ECM Releases

Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble: The Moment’s Energy (ECM 2066)

| Tyran Grillo

The Moment's Energy

Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble
The Moment´s Energy

Evan Parker soprano saxophone
Peter Evans trumpet, piccolo trumpet
Kō Ishikawa shō
Ned Rothenberg clarinet, bass clarinet, shakuhachi
Philipp Wachsmann violin, live electronics
Agustí Fernandez piano, prepared piano
Barry Guy double-bass
Paul Lytton percussion, live electronics
Lawrence Casserley signal processing instrument
Joel Ryan sample and signal processing
Walter Prati computer processing
Richard Barrett live electronics
Paul Obermayer live electronics
Marco Vecchi sound projection
Recorded November 2007, Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield
Engineer: Steve Lowe
Produced by Steve Lake

With the conviction of a fractal, this fifth ECM outing from Evan Parker’s Electro-Acoustic Ensemble unwinds in distorted, vastly interconnected replications. True to form, the ensemble welcomes three new members: trumpeter Peter Evans, reedman Ned Rothenberg (who also plays shakuhachi), and Kō Ishikawa playing the shō (Japanese mouth organ). As the growing roster (here numbering 14 members) simultaneously hones and fragments the ensemble’s dynamics, it likewise reshuffles Parker’s role as composer and bandleader in this commissioned piece for the 2007 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. As with The Eleventh Hour, a wealth of intensities emerged in the rehearsal sessions leading up to the event in question, only now most of the selections are taken from behind those very scenes (only Part IV and the epilogue are live). A meticulously composed fuselage serves to enhance the spontaneity of its appendages.

Part 1 introduces us to the masterful cross-referencing of signatures that distinguishes this album from its predecessors as a work of superlative control. Waterspouts of piano (Agustí Fernández), soprano saxophone (Parker), and violin (Phillipp Wachsmann) leap and drown in a roiling ocean of sonic information, from which Part 2 draws out cartographic ingredients in the effervescent soup of Rothenberg’s bass clarinet. Part 3 pales into lachrymose shades, rubbed smooth by the sandpaper of a deep-throated awareness. Its echoes are more pre than post. Part 4 strikes the expressiveness of Ishikawa’s shō like a match to wick. If ever there was darkness in these halls, it is now dispelled by holy presence. This transmogrifies into a jangling exposition in Part 5 and on to the bowed details of Part 6. In a space where siren and unfinished business can stew and percolate, its string-heavy idols pirouette at the border of gut and reason before Part 7 evinces fantastic droning depth. The album’s most nourishing morsel comes last in the form of “Incandescent Clouds,” an electronic summation of all that has preceded, spliced and held together until it fuses anew.

As the most electro-centric of the EAE recordings, The Moment’s Energy embodies an exact and accomplished science. Yet no matter how technologically slanted the music becomes, it always retains an earthen quality. Interventions reveal the circuitry of life at large. Every element carries equal atomic weight. Thus it becomes the thing it never professes to be: naked sound. Like the repeated word, it sheds its associations, becomes its own entity.

This is energy’s moment.

Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble: The Eleventh Hour (ECM 1924)

| Tyran Grillo

The Eleventh Hour

Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble
The Eleventh Hour

Evan Parker soprano saxophone, voice
Philipp Wachsmann violin, live electronics
Paul Lytton percussion, live electronics
Agustí Fernández piano, prepared piano
Adam Linson double-bass
Lawrence Casserley signal processing instrument, persussion, voice
Joel Ryan sample and signal processing
Walter Prati computer processing
Richard Barrett sampling keyboard, live electronics
Paul Obermayer sampling keyboard, live electronics
Marco Vecchi sound projection
Recorded November 2004, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow
Mixed February 2005 at Gateway Studio, Kingston-upon-Thames
Engineer: Steve Lowe
Produced by Steve Lake

The birds have survived winter’s bane. Wind pulls their feathers northward. The cranes arch their necks. Let the awakening begin, they seem to say. Chickadees distort in and out of frame, radio stations at the whim of a quavering dial. The crows prune their ebony in the guise of indignation. The starlings weep electricity. Echoes of samples wound forward lift their minds while lowering their eyes. Hammers and strings convulse in riddles of expression. Ghosts become living. The analog becomes digital. There is always something of one in the other.

So begins The Eleventh Hour, the fourth album by saxophonist Evan Parker’s Electro-Acoustic Ensemble for ECM. Adding to his already growing menagerie are the voices of Richard Barrett and Paul Obermayer, both remarkable composers and electronic alchemists. Their extensive databank brings a gravid feeling that such manipulations often lack. In the same vein are knob-turners Lawrence Casserley, Joel Ryan, and Walter Prati, all of whom bring so much to “Shadow Play,” the opening track described above in which their real-time modifications expand upon Parker’s multilayered soprano solo. The latter’s relative absence thereafter speaks to his appreciation for space and his ability to mark its passage without uttering a note. And while we do hear ghosts of Barry Guy in the mix, it is American bassist Adam Linson who takes the stage in his place.

This vibrant record documents the 11-piece ensemble in performances commissioned by Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts, under whose auspices it developed the five-part title piece nightly for a week in early November 2004. The Parker solo is from November 3rd, the centerpiece from three days later. Part 1 begins in a flurry of zippers, catches, and locks coming undone in one glorious catharsis (then again, catharsis may not be the right word, for the end of every tunnel begins another). Violinist Phillipp Wachsmann is a prominent voice in Part 2. Jagged, cilial, and primordial, he playfully alludes to Arvo Pärt’s violin/piano version of Fratres amid a small explosion of squeals and giggles. The filaments of Part 3 wrap us in droning bliss, pianist Agustí Fernández continuing where he left off on Memory/Vision with deeply felt cartilage. The human voice (courtesy of Parker and Casserley) makes a rare EAE appearance in Part 4, adding considerable movement to the palette. Reeds crackle like logs in a settling fire, holding fast to the smoke that draws their spirit out, tendril by tendril. This leaves us with a taste of afterlife in Part 5, which glows among the embers left behind to a tune of humming sky, gilded by a veneer of high-pitched sweetness to the savory heart within.

The divisions between parts seem only nominal at first, sharing as they do the same blood in their veins, but upon closer listening they reveal distinct planes to the overall shape. The mounting electronic presence this time reveals the henna-patterned hand of technology in utterly glowing ways and forges an unforgettable experience that is atmospheric to the core. Like any EAE session, this will challenge as many as it delights. Either way, it’s worth taking a chance to see which camp you’ll fall in with.

Crossing Reeds: Roscoe Mitchell and Evan Parker on ECM

| Tyran Grillo

–Locution–

Jazz multi-instrumentalist Roscoe Mitchell has been called many things: technical genius, avant-garde pioneer, iconoclast. Although I may expound upon any of these assertions by way of proof, there seems to be a futility to the reviewer’s task when in the presence of his sound. Mitchell grew up on sound. His musical household was brimming with it, leading him to take up saxophone and clarinet as a young teen. While stationed in Germany in the 1950s, he met the great Albert Ayler and others, from whom he learned to develop his palette without fear. After returning to the States, he fell in with two Lesters (trumpeter Bowie and trombonist Lashley), bassist Malachi Favors, saxophonist Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, and drummer Alvin Fielder—a group first known as the Roscoe Mitchell Sextet and out of which grew the legendary Art Ensemble of Chicago. By no mere coincidence was their first path-breaking album entitled Sound (Delmark, 1966). It was, and remains, the alpha and omega of what he does.

Across the pond in England, one might tell a similar story about Evan Parker. The free jazz stalwart also picked up the saxophone in his early teens and sought inspiration in Ayler, Paul Desmond, and John Coltrane. If Mitchell is about sound, Parker is about breath. Since the 1960s, he has shared his characteristic love of extended techniques, of which his mastery of circular breathing has become something of a doctrine. His first defining efforts came with the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, with whom he cut his first record and which included drummer John Stevens, guitarist Derek Bailey, bassist Dave Holland, and trumpeter Kenny Wheeler. Parker and Bailey went on to form the Music Improvisation Company, the free wonders of which were documented on ECM’s fifth ever album of the same name. Subsequent decades have brought fresh collaborations across the board and the formation of his most influential, the Electro-Acoustic Ensemble. Formed in 1990, it remains the benchmark of his collaborative achievements.

In 2003, Munich’s Kulturreferat (one of twelve municipal departments responsible for the promotion of art and culture) invited Mitchell and Parker to participate in a symposium on the role of improvisation in the compositional process. Thus the Transatlantic Art Ensemble was born, pushing the boundary—fuzzy as it is—between predetermined and spontaneous music-making. Together, these master thespians of the reed present a double bill of “scored improvisations” that combine the cross-idiomatic interests of the one with the stimulatingly open approach to group performance of the other.

–Illocution–

In addition to his activities as a jazz artist, Mitchell has been a longtime classical composer (he would just as soon call it “music,” plain and simple). This work has led him to his current post at California’s Mills College, where he holds status as Distinguished Darius Milhaud Professor of Music, and comes across vividly in Composition/Improvisation Nos. 1, 2 & 3. Through nine “scenes” Mitchell instructs the musicians to improvise from: (a) prewritten cards (Nos. VIII and IV), (b) using only a certain set of notes (I, II, V, VI, VII, IX), and (c) through real-time manipulation of previously composed elements (III). If this sounds like a puzzle, it’s only because said elements fit together so complementarily. Along the way, Art Ensemble of Chicago members Corey Wilkes (trumpet, flugelhorn), Jaribu Shahid (bass), and Mitchell sideman Tanni Tabbal (drums, percussion) share the stage with pianist Craig Taborn, whose stylings have since caught the ECM wave in well-deserved projects both solo (Avenging Angel) and alongside bassist Michael Formanek (The Rub And Spare Change), not to mention Mitchell’s own Note Factory project (Far Side, Nine To Get Ready). Parker cohorts Philipp Wachsmann (violin), Paul Lytton (drums, percussion), and Barry Guy (bass) add spark to an already iridescent fire, along with a handful of classically trained talents.

Roscoe Mitchell
Composition/Improvisation Nos. 1, 2 & 3 (ECM 1872)

Roscoe Mitchell soprano saxophone
Evan Parker tenor and soprano saxophones
Anders Svanoe alto and baritone saxophones
Corey Wilkes trumpet, flugelhorn
John Rangecroft clarinet
Neil Metcalfe flute
Nils Bultmann viola
Philipp Wachsmann violin
Marcio Mattos cello
Craig Taborn piano
Jaribu Shahid double-bass
Barry Guy double-bass
Tanni Tabbal drums, percussion
Paul Lytton drums, percussion
Recorded September 2004, Muffathalle, Munich
Engineers: Manfred Eicher and Stefano Amerio
Produced by Steve Lake

Stepping into the suite at hand, we recognize the variety of architectural turns, tempered by an idiosyncratic feel for harmony and appreciation for pause. The haunting viola of Nils Bultmann articulates the first of many monologues, which with increasing clarity map the genomes of the ensuing developments (Bultmann returns for the end, hub to a forlorn and longitudinal ode to losing oneself). When the helix breaks and the family grows, the conversation suspends its provocations from the beam of judgment, only to cut their strings and notate their descent into sanity. Percussion solos speak in riddles of color. Winds scour away the film of predestination and refill the basin with trust before carrying over into gorgeous turns from Parker on tenor, building with the group to a level of virtuosity so intense it can only be described as oneness incarnate. The pastoral clarinet of John Rangecroft leads us into a den of foxes, where the fear becomes flesh, and flesh an opportunity for reflection. Neil Metcalfe on flute reveals a subtly adorned canvas, while Wilkes flashes his notes like sunlight off a turning crystal. Anders Savanoe completes the picture with his spastic yet saintly contortions on baritone. Because everyone reacts, possibilities narrate themselves with humble authority, somehow jarring in its regularity toward the end. There is so much commitment to the moment that we can only follow along like shadows, filling the spaces left behind.

–Perlocution–

The second half of the Mitchell/Parker collaboration finds the Englishman laying compositional concepts before the same personnel while also leaving spaces for improvisation to flourish. The title is at once curious and instructive. Meaning “like an ox plowing,” it gives insight into six “Furrows,” each of which cultivates its own crop of fertile solos.

Evan Parker
Transatlantic Art Ensemble
Boustrophedon (ECM 1873)

Evan Parker soprano saxophone
Roscoe Mitchell alto and soprano saxophones
Anders Svanoe alto saxophone
John Rangecroft clarinet
Neil Metcalfe flute
Corey Wilkes trumpet, flugelhorn
Nils Bultmann viola
Philipp Wachsmann violin
Marcio Mattos cello
Craig Taborn piano
Jaribu Shahid double-bass
Barry Guy double-bass
Tanni Tabbal drums, percussion
Paul Lytton drums, percussion
Recorded September 2004, Muffathalle, Munich
Engineer: Manfred Eicher and Stefano Amerio
Produced by Steve Lake

A spiral staircase of percussion from Lytton and Tabbal in the “Overture” pairs one musician with his transatlantic counterpart in the watery expanse of the Furrows, each a different curl of octopus ink in the brine. The instruments take on their roles with surety and purpose. In this context said roles are not theatrical, but are (psychologically, at least) offstage. Rangecroft’s flute in “Furrow 1” is the knowing bird, conversational partner of Taborn’s keys. The latter elides the slide of its introspection and lays it to dry in the sun until it cracks underfoot—just one of countless leaves on the forest floor leading toward a sunlit grove. Violin and viola in “Furrow 2” are two travelers carrying histories in their satchels. The cello of Marcio Mattos in “Furrow 3” is the subterranean yearning to these aboveground wanderings (their protracted journey is a highlight of this live performance). Svanoe’s entrance on alto here is an awakening and reveals a voice of descriptive genius. The clarinet of “Furrow 4” becomes a base to the strings’ acid, the trumpet a distant commotion. The two basses in “Furrow 5” become a shadow of the past, which casts its lessons upon the yet to be and configures music-making decisions as would a breeze goad a butterfly’s path. Parker maintains notable restraint until the open sky of “Furrow 6.” He spreads the clouds like wings and gives his flight room to sing. But the compression of his playing is such that we feel more than an album’s distance in its shape. It is the sonic white dwarf, a single note of which weighs many scores yet which floats like a feather plucked from the cap of the Milky Way. His elliptical solo bleeds into a steamy rhythm section, bringing a flavor of the club to the dialogue at large. Hints of big-band ebullience shine through the tatters but are drowned by the density of the center. As the group fades, we hear that this density has resided all along in the drums. An intimate gallery of solos ensues in the oddly beautiful “Finale” (in order: Shahid, Metcalfe, Svanoe, Wachsmann, Taborn, Mattos, Bultmann, Rangecroft, Wilkes, Guy, Mitchell), tying a series of knots until they form a single ball of string.

The sense of flow imparted by the compositional elements in both albums is breathtaking, building textures organically and never indulging in extremes for too long. Rather, the continuity lies somewhere in the shadows, balancing on the fulcrum of surrender between static and whisper. In the end, such teetering of intuition becomes a way of life, a mantra for those whose ears flower with curiosity.

Maneri/Phillips/Maneri: Angles of Repose (ECM 1862)

| Tyran Grillo

Angles of Repose

Joe Maneri alto and tenor saxophones, clarinet
Barre Phillips double-bass
Mat Maneri viola
Recorded May 2002, Chapelle Sainte Philomèe, Puget-Ville
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Produced by Barre Phillips and Steve Lake

When Joe and Mat Maneri and Barre Phillips materialized in the studio to record Tales of Rohnlief, the result was a magical recipe of microtonal blues and other off-the-beaten-path catharses. The session begged for a sequel, and its name is Angles of Repose. This time around, our synergistic trio throws rules into the air like pigeon feed for the small frame of life that is the cover photograph (incidentally, my favorite ECM sleeve/title combination in the entire catalogue) in the name of integrity.

Number One
Phillips is a grounding force in this opener, adding as much as he takes away and saving the sawdust, so to speak, from his whittling. Joe snakes his prophetic way through vocal and instrumental languages in a veritable feast of biological rumination, tempered by analysis in the immediacy of discovery.

Number Two
The internal machine may be vast, but its weak spot is infinitesimal. Father and son patty-cake the earth into submission. You can skitter and flitter all you want, but you’ll never find the path unless it finds you, whether gelled by time or fragmented by the violence of discovery.

Number Three
Joe cracks the fountain with faith and signs his nameless art with dots and dashes. If he seems winded, it’s only because he is the wind. Ameliorated by the corona of experience, he tempers his weapons with air, that they might never pierce the skin of any mortal fear, along which flounders the death of discovery.

Number Four
Twisting between thumb and fingers, the night rolls the city into a cigarette and smokes it until it sleeps. Every noteless space only makes it stronger. Butterflies and rhinoceri now share the same breath, fraught with the wonder of discovery.

Number Five
A duet for strings of spacious mind channels the wastes of contradiction and melts them into a mold. As the sculpture cools, it becomes a shadow. Its visage weeps invisibility. The hands of passersby inadvertently float through it, so that all they are left with is the fallacy of discovery.

Number Six
The cup has tipped, its contents spreading in a partially eclipsed circle. In this pool where broken mirrors float, we see the multiplicity of our genetic code’s sonority. Harmonics are the edges of fingernails on glass, and further the edge of that glass on sky. Resonant beauty briefly surfaces—a dolphin’s back—before plunging into the brine of discovery.

Number Seven
Blood begets blood begets the onlooker, whose wayfarer soul quivers with the loss of discovery.

Number Eight
The metamorphosis has occurred, not from man to insect but from insect to man, still carrying the language of its forbearers, dribbling into the cupped hands of discovery.

Number Nine
Birdsong becomes liquid mercury in the room-temperature stare of indifference. It is here where music is born, shedding truth for its simulacrum in the hopes that it will be consumed more quickly and forgotten on the way to the core. When our ears spread their wings, they need only lift one talon to leave their carrion. All the screeching and scratching accomplishes one thing: activation. We can feel in the air a vibrant disturbance, which brings its own instructions, blank as October sky. There is a beginning in every end, the anode to galactic circuits in search of a name. And if you lean in close enough, it may just whisper it to you, for it is the breath of discovery.

Number Ten
The whale scratched by Ahab’s spear swims for a song. Its balanced lyric of play guides the sonar true. It wakes you up just to tell you to go to sleep. This is the dream of discovery.

Three lines make not a braid, but a single unbreakable filament plugged directly into the kundalini of any listener willing to close the mind and open the body to the possibility of its activation. Yes, the album has its highlights (Numbers Five and Nine, I’d say, if you asked me), and contains Joe’s most heart-wrenching playing on record, but its lowlights are just as expertly realized, for in this sound-world there is no hierarchy, only the contemplating line that wraps around us as it goes along its way. If pinnacles have restless dreams, these are their soundtracks.

A second look: Pirchner/Pepl/DeJohnette (ECM 1237)

| Tyran Grillo

Werner Pirchner / Harry Pepl / Jack DeJohnette

Werner Pirchner tenor vibes, marimba
Harry Pepl ovation guitar
Jack DeJohnette drums
Digitally recorded on a Sunday afternoon in June 1982 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Writing these reviews has been as much an opportunity to learn about the many fascinations of ECM (and music in general) as about myself. Part of that learning process involves reassessment. So far in my explorations of the label, there have been only two bumps in the road—no small feat for a catalogue of 1300 releases. One of these bumps was the self-titled record cut by Werner Pirchner, Harry Pepl, and Jack DeJohnette. Recorded on a Sunday afternoon in June of 1982, it came across to my ears as a one-off session that was perhaps better suited to remain in reissue limbo. Yet after posting a rare critical review, I incurred an unexpected backlash. Rather than let this underscore my defensiveness—which is useless, for how can one argue with another’s appreciation of art?—I took it to heart and have, over the past year, returned to this album on occasion to absorb its expressive secrets. The experience also revealed an imperfection in my system: because I am hearing so many of these records for the first time, and in my sometimes-overzealous efforts to reach synchronicity with ECM’s rigorous release schedule, I tend listen to albums only once before reviewing them. While on the one hand this gives (I hope) a freshness of feeling to my attempts at describing the indescribable, on the other it doesn’t always leave me prepared to expound upon an experience that may be a longer time in coming. I am also an ardent, if idealistic, believer that music tends to come into one’s life when it is meant to, but that sometimes its interest requires incubation. I simply did not give this date the attention it deserves.

“African Godchild” opens its eyes to a savannah dawn and draws us into a scene resonant with life. The depth of Pepl’s talent, now that I’m more familiar with it, is immediately evident in the spaciousness of his evocations. Pirchner matches that spaciousness on the inside, so that our understanding of it becomes unified. We can hear from this that the Pepl/Pirchner relationship is the nexus of the trio, the guitarist providing spider webs of support for the mallet man’s acute inscriptions. DeJohnette’s kick drum and cymbals add relief to their subtle crosstalk. The interrelatedness of foreground and background is deftly realized, especially as Pepl steps forth with an echoing solo, sculpting the drama with practiced fingers. “Air, Love And Vitamines” is perfect for an autumn afternoon. It is a prime vehicle for Pirchner, whose Jarrett-like inflections enchant at every turn and constitute the vertical to DeJohnette’s horizontal. The drummer balances the hidden urgency of this tune and blends seamlessly with Pirchner’s chording. After listless beginnings, “Good-bye, Baby Post” Pirchner leads the way into a resonant groove. Pepl acts the bass player’s part, even more so in his solo, before pinpointing the night with far-reaching flame in “Better Times In Sight,” for which Pirchner brings us back to earth but not to land, preferring as he does to skate the limpid waters of a forgotten sea.

I stand by my original opinion that the processing on Pepl’s instrument obscures what is already such a direct voice (compare this to the more organic buzzing of Pirchner’s marimba), yet I can understand the motivation for contrast. Ultimately, his gorgeous sustains and crunchy backing ring true in spite of the effects applied. And while I still think the recording levels could still use some tweaking, I have found a solution: listen to it loud.

This curious little gem may or may not hold you at first listen, but it does have the potential, like anything worth its salt, to endear as it endures.

<< Arild Andersen: Molde Concert (ECM 1236)
>> Dave Holland: Life Cycle (ECM 1238)

John Surman/Jack DeJohnette: Invisible Nature (ECM 1796)

| Tyran Grillo

John Surman
Jack DeJohnette
Invisible Nature

John Surman soprano and baritone saxophones, bass clarinet, synthesizers
Jack DeJohnette drums, electronic percussion, piano
Recorded November 2000, Tampere Jazz Happening and Berlin JazzFest
Engineers: Ralf Sirén and Ekkehard Stoffregen
Produced by Steve Lake and John Surman

Since first recording for ECM as a duo on The Amazing Adventures Of Simon Simon, multi-reedist John Surman and drummer Jack DeJohnette have maintained a connection that finds deeper traction on the seven enhancements of Invisible Nature. Surman gurgles his way through the organ drone of “Mysterium,” which combined with a plodding bass line sounds like the seed of Jan Garbarek’s RITES. It is a silvery tapestry unspooling in flourishes that escape our ken. The music is so much of its own world that to hear applause segueing into “Rising Tide” is jarring. It reminds us that we’re still on Earth, that what we’ve been hearing has come from human hands and breath. The fantastic sweep of baritone amid DeJohnette’s frenetic pacing here elicits a wide spectrum, and charts the same balance of delicacy vs. punch that makes tracks like “Underground Movement” and “Ganges Groove” such inspiring excursions. Painting his snare like the eye of a hurricane, DeJohnette crystallizes steady grooves for Surman’s cerebral and biologically direct highs in the former, while in the latter he paints with his tabla generator a scene as lush as it is arid. “Outback Spirits” makes gorgeous use of digital delay in a trip filled with cinematic tension, equal parts Nicolas Roeg and Stanley Kubrick. It is the elegance of uninhibited joy, the patter of the disembodied. A welcoming freedom of expression prevails. “Fair Trade” is the masterwork of the collection and shows the depth and breadth that these two legends are capable of when the gloves come off and all that’s left to feed on is fire. Between the crunchy baritone and DeJohnette’s astonishing ear for space, there is more than enough to savor for future listening. “Song For World Forgiveness,” the only piece not entirely improvised, floats a swanky bass clarinet on a river of lipstick and smoky alleyways: an homage to roots, to loves, and to new beginnings.

For all the trickery, there is at this album’s core a duo of infinite potential, one that walks a tightrope—blindfolded—across wide canyons. The nature of this music may be invisible, but man, is it ever audible.

<< Arvo Pärt: Orient & Occident (ECM 1795 NS)
>> Trygve Seim: Sangam (ECM 1797)

Robin Williamson: Skirting The River Road (ECM 1785)

| Tyran Grillo

Robin Williamson
Skirting The River Road

Robin Williamson vocals, harp, guitar, whistles
Mat Maneri viola, violin
Paul Dunmall tenor and soprano saxophones, clarinet, border pipes, ocarina, moxeño
Ale Möller mandola, lute, hammered dulcimer, shawm, clarino, drone flutes, natural flutes, bamboo flutes, vibraphone
Mick Hutton double-bass
Recorded March/April 2001 at Gateway Studios, Kingston-Upon-Thames
Engineer: Steve Lowe
Mixed at Albany Productions Ltd, Cardiff
Engineer: Lawson Dando
Produced by Steve Lake

No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.
–William Blake

These words have it: despite the mystic winds he rides, Robin Williamson flies close to the ground. He keeps us in sight. He wanders as he speaks, voice rising like the morning’s rooster even as it plunges a laborer’s tools into wet concrete. It is a storm in a teacup, the laugh inside a tear. For his sophomore ECM date, the Scottish singer/songwriter joins musicians whose participation is as unlikely as it is inevitable. With multi-instrumentalists Paul Dunmall and Ale Möller, viol(in)ist Mat Maneri, and bassist Mick Hutton at his side, he trudges his peerless way into fifteen territories under the banner “Songs and Settings of Whitman, Blake and Vaughan.” It is Blake whose legacy weighs heaviest on the scale, reaching the value of an ingot in “The Four Points Are Thus Beheld.” On the surface a lesson in cardinal perception, it is more deeply a catacomb riddled with improvisatory petroglyphs. Dunmall on tenor paints the most dynamic of these while strains of hammered dulcimer pluck the invisible strings that loom the stars with acoustic force. This opens into rich and sharply defined border pipes and peaks in meteorites of sustenance. Like the compass therein, Skirting The River Road has four hearts, for one must add Williamson himself to the subtitle’s list of three. The album carries the lantern of its main title from his “Dalliance Of Eagles.” Resting on a fulcrum of bass and framed by a wordless circle, his verse swivels from past to future and back again at a single breath. “The Journey” unravels its eponym in a pathway of hard-won disregard that recognizes the privilege of its vantage point. Further, “The Map With No North” crochets from every utterance a life bound by the dried skins of wayfarers, casting its far twisted spells for our naked scrutiny. A masterpiece.

Another original, “West From California’s Shores,” adds a drop of dawn to this dusky crucible that delights me. Not only because I am only now discovering the varietal delights of Williamson’s craft, but also because the title takes me back to Fairfax, the small town in northern California where I spent the first twelve years of my life. His animated travelogue drapes smiles like garlands along the neck of experience and underscores the travels that have since taken me far from home. One of Fairfax’s most unforgettable fixtures was The Sleeping Lady, a café and music venue where my mother could be found singing from time to time, and where my father saw Williamson perform with his Merry Band in the early 1980s. Sadly, I was with a babysitter during the show. Aside from the colorful instrumentation, which included the haunting mandocello at the bard’s fingertips, my father recalls harpist Sylvia Woods shooting rubber-tipped arrows from her strings (much to the audience’s chagrin) while the band engaged in bawdy banter in between songs. Above all, he remembers a comment that Williamson made: “The band members and I feel that the best kind of joke is something you can barely laugh at.” We can hear something of that wryness in this tune, so distinct from its gorgeously dour surroundings.

Yet let us not ignore the awakening of “The Morning Watch/A Song Of Joys.” This Whitman/Vaughan diptych opens the program by splashing a ray of golden light across pasture, thereby setting the blend of Williamson’s fullness at the helm and the ornamentation of his crew. A buttery soprano lends notably warm hues to the spectrum on deck, while Maneri’s viola flicks his hairs with programmatic brilliance in “Here To Burn.” Another Blake setting, it sits like its protagonist at a box of masks and destroys them one by one, making note of each parched expression before it fades. “Abstinence Sows Sand” is yet another. It takes some of the Indian influence that imbued much of the earlier Incredible String Band experiments and spins it afresh in dyed reeds. And then, there is “Infant Joy,” with which, as a new father ten weeks into a lifelong journey, I cannot help but hum in sympathetic resonance. Its articulation opens the gift of new life and finds within it infinitely more.

“The Terrible Doubt/The Price Of Experience” is a dire prologue that casts shadows over idyllic life and brings light to the wick of death to which we all must touch a flame. Infirmity looms outside the door of every private joy. This is linked by a lively “Shepherd’s Tune” on pipe into the web of “The Spider,” which along with “The Fly” fills a grave with filamented ale. Whitman makes a late reappearance in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” His strong shadow claps a palm on our backs and guides us through the waters of its epic passage. Upon arrival, “The World Of Light” welcomes us: our immigrant soul turned inside out and signed by the promise of another livelihood.

Williamson doesn’t so much draw out notes as knead them into thumb-printed strands, so that by the end one remembers not the music so much as the histories it activates. Vibrato lies dead by the wayside, caught among the bramble of virtuosos who look on from their perches of fatigue. In its place, the rawness of forgotten things. Skirting The River Road is therefore more than an album. It is an interaction of the deepest kind. Every song is its own entity standing beside Time’s crystal, which with every turn catches the light ever so differently as children awaken to replace others in forever-sleep.

<< Charles Lloyd: Hyperion with Higgins (ECM 1784)
>> Paul Bley: Solo in Mondsee (ECM 1786)

Mat Maneri: Trinity (ECM 1719)

| Tyran Grillo

Mat Maneri
Trinity

Mat Maneri violin, viola
Recorded July 1999 at Gateway Studio, Kingston
Engineer: Steve Lowe
Produced by Steve Lake

There’s something about the title of “Pure Mode,” prologue to Mat Maneri’s first solo album, Trinity, that describes his abilities just right. Like the nine improvisations that follow, it jumps off of a prewritten motive (in this case, by Matthew Shipp) and offers us a four-stringed experience like no other. Maneri goes unplugged this time, feeling out the forest of richness already ingrained into the wood and gut at his bow. He stews in every design for what it’s worth and walks along a slippery melodic slope as if it were dry and even ground. If we take “Almost Pretty” as a mirror, then we know this project is anything but vain, for Maneri consciously eschews the trappings of virtuosity that so often loom before the solo performer like a locked door. He is instead interested in the intricacies of that mechanism. He coaxes it open through disinterest alone. The scuttling crabs of this tidal song do not tempt him. Theirs is a rhythm he does not need. We might, then, look to the title track for a snatch of mission statement. In its 10-minute passage rests the winged key to another realm entirely, one that walks a bridge of half-light. Thus he traces the shores of his own dreams, christening John Coltrane’s “Sun Ship” on its raga-like voyage to the earth’s center. The unerring valences of his notecraft are nowhere more apparent. His quiver stocked with idiomatic arrows, he looses them into the sky, knowing they will never heed gravity. Such artistry extends into the visual, as in “Blue Deco,” for which Maneri treats the violin like paint. He chooses air in place of canvas and renders a world alone. This, along with “Veiled,” is the most chamber-like excursion of the program, a void of interpretable dots and dashes that peaks in children’s squeals. In each, solid walls of pizzicato break the flow. “Iron Man” (Eric Dolphy) and “Lattice” (Joe Morris) form another pair. Wrought in heavy matter and spindling filigree alike, they wander drunkenly into the distilled tonic of “November 1st.” This we can sip and savor, a duster for the cobwebbed staircases of the mind. Meanwhile, the house is littered with “Lady’s Day Lament.” Riffing on a tune by his father, Maneri loosens every nail until the entire structure hums.

Whether or not Mat Maneri’s sound-world will divide listeners is irrelevant, for it already fuses so many disparate strands into a single precious current that everyone gets swept up in it all the same. Open your mouth and drink it. You will never drown.

<< Anour Brahem Trio: Astrakan Café (ECM 1718)
>> Karl Amadeus Hartmann: Funèbre (ECM 1720 NS)