Vijay Iyer composer
Prashant Bhargava film director, editor
Anna George actor
Craig Marsden director of photography
International Contemporary Ensemble
Eric Lamb, Laura Jordan Cocks: flute, alto flute, piccolo
Joshua Rubin: clarinet, bass clarinet
Rebekah Heller: basoon, contrabasoon
Gareth Flowers, Amir Elsaffar: trumpet
Jennifer Curtis: violin
Kyle Armbrust: viola
Kivie Cahn-Lipman: cello
Cory Smythe: piano
Ross Karre: percussion
Tyshawn Sorey: percussion, drum set
Adam Sliwinski: conductor
Vijay Iyer: piano, electronics
Soundtrack produced by Vijay Iyer and Manfred Eicher.
Recorded live at Memorial Hall, UNC Chapel Hill, March 26, 2013
Engineer: Frank Martin/Media Production Associates
Live concert sound engineer: Levy Lorenzo
Additional recording at The Bunker Studio, April 20, 2014
Engineer: John Davis
Mixed at Avatar Studios, NYC by James Farber, Vijay Iyer, and Manfred Eicher
Assistant: Aki Nishimura
Additional engineering, editing, and consultation: Liberty Ellman

Ron Fricke’s 1992 classic Baraka endures as one of the most consummate examples of non-narrative cinema. Its montage of images from around the world was even more eclectic than the soundtrack that went along with it. But despite the many ceremonies, creative arts, and labors that Fricke documented—including death pyres and ritual baths in the river Ganges—he never captured the Hindu religious festival known as Holi. Had he done so, it might have looked something like Radhe Radhe.

Filmmaker Prashant Bhargava’s ode to this so-called “festival of colors” traces the eight-day celebration back to Mathura, mythic birthplace of the supreme deity Krishna and his lover (in the strongest sense) Radha. Hence the film’s title, a term of praise and greeting often exchanged in the streets of Mathura, where she is believed to be a gateway to true understanding of Krishna. Her power is a central theme, an explosion of devotion far more vivid than the human-made pigment sold on the streets in the weeks leading up to this cathartic event.

Given the film’s subtitle, “Rites of Holi,” and the fact that Holi is practiced in the spring may put one in mind of Igor Stravinsky. This is no coincidence. Although not a direct homage to Stravinsky, Radhe Radhe was the result of a commission for the 100th anniversary of the Russian composer’s Rite of Spring, and one of a dozen projects freshly created in its honor. It is still a ballet of sorts, not least of all for the dialogic contributions of Indian-American pianist Vijay Iyer. In a manner of speaking, he and Bhargava met halfway—the director boiling down over 30 hours of footage into a 35-minute film and the composer expanding molecular impressions into a fully integrated score—so that the finished product was a narrative duly rendered. Iyer’s task was to match Bhargava’s rhythms, taking the listener through what he calls a “series of energies.”

Bhargava first gained international attention with his debut feature Patang (The Kite) in 2011. That his roots grabbed their soil in hip-hop and graffiti art should come as no surprise, for his gifts of rhythm, poetry, and color were likeminded in their urban respect. But with Radhe Radhe he went further underground, mining deeper traditions of those same creative registers. The film is, then, as much a musical as it is a visual tour de force, building like a raga to near-ecstatic heights. Indeed, before a single image graces our retinas, Iyer’s pianism sets the stage over a dark title screen. Slight dissonances therein betray something of the chaos about to unfold, but obscure enough of it so that we might experience it anew, even in multiple viewings. Along with the young musicians of the International Contemporary Ensemble, Iyer creates a mood that is beautifully unsettling, and all the more organic for it.

The film’s first part, “Adoration,” builds its intimacies one stratum at a time. The stage is set in a misty landscape. We see only details: boatmen preparing for the days’ revelry, a bare back, a glimpse of braided hair. The streets then come to life as food vendors ready their meals and women wash their garments in the river. The soundtrack is restless, anticipatory. A cargo train passes by, as if to underscore the film’s narrative drive. More fragments: a face half-reflected in a mirror, candles burning on an altar, a gossamer veil. As crowds thicken and the dance begins, Iyer’s pianism brightens. Even the birds in the field seem to join in. Flute and brass contrast one another with purpose. Their notes flower and wither, changing focus like the lens that guides them. Strings and percussion add color streamers of their own as the iconic powder hits the air.

Part 2, “Transcendence,” puts further emphasis on Bhargava’s footage of an imaginary Radha played by actress Anna George. He spins from these scenes, shot in the US and woven throughout the film, a primal and sexual interplay that signals the true emergence of spring. It’s a bold move, as the director himself is first to admit in the DVD’s “Making Of” segment, but he wanted to bring that “everyday magic, that intimacy that we share as people to the narratives of the gods.” He believes that the push and pull of Radha and Krishna exists in all of us, as it does also in the increasingly inseparable relationship between sounds and scenarios. A trumpet, for example, works its melodic overlay during a long shot of Radha’s face, implying an environment far vaster than the immediate contrivance of the studio.

As the cinematography becomes more contemplative, the music subdues itself in solidarity. In the same way that Bhargava seems to have eyes in many places at once and flits between them by changing cognitive channels, so too does Iyer’s complementary switching take every movement into account. A sensual flowering of street noise enters the mix, as if bleeding of its own volition, leaving us wanting to shed our inhibitions and dive into that sea of color.

In May of 2015, Bhargava died at the age of 42 from cardiac arrest after a history of heart disease. But the tragedy of this death is so graciously balanced by the exuberance of his small yet vivid oeuvre that one can focus on the latter in a state of pure invigoration. In this respect, we do well to read Radhe Radhe in the spirit for which it was made. In a world where the rites of Holi have spread to unlikely corners (I witness its rainbowed aftereffects on my American university campus every year), it’s nice to know that one artist’s vision can bring us anytime to the source with just the press of a PLAY button.

(See this article as it originally appeared in RootsWorld online magazine here.)

Keith Jarrett: Creation (ECM 2450)

May 26, 2015 | Tyran Grillo

Keith Jarrett
Creation

Keith Jarrett piano
Produced by Keith Jarrett
Recorded April, May, June and July 2014
Engineers: Martin Pearson and Ryu Kawashima (Tokyo)
Mastered at MSM Studios by Christoph Stickel and Manfred Eicher
Executive Producer: Manfred Eicher

Keith Jarrett’s second of two recordings released in 2015 is his most recent vintage, and a first in his discography for being a compilation of solo improvisations handpicked by the pianist from concerts in Toronto, Tokyo, Paris, and Rome the year before. As with all of the best solo recordings, this one develops patiently and with a sense of something so grandiose yet so intimate—the universe in a drop of ocean—that it’s all one can do to stay afloat in the sheer expanse of it all. Then again, Jarrett offers these pieces with such solemnity that we cannot help but feel invited to share in their rituals as equal partners.

Part I opens in deepest pulse, notes circling around one another like magnets that cannot decide whether they are polar complements or opposites. During the unfolding, it becomes clear that Jarrett was ready to pick up right where he left off on Rio, unraveling time through heart and fingers. The plodding nature of its construction does nothing to obscure a filament of light, which is then singled out by the nostalgic purview of Part II. In a promotional interview with NPR’s Rachel Martin, one of a few marking his 70th birthday, Jarrett stressed his new role as producer: the creation of Creation was indeed his first attempt at sequencing. Once he had settled on the first track, this second one followed, and so on. If the emerging narrative feels intentional, it’s only because it has a will of its own.

Lyricism reigns in Part III, which sounds like every ballad you’ve never heard. Its clarity is also its mystery. That such a fully formed openness could crawl out of any human being is astonishing to consider—that is, unless you count the birth of a child, which may just be the only wonder in this world to surpass it. Part IV nourishes this theme of growth from infancy, tracing as it does the wide-eyed expression of new parenthood even as it prunes back the shadowy branches of mortality sprouting foliage overhead. As so often happens when these emotions become too concentrated to keep inside, Jarrett’s voice makes its tender emergences. “It’s potential limitlessness,” he says in the aforementioned interview of that singing. “My main job is listening.” And rightly so, for we may feel him listening as intently as we are to Part V, which helicopters to the ground like a flurry of maple seeds in summer before wiling away the heat under the shade of a less threatening tree. Impressions of the prairie, of undying wilderness and civilization in kind, intermingle with anthemic signatures until the piano seems an open font.

Part VI marks a turning point in the program from the merely soulful to the fully sacred. Its every hue is captured with archaeological precision before it is set free. As the album’s widest vista, it encompasses the fewest impulses, and only magnifies them to the point of such scope that they feel more populous than they are. Every rolling hill becomes a puff of dandelion before us, the dream of a gentle giant with no harm in its past…or future. Part VII chooses one path among many and follows it as far as it will go. The river’s flow of its desperation is strangely tempered by solitude and leads to the angular way station of Part VIII. Here the slumber is more fitful, but nevertheless unbroken by violence. Indeed, peace is the order of the day in the final Part IX, which by virtue of its placement is destined to speak in the language of departure.

With such an extensive archive as yet unrendered, one may no longer speak of “classics” in the plural when referencing Keith Jarrett’s output. It’s all part of one ongoing song to which our attention is as mandatory as breathing.

(To hear samples of Creation, click here.)

Mathias Eick: Midwest (ECM 2410)

May 26, 2015May 13, 2018 | Tyran Grillo

Mathias Eick
Midwest

Mathias Eick trumpet
Gjermund Larsen violin
Jon Balke piano
Mats Eilertsen double bass
Helge Norbakken percussion
Recorded May 2014 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

So many of ECM’s finest trumpeters also happen to be skilled travelers. Tomasz Stanko and Enrico Rava in particular have hopped the globe in search of inspiration, life experience, and musical expansion. Yet few, among the possible exceptions of Nils Petter Molvær and Per Jørgensen, have gone so deeply inward and emerged with such painstaking lyricism as Mathias Eick. Midwest was inspired by a North American tour, during which time Eick recalls feeling very homesick: “Then we reached the area called the Rural Midwest and I suddenly had the strange feeling that I was home. It occurred to me that some of the early settlers must have felt this way, when they looked at the rich soil of the plains and saw that this was wonderful land for farming. Parts of the Midwest remind me strongly of parts of Norway including the southeast of Norway where I grew up.” Even with this, and the migratory tunes that comprise this album, in mind, the journey on which we are led is far more psychic than geographic. Joining his caravan are violinist Gjermund Larsen (last heard on the Christian Wallumrød Ensemble’s Outstairs), pianist Jon Balke, bassist Mats Eilertsen, and percussionist Helge Norbakken: a continent unto themselves.

The word “lyrical” gets rehashed a lot to distinguish jazz that is “pretty” versus that which is “raw.” Yet no rule says that the two must be exclusive. In fact, Eick has forged just such an alloy on this album, and you can hear it in everything from his tone to his soulful interactions in and among the band. Eick has clearly worked hard to establish an identity on the trumpet, because we can hear it the moment he sounds his first note. In this vein the title track pans us into the emotional thick of things, blessing the land with the gentle rain of cymbals and the tilling of piano. Eick and Larsen set an album precedent by way of their give and take, threading the ether with a sound so lucid it’s almost dreamy. Larsen’s folk inflections do, in fact, make Midwest as much of what it is as its bandleader. Their harmonizing in “Hem” is just one example of this successful blend. The latter tune further epitomizes the sheer magnification of detail that has overlaid Eick’s playing and composing since his leader debut, The Door. More than ever, he is like the master photographer, who puts his eyeglass to every questionable grain and tinkers behind the scenes to get just the right emulsion before presenting the finished, developed image. That said, his pictures are often moving than still. Much of this movement can be found in either the emotional journeys at hand (cf. “March”) or in the contributions of individual musicians. Eilertsen pulses through “At Sea” like the power of recollection incarnate in one of two more straightforward thematic vehicles. The other, “Dakota,” also emphasizes the wonderment and space Balke brings to the palette, while Norbakken sends harmonic minnows into the periphery.

“Lost” is, along with the title tune, an emblematic one. Its evocation of slippage across space and time heightens Eick’s apparent dislocation even as it deepens his newfound connections to faraway soil. A lovely solo from Balke, nestled in a reed-bed of cymbals and bass, adds to the feeling. So, too, does “November,” by which we arrive at the bittersweet yet inevitable farewell, a taking stock of things learned and gained, those things long left behind and others soon to be, and still others waiting for return. It is the realization that the pleasure of going home is always darkened by the sadness of departure.

If Eick has so far crafted a distinct melodic solar system on ECM, Midwest is a galaxy unto itself. Fresh, spiraled, and classic to the core, it’s sure to be one of the label’s most enduring statements of all time.

(To hear samples of Midwest, click here.)

Jormin/Willemark/Nakagawa: Trees Of Light (ECM 2406)

May 26, 2015 | Tyran Grillo

Lena Willemark voice, fiddle and viola
Anders Jormin double bass
Karin Nakagawa 25-string koto
Recorded May 2013, Konstepidemin, Göteborg
Engineer: Johannes Lundberg
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher

Angels
Childangels
Opportunities come with the rainbow
and the children
Sing to us
so our hearts come back to us!

Anders Jormin returns to ECM with yet another surprising blend of multi-genre elements. The Swedish bassist welcomes folksinger Lena Willemark and, in her ECM debut, virtuoso of the 25-string koto Karin Nakagawa in settings and improvisations around Willemark’s poetry, sung in her native Älvdals dialect. Jormin has always been one for self-reinvention, and on Trees Of Light he has stepped into some of his most ambitious territory yet. Not because of any sense of scope (although the trio does evoke some rather expansive scenery), but because the import of every gesture is magnified in such an intimate setting.

Yet it’s Willemark, absent from the label since Jormin’s 2004 In winds, in light, who crafts the center of the current project. Her words and melodies inform every song of the program, with the sole exception of Jormin’s instrumental “Hirajoshi.” The latter piece’s title refers to the hirajōshi mode of pentatonic (plus semi-tonal) tuning in which it is played and foregrounds the koto’s dry-wing rasp, percussive accents, and open field. When Nakagawa sweeps her hands over its waters as Willemark’s viola and Jormin’s arco bass sing their way into union, the trio captures something ancient in its hands.

Around this wordless center flows a veritable ecosystem of dreams, recollections, and impressions. It’s not simply that jazz, Swedish folk, and traditional Japanese music are melding into something new. Rather, it’s that they are speaking to one another in the interest of honest friendship. Both the title and music of “Krippainggler” (If you listen) best exemplify this philosophy, as each musician occupies her or his place. Where Willemark’s voice is like the reed and Jormin’s bass is the riverbed, Nakagawa draws the waterline between them in a song of angels and resuscitation of life forces.

Pairings occur naturally throughout. Nakagawa and Jormin sometimes beckon their vocal traveling companion as if she were the sun itself, while at others koto and voice share ululations and whispers. Spotlight moments also abound, as when Nakagawa proves her improvising strengths in “Urbanus” or Willemark sings alone on “Minni” (Memories), an arresting segment of horizon. Whatever the mood, the listener can be sure to feel it wholeheartedly. “Ogadh Dett” (Your eye), for one, opens with a bass solo that is muscular yet somehow gentle, giving way as it does to the koto’s fairytale strains and taking lyric comfort in the warmth of unbroken regard. “Uoruo” (Worry), for another, walks the way of sorrow as if it were the clearest path of all.

And perhaps there is some truth here: that which leaves the deepest scar is also the easiest to follow, so that even when we are dancing, as in the title track or the “Slingerpolska” (Winding polska), somewhere in the back of our minds we know that we will end up alone, and all the stronger for it.

I am still standing where I left me
I walk on as another
See that the earth is still there
Still there
That I must remember
I have loved

(To hear samples of Trees Of Light, click here.)

Gary Peacock Trio: Now This (ECM 2428)

May 25, 2015September 10, 2015 | Tyran Grillo

Gary Peacock Trio
Now This

Marc Copland piano
Gary Peacock double bass
Joey Baron drums
Recorded July 2014 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

After decades of sharing a legendary board with Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette, bassist of bassists Gary Peacock rides a choice wave of his own with pianist Marc Copland and drummer Joey Baron. Now in his 80th year, Peacock needs no introduction except to those who’ve been living with their hands over their ears. He’s the pioneer of a lyrical and dynamically inflected style, a consummate player who knows no boundaries of expression, and, let us not forget, an influential composer to boot. The latter point finds appropriate stress on Now This, which nestles a few featherless tunes among the fully plumed.

(Photo credit: Eliott Peacock)

Perennial classics such as “Moor,” which here achievements the wonderment of renewal, and “Gaia,” which opens the set, confirm the breadth of Peacock’s abilities. Copland’s lyricism is a most welcome addition to their unfolding, peering into the heart of this music and making it crystalline. Yet the unforced feeling of emergence is shared by all, perceivable in a glint off Baron’s cymbals and in Peacock’s own forthright intimacy. Even at his most cautious, as in “Shadows,” the bassist is so sure of where he is going. Not because he sees the end in sight, but because he knows he will always arrive where he is meant to arrive. It’s one thing to trust your bandmates so wholeheartedly; quite another to trust yourself. Such commitment is a lifetime in the making.

“Christa” melts like a candy in the summer sun and finds Peacock humming through his instrument like someone newly in love. There’s also “Vignette,” a set highlight—not least of all for Copland’s beautification. The pianist’s elucidations are such that it’s all one can do to fend off surrender. That being said, his two composition credits elicit some of the most balanced playing on the record. Between the eddying, watercolor world of “And Now” and the slippery “Noh Blues,” there’s much to savor in the currency of their exchange. Baron, for his part, contributes one in turn: “Esprit de Muse.” What begins as an enigmatic tune, however, gains traction midway through and rides the rails into some concentrated swing. Another gem comes by way of Scott LaFaro’s well-polished “Gloria’s Step.” Lithe and limber as ever, Peacock navigates its familiar corridors with eyes closed and heart open, while Copland and Baron provide equally percussive support into interlocking bliss.

As epitomized by “Requiem,” last of the Peacock originals and of the set as a whole, Now This is marked by the sheer maturity of its players. To be sure, so long as you walk into this album without expectations of dramatic flourishes, you will walk out of it with something much longer-lasting: grace.

(To hear samples of Now This, click here.)

David Torn: only sky (ECM 2433)

May 25, 2015 | Tyran Grillo

David Torn
only sky

David Torn guitar, electric oud
Recorded February 2014 at the EMPAC Concert Hall, Troy, NY and Cell Labs, NY
Engineer: D. James Goodwin
Assistant engineer: Steve McLaughlin
Produced by David Torn
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher

The solo artist is never alone. David Torn therefore can only speak of improvisation as a form of “self-hypnosis” or “secular meditation,” acknowledging either way the role of an alternate self or spatial reality to give context to his outpourings. Having passed through the filters of wide-ranging genres, including seminal appearances on ECM, the elusive yet ever-productive guitarist returns with a set of spontaneously composed pieces: just he, himself, and I.

It’s difficult to place Torn in any particular tradition based on one recording alone, but listening to only sky it’s easy to see how his influence has crept into the younger generation of guitar-oriented smiths—in particular James Plotkin, Tim Hecker, and Christian Fennesz—and how Torn continues to enrich the wider landscape by means of a style that is more personal than ever. Each piece on only sky develops as it will, treading wherever feet may land and without fear of erasure, if only because erasure was the purpose for its invention.

Influences from the other direction may feel warranted here and there, not least of all in the Bill Frisell-like desolation of “spoke with folks.” Tearing off chunks from its quilted prairie as the starts of new memories, Torn elicits electronic tics from the feedback loop of his instrument, reminding that what we hear occurs at the level of intervention between body-spaces and thought-technologies. Even the smoother title track sounds at points like Buckethead at his most lyrical. But beneath all this associative skin flows a blood type with few potential donors. Torn’s ability to breathe through the guitar is certainly in a league of its own, and here his thoughtful pauses and expectorations both flow back into themselves, diving into the awkwardness of a first swim with all the love in the world.

In accordance with their evocatively open-ended titles, few of the album’s individual tracks are consistent in either mood or construction. The opening “at least there was nothing” sets a precedent for just this sort of unraveling. What begins in an expansive drone morphs into an errorful stream of purpose, which nevertheless sees little need to define itself in such terms. The contours imply something soft, aerodynamic. But then, the guitar grows spindles, as if waiting to snare a lightning bug, and this it seems to do the moment Torn picks up an electric oud and directs its itinerant voice into the sunlight. Similarly, “I could almost see the room” eases in by way of ambience, only to reveal that its quietude is a matter of distance and not temperament. At the helm, Torn’s guitar sputters from the notes stuck in its throat, each level of dislodging painstakingly recorded for posterity. Even “a goddamned specific unbalance” turns straightforward picking into a numerical sequence of hysterical motherboards.

Some moments, such as the twisted smiles of “ok, shorty,” bleed with omniscience. Others, such as the speech patterns of “reaching barely, sparely fraught,” exist at standstills of communication by the fascination of their own pulses. The cryptic “so much that” seems more like a continuation of itself, flushed with so much warmth that it must keel over and sing before succumbing to the past tense. This leaves only one standing: the seemingly more abstract but in reality most forthrightly singing piece of circuit bending known as “was a cave there…” Through its removal of wires, this masterful act of surgery amplifies the swan song of each precordial snap in a requiem for biological determinism. A crowd gathers in the lungs, writing its manifesto of escape bit by immeasurable but in those spaces between breaths. And when at last they breach contract by emanating through a scream, the body realizes that its fundamental error was symbiosis, no longer taken for granted as it inhales the mounting swarm of resistance and subsumes itself to a greater cause in the final tone.

Torn is part of the natural order of the airborne, the bottom end of a power chord that dips out of sight just before it can be consumed. His guitar is a choir, formless yet undeniably material, coaxing from the very earth particles of resonance. It is the crosshair within a crosshair, aimed at itself for the purpose not of annihilation but of undoing. In this enmeshment of noise and solace, the benefits of experience are in the details. Like pareidolia, the psychological phenomenon that predisposes us to seeing images in the clouds or moon, this music invites us to read it as we will. Yet the more we do so, the more the music reads shapes into us in return. It’s all so beautifully uncomfortable that it might just never leave you once it finds a way in.

(To hear samples of only sky, click here.)

Jack DeJohnette: Made In Chicago (ECM 2392)

May 24, 2015September 29, 2019 | Tyran Grillo

Jack DeJohnette
Made In Chicago

Henry Threadgill alto saxophone, bass flute
Roscoe Mitchell alto, soprano and sopranino saxophones, bass recorder, Baroque flute
Muhal Richard Abrams piano
Larry Gray double bass, cello
Jack DeJohnette drums
Produced by Dave Love and Jack DeJohnette
Recording engineer: Martin Walters
Assistant engineers: Jeremiah Nave and Daniel Santiago
Recorded live August 29, 2013 at the Pritzker Pavilion Millennium Park Chicago at the 35th Annual Chicago Jazz Festival
Sponsored by Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events
Programming in part by the Jazz Institute of Chicago
Tour manager: Ken Jablonski
Mixed at Avatar Studio, New York by Manfred Eicher, Jack DeJohnette, and James A. Farber (engineer)
Mastered at MSM Studios, München, by Christoph Stickel
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher

As the story goes, when legendary drummer Jack DeJohnette was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master and given carte blanche to perform at the Chicago Jazz Festival in 2013, he immediately thought of his old jam buddies from the early 1960s, the founding sessions of which had led to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), whose most hallowed disciples formed the Art Ensemble of Chicago, resolutely documented on ECM. As Roscoe Mitchell recalls, “Every time I get together with musicians from the AACM it’s like we are just picking up from wherever we left off.” To be sure, the conversation between reedmen Henry Threadgill and Roscoe Mitchell, pianist Muhal Richard Abrams, bassist Larry Gray, and DeJohnette himself feels like it’s been going on forever. Despite the fact that these musicians had never recorded before as a quintet, much less played as one, it feels as if they have been plowing through ether on its way to the cosmos all along, and that we can count ourselves fortunate for catching even a snippet of their time on this planet. As if in service of this analogy, the recording is very present in relation to the musicians, while the crowd cheers like some distant panel of stars whose appreciation arrives light-years after the fact.

Mitchell—who plays alto, soprano, and sopranino saxophones, bass recorder, and Baroque flute—offers two substantial originals to the stage. “Chant” cracks the concert’s outer shell with a sacred tap. From raw, arpeggiated materials it constructs a body from the ground up and, by addition of instruments, imbues it with consciousness. Likewise, every member knows his place in the larger symphony of his setup. DeJohnette pays off his timbral dues with handfuls of Benjamins, especially in his dialoguing with Mitchell, while Threadgill touches off more angular lines of flight. Gray meanwhile appears, stealthily at first but with increasing conviction, to be the psychological impetus behind it all. But it’s Abrams whose torrent of ideas seems most organic. Like a healing energy itself in want of healing, he plays the all-important trickster as Threadgill curls his fist in staunch refusal of suspension. Thus do we return to the center of the spiral, only to find another waiting to be sung. The aptly titled “This” reveals an adjacent facet, fronting Baroque recorder and Threadgill’s bass flute in an excursion of astute reflectivity. Abrams again proves vital to the physical nature of this sound, his pianism attaining downright Beethovenian proportions.

The bandleader’s “Museum Of Time” fuels the Abrams fire. Spanning a gamut from whirlwind to delicacy, its touch provides spatial reference for the reeds and a still larger context for the slippery groove in which DeJohnette and Gray find themselves. Threadgill’s “Leave Don’t Go Away” flips this approach, beginning in interlocking fashion before spawning a lone piano with a mind of its own. Bass and drums jive their way into frame, while sopranino nears bursting from the strength of its inner poetics. And then there is “Jack 5” by Abrams himself. Light cymbals clear the air before late-night sounds ground an alto and all the soulful things it has to say. DeJohnette then takes the reigns and builds his steed one muscle at a time, each part mutually independent of motion.

As the MC of the evening, DeJohnette extols the spirit of brotherly love on which all such jazz must feed. It’s a love you can feel when the band jumps into a spontaneously improvised encore titled “Ten Minutes,” which actually clocks in at just over six. Abrams checks a pulse, reeds exchange powerful mutations, DeJohnette and Gray ride the middle line: these become the markers of giving in. Mitchell saves his best for last this time around, his mind reveling in its own synapsial wanderlust.

A masterpiece? Please. This is more than a piece. It’s mastery incarnate.

(To hear samples of Made In Chicago, you may watch the EPK above or click here.)

Jakob Bro: Gefion (ECM 2381)

May 24, 2015May 24, 2015 | Tyran Grillo

Jakob Bro
Gefion

Jakob Bro guitar
Thomas Morgan double bass
Jon Christensen drums
Recorded November 2013 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

After playing with Tomasz Stanko on Dark Eyes and, before that, less conspicuously a part of the Paul Motian Band on Garden of Eden, Danish guitarist Jakob Bro reaches a milestone with his first ECM leader date. For this auspicious recording event, one could hardly ask for finer support than Thomas Morgan and Jon Christensen. Morgan stands as one of the most versatile bassists of his time, as borne out on a number of diverse projects for the label, whose fans will of course need no introduction to Christensen. Bro cites the drummer’s sound as a formative inspiration, and one can hear the joy of sharing the art of jazz with someone whose contributions to the same he so adores. After premiering at the 2012 Copenhagen Jazz Festival, this intergenerational trio stepped into Oslo’s Rainbow Studio to document after only a year’s worth of refinement. The end result sounds like 10.

At nearly 11 minutes in duration, the title opener may be the longest of the set, but it is neither longwinded nor overwhelming. Rather, its spacy guitar is a fire in winter you don’t want to leave. Christensen’s cymbals awaken in the light of dawn, eyes still carrying afterimages of the night. Beyond this, Bro takes his first steps from the cabin into the open forest. Morgan’s bass follows suit, leading us to belief we are in for a long hike. But then something magical happens as the view now goes aerial. A clear Bill Frisell influence reigns in this transition, mellifluous and spun from open sky. The band traces a spectral parabola from one glade to the next, until every animal trap along the way has been disabled and burned to ash. And it is to ash we return at the album’s straightforwardly titled “Ending,” which at just under three minutes is its shortest. Still, looping arpeggios and tactile strums give it a fullness of structure, fading out on the moonwalk with which the album began.

As if to stretch this metaphor, “And They All Came Marching Out Of The Woods” finds Bro opening up a little more in tandem with Morgan’s flexible backbone. His guitar shines like a prism at a laser’s touch, until individual notes split into spectrums, but not before we dive into the streets of “Copenhagen.” Or is it into the water gently lapping the city’s harbors? This would seem to be the image evoked by Bro’s understated motifs. Or might it also be the sky above? For is it not the realm from which Bro drops a rope ladder for his bandmates to climb?

In thinking of the sky over Copenhagen, I find my thoughts turning to Gefion herself, a Norse goddess of land and plowing immortalized in the famous fountain I photographed during a trip in March of 2015:

With her whip in hand she pushes her oxen through the land, but does so without need for virtuosity or flourish. Rather, like Bro, she sees music in the work itself.

Other references point to the heavily arpeggiated solo compositions of guitarist Jeff Pearce, a prime example being the ghostly nocturne of “Oktober,” and in “White” to the slow-motion streamers of a Motian ballad. Bro navigates both with the surety of a hiker in his favorite woods, one who knows every tree so well that he needn’t bother trying to account for them all. He leaves—no pun intended—that task to his sensitive support team, a rhythm section that foregoes rhythm toward an environmental approach. But urbanity, we soon realize, is never far behind, as we squint into the glare of “Lyskaster” (Searchlight). This can only be an ode to travel, for it embodies the constant balance, known to any itinerant, between missing what you love and craving what you have yet to love. “Airport Poem,” on the other hand, is an exercise in capture, of layover and tedium, Christensen’s barest presence only adding to that feeling of suspension.

Bro is a breath of fresh air for eschewing the trappings of technical virtuosity and instead plowing the far more challenging field of atmospheric integrity. His playing is so rich, in fact, that Gefion at times feels more like a solo album. This is not to insult the contributions of Morgan and Christensen, but to praise them for understanding that every white square needs a black one to keep it company, and that in the cosmos of any one of them exists far too many pieces to fit on one chessboard anyway.

In closing, it’s worth noting that Gefion bears dedication to Ib Skovgaard. The late jazz journalist and radio producer, who died in early January at the age of 67, was a tireless champion of improvised music in his native Denmark and a particularly stalwart supporter of Bro and his generation. With this knowledge in mind, we do well to see the album as the closing of one circle of appreciation by way of opening many others in its place. Here’s hoping you’ll be one of them.

(To hear samples of Gefion, click here.)

Giovanni Guidi Trio: This Is The Day (ECM 2403)

May 23, 2015 | Tyran Grillo

Giovanni Guidi Trio
This Is The Day

Giovanni Guidi piano
Thomas Morgan double bass
João Lobo drums
Recorded April 2014, Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Produced by Manfred Eicher

When Italian pianist Giovanni Guidi, American bassist Thomas Morgan, and Portuguese drummer João Lobo made their ECM debut as a trio with City of Broken Dreams, they quietly shrugged off the trend of splash-making entrances. What they produced instead nearly took me aback with a lyricism not heard, I dare say, since Paul Motian at the peak of his invention. The style was, at the same time, very much its own and begged many contemplative returns to understand the breadth of its purview. Now, on This Is The Day, Guidi and his cohorts again tend a field of largely original soil, leaving twelve meticulously tilled rows for a harvest of 74 glorious minutes.

The aching lyricism of “Trilly” (including its later variation) hits the chest in slow motion. Guidi’s pianism is assuredly delicate from the start: every note knows its place. And yet, while his craft may be the heart of everything, its beats are nothing without mind and body, and these his rhythm section most healthily provides. Be it through Lobo’s thoughtful traction in “Carried Away” or Morgan’s lucidity of expression in “Game Of Silence,” they further the trio’s mission of lifting every rock in places torn to their foundations by strife, salvaging whatever melodic material they can in the hopes of reuniting it with the original owners. Whereas in the first album there was little time for rebuilding, here the band is constantly separating and fitting architectural elements together. Through intensive understatement, each member’s contributions are translucent enough to let the others show through.

Also showing through are the band’s heightened powers of illustration. The plucked piano strings and pointillist accompaniment thereof are only the beginning of “The Cobweb,” which builds to an almost frantic density. Despite its brevity and abstraction (most of the surrounding tracks are melodic and of sizable duration), it holds a wealth of information and, like a web, trembles at even the most peripheral movement. This, along with the rubato poetics of “The Debate” and the sporadic “Migration,” comprise the freest portions of the set. Guidi makes it all sound effortless by never giving in to the drama of verticality. Even the cosmically good melodizing of “Where They’d Lived,” the album’s master ballad, rests on a hammock between skyscrapers, so content in the danger that it wears fear like a blanket. Behind closed eyes, Guidi’s dreams sound like “The Night It Rained Forever,” a boat ride through drone and mist that resolves into shores both empty and alive.

Only three tracks bear non-leader credit. Lobo’s “Baiiia” is a nuanced construction of cymbals and drums, of which tracings from piano and bass build to a tidal finish, while the standards “Quizas Quizas Quizas” (penned by Cuban songwriter Osvaldo Farrés and made famous by Nat King Cole) and “I’m Through With Love” recall Tord Gustavsen’s likeminded trio in its finest hour. As songs without words, they have so much more to say than with. At their departure, the currents of a thousand rivers converge into one, sending us on our way toward the hope of a thousand more.

A modern classic before a single note was laid down.

(To hear samples of This Is The Day, you may watch the EPK above or click here.)

Between Sound and Space: ECM Records and Beyond

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