My first review for All About Jazz is now up, and should be of interest to ECM fans. The album in question is the Yelena Eckemoff Trio’s Glass Song, for which the Russian-born pianist brings bassist Arild Andersen and drummer Peter Erskine together for the first time in a sparkling session. Check out the review here, and be sure to watch the promo video below.
Tomasz Stanko Quartet
Lontano
Tomasz Stanko trumpet
Marcin Wasilewski piano
Slawomir Kurkiewicz double-bass
Michal Miskiewicz drums
Recorded November 2005, Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Produced by Manfred Eicher
In the 1996 documentary Microcosmos, one memorable scene depicts a frog’s harrowing encounter with a rainstorm. The filmmakers take us inside the amphibian experience, dramatizing the rain’s weight and sound through a clever slow-motion technique that allows us to feel these seemingly harmless water droplets in a unique remove of consciousness and stature. The Tomasz Stanko Quartet begins with the opposite in Lontano, distancing us so diffusely from the drama that it is but a pale blemish on the earth.
The title track assumes three forms, each an axis of the album’s crystalline structure. Together they blend the storm’s aftermath, as might an artist smudge an errant pencil mark. Stanko’s trumpet, ever the veiled shaman, assures his fellow travelers: We can brave the cosmos. These sentiments twine a microscopic thread down which the band slides into a river valley miles below. Although the rush of waters remains only as a whisper in the rocks, we still feel the story being told as if it were our own. Amid a wealth of soft angles and lyric cast, the distantly miked drums of Michal Miskiewicz add strange hues to every distinct section. These are epic statements, thoughtful and sincere.
In its flesh are lodged the thorns of a soulful bramble, of which pianist Marcin Wasilewski’s pedaled carpet in “Cyrhla” is among the most haunting beauties ECM has ever committed to disc. This song is so deep that it seeps into every pore of the bones and replaces our blood with music. Not far away, “Song for Ania” is so heartwarming it burns: an anthem that sweeps past us like an unrequited love, lingering just long enough to brush its lips against an idol of permanence. One can hear Miskiewicz thinking through every shift in terrain here, adapting the spirit of his tread accordingly. Bassist Slawomir Kurkiewicz likewise reaches deep into his responsive toolkit and emerges with some precious soloing. “Kattorna” is the only song retained of Stanko’s original set list, and as such drops like a kernel into a pool of more wistful, though no less tinctured, sediments. The funkier developments therein give him a license to melodize, and then some.
“Sweet Thing” is nothing less. It’s an easygoing and amiable entity, whose constitution represents a real-time blending of experience and conversation. Stanko is front and center, even in the context of Wasilewski’s calm fortitude. “Trista” turns sadness into a child’s name and throws her innocence into the wind, that it might calm the demons who seek us. Stanko comforts us again with a dip into peripheral colors, shaking off the excess to paint pure and seeking lines. In “Tale” we get the prologue as epilogue, finding in itself the key to expressing the import of its nature. It’s a welcome cameo from his first ECM joint, Balladyna, and brings us full spiral into a fragrant future.
Lontano is a timeless testament to this quartet’s brea(d)th of creativity. With every knot this session ties, it undoes another in an enduring chain of freedom. Impressionistic is hardly the word, for it does nothing to signal the total embodiment thereof, the sheer delicacy of the chrysalis in which it incubates. If Stanko was father before, now he is sage. He divines us.
This is jazz of the heart, and further of the cells that make it.
Tomasz Stanko Quartet
Suspended Night
Tomasz Stanko trumpet
Marcin Wasilewski piano
Slawomir Kurkiewicz double-bass
Michal Miskiewicz drums
Recorded July 2003 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Two years after the classic Soul of Things, trumpeter Tomasz Stanko and his young Polish sidekicks took things to the next level—by going deeper into the night. Stanko’s uniqueness comes through his ability to be at once atavistic and novel. He turns an ear to those spaces in between notes and shows us just how musical they truly are. This is to say nothing of the fact that his tone only seems to get more fluid as he ages, sometimes burrowing its way through a thickly described sentiment, at others swooning from the percolations of its discovery. He is sly and cool, and with the committed trio at his side there is nothing to fear on either end of the brass.
“Song for Sarah” spreads its roots into an earthy prologue for the ages. Like “Nicolette” (from a different classic, Angel Song), it sinks its teeth into a cloud, one that finds absorbent life here through the ten “Suspended Variations” that follow. In the first there is already an album’s worth of material to unpack. As he has done before, pianist Marcin Wasilewski brings the rain, only now its colors speak as much as they sing. Set aloft on Michal Miskiewicz’s popcorn snare and with Slawomir Kurkiewicz’s netted bass, Stanko’s subtle panoply of pops and whispers turns the ingredients of the solo into a home-cooked soliloquy.
The more you get to know this music, if not the other way around, the more its gradations clarify. What at first, for instance, feels like a tracing of that indefinable border between flying and falling in Variations III and IV reveals more domestic light with every listen. It is the kind of playing one can only dream about, wrapped as it is in a cloak of lens flare to stave off the half-hearted imitators of the world. The seemingly straightforward groove aesthetic of II and V pulls another curtain to the dawn, finding in every crosscurrent a decodable sigh. The responsive playing from the rhythm section here is something of a marvel. The pianism of VI wraps around us like skin and for the first time brings palpable darkness to the album’s palette. Stanko’s restraint is such that we can’t help nodding our heads and squinting our eyes into the billowing smoke that welcomes us.
Variation VII just might be the jewel of the set. Short and sweet, it reveals the breadth of the quartet’s subtleties in a sleek and compact package. VIII is likewise studded with microscopic touches from Wasilewski. Stanko, meanwhile, threads the needle with a hand so intuitive that his fingernails blur into the inlay of the valves until X fulfills the promise of suspension at last.
There is a veiled spirit to Suspended Night. Touched by the hesitations of a melancholy philosophy, it dispels the myth of origin and creates one for itself. This is the scar of maturity, the infant’s cradle chopped into firewood and burned until smoke and a few lullabies are all that’s left to prove its having been here.
Please check out my latest review for RootsWorld online magazine regarding a phenomenal album entitled The Arch, which features Nils Petter Molvær, Bill Frisell, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Laurie Anderson, and tens of others in an unprecedented crossover project built around a core sound spun by the Eva Quartet (of the famous Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares) and late French composer, producer, and world music dot connector Hector Zazou. You won’t want to miss this one.
Tomasz Stanko Quartet
Soul of Things
Tomasz Stanko trumpet
Marcin Wasilewski piano
Slawomir Kurkiewicz double-bass
Michal Miskiewicz drums
Recorded August 2001 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher
“I’ve been playing the same song my whole life,” says trumpeter Tomasz Stanko, who puts his claim to the test in thirteen numbered tracks under the title Soul of Things. Together they are not variations on a theme, but are a “balladesque suite” built around the theme of variation. And who better to weigh this theory than the all-Polish backing of Marcin Wasilewski (piano), Slawomir Kurkiewicz (bass), and Michal Miskiewicz (drums)? For perhaps no one else has internalized every aspect of Stanko’s career with such commitment and chased it down with a healthy ECM diet to boot. Being in the legendary space of Oslo’s Rainbow Studio, under Manfred Eicher’s careful and deepening guidance no less, stirred their blood to permeating, concerted action in a timeless document.
Even if I wanted to resist contextualizing Stanko’s music against a silver screen, one can almost feel the tick of raindrops on gabardine as Variation I bathes us in film noir atmosphere. Stanko’s protagonist is recognizable from the first curl of fog that precedes him. The band’s attunement, down to the molecular level, is also palpable in Kurkiewicz’s attention to space, finding in Wasilewski’s pianism fertile ground for unmitigated ideas beneath a sprinkling of drummed dew. Variation II glides along with an ice-skaterly flow. Stanko’s gentility here astonishes, though even the more upbeat variations like III and X maintain an elasticity of time that softens our ears. From lullabies of empathy (IV) to heart-wrenching spotlights on closed curtain (XII), we feel every hidden thing as if it were already inside us.
Wasilewski, in his first ECM appearance, is the session’s golden child, spreading out every wrinkle with iron fingers. He paints a forest one branch at a time in VI, drums quivering like the wind-touched foliage. Likewise in VII. Billowing like a curtain in a summer breeze, it manifests the flexibility of our well-being and weaves its thread count to translucent density. The contemplative solo from Miskiewicz here is something of a transition point, a hidden portal through which Stanko breathes his undying love for the unspoken lyric. Like the cover image—a still from Jean-Luc Godard’s 2001 masterpiece Éloge de l’amour—it opens a sky in the mind’s eye, a rift of flame and critical reasoning.
So often Stanko comes close to the edge, hanging only by a finger, but pulls himself up just in time, filling every chasm with hope before stepping confidently on his way to the next. We hear this in IX, when after an ascending line he waits for the implications to settle before auguring their full-blown fate. Such profundity abounds also in XI. It is filled sublime moments, as when Stanko unleashes a raspy cry and Miskiewicz responds not with a rise in intensity but a flowering of cymbals, gentle yet sure. From a long solo intro, the final variation plies the studio’s reverberant space as one might a deity with questions that are their own answers.
Soul of Things only grows more ponderous as it develops, trail-marking its passage not with breadcrumbs but with delicacies far more edible by heart. This quartet, while formidable, is never confrontational, even when Stanko is blatting his golden song across the stratosphere. His titles may always come after the fact, but the soul of these things has been there from the start.
<< Yves Robert: In Touch (ECM 1787)
>> Helmut Lachenmann: Schwankungen am Rand (ECM 1789 NS)
Tomasz Stanko
From The Green Hill
Tomasz Stanko trumpet
John Surman baritone saxophone, bass clarinet
Dino Saluzzi bandoneón
Michelle Makarski violin
Anders Jormin bass
Jon Christensen drums
Recorded August 1998 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher
A burning ridge. Gills of flame in the dark. Smoke rises; ashes sink. This is the visual manifestation of all that resounds From The Green Hill, yet another leap of profundity from Tomasz Stanko after the Polish trumpeter’s four-album ECM panorama. To achieve this, he couldn’t have asked for a more appropriate band: John Surman (dipping into his characteristic low reeds), bandoneón maestro Dino Saluzzi, violinist Michelle Makarski, bassist Anders Jormin, and drummer Jon Christensen decode the cover photograph as a meta-statement of Stanko’s bite and his underlying deference to the spirits lurking within his instrument. Of those, the ghost of Krzysztof Komeda opens its mouth most widely and unleashes its lachrymose glow at 24 frames per second in two versions of “Litania.” Saluzzi plays each alone, keying from them a vital thematic thread of Stanko’s sound-world, a floating lily with no destination but its will to bloom. Saluzzi thus adopts a narrative voice, without which the story would lack a vital organ.
Surman contributes the album’s frame tale in the form of “Domino,” which opens the set and also makes a penultimate reappearance. In the former incarnation, it constitutes a viscous introduction in which the free considerations of the band’s rhythm section (to which the bandoneón is bonded) are the matchbook strip to Stanko’s strike. “Stone Ridge,” also by Surman, puts his bass clarinet in the spotlight. Flowering from a solo violin before Stanko’s muted strains pull up the others in his net, the ensuing groove gives plenty of hooks for its chain of soliloquys, of which Makarski’s is utterly remarkable.
The compositional skin that keeps this all embodied is writ large by Stanko, despite the fact that he seems relatively absent. What he lacks in airtime, however, he makes up for with a honed improvisatory laser that etches every nook of this shadowy house in which we find ourselves. It all reaches a nadir in “Love Theme from Farewell to Maria” and in the title track. The level of attunement to every change in both offers hope against the somber charge. Not to be ignored, Jormin stands out for his restless solo in “…y despues de todo” and for the inversions of “The Lark In The Dark.” Christensen’s drumming, too, with its microscopic and sparkling current, sets off a halting sort of poetry. (Note also his free talk with Saluzzi in “Buschka.” Brilliant.) We end in “Argentyna,” which confirms the presence of a magnifying glass in Stanko’s Swiss Army knife, though with no loss of intensity—if anything, more of it. Stripped to the core of their melodic undertaking, his powers of recollection gnaw at the arbitrariness of intellectual border zones. His are not cerebral toys, but direct methods of communication, their raw rubato the touchstone of an unrelenting lyricism…and all of this with hardly a trace of aggression.
The genesis of From The Green Hill can be traced back to ECM’s May 1997 Whitsun concerts at the Hotel Römerbad in Badenweiler, Germany. It was there that Stanko found himself performing at the behest of producer Manfred Eicher, who dropped his weight into new and exciting pools. Several performances and one all-night jam session later (oh, to have been there…), we arrive in this masterfully interwoven place, where ebb and flow have only one name: you.
<< Alexei Lubimov: Messe Noire (ECM 1679 NS)
>> Paul Giger: Ignis (ECM 1681 NS)
Keith Jarrett
La Scala
Keith Jarrett piano
Recorded February 13, 1995 at Teatro alla Scala, Milano
Remixed at Rainbow Studio by Jan Erik Kongshaug and Manfred Eicher
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
February 13, 1995 marks an historic event. It was the first time that Milan’s Teatro alla Scala allowed a jazz musician to headline. Yet Keith Jarrett is, of course, more than his moniker and brings a wealth of music that is no less operatic that what normally graces its stage. For in the same way that opera embodies a flowering intersection of text, acting, and sound, Jarrett unapologetically translates vibration, feeling, and commitment through the lens of the body until their collective prism opens like an eagle’s tail. So begins another of his improvised piano concerts, which in this case augurs a twitch in the skin of space-time until it bleeds.
The melodious unfolding of Part I is a self-fulfilling wish. I cannot help but read shades of childhood into its 45-minute sweep that materializes before our ears. I feel it in the parental awe of the more delicate moments; in the expulsion of air that, with the flick of a pedal, comes tumbling forth with sepia; in the self-referential diamonds sparkling within: shades of Köln, of Gurdjieff (though here he seems to be doing more “writing” than “reading”), of monuments yet to be discovered. Jarrett keeps his hands close together at first, as if to embrace the intimacy taking shape between them, caging a bird whose flight is still a dream. His fingers move in gradations in much the same way that sunlight changes its constitution according to the passage of clouds. As the density grows into a veritable corn maze, Jarrett wraps his mind around a solution and strains that path through the voice. He mixes his breath into those of everyone in attendance, rotating on an axis of love. The feeling of pasture is profound. Like sand between the toes, it is rare and welcome. Finger rolls paint window boxes with the lingering light of day, planting a summer’s worth of flowers in a single cluster. When they wilt, they are but one stem. Caught in the pondering flame that borrows them from sight and reworks their scent into something audible, their continuity is a magic unto itself, a sutra without words. Part I ends in stasis, flipping by gentle degrees the plane of its existence until a full and impenetrable sphere is left behind, which, while translucent, steels itself against the vagaries of interpretation, spinning until it can sing again.
Part II holds a microscope to an eddy of schisms. Brief touches from pedal and tight flowering runs culminate in a fast-forward ball bounce. The music accelerates, is compressed. Meticulously detailed explorations of the piano’s upper register unchain a host of fresh impressions. Particle by particle Jarrett builds a raincloud and flicks its contents in fingerfuls of inspiration. Ever so gradually, his left hand bespeaks a deeper gravity, tumbling over rocks and smoothing into the glassine surface of a faraway lake. There something of life lingers and the kiss of death feels as far away as the horizon. This melts into one of Jarrett’s deepest tunnels of light. He soars in a Gershwinian mode, coating the land with stardust before playing us out to stealthy footsteps, the wake of an unbridled tide.
Jarrett paints worlds of transitions, if not transitions of worlds. Each moment is the fragment of a larger meteorite, whose face can only be heard yet never seen, whose tears can be tasted but never shed. This makes his decision to conclude with a rendition of “Over the Rainbow” far beyond touching. And a rendition is what it truly is, for it must be worked through the body like breath itself until it expands. It is all the more heartwarming for the storm of bravos that drenches its fields before they’ve even had a chance to dry.
La Scala stands out in the Jarrett archive for becoming more absent as its intensity builds. He flushes out unspoken rhythms with stomping feet, painting not external vistas but intimate anatomical diagrams, so that when the chording becomes denser and the music more fully resolved, it feels like dissolution. The relationship between sound and effect, then, is not causal. Just because these styles inhabit the same music doesn’t mean they inhabit the same body. It’s more that Jarrett allows himself to be attuned to their shuffling, inscribing things in real time as if they were self-evident
The brilliance of these solo events manifests not only through the sheer volume of material that flows through him, seemingly translated from some ethereal source, but also through the potency of his melody-making, which at his touch produces a songbook that is timeless and can only be accessed from a place of wonder.
<< John Surman: Proverbs and Songs (ECM 1639)
>> Brahem/Surman/Holland: Thimar (ECM 1641)
Enrico Rava
“Quotation Marks”
Enrico Rava trumpet
Jeanne Lee vocal
John Abercrombie guitar
David Horowitz piano, synthesizer
Herb Bushler bass
Ray Armando percussion
Warren Smith marimba, percussion
Jack DeJohnette drums
Finito Bingert tenor saxophone, flute, percussion
Rodolfo Mederos bandoneón
Ricardo Lew guitar
Matias Pizarro piano
El Negro Gonzales bass
Nestor Astarita drums
El Chino Rossi percussion
Recorded December 1973 at Blue Rock Studios, New York
Engineer: Jane…
Produced by David Horowitz and Jack Tafoya
Recorded April 1974 at Audion Studio, Buenos Aires
Engineer: Nello
Produced by Nano Herrera
“Quotation Marks” was a milestone for Italian trumpeter, now ECM mainstay, Enrico Rava. In addition to being his first of many projects on Manfred Eicher’s watch, it was his debut as leader. The record blends two sessions into a seamless program. The first (December 1973) went down in New York City, where he was backed by guitarist John Abercrombie, drummer Jack DeJohnette, keyboardist David Horowitz, bassist Herb Bushler, and percussionists Ray Armando and Warren Smith. The second (April 1974) placed Rava in Buenos Aires alongside Radolfo Mederos on bandoneón, Finito Bingert on tenor sax and flute, Matias Pizarro on piano, Ricardo Lew on guitar, and percussionists Nestor Astarita and El Chino Rossi.
Of this fine assembly, Mederos’s sound rings foremost. His lovely bellows open “Espejismo Ratonera” with a lilting air before Pizarro’s smooth pianism flushes its alleys clear for less straightforward melodic explorations. Touches of tango warm the cockles, making for an easy, patient entrance to Rava’s dancing grammar. Youth and joy are obvious in his playing, which by a clever turning of the knob bleeds back into the bandoneón with which the track began. American jazz vocalist Jeanne Lee sings lyrics by Argentine poet Mario Trejo in the “Short Visit To Malena” that follows. It too benefits from studio subtleties, fading in as if we were being escorted from one nightclub to another. We seem to wander in at mid-song and notice the crowd sipping their cocktails, arriving just in time for Rava’s trade-off to Abercrombie. (I cannot help but be reminded at this point, if you’ll forgive the comparison, of “Club Tropicana” by Wham!, which begins outside and plunges the listener into a club atmosphere once the door is opened.) “Sola” throws us headlong into the bounce of the South American band. A flute solo here from Bingert stands as the album’s highlight. Like a light streaking before an open lens, it lingers against the skip of bandoneón and snare. The track fades all too soon, just as Lew catches a tailwind. “San Justo” is another horizontal with dissonant verticals from Mederos and a gritty prison break from Lew. Lee rejoins the cast for the heavenly watercolors of the title track before her cathartic leaps float amid a heady beat of brassy beauty, while in the steady groove of “Melancolia De Las Maletas” she adds flips and dips. All of this gives plenty of ground for Rava to unleash his confidence, handing it over to Abercrombie for a crunchy and edible passage.
We know these musicians are capable of incendiary moves, which renders their restraint (and the occasional burst) all the more intense. Rava especially takes time to introduce himself into nearly every tune. Even those like “Water Kite” cloak him in a deceptively thematic role before asserting his personality at stage center. It is a testament to his maturity as a young player and deference to the talents with which he finds himself. The result is an unspoiled gem in the Rava discography that is more than worth the import price if you can afford it.
…. . ….
As a service to my readers, I’ve taken the liberty of translating the liner notes by Minoru Wakasugi that accompany the 2006 Japanese reissue, especially because the album has since become available far more cheaply via digital download, sans booklet:
Now available for the first time on CD is Italian trumpeter Enrico Rava’s 1973 work “Quotation Marks”, which shuffles together a New York session recorded that same year (tracks 2, 6, 7) and another recorded in Buenos Aires the following.
The story behind the South American session and its journey to CD is as vivid as the music’s colors.
At the very least, we can think of this record as marking the beginning of Rava’s relationship with Latin music. Since the 80s, imprints such as Soul Note (Italy) have boasted similar, richly hued sounds, but among ECM’s productions throughout the 70s there was nothing that so vividly repainted the label’s image. Unable to move about as he’d wished, and in something of a quagmire as he pondered his solo debut, Rava, no doubt inspired by ECM owner Manfred Eicher’s philosophy and the image he’d established, felt this was a good way to go.
Such instability wasn’t unknown to Eicher, as it had defined the young label’s activities thus far. Although that same year saw the production of Jazz a Confronto 14 – Enrico Rava on the Italian Horo label, by then the groundwork had already been laid in a slew of formative records.
And let us not forget his participation in soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy’s 1966 The Forest and the Zoo, also recorded in Buenos Aires. Although that album took him in an entirely unrelated musical direction, Rava’s first South American experience surely stirred the Latin blood lurking within him.
Not long after, he traveled to New York in 1967. In making the transition from the rundown streets of Buenos Aires to those of another metropolis, Rava was baptized in the waters of authentic free jazz. He returned home temporarily, only to find himself back in the Big Apple, by which time seven years had passed. In that period, he’d played with Carla Bley in the pianist-composer’s large-scale project Escalator Over the Hill (1971). Seeing as Bley’s WATT label had direct business relations with ECM, it was perhaps inevitable that Rava would come to know Eicher.
Living in a racial and cultural melting pot like New York placed Rava at world center. It was more than just a dollop of land in the eastern U.S.; it was a crucible of global influences that seeped into every part of the city and led him to Buenos Aires a second time.
He drew up his first South American sketch with Pupa o Crisalide, released on Vista (Italy), known for producing artists like Duško Gojković. Featuring such talents as Italy-based Brazilian percussionist Mandrake, the album was oriented more toward Brazilian fusion than Argentine tango and gained popularity even among the young club crowd. It was also my introduction to Rava.
One can hear from Pupa o Crisalide just how fulfilling his time in Buenos Aires was. He produced quite a few recordings there, and from them a wonderful body of work. “Quotation Marks” was essentially culled from the Vista outtakes.
Uniformity reigns in Pupa o Crisalide. And although the present CD is three recordings in one, laid down in Buenos Aires, New York (alternate takes), and locally in Rome, one can read balance into their triangular interrelationship. The colors are uniform, maintaining as they do a consistent temperature and climate.
On the other hand, it is also a sound-world where, by virtue of its intermingling, warmth and coldness, brightness and darkness butt up against one another, so that their urban commonalities come about through subtle variations. The stability of Pupa o Crisalide, then, no longer applies.
Not that “Quotation Marks” needs it. With Rava’s reverberant blat and tenacity, it obscures melancholy and sordidness, finding among the urban sprawl an inner spiritual world hitherto unseen. It is the same power of spirit that moves the Piazzolla Quintet’s Piazzolla at the Philharmonic Hall New York (1965) and anticipates the “neighborhood music” of Kip Hanrahan (of American Clavé fame) by decades.
None of this means that Rava was necessarily ready to jump the gun as leader, for he inevitably took on the “colors” of his costars, all of whom helped to draw out his magnetic attraction. Nevertheless, he made a huge impression. More than Rava’s skills and such, it was his commitment to a total concept that won listeners over, and the effect was incalculable. The combination with bandoneón was unique at the time, although now it will readily put ECM fans in mind of Dino Saluzzi. It was nothing so original as taking Saluzzi’s unique ambience and meshing it with the unsettling melodies of tango, but still one caught a glimpse of ECM’s innovation for treating the bandoneón as primary actor.
Rodolfo Mederos, who held the key to the South American session, is a bandoneón player of a generation younger than Saluzzi. And while he cherished his instrument as if he’d inherited it from Piazzolla himself, he also formed a rock-leaning band called Generación Cero (Generation Zero), and for a time was involved in activities that would seem to go against the Piazzolla grain. Nowadays we can chalk up these exploits to youthful indiscretion and self-reformation, but we need only look at tango master Osvaldo Pugliese, whose compositions were already heralding a new age of performance, to see their importance.
Ricardo Lew (guitar), Matias Pizarro (piano), and Nestor Astarita (drums), who assisted in Rava’s South American sketches with Mederos, were always looking to attract other local players. Pizzaro in particular was a central figure during this period in promoting and developing “folklorization,” an underground style of Andean fusion. Its effects continue to be an inspiration for modern-day outfits, like France’s Gotan Project, which trace their roots directly to tango. Along with late bombo drummer Domingo Cura (1929-2004), who inspired a reassessment of the genre from behind the scenes, these artists have charted the modernization of Andean music. We may not lay the same claims on “Quotation Marks”, but because we’re unveiling the album at this historical moment, in 2006, it is important to tease out the effects of everything going on around it. (Translation ©2013 Tyran Grillo)
John Surman
Proverbs and Songs
John Surman baritone and soprano saxophones, bass clarinet
John Taylor organ
John Surman
Howard Moody conductor
Recorded live at Salisbury Cathedral, 1 June 1996
Engineer: Mike Walter
Produced by Derek Drescher and Manfred Eicher
Multi-reedist John Surman returns to his chorister roots and lays bare his compositional prowess with this oratorio commissioned by the Salisbury Festival and premiered in June of 1996. The Salisbury Festival Chorus, founded in 1987 by Howard Moody (of whose compositions the Hilliard Ensemble and Trio Mediaeval have been strong proponents) approaches its Old Testament sources as the composer sets them: that is, with panache, a flair for syncopation, and raw intensity. Add to this pianist John Taylor in an unexpected turn on cathedral organ, and you’ve got a recipe for one of Surman’s most intriguing catalogue entries to date.
Despite the forces assembled, it is he who dominates the palette. The “Prelude” immediately places his cantorial baritone amid a wash of organ in a free-flowing Byzantine mode, thereby establishing a rich narrative quality from the start. Our first foray into choral territory comes in the form of “The Sons,” a robust piece that works men’s and women’s voices in an iron forger’s antiphony toward genealogical harmony. At first, the thicketed singing feels more like a shoreline along which reed and pipes crash in pockets of light and bas-relief. Yet as the “The Kings” soon proves, it is capable of the jaunty togetherness at which Surman excels. “Wisdom” has its finger most firmly on this pulse of greater fellowship, for there is a wisdom of Surman’s own in the brushwork of his soprano, which dances for all the world like the world.
This being a live BBC Radio 3 recording that was later mixed down at Oslo’s Rainbow Studio, the quality is rather compressed. Then again, so is the music, the message of which is as dense as its King James texts. The album’s space is left to Taylor, its images to the voices, its method to Surman’s winds. There is a rusticity to the album’s sound that matches the unadulterated emotions of the music. We hear this especially in “Job,” which like its scripture upholds divine reason in the face of hardship. The chanting here is a form of punctuation, the snaking baritone lines its restless grammar.
“No Twilight” continues to unravel the sopranic weave in what amounts to the heart of the album, both in spirit and in execution, and places the voices at the slightest remove to haunting effect. Surman’s streaks of sunlight—here the voices of reason—add depth of field to this vision, so that the whimsical shallows of “Pride” emphasize the frivolity and fragility of their eponym. The truth comes out in the ruminative organ solo that epilogues the piece. “The Proverbs,” with its ominous recitation, is the freest and builds eddies of judgment and self-reflection (note Surman’s brilliant evocation of the dissenter) until the rays of sacrifice blind with “Abraham Arise!”
In light of the stellar body of choral work that ECM has produced, Surman’s forays into the same are not life-changing, if only because they are about unchanging life. True to the lessons at hand, it is more descriptive than it is aesthetic. Its juxtaposition of distinct sonic color schemes is pure Surman, and represents not a detour from but a dive into the kaleidoscope of his discography…and one well worth taking, at that.
<< Dino Saluzzi/Rosamunde Quartett: Kultrum (ECM 1638 NS)
>> Keith Jarrett: La Scala (ECM 1640)
Between Sound and Space: ECM Records and Beyond 