If you care at all about where the art of song is headed, give your ears some education with the debut album of Alicia Hall Moran. Click the cover for my review at All About Jazz.
Month: October 2015
Karl Seglem review for RootsWorld
My latest review for RootsWorld online magazine is of Norwegian jazz trailblazer Karl Seglem’s album of music for the goat horn. An unusual mash-up of genres that is sure to appeal to fans of Nils Petter Molvær and Eivind Aarset. Watch the video below for a taste, and click the photo for more!
SPARKLER: I Colored It In For You
Bill Laswell’s “Incunabula” is a series of digital-only releases from the M.O.D. Technologies label. It has expanded the bassist-producer’s palette in directions ancient and futuristic, allowing freedom to strengthen his expressive reach. Part of that freedom includes promotion of artists from many walks of life, each highlighting one gradation of an ever-expanding spectrum. An apt metaphor, to be sure, in the context of I Colored It In For You. This debut single by SPARKLER kicks off the latest project from multi-instrumentalist Peter Apfelbaum, of New York Hieroglyphics fame. Having played with artists as varied as Don Cherry and the Grateful Dead, Apfelbaum presents here a 21st-century assembly of Natalie Cressman on vocals/trombone, Jill Ryan on vocals/alto sax, Will Bernard on guitar, Barney McAll on homemade instruments, Willard Dyson on drums, and co-producer Aaron Johnston (of Brazilian Girls) on drums and programming. Together they slide their way through two distinct tracks.
In the album’s EPK, Apfelbaum admits an affinity for extremes, as evident both within and between the song’s bifurcation. Part 1 shakes the night sky free of its galactic mess and uses it as a canvas for fresh, playful songwriting. The lyrics, while seemingly haphazard, reveal the randomness of a relatable mindset. Cressman and Ryan dress declarations of independence like “I’m gonna do it all” in frills of youthful confidence. It’s a whimsical contrast to the slickly crafted road beneath, and just off-center enough to make it endearing. “You make we wanna write ’til my memory is full” is another memorable line that blurs the separation between body and technology. The chorus moves through an honest groove, giving way to smooth horn work from the vocalists. Part 2 is more keyboard-driven and contradicts the previous incarnation with gentler, ephemeral transferences. A less bold and more reflective side of the band, it is an extreme in and of itself.
Rounding out the single is a Mix Translation (dub remix) by Laswell, who emphasizes the dreamy undercurrent, deepening the intro’s spatial qualities while rendering the voices into occasional messengers. A key bass line and drum beat kick things into gear, horns hopping in along the way, as the title phrase emerges in intermittent signals. Laswell crosses the song’s inner arc through gorgeous break-flow, surfacing with coral souvenirs.
It’s just the beginning of a journey, and I’m gonna hear it all.
(For ordering information, please visit M.O.D. Technologies here.)
Paolo Fresu/Daniele di Bonaventura: In maggiore (ECM 2412)
In maggiore
Paolo Fresu trumpet, flugelhorn
Daniele di Bonaventura bandoneón
Recorded May 2014, Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: 20 March 2015 (Europe only)
Trumpeter Paolo Fresu hails from the island of Sardinia, bandoneonist Daniele di Bonaventura from the coastal town of Fermo on the Italian mainland. Water and land may separate their origins, but together they make music so unified that a single landscape is enough to define them in this context. Their first ECM appearance on Mistico Mediterraneo placed their collaboration at the center of a project fusing improvisation with Corsican chant. With nothing but air between them here, they create a chant all their own, a language that breathes in and sings out.
“Da Capo Cadenza” is the first of three tunes by di Bonaventura. Fresu’s lucid colorations cross every tee of the composer’s bellowed writing. The feeling of cinema is so strong here, it’s no wonder that the recording session should be the subject of Italian filmmaker Fabrizio Ferraro’s documentary Wenn aus dem Himmel, which turns the creation of this music into a meditation on spatial crossings.
This set opener is also a fine example of flugelhorn virtuosity, not in terms of technical flourish (a given) but of emotional integrity. His way with a horn lends itself to poetry, but versifies with a style that shades any description of it. To experience its atmospheric range, listeners need only immerse themselves in the duo’s take on Brazilian composer Chico Buarque’s “O que será,” last heard on an ECM album of the same name by Stefano Bollani and Hamilton de Holanda. The version here follows a progression that characterizes many on this album, building from caution to confidence as it gathers momentum into the Chilean resistance song ”El pueblo unido jamàs serà vencido” of Sergio Ortega. Despite, if not because of, the delicacy with which Fresu and di Bonaventura breeze through these changes, a raw, underlying power begins to emerge.
Fresu deepens the flugelhorn in three tunes from his own pen, including “Calmo” and the title track, both lyrical highlights. The latter tune closes out a disc that, despite its general quietude, stays on in the memory as a blast of renewable energy. As Fresu’s final note trails into non-existence, it carries into tomorrow the certainty of another sunrise. Other highlights from this darker instrument can be found in the freely improvised “Sketches” and delightful, if somber, take on “Quando me’n vò” from Puccini’s La Bohème. It is music that has lived many lives before, and lives again, as it will ever onward.
Close to center is di Bonaventura’s “Kyrie Eleison,” a wordless solo moves with the quiet strength of a hymn. Beyond it are tracks that employ muted trumpet, which at Fresu’s fingertips invokes early Miles Davis, even as it oozes a distinct charisma. Along with his own “Ton Kozh” and di Bonaventura’s “La mia terra,” Uruguayan singer-songwriter Jaime Roos’s “Se va la murga” stands as an album touch-point. The latter is lovingly arranged and awakens percussive details from within the instruments. By it is revealed an inner pulse that binds their art within the acoustics of the Lugano recording studio in which they find themselves transfixed for this enchanting hour. Di Bonaventura carries enough weight in his bellows to support the grandest sweeps from Fresu and, by the same token, enough airiness to guide his lightest feathers, unbroken, to shore.
More playful elaborations make the four minutes of Neapolitan composer Ernesto de Curtis’s “Non ti scordar di me” (Do not forget me) pass by with the wistfulness of youth itself, thereby enhancing the nostalgic hope of the title. But nowhere does the muted trumpet speak so forthrightly as in “Te recuerdo Amanda.” This aching melody by Chilean songwriter Victor Jara flows through brass like time itself, bypassing layers of history to let its voice be known. And, really, that’s the essence of this music. It is so personal that it becomes relatable on a purely human scale, shed of politics and origins until only the musicians and audiences remain, bound by mutual recognition that life is infinitely more important than its hindrances.
(To hear samples of In maggiore, please click here.)
Suite for Sampler – Selected Signs, II (ECM 1750)
Suite for Sampler – Selected Signs, II
This second ECM anthology was released in the spring of 2000, three years after the first, and shows the broadening of the label’s ocean in that short yet productive span. This album’s predecessor sustained itself on breath, featuring as it did a generous helping of Tomasz Stanko, and here too we encounter the clarinet of Gianluigi Trovesi and accordion of Gianni Coscia in the title track from from In cerca di cibo, which opens new contexts still. The tune was originally composed by Fiorenzo Carpi for a 1971 TV mini-series about Pinocchio, and perhaps one can read the stirrings of life in dormant wood passing over Trovesi’s reed. A leafy introduction from pianist Bobo Stenson then draws us into the forested “Polska of Despair (I),” off his trio album Serenity. As bassist Anders Jormin and drummer Jon Christensen fall into frame, the evolution of ECM’s sound practice discloses a yearning for space in jazz structures. The distance applied to Christensen’s drums is especially evident against the foregrounded cymbals and makes for effective contrast within a single instrument.
“Vilderness 2” significantly changes up the palette with Nils Petter Molvær’s electronics-heavy assembly, flowing into a blinding sun with every mechanism shining. The enhancements of guitarist Eivind Aarset add crosswind to the flight, while drum ‘n’ bass thermals puff their sporadic dragons into being. This one is off Molvær’s second ECM leader date, Solid Ether, the title of which produces as much as it describes.
Greek pianist Vassilis Tsabropoulos, a classically trained musician turned jazz architect, made an intensely melodic splash with Achirana, on which he debuted a trio with bassist Arild Andersen and drummer John Marshall. The smoothness of his improvising on the selected sign “Mystic,” which demonstrates the ECM ethos of melody having a life of its own, turns the program in yet another direction. And just when we are about to slip along an atmospheric slope into misty uncertainty, Trovesi and Coscia bring us back to where we started, extolling the virtues of “Django,” by jazz pianist John Lewis. It’s a subdued romp, but one of assertive whimsy.
Epigraphs was the second duo album from pianist Ketil Bjørnstad and cellist David Darling, and from it we encounter a fresh pairing of tracks. The aching “Upland” carries the flow of this compilation even deeper into the rock, while “Song for TKJD” drifts along the currents of Darling’s electric cello and Bjørnstad’s poetic commentary. Lest we get too attached to reverie, the first two movements of Heiner Goebbels’s Suite for Sampler and Orchestra (from the album Surrogate Cities) fragments all expectation with an electro-acoustic blend of cantorial sampling and string swells that recalls John Zorn’s Kristallnacht, ending this album with a reminder that beauty sometimes comes at the price of senseless destruction, and vice versa.
<< Claudio Puntin/Gerður Gunnarsdóttir: Ýlir (ECM 1749)
>> John Taylor Trio: Rosslyn (ECM 1751)
Keller Quartett: Cantante e tranquillo (ECM New Series 2324)
Keller Quartett
Cantante e tranquillo
Keller Quartett
András Keller violin
János Pilz/Zsófia Környei violin
Zoltán Gál viola
Ottó Kertész/Judit Szabó violoncello
Alexei Lubimov piano
Recorded 1995-2012
Casino Zögernitz, Vienna
Stadttheater Eichstätt
Radiostudio DRS, Zürich
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Mastered by Christoph Stickel at MSM Studios, München
Produced by Manfred Eicher
U.S. release date: 2 June 2015
Cantante e tranquillo grew out of a conversation between producer Manfred Eicher and violinist András Keller, who envisioned an album of slower sections divorced from longer works. In true ECM fashion, this idea developed into a project all its own, framing previous recordings of Knaifel, Schnittke, Ligeti, and Bach by the renowned Keller Quartett with newly recorded selections from Beethoven’s opuses 130 and 135, and between them shorter pieces by Kurtág. The result is not a compilation but a sculpted entity with shape and sentience.
The concept alone is haunting enough; more so in execution, as ghostly appearances begin to sing once the third movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s F-major quartet (from which the album gets its name) whispers into life. This rustling of the heart, slowed to feverish pathos and drawn as a brush across absorbent paper, embodies a yearning that, over the course of its awakening, resolves into a style of slumber in which the depth of life is surpassed only by that of death. Unlike the Adagio from the quartet in B-flat major, in inhales rather than exhales, holding all it can before expiring.
György Kurtág is known for his ability to pack surprising amounts of information into minute forms, but the Kellers give us examples of pieces that, despite their characteristic brevity, are spacious and expansive. At times parabolic (cf. the Officium breve in memoriam Andreæ Szervánszky), at others misty (Flowers We Are – for Miyako), and at still others pulsing like a geographic lay line (Aus der Ferne V), his music has no need to seek anything because it is starting point and destination all in one. The final movement of György Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 2, by contrast, sprouts in leaf-like structures that tremble to the rhythms of nervous winds. Unlike Narcissus, its reflection is being constantly disturbed, so that the illusion of a second self never clarifies. By yet further contrast, the stillness implied by “An Autumn Evening” (from Alexander Knaifel’s In Air Clear and Unseen), along with the Moderato pastorale of Alfred Schnittke’s Piano Quintet, breathes with lucidity. The latter’s pianism filters an unrequited dance which, like something out of a Tolstoy novel, twists until it bleeds music.
Anchoring all of this are two selections from one of the Keller Quartett’s finest recordings: Die Kunst der Fuge. Johann Sebastian Bach’s final masterwork is alluded to twice in the program, cycling between gradients of lost and found before ultimately falling in love with exile. A variation of Beethoven’s “Cantante” closes the circle with urgent, pregnant emotion, outlining a keyhole that only shadow can unlock to access the light beyond it.
Listening to this album is like watching the moon rise: if you focus on it long enough, you begin to detect its movement through the sky as if it had a mind of its own. Haunting, yes, but then again this music has no ghost to give up. It has one only to acquire.
(To hear samples of Cantante e tranquillo, click here.)
Praxis: Sound Virus
Sound Virus combines selections from the second (Sacrifist) and third (Metatron) studio albums of Praxis, featuring bassist Bill Laswell, guitarist Buckethead, and drummer Brain, along with inimitable contributions by John Zorn on alto saxophone and vocals by Yamatsuka Eye and Mick Harris. Both albums were released in 1994, during a particularly fruitful era for everyone involved, on the seminal yet ephemeral Subharmonic label. While such a description might lead one to treat the present compilation is merely that, it is in fact a reconstructed vehicle running on fresh cylinders. Not that fans won’t recognize enduring riffs from this eruptive supergroup; only that new fault lines will appear by the tectonic re-reckonings of producers and listeners alike. Tracks once separated by others find themselves melded in new biomechanical assemblages, while standalones emerge, nostalgia intact, in remastered clothing.
Three selections from Sacrifist indicate their mother context as arguably the edgier of the two albums, not least of all through the influences of Zorn, Harris, and Eye. Their juxtapositions not only of genres, such as they are, but also of atmospheres might seem audacious were it not for the inner logic of their grafting. Their placement is paramount. “Suspension” opens the skin, proceeds through several subcutaneous layers before nicking “Stronghold,” then lodges itself at last in the muscle of “Nine.” The latter track, originally billed as “Nine Secrets,” no longer has anything to hide, for it has stood the test of time. A masterpiece of the Praxis canon, it ends Sound Virus on a high note, flipping itself like a coin between industrial hell-scape (replete with Zorn’s spastic reed and Harris’s screaming) and tropical heaven (in which a squealing Eye swings whimsically from vine to vine). Here, as throughout, one encounters proof of the Praxis formula, solvable less through calculations of virtuosity than an unalterable dedication to every climate change. In the first Sacrifist throwback, for instance, initiatory transmissions of some other universe send out barest pulses via wormhole, indicating nothing of the onslaught about to ensue. The effect is not one of contrast or startlement, but rather of productive rupture that flags these audio signals as more than postmodern—they are posthuman.
At its most aggressive, Praxis plies a melodic arc, finding truth in the pain of things through self-awareness. And because Metatron deals with the Laswell/Buckethead/Brain nexus alone, its commitment to a center line is even clearer. Noticeable is the foregrounding of Buckethead’s guitar, an instrument of such versatility that it’s like listening to history in the making. Those familiar with his prolific solo work will recognize seeds of later albums such as Colma (“Low Time Machine”) and are sure to appreciate the anthemism of “Inferno.” There’s even a guitar-only collage, “Triad,” of which chameleonic shifts through metal, backwoods blues, and psychedelic freak-out distill themselves from the harder liquor of “Warcraft.” Again, what seems to be a thrash-oriented aesthetic cages a heart sustained by absolute kinship. One can hear the trio working toward something so unpretentious, it can’t help but blast satellites away with its catharses.
Laswell, for his part, pushes the cerebral groove quotient into the stratosphere, bringing in that exacting way he does a level of control to every head-nod drift. The elasticity of his playing in “Skull Crack/Cathedral” recalls the muddy jams of Primus, of which Brain was of course a key member in the latter half of the 1990s. The relationship between bassist and drummer is a tactile one throughout most of these tunes, and triangulates most memorably with Buckethead in “Turbine.” Cohesion abounds in all inward directions and renders this album’s title a most appropriate one. Like that strangely pleasant ache after a blood draw, you emerge knowing that, although something has been taken from you, a surge of survival has rushed in to take its place.
Hans Abrahamsen: Schnee
All Heaven and Earth
Flowered white obliterate…
Snow…unceasing snow
–Kajiwara Hashin (1864-?)
Written between 2006 and 2008 as five two-part canons and three intermezzi, Schnee grew out of Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen’s engagement with Bach. Commissioned by the ensemble recherche, who performs it for this Winter & Winter Music Edition (and what more appropriate label?), this vast, feathery piece withstands its composer’s own comparison to the structures of an Escher print. Such ambiguity of foreground and background, at once both and neither, makes it an all-encompassing experience. Like the recording itself, it reaches for us even as it occupies a world of its own making.
Despite the sparseness of Abrahamsen’s scoring, to say little of his nominal allegiance to the so-called “New Simplicity” movement, it would be deceptive to call him a minimalist. If anything, he is a maximalist, maximizing as he does the depth of effects possible through bare means. Unlike the music of, say, Alexander Knaifel, you won’t find yourself drifting through, but rather pervaded by, incarnate atmosphere.
Describing the music itself is as futile as describing the snow it is meant to evoke. First and foremost, it creates a tactile climate, not least of all through the placement of its instrumental forces. Two trios—one of strings, the other of woodwinds—occupy stages right and left, respectively, with a piano behind each and percussion tables at their center. It’s an arrangement that recalls the meticulousness of Karlheinz Stockhausen, only here it is meant to transform space, but become space. In this sense it is not some metaphorical re-creation of wintry landscape, but snow of a fashion all its own, replete with self-generated season.
Despite their placement, the pianos occupy a harmonic center, while the strings and cor anglais have been detuned to nearly imperceptible intervals of alterity. The caution with which bowed instruments are for the most part played yields indeterminate overtones with lives all their own, thus providing organic contrast to the regularity of their patterns on paper. The pianos move more waywardly, grabbing hold of congruities at the ends of phrases with hands of flame.
Abrahamsen’s snow isn’t always white. Sometimes it takes on the colors of sunset and other times a paler hue. Neither are his snowflakes always frail descenders, subject instead to a variety of physical actions. Whether being scraped off the bottom of a boot or alighting upon a metal roof, together they lay a path into a place where dreams reside. All of this dispersion and coagulation, a persistent binary of unblemished skin and ashen muscle, builds to premonitory levels of dynamism in an environment that you do not touch but which touches you—a cognizant sprawl in which every cell knows its place.
The writing for flute is particularly affecting, becoming more diffusive as its role intensifies. With each successive canon, layers of reflection build to peak levels of mystery, erupting with a blush of sun through the fragmented lungs of the fourth canon. The shortest intermezzo then leads to the shortest pair of canons. Fragile and sparse, each the mirror image of the other, they allow an eternity to step through on finite legs.
Quicksilver: Fantasticus
Those among my regular readers who admire the work of Stephen Stubbs, John Holloway, and Rolf Lislevand as documented on ECM’s New Series will want to cast their ears on this assortment of Baroque gems from the independent Acis label. Plying their gifts are violinists Robert Mealy and Julie Andrijeski, trombonist Greg Ingles, dulcianist Dominic Teresi, viola da gambist David Morris, keyboardist Avi Stein (on harpsichord and organ), and Charles Weaver on theorbo and guitar. Known collectively as Quicksilver, they bring a formidable admixture of panache and musicological erudition to everything they touch, engaging the discerning listener with the alacrity of their programming.
Although billed as “Extravagant and Virtuosic Music of the German Seventeenth Century,” the present program approaches these monolithic adjectives in ways more nuanced than one might expect. The album’s title refers to the “Stylus Fantasticus,” which in the experimental tradition of the Italians (think Farina, Fontana, Castello, etc.) brought a cellular, wayward brand of composing into vogue. In this instance, however, “extravagance” connotes not grandiosity but inward qualities at play. The music offered here is focused and stays true to where it wants to go. As for virtuosity, it is less a matter of technical flourish than of balancing and controlling emotion, of keeping even the most challenging motif always within frame.
Although pieces by better known composers are sure highlights—the g-minor Prelude and G-major Sonata by Dieterich Buxtehude (1637-1707) for their urgent, sparkling counterpoint and the Polnische Scakpfeiffen of Johann Schmeltzer (c.1623-1680) for its vibrant upsweep—the generous helping of sonatas by Matthias Weckmann (1616-1674) and Antonio Bertali (1605-1669) is by no means anything to balk at. The former’s acrobatically inflected Sonata no.9 à 4 delineates complementary qualities in each instrument, while each of the latter’s three chosen selections, and especially the Sonata à 3 in d minor, blends courtly and bucolic sentiments with nary a seam within earshot. Bertali’s Sonata no.10 is another lively delight, which, in being hollow-boned, is best suited for its edgier chromatism.
Other pieces showcase the musicians as much as their composers of interest. A sonata by Johann Kaspar Kerll (1627-1693) emphasizes the conversational relationship between the violins, another by Andreas Oswald (1634-1665) the dulcian’s melodic potential and keen interactions with trombone, and an anonymous Ciaconna the shadings of Quicksilver’s basso continuo. This leaves only the Canzona in C major, no.21 of Johannes Vierdanck (1605-1646), which gathers wood and strings in concert with Biber-like exuberance, shuffling atmospheres like a deck of cards dealt into a royal flush with every hand.
Between Sound and Space: ECM Records and Beyond 