ECM Releases

Kappeler/Zumthor: Babylon-Suite (ECM 2363)

| Tyran Grillo

Babylon-Suite

Kappeler/Zumthor
Babylon-Suite

Vera Kappeler piano, harmonium, toy piano, voice
Peter Conradin Zumthor drums, toy piano, voice
Recorded June 2013, Auditorio Radiotelevisione svizzera, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Produced by Manfred Eicher

How appropriate that the music of Babylon-Suite, which introduces Vera Kappeler and Peter Conradin Zumthor to a wider world of deserving listeners, should have been premiered in a Swiss hydroelectric power plant: it’s subterranean to the core. Although in the fullest sense recreated here for the studio, it retains every atom, at once surrounded by and transcending the stone enclosure of its origins. And while the backstory of this album’s inception is telling enough, drawing inspiration as it did from the Book of Daniel, Peter Rüedi’s liner note rightly warns us against taking this music descriptively. It was never meant as a Biblical illustration, but a reconfiguration of text into texture. And in an accompanying statement by Giovanni Netzer, who commissioned the piece, we find the suite described as one in a “long tradition of lamentations.”

Babylon Portrait

Although Kappeler is nominally the pianist and Zumthor the drummer of the duo, both switch roles as often as they abide by them, employing bodily voices, too, as moments strike them. This modus operandi is proven in “Das erste Tier,” which opens the suite with a quasi-ritualistic bass drum and barest breath in the piano’s lowest register. But nothing is what it seems in the Kappeler/Zumthor space, for what might elsewhere be a jolt of awakening is now the jolt of slumber: that moment when you realize you’re caught in a dream built on a graveyard of unintelligible syllables. Pianistic strands come forward as lit candles, at once stoic and trembling, reminding us that the cessation is an illusion fed on five-sense realities.

To speak of extended techniques is one thing. To hear those techniques speak for themselves is quite another, and it is in this vein that Kappeler and Zumthor’s instruments—whether novel as a music box or antique as a harmonium—inhabit every transformation of this Babylon. The caged wing beats of “Traumgesicht,” for instance, break down the fourth wall, only to reveal a fifth, so that ultimately desperation seems to be a precondition for all life. Like the two variations of “Bontempi,” they turn on axes of double meanings, lending them where they should exist but don’t. And so, if light means the absence of dark and a lack of substance, dark now means both the absence of light and the abundance of substance.

The album’s divination bones come in the form of four pieces marked “Tor.” Each is a Russian doll of gear systems, its skin tender as balsa, wherein cogs lock teeth in assurance of the future. Clock springs assume the shapes of prayer bowls, while a toy piano manifests the inner thoughts of outer automata. Only in the presence of explicit foundations do such mechanisms melt away, as they do in “Annalisa” and “November.” These respective compositions by Zumthor and Kappeler write themselves into codes of ethereal hieroglyphs and childhood memories. Even the Ukranian traditional “Ne Pidu Ja Do Lesa” punctuates its drunken dance by means of erasure, leaving nothing but the blank ear waiting for fresh inscription.

(To hear samples of Babylon-Suite, click here.)

Vilde&Inga: Makrofauna (ECM 2371)

| Tyran Grillo

Makrofauna

Vilde&Inga
Makrofauna

Vilde Sandve Alnæs violin
Inage Margrete Aas double bass
Recorded June 2012 at The Norwegian Academy of Music, U1021
Engineer: David Aleksander Sjølie
Mixing and mastering: Guiseppe Ielasi
Produced by Vilde&Inga

Unlike the stage name Vilde&Inga, the first ECM appearance of violinist Vilde Sandve Alnæs and double bassist Inga Margrete Aas is filled with spaces. Within those spaces exists an ecosystem with something to say for any who will listen. In the album’s booklet, the Norwegian duo thanks label mate Sidsel Endresen, with whom they studied improvisation and who was responsible for bringing this music, recorded at The Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo, to producer Manfred Eicher’s attention. We can grateful that this acoustically minded granular synthesis should be made so widely available on a label that cares as deeply about its artists as they do about their music.

Vilde&Inga
(Photo credit: Peter Gannushkin)

Whereas some musicians read between the lines, Vilde&Inga read between the veins. It’s as if, rather than training at the academy, they learned their fundamentals in the natural sciences, so anatomically correct is their music. The beauty of that music respires through its very contradiction: one might say it simultaneously begs and vehemently denies the need for specialized nomenclature. However we choose to frame it, there’s something undeniably microscopic about an album called Makrofauna. We feel the creak of every ligament, the thrum of every lumbering step of creatures whose mythology reigns no more but who continue to play servant to the overwhelming architecture of fantasy.

Anchoring us in that fantasy are three tracks labeled “Årringer,” each placed into the soil like a nutrient-rich capsule at a strategic location in the garden. From tendon and timbral extremes to fluttering propeller dream and blustering reset, these brief yet moving stories rewrite themselves into sequel after genetic sequel until the originals are lost in the shuffle. The methods of sound production employed by the musicians—or do the methods employ them?—open their hearts like ecology textbooks, skipping over tables of contents in favor of the indexes. Said methods are not extended techniques in the sense of stretching technologies, but those burrowing deep into the wood of their instruments to reveal voices trapped between the grains. By their unorthodox approach, Vilde&Inga do not stretch limits, but reveal them for what they are.

Vilde&Inga perform in 2014:

Although “Under Bakken” begins the album, it feels more like the closure of a life than the start of one. Harmonics whisper like last testaments, while stiff bones creak at the mere inference of communication. Indeed, friction seems to be the red thread of these spontaneously composed pieces. It is the heart of every action on “Sårand,” in which pizzicato bass harmonics dangle from the violin’s insectile scraping. The squeak of hands rubbed over the bass’s dry skin becomes the uprooting of a tree. The title track further reveals breath itself as friction, marking the scrim between survival and death. A step deeper reveals the sibilance of “Løss,” with barely a note value to be felt, and the mitochondrial respiration of “Røys.” And while elsewhere the meeting of bodies yields discernible pulses (“I Trær”), for the most part we are stuck somewhere between a growl and a purr.

This is not an album of improvisations, but one of spores germinated by touch. The difference is in the details, and what an abundance we can savor on Makrofauna. Taken as a whole, it is but one molecule of infinitely more, an ode to inevitability that emphasizes the sheer amount of concentration required in simply being a physical entity.

Julia Hülsmann Quartet w/Theo Bleckmann: A Clear Midnight (ECM 2418)

| Tyran Grillo

A Clear Midnight

Julia Hülsmann Quartet
w/ Theo Bleckmann
A Clear Midnight – Kurt Weill and America

Theo Bleckmann vocals
Julia Hülsmann piano
Tom Arthurs trumpet, flugelhorn
Marc Muellbauer double bass
Heinrich Köbberling drums
Recorded June 2014 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

In his book Kurt Weill: An Illustrated Life, biographer Jurgen Schebera shares the following anecdote from behind the scenes of the composer’s renowned The Threepenny Opera:

“One day the lead, Harald Paulsen, who had previously played mostly in operettas and was an idol of Berlin’s female theater audience, insisted on wearing a frightful blue bow tie with his suit. [Bertolt] Brecht saved the day: ‘Let’s leave him as he is, oversweet and charming. Weill and I will introduce him with a Moritat that tells of his gruesome and disgraceful deeds. The effect made by the light-blue bow will be all the more curious.’ Thus the ‘Moritat von Mackie Messer’ (Mack the Knife) was born practically overnight.”

The story of Weill’s most well-known song is indeed illustrative of a life filled with sudden changes—none so dramatic, in the most multivalent sense of the term, as his fleeing of Nazi Germany to take up residence in New York. His transition, as one alliterative songbook title would have it, from Berlin to Broadway gave his music new audiences, just as his music gave audiences something new. Although it would be decades from his death in 1950 before his work would gain recognition beyond the handful of popular numbers, Weill has now become a household name in songs of the stage.

Pianist Julia Hülsmann carries over the same quartet—with trumpeter Tom Arthurs, bassist Marc Muellbauer, and drummer Heinrich Köbberling—from 2013’s In Full View and to that outfit welcomes vocalist Theo Bleckmann to celebrate Weill in America. The result of an invitation to participate in the Kurt Weill Festival held is Dessau, Germany, Hülsmann’s new project grew to prominence until it landed in ECM’s lap with every edge smoothed to jigsaw compatibility. Every new arrangement comes from within the group, with Muellbauer and Hülsmann taking most of the credit in that vein.

JHQ

Bleckmann is a natural tenor whose voice combines the smooth, pop sensibilities of French singer Louis Philippe and the intuition of Meredith Monk, with whom he has incidentally worked. (It’s Monk, in fact, to whom Bleckmann most overtly alludes in “Little Tin God” when he borrows the wordless lilt of the travelers from her Book of Days.) The song itself comes by way of Lost in the Stars, and concerns itself with the idolization of money over God. Looped, multi-tracked voices and dissonant clockwork pianism emphasize its lyrical unease, the full quartet emerging only to break itself down like a set into resonant finish. The lesser-performed “Your Technique” and “Great Big Sky,” both from the annals of the Unsung Weill, are equally haunting in their present guises. In addition to their delicate prosody, both feature colorful touches from the rhythm section and, in the latter instance, shine light on a largely forlorn set list. And even though “Speak Low” (from One Touch of Venus) occupies the opposite end of the obscurity spectrum, its retrospective mood and expository finesse align it well with the lesser-knowns. It is second perhaps only to the above-mentioned “Mack The Knife,” which in Hülsmann and Bleckmann’s ponderous co-arrangement takes on such lucidity as to become something of its own. Arthurs’s trumpeting makes noteworthy additions to this introductory track as well.

In addition to Brecht’s self-aware moroseness (as filtered through Marc Blitzstein’s superseding English adaptation), we are treated to other finely crafted lyrics by Anne Ronell (“Your Technique”), Maxwell Anderson (“September Song” and “Little Tin God”), Ira Gershwin (“This Is New”), Ogden Nash (“Speak Low”), and Langston Hughes (“Great Big Sky”). Hülsmann’s tracing and Arthurs’s muted trumpet transform “September Song” (from Knickerbocker Holiday) from oil to watercolor, while “This Is New” (from Lady in the Dark) spins its key changes like a web of attraction into a blissfully modal tail. Likeminded enchantments abound in two gorgeously realized instrumentals. “Alabama Song” (from Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny) magnifies the album’s pristine recording, cymbals glittering like magic, while “River Chanty” (from Huckleberry Finn) finds Arthurs at the helm, leading the quartet into melodious, full-on journeying.

Along the way, Hülsmann treats the unsuspecting listener to three original settings of Walt Whitman, including the album’s title nocturnal title track and the invigorating “Beat! Beat! Drums!” But it’s in “A Noiseless Patient Spider” that both the album and its roster find untold synergy. A little bit of fun in the studio adds to the poem’s inherent charm and surrounds the clear and present center with a distant piano and flanged voice. As with everything else taking place on this clearest of midnights, it epitomizes a tasteful interpretive license. And the end effect? Let’s just say that, even if you think you’re not a Kurt Weill fan, it’s hard not to reassess after learning to appreciate these songs, and the musicians’ brilliant augmentations of them, on their own terms.

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

Eberhard Weber: Encore (ECM 2439)

| Tyran Grillo

Encore

Eberhard Weber
Encore

Eberhard Weber electric double bass, keyboards
Ack van Rooyen flugelhorn
Live recordings 1990-2007
Engineers: Walter Speckmann and Gert Rickmann-Wunderlich
Mixed and edited at Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines by Gérard de Haro and Sun Chung
Assistant engineer: Nicolas Baillard
Album produced by Manfred Eicher

Electro-bassist Eberhard Weber’s Encore continues where Résumé left off and is culled from the same tapes. As on the last album, a monumental achievement in and of itself, the music here came about during interludes played while touring with the Jan Garbarek Group between 1990 and 2007. Weber has fleshed out those solos in the studio with keyboards and, in a poignant surprise, the contributions of Dutch colleague Ack van Rooyen on flugelhorn. Die-hard fans will recognize van Rooyen from Weber’s 1974 debut, The Colours of Chloë, and will welcome his return for what will likely be Weber’s finale.

Weber

Weber’s instrument has been his dousing rod four decades running. The result of much customization and refinement, it took his playing in new and challenging directions, while also freeing him from the snares of its acoustic counterpart. Although he humbly sees the electric hybrid that would become his trademark as something of a mask behind which he learned to hide his lack of virtuosity, it’s plain to hear that he has defined a virtuosity all his own. Setting him apart is not only his sound, but also the robustness of his melodies. Whether created in the moment or meticulously crafted (every piece on this album, of course, being a combination of both), his songfulness captures something essential to the power of technology in the right hands.

As before, track titles are named for their places of origin. Rather than make any sort of emotional or thematic statement—aside, that is, from their indications of a musician’s traveling life—they serve as compass points in the relatively intangible cartography of musical development. What begins in “Frankfurt” as a thick, rubber-banded enclosure for van Rooyen’s low-flying lyricism and Weber’s own note thresholds ends in “Pamplona” with more primal, rhythmic tapping on strings and flashes of ageless energy. That said, we do well to avoid seeing these outer tracks as beginning and ending of a long journey. They are instead signposts made visible by the magical privilege of recorded media.

The range of Weber’s evocative power is on fullest display. At one end of the spectrum we find “Cambridge,” which swings its trunk like a gargantuan elephant, if not the arm of a person imitating one, before brighter, more playful textures take over. Subsequent modal explorations make Weber’s bass seem like a magnified oud shaped by a whimsical physics. At the other end are the enigmatic diversions at “Bradford,” a brilliant piece of clockwork rhythms and colorful shifts in texture, and a leaping carnivalesque from “Edinburgh.” Somewhere between the two are cinematic gems from “Rankwell” and “Klagenfurt.” Where one begins dreamily and sobers through van Rooyen’s soloing, the other twists a lucid dance into the stuff of fantasy, sending the flugelhorn off on a scouting mission into the unknown. There is, too, the stalking, catlike thing of “Sevilla,” in which rhythmic impulses skirt a line between realities.

Elsewhere, as in “Konstanz” and “Granada,” Weber unrolls richly woven carpets of synthesizer, so that by the time he exchanges telescope for microscope in “London,” we have that expanse thrumming already in our hearts. And even as we walk away thinking this may be the end of the line, we can rest assured that there is still much to learn by revisiting the past.

(To hear samples of Encore, click here.)

Vijay Iyer Trio: Break Stuff (ECM 2420)

| Tyran Grillo

2420 X

Vijay Iyer Trio
Break Stuff

Vijay Iyer piano
Stephan Crump double bass
Marcus Gilmore drums
Recorded June 2014 at Avatar Studios, New York
Engineer: James A. Farber
Assistant: Akihiro Nishimura
Produced by Manfred Eicher

“He often said that he would sit down at a piano someday and show me how jazz worked, and that when I finally understood blue notes and swung notes, the heavens would part and my life would be transformed.”
–Teju Cole, Open City

After his imaginative ECM debut, pianist Vijay Iyer returns to the label with bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Marcus Gilmore. Although in operation for over a decade, the trio still finds room to grow, and rarely in such giant leaps as those documented on Break Stuff. The title is Iyer’s mission statement: rupture as rapture. The music hanging from its rafters is theory in practice.

Iyer has been blessed with a peerless tonal command of his instrument. Like the greats that inspire him daily, his artistry is summed up in the word touch. His composing reveals another distinguishing characteristic: a penchant for tempering beauty with something obfuscated. This allows us to appreciate the role of either toward the consummation of the musical experience. Not everything, he seems to say, can be sunshine and roses. We also need moonlight and thorns.

VIT

The atmospheres of Iyer’s trio are remarkable for using such minimal means, and nowhere so evocatively than in the three avian-themed tracks peppered throughout. The well-rounded “Starlings” introduces us to this album’s freshly baked sounds. Already, two things are noticeable. First is that Iyer’s descriptive prowess is as formidable as it is organic. Second is that listeners are invited to bring whatever associations they might have to the music without judgment. What sounds like a flock overhead to one may to another feel like the city streets to another. “Geese,” in fact, proves to be as much about nature as nurture as it morphs from harmonic rumination into urban sprawl. Even the evocatively titled “Wrens,” which ends the album, reaches back with arms bangled in classical chord progressions toward sublime narrative origins. Between the latter two tracks is nestled one of the album’s heartfelt tributes. “Countdown” pays deference to John Coltrane, starting off small but playing big in some of the trio’s densest texturing on record. Gilmore reads between the lines like no one’s business and adds further grounding to other classics by Thelonious Monk (“Work”) and, in a Gershwin-flavored piano solo, Billy Strayhorn (“Blood Count”). In these one can hear the nakedness of Iyer’s creative process, all its trials and errors that occur in the name of seeking. His nod to DJ Robert Hood is likewise into its own negative spaces, laying microtonal harmonies over consonant foundations.

“Taking Flight” is another portrait of the musician’s world. Here, too, balance reigns, weighing on one pan constant travel and dislocation, but on the other the connections achievable only through performing. As indicated by its mixture of reggae and impressionistic touches in the higher register, this tune embraces whatever life has in store. Such openness imbues the remaining tracks with like spirit. Whether in the amethyst “Chorale” or the more ornamental “Diptych,” in both of which Iyer’s rhythm section makes subtle sweeps of brilliance, the trio rounds every angle to jigsaw fit. Yet none of the above is so confident as the title track, the sway of which recalls the opening scene of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, in which the director and Denzel Washington own the streets, clipped and shined.

Iyer is making the most effective music of his career, and there could be no better place for it to flourish than ECM. Like the missing note in the arpeggio of “Mystery Woman,” the affiliation has opened a gap of opportunity, thereby revealing experience as the most important form of improvisation there is.

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

Lumen Drones: s/t (ECM 2434)

| Tyran Grillo

Lumen Drones

Lumen Drones

Nils Økland fiddles
Per Steinar Lie guitars
Ørjan Haaland drums
Recorded November 2011, ABC Studio, Etne, Norway
Recording and mixing engineer: Kjetil Ulland
Mastering: Christoph Stickel and Manfred Eicher
An ECM Production

Since his first ECM appearance on the Christian Wallumrød Ensemble’s Sofienberg Variations in 2003, and even more so on his 2009 solo effort Monograph, Nils Økland has served as a conduit between the then and the now. His latest project, Lumen Drones, finds the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle virtuoso in the company of guitarist Per Steinar and drummer Ørjan Haaland. Økland had previously collaborated with Steinar and Haaland, both members of the post-rock group The Low Frequency in Stereo, for a track on the latter’s 2009 album Futuro. That track was called “Solar System,” which best indicates the cosmic reach of this new trio. In ways similar to the band Mono, Lumen Drones cultures its motifs like bacteria in Petri dishes until they reach dizzying proportions.

LD

Chalk it up to ECM’s penchant for balance that often the most obscure, indefinable album covers sleeve the most clearly defined music, while here we have a rare animal encounter for music that is amorphous as the sun’s corona. Aside from two pieces—Lie’s webbed “Lux” and Økland’s ponderous “Keelwater”—this self-titled debut is comprised of collectively burnished hardwoods. “Dark Sea” comes to life without warning, as if startled from a dream, and draws us into a world of brushed drums, guitar, and fiddle. In wave after wave of memory, this unique combination sets a ghostly precedent. Even at its most enigmatic, however, the music that follows is so intensely visual that it’s near impossible not to accompany it with your own mental cinema. “Ira Furore,” for instance, unspools a single thread of cymbal from a tangle of heat-distorted guitar, while the fiddle pours its tenderness in a vain attempt to staunch the flames. The smoldering atmosphere recalls David Lynch’s Lost Highway in both its spatial and psychological desolations, tempered but never transcended by Økland’s soaring grammar. Further distortions abound in “Anemone,” which from deepest roots projects a bouquet of amplified thistles and burns by means of water. Yet the strongest inertia is to be found in the melodic progressions and folkish qualities of “Echo Plexus.” And with so much retrograde to appreciate, it’s no wonder we’re given some room to breathe in “Husky,” a brief and flowing duet between Lie and Økland. From here, it’s only a hop to “Svartaskjær.” Joining a free improv already in progress, it finishes with a jam band sensitivity stripped of all ornament. It breathes, cackles, and swivels its way into a 1970s bonfire, spreading ash all over its Technicolor skin.

Some make mountains of out molehills; Lumen Drones makes molehills out of mountains.

(To hear samples of Lumen Drones, click here.)

Tim Berne’s Snakeoil: You’ve Been Watching Me (ECM 2443)

| Tyran Grillo

You've Been Watching Me

Tim Berne’s Snakeoil
You’ve Been Watching Me

Tim Berne alto saxophone
Oscar Noriega clarinet, bass clarinet
Matt Mitchell piano and electronics
Ryan Ferreira electric and acoustic guitars
Ches Smith drums, vibraphone, percussion, timpani
Recorded December 2014 at “The Clubhouse” in Rhinebeck, NY
Engineer: D. James Goodwin
Assistant: Bella Blasko
Mastering at MSM Studios by Christoph Stickel
Produced by David Torn

Alto saxophonist Tim Berne and his Snakeoil outfit stand poised and ready to strike on their third ECM excursion. You’ve Been Watching Me might just as well be titled “You’ve Been Listening To Me,” because it’s impossible to have wandered into Berne’s unmistakable ghost towns and not swear you’ve heard every poker game that went down in their saloons. As if the band weren’t tetrahedral enough, Berne welcomes guitarist Ryan Ferreira to his honed nexus of clarinetist Oscar Noriega, pianist Matt Mitchell (who also provides electronics), and drummer-percussionist extraordinaire Ches Smith. In this album’s press release, Berne speaks of Ferreira’s presence as “subtraction by addition,” and these musicians’ ability to open their sound by virtue of greater number speaks to the intuitiveness of this apparent contradiction. Producer David Torn, known to ECM fans for his own incendiary trips, further notes the role of space in the band’s improvisational purview.

TBS

In the latter vein, “Small World In A Small Town” opens Snakeoil’s postmodern borders to the possibility of transcendence. The late-night balladry of Berne and Mitchell forms a double helix that is equal parts playoff and championship before vibraphone and electric guitar place their thematic bets. Yet what begins in typical Berne territory soon veers skyward as verdant cymbals and sustained pianism ride a wave of panning satellite transmissions. Noriega’s clarinet pulls weeds as if from below, leaving room for Berne to sprout in their place some of his most beautiful playing on record. In return, Noriega draws a bow from klezmer strands and nocks an arrow of river water before letting it fly in slow motion into an originary cushion. The band rises like a golem, overrunning its cup with maxed-out levels of intensity.

Before taking that space walk, we start out with the recognizably jagged cohesions of “Lost In Redding.” Ferreira’s firewall of distortion is noticeable from the outset and gives the other instruments an indelible point of reference. Guitar and bass clarinet find each other in the swarm just as the band leaves them hanging like solars in desperate absence of systems. Multi-phonic squeals from the two reedmen and Ferreira’s crisp unraveling send a newborn piano out on its stumbling legs, gaining uprightness like a foal on the outside. Berne and Noriega find tenderness in the poignant “Embraceable Me,” which opens a direct line of communication between the listener and the listened. This irons itself out into a resonant space of timpani, piano, and edge-worn clarinet, while Ferreira goes splashing through martial orbits.

Much of what follows is fragmentary or, as one title would have it, “Semi-Self Detached.” The latter tune’s hazy flotation marries alto to echo until Ferreira unsolders the seams of time, thus unleashing Berne’s anti-tirade like the electricity from King Humpty Dumpty’s cracked sun. The compact yet strangely gradual “Angles” is the yolk within, just at the brink of rupture, while the title track, a through-composed refraction for solo acoustic guitar, diffuses the white around it. At the end of the tunnel we find the roller-coaster ladders and cinematic desiderata of “False Impressions,” another prime space for Ferreira seen through the darker glasses of vibraphone and alto.

One may speak of great jazzmen as evolving before our very ears with each successive release, but Berne’s case is a living example of an artist involving with age: not scaling an impossible mountain of ideals but boring through it to see how people live on the other side. What he returns with is something like jazz times ten, an advancement of such integral proportions that it might set your cells to stun. A phenomenal album, and Snakeoil’s highest proof mash so far.

(To hear samples of You’ve Been Watching Me, click here.)

Louis Sclavis Quartet: Silk And Salt Melodies (ECM 2402)

| Tyran Grillo

Silk And Salt Melodies

Louis Sclavis Quartet
Silk And Salt Melodies

Louis Sclavis clarinet
Gilles Coronado guitar
Benjamin Moussay piano, keyboard
Keyvan Chemirani percussion
Recorded March 2014, Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
Engineers: Gérard de Haro and Romain Castera
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Silk And Salt Melodies draws on the well of Louis Sclavis’s Sources. The latter trio album showed the French multi-reedist and composer channeling the spirit of invention with guitarist Gilles Coronado and keyboardist Benjamin Moussay. To that band he now welcomes Iranian-French percussionist and goblet drum master Keyvan Chemirani in a characteristically recalibrated project of musical nomadism. Sclavis’s writing, of which this album is entirely composed, is obviously enlivened by the reinvention.

Louis Sclavis Quartet
(Photo credit: Olivier Degen)

The year 2014, when this album was released, was something of a golden one for the electric guitar on ECM, which found ambassadorship in the artistries of Wolfgang Muthspiel, Jacob Young, and Per Steinar Lie of Lumen Drones. Coronado is no exception, and adds his gold-leaf appliqué with more aplomb than ever. Like each of this band’s musicians, he cares less for soloing than solitude and accordingly explores the methods by which one can travel alone while still being in the company of others. The modal harmonies Coronado shares with Sclavis’s bass clarinet in “L’homme sud,” for example, would seem to indicate a total fusion of interests but, like a deck of cards fanned in anticipation of a spectator’s selection, his guitar waits for just the right moment to be plucked. Then there is his knife-edged interjection into “L’autre rive,” by which he pares a pianistic reverie down to a bite-sized blues. And one must also remark on Coronado’s geometric approach to “Cortège,” in which he takes his playing to a third dimension along a percussive z-axis.

And speaking of percussive axes, Chemirani draws them wherever he happens to be. His opening duet with Coronado in “Dance For Horses” shows a natural virtuoso at work and establishes the pulse by which piano and bass clarinet must reach their apex at the precise moment of abandonment. Chemirani connects his biggest constellations in “Dust And Dogs,” making it the album’s highlight for its ripple effect. From the groovy electric piano, twanging guitar, and beautiful reed work, one can sense a new door opening by the end of its 10 venerable minutes.

Sclavis, for his part, gives back that same inspiration with interest in “Sel et soie.” In his hands, the bass clarinet becomes an emotional portal, and it is all we can do not to get sucked in. Moussay is a suitable partner for that darker reed, as in the duo track “Des feux lointains,” which like a Jenga tower at the hands of skillful players maintains its structural integrity no matter how many pieces are removed. This same combination opens the album’s introductory “Le parfum de l’éxil” before giving way to the full quartet in all of its distorted integrity. From the beginning we jump to “Prato plage,” which caps off the album with a brief, minute-long field recording of amphibious night that suddenly leaves us suspended, grasping for the melodies that brought us here.

Louis Sclavis is like a sun that whips planetary bodies into harmonious dances of orbits. Or, better yet, a moon that draws melodies from the waves at any hour. Over the years he has narrowed his focus, unpacking the multifaceted implications of liner melodies rather than the linear implications of multifaceted arrangements. Leaning toward the former with experience and age has made his music at once edgier and more accessible. Because the improvising among these musicians is so well matured, the material along this Silk Road feels arranged right out of the box and awaits the manipulation of our listening to make it so.

(To hear samples of Silk And Salt Melodies, click here.)

Michael Mantler: The Jazz Composer’s Orchestra Update (ECM 2391)

| Tyran Grillo

Mantler Update

Michael Mantler
The Jazz Composer’s Orchestra Update

Nouvelle Cuisine Big Band
Christoph Cech conductor
Michael Mantler trumpet
Harry Sokal tenor saxophone
Bjarne Roupé guitar
Wolfgang Puschnig alto saxophone
David Helbock piano
radio.string.quartet.vienna
Bernie Mallinger violin
Igmar Jenner violin
Cynthia Liao viola
Asja Valcic cello
Recorded live August 30/31 and September 1, 2013 at Porgy & Bess, Vienna, Austria
Engineer: Martin Vetters
Mixed and mastered October and December 2013 at Studios La Buissonne, Pernes_les_Fontaines, France
Engineers: Gérard de Haro and Nicolas Baillard
Produced by Michael Mantler
An ECM Production in collaboration with Porgy & Bess, Vienna

Trumpeter and composer Michael Mantler began the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra in the mid-1960s with Carla Bley as a larger outlet for radical jazz interventions. Having just arrived in New York City as a young man from Vienna, Mantler was raring to float his ideas among musicians—Pharoah Sanders, Cecil Taylor, and Don Cherry among them—who cared. In an interview with Steve Lake printed in this album’s booklet, he stresses the tightly knit community of free jazz at the time. The scene was small, he recalls, “and most everybody knew and worked with each other, having formed a kind of bond through necessity, since we were involved in a music that was commercially totally unviable and often even quite disliked by the mainstream audience and critics alike.” While digitizing old JCO scores in 2012, he saw a chance at renewal and The Jazz Composer’s Orchestra Update was born. The new pieces—penned 1963-69 and revised in 2013—are sheep in wolves’ clothing, each precisely notated but with room to spin wool of improvisation.

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Mantler has always been one for forthright atmospherics, and these pieces are no exception to that tendency. If anything, they embody it to the fullest. Aiding in the reshuffling are guitarist Bjarne Roupé (last heard on Mantler’s For Two), altoist Wolfgang Puschnig, tenorist Harry Sokal, pianist David Helbock, the radio.string.quartet.vienna, the Nouvelle Cuisine Big Band under the direction of Christoph Cech, and the composer himself on trumpet. Mantler is, in fact, the featured soloist of Update One, which introduces a slightly dissonant and reactive world of sound. Because the big band cuts such a complex figure in the studio, muscling its way through a chain of through-composed cells, each “Update” may be distinguished by its soloist(s). While all the musicians here are well suited for the job, Roupé is a natural-born Mantler interpreter. His gestures cut like a razor across Updates Eleven and Part 1 of Twelve, both of them bursting with roots in a gnarled sort of grandeur.

The main reedmen are likewise exceptional. Sokal’s tenor flips a coin of thunder and soul in Update Eight, landing once on each side in the name of night. Puschnig’s alto, rides a wave somewhere beyond even those extremes in Update Ten, crashing on a vacant shore and leaving only a tender solo from bassist Manuel Mayr to show for having been there. Update Five lodges both saxophones in a briar patch of architectural impulses as the brass section blasts its messages with faith. The radio.string.quartet.vienna adds a dab of brooding to the palette in Update Nine. Violent expectorations, flowering pizzicati, tinkling cymbals, bright piano, clarion trumpet, and dim sonorities from the horns all enhance the strings’ flexibility as spider-web anchors bowing in the wind. Update Six, meanwhile, boasts crepuscular descriptions from Helbock at the keys, while Mantler returns in his barnacled shell.

The last two tracks form an unspoken diptych, with “Update Twelve Pt. 2 (Preview)” going all in with its round of spotlights, and “Update Twelve Pt. 3” taking the opposite route in a skeletal motif, ending where it might also have began: with a thesis statement. It’s an enjoyable reminder that Mantler’s pieces, while consummate in execution, are forever malleable in form, markers along a trail like no other on ECM grounds.

(To hear samples of The Jazz Composer’s Orchestra Update, click here.)

The Jazz Composer's Orchestra Update