ECM Releases

Keith Jarrett: Rio (ECM 2198/99)

| Tyran Grillo

Keith Jarrett
Rio

Keith Jarrett piano
Recorded live April 9, 2011 at Theatro Municipal, Rio de Janeiro
Engineer: Martin Pearson
Rio concert produced by OGM (Guillermo Malbrán/Augusto Tapia) and dell’arte (Myriam Dauelsberg/Steffen Dauelsberg)
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher

On 9 April 2011, Keith Jarrett took the stage at the Theatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro for a concert of improvised music at the piano. Under any other artist’s name, this formula might ring as flat as the disc it’s printed on, bat Jarrett’s fingertips those keys do something unknown even to him. Like a marionette that comes to impossible life in the hands of a master puppeteer, an instrument before Jarrett is a broken circle waiting for its final arc. Rather than hang that circle as one would a mirror on the wall, he rolls it as a child would a hoop down the street. Such is the spirit of abandon that opens his every note like laughter at something intangible, and points to a destination so far away that it returns to its origin.

On Rio, he crosses 15 short bridges to get there, mapping a spectrum of interlocking terrains along the way. Still, the serial infrared beginnings are something of a surprise on his way to ultraviolet. Over a knotted, postindustrial dream, they reveal a spontaneous imagination at play. A wall rises before us. On one side is the melancholy we might come to expect of the musician who brought us wonders at Köln, Paris, and Kyoto. The listener cannot help but feel it in the rapt attention of the audience, which acts as spinner for the many fibrous experiences that had to come together to create such a shimmering veil of beauty. On the other side of that wall is the bluesy pointillism that never seems far away when Jarrett is near. Yet the more we listen, the more we realize that every brick is its own song, and bonds the spaces on either side with sound and sentiment. Part 4, for example, is a smooth ballad reminiscent of “As Time Goes By” that cracks open a bottle of Gershwin along the way, while the staggered overlay of 5 shows us two hands in fluid independence. Guitaristic flamenco dances change places with the sweeping elegy that is Part 7, one of two major turning points in the concert during which Jarrett and the audience must have known something unprecedented was happening. Its sister moment occurs in 9: sure to still your thoughts. If the concert’s second half seems but meteoric offshoots of the first, it’s only because every mirror has its dark side, so that when the blues returns in Parts 11 and 14, it feels twisted in spite of its enervations; and when Parts 12 and 15 revive those earlier rays of heavenliness, they have grown heavier, wiser. Not that this leaves us in any less a state of awe. Rather, these transmogrifications show us the nature of life, which teaches us that nothing is ever the same.

As the story goes, Jarrett called Eicher after this performance, professing it to be his best. Yet I would appeal to the earlier man, who once said that no night is better than any other. It all comes down to the moment, the experience, the pureness of making music that will forever evade definition. What we hear, then, is neither his “best” nor “worst.” Inhaled and exhaled through the digital lungs by which we have come to measure our listening pleasures, it is what it is: a gift to be lived on as it is fed.

(To hear samples of Rio, click here.)

Ricardo Villalobos/Max Loderbauer: Re: ECM (ECM 2211/12)

| Tyran Grillo

Re: ECM

Ricardo Villalobos electronics
Max Loderbauer electronics
Soundstructures by Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer
Developed and produced at Laika Studio, Berlin, September-December 2009
Pre-mastering: Rashad Becker
Mastering: Manfred Eicher and Christoph Stickel
Original recordings produced by Manfred Eicher

The term “acousmatic” was first used in reference to the philosopher Pythagoras, who delivered his lectures from behind a screen while his students sat mutely on the other side. Many centuries later saw the introduction of European closed-eye listening practices, blindfolding audiences to ensure a musical experience devoid of visual bias or distraction. Yet it would take musique concrète pioneer Pierre Schaeffer to realize the deeper potential of such a situation when he replaced screen with loudspeakers, from which issued sound collages of indeterminable origin. Now the ears wore the blindfold. According to Schaeffer, imaginary sounds are ontologically distinct from the objects that produce them. They begin with an effect and work back to cause. The acousmatic experience, then, fundamentally separates sound from source.

This equation is never foolproof. Once the sound in question has been activated it takes on a familiarity of its own. Where Schaeffer perhaps shortchanged his own convictions was in never turning the mirror around, for the mise-en-abyme of his sonic philosophy indicates not only an external distinction, but also an internal one—namely, that in their solicitation found sounds morph into experiences in and of themselves. The severance is a divided cell, an audible illusion whereby infinity speaks.

Another possibility: that, even in the intimate knowledge of a source, the acousmatic experience may thrive. Acousmaticity depends on spacing of source, case, and effect; on reversibility between inner and outer. At its heart is an aporia. It can never be more than an interpretive effect of the listener. In such a context, our instinct pushes us toward treating sound as material, especially when we can hold recorded art in our hands and manipulate its realization at will. The moment we press PLAY, two temporal realities—that of the recording and that of the listening—share a space. Time collapses.

With this in mind, I turn to minimal techno wunderkind Ricardo Villalobos and experimentalist Max Loderbauer, who were given permission by Manfred Eicher to dip their hands into his label’s unfathomable catalogue and finger-paint a fresh compositional framework of suggestion and inner-space. As a self-styled “synthesis of two musical worlds,” Re: ECM does, in fact, create a third, acousmatic one. Without access to individual tracks, the Berlin-based DJs looked to separable bits for sampling, and to the gaps therein. In so doing, they went beyond effect to aftereffect, charting the ghosts of these pristinely recorded sounds (which, no matter how you splice them, betray their source). Yet in the hands of this artful duo, even the obsessive ECM listener (points to self) will find there is still an enigma to be had. Much of this feeling derives from the fact that Villalobos and Loderbauer took an improvisational approach to layering these loops and elements in the studio. Their acousmaticity goes from the outside in.

At the risk of oversimplifying, I am tempted to separate this recording’s mesh into its classical and jazz streams. Though the genres are not so distant, their approach manifests differently throughout. Looking to the latter first, we find a marked balance of organic and electronic. More than balance, even, is the unity of these two categories—again, not so distant. Said unity comes mostly from the Christian Wallumrød Ensemble, specifically the Fabula Suite Lugano, making adroit use of Giovanna Pessi’s baroque harp in “Reblop” and its counterpart, “Replob.” Both are sparkling odes. Pianos unravel chains of icicles, swaying hand in hand with satellite interruptions and wave distortions. The inevitable nod to Jon Hassell comes in “Requote,” for which a cunning horn winds its way in a bowed expanse of intimate measure. “Redetach” ends the album on a snare- and cymbal-driven journey into the center of a vast digital biome. Gloopy and viscous, this bubbling drone touches feet to ground, its back to sunset. The remaining Wallumrød refraction comes in “Recat,” this time from The Zoo Is Far, for a groovy, if subdued, drum ‘n’ bass vibe. Gut strings wince in self-reflective heartbeats as the ghosts of drums flip from open to shut. With its scattered rhythms, rusty veneer, and granola crunch, this track takes due cue from Boards of Canada. Out of this shadowy enclave we are dropped like buckshot into water for “Retimeless.” Penning its tale from the ink of Timeless, its windblown beats and vocal blips dance their gavotte in moonlight. Miroslav Vitous’s Emergence affords another fond look back at some of the label’s classics, as does “Rensenada,” drawn from Bennie Maupin’s The Jewel In The Lotus. Whereas “Reemergence” lives on the underside of a snare drum, the other lumbers across its top surface before liftoff. Louis Sclavis makes a knotted cameo in “Reannounce.” The raw material this time is his L’imparfait des langues. Metals and reeds flick their throats away like the cigarettes that have destroyed them, leaving a pile of dreams for ashes. Clay percussion trades places with outer contacts, devolving into a contest of morals for the sample-addicted. The Wolfert Brederode Quartet’s Currents finds new life in “Recurrence.” As much a mantra as a challenge to silence, it finds itself flanged for want of a sharper blade. Enrico Rava’s TATI feathers the wings of “Rebird,” a distorted pathway of grace.

From Russian composer Alexander Knaifel comes the bulk of the album’s classical skeleton. As the dark side of this moon, it puts the emotional back into the rhythm-formula of the club, seeking in its body-to-body connections something akin to the heart-to-heart. Much of this pulse comes from Svete Tikhiy and Amicta Sole, giving us soprano Tatiana Melentieva’s otherworldly rise above all in “Resvete.” In such primordial surroundings, she sounds like Cathy Berberian reborn, radiant still through a tintinnabulation of brushes and cymbals. Distant sirens splash through smoke and cloud, each indistinguishable from the other against the Ligeti-like whispers of “Retikhiy.” Where in this ritual passage rhythm remains paramount, sandy and free, in “Resole” it recedes for a spacy vibe reminiscent of Vesptertine-era Björk. BLAZHENSTVA yields its embryonic “Reblazhenstva,” laying choral strains on a bedding of digital beats while a cello spasms and swoons from its own melancholy residue. Swiss violinist Paul Giger’s Ignis makes a morose appearance in “Reshadub.” Its drums tremble before an oncoming train of opaque intentions, crumbling into radio dial anxieties at the moment of death. This leaves only Arvo Pärt, whose Kanon pokajanen inspires the throat-sung drones and sacred curtain of “Rekondakion.”

All of this shares a border with a glitch aesthetic, by which the crust of representation cracks open to reveal something intrepid and uncompromising. Its skin hosts as many nests of reality as there are humans, each a node of anxiety. Whether or not this anxiety yields pleasure has much to do with personal preference, but also with the fact that all sounds are phenomena. Only our allegiance determines their marketability. And so, if we instead let the organic experiments of Villalobos and Loderbauer breathe as they will, if we avoid weighing down their pockets with texts such as this, then the soundness of their message will grow of its own accord, rampant and unbridled in the photosynthesis of blind appreciation.

(My thanks to Brian Kane, whose discussion of acousmatics gave me context for the present review. To hear samples of Re: ECM, click here.)

Terje Rypdal: Odyssey – In Studio & In Concert (ECM 2136-38)

| Tyran Grillo

Terje Rypdal
Odyssey – In Studio & In Concert

Terje Rypdal electric guitar, synthesizer, soprano saxophone
Torbjørn Sunde trombone
Brynjulf Blix organ
Sveinung Hovensjø bass guitar
Svein Christiansen drums
Swedish Radio Jazz Group

Odyssey (ECM 1067/68)
Recorded August 1975 at Arne Bendiksen Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

My first encounter with Odyssey came in the late nineties. Still young in my ECM explorations and having just barely crossed over into Jan Garbarek’s Visible World, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the journey that label stalwart Terje Rypdal (a name as yet unfamiliar) had just taken me on. The CD fell out of rotation quickly, I’m afraid to say, buried under the pile of New Series albums then dominating my attention. Years later, and well into my own listening odyssey, I returned to it, only to find that it had never left me.

Rypdal has, of course, been under the ECM umbrella since almost the very beginning. The release of his self-titled debut in 1971 sparked an intrepid flame that continues to burn through a wide spectrum of colors. As the informative liner notes from John Kelman tell us, the band that was to define Odyssey was the product of circumstance. Drawing on a pool of musicians from previous sessions, including bassist Sveinung Hovensjø from 1973’s What Comes After, he also welcomed unexpected talents into the fold, such as drummer Svein Christiansen and organist Brynjulf Blix, the latter of whom contributed heavily to the album’s well-aged luster. The resulting sound proved a defining one, as inescapable bass lines danced touch-and-go with the guitarist’s unbridled narratives. We hear this most in the solid underpinnings of “Midnite.” Hovensjø lays down the rules for all of its 17 minutes, leaving Rypdal to stretch them to the pathos of his progressive solitude. Those carefully pedaled strings and alluring soprano sax (played by Rypdal himself) careen through its nocturnal billows with humble ferocity as Torbjørn Sunde brings comparable light to the sky with muted trombone. If the plangent cry of “Darkness Falls” that precedes this and opens the album tells us anything, it is that here is a terrain of emotional clarity and immediacy. The magic of this rendering lies in its continual flux, in its refusal to settle into one topographic pattern. The following “Adagio” plunges the album to new depths, even as it raises the bar from which it hangs. Solina strings owe their thickness to the charcoal yet discernible picture into which Rypdal’s guitar spills ether: a shout of autonomy in its coolest disguise. “Better Off Without You” walks in organic circles, occasionally poking its head above the watery depths of Blix’s ostinato haze, keeping an eye trained “Over Birkerot.” In this punchier setting, Rypdal keeps his feet planted amid a chain of horn blasts (think Hans Zimmer’s Inception soundtrack on a smaller scale). His cathartic rock-out midway through is a chance to let hair fly and pulls open the ribbon of “Fare Well.” Along with the final “Ballade,” it finds the musicians in languid suspension, crossing vibraphone-like paths toward elegiac destinations. It may feel blinding, but we can be sure this light comes to us by the force of a distant hope.

Rypdal has an incisive way of building anticipation, of dropping his solos at the most carefully thought-out points, his guitar an endless book of codas. Like the photo that graces its cover, Odyssey captures the life of a nomadic musician in candid monochrome. And while the album had been reissued on CD prior to this New & Old Masters set, the 24-minute “Rolling Stone” sadly did not survive that first digital makeover. An organ-infused underwater symphony of legendary status, its primal bass line and whammy bar ornaments flow like a meeting between Bill Laswell and Robin Guthrie before bringing on the album’s most rock-oriented developments. It also charts Rypdal in a pivotal moment of self-discovery where his tone began to coalesce into the sound for which he has come to be known. What a treasure to have in restored form.

As if this weren’t already enough to celebrate, ECM has gone above and beyond with another gem from the archives:

Unfinished Highballs
Recorded June 1976 by Swedish Radio, Estrad, Södertälje
Recording producer: Bosse Broberg
Engineer: Ola Kejving

This commissioned radio performance from 1976 features a streamlined Odyssey band (sans Sunde) fronting the 15-piece Swedish Radio Jazz Group. At under four minutes, the title track might blow by like the foreword to a novel were it not for its sheer theatricality. Rypdal’s vision cuts the darkness with a film projector’s eye, and blends into the Matterhorn bass of “The Golden Eye.” Icy synths challenge the thaw of Blix’s electric piano as fiery horns uncurl their tongues from the firmament and lick the snowcapped mountains of an unbridled story. Rypdal lifts this image skyward on waxen wings, which, unlike those of Icarus, are impervious to the light on which they feed. Next on this spacy ride is “Scarlet Mistress.” At once sharpened by muted trumpet and rounded by swinging textures, it gives wide relief to Rypdal’s laser etchings. One feels in its background the kick of eras when music’s enervation thrived in proportion to the harshness of its sociopolitical climate, so that the clubs of the 20s and 30s resurrect themselves and dance their ghostly dance. The soprano returns for a spell, for all a moonbeam peeking out from the clouds into a well of chords that pull us into “Dawn.” Melodies unwind, each a snake wrapped around the wrist of a god who whips it free into the glittering sky. Some enticing bass work dances amid Rypdal’s shimmers of water-harp enchantment, lowering us on a fishhook into the depths of “Dine And Dance To The Music Of The Waves,” in which sitar-like sounds pave a Nazca runway for the soprano’s grand coverage of worldly joy. Christiansen is the contortionist’s backbone of “Talking Back.” Sporting also high-flying reeds from Lennart Åberg and Ulf Andersson, its attunement is downright symbiotic. A real highlight. And speaking of which, where else to end but in “Bright Lights – Big City,” closing out the set on a signature dronescape.

With such a full sense of architecture to explore, it’s no wonder this newly unearthed companion has held its shape. In elevating the big band to a level of orchestral aliveness so rarely achieved, Rypdal has left a mark that is not only indelible, but also inimitable. With a nostalgic sound that distinguishes so much of ECM’s output from the decade, Odyssey – In Studio & In Concert shares the pedestal with Keith Jarrett’s Sleeper as release event of the year.

<< Eberhard Weber: Yellow Fields (ECM 1066)
>> Kenny Wheeler: Gnu High (ECM 1069)

 

Marcin Wasilewski Trio: Faithful (ECM 2208)

| Tyran Grillo

Marcin Wasilewski Trio
Faithful

Marcin Wasilewski piano
Slawomir Kurkiewicz double-bass
Michal Miskiewicz drums
Recorded August 2010, Auditorio Radiotelevisione svizzera, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Technical Assistant: Marco Strigl (RSI)
Produced by Manfred Eicher

For its third ECM outing, the Marcin Wasilewski Trio expands the precious spaces delineated to such patient effect on TRIO and January. A pianist of uncommon insight, Wasilewski brings out the minimal best in bassist Slawomir Kurkiewicz and drummer Michal Miskiewicz, who in turn inspire reflections on those keys that might not otherwise reveal themselves in solitude. Together, they plant the seed of the album’s ever-expanding flower with a curious opener: “An den kleinen Radioapparat.” This song, by German composer Hanns Eisler (so vivaciously immortalized in Heiner Goebbels’s tribute), is meant to evoke the voices of radio, which haunt the now wordless protagonist in exile. After a 4.5-minute wait at this remote station of smooth and translucent contours, we are welcomed aboard the “Night Train To You.” The first of five Wasilewski tunes, its landscapes bleed watercolor beyond our window. We feel at home somehow, despite being so far from it. Yet with such attentive passengers sharing our car, how could it be otherwise? Their erudition is so fully ingrained into the surroundings that they are free to jump on and off these tracks at will, laying their own along the way. A riffling snare pulls us aside and whispers timetables into our ears, while Kurkiewicz supplies the dimly lit lanterns, the art deco screens, and lavish accoutrements of an Orient Express dining car. If we are the serviettes folded so neatly beside those empty plates, then the lush cut of the title track is the main course that awaits our dabbing. Shingled wave lines on the shore are the language of this Ornette Coleman classic, constantly redrawn to the rhythm of the tide. Which is very much like the flip-flopping of rubato and steady cells in “Mosaic,” also by Wasilewski. The rhythm section’s current polishes our ears to the smoothness of river-rolled stones, culminating in a sparkling waterfall finish. The long exhalation of “Ballad Of The Sad Young Man” follows. Its liberation of youthful fears and more mature reflections make for an utterly captivating experience. Then again, the tenderness of “Oz Guizos” (by Brazilian composer Hermeto Pascoal) makes the last feel like sandpaper in comparison, standing as one of the gentlest and most heart-stilling pieces in the ECM catalogue. Its heartbreak drips like rain from leaves after a quiet storm. The somber piano intro of “Song For Świrek” leads us into the album’s grooviest execution. Written by Wasilewski in memory of Marek Świerkowski, a close friend of the trio, its Ferris wheel pace turns skyward with the breadth of a hang glider. Miskiewicz caresses his kit, appropriately enough, as if it were in need of healing. The pianist’s final offering is “Woke Up In The Desert,” indeed a haze, a dream, a sun pressed into the scrapbook of the sky. Paul Bley’s “Big Foot” finds itself duly revived since its first label appearance on Paul Bley with Gary Peacock. The lively sasquatch of a solo from Kurkiewicz mixes wonderfully with the cameraman’s excitement in the piano. A true delight that reveals also superb detail in the drumming. Wasilewski ends things with his “Lugano Lake,” a protracted gaze through the studio window from one who would rather leave the condensation intact and examine every bead of upturned scenery as it drips into the proportion of something true.

Faithful represents a new direction. It favors protracted treatments and heightened sensitivity. The trio plays as it breathes, knowing just when to pause before moving on. Particularly well recorded, with just the right balance of intimacy and the infinity beyond it, it lives in soft focus. If you wish to know to whom they are being faithful, you need only turn the CD over and look at your reflection.

(To hear samples of Faithful, click here.)

Gianluigi Trovesi and Gianni Coscia: Frère Jacques – Round about Offenbach (ECM 2217)

| Tyran Grillo

Frère Jacques – Round about Offenbach

Gianluigi Trovesi piccolo and alto clarinets
Gianni Coscia accordion
Recorded January 21-23 and March 2-4, 2009, Centro Civico Musicale Sant’Anna, Perugia
Engineer: Francesco Ciarfuglia
Produced by Manfred Eicher

In search of Brother Jacques, Mr. Offenbach, the great iconoclast, composer of operettas and wound-bringer to discerning classical minds. Our guides, multi-reedist Gianluigi Trovesi and accordionist Gianni Coscia. The itinerary destroys borders, forges new ones in their wake, and takes every path with more than a grain of salt. The melodies take on an ember glow, gesticulating in the manner of an oil painter’s brush and leaving behind a portrait that is offering and caricature in one. We stumble and marvel at what impedes our feet, knowing that we can only sit this one out and accept the frivolity of its passage. It is the pageant, and we the hapless spectators, ears sharpened to the whim of interpretation.

Scholar Heather Hadlock writes of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann as a “death-utterance,” so concerned is his only (and unfinished) opera with death and its many reflections, to say nothing of its emergence from the pen of a dying man himself. In the course of the work, Offenbach “reviews his own compositional past, drawing its various elements into a musico-dramatic kaleidoscope.” And so, Hadlock concludes, we might better see it as “undead,” for the narrator lives and speaks on even after his symbolic passing. Doubtless, the listener will find in Trovesi and Coscia’s striking reinventions a death-defying vivaciousness on par with their sources. Breath and bellows jump from their digital oven like myriad gingerbread men, running nakedly and wittily through Hoffmann with all the requisite stagecraft such activity would require to convince us of its aliveness. Fitting, too, is the “Epilogue” drawn from the same, which ends the album on a funereal pitch.

Most of what precedes it, however, seats us at a banquet table of delights. The four opéras bouffes—operettas rich in parody and farce named for the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens at which Offenbach premiered them, if not the other way around—sampled here come out of a particularly fruitful tenure, during which time the composer produced some of his most popular work. Of La belle Hélène (1864), La vie parisienne (1866), La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867), La Périchole (1868), he quipped most characteristically, “I am certainly the Father, but together they are the Son and the Wholly Spirited.” Trovesi and Coscia are more than happy to toss these ingredients almost cartoonishly in their kitchen. With herbs and stalks a-flying, they include whatever comes to mind in the largest pot they can find, only to ladle the resulting concoction with butler-like care into our bowls. It’s all we can do as their guests to not dip our spoons in unison, and join in the after-dinner dancing into which the sheer joy of these flavors bids us welcome.

To be sure, these provide a rich and complementary tasting experience. The truffle of Trovesi’s alto clarinet blends into Coscia’s creamy leeks, each enhancing the other to infinite effect. La vie parisienne provides some of the album’s maddest brilliance, ambulating like feet on a mission to stir up gossip in the village square. From Mozartian prances to fervent declarations, the remainder flies. Yet it is in the improvisatory hands of our fantastic duo where lie the deepest treasures. Among them are the vivid gems of “Tangoffenbach” and “Dedicated to Hélène and her little birds,” each an aperitif of smoothest finish. These are monologues that sing and move, bringing shadow to can-can, and lipstick to statues.

This is a diarist’s playbook, a sincere exploration of passion and obsession that not only pays tribute to but also transcends its namesake, all the while caging the spark of creativity in action. What’s left is an affirmation…and a smile.

Bjørnstad/Darling/Rypdal/Christensen: The Sea II (ECM 1633)

| Tyran Grillo

The Sea II

Ketil Bjørnstad piano
David Darling cello
 Terje Rypdal guitars
Jon Christensen drums
Recorded December 1996 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

If The Sea was a sweeping journey along the surface of its namesake, then this sequel is a plunge into its darkest depths. With the focus of an underwater camera, Ketil Bjørnstad and his peerless group render visible entire worlds we would otherwise never have known. Unlike its predecessor, The Sea II unfolds its map in 10 titled sections, each a different island strung along a melancholy chain. Cellist David darling joins the pianist for the introductory “Lalia.” In so doing, he carries on the sentiments they so beautifully wove together on The River, the chronological and elemental link between the two seas. A voyage in and of itself, it emotes in all directions until guitarist Terje Rypdal brings forth his blade in “Outward Bound.” Jon Christensen’s orchestral drumming is the only reminder of land to be found as we approach the sandy floor. And while Darling does crest a wave in “Brand,” holding fast to boxes from a forgotten shipwreck, within those boxes lie innumerable others. Rypdal rockets off into the night, where more water awaits him as he jumps into that great river in the sky. Anchorage returns in “The Mother,” its quivering arcs the salve for a wounded heart. “Song For A Planet” takes a solemn look at our own, settling into the album’s most understated cradle. Darling and Bjørnstad are simply transcendent on this duo track, as they are on the forlorn “Agnes” and “December,” the latter an ode to the month in which the album was so sensitively recorded. All three speak to the astonishment of their craft. “Mime” is Rypdal’s time to break into the current, a veritable shaft of sunlight lassoed to a dolphin’s fin, while“South” shuffles to the beat of Christensen’s drum, ever detailed and sincere, as Rypdal plies the ether with inquiries of rain and fertility.

This is music to swim in, to touch and be touched by. Don’t let it leave you dry.

<< Stephan Micus: The Garden Of Mirrors (ECM 1632)
>> Charles Lloyd: Canto (ECM 1635)

Stephan Micus: The Garden Of Mirrors (ECM 1632)

| Tyran Grillo

Stephan Micus
The Garden Of Mirrors

Stephan Micus voice, steeldrums, sinding, shakuhachi, suling, nay, tin whistles, percussion
Recorded 1995-96 at MCM Studios

Just as one look at the many instruments Stephan Micus plays is sure to impress, so too does one experience of what he produces with them dispel arbitrary interest in those means. Music flows from his fingertips in such an organic way that the source catches light in all of us. Nothing feels out of place. It’s worth noting, however, that The Garden Of Mirrors makes especial use of that most intuitive instrument of all: the human voice. Like water in sunset, Micus’s wordless songs collect light-years of travel along the glittering surface of their multiplication. Twenty such voices manifest themselves first in “Earth.” Accompanied by the bolombatto, an African gut-stringed harp, this world traveler speaks to the very marrow of life. A binary star leaves his lips, the being to our nonbeing. These twins become triplets, and so forth, until the galaxy is alive in a choir whose rhythms are the stuff that binds. “Violeta” and “Night Circles” exchange the bolombatto for its hemp-stringed cousin, the sinding, melting into a future where hope may breathe like an autumnal wind through leaves. Dry and crackling fields shape syllables with the ferocity of a linguist. Vocal flocks outline the sky in chalk, coloring it in like the white of a giant eye. Veins become songs. These become the world. “Passing Cloud” bands steel drums, two sinding, and shakuhachi for a sound at once vapor-like and heavy as soil. Those who are content see in it animals, trees, and faces, while others see sighs, depressions, and hardships. For “Flowers In Chaos” we get a coterie of 22 suling (Indonesian bamboo ring flutes), dispelling that very cloud with tales of earthly things. “In The High Valleys” is the album’s most insightful contemplation. In its intimate pairing of sinding and voice, it moves, to reference an album title of the Alial Straa, in a lumbering intransitive dream, and would seem to invoke the origin myth of the jazz bass. “Gates Of Fire” marks its passage with ashen footprints, bringing atonement in circular motions, each a brand on the side of a mountain. “Mad Bird” is a living solo for Irish tin whistle that traverses its own boundaries in search of landing, for life on the wing desires stillness. This singles out the final “Words Of Truth,” where the breath of life courses through six shakuhachi in self-reflective bliss. It is the sailor and his reflection, the storm and its rainbow, caressing the shores of a fading continent, of which we are the only inhabitants left standing.

<< Arild Andersen: Hyperborean (ECM 1631)
>> Bjørnstad/Darling/Rypdal/Christensen: The Sea II (ECM 1633)

Cain/Epstein/Alessi: Circa (ECM 1622)

| Tyran Grillo

Circa

Michael Cain piano
Peter Epstein soprano and tenor saxophones
Ralph Alessi trumpet
Recorded August 1996 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Having heard Michael Cain through his associations with Jack DeJohnette, but not his session mates, avant-garde saxophonist Peter Epstein and trumpeter Ralph Alessi, I went into this album blind and emerged fully sighted. The influence of Charlie Haden, under whom the latter two both studied, lingers in “Ped Cruc” and “Egg,” each of which brings a watery current to the album’s classically inflected aesthetic, as well as in “The Suchness Of Dory Philpott” (a John Surman-inspired title if there ever was one). The soprano’s gorgeous sustains carry over into the title track, which, changing shape like a bubble on the wind, walks a fine edge between script and adlib. This same balance percolates through “Siegfried And Roy” and its later companion, “And Their White Tigers.” Both linger like an aftertaste, casting nets toward elusive memories of the night before. More postmodern meditations await us in “Social Drones” and “Top O’ The Dunes,” for which the trio offers tapas portions of alienation and playful distance. In such a context, humor retains a certain depth of hue, as realized in “Miss M.” Here more than elsewhere, the two horns dance, two birds of a feather, from branch to branch while the piano preens their nest in wait. What begins as a simple tune in unison turns into an intense free-for-all: the session’s highlight by far, set against the caresses of “Red Rock Rain” and earthen mixtures of staggered harmonies and pointillist speech acts in “Marché.”

Fans of Oregon and ECM’s earlier chamber jazz experiments (Gallery and the like) should feel right at home here. Newcomers, perhaps even more so.

<< Jean Barraqué: Sonate pour piano (ECM 1621 NS)
>> John Abercrombie Trio: Tactics (ECM 1623)

Joe Maneri Quartet: In Full Cry (ECM 1617)

| Tyran Grillo

Joe Maneri Quartet
In Full Cry

Joe Maneri clarinet, alto and tenor saxophones, piano
Mat Maneri six-string electric violin
John Lockwood double-bass
Randy Peterson drums, percussion
Recorded June 1996 at Hardstudios, Winterthur
Engineer: Martin Pearson
Produced by Steve Lake

It’s safe to say that the work of improviser Joe Maneri and his son Mat, whose combination of acoustic reeds and electric strings baffled and astonished listeners in turn on Three Men Walking, is as legendary as it is underappreciated. For that ECM debut, they swabbed the deck with guitarist Joe Morris, whose likeminded spirit never once compromised the duo’s slippery needlework. Here they meld minds with bassist John Lockwood and drummer Randy Peterson. Vivid idiosyncrasies abound. So much so that, more than microtonal, the music is multilingual. Borrowing from blues, free jazz, 12-tone serialism, chamber music, and another indefinable source, the sounds that issue from this quartet span centuries and continents of influence. While perhaps unsettling in isolation, as part of a musical worldview these languages shine with a boggling fluency of translation. The album’s title, then, is something of a mission statement.

Then again, so are the titles of every song therein. For indeed, these instantaneous introspections are bursting with the urges of songcraft. We hear this from track the first. “Coarser And Finer” is, like sandpaper grit, an adhesive and shaping tool, rounding lyrical beginnings to a smile. An agile clarinet finds purchase in “Tenderly” and “Nobody Knows,” the latter one of two spirituals to open their eyes to this wilting landscape. Its lines find barest intimation in that burnished reed and condense into the arresting falter of Peterson’s bangers and mash. Joe warbles like a bird gnawing at is own branch until he falls, begging with feet extended and wings clipped. “Motherless Child” plummets that bird like a seed for future trees. Such distortions breathe in the shadow of what any by-the-book version might romp through. Performers and subject hold each other so tightly that they pass through one another. Rather than make something new of traditions and standards, these sages peel back the many added layers and chart the veins beneath to find something essential to their persistence.

We’re taken also “Outside The Dance Hall,” a space where frenzy and madness stick like the residue of abandoned presentiment, and on through the primordial soup of “A Kind Of Birth,” in which Mat’s violin swims in search of “The Seed And All.” This blistering whisper, if not a whispering blister, carries forth the dreams of elders made new in puppet form, an intimate marionette for whom the bell sings fitfully. “Pulling The Boat In” is the swan song of a warped unicorn, writhing under the title track’s gravid thumb—only the belly of this beast is quiet and self-reflective. “Shaw Was A Good Man, Peewee” is the tapeworm’s song, ribboned with guilty pleasure; “Lift” a puff of air from puerile lips, cackling as if on slowed-down tape. As if this weren’t enough to whet our appetites, this outing ends like the last with a piano solo. Now protracted and exploratory, it wrenches from Duke Ellington’s “Prelude To A Kiss” a spectrum of shades. In so acknowledging his compositional roots, he leaves us dangling in pursuit of a drop that never speaks.

Four brains, eight hands, infinite secrets.

<< Dino Saluzzi: Cité de la Musique (ECM 1616)
>> Heinz Holliger: Lieder ohne Worte (ECM 1618 NS)