AMM III
It Had Been An Ordinary Enough Day In Pueblo, Colorado
Keith Rowe guitar, prepared guitar, transistor radio Eddie Prévost drums
Recorded December 1979 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Steve Lake and AM III
By the time this obscure JAPO album was released in 1980, AMM was 15 years old. The British free improvisation outfit, credited here as “AMM III,” was already an underground legend, and thankfully has stayed that way, even now preserving its integrity as an exploratory unit. For this brief incarnation, founding members Keith Rowe and Eddie Prévost set out as a duo, respectively combining guitar and percussion in a real-time evolution that fans of Evan Parker are sure to appreciate. Like Parker, Rowe and Prévost spend as much of their time listening as playing, soaking in the feeling of the surrounding soil before enriching it with just the right minerals.
“Radio Activity” is both mantra and anti-mantra. Rowe’s use of a transistor radio underscores the title as a method of operation, leaving behind its descriptive properties to shrivel in the sun of another day. The metallic details put forth by the two musicians, at once percussive and speech-oriented, seem to fold themselves like sheets of self-aware origami paper. The sounds of broadcasts moving through a flanged portal are complemented by an amorphous electric guitar, its ochre pigment drawing a halo without an angel. In this amphibious dronescape, valleys eventually turn into peaks as Rowe and Prévost lock into powerful, staccato interplay before compressing into a jam between molecules.
After the massive parentage of this first track, the ones that follow feel like its offspring. “Convergence” is the youngest sibling, a frail yet expertly tuned entity whose potential for strength is unlimited. The elasticity of “Kline” pegs it as the eldest child. Its swansong is written on parchment, a brittle medical document that is beyond the need for prescription. Frenzy ensues, throughout which Rowe treats the air like a pin cushion while Prévost shines a light through every eye like a star.
The two middle children are intersectional beings. “Spittlefields’ Slide” is exactly what one might expect it to be: a stuttering and warped chain of expectorations. It’s also a fine exercise in restraint that grows even as it flounders into dust. “For A” sounds as if the musicians dismantled a pay phone and made music with all the loose change gutted from within, faithfully documenting every snap of communication in a game of resuscitated conversations.
Your guess is as good as mine as to what any of the above to do with the album’s title, but I like to think that somewhere in Pueblo, Colorado there exists an echo of these soundings, ghostly yet content in its geographical prison.
Steve Swallow bass Chris Cheek tenor saxophone Steve Cardenas guitar Carla Bley organ Jorge Rossy drums
Recorded November 15/16, 2011 and mixed and mastered at Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
Engineers: Gérard De Haro and Nicolas Baillard
Produced by Steve Swallow
Release date: June 14, 2013
Over a career spanning more than half a century, Steve Swallow has consistently redefined the electric bass as a jazz instrument. More importantly, he has taken any and every opportunity along the way to deepen his craft as a composer. His self-discipline in this regard has made every album seem at once a culmination and a stepping stone into greater futures. Into The Woodwork is no exception.
For this latest incarnation of his quintet, Swallow has chosen a lineup worthy of the subtlety on which these 12 original tunes nourish themselves. The tenor of reedman Chris Cheek, who made a noticeable ECM appearance as part of the Paul Motian Band on Garden of Eden, brings the smoke before the fire in “From Whom It May Concern,” a ballad that tilts its own thematic mirror toward artful reflection. Cheek also plays beautifully in “Unnatural Causes,” from the paint-by-number simplicity of which he unpacks the robustness of an unexpected spectrum. This tune is further notable for the contributions of guitarist and fellow Motian associate Steve Cardenas, whose unforced geometries settle us into the album’s intimacies by way of “Sad Old Candle.” Cardenas, in fact, proves to be the quintet’s greatest converser, whether exchanging remarkable banter with Cheek (“The Butler Did It”) or playing in duet with Swallow (“Suitable For Framing”). His lyricism pairs well, too, with the organ of Carla Bley, whose own omnipresence reveals another defining mastery in tunes like “Never Know,” “Still There,” and “Grisly Business.” The latter’s gentle carnivalesque is ideally suited to her touch at the keys.
Drummer Jorge Rossy is a constant thread to which the band looks for guidance, but especially in the more energetic turns such as “Back In Action” and “Exit Stage Left.” His understated groove actualizes Swallow’s ethos of less as more, and demonstrates that self-assured music need never be arrogant. And then there’s Swallow himself, whose first true solo doesn’t come until the album’s ninth track, “Small Comfort” fans the embers. The edge of his new custom bass sounds already finely aged over this bed of organ and cymbals, exposing a little more of his inner workings as brushed snare and tenor pull back the curtain to clarity.
In contrast to the steadied pacing of Swallow’s ECM outings, many tunes on Into The Woodwork flow into the next without break, thus keeping his atmospheric integrity in constant check. Like the title track itself, the album as a whole finds balance between the grounded and the free, always keeping one arm around the listener’s shoulder. The fact that this music doesn’t overtly challenge is a challenge in and of itself to experience its strengths as givens. Like an old friend, it may not often surprise, but its comforts are exactly where they need to be.
Cymin Samawatie vocals Benedikt Jahnel piano Ralf Schwarz double bass Ketan Bhatti drums, percussion Martin Stegner viola Recorded March 2014 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: 20 February 2015 (Europe only)
My melodies are reaching your heart, how come? My words are easing your pain, how come? Everything that I do, I don’t do it myself, how come? I live for the ones, who love me Why not for myself?
Cymin Samawatie, whose band Cyminology has swum twice in ECM waters (cf. 2009’s As Ney and 2011’s Saburi), is a crosser of barriers at once ethnic, linguistic, and musical. Such a characterization risks painting the German-Iranian singer as an enigma, when in fact she gives voice to her gifts through love of sentiment, empathy for politics, and humility of creation in a way so grounded, it feels as if she is singing as much for you alone as for the world. Samawatie’s backing trio of pianist Benedikt Jahnel, bassist Ralf Schwarz, and drummer Ketan Bhatti now welcomes violist Martin Stegner, whose presence is as defining as it is dressed in shadow. The voices of his bow constitute nominal additions, but their presence removes a few more layers of perception to reveal the naked truth of every note they touch.
The appropriately titled Phoenix revisits Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzaad (1935-1967), from whose own premature ashes emerged the winged verses explored therein. Farrokhzaad paints a veritable world around her body, which in “Aaftaab” and “Gozaraan” binds the narrator hand and food with ribbons of love’s many unspoken hues. The latter song’s improvisatory colors slip into a black hole as quickly as they emerge from one, feeling through the dark as if by every word, a fingertip. This is much in contrast with the former song, which unfolds, fractal-like, inlaying repeated patterns and meshing viola and voice interchangeably. Likewise, Farrokhzaad’s shapes tend toward a yin and yang relationship, whereby every pool of light contains one fish of dark, and vice versa. Like the stars she collects in “Harire Buse,” which accompanies Samawatie by bass alone, they shine only because of the unknowable pitch in which they swim.
Yet nowhere does Farrokhzaad—and Samawatie, by extension—speak so inwardly as in the closing “Baraaye To.” Here drums and bass shed their rigid constructions to better comprehend Cymin’s realisms as she sings:
I am writing this poem for you In the sunset, in the thirsty summer On a half gone, fatal way In the old grave of my endless pain
Let my eyes overflow again with dewdrops
The day will come when your yearning sight Will fall on this painful tune Searching within my words You will say: “This was my mother”
Throughout this incremental, emotional implosion, the band’s melodic blush yields more than the sum of its parts and proves that life can be written only on the palimpsest of memory.
The distinction of Cyminology as a vocally-centered group is that its instrumentalists also emit a poetry of their own, every bit as verbal as their bandleader’s. This is nowhere truer than throughout Samawatie’s own songs, wherein members of the rhythm section, into which the piano grows to be an interlocking part, punctuate each other’s sentences until they are spherical—global, if you will. Her texts may be far more concise, but their impact is anything but. In the pulsing infrastructure of “Che Gune Ast,” she activates a fierce individuality. From the pulsing pianism, which gives a sun for drums to compass their solar system, to the viola’s innocence, which feels almost blood-related to the breath-drawn bass, Samawatie’s singing tracks every change of mood as if it were a diary in real time. “Talaash Makon” is another duet, this time pairing her with Jahnel, whose defining pianism sets up one patch of earth per footstep. The band saves its deepest poetry for “Baraaye Ranj,” which, although effectively wordless, nevertheless alters its own DNA as if by language alone.
From Nimā Yushij (1896-1960), so-called father of Persian poetry, comes the album’s title poem. Over the course of its two parts, Samawatie embodies the fabled bird’s tragic cycle, which in this context becomes an exercise in self-reflection. The viola reveals itself as a descriptive force, soaring with arpeggios before landing on the mountain from which Yushij unspools its sorrowful cry. In Part II, the instrumentalists are Erdnase-shuffled into Samawatie’s muscular legato, by which new details emerge from every listen.
A canonical Sufi poem by Hāfez (c. 1325-1390) completes the mosaic. The mournful “Dishab” is the album in miniature, blending clearly defined voices into an even more clearly defined whole, while holding on to one elemental mantra: there can be no water without land. And indeed, as a whole these melodies reach out their talons and pull until sky and earth become one horizon, opening an internal eye that interlocks with the external knowing of being gazed upon. By this dynamic, the listener turns into participant and allows the music to be reborn through the act of knowing it.
(To hear samples of Phoenix, you may watch the EPK above or click here.)
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Between Sound and Space: ECM Records and Beyond 