Author: Tyran Grillo

Karen Mantler: Business Is Bad (XtraWATT/14)

| Tyran Grillo

Business Is Bad

Karen Mantler
Business Is Bad

Karen Mantler vocals, harmonica, piano
Doug Wieselman guitar, bass clarinet
Kato Hideki bass
Basic tracks recorded by Kato Hideki and Peter Karl at Peter Karl Studios, Brooklyn, NY, October 2012
Overdubs recorded by Kato Hideki at Dog Day Studio, Brooklyn, NY, November 2012
Mixed and mastered by Kato Hideki at Dog Day Studio, July-September 2013
Produced by Karen Mantler and Kato Hideki
Release date: June 13, 2014

Karen Mantler is more than the sum of her genetic parts. As the daughter of Michael Mantler and Carla Bley, one might expect her to be any number of things, but ultimately she has come into her own as a singer-songwriter of understated brilliance. It’s difficult to capture the profound simplicity, it not the simple profundity, of her lyrics, much less so the skeletal arrangements in which she couches them in trio with bassist Kato Hideki and Doug Wieselman on guitar and bass clarinet. There is an innocence and charm about these songs, but also a maturity that only comes with the ups and downs of life experience. Mantler focuses decidedly on the latter throughout Business Is Bad, which paints the portrait of an artist starving through deprivations at once social, linguistic, climatic, emotional, legal, artistic, and geographic. Practically dripping with self-awareness, each is a vignette of insight into the working mind of a mind at work.

Mantler Trio
(Photo by Carol Lipnik)

Whether taking on the plight of the homeless in “Catch As Catch Can” or lamenting airport closures caused by “That Damn Volcano” (which, one can only assume, refers to the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull in 2010), Mantler’s slack-jawed lyricism discloses a tongue in universal cheek that wags almost like a child’s, filtering out none of life’s pessimistic moments. With deadpan humor and the meticulous support of her bandmates, she comes across like bold print on the page, a DNA helix gone rogue.

Despite the album’s gloomy pall, there’s much whimsy to be savored, and much of it self-deprecating. The bossa nova skin of “My Magic Pencil (Wrote This Melody)” does little to conceal Mantler’s delightful frustrations over the wanderlust of her most ubiquitous compositional tool. “Speak French” conveys the disadvantages of being monolingual, seesawing English and French like a language instruction tape. On a subterranean level, however, it is a song about the musician’s desire to be heard—all the more ironic, because music is one of the very few languages that transcends such arbitrary barriers. Even when she sings of dead ends, lost causes, and a faithless system in “I Can’t Afford My Lawyer,” she makes as astute observation on the nature of art, which becomes little more than a profit machine built around people’s misfortunes. And in the nervous “My Solo,” in which she expresses a lack of confidence in playing exactly that, she nonetheless produces a songful harmonica solo in the album’s longest, and prettiest, instrumental section.

Between jazzier, diaristic observations (see “Wintertime” and the title track’s funkier blues) and the requisite breakup song (“Surviving You”), Mantler jumps from the quotidian to the philosophical in a single keystroke. If this is your first Mantler album, these extremes may either repel or enchant, but one thing is for sure: her songs are a gust of fresh air in a musical landscape gone dry.

AMM III: It Had Been An Ordinary Enough Day In Pueblo, Colorado (JAPO 60031)

| Tyran Grillo

AMM III

AMM III
It Had Been An Ordinary Enough Day In Pueblo, Colorado

Keith Rowe guitar, prepared guitar, transistor radio
Eddie Prévost drums
Recorded December 1979 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Steve Lake and AM III

By the time this obscure JAPO album was released in 1980, AMM was 15 years old. The British free improvisation outfit, credited here as “AMM III,” was already an underground legend, and thankfully has stayed that way, even now preserving its integrity as an exploratory unit. For this brief incarnation, founding members Keith Rowe and Eddie Prévost set out as a duo, respectively combining guitar and percussion in a real-time evolution that fans of Evan Parker are sure to appreciate. Like Parker, Rowe and Prévost spend as much of their time listening as playing, soaking in the feeling of the surrounding soil before enriching it with just the right minerals.

“Radio Activity” is both mantra and anti-mantra. Rowe’s use of a transistor radio underscores the title as a method of operation, leaving behind its descriptive properties to shrivel in the sun of another day. The metallic details put forth by the two musicians, at once percussive and speech-oriented, seem to fold themselves like sheets of self-aware origami paper. The sounds of broadcasts moving through a flanged portal are complemented by an amorphous electric guitar, its ochre pigment drawing a halo without an angel. In this amphibious dronescape, valleys eventually turn into peaks as Rowe and Prévost lock into powerful, staccato interplay before compressing into a jam between molecules.

After the massive parentage of this first track, the ones that follow feel like its offspring. “Convergence” is the youngest sibling, a frail yet expertly tuned entity whose potential for strength is unlimited. The elasticity of “Kline” pegs it as the eldest child. Its swansong is written on parchment, a brittle medical document that is beyond the need for prescription. Frenzy ensues, throughout which Rowe treats the air like a pin cushion while Prévost shines a light through every eye like a star.

The two middle children are intersectional beings. “Spittlefields’ Slide” is exactly what one might expect it to be: a stuttering and warped chain of expectorations. It’s also a fine exercise in restraint that grows even as it flounders into dust. “For A” sounds as if the musicians dismantled a pay phone and made music with all the loose change gutted from within, faithfully documenting every snap of communication in a game of resuscitated conversations.

Your guess is as good as mine as to what any of the above to do with the album’s title, but I like to think that somewhere in Pueblo, Colorado there exists an echo of these soundings, ghostly yet content in its geographical prison.

The Swallow Quintet: Into The Woodwork (XtraWATT/13)

| Tyran Grillo

Into The Woodwork

The Swallow Quintet
Into The Woodwork

Steve Swallow bass
Chris Cheek tenor saxophone
Steve Cardenas guitar
Carla Bley organ
Jorge Rossy drums
Recorded November 15/16, 2011 and mixed and mastered at Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
Engineers: Gérard De Haro and Nicolas Baillard
Produced by Steve Swallow
Release date: June 14, 2013

Over a career spanning more than half a century, Steve Swallow has consistently redefined the electric bass as a jazz instrument. More importantly, he has taken any and every opportunity along the way to deepen his craft as a composer. His self-discipline in this regard has made every album seem at once a culmination and a stepping stone into greater futures. Into The Woodwork is no exception.

Swallow

For this latest incarnation of his quintet, Swallow has chosen a lineup worthy of the subtlety on which these 12 original tunes nourish themselves. The tenor of reedman Chris Cheek, who made a noticeable ECM appearance as part of the Paul Motian Band on Garden of Eden, brings the smoke before the fire in “From Whom It May Concern,” a ballad that tilts its own thematic mirror toward artful reflection. Cheek also plays beautifully in “Unnatural Causes,” from the paint-by-number simplicity of which he unpacks the robustness of an unexpected spectrum. This tune is further notable for the contributions of guitarist and fellow Motian associate Steve Cardenas, whose unforced geometries settle us into the album’s intimacies by way of “Sad Old Candle.” Cardenas, in fact, proves to be the quintet’s greatest converser, whether exchanging remarkable banter with Cheek (“The Butler Did It”) or playing in duet with Swallow (“Suitable For Framing”). His lyricism pairs well, too, with the organ of Carla Bley, whose own omnipresence reveals another defining mastery in tunes like “Never Know,” “Still There,” and “Grisly Business.” The latter’s gentle carnivalesque is ideally suited to her touch at the keys.

Drummer Jorge Rossy is a constant thread to which the band looks for guidance, but especially in the more energetic turns such as “Back In Action” and “Exit Stage Left.” His understated groove actualizes Swallow’s ethos of less as more, and demonstrates that self-assured music need never be arrogant. And then there’s Swallow himself, whose first true solo doesn’t come until the album’s ninth track, “Small Comfort” fans the embers. The edge of his new custom bass sounds already finely aged over this bed of organ and cymbals, exposing a little more of his inner workings as brushed snare and tenor pull back the curtain to clarity.

In contrast to the steadied pacing of Swallow’s ECM outings, many tunes on Into The Woodwork flow into the next without break, thus keeping his atmospheric integrity in constant check. Like the title track itself, the album as a whole finds balance between the grounded and the free, always keeping one arm around the listener’s shoulder. The fact that this music doesn’t overtly challenge is a challenge in and of itself to experience its strengths as givens. Like an old friend, it may not often surprise, but its comforts are exactly where they need to be.

Dreamers’ Circus review for RootsWorld

| Tyran Grillo

My latest review for RootsWorld online magazine looks at Second Movement, the sophomore album from Danish folk trio Dreamers’ Circus. This is sweeping, dreamlike music that should appeal to fans of Ale Möller. To read the review, click on the cover below. Also check out the live video below that to see the musicians in action.

Second Movement

Stephan Micus: Implosions (JAPO 60017)

| Tyran Grillo

Implosions

Stephan Micus
Implosions

Stephan Micus sitar, acoustic guitar, vocal, Bavarian zither, shakuhachi, shō, Thai flute, rabab
Recorded March 1977 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

As of this month (August of 2015), ECM’s intrepid Stephan Micus has released his 21st album for the label, Nomad Songs. In recognition of this achievement, and of the prescience of that title, I thought it only appropriate to acknowledge Implosions, his first album for producer Manfred Eicher, released on the JAPO sub-label in 1977. What might the first-time listener have imagined when spreading roots into its soil? What fantasies or lamentations? What creeds or philosophies? Micus’s sound art, assembled as it is from a uniquely global perspective, is one in which such questions, but never their answers, reign supreme. Like the sitar solo which opens “As I Crossed A Bridge Of Dreams,” it contains many possible universes but yields only one. One sitar becomes three, and one instrument two as Micus adds an acoustic guitar, all the while spirographing this inner sanctum with the curvature of his singing. The two lap instruments reveal themselves to be indeed rooted in seated chakras, while the voice treads with more luminescent footprints to show for its passage. Crossing threshold after threshold, it shakes the sky out as if it were a laundered sheet, until the stars release their hands from prayer.

Although Micus has most often crafted albums at his home studio and sent them to Eicher for mixing and mastering, earlier ones such as this were recorded at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg, Germany, where many of ECM’s formative releases were also realized. The studio dynamics imbue these travels with a rather different intimacy, one which brings its own climate and bounces back sunlight like the moon. Three Bavarian zithers, each with its own signature, form a dense and percussive bed for Micus’s singing in “Borkenkind.” His floating transpositions trail sutras of memory, spinning from them a yarn of forgetting. This becomes the sole purpose of the music: to detach oneself from the snares of fame and recognition until only the sound and the ear are left to dance unhindered. And indeed, when Micus sings again in “For M’schr And Djingis Khan,” accompanied by the uncut diamond of the rabab (Afghani lute), he balances on a tipping point into infinity, his mouth filled with empty pages.

Even when he doesn’t sing, his heart resounds through the four shakuhachi of “Amarchaj,” each chamber a bird with its own ritual warble, threading clouds to their shadows on earth below. This leaves only the Thai flute of “For The ‘Beautiful Changing Child’” to cast itself into an ocean without language. Lifted by three shō (Japanese mouth organs), it resists even these words struggling to catch it, riding the waves from one dawn to the next, waiting for my well to run dry.

Stephan Micus: Till The End Of Time (JAPO 60026)

| Tyran Grillo

Till The End Of Time

Stephan Micus
Till The End Of Time

Stephan Micus table harp, kortholt, zither, guitar, vocal
Recorded June 1978 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Before migrating across the ECM continent, Stephan Micus outfitted some of his most formative expeditions in the territories of the JAPO sub-label. On these albums one hears Micus at his most elemental, turning every gesture into inter-spatial awareness. The album’s duration of 36 minutes only serves to deepen its intimacy as a space in which the listener might catch a cushion of meditation in a world of splinters.

Micus’s practice has always been to render the stem before the flower, and in the album’s title track a table harp provides that very illustrative function. Its dulcimer-like heart beats a rhythm at once ancient and fresh, curling as the scriptural page, its edges darkened from constant contact with the hands. Those same hands cradle a method of speech so musical that its melody is discernible only in the freedom of solitude. This is perhaps why Micus tends to work alone: so that he might open every angle honestly and uniquely, until the geometry of his life grows big enough to Venn-diagram into the listener’s own. Bowed zither expands the roots and gives way to a kortholt, a crumhorn-like reed from the Renaissance that pulls hidden colors from the sunlight. A classical guitar, which all but disappears from Micus’s later work, defines ethereal flesh through a worldly skeleton. Like the music itself, it is gut and wood and movement, drawing a string through immediate intellect to that of another time.

“For Wis And Ramin” is even more direct in its expressiveness, triangulating guitar and zither with Micus’s imagined singing. Imagined, because no words would do justice to the palette from which he draws, one that harbors not the barest pigment of politics. After the opening classical guitar solo connects its geometric touch-points, only a throated language can bring to the light that which is born in the dark. Micus is thus a troubadour who seeks love not only on earth but also from heaven, so that when the zither walks in the voice’s path, we must also feel the soles of our feet pressing their outlines into planes of stardust, refuges of forgotten pollen.

on a rainy night a traveler: Stephan Micus’s ongoing raga

| Tyran Grillo

The music of Stephan Micus is a soundtrack to life. It holds the sky in its crown, the earth in its belly, a molecule of ocean on its tongue. And while each of his albums may be the first step of a longer journey, the two early releases reviewed here just might be the best places to start for those who have never encountered him in their travels.

Listen to the Rain

Listen to the Rain (JAPO 60040)

Stephan Micus dilrubas, Spanish guitar, steel string guitar, suling, shakuhachi, tamboura
“For Abai and Togshan” recorded July 1983 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
“Dancing with the Morning,” “Listen to the Rain,” “White Paint on Silver Wood” recorded June 1980 at Sound Studio N. Kiln
Engineer: Günther Kasper

If Micus’s saga were an ongoing raga, then 1983’s Listen to the Rain would be one of its most inward-looking prayers. All four meditations that make up the album, while externally distinct, are internally connected through Micus’s use of guitar. The Spanish variety plays a particularly active role throughout, with the sole exception of “Dancing with the Morning,” for which he pairs the ubiquitous steel-stringed with the suling, a bamboo flute often heard in gamelan ensembles of southeast Asia. Knowledgeable listeners will recognize both the rarity of the backpacker’s trusty companion in the Micus canon and its elemental necessity in this setting. The ascetic sheen of its metal strings paints a world of shine to which a human presence adds less manufactured colors. The suling’s unclipped wings, by extension, are exhaled into the sky above, circling and darting through the surrounding melodies until they take shape under cover of their own imagination.

The title track is a duet for Spanish guitar and tamboura. True to his extensively creative spirit, Micus plays the latter like a zither, over which the former’s gut strings produce an ascendant pathway into “White Paint on Silver Wood,” which trades the tamboura for shakuhachi. The Japanese bamboo flute begins with a solo that teeters on the edge of breathlessness and follows through on its wandering spirit. Flamenco-esque touches evoke movement not only of dancer’s feet but also of artist’s brush.

Yet it is “For Abai and Togshan,” which takes up Side A of the original vinyl, in which the farthest reach of this interior song takes physical form. Three dilrubas (bowed lap instruments from northern India) open in drone, wavering like bodies once lost in time but only now finding each other, piece by sunlit piece. Three soon give way to five, joined by four Spanish guitars, whose harmonic infusions fade in rose tones of complexion. The atmosphere is as much introspective as it is joyous, and finds in the solitary center a peace immune to corruption of shadow. The dilruba’s sympathetic overtones begin as if leaving, dropping cartographic messages as breadcrumbs into sundown.

East Of The Night

East Of The Night (JAPO 60041)

Stephan Micus 10- and 14-string guitars, shakuhachi
Digital recording, January 1985 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland

East Of The Night, released in 1985, is one of Micus’s most melodic albums. Its two long tracks epitomize, ever so humbly, the dictum of less is more. The title piece, a conversation for 10-string guitar (an instrument of his own design) and shakuhachi, feels like a dialogue between master and disciple. Micus’s guitar combines the reediness of a lute with the subtle ferocity of a koto, making it a natural partner to the shakuhachi’s dawning breath. Each pluck of a string works the upholstery of the sky until a surface of untreated wood is revealed behind it. Details of handiwork once obscured by finery and ornament now become naked art. With the softness of a windblown curtain, the plectrum moves from foreground to background before the shakuhachi takes on a Milky Way texture in a suite of thrumming stardust. The flute fragments, multiplies, and ends the set’s first half on a congregational sigh.

“For Nobuko” is dedicated to Micus’s wife, recipient of this powerfully intimate solo for another custom instrument: the 14-string guitar. Its flowerbed extends far beyond the window box and trails vines from one domicile to another, stretching across vast plains of tundra toward immaculate love. It encompasses the dedication of one human being, whose balance is achievable only by offering himself up to another’s fundament, into which the listener’s own messages might also be divined.

Like two vapor trails, Listen to the Rain and East Of The Night mark their respective paths of motion by holding relatively still against the blue. One is the parallel of the other, never intersecting except by the illusion of perspective. Together, they are further significant for easing the JAPO sub-label’s 14-year flight in for a landing, thus ending one fantastic voyage by barely beginning another.

Cyminology: Phoenix (ECM 2397)

| Tyran Grillo

Phoenix

Cyminology
Phoenix

Cymin Samawatie vocals
Benedikt Jahnel piano
Ralf Schwarz double bass
Ketan Bhatti drums, percussion
Martin Stegner viola
Recorded March 2014 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: 20 February 2015 (Europe only)

My melodies are reaching your heart, how come?
My words are easing your pain, how come?
Everything that I do, I don’t do it myself, how come?
I live for the ones, who love me
Why not for myself?

Cymin Samawatie, whose band Cyminology has swum twice in ECM waters (cf. 2009’s As Ney and 2011’s Saburi), is a crosser of barriers at once ethnic, linguistic, and musical. Such a characterization risks painting the German-Iranian singer as an enigma, when in fact she gives voice to her gifts through love of sentiment, empathy for politics, and humility of creation in a way so grounded, it feels as if she is singing as much for you alone as for the world. Samawatie’s backing trio of pianist Benedikt Jahnel, bassist Ralf Schwarz, and drummer Ketan Bhatti now welcomes violist Martin Stegner, whose presence is as defining as it is dressed in shadow. The voices of his bow constitute nominal additions, but their presence removes a few more layers of perception to reveal the naked truth of every note they touch.

Cyminology

The appropriately titled Phoenix revisits Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzaad (1935-1967), from whose own premature ashes emerged the winged verses explored therein. Farrokhzaad paints a veritable world around her body, which in “Aaftaab” and “Gozaraan” binds the narrator hand and food with ribbons of love’s many unspoken hues. The latter song’s improvisatory colors slip into a black hole as quickly as they emerge from one, feeling through the dark as if by every word, a fingertip. This is much in contrast with the former song, which unfolds, fractal-like, inlaying repeated patterns and meshing viola and voice interchangeably. Likewise, Farrokhzaad’s shapes tend toward a yin and yang relationship, whereby every pool of light contains one fish of dark, and vice versa. Like the stars she collects in “Harire Buse,” which accompanies Samawatie by bass alone, they shine only because of the unknowable pitch in which they swim.

Yet nowhere does Farrokhzaad—and Samawatie, by extension—speak so inwardly as in the closing “Baraaye To.” Here drums and bass shed their rigid constructions to better comprehend Cymin’s realisms as she sings:

I am writing this poem for you
In the sunset, in the thirsty summer
On a half gone, fatal way
In the old grave of my endless pain

Let my eyes overflow again
with dewdrops

The day will come when your yearning sight
Will fall on this painful tune
Searching within my words
You will say: “This was my mother”

Throughout this incremental, emotional implosion, the band’s melodic blush yields more than the sum of its parts and proves that life can be written only on the palimpsest of memory.

The distinction of Cyminology as a vocally-centered group is that its instrumentalists also emit a poetry of their own, every bit as verbal as their bandleader’s. This is nowhere truer than throughout Samawatie’s own songs, wherein members of the rhythm section, into which the piano grows to be an interlocking part, punctuate each other’s sentences until they are spherical—global, if you will. Her texts may be far more concise, but their impact is anything but. In the pulsing infrastructure of “Che Gune Ast,” she activates a fierce individuality. From the pulsing pianism, which gives a sun for drums to compass their solar system, to the viola’s innocence, which feels almost blood-related to the breath-drawn bass, Samawatie’s singing tracks every change of mood as if it were a diary in real time. “Talaash Makon” is another duet, this time pairing her with Jahnel, whose defining pianism sets up one patch of earth per footstep. The band saves its deepest poetry for “Baraaye Ranj,” which, although effectively wordless, nevertheless alters its own DNA as if by language alone.

From Nimā Yushij (1896-1960), so-called father of Persian poetry, comes the album’s title poem. Over the course of its two parts, Samawatie embodies the fabled bird’s tragic cycle, which in this context becomes an exercise in self-reflection. The viola reveals itself as a descriptive force, soaring with arpeggios before landing on the mountain from which Yushij unspools its sorrowful cry. In Part II, the instrumentalists are Erdnase-shuffled into Samawatie’s muscular legato, by which new details emerge from every listen.

A canonical Sufi poem by Hāfez (c. 1325-1390) completes the mosaic. The mournful “Dishab” is the album in miniature, blending clearly defined voices into an even more clearly defined whole, while holding on to one elemental mantra: there can be no water without land. And indeed, as a whole these melodies reach out their talons and pull until sky and earth become one horizon, opening an internal eye that interlocks with the external knowing of being gazed upon. By this dynamic, the listener turns into participant and allows the music to be reborn through the act of knowing it.

(To hear samples of Phoenix, you may watch the EPK above or click here.)

One in a million

| Tyran Grillo

As of this afternoon, between sound and space has reached one million hits. As always, I thank you all for reading. Keep an eye out for some new reviews this week, at long last!

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