle of music making. The band, goes the backstory, recorded a dozen hours of free improvisation, from which were culled and refashioned an album’s worth of material, surgeried by Torn post factum. Finding one’s way through the end product may be no small task, but reaps its rewards in proportion to the openness of the ears receiving them.

At sound center is Torn himself, who, if not picking his glyphs across six amplified strings, is deepening them at the mixing board. Indeed, his presence (the album’s title under another name?) echoes far beyond the chord that stretches its yawn across “ak” in a swirling electronic haze. If the appearance of drums, organ, and saxophone seems out of place in this opening track, it is because they belong there so needfully. Ambient constructions flit in and out of aural purview, foiling the physicality of the acoustic here and now. Trailing the footfalls of Berne’s ghostly doppelganger, they trip over grungy riffs from Torn, who invites satirically blissful finish. Ganglion to ganglion, each instrumental element touches the third eye of something cerebral yet instantly accessible. Accessible, yes, because of the music’s inability to clothe itself. This isn’t meant to make your head nod, but to implode.

Spoken words hide like poison in “rest & unrest,” an exploration of the illusory nature of reality, a musical testimony led astray by its own shadow. It reveals the album’s variety of diction and leads into the evolved patterning of “structural functions of prezens.” As Torn’s electric keens distantly yet with the bleed-through of a Venn diagram, cells of machine-gun drumming turn this forlorn jam session into an exercise in self-destruction. Berne’s alto weaves its legato path across a landscape that is equal parts Jon Hassell and Steve Tibbetts, as if smuggling genomes across the border between consciousness and unconsciousness. So begins a chain of possible references one might connect. The electrical charge of Elliott Sharp activates the filaments of “bulbs,” while Bill Frisell’s weeds tumble through the ghost town of “them buried standing,” the latter further notable for its angelic resolution.

The album’s latter half mines decidedly urban sites of sonic production. The mélange of beat and grunge that is “sink” pulses with the muffled wisdom of an underworld nightclub. Berne’s hard-hitting altoism here gives the sheen of dislocation that comes with dreams. Yet grooves are rare on Prezens, because this project is less about the hook than about the catch dangling and writhing on its barb. Despite the metallurgy of “ever more other” and “ring for endless travel,” two further rhythmic outliers, warped atmospheres prevail. By those atmospheres the music is always connected, whether in the jangly slide acoustic of “miss place, the mist…” or in the mock shredding of “transmit regardless,” so that by album’s end we find ourselves wrapped in a swan song to impetuous youth by way of looking into the maturity of an artist who with his cohorts has unearthed a timeworn stone to contemplate for decades more.

Prezens is an album of inbound escapism—that is, one which enjoys getting lost in itself. Its codes come to us broken, for they speak only of that which was never whole.

Belonoga review in RootsWorld

| Tyran Grillo

Fans of Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares won’t want to miss the latest album by one of its most distinguished members, Gergana Dimitrova.

Belonoga

Under the moniker Belonoga, she forges otherworlds by means of her studied voice, along with a group of dedicated musicians. The result is a potpourri of styles and traditions, with a fragrance just as intoxicating. Check out my review and listen to samples at RootsWorld here.

Through the Eyes of the Sun

Stefano Battaglia: Re: Pasolini (ECM 1998/99)

| Tyran Grillo

Stefano Battaglia
Re: Pasolini

Stefano Battaglia piano, prepared piano
Michael Gassmann trumpet
Mirco Mariottini clarinets
Dominique Pifarély violin
Vincent Courtois cello
Aya Shimura cello
Salvatore Maiore double-bass
Bruno Chevillon double-bass
Roberto Dani drums
Michele Rabbia percussion
Recorded April and July 2005, Artesuono Studio, Udine
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Produced by Manfred Eicher and Stefano Battaglia

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was one of the twentieth century’s great auteurs. A true interdisciplinarian, he activated discourses of post-colonialism (The Savage Father), politics (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom), and literature with comparable fervor. These honeycombs and more shaped the hive of his restless craft through an imagination of superimposition and mélange. In his book The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini, scholar Sam Rohdie likens prototypical works such 1967’s Oedipus Rex (incidentally, my first experience of Pasolini as director) to archaeological sites. We do well to analyze them as such, brushing away the dirt of history ever so carefully so as not to damage a single bone. For pianist-composer Stefano Battaglia, the challenge of fleshing out this double album was therefore not to make him musical (Pasolini was notoriously meticulous about every aspect of his mise-en-scène, including sound) but to make him walk again. And surely, within the wide angle that is Re: Pasolini, we can sense his footsteps.

For the first half of the program, Battaglia is joined by Michael Gassmann (trumpet), Mirco Mariottini (clarinets), Aya Shimura (cello), Salvatore Maiore (double-bass), and Roberto Dani (drums), with whom he spins a veritably orchestral web in “Canzone di Laura Betti.” Like the album as a whole, it is a love song (in this case, to the eponymous actress and filmmaker) that unfolds compact wisdom. At its heart is a jazz trio, around which trumpet and cello spin their filaments—interpreters between worlds. As the first of many nods to the silver screen, it sets in motion Battaglia’s greatest strength: namely, his instinct for development. Like a film itself, the program has a beginning, middle, and end, and opens on this facial close-up with all the possibility in the world at its feet.

One face becomes two in “Totò e Ninetto,” a sonic fable in which clarinet carries with it the fragrance of a cutting room. The intonation and togetherness of the musicians here are such that one feels them to have arisen from the ground fully ripe. Two faces become many in “Canto popolare,” a nod to the Italian folk traditions that Pasolini so adored and the recession of which he lamented. For these few minutes, at least, their spirit flourishes anew. All the more appropriate that this should be the trio, unmasked. Maiore’s bassing is particularly gorgeous, at once anchoring and decorating the pianism with undulating care.

Gassmann’s trumpet, sounding like Enrico Rava’s, piles on the nostalgia in “Cosa sono le nuvole,” a song co-written by Pasolini and Domenico Modugno (of “Volare” fame) that sets up the poetics of “Fevrar.” Maiore again astonishes, content as he is to blend into the background, building off Battaglia’s lines in shadowy emphasis, sometimes surfacing as he does here with quivering little cries that seem to say, “I am here and my melody is now.” Chromatic shifts in the surrounding terrain catch us just before we fall off the edge. Literary impulses continue with “Il sogno di una cosa” (named for Pasolini’s sub-proletarian novel) and flit once again in “Teorema,” a plodding and morose twist of emotional lemon.

Act I ends with “Callas” and “Pietra lata,” the former of which brings heartfelt undercurrents to glowing fruition. A tribute in both feeling and practicality, it comes to us revised from an earlier, 1984 piece (in Battaglia’s words: “a simple music box melody inspired by the ascending vocal exercises used daily by singers”). The final tune is a chorale for Rome, a cave where shadows do not move, frozen in time like the stalactites of Battaglia’s slow-forming crystal.

The second disc shuffles personnel, Battaglia now flanked by Dominique Pifarély (violin), Vincent Courtois (cello), Bruno Chevillon (double-bass), and Michele Rabbia (percussion). The bulk of this parallel chamber setting consists of eight “Lyra” pieces, all of which deepen Battaglia’s engagement with Pasolini the poet. In various combinations of violin, cello, and piano (plus the occasional percussive spotlight), they build a storehouse of freely improvised mementos. Like an attic, they grow darker as more memories are poured into it. The string players tend toward the outer edges of their instruments, while Battaglia treads the middle path, forging music that sees itself reflected but does not recognize its own face.

These pieces, scattered throughout, give context to the weighty impressionism of “Meditazione orale” and “Scritti corsari,” both attuned to an adamant politic. Another diptych of sorts (if not for “Lyra VI” between them), in the form of Battaglia’s solo pieces “Epigrammi” and “Setaccio,” tells the story of Pasolini’s formative years. The dialogic elements implied therein flourish tenfold in “Mimesis, divina mimesis,” melting down Apollo and Dionysus in a crucible of prepared piano and percussion. Yet another pairing rolls the end credits. “Ostia” names the town where Pasolini was murdered in 1975 and evokes his last moments before slippage. It expands the molecules of the “Lyra” pieces to planetary scale, drawing wobbling arcs in a surreal yet naked comprehensibility. All of which brings us to the beginning, as it were, with “Pasolini.” As the first piece Battaglia ever composed in this vein, it is the seed of all that precedes it. On its tomb: a bouquet of black roses, each petal forged of gut and flesh and fronded with lens flares of the soul.

It would be easy to say that Re: Pasolini defies description, when in fact it yearns for it, if only because its honoree built a life around speech, character, and action—vital aspects each to our shaping of words. Despite, if not because of, its elegiac finish, the album confirms of all that is good and beautiful in life. It is the comfort of humanity, of communication, of sounds and the inclinations behind them, an all-encompassing embrace of something invisible yet common to it all. No small feat, to be sure, in light of Pasolini’s psychological knots. Battaglia and his allies have crafted a genre unto itself, a paragon of audio cinema that was a classic before it was even recorded. It is a pair of lips that passes us in the night like a kiss that might have been, but which instead hobbles on crutches of wordless keep.