Jazz

Gary Burton: Seven Songs For Quartet And Chamber Orchestra (ECM 1040)

| Tyran Grillo

1040 X

Gary Burton
Seven Songs For Quartet And Chamber Orchestra

Gary Burton vibraharp
Michael Goodrick guitar
Steve Swallow bass
Ted Seibs drums
NDR-Symphony Orchestra
Michael Gibbs conductor
Recorded December 1973 in Hamburg
Engineer: H. Ruete
Produced by Manfred Eicher

If one were to draw a line between the ensemble aesthetics of Eberhard Weber and Keith Jarrett, then one might plot the compositions of orchestral jazz legend Mike Gibbs somewhere along the way. Born in 1937 in what was then Southern Rhodesia, and a graduate of Boston’s Berklee College of Music, Gibbs has laid down a musical path as diverse as his travels. On Seven Songs for Chamber Orchestra, one gains vision of a mind looking not so much to cross over into uncharted waters as to expand the inclusivity of jazz’s already broad topography. At the heart of this project is Gibbs’s most famous student, the inimitable Gary Burton, who presents a lovingly realized program of his mentor’s own design. “Nocturne Vulgaire” sets the album’s plaintive tone with a groundswell of strings, into which Burton drops his mercurial sound. This delicate blend of mallets and bows continues unabated in “Arise, Her Eyes” (Steve Swallow), the only non-Gibbs number on the album. Mick Goodrick’s steady strums and Ted Seibs’s cymbal-heavy drumming make the most of the tender “Throb,” as Burton’s vibes glow like phosphorescent blood in the piece’s ambulatory body. “By Way Of A Preface” spins the album’s densest song. Its abstract beginnings carry over into a gorgeously perpetual solo from Goodrick, while Swallow makes his memorable mark in the pensive confines of “Phases.” The vast open fields that underlie “The Rain Before It Falls” give way to the chromatic wonders of “Three,” in which Burton and Goodrick’s relays emerge with all the inevitability of a final word.

This is a dream album for admirers of both Burton and Weber, combining as it does the former’s dulcet precision and the latter’s lush arrangements, and is therefore well worth tracking down (a CD-reissue is long overdue). Burton’s ability to carry a tune to fruition is only enhanced by Gibbs’s affected settings, which hardly make a dent in their emotional reserves. If jazz is about discovering the integrity of every lifted voice, then certainly Seven Songs rises from its murky waters with just a few of many unheard treasures.

<< Dave Liebman: Lookout Farm (ECM 1039)
>> Jan Garbarek: Witchi-Tai-To (ECM 1041)

Dave Liebman: Lookout Farm (ECM 1039)

| Tyran Grillo

ECM 1039

Dave Liebman
Lookout Farm

Dave Liebman soprano, tenor saxes, alto c flute
Richard Beirach electric, acoustic piano
Frank Tusa electric, acoustic bass
Jeff Williams drums
John Abercrombie acoustic, electric guitar
Armen Halburian percussion
Don Alias congas, bongos
Badal Roy tablas
Steve Sattan tamburine, cowbell
Eleana Sternberg voice
Recorded October 10/11, 1973 at Generation Sound Studios
Engineer: Tony May
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Saxophonist, flutist, and all-around wunderkind Dave Liebman—who only last year received an NEA Jazz Masters lifetime achievement award for his tireless efforts in music and instruction—made his ECM debut with Lookout Farm, his first of only two albums for producer Manfred Eicher as leader (the other being the enthralling Drum Ode; he would also guest on Steve Swallow’s Home some six years later) and a trendsetter for fledgling improvisers seeking their voices in the seventies and beyond. Here, he is joined by a telepathic ensemble that includes regulars Richie Beirach and John Abercrombie, in addition to a pointed percussion section. Abercrombie’s quasi-flamenco arpeggios open the evocative “Pablo’s Story.” Liebman leads in on flute, establishing an intimate flywheel from which is spun a most democratic mosaic of intersections, solos, and rhythmic ecstasy. Liebman (switching to soprano sax) and Beirach provide the skeleton of the track’s flexible physiology. An intuitive pattern of tension and release ensues, thus maintaining a solid unity throughout. Frank Tusa’s understated yet richly emotive bass lines bring out a vital inner depth, and one can hardly remain static during the hand-drummed interlude. “Sam’s Float” introduces a more hardened sound, cut to the core by Leibman’s alto squeals and Abercrombie’s biting electricity. The 24-minute “M.D./Lookout Farm” closes this humble set of three. The first half turns down the lights with its elegiac piano and tender reeds, while the title half transports us with Jeff Williams’s downright flammable drumming.

A spectacular sense of curiosity would seem to be de rigueur in Liebman territory, its infectiousness inescapable. This is a milestone album, not only for the liberating musicianship and timeless sounds, but also for its production value. With Lookout Farm, Eicher channeled the reverberant specter that has haunted the label’s sound ever since, and with it an entirely new way of listening emerged.

A pilgrimage for the ECM enthusiast.

<< Art Lande/Jan Garbarek: Red Lanta (ECM 1038)
>> Gary Burton: Seven Songs For Quartet And Chamber Orchestra (ECM 1040)

Terje Rypdal: What Comes After (ECM 1031)

| Tyran Grillo

ECM 1031

Terje Rypdal
What Comes After

Terje Rypdal guitars, flute
Barre Phillips basses
Jon Christensen percussion, organ
Erik Niord Larsen oboe, English horn
Sveinung Hovensjø electric bass
Recorded August 7/8, 1973 at Arne Bendiksen Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Terje Rypdal’s What Comes After, his second for ECM as frontman, is more about what came before. An exquisite diversion from the dustier billows of his later work, it charts much of the same territory as its self-titled predecessor, only this time with a tighter supporting roster. Sveinung Hovensjø lays down the dominant bass line that is “Bend It,” an atmospheric 10-minute opener that lulls us into its nocturnal crawl. The bowed bass of Barre Phillips and Jon Christensen’s subtle drum work adorn long-form improvisations from Rypdal as he wrenches out an ever-changing dialogue from the repetitive core. “Yearning” reprises the sinewy oboe (played here by Erik Niord Larsen) of Rypdal’s self-titled effort and features him in a rare acoustic turn. The jangly percussion makes for a mystical, if all too brief, experience. The see-sawing melodies and tender bass solo of “Icing” extend this feeling of isolation and memory before the delicate rimshot of the title track slinks metronomically through Rypdal’s mounting ruminations. “Séjours” marks the oboe’s standout return in one of the album’s most thoroughly realized tracks, while “Back Of J.” leaves us with a sparse final word, Rypdal unplugged and unhurried.

Albums like this allow us to appreciate the ways in which artists grow. ECM’s consummate electric guitarist has worn many hats, and perhaps none so many as in his formative years. Here, he feeds off his surroundings, even as he strays in equally fruitful directions, always harboring an innate awareness of where he is grounded. A wonderful place to start for initiates and strangers alike.

<< Gary Burton: The New Quartet (ECM 1030)
>> Ralph Towner: Diary (ECM 1032)

Jan Garbarek: Triptykon (ECM 1029)

| Tyran Grillo

ECM 1029

Jan Garbrek
Triptykon

Jan Garbarek soprano, tenor and bass saxophones, flute
Arild Andersen bass
Edward Vesala percussion
Recorded November 8, 1972 at Arne Bendiksen Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Jan Garbarek’s third album for ECM is a free, though by no means easy, trek through indeterminate territories. “Rim” breaks into light with the mournful saxophonic cries that thread the entire set. Arild Andersen dots Garbarek’s auditory cloth with almost vocal ink stains. We find Garbarek in a uniquely agitated mode, showing both great restraint and willful shifting in his performance. This is an arresting track, as sublimely depressing as it is soulful. The title denotes “frost” in Norwegian, and describes Edward Vesala’s icy percussion to a T. In “Selje,” Garbarek opts for a wooden flute against a thawed backdrop of bass and wind chime-like glockenspiel: a mystical aside to an otherwise forward projection.

“J.E.V.” breaks from the album’s expansive palette with a more flatly recorded sax intro. The appearance of bass and drums merely underlines the music’s hesitancy, at once assured and unaware of its future paths. “Sang” (Chant) is another subdued interlude, featuring a bass sax caught in a silken web of percussion and bass. The title track unravels like a herding song picked apart piece by piece, its remnants scattered along the base of a low mountain to the tune of an intriguing bass solo. “Etu Hei!” screeches and pounds its way into being before the Norwegian folk song “Bruremarsj” is rendered in a tense bondage of sax and bowed bass, closing with a flutter of wing beats in the final drum break.

In spite of its many abstractions, Triptykon is rife with melody and movement. It’s almost as if a distant relative were singing traditional tunes that everyone else in the family has forgotten. Though drunk with nostalgia and slurred speech, his voice is so genuine that one can hardly fault him for straying a bit off the beaten path. With repeated listenings, one begins to distinguish such thematic material from its improvised surroundings, thereby rendering any challenges this album sets before us much deeper in their returns.

<< Paul Motian: Conception Vessel (ECM 1028)
>> Gary Burton: The New Quartet (ECM 1030)

Ralph Towner with Glen Moore: Trios/Solos (ECM 1025)

| Tyran Grillo

ECM 1025

Ralph Towner with Glen Moore
Trios/Solos

Ralph Towner guitar, piano
Glen Moore bass
Paul McCandless oboe
Collin Walcott tabla
Recorded November 27/28, 1972 at Sound Ideas Studio, New York City
Engineer: George Klabin
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Essentially an Oregon album under a different name, Trios/Solos consists mainly of Ralph Towner originals culled from the group’s Vanguard sessions. The opening “Brujo” is anchored by Towner’s twelve mighty strings and the late Collin Walcott’s tabla stylings, leaving a winding crevice through which Glen Moore works his whimsical bass. “Noctuary” features Paul McCandless on oboe, soaring loosely through the Towner/Moore fulcrum before the trio ties itself into a tightly improvised not. The Bill Evans tune “Re: Person I Knew” stands out in a gorgeous rendition. Towner doubles on piano and 12-string—laying down a sound that would soon crystallize into his classic ECM album Solstice—as Moore lurks in the background. “Raven’s Wood” continues the same configuration, only this time with nylon, darkening its pastoral modality with nocturnal visions.

Despite the intimate wonders of these trios, the album’s titular solos abound with some of its most focused and furthest-reaching moments. Moore’s “A Belt Of Asteroids” is a curious one at that. Seeming at first out of place in its present company, it carefully peels open the album’s outer layers with every twang. The remainders feature Towner doing what he does best. Take the compact “Suite: 3×12,” a carefully thought out composition in which his palpable picking and love for harmonics shines through at every turn, not to mention his consistently progressive energy. The last of the three movements is more aggressive in its attack and wound around a precise rhythmic core. “Winter Light” is heavily steeped in 6-string nostalgia, lonely but content in its solitude. “1×12” is, by contrast, a run along a blazing trail. Lastly, we have “Reach Me, Friend,” a snapshot of expectation that breathes with audible resolve.

As the driving force behind the album, Towner’s technique is mellifluous as usual, forging an aerial sound that constantly surveys the untouched lakes shimmering below like mirrors in the brilliance of his execution. Despite the lush performances throughout, the imagery is all so viscerally sere. And while there is no danger in what we see, there remains a threat unseen, lingering just beyond the horizon, quelled only by the arrival of the morning sun.

<< Gary Burton/Chick Corea: Crystal Silence (ECM 1024)
>> Stanley Cowell Trio: Illusion Suite (ECM 1026)

Keith Jarrett/Jack DeJohnette: Ruta and Daitya (ECM 1021)

| Tyran Grillo

ECM 1021

Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette
Ruta and Daitya

Keith Jarrett piano, electric piano, organ, flute
Jack DeJohnette drums, percussion
Recorded May 1971 at Sunset Studios, Los Angeles
Engineers: Rapp/Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette, who continue their formidable partnership to this day, join forces for an early and unique collaboration. This being the tail end of Jarrett’s electric period with Miles Davis, Ruta and Daitya marks an archivally important transition into his imminent acoustic pilgrimages. “Overture Communion” captures our attention from the start with a funky, wah-wahed electric piano, warmly guiding us into the album’s exciting, yet somehow always plaintive world. The title track shakes things up with a spate of hand percussion as Jarrett flutes a more abstract improvisation than the one that began the album, though to no less captivating effect. When Jarrett abandons flute for piano, a markedly different shape brands itself into the foreground. In doing so, something gets obscured. It’s not that instruments from such seemingly disparate geographies cannot tread the same path, but simply that they don’t speak to each other as complementarily. Thankfully, Jarrett’s return to flute, this time of bamboo variety, puts us right back into the conversation. DeJohnette takes up a standard drum kit for “All We Got,” a cut that runs around in circles, even as it rouses us with its gospel-infused aesthetic. Jarrett finds himself acoustically redrawn in “Sounds of Peru.” Piano and hand drums work magically this time around as the duo hones further the groove it has been searching for. Jarrett opens up his playing, giving DeJohnette a wider berth in which to lose himself. No longer do the drums skirt the periphery, but frolic in the territory proper. There is even what amounts to a percussion solo as Jarrett coos in the background with delight, thus preparing him for an inspired passage that grinds bass notes in counterpoint to his running right hand. In “Algeria,” Jarrett sings into the flute again, leaving me to wonder why we don’t hear him on the instrument more often, though perhaps its linearity is somewhat limiting to a musician with such expansive hands (hence, his propensity for polyphonic playing). “You Know, You Know” brings us full circle to the electric piano for a more laid-back coolness before we end with “Pastel Morning,” a beautiful meditation on the electric piano. In the absence of punchy distortion, it sounds almost like a vibraphone, its gentler capacities allowed to float of their own accord.

The album’s title is a curious one, and offers at best a rather opaque X-ray of the conceptual skeleton it sheathes. Ruta and Daitya refer to two island-continents, remnants of the second cataclysm to befall the great island of Atlantis. Both were populated by races of titans, known as “Lords of the Dark Face” as a means of indicating their ties to black magic. If we are to believe Madame Blavatsky, who in her second volume of The Secret Doctrine outlines their genealogical significance in her mystical, albeit highly racialized, account of creation, the Egyptians inherited the cosmological legacy of the Ruta Atlanteans, as supposedly evidenced in the similarities of their Zodiacal beliefs. Whatever the origins, there is much to ponder in Ruta and Daitya. The sensitive pianism for which Jarrett is so renowned is in full evidence throughout, though for me his flute playing really sells the album. Jarrett proves himself more than adept and plays with an addictive sense of abandon. DeJohnette, meanwhile, enchants with a melodic approach to his kit, especially in his use of cymbals.

ECM 1021 LP
Original cover

This isn’t an album I would necessarily recommend to those just starting their Jarrett or ECM explorations. For what it is—a meeting of two consummate musical minds—its importance is a given. While perhaps not as consistently inventive as other likeminded projects (see, for example, the phenomenal Charles Lloyd/Billy Higgins effort Which Way Is East), it is certainly more hit than miss, and strikes this listener with the ambitions of its musicians’ reach every time.

<< Chick Corea: Piano Improvisations Vol. 2 (ECM 1020)
>> Chick Corea: Return To Forever (ECM 1022)

Circle: Paris Concert (ECM 1018/19)

| Tyran Grillo

ECM 1018_19

Circle
Paris Concert

Anthony Braxton reeds, percussion
Chick Corea piano
Dave Holland bass, cello
Barry Altschul percussion
Recorded February 21, 1971 at the Maison de l’O.R.T.F, Paris
Engineer: Jean Delron
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The short-lived Chick Corea outfit outdoes itself in this 1971 live recording. A delicate piano intro primes us for an extended rendition of Wayne Shorter’s “Nefertiti” to start. Once Braxton throws himself on top of incoming bass and drums, however, what began as contemplative awakening quickly turns into a spastic jaunt into more upbeat territory. The gnarled unity of the quartet paints in bold strokes, all the while flirting with total breakdown. Braxton’s perpetual motion and uncompromising tone make a superb tune out of a great one. “Song For The Newborn” gives Holland a moment in the spotlight. Swaddled in all the innocence of its title and bound by a mature sense of structure, this is an engaging interlude to the Braxton/Corea duet that follows. Corea’s frenetic style in the latter works its way through a host of rhythmic options before settling into a row of block chords. Braxton’s heady phrasing tears a page from the book of Coltrane, while his solitary diversions crackle with the urgency of a broken mirror, as yet unframed by the bastion of mundanity. Altschul delights in “Lookout Farm,” in which he dives headfirst into his percussive arsenal. The tinkling of icicles and cowbells in an open field give way to an extended solo, thus providing ample segue into “73 506 Kelvin 8,” a beautifully convoluted organism that could only come from the mind of Braxton. Below its cacophonous surface pulsates a vast network of instrumental veins, through which flows the passionate immediacy that is Circle’s lifeblood, and from which Holland’s rapture sings with detail and imagination. “Toy Room ­- Q&A” (Holland) boasts Corea in notably fine form, leaving plenty of elbowroom for Braxton to flex his reeds. The freer aesthetic crashes in on itself by the end, leaving us craving a familiar foothold. This, we get in the standard “No Greater Love,” capping things off with notable turns from all.

Corea busts out with some of his most captivating fingerwork, proving himself finely attuned to the mechanisms of his caravan at every rest stop along the way; Braxton’s “Pharaonic” sound titillates the ear; and one could hardly ask for a tighter rhythm section at one’s side. As a collective unit, Circle doesn’t so much make music out of as inhabit its raw melodic materials. This recording is a lasting testament to a vibrant formative period for ECM. The audience’s enthusiastic reactions give the listener the feeling of being present in the making of history.

<< Keith Jarrett: Facing You (ECM 1017)
>> Chick Corea: Piano Improvisations Vol. 2 (ECM 1020)

Heiner Goebbels: Ou bien le débarquement désastreux (ECM 1552)

| Tyran Grillo

Heiner Goebbels
Ou bien le débarquement désastreux

André Wilms voice
Sira Djebate vocals
Boubakar Djebate kora, vocals
Yves Robert trombone
Alexandre Meyer electric guitar, table-guitar, daxophone
Xavier Garcia keyboards, sampling and programming
Heiner Goebbels sampling and programming
Moussa Sissoko djembe
Recorded June 1994 at Studios De La Grande Armee, Paris

If we have entered into familiarity with these particular offices of nature, if they have acquired the chance to be born in the world, it isn’t merely so that we may offer anthropomorphically an account of this sensual pleasure, it is so that there may result from it a more serious co-naissance (being born together/knowing). Let’s go deeper then.
–Francis Ponge, Le Carnet du Bois de Pins (The Notebook of the Pine Wood)

Ou bien le débarquement désastreux (Or the hapless landing) is another intriguing entry in ECM’s growing Heiner Goebbels lexicon. As a piece intended for the stage, one gets only half the experience, if even that, on disc, though minimal scoring ensures that the text (all of it in French) remains absolute. In this regard, Ou bien… requires only one actor (André Wilms) in the narrative role, and represents a direction that Goebbels has now taken further with his recent Stifters Dinge, which has need of neither actors nor musicians, per se, and relies instead on mechanically controlled “performers,” with Goebbels as their brain.

The present composition is based on texts by Joseph Conrad (from his Congo Diary), playwright and frequent Goebbels collaborator Heiner Müller, and essayist/poet Francis Ponge (from the work epigraphed above). All of these texts intersect at the site of the forest, which emerges as the primary visual field in this postcolonial space. Goebbels ruthlessly combines Senegalese and “Western” musical strands. The former emerges as refined and anything but primitive, while the latter by turns titillates and grates on the ears with its aggressive tendencies. The vivid kora of Griot Boubakar Djebate is the album’s alpha and omega and cuts out, in negative image, a porous backdrop for otherwise opaque texts. The ensemble is completed by instruments both familiar (trombone, electric guitar, djembe, keyboard, and sampler) and not (such as the daxophone, an amplified piece of wood brought to life when a bow is drawn across it). Instrumental interludes are rendered with the rougher textures of guitar and croaking brass. Conversely, the kora cuts through with the smoothness of a scalpel, even if closer inspection reveals a handle with decades of violence burnished into its grooves. Conrad’s diaristic structure contributes to the underlying unease, so that Djebate’s glorious rendition of “Il eut du mal” lifts us only partially from its surface like a scab. The range of emotional registers is pure Goebbels. From the drone of “Dangoma” to the upbeat pastiche of “Haches, Couteaux, Tentacules” and the banal charm of “Le Soir,” this album carries us through a journey as didactic as it is self-destructive, so that by its end we are in a grove of shattered intentions and piecemeal recollections.

In reference to this piece, Rodney Milnes observes: “As in all melodrama there is a conflict between word and note: it is more difficult for the human brain to absorb the two when the words are not simply set to music.” This is precisely what one finds enacted through the colonial process, the mindset behind which seems to bleed through Ou bien…, regardless of whether one understands its texts or not. Such is Goebbels’s gift for evocation. Still, a lack of French knowledge or translations at hand, not to mention of a stage upon which to view the comportment of the work as a whole, gives us an album that is but one reflective facet of a larger crystalline whole. Ultimately, I don’t believe Goebbels so reductive as to reenact oppression through the encroachment of his own musical ideas upon the lineages he exploits therein. Rather, he is interested in the ways in which lingering traces of such oppression may be refashioned into a new mode of speech, one both painfully aware of its roots while also hopeful for an amalgamated future.

<< Stephan Micus: Athos (ECM 1551)
>> Surman/Krog/Rypdal/Storaas: Nordic Quartet (ECM 1553)

Keith Jarrett: In The Light (ECM 1033/34)

| Tyran Grillo

ECM 1033_34

Keith Jarrett
In The Light

Keith Jarrett piano, gong, percussion, conductor
String Section of the Südfunk Symphony Orchestra Stuttgart
Mladen Gutesha conductor
The American Brass Quintet
The Fritz Sonnleitner Quartet
Ralph Towner guitar
Willi Freivogel flute
Recorded 1973
Engineers: K. Rapp, M. Wieland, M. Scheuermann
Produced by Manfred Eicher and Keith Jarrett

One look at my other Keith Jarrett reviews is enough to confirm that I have been guilty of separating his skills as performer and improviser from those of his role as composer. After listening to an album such as In The Light, however, I begin to suspect that for him they are one and the same.

The lush flavors of Metamorphosis for flute and strings are a most substantial appetizer to the many courses that follow in this early foray into larger territories. Soloist Willi Freivogel soars through the orchestra’s empty skies with a free and easy charm, bringing a pastoral sound in which memory is more than recreated; it is relived. Jarrett’s balance of density and linearity speaks with the same sense of total concentration and calculated surrender to the melodic moment as his most admirable improvisations. Moods and techniques take sudden turns, as in a particularly inventive passage during which the members of the orchestra tap their instruments for a pointillist interlude. The album has its fair share of similarly expansive works, including the enchanting Short Piece For Guitar And Strings (with Ralph Towner on nylon), and the anthemic In The Cave, In The Light (pairing Jarrett on piano, gong, and percussion with orchestra). While the latter two never quite scale the heights of Metamorphosis, they are so distinctly realized that one is hard-pressed to make a case for such comparisons. A smattering of chamber works rounds out this ambitious double effort, of which the String Quartet is the most appealing. Its pseudo-neoclassical style is sharp, taut, and uplifting. Unfortunately, Crystal Moment for four celli and two trombones doesn’t work so much for me, and seems to meander from the album’s otherwise steady path. The Brass Quintet, on the other hand, is a wonderful hybrid of timbres and chameleonic styles. Two solo pieces, Fughata for Harpsichord and A Pagan Hymn (both played by Jarrett on piano), provide the sharpest angles in a gospel-Baroque pastiche.

Overall, the idiomatic slipperiness of In The Light keeps us on our toes and ensures that we never outstay our welcome in any given label. Though perhaps a daunting journey to take in one sitting, it is nevertheless a deep insight into one of contemporary music’s most fascinating figures. These orchestral projects are in some ways Jarrett’s most “experimental.” Then again, isn’t experimentation what music is all about?

<< Ralph Towner: Diary (ECM 1032)
>> Keith Jarrett: Solo Concerts Bremen/Lausanne (ECM 1035-37)