Author: Tyran Grillo

Kremerata Baltica: Hymns and Prayers (ECM New Series 2161)

| Tyran Grillo

Hymns and Prayers

Kremerata Baltica
Hymns and Prayers

Gidon Kremer violin
The Kremerata Baltica
Roman Kofman conductor
Khatia Buniatishvili piano
Andrei Pushkarev vibraphone
Marija Nemanytė violin
Maxim Rysanov viola
Giedrė Dirvanauskaitė violoncello
Sofia Altunashvili voice on tape
Recorded July 2008, Pfarrkirche St. Nikolaus, Lockenhaus
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Gidon Kremer and Manfred Eicher

A recent album released of solo piano music by Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer bears the title Gaps, Absences, which best describes the music of the composer, pianist, and essayist who, born 1963 in former Yugoslavia, has since 1991 called France his home. His life as an improviser has brought him in collaboration with Fred Frith, Chris Cutler, and many others of the avant garde, while on the classical side he has enjoyed fruitful collaboration with violinist Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica, having served as composer in residence at the renowned Lockenhaus chamber music festival, where this album was recorded in 2008, and more recently at the Kremerata Baltica’s own festival in Latvia. His Eight Hymns (1986/2004), written in memory of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, begins a tripartite program of monumental works for various ensembles. Scored for violin, strings, vibraphone, and piano, each of Tickmayer’s hymns bears a title of calm strength. His atmospheres are deceptively minimal, at times spectral and at others hovering as mist over a lake at dawn. The instruments interlock in alternating tides and continental shelves. The piano paints evening skies as single notes break off into satellites of a deeper gravitation. The violin is a thin yet utterly present voice, an omniscient myth-keeper whose experiences of assumption, redemption, and remembrance all answer to the same voice. The vibraphone is a pinwheel moved by breath of slumber. Strings move in the draw of a paintbrush from behind a veil of ash and harmonic light. All of this ends in a flower, as fragile as it is trembling, leaving us indeed with gaps and absences of profound resonance.

Such soul-nourishing music finds like spirit by way of Giya Kancheli, who wrote his 2007 Silent Prayer in honor of Mstislav Rostropovich (for his 80th birthday) and Gidon Kremer (for his 60th). The familiar Kancheli themes crystallize in the prerecorded singing of one Sofia Altunashvili. Her pure-toned voice, carried like a feather on exhale, rings authentically for its vulnerability. It’s an unusual voice, an untrained voice, a voice unafraid of a misshapen psalm. As in the Tickmayer pieces, the violin feels thin and unchained, and puts into relief the spaciousness of strings dragging hands across water from methodical vessels. Their occasional interjects feel like proclamations from above, chances to restring the universal lyre. Still, there is a feeling of oppression to this piece, as if the sky had become weighted with death, so that the lively center almost blinds. Even more cinematic in feel than the Tickmayer, Kancheli’s hymnal cast turns wine into water in a single tracking shot.

Equally affecting, if by relatively compressed dynamic force, is César Franck’s Piano Quintet in f minor (1878/79), which occupies program center. A dramatic and chromatically ecstatic work that met with criticism at the time of its premiere, it also makes expert use of its formidable combination of instruments. What appears short and sweet by name becomes epic in performance as Kremer and his colleagues muscle their way through the first movement with heartfelt aplomb, chipping away at the music’s calcified soul as they proceed. Each drift into the major is a barrel over the waterfall of reality. The most genuine passages are the quietest. On that note, the second movement turns an elegiac frame into a window on fertile land. The legato phrasings of the final Allegro, then, are a bittersweet harvest, tempered by the promise of winter’s freeze. In anticipation of that cold, the piano holds a fire in its belly, changing from blue to orange to white as echoes return with nourished grief. For indeed, mourning is the final message of even the brightest day. The tinge of mortality knows no limits of sun.

Garth Knox: Saltarello (ECM New Series 2157)

| Tyran Grillo

Saltarello

Garth Knox
Saltarello

Garth Knox fiddle, viola, viola d’amore
Agnès Vesterman violoncello
Sylvain Lemêtre percussion
Recorded December 2009, Auditorio Radiotelevisione svizzera, Lugano
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Garth Knox describes Saltarello, his second nominal disc for ECM’s New Series following 2008’s D’Amore, as “a mobile structure of musical ‘snapshots’ taken from nearly one thousand years of music.” As the former violist of the Arditti Quartet, Knox gained in-depth knowledge of music by living composers, all the while strengthening his relationship to the viola d’amore and folk-grounded fiddling, and compresses that knowledge into a roaming program. Knox has also developed his voice as a composer, as demonstrated by his Fuga libre for viola solo, which juxtaposes fiery arpeggios with moonlit pizzicato diffusions, glissandi, and harmonic overlays. This cellular approach is writ large across the album’s full breadth, which for the most part traverses centuries-old lineages. Joining Knox on his time travels are cellist Agnès Vesterman and percussionist Sylvian Lemêtre.

On the deepest end of the spectrum we encounter works of medieval masters Hildegard von Bingen and Guillaume de Machaut. The former’s lilting poetry, liturgical and solemn to its ashen core, comes out all the more authentically in the intimate setting, while the latter’s Tels rit au ma[t]in qui au soir pleure adds percussion in Sephardic spirit. Three dances from the 14th century speak further to an ancient aesthetic uncluttered by the discontents of modernity, resonating instead through the viola d’amore’s singing body. Here, too, the percussion balances luminescence opposite Knox’s originary tone. A handful of traditionals takes us into less definable territory, where Appalachian folk song and Irish fiddling meet in Black Brittany in limber arrangement with cello, and a trio of Irish tunes under the title of Pipe, harp and fiddle turns temerity into joy through a prism of bells and drums.

A dip into the font of the Baroque gives up the ghosts of Henry Purcell and Antonio Vivaldi. Where one feels steeped in downright cinematic tragedy, the other crucibles a concerto originally written for viola d’amore and orchestra down to its lead and bass lines, so that the striking geometries of each movement, from dancing to slumbering to dancing again, mold a beautiful sculpture of exuberance.

Bolstering all of this is contemporary Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s Vent nocturne for viola and electronics, which was written especially for Knox. The first of its two movements bears the title “Sombres miroirs” (Dark Mirrors), the second “Soupirs de l’obscur” (Breaths of the Obscure). The piece includes the composer’s own breathing, as well as the amplified sound of the bow drawn across a string, in a mood that best recalls Sofia Gubaidulina’s String Quartet No. 4. It’s a windblown reverie, opened and not merely enhanced by the technological overlay. It is sometimes restless and draws from a relatively stark palette, even as glass harmonica-like drones bleed into frame as if they were time itself. Splitting the two movements even as it binds them is John Dowland’s Flow My Tears, a song last heard under ECM auspices with words on In Darkness Let Me Dwell. It is, like the album as a unit, a prayer that looks itself in the mirror and neither smiles nor frowns, but takes in the entire face, scars and all, as something greater than the sum of its features.

Billy Hart: All Our Reasons (ECM 2248)

| Tyran Grillo

All Our Reasons

Billy Hart
All Our Reasons

Mark Turner tenor saxophone
Ben Street double bass
Ethan Iverson piano
Billy Hart drums
Recorded June 2011 at Avatar Studios, New York
Engineer: James A. Farber
Assistant: Fernando Lodeiro
Produced by Manfred Eicher

It’s no coincidence that Billy Hart’s surname is homophonous with “heart,” because this album is filled with it. From the simpatico yet open-ended musicianship to the flowing compositions, his quartet knows exactly where it’s at…and where it isn’t. In the latter vein, the bandleader-drummer emotes as much on the inhale as on the exhale, selectively deploying bursts of illustration. Pianist Ethan Iverson and bassist Ben Street make their first ECM appearances, while tenorist Mark Turner and Hart himself represent two very different intersections with the label: respectively, with the Fly Trio and the Charles Lloyd Quartet.

It’s Lloyd, in fact, whose influence is most apparent in “Ohnedaruth,” the first of three tracks penned by Iverson. Despite being based on John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” (Ohnedaruth was Coltrane’s adopted spiritual name, a Sanskrit word meaning “compassion”), the balance of viewpoints between Hart and Turner is, both here and across the album’s full spectrum, so strong that I could easily imagine a duo flight in the vein of Lloyd and Billy Higgins’s Which Way Is East. Hart is staggered (and staggering), deciphering Iverson’s chromatic twists like a locksmith jiggling his way into Street’s fixed grooves. Turner’s studied approach spreads virtuosities as the icing of a delicately layered cake. Iverson is as bold as a composer as he is understated as a pianist. Even when given the spotlight, as in his Paul Bley-inspired “Nostalgia For The Impossible,” he opts for an inward quality that allows Hart’s brushes to sing. Iverson’s alchemy is naked and slow, and all the more impactful for it. His solo interlude, “Old Wood,” cuts the corner pieces of the larger puzzle.

Turner offers up two tunes of his own. “Nigeria” takes inspiration from Sonny Rollins’s “Airegin.” Its wing-beat opening fades from theme to solo, Hart taking a downright spiritual path of expression. As a drummer, Hart can be at once free and meticulous, but as a musician he combines molecule after molecule into the audible compound of this track’s flowering architecture, all while Turner and Iverson open every window to let in a flood of sunlight. Street, meanwhile, responds to gradations of the passing day. “Wasteland” opens with an acrobatic introduction from its composer and floats along its own ripples through the other instruments toward the opposite shore.

Hart shares his gifts on four originals. On the whole, they reap distinction from the incantational properties of his playing. One by one, they till the soil with a uniquely shaped implement every time. His most artisan spade breaks ground in “Song For Balkis,” which inspires his musicians in turn. Turner’s tone is bracing and wrought in spirit magic, working busily to transmit the messages his fingers receive into mortal recognition. Iverson tears up patches of earth and replaces them with sound. His pianism, restless and responsive, breaks every mold that clutches it. Hart, for his part, carves directly into the bedrock something beautiful. A rustic feel pervades the funkier blues that is “Tolli’s Dance,” which from modest foundations builds a tower to the sun—only this one isn’t made of brick, rivet, and lime, but of slick rhythm and rhyme. Hart’s “Duchess” and “Imke’s March” are by turns ecstatic and revelatory. The latter’s bee-wing delicacy wears such personal clothing that one can envision its colors with eyes closed and ears open.

All Our Reasons has plenty of reasons to discover, appreciate, and enjoy. But most important among them is the realization that mastery exists only when egos get left at the door. This is music for the soul, because only the soul knows how to detach itself from harmful desires that would get in the way of the experience.

(To hear samples of All Our Reasons, click here.)

Yeahwon Shin: Lua ya (ECM 2337)

| Tyran Grillo

2337 X

Yeahwon Shin
Lua ya

Yeahwon Shin voice
Aaron Parks piano
Rob Curto accordion
Recorded May 2012 at Mechanics Hall, Worcester, MA
Engineer: Rick Kwan
Mixed at Rainbow Studio, Oslo by Jan Erik Kongshaug, Manfred Eicher, and Sun Chung
Produced by Sun Chung

If we can believe poet Federico García Lorca, who in a 1928 lecture entitled “On Lullabies” claimed that “Spain uses its saddest melodies and most melancholy texts to darken the first sleep of her children,” then we can also believe in a culture where lullabies nourish the growing soul. Of the latter persuasion are those offered by Yeahwon Shin on Lua ya. Shin’s selections give voice to transitions of darkness to light, spirit to flesh, dependence to independence, and all with a grace of expression that pretends nothing. Although best known as a Brazilian music specialist (her 2010 self-titled debut was nominated for a Latin Grammy), the singer rejoins accordionist Rob Curto and, for the first time, pianist Aaron Parks, in an enchanting survey of Korean children’s songs.

“The album’s theme is the remembrance of childhood,” Shin tells me in an e-mail interview. “I would like the listeners to have the freedom to imagine the story themselves.” In light of this invitation, we may still feel the need to tread lightly, for each song is of such fragile constitution that it would seem to crumble at the slightest mishandling. Then again, the music blossoms with such strength—a strength born of unconditional love—that it also feels impervious to misunderstanding. As in the opening improvisation, called simply “Lullaby,” it crafts a world of tracings and starlight. Parks’s pianism introduces the landscape across which Shin’s voice emerges as a maternal whisper, carrying with it the histories of countless mothers before, and the countless more to follow, in life’s eternal cycle.

Yeahwon Shin
(Photo credit: John Soares)

Shin grew up enchanted by the music of Egberto Gismonti, who along with the iconic Tom Jobim spun the tapestry of her appreciation for Brazilian music. She looks back even further to Chopin and Bach, composers who informed her first love—the piano—as fundamental inspirations in her development as an artist. “I like Korean traditional music, as well,” she says. “I am strongly bonded to Korea’s rhythmic patterns. I still want to discover more about this music.” Lua ya is a new step in precisely this direction. It is also a return to origins. For Shin, what seems most important in life is that which imparts it: “My parents are very important figures in my life. I respect my father’s wisdom, my mother’s unlimited love and spirit of self-sacrifice. They are not musicians, but the way they express themselves by singing shows a pure love for music. I have always wanted to feel that way in music.”

To be sure, Shin’s filial respect echoes in the songs passed down from her own mother, whose voice is forever preserved in memories of a family that was always singing. Of those songs directly passed down, “Island Child” is among the album’s most emblematic. Syllables roll off the tongue from both singer and instrumentalists until language ceases to matter. Indeed, Shin is at her most powerful when singing wordlessly (as she does here, and in “Moving Clouds”), as one needs not struggle against the elastic of linguistic barriers. “The Orchard Road” is another descendent of personal experience and shows the trio at its densest. Shin’s breathy storytelling develops over a rustic backdrop, as affecting as it is brief.

If Lua ya feels less like a cycle and more like one continuous song, it’s because it was, at the behest of producer (and Shin’s husband) Sun Chung, conceived and realized as a concert, played from start to finish with no edits. Chung acted as both audience and director when the performance was being recorded in Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Massachusetts. His presence is palpable in the album’s dynamic flow. Also present are Shin’s attentive accompanists, both of whom take her voice as a compass takes magnetism.

(Click here to see this article as it originally appeared in RootsWorld magazine, where you can also hear samples.)

Norma Winstone: Stories Yet To Tell (ECM 2158)

| Tyran Grillo

Stories Yet To Tell

Norma Winstone
Stories Yet To Tell

Norma Winstone voice
Klaus Gesing bass clarinet, soprano saxophone
Glauco Venier piano
Recorded December 2009 at Arte Suono Studio, Udine
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Produced by Manfred Eicher

While walking home on 8 October 2014, I was listening to Norma Winstone’s Stories Yet To Tell on my iPod. The opening song, “Just Sometimes,” had already enchanted me with its tender traversal of the heart’s shadowed chambers. Its bittersweet emotions lingered on in my mind as the second track, “Sisyphus,” held my ears captive. Named for the Corinthian king of Greek mythology forced to endlessly roll a giant boulder up a hill, the song evokes the curse of repetition in Glauco Venier’s pianism and the vain hope of breaking free in the tension of Klaus Gesing’s bass clarinet. While immersed in the atmosphere of this music, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I pressed PAUSE, removed my headphones, and turned to see my friend Andy, who had terrible news: our dear mutual friend Taylan had committed suicide that morning.

In the weeks following this tragedy, my iPod remained stuck halfway through “Sisyphus,” stymied like my desire for listening. By the time I returned to the song, I couldn’t help read the myth into Taylan’s untimely end. His life, it seemed, had thrown one boulder too many in his path, and he’d grown tired of rolling them upward in vain. While learning to cope with my grief, I was also comforted by the album’s title. It was a gentle reminder that, although he was gone, stories of Taylan’s legacy as a musician (he was an electronics genius for whom Evan Parker’s The Eleventh Hour was a life-changing record) had yet to be told. It was only a month later that I had the courage to continue where I’d left off in “Sisyphus,” which will forever be for me an elegy.

It’s not entirely morbid, however, to read a certain understanding of mortality into Winstone’s craft, singing as she so often does of moments that are fleeting, captured only through imagination. In the sadness of “Among The Clouds,” the retrograde of “Goddess,” and the wordless farewell of “En mort d’En Joan de Cucanh,” Winstone and her attuned trio understand that directions below are written in scripts above. Each song searches for meaning in a world that so often denies the divinity of simplicity. Furthermore, Winstone’s lyrics, especially in “Rush” and “The Titles,” linger on impermanence and, like the second, break down the theatrical stage of experience into its component parts.

In a few tracks, Winstone uses her voice as wordless instrument, employing melodic flight paths in the service of folk songs and lullabies. And even when she does inhabit the domicile of language, as in the tender “Like A Lover,” she does so with an insightful balance of coarse action and empty heroism, all the while keeping fear at bay with the shapes of her mouthing. She demonstrates that those of us still living must recognize that death is not an end but the first sentence in a story waiting for the spark of remembrance to reveal its narrative arc.

(To hear samples of Stories Yet To Tell, click here.)

Taylan
Taylan Cihan
(June 13, 1978 – October 8, 2014)