Author: Tyran Grillo

Sofia Gubaidulina: Canticle of the Sun (ECM New Series 2256)

| Tyran Grillo

Canticle of the Sun

Sofia Gubaidulina
Canticle of the Sun

Gidon Kremer violin
Marta Sudraba violoncello
The Kremerata Baltica
Nicolas Altstaedt violoncello
Andrei Pushkarev percussion
Rihards Zalupe percussion
Rostislav Krimer celesta
Riga Chamber Choir Kamēr…
Māris Sirmais conductor
Recorded July 2006 (Lyre) and July 2010 (Canticle) at Lockenhaus Festival
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher

The liner notes for Canticle of the Sun open with a laudatory note from Gidon Kremer, who thanks Sofia Gubaidulina “for generously sharing your magic world with all of us.” Few recordings abide by that sentiment as vividly as ECM’s first album dedicated entirely to the Russian composer. The two pieces featured here were both recorded at Kremer’s Lockenhaus Festival, captured in all their spirit of absolution.

SOFIA GUBAIDULINA

The Lyre of Orpheus (2006), of which this is the world premiere recording, is the first of a triptych that explores the space between summation tone and difference tone (produced when two tones are sounded together), grinding them down into states where notes lose their value and become pulses alone. These pulses are, however, inaudible—an “acoustic no man’s land” as Gubaidulina calls it. Her search for intersections of metrical unity yields a sequence of notes corresponding to the titular lyre and its Pythagorean intervals, with which she inscribes a musical memorial to her late daughter. A mass of orchestral molecules coalesces into a solo violin, yet what seems to be a narrative focal point is more accurately heard as an obfuscation of linear storytelling. Beneath its glassine surface beats a heart of ash, reaching out toward the cellos for confirmation of purpose. Bow slaps and other percussive elements—a triangle here and snare drum there, along with touches of marimba and tympani—thread the soloist’s every needle. Strings work dichotomously between high and low, forging an inner realm between them and, at one point, lapsing into one of the most foreboding pizzicato passages of modern music. Kremer’s mastery labors in the service of Gubaidulina’s own, evoking her acute sense of mythological becoming by a thread of breath and mirror’s glint.

The album’s title composition, written in 1997 and revised in 1998, bears dedication to Mstislav Rostropovich for his 70th birthday. Scored for cello, percussion, and choir, and setting the eponymous poem by St. Francis of Assisi, it treats choral voices as, in Gubaidulina’s term, “secretive.” The cellist is likewise instructed to consolidate his or her playing on the C string, tuning it down to the brink of viability and eventually abandoning the bow altogether for bass drum and flexatone, only to return to the highest reaches of the cello in the final “Glorification of Death.” One might see this piece as an expansion of the light that concludes The Lyre of Orpheus, in the wake of which this catachresis of voices feels like flesh and scars. Where so much of Orpheus assumes a bird’s-eye view, Assisi’s beloved personifications shine through fractured glass, a webbing of damage that sees the sinful subject as a vessel for illumination. The cello gives voice to that illumination as if it were a self-aware body. In a variety of icons—some taut like Christmas carols, others stretched like spiritual elastic—Gubaidulina paints with a brush that manages to be declamatory even as it trembles in abundance of dawn. Of the percussion, marimba figures as an earthly voice, leaving the cellist with the difficult task of transfiguration. Whether or not the music is worthy of such characterization even after the fact will depend on the listener’s willingness to stare into our nearest star.

(To hear samples of Canticle of the Sun, click here.)

Keith Jarrett/Charlie Haden: Last Dance (ECM 2399)

| Tyran Grillo

Last Dance

Last Dance

Keith Jarrett piano
Charlie Haden double bass
Recording Producer: Keith Jarrett
Recorded March 2007 at Cavelight Studio
Engineer: Martin Pearson
Mastering at MSM Studios by Manfred Eicher and Christoph Stickel
Executive Producer: Manfred Eicher

Seeing as this was to be Charlie Haden’s final record, one could easy read mournful prophecy into Last Dance. To be sure, its poignancy is as heavy as the burden of the bassist’s loss. To do so, however, risks obscuring the fact that the music under its title stretches seams by virtue of an abundance of life. Born of the same sessions as Jasmine, the lovingly interpreted standards of Last Dance again find Haden in the company of pianist Keith Jarrett, who once characterized this rare partner as a musician who thinks through whatever melody comes his way.

Keith and Charlie

From the first few steps of “My Old Flame,” it’s clear these two men walk not together but along complementary paths, their shadows interlocking at any point along the trajectory of a tune. And by this forlorn song’s guiding hand, held above the starving ear like that of a Reiki master, an inner heat comes through. There is an album’s worth of feeling in this opener alone, and its flame is sustained in all that follows. It sets a proportional pace of love and loss that echoes throughout “Every Time We Say Goodbye” and “It Might As Well Be Spring.” That latter brings an especially joyful yet contemplative tone to the emerging image.

Lest we fall into a homogeneous meditation, the duo adds one part spice for every two of sugar. Be they navigating the rhythmic changeups of “Dance Of The Infidels” or leaping through the sprinklers of “Everything Happens To Me,” Haden and Jarrett sand down every jagged edge they encounter. True to the title of “My Ship,” they do not soar so much as sail, opening canvas to wind and mapping its lead. Their grandest voyage is an integral take on “’Round Midnight.” In addition to Jarrett’s oceanic foundation, it boasts a superbly architected solo from Haden, who builds a spire of song, robust as a centuries-old tree at the bottom yet thin as a whisper up top.

Alternate takes of “Where Can I Go Without You” and “Goodbye” carry over from Jasmine with even grander intimacy. Despite the bittersweet core of both, they feel like new beginnings. Each is a door of appreciation opened in the listener, from which pours memories of Haden’s legacy, thus making room for new ones to come. The musicians are achingly present, even as they transcend minds toward lyrical enlightenment. They flip through the Great American Songbook not as one might a newspaper, but resolutely and sincerely, as if it were scripture.

Given the lengths of these tunes (averaging about nine minutes each), I like to think that Haden and Jarrett might have spun any of them into a lifetime of improvisation. And perhaps, in a way, they already have. They play off each other so artfully before trading a single solo that solos begin to feel more like roots than departures. No matter how virtuosic their skills, the melody remains forever paramount. This album is like one massive song that will continue to evolve even after those who left its traces have improvised their way into another plane of existence entirely. And while Last Dance may be called cinematic, it differs from cinema in one key aspect: where cinema so often concerns itself with fictional characters, here the subjects are anything but. They are so real, it almost hurts to witness their conversation.

If Jarrett is the body, Haden is the soul.

(To hear samples of Last Dance, watch the video above or click here.)

Giovanni Guidi Trio: City of Broken Dreams (ECM 2274)

| Tyran Grillo

City of Broken Dreams

Giovanni Guidi Trio
City of Broken Dreams

Giovanni Guidi piano
Thomas Morgan double bass
João Lobo drums
Recorded December 2011, Auditorio Radiotelevisione svizzera, Lugano
Producer: Stefano Amerio
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Italian pianist Giovanni Guidi was not yet 30 when he recorded City of Broken Dreams, his ECM leader debut. Not only is it a trio album of crisp technical edges; it also welcomes to the fold an artist coming into his own as a composer. Fully schooled on Enrico Rava’s Tribe, he joins bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer João Lobo for a set of itinerant balladry.

Broken Trio

The title track and its variation begin and end the album’s journey. Snaking contours therein describe passage from gentle introduction to long goodnight. Like the outer frame, the inner picture is one of gentle spells and molecular grooves. From the lyrical and emotionally honest “Leonie,” one might think this was a trio decades in the making. The musicians’ democratic finger-painting renders speed a non-variable on the path of expression, working toward a unity not heard on the label since the Tord Gustavsen Trio made its own debut with 2003’s Changing Places.

Still, one can’t help but squint into individual floodlights breaking through the haze. Morgan stands firmly the center of this album. His contributions alone make the album a must-have for fans of the instrument and/or its player. He is just as comfortable feeling his way through the geometric interplay of “No Other Possibility” as he is wavering like a reflection behind the sweeping pianism of “The Way Some People Live.” Lobo, for his part, is a drummer of scope. On “Just One More Time” he swings in the way that Paul Motian did before him—that is, with a meticulous stagger. His penchant for subtlety on the cymbals is thusly noted, evoking a cautious stroll through “The Forbidden Zone” and revealing images in the afterglow of “Late Blue” as if it were a scratchboard. Not to be overpowered, Guidi dialogues with his bandmates in “The Impossible Divorce” with a synergy of wing and wind and waxes poetic on the nature of waves in “Ocean View.” He is one possessed of an explorer’s intuition and, like the album as a whole, is far more interested what lies beneath the rubble than what that rubble once signified.

(To hear samples of City of Broken Dreams, click here.)

Stephan Micus: Panagia (ECM 2308)

| Tyran Grillo

2308 X

Stephan Micus
Panagia

Stephan Micus Bavarian zither, dilruba, chitrali sitar, sattar, 14-string guitar, nay, voice
Recorded 2009-2012 at MCM Studios
An ECM Production

Panagia may be heard as the divine counterpart to Stephan Micus’s earthly album Athos of two decades before, and revisits the Greek peninsula that inspired its predecessor. As with all Micus projects, the focus here is crystalline and spiritual in a way that shuns any specific label or dogma. That being said, one can surely feel the personal histories that go into the many instruments with which he births his universal sounds, their ties to places rendered frozen by time. Micus’s magic—his rite, if you will—is to blend those variant histories into a singularity that few world travelers have ever translated so nakedly into the language of music.

Micus 1

Micus demonstrates this personal ethos in a brief album statement: “Throughout the world people have put their trust in a female goddess. In Greece she is called Panagia,” thus invoking an all-encompassing goddess even as he locates her within a particular faith. According to Evy Johanne Håland in her book Rituals of Death and Dying in Modern and Ancient Greece, Greek orthodoxy calls her Ē Prōtē (The First) and places her at the pinnacle of sainthood. Hence the seventh-century Byzantine prayers to Panagia of which Micus sings his verses, and in which Panagia is called, among other things, “Virgin Mary,” “blissful swallow,” “radiant cloud,” and, in Christ-like fashion, “the joy of the distressed, the guide of the blind and the refuge of orphans.” Where normally Micus falls into the histrionics of his own phonetic language, here a certain thematic vividness of worship lends his singing fresh anchorage.

Through its 11-part traversal, the album shuffles vocal tracks into instrumentals. The former are songs of praise, as indicated by their liturgical titles, while the latter are analogic poems in and of themselves. “I Praise You, Unfading Rose” and “I Praise You, Cloud of Light” open and close the circle with Micus accompanying himself on the Bavarian zither. The zither’s sparkle, in combination with the words, draws flesh from vibrational frequencies. It is as if the world were cradled in a giant hammock and swung from soul to soul like a pendulum of fate, leaving the solitary voice to twist like knots of meditation where tether meets tree. “I Praise You, Shelter of the World” is also bifurcated, only now we encounter 10 voices accompanied by Chinese gongs in a tangle of vapor and vine. In “I Praise You, Sweet-Smelling Cypress,” Micus adds to that number of voices his custom-built 14-string guitar, 8 dilruba (a bowed Indian instrument similar to the sarangi and prominently featured in Desert Poems), 3 sattar (Uyghur violin), and 5 Egyptian nay flutes for a thoroughly spectral palette. Two further tracks—“I Praise You, Lady of Passion” and “I Praise You, Sacred Mother”—feature 22 voices and 20 voices, respectively. Both are deeply hymnal.

Micus 2

The rebec-like sonority of 3 sattar in “You are like Fragrant Incense” (3 sattar) adds new timbres to Micus’s sound-world. With only their wordlessness to reckon with, the listener can feel their shape in a performance that travels like a pheromone: just below the radar of perception yet overflowing with connectivity. Whether doubled and joined by 2 Chitrali sitar in “You are Full of Grace” or with one sitar and 6 dilruba in “You are the Life-Giving Rain,” their topographical consistency attends to every leaf and branch and reveals the love necessary for self-enclosure. In a different stroke, both “You are the Treasure of Life” and “You are a Shining Spring” engage the same instrumentation of Tibetan chimes, Burmese temple bells, Zanskari horsebells, and 2 dilruba. The contrast between bell dust and dilruba soil mirrors that between sleeping and waking.

If pressed for a comparison, I would say that Panagia resembles Japanese classical gagaku in its arrangement and color, even if it is devoid of gagaku’s exclusivity. Rather, it makes of this big blue ball a royal court where we live not as servants but as purveyors of destiny. Its play of light on reflective surfaces makes it one of the best-recorded albums in the Micus catalogue. It is the meta-statement of a meta-statement, an expression of Gaia through cycles of human thought.

(To hear samples of Panagia, click here.)

Back, and here to stay

| Tyran Grillo

For those of you wondering where I’ve gone, and especially those who so kindly inquired, I just want to assure you that I’ve officially returned to my labors of reviewing love. As longtime readers will know, by day I’m pursuing a Ph.D. in Japanese Literature at Cornell University, and in that guise I’ve spent the better part of two months working on a rigorous and possibly career-defining fellowship application to conduct dissertational research in Japan. Now that said application is finished and has been submitted, I can return both to my academic and musical ramblings with renewed vigor. Onward I go.

Jordi Savall: A Melancholy Rose

| Tyran Grillo

Jordi Savall
(Photo credit: Molina Visuals)

On 24 January 2003, I witnessed a vibrant soul at play on Vienna’s Konzerthaus stage. Leading La Capella Reial de Catalunya and Le Concert des Nations in a program of madrigals and sinfonias by Claudio Monteverdi, Johann Hermann Schein and Samuel Scheidt, Jordi Savall’s performance was everything the music was: thrilling, captivating and, above all, inviting. On April 15, hunched over his bass viol (the fretted, cello-like instrument of which he is a legendary virtuoso) and accompanied by soloists from Le Concert des Nations, I saw a changed man—a man playing for himself, as if into a mirror.

It was more than a little surprising that, from a musician who boasts nearly 200 recordings, we should encounter such a pedantic program. Composers Jean de Sainte-Colombe and protégé Marin Marais were surely familiar to anyone who has at least glanced at Savall’s 40-year career, which broke international waters when he provided the soundtrack for the 1991 film Tous les Matins du Monde, a dramatization of Marais’s relationship with his reclusive teacher. By far, the musical offerings from those masters of the instrument were highlights of the evening’s performance. Sainte-Colombe’s brooding Tombeau les Regrets was a rare chance to hear Savall in duet. The sound of two bass viols alone was nothing short of transportive. Even the leading violin of Marais’s Sonnerie de Ste-Geneviève du Mont-de-Paris, an inventive piece meant to evoke the din of church bells, could do nothing to undermine their resonance.

The same could not be said for the rest of the program, which distilled unremarkable background music from some of the biggest names in the 17th-century French Baroque. Anonymous selections from the era of Louis XIII set the tone for the program’s theme, which sought to articulate the splendor of the French Bourbon court. And yet, what began as a royal affair settled into what felt like a glorified rehearsal. This was not only because of the awkward staging (the musicians were, for instance, left floundering without assistance when a music stand broke), but also because court music was for the most part incidental and not designed to be heard out of context. And so, whatever stateliness might have infused its origins, this music came across not as regal but as dolorous. This rendered the listening experience both intriguing and depressing. While on the one hand we could feel ourselves traveling back in time, on the other it reminded us of the transience of power and arbitrariness of kingly life. It was like hearing history crumble before our very ears, leaving only a handful of extant sonic monuments to an unrecoverable age. Even the jewelry of violin and flute seemed to harbor shadows of doubt. It was a strange thing: this music would not have existed without the power structures that engendered it, but its occasional beauties spoke of realms far beyond any artifice of courtly refinement.

From a curatorial perspective, missed opportunities abounded. For one, there was no chance to hear the unaccompanied solo viol, and two duo miniatures by Antoine Forqueray and his son Jean-Baptiste were etudinal at best, further diluted by a superfluous keyboard backbone. Despite father Forqueray being once called by Savall “a knight who is always on the verge of working his horse to death, but who knows his horse too well to go quite that far,” there was little proof of concept. For another, to be in the presence of renowned harpsichordist Pierre Hantaï, only to find him relegated to a continuo (i.e., supporting) role was curious, even if we did hear some of his brilliance come through in three selections from Jean-Philippe Rameau’s 1741 Pièces de Clavecin en Concerts. Yet with so much rich keyboard literature to choose from among the likes of Rameau and François Couperin, I couldn’t help but scratch my head over the latter’s Les Concerts Royaux, of which the three sections played were like the courtiers they were meant to entertain: passive and overdressed. (Far more active, though no less dressed, was the suite from Jean-Baptiste Lully’s 1670 Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, after which the musicians were, for once, visibly satisfied.) Why not choose from something more suitable for a live setting, such as Couperin’s 1728 collection of suites for viol? Likewise, the inclusion of Jean-Marie Leclair’s Sonata in D Major, Op. 2, No. 8 was apocryphal at best, especially when one considers the lack of any credible evidence suggesting that Leclair even played at the court of Louis XIV. Why not instead bring another violinist and play the far more mature fascinations of his Opus 5?

In light of the fact that Savall has become increasingly known as an artist of difference, weaving together wide-ranging faiths, histories and spiritual threads through the loom of his musical vision, perhaps there was too much similarity. In the end, the playing, while effortless, was self-contained and the virtuosity incidental. And while one may never fully see into the heart of another, it was impossible to watch Savall and not mourn for him. Since facing immeasurable personal tragedy in 2011, we may only speculate about the depth of his loss and stand in awe at his creative resolve. Having recently lost someone close to me, I am admittedly primed to give such a reading, but I couldn’t help but feel the melancholy rose of his heart wilting just a little under the spotlight. It made me want to hear him play alone, if only to let that heart sing without obstacle, so that it might throw open a window into its own unrecoverable past. With this realization—or projection, if you will—in tow, I left the concert hall berating myself for the above criticisms and share them here only in the interest of full disclosure. It was a sobering reminder that there is far more to gain in this world than there is to lose. And at any rate, the world has gained so much from Savall already that one mere lackluster performance will leave no dent in his legacy.

Stephan Micus: Koan (ECM 2305 804 SP)

| Tyran Grillo

Koan

Stephan Micus
Koan

Stephan Micus shakuhachi, zither, gender, sarangi, rabab, bodhran, angklung, kyeezee, Burmese bells, guitar, voice
Recorded 1977 in Cologne
An ECM Production

Wayfaring multi-instrumentalist Stephan Micus began his ECM journey with this five-part album of characteristic rituals, now digitally restored for posterity. The Zen Buddhist kōan, often misunderstood as a riddle without answer, is more rightly experienced as a path to openness, and it is this path that Micus has walked since he first committed his sounds to disc. In denying an effect for every cause, the kōan opens both the questioner and the questioned to the possibility of possibility—which is to say, beyond the duality of things. Like the music contained on this eponymous recording, it is not meant to be solved but discovered for what it is. Micus’s music is thus an ongoing kōan, for despite the fascination of his array and technical adjustments thereto, an awareness of infinity prevails.

If we discover anything from the shakuhachi solo that is Part I, it’s that Micus’s unaccompanied sojourns are as multitudinous as his multi-tracked assemblages are singular. For while that hollowed stalk of bamboo, itself a voice without breath, finds accompaniment in the form of zither, gender (Balinese xylophone), and guitar in Parts II and V, in those group settings it feels more like the reflection than the reflected. Each instrument embodies one element in an organic picture, leaving the unsung song to trace its slow-motion arc across the sky, a comet on its way toward slumber. In the final wave, the zither offers itself percussively: the string as skin. Micus’s breath, simple and serene, meanwhile blots the torch of every star until the darkness becomes an expression of light.

Parts IIIa and IIIb feature the rabab—an Afghan lute, which sounds like a resonant shamisen and has both rhythmic and melodic functions—and the deeper sarangi. A translucent shakuhachi marks the first half, but gives way to a Mongolian-influenced sound, scraped like barnacles from the earth’s crust. This leaves only Part IV, in which Micus sings over a congregation of Burmese bells.

In this sound-world, instruments never compete. Nothing “solos,” per se, but coheres by means of an undying spirit, to which only the master musician may attend through a lifetime of rare creation. As one of Micus’s most meditative sustains, Koan enables a microscopically visceral experience that is forever new because it is the very picture of regeneration.

John Surman: Saltash Bells (ECM 2266)

| Tyran Grillo

Saltash Bells

John Surman
Saltash Bells

John Surman soprano, tenor and baritone saxophones, alto, bass and contrabass clarinets, harmonica, synthesizer
Recorded June 2009 and March 2011 at Rainbow Studios, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by John Surman and Manfred Eicher

Saltash Bells expands multi-reedist John Surman’s ECM cartographies in directions that are at once new and familiar. The album marks a return to the solo projects that so distinguished his contributions to recorded art in the 80s and 90s. Originally conceived as the soundtrack for a documentary on the English West Country that fell through the cracks, the music evolved from memories of Surman’s childhood in Devon, of which the local environs are cued by track titles throughout.

JS

Despite the fact that Surman’s solo efforts are known for incorporating—seamlessly, I might add—the technological adornments of synthesizers and digital delays, there’s always a taste of soil about them. Take, for instance, “Whistman’s Wood,” which opens the program with a program of its own in the form of pulsing, electronic signals beamed across a vista tilled by bass clarinet. An ancient spirit works the land, lifting arpeggios from their graves and animating them in such a way that respects their ability to sing. All this before Surman’s baritone proclaims its inner heart and unfolds it as a map for the journey to follow. Guided by a comet’s tail of soprano, he proceeds into the lonesome yet unbreakable bass clarinet of “Glass Flower.”

On the low reeds Surman is unmatched. His bass clarinet hovers as a sagacious presence over the oceanic currents of “On Staddon Heights” until a soprano joins in the swim, caressing every bubble to ensure it doesn’t break on the way to the surface. The same pairing ends the album with “Sailing Westwards,” further augmented by an exclusive appearance of harmonica. Aquatic textures also pervade the title track, which immediately follows “Ælfwin,” a robust yet lacey baritone solo. Between this and “Dark Reflections” (an unaccompanied piece for soprano), one can chart a defining contradiction of Surman’s playing: the higher the reed, the darker the sound, and vice versa. And in the solos especially, listeners can encounter the naked, self-directed nature of his writing.

The small congresses of “Triadichorum” and “The Crooked Inn” nevertheless pack visceral effect, rounding out one of Surman’s finest to date with the assurance that he still has decades more to say.

(To hear samples of Saltash Bells, click here.)