Author: Tyran Grillo

Charles Lloyd Quartet: Rabo de Nube (ECM 2053)

| Tyran Grillo

Rabo de Nube

Charles Lloyd Quartet
Rabo de Nube

Charles Lloyd tenor saxophone, alto flute, tárogató
Jason Moran piano
Reuben Rogers double-bass
Eric Harland drums
Recorded live April 24, 2007 at Theater Basel
Engineers: Adam and Dominic Camardella
Produced by Charles Lloyd and Dorothy Darr

Rabo de Nube marks the inauguration of a quartet that has come to define Charles Lloyd to the present day. Pianist Jason Moran (making here his ECM debut), bassist Reuben Rogers, and drummer Eric Harland join the tender tenorist for a set of seven recorded live before a rapt Swiss audience in 2007. Anyone who doubts that wisdom comes from experience need only drink in the meditations of “Prometheus” to know the truth of that maxim. Lloyd sparks the 15-minute opener by plucking a thread from the air and pulling the rhythm section’s explosive entrance into being. The ensuing uplift gives juice to his improvisational engine, which purrs all the more for its decades of breaking in.

The melding of playing styles in this quartet is obvious from the start. Moran flirts with rampage through Lloyd’s sunrays. Like a flock of loosed birds, the pianist’s notecraft scatters with purpose and genetic design. To this Rogers brings a fluid approach, redrawing the perimeter in anticipation of a grand return gilded by Harland’s signature delicacies. In keeping with this mood, Rogers intros “Migration of Spirit” humbly, thus priming the stage for Lloyd’s luscious thematizing. Moran is epic here, trailblazing rainbows into ragtime horizons. Those same nostalgic geometries permeate “La Colline de Monk,” which feels like a mission statement for Moran—a student paying homage to teacher. Complex yet never muddied, he holds a lens to the past, working in duet with Lloyd, as if to foreshadow Hagar’s Song. The story deepens.

Another backward glance brings the band to “Sweet Georgia Bright,” a classic that proceeds without fanfare, harking to Voice In The Night and further to the 1960s, when it was written. The rhythmatists are smoldering this time around, leaving Moran with a strong percussive challenge, duly met. This gives way to a drum solo of evolving sensitivity, working from droplets to drizzle to storm.

“Booker’s Garden” (written in memory of Booker Little, a childhood friend) and “Ramanujan” are the album’s only tenor-less departures. The former is a lilting vehicle for alto flute, while the latter fronts tárogató before a mélange of delicate bassing and transcendent pianism. In both is a gentle rendering that, like a skilled pumpkin carver, takes away just enough of the skin to let the candle shine through without puncture: luminescent to the core.

Although Rabo de Nube ends with its title (which translates as “Tail of a Cloud”), it’s a clear beginning: of an era, of a sound, of this quartet as it rides into the future. This tune is the only of the set not penned by Lloyd, coming instead from that of Silvio Rodríguez. It is the tenderest of them all and sustains Moran, who leads the way into terrain that finds abundance in sparseness.

Charles Lloyd’s music evolves like a fractal, from macro- to microscopic patterns. The album is accordingly structured so that little of it involves all band members at once. Each chapter is, rather, a catalyst for character development. The true accompaniment is something beyond even the musicians themselves, a sense of spirit that moves them to act. Through it all, Lloyd remains the familiar stranger. He wanders into town, leaving behind an ashen horizon, from which tendrils of smoke continue to rise, the only remainder of the civilization they once nourished—a civilization preserved in his horn. This album is a dream, ready to birth another.

Louis Sclavis: Dans la nuit (ECM 1805)

| Tyran Grillo

Dans la nuit

Louis Sclavis
Dans la nuit
Music for the Silent Movie by Charles Vanel

Louis Sclavis clarinets
Jean-Louis Matinier accordion
Louis Sclavis violin
Vincent Courtois cello
François Merville percussion, marimba
Recorded October 2000, Studios La Buissonne
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Produced by Louis Sclavis

Louis Sclavis, who had by this point already left indelible footprints in the ECM trail with such memorable recordings as Acoustic Quartet and Les Violences de Rameau, surely surprised many with the release of Dans la nuit. The album foregrounds the French multi-reedist’s visionary composing via incidental music commissioned for a new print of Charles Vanel’s tragic 1929 silent film of the same name. One of France’s last silent pictures, Dans la nuit needed a soundtrack. Says Sclavis of the task, “I had to compose music that takes into account the period, the atmosphere of each sequence and their cinematic aesthetic. The music, at times, should have an angle on the action, an attitude, especially during the dramatic passages, should be almost as it were out of synch, giving it a distance that allows the tempo and the light to play their part. On the other hand there should also be a play of simple proximity to the characters and their feelings, realist or expressionist passages; all of this without too many sudden breaks.” In addition to his meticulously timed score, he included improvised passages in response to the images, thereby underscoring the Vanel’s spontaneous mise-en-scène.

The film itself is an almost forgotten gem of silent cinema, as attested by the intensity of its acting, the expressionism of its lighting, the creativity of its camera work, the brutality of its storyline, and the confrontational ploy of its denouement.[*] Its opening shots introduce us to an unnamed French mining village, a place rife with the very brand of contrast borne out by the protagonists. Scenes of industry clash with the gaiety of a rural wedding party.

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Friends and family drink and are merry, their revelry buoyed by the obvious happiness of the newlyweds in whose honor they have gathered.

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Meanwhile…

Recurring shots of an accordion player give Sclavis an easy clue into the album’s instrumental spread, from which Jean-Louis Matinier’s bellows stand out for their fluid narrative power.

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A dramatic cut sequence, however, upsets the certainty of the couple’s outlook as shots jump between a dolly pan of the wedding party and a crowd of miners headed for the local carnival. It is in the latter’s confines—the cacophony of which is palpable despite the lack of ambient noise—that these two worlds collide, and gives first indication that the husband is, in fact, a miner himself and is enjoying a rare reprieve from his toil. The happy couple rides into town by carriage, throwing bride (Sandra Milovanoff) and groom (played by the director) into a storm of activity. The ensuing whirlwind is expertly and descriptively captured by Vanel. Frantic overheads of swings and other amusements frame the bride in a blur of flesh and flowers, further unsettling her chances at happiness.

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Before the newlyweds consummate their marriage, their faces are singled out by the camera in a montage of longing gazes, each a placeholder for the twist of resolution to be dropped like a lemon peel into the film’s martini glass in the final act.

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Time passes, and wedded bliss has pervaded the wife’s daily routine. Viscous liquid flows down a sheet of glass placed before the lens, reverting us to the mine, where workers are preparing to dynamite the rock.

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“Fire in the hole!”

Children play in a nearby field, reinforcing Vanel’s penchant for contrast and painfully letting us in on the inevitable: the husband is buried by rocks dislodged from the blast.

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He returns home, a disfigured man.

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He bids his wife to fetch a mask from his belongings, which he wears to give his appearance at least semblance of normalcy. Life wanders on, but so do the wife’s passions, landing her in the arms of an illicit lover. The latter finds another mask (presumably a spare) in her husband’s likeness and puts it on. When the husband comes home unexpectedly early, the two men tussle for her hand. Vanel’s choreography makes it seem as if the husband has been killed. The wife and who she believes to be her lover dump the body, but when they return home, the man reveals himself to be her husband.

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“Yes, it’s me!”

Even as she feels her entire world crumbling around her, she wakes up to find it was all a dream.

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One could hardly dream of a more fitting score for this melodrama. Sclavis has forged no mere accompaniment, but rather a living entity that balances the film’s morbid undertones with a harmonious sheen. Two recurring motifs, “Dia Dia” and the title theme, lend the album a narrative arc all its own. Together, the former’s pairing of bellow (Matinier) and cello (Vincent Courtois) and the latter’s Yann Tiersen-like breezes lend a feeling of symmetry.

The descriptiveness of each tune speaks in the language of cinema, so that François Merville’s light percussive appliqué in “Le travail” gives just a hint of the labor it names. (The stark textures here recall Philip Glass—and indeed, one may wish to explore the American composer’s own scoring for silent films for more in this vein.) “Fête foraine” (Fairgrounds) lays tightly wound strings over martial snare, shifting midway through to mallets before returning to the procession. Such changes beguile throughout. The full import of the wife’s “Mauvais rêve” (Bad dream), for example, finds perfect introduction in the clarinet and cello duet (“Retour de noce”) that precedes it. Fantasy (“Amour et beauté”) changes hands with reality (“Le miroir,” in which violinist Dominique Pifarély sounds like a ghost), excitement (“La fuite”) with comeuppance (“Les 2 visages”).

Two of the album’s finest moments occur in “La peur du noir” (Fear of the dark), which expresses itself through a nervous heart murmur of solo accordion, and in “L’accident,” a two-part fragmentation of the film’s underlying tensions that works its corkscrew into a bottle long emptied of its hope.

Meticulously composed, arranged, and performed, Dans la nuit stands tall in the Louis Sclavis lineup—not because it is relatively “accessible” (which it is), but because its storytelling is so enmeshed with its source. It’s brittle continuity maintains shape even in the emotional push and pull in which it finds itself caught. Like the nameless wife’s nightmare, the music carries in its breast a hint of its own anxieties, reliving them for as long as there are mirrors, smoke, and light…

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[*] I regret that I was only able to obtain an untranslated VHS library copy of the film, from which I could only extract stills by photographing the screen with my iPhone.

Susanne Abbuehl: Compass (ECM 1906)

| Tyran Grillo

Compass

Susanne Abbuehl
Compass

Susanne Abbuehl voice
Wolfert Brederode piano
Christof May clarinet, bass clarinet
Lucas Niggli drums, percussion
Michel Portal clarinet (on two tracks)
Recorded January 2003 and October 2004 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Leave dreams to the dreamers
That will not after,
That song and laughter
Do nothing move.
–James Joyce

Compass is more than the title of Susanne Abbuehl’s sophomore ECM album. It is also a physical manifestation of the singer’s artistry. The compass guides with a needle fluid and true, trembling at the slightest change in direction to indicate north. Aiding Abbuehl in this navigation is pianist Wolfert Brederode, clarinetist Christof May, and drummer Lucas Niggli over a span of 12 songs. The number implies a compass of a different register—the clock—and grander others—the solar system, and by extension the Milky Way (hence, perhaps, the cover of her label debut, April)—which dictate the sweep of the clock’s hands with such precision that mortal instruments can only sample a simulacrum of their taste.

That said, Abbuehl’s originality in a planetary system of so-called “jazz vocalists” spins like an instrument celestial, an undiscovered body whose reflection shines through the introductory telescope of “Bathyal.” The words and music are her own, emerging from a primal bass clarinet, dark as the sun is bright, as a vessel down the piano’s river run. The feeling of water, overwhelming enough to drown out the noise of the world, carries also a promise of depth in nature, its tickling spray a mist of love. “Do not run just yet / Do not hide,” she implores: less a challenge to the listener than it is to her own emotions, without which the album’s remainder would fade along with the salmon in their streams.

Two selections—“Black Is The Color…” and “Lo Fiolairé”—from Luciano Berio’s Folk Songs are subjected to unique investigation. The words are carried along by a rather different current, this of charcoal in the form of two clarinets (Michel Portal provides the second reed). In her bare renditions, Abbuehl underscores the power of melodies to overcome the means of their expression. Tied in a braid of lyrical hair, their elements grow along an ebony trail of origins in strands of night and shadow. The Berio inclusion hints at a less obvious connection to the poetry of James Joyce, whose words the Italian composer set to music in 1953, as does Abbuehl for the new millennium. Here she draws inspiration from the same collection, 1907’s Chamber Music. These revivals come in the form of “The Twilight Turns From Amethyst,” “Bright Cap And Streamers,” and “In The Dark Pine-Wood.” In them lies another version of the album’s eponym: as color wheel in the painter’s hand (yellow, as Abbuehl sings later in William Carlos Williams’s “Primrose,” is not a color, but is among other things a shadow). Their circadian approach to worldly being bleeds through the clarinet’s fleshy overlap, a call for unity through real-time calculations of difference. Brederode’s keyboard—the ever-present messenger, the mournful traveler who finds beauty in rest—carves a hovel in every tree along the way, until only a shell of the journey remains. Joyce breathes also through “Sea, Sea!” This song from Finnegan’s Wake outlines a bridge, a meeting of souls across unfathomable expanse, and weaves a basket of alliterations against Niggli’s earthen percussion.

Chinese poet Feng Menglong of the late Ming dynasty rises from the deep in “Don’t Set Sail,” a love poem that is about as hopeful as the waves it fears—although with Brederode behind her, Abbuehl needs no oars. This song pairs hauntingly with the last track, which in having brought us over water now keeps us from it, under threat of storm and chop. A potent metaphor for the solitary heart. Sun Ra’s “A Call For All Demons” unearths deeper loneliness, washed in mercury, while “Children’s Song No. 1,” comes from Chick Corea’s landmark collection of piano miniatures, turns the Tarot card over to reveal a bluebird’s Empress flight.

Although “Where Flamingos Fly” is a jazz standard (the album’s only), it feels the least familiar in the present company. Its distance is emphasized by the soulful clarinet, of which the rasp of breath and wood runs its fingers along the edge of every utterance. Like the album as a whole, it finds in its source a new seed to sprout. In light of this, to call Abbuehl’s arrangements understated would itself be an understatement. Sparse though they are, their awareness of negative space is as thick as the pitch that holds the stars in place.

John Surman: Free and Equal (ECM 1802)

| Tyran Grillo

Free and Equal

John Surman
Free and Equal

John Surman soprano and baritone saxophone, bass clarinet
Jack DeJohnette drums, piano
London Brass
Recorded live June 2001 Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
Recording engineers: Steve Lowe and Ben Surman
Mixed January 2002 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo by Jan Erik Kongshaug, John Surman, and Manfred Eicher
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher

Free and Equal, John Surman’s furtherance of intermingling genres, is its own animal. Under its original title of That’s Right, it was the culmination of a 2000 festival commission and premiered in October that same year. The performance recorded for ECM comes from 2001, giving the work some time to incubate, as did subsequent mixing in Oslo’s Rainbow Studio under the direction of its composer, engineer, and producer.

Nods to classical and jazz modes are a clear and present danger throughout, for the purpose of their coexistence is not to mash them into some new hybrid but rather to flag their common goal: namely, to move listener and performer alike. Surman is joined by drummer Jack DeJohnette (also on piano) and classical stalwarts London Brass in an atmospheric tour de force that departs considerably from such previous experiments as Proverbs and Songs. The instrumentation alone would seem to imply a big band experiment à la Surman’s robust work with John Warren (see The Brass Project), but such is not the case. Neither should the DeJohnette connection, already well honed on Invisible Nature, foster misperceptions of what’s going on here. For as Surman paints the canvas with his soprano oils amid the swells of “Preamble,” it’s clear that freer considerations are at play. DeJohnette’s pianism, heard only occasionally on disc, proves descriptively apt in the follow-up “Groundwork,” which loops bass clarinet through trumpet in an evolving macramé of melody. Here, as elsewhere, Surman finds seemingly impossible paths for his improvisations through growing mazes of gold. Such balancing of the minimal and complex is no small task, and the establishment of that balance highlights their mutuality. It is in this spirit, perhaps, that DeJohnette doesn’t pick up his drumsticks until ten minutes into the album, working into “Sea Change” with the crash of surf in his cymbals, the heave of ocean waves in the brass choir at his back. His moments of abandon are thus kept within sight.

Soloists among the London players strengthen the marrow of this nine-part suite. The tuba soliloquy that opens “Back and Forth,” for one, gives an edible sense of textural contrast. Punctual and enlivening, it signals the first in a series of hardenings and dissolutions, from which trombone throws streams of light and draws Surman’s low reed into an invigorating trio with skins. Likewise, “Fire” traces the multifarious paths of its namesake through a modified trio of drums, trumpet, and bass clarinet. The latter continues its coppery speech in “Debased Line” with a nostalgia and restlessness of spirit that embodies Surman’s passion as a musician. “In the Shadow” evokes Paul McCandless in its sopranism, which floats over a relatively aggressive waltz in the background and sparks an ensemble-wide reaction in the title portion. Virtuosity is on full display as Surman looses his wilder side and fuels DeJohnette’s closing protraction. The drummer cracks many dams in the “Epilogue,” emptying into an open sea of well-earned applause.

Filled with exciting music that creates and maintains its own standard, Free and Equal represents an evolutionary leap in Surman’s compositional thinking. His uncanny ability to be at once joyful and mournful in a single arpeggio has elsewhere never been so explicit. It is music that begs for dancers or the flicker of a cinema screen—a vast, organic machine that runs on the promise of another listen.

Stephan Micus: Wings Over Water (JAPO 60038)

| Tyran Grillo

Wings Over Water

Stephan Micus
Wings Over Water

Stephan Micus acoustic guitar, nay, sarangi, voice, flowerpots, spanish guitar, Bavarian zither, suling
Recorded January 1981 at Ibiza Sound Studio and October 1981 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineers: Manfred Ballheimer and Martin Wieland

Wings Over Water is the third of five JAPO outings—the most by any artist on ECM’s sister label—by Stephan Micus. Featuring a rare turn by the intrepid multi-instrumentalist on that most quotidian tool of accompaniment, the guitar, it spins a web of enchantment across six numbered parts.

Part 1 uses the guitar to anchor that very web, its strings flexing before a soul-piercing tongue. The ney (an end-blown flute of the Middle East featured prominently in Micus’s work across the decades) is the breath behind it, a servant of the molecules swimming through its porous tunnel. These encirclings open a space into which the listener might step. Thus surrounded in the comfort of these repetitions, s/he may find that the ney’s improvisational flights have similarly taken solace within. Every rhythmic lapse is a micro-phase of organic awareness, attuned to said listener, to the perfect imperfection of things, which like the bird framed in the album cover photograph is austere yet warped in reflection. Gazing and gazed upon, it is self-sufficient, fragile as wind.

Part 2 gives insight into Micus’s unique approach to the sarangi, which in taking on such percussive function provides undulating waves for Micus’s voice and stretches arcs of flight over a ceramic pulse of flowerpots.

Part 3 rises from the mountains through the rusticity of a Spanish guitar and holds in its hands a dimly lit star, hewn in mineral and soil. The guitar becomes an agent of solace, its sound a meditation on meditation—two mirrors held soul’s distance apart and compounded by the interest of infinity. Flowerpots lend their pacing to the skeleton, marrying Sephardic and Southeast Asian influences by way of natural ligaments. The piece ends as it begins: in hermetic garments, tattered yet resilient to the elements, in fact becoming an element unto itself.

Part 4 is a spiritually unbound ney solo, an avian dream that remembers when sustenance was easier to come by, when one could freely roam the air currents to find all that was needed.

Part 5 is an open letter written in the language of flowerpots to the very cosmos. Its paths are as vast and unknowable as Nazca lines, a runway for the ether, embodied in ney and mapped by less visible instruments. Beats rise above the waterline, the breath an unbroken promise of sailing.

Part 6 unfolds, like Part 3, with hints of Andalusian soil. Joining Spanish guitar with Bavarian zither, it unleashes sweeping gardens of profusion, which then quiet to support the lilt of a suling (Indonesian bamboo ring flute) and with it sink into the ocean of forgetting.

An expressly visual journey that skips across rice paddies, this music moves as water strider on pond, and leaves in its wake the promise of a good harvest. It is a vestibule from the rain, a haven where bodies stretch in anticipation of sun.

Abdullah Ibrahim: African Piano (JAPO 60002)

| Tyran Grillo

African Piano

Abdullah Ibrahim
African Piano

Abdullah Ibrahim piano
Recorded live on October 22, 1969 at Jazzhus Montmartre, Copenhagen

South African pianist-composer Abdullah Ibrahim (born Adolph Johannes Brand), still performing at the time of this 1969 live album under the moniker “Dollar” Brand, unleashed a mastery so enticing on African Piano, it’s a wonder that any of the folks at the club where it was recorded had the resolve to treat it as background to their dining. By the same token, reinforcement of that fact by constant ambient noises renders Ibrahim’s performance all the more sacred by contrast.

Amid a sea of chatter, cleared throats, and sudden intakes of breath, he breaks the surf with the gentle yet hip ostinato of “Bra Joe From Kilimanjaro,” working meditative tendrils into the bar light. Over this his right hand brings about an explosive sort of thinking that spins webs in a flash and connects them to larger others. With clarion fortitude, he drops bluesy accents along the way: a trail of crumbs leading to “Selby That The Eternal Spirit Is The Only Reality.” Ironically (or not), this is the most solemn blip on the album’s radar and blends into the ivory tickling of “The Moon.” Here Ibrahim’s heartfelt, dedicatory spirit comes to the fore, proving that, while technically proficient, he possesses a descriptive virtuosity that indeed evokes a pockmarked surface lit in various phases, harnessing sunlight as if it were skin in dense, vibrating harvest. The kinesis of this tune is diffused in the tailwind of “Xaba,” which then flows into “Sunset In Blue.” Ibrahim’s ancestral awareness is clearest here. The level of respect evoked for both the dead and the living lends a ritualistic quality by virtue of tight structuring, which despite hooks at the margins flies freely in its magic circle. “Kippy” is a smoother reverie with flickers of flame. A beautiful amalgam of measures and means, it slips an opiate of reflection into its own drink. After this, the intense two minutes of gospel and downward spirals that is “Jabulani—Easter Joy” takes us into “Tintinyana,” thereby crystallizing the album’s flowing energies. Tracks bleed into one another: they runneth from the same cup, their spiritual resonance deep and true.

African Piano is a gorgeous, thickly settled album, but one that is always transparent when it comes to origins. Such is the tenderness of Ibrahim’s craft, which speaks with a respect that transcends the sinews, muscles, and eardrums required to bring it to life. It finds joy in history, connecting to it like an Avatar’s tail to steed.

African Piano
Original cover

Herbert Joos: The Philosophy of the Fluegelhorn (JAPO 60004)

| Tyran Grillo

The Philosophy Of The Fluegelhorn

Herbert Joos
The Philosophy of the Fluegelhorn

Herbert Joos fluegelhorn, bass, bass recorder, bamboo flute, mellophone, trumpet, alto horn, vibes
Recorded July 1973 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer Carlos Albrecht
Produced by Herbert Joos

The Philosophy of the Fluegelhorn is Herbert Joos’s first of two albums for ECM’s sister label JAPO, the second being Daybreak. Where the latter was a lyrical, if longwinded, excursion, the former is something of a meta-statement for the German renaissance man—not only because he plays a bevy of overdubbed instruments, but also because its freer detailing gives pause over the sheer depth of realization.

The title track draws us into the outdoors, where field-recorded birds—and, among them, Joos’s horn—populate the trees with temporal awareness. Sibilant breath and popping bamboo flutes share the entanglement: the rhizomatic spread of Joos’s becoming-animal. Following this undulating prelude, “The Warm Body Of My True Love” opens the stage, a halved and hollowed whole. The nature of this soliloquy must be sought out in stirrings of life, excitations of molecules, and less definable physical properties. The horns are trembling, universal. “Skarabäus II” is of similarly finite constitution, navigating passage into darker dreams and adding to those horns a string’s uncalled-for response to the question of existence. Braided offshoots of trumpet fly around one another, each carrying its own flame of obsession. Next is the smooth and sultry “Rainbow.” Tinged by the alcoholic sunset of vibes, it is a hangover not yet shaken for want of the altered perspective. The squealing litter of horns that is “The Joker” segues into “An Evening With The Vampire.” Bathed in the sounds of nine arco basses, it enacts a morose ending to an otherwise luminescent session. Its sul ponticello screams recall George Crumb’s Black Angels and spin the echo-augmented horn like a chromatic Ferris wheel until the breath stops.

If you’ve ever been curious about Joos but didn’t know where to start, then by reading this you’ve already put your hand on the knob. Just turn it.

George Gruntz: Percussion Profiles (JAPO 60025)

| Tyran Grillo

Percussion Profiles Front

George Gruntz
Percussion Profiles

Jack DeJohnette drums, cymbals, gongs
Pierre Favre drums, cymbals, gongs
Fredy Studer drums, cymbals, gongs
Dom Um Romão percussion, gongs
David Friedman flat gongplay, vibes, marimba, crotales
George Gruntz gongs, keyboards, synthesizer, crotales
Recorded September 20, 1977 at Wally Heider Studios, Los Angeles
Engineer: Biff Dawes
Mixing: Georg Scheuermann and Manfred Eicher
Producer: Robert Paiste

Late Swiss composer, multi-instrumentalist, and artistic director George Gruntz (1932-2013) left behind a long and fruitful trail, one that intersected with ECM twice: once for the label proper as Theatre and before that for JAPO in the form of Percussion Profiles. The eminently influential Gruntz assembles here a veritable Who’s Who of the rhythmic circuit at the time of its recording (1977): namely, Jack DeJohnette, Pierre Favre, Fredy Studer, Dom Um Romão, David Friedman, and Gruntz in the architect’s chair on synths and keyboards. The project speaks less to Gruntz’s big band experiments than it does to his classical roots. Dedicated to Paiste brothers Robert (who also produces) and Toomas, the piece is a bona fide percussion concerto that approaches its performers as equal elements in a larger chemistry.

The piece is divided into six Movements, each illuminating a facet of the whole. Movement 1 introduces the pleasant blending of registers—from twinkles to full-throated calls—that defines the album’s broad trajectory. Like the sun on a cloudy day, its light shines variedly: sometimes in floods, sometimes in winks and flashes, but always with a clear conscience. There is a sensitivity of expression here that tells the stories of chamber music in the language of the Serengeti. Movements 2 through 4 bring out a veritable bouquet of fragrances: briny ocean (laced with intimations of birdsong and splashes of electronic marginalia), undercurrents of metal and oil, and resonant drones share a path toward the masterful “Movement 5.” This last opens in a vocal flower, which cups in its petals a sparkling array of notions and potions. The histrionic ways of this piece make it a beguiling standout, akin to Marion Brown’s Afternoon Of A Georgia Faun. Here is where the visuality of his medium is most apparent. If this record is a house, this movement enacts a thorough cleaning of its basement. Rusted tools and unused others share conversations of things past. Stuck between the water-damaged photographs and listless rodents are fortuitous becomings, blips and dots and dashes, sputtering pipes and creaking infrastructure. These are the feelings within, the memories of which “Movement 6” is a snare-inflected shadow, a spacy ride through keyboard textures and xylophoned exeunt.

Those who admire the work of Edgard Varèse will find much to sink their teeth into in Percussion Profiles, which begs repeated, unaccompanied listening, if only for its level of detail. A memorable rung on the JAPO ladder, and worth the climb to get there.

Percussion Profiles Back