My latest review for All About Jazz is of NYC-based singer Kosi’s tribute to the great Abbey Lincoln, Ghosts Appearing through the Sound. Click the cover to read on.
Non-ECM Reviews
Vilma Timonen Quartet review for RootsWorld
My latest review for RootsWorld online magazine is of Finnish kantele player and singer Vilma Timonen, whose latest quartet album is sure to please fans of Sinikka Langeland. The music is enlivening and evocative, drawing from folk influences in an originally composed storybook of myths, moonlight, and maidens. Click the cover to discover!
Hristo Vitchev Quartet: In Search Of Wonders
Few guitarists have carried the torch of Pat Metheny so humbly as Hristo Vitchev, and never with such brightness of purpose as on his latest quartet album, In Search Of Wonders. The Bay Area-based musician and producer has since 2009 put out a consistent, top-flight catalog of records, ranging from explorations of his Bulgarian roots to straight-ahead jazz road trips, but always by original design. With Wonders, he has at last tackled that most risky of studio ventures: the double album. The result is not only a magnum opus, but his most emotional work so far, and one that is sure to put smooth jazz naysayers in their place.
I asked Vitchev to elaborate on the significance of this album, which to me feels like his most autobiographical. “It has been an exciting journey since I started recording and publishing my own work. All the music presented in this release describes who I am both as an artist and person.” And if opener “The Transitory Nature” is any indication, Vitchev’s life has been one lived in deepest gratitude. It’s right there in the brotherhood he shares with his dedicated crew of pianist Jasnam Daya Singh (a.k.a. Weber Iago), bassist Dan Robbins, and drummer Mike Shannon. Their connections are key to the integrity of Vitchev’s sound, which by virtue of its infrastructure expands the limitations of any foundation. “All of us are first and foremost best friends,” says the leader of his bandmates. “The camaraderie, trust, respect, and love we all share is very special. That is in reality all you need as an artist to be able to open and present even the most fragile sectors of your soul and heart. I have only them in mind when I write this music.”
(Photo credit: Don Barnes)
Vitchev further stresses that he has never subbed in other players when performing this music live, and it shows in the leaps of evolution taken by his distinct method of archaeology, which now yields its best preserved artifacts. Among them is “It May Backfire.” Singh’s intro leads the band into a groove of geometric proportions. The unity of vision, held together in no small way by Shannon’s drumming, is well muscled. And while Vitchev may be the light that gives it sanctity, and Robbins a sense of corporeality through his articulate soloing, it’s the density of build through which the collective reality of this music is best spoken.
If I were to draw any internal relationship from the whole, however, it would be that shared between Vitchev and Singh, whose bond in “Post Nubes” and “Fuchsia Brown Eyes” is unbreakable. The latter’s tenderness reveals a hidden, spectral blues in the pianism, which in tandem with Vitchev’s adlibs adds layers of photorealism. The title track, too, with its Brazilian underlay, opens many doors with a single key.
It’s not by chance that tunes like the understated “Falling In Orange,” which opens the second disc, and the greener “It Is Here, Somewhere” should feel so visual. Vitchev has cultivated this quality in his music with great awareness. “My composing process as well as the arrangements are always driven by vivid imagery,” he explains. “When I sit down on the piano to write I will often close my eyes call up a picture. Only when that picture is in sharpest focus do notes, chords, and rhythms take form in ink.” With this in mind, it’s impossible not to read a growing nostalgia into the album’s progression, at its peak in “Old Theme.” The slick, youthful theme yields some of Vitchev’s most inspired soloing on record, rendered all the more exploratory by the rhythm section’s keen regularity.
Memories thrive throughout the album’s remainder. From the rhythmically savvy “Almost Home” to the dreamlike twists of “The Invisible Stairway,” moving pictures abound, at once frozen in, and animated by, time. In this respect, the album is a living portrait of Vitchev as composer, “a little corner of this musical landscape,” as he puts it, “I can call my own.” In other words, Wonders feels more at home than ever because it reaches farther than ever. This feeling of comfort is perhaps what distinguishes it from its predecessors and underscores the message epitomized in the piano-guitar epilogue, “We Search For Wonders.” Vitchev is quick to underline this point by way of conclusion. “Life is full of amazing things, but it takes desire and energy to lift your head, look around, and notice them. We are so grateful to have found each other and do the things we love as a group. These are our wonders, and this is our musical tribute to all that is around us.”
David Rothenberg & Korhan Erel: Berlin Bülbül
David Rothenberg, familiar to ECM listeners through his fascinating duo album with Marilyn Crispell, has constructed one of the most idiosyncratic vessels in which to sail the waters of improvised music. He excels at expanding his own terms to suit an ever-changing roster of natural musicians. The German field recording label Gruenrekorder is the host for this rather different collaboration, which combines Rothenberg’s clarinets with Turkish sound artist Korhan Erel on computer and iPad, along with nightingales fed live from the parks of Berlin. Anyone who has followed Rothenberg’s career will know of his mythical explorations of bird song in the book Why Birds Sing and its accompanying CD. More recently he has done the same with whales and insects, but the birds have been a regular point of return.
The liner notes of Berlin Bülbül (the second word being Turkish for “nightingale”) riff off these birds’ distinct ways of singing, which mirror jazz tactics in their abilities to lead, respond, and interpolate. The album is peppered with four live tracks, which through varied levels of construction proceed to tie as much as they unravel. This sense of push and pull, most vivid in such illustratively titled pieces as “Dark with Birds and Frogs,” leads to a fleshy palette of interspecies interaction and epitomizes the porosity of music as a communicative act. Rothenberg’s ability to manifest the intangible is perhaps uncanny at first, yet more organic the more one hears it, while the details of Erel’s live samplings, the rustle of human conversation, distant sirens and other errata of the city’s soundscape cinch a cord of continuity around them. As for the birds, chirpy and reaching down to microscopic levels of resonance, they are the champions of cohabitation, each more sagacious—yet whimsical!—than the last.
The magic circle of birds and breaths, looped back in on themselves in digital ellipses, is what this album is all about. And even in the studio, their spells bear fruit. Whether lurking in the John Surman-esque bass clarinet of “A Long Note’s Invisible Beam” and “Nachtigall Imbiss” or the clicks and wing-flutters of “Unearthly Untaught Strain” and “Her Pipe in Growth of Riper Days,” the overall texture is of swamp grass and urban concrete, of trees and asphalt rolled into one gorgeous mess of songs. Erel’s manipulations only enhance this effect by revealing the inner life of Rothenberg’s extroversions, and vice versa. And while these pieces may feel like vignettes, they are lives in miniature—full troves of existence with beginnings, middles, and ends. The granulations of “Omnibus” are just as insightful as the larger brushstrokes of “From That Moonlit Cedar What a Burst,” in which even deeper rhythms externalize. But, like the bluesy reverie of “Interfused Upon the Silentness,” it always ends in the sky, riding a purple cloud of thought into another dawn.
Barton Rage & Bill Laswell: Realm 1
For this first installment of the “Realm” series of concept albums on the M.O.D. Technologies label, wherein artists are free walk their own paths even when those paths crumble from beneath their feet, Bill Laswell and Barton Rage combine heat sources to forge an ambient talisman that is sure to haunt you with its protections.
Hints of orchestras and long-playing melodies, each the ancestor of a solitary listener, learns the art of flotation right before us. Gloomy, perhaps, but only because darkness is sensed by the ears as light by the eyes. For in the darkness there is a sound which wilts at misinterpretation and blossoms when taken on its own terms. Barest hints of drumming flicker in and out of frame, while lower lines take shape as pure sonic reckoning, their compasses burrowing into skin unaware of their own mapping. A meditation made reality. This is “Mater.”
Clicking of cymbal and drum, an echo chamber that knows not the wrath of an open gate. Rather, it peers into the heart of things. The duo’s to-the-marrow methodology braids time signatures so tightly that the sun no longer reflects off them. A flash of song. An electronic insect attracted to pheromones emitted by throat and wrists. Laswell’s bass cannot help but lumber through the landscapes of its upbringing with sketchbook in hand. The confluence of machinery and sinews is the decoration, not the anchor, of this evolving tree, around which leaves dance in the wind like a child waiting for an embrace. This is “Waters of Mirage.”
Globular, uncertain arcs bow before a sacred dub altar, on which has been left offerings of star-bound digitalia. The signal is incomplete, its transmitter having broken eons ago in a moment of distress during some mission no one remembers. Synthesized trumpet breaths channel a chasm of death into automatic life, drinking in the scent of fortune to get away from the smoke. A pause before drum ‘n’ bass snakes shed their skins. A groovier test of faith through dance music for isolationists. This is “Triad Seer.”
A watery expanse larger than any ocean on Earth. A smooth undertow, amphibian and pliant. Funkier textures unfold wings of air, ephemeral yet alive. This is “Seraphim.”
A freer space ensues, prowling caves for want of ore. Weightless spaces intertwine with heavier drops of thought. This is “Beyond the Abyss.”
A melodic fractal, in the mode of guitarist Jeff Pearce, though with a murkier pulse. The finality here is heavy with cinema. This is “Nama.”
I haven’t been moved in this particular way since Mick Harris’s Somnific Flux, a 1995 collaboration with Laswell on Subharmonic. Such nostalgic threads also pull me back to Cypher 7’s Decoder (released the year before on Strata), bringing together past and future in a single, protracted blink. Let’s have more of this.
Two new reviews for All About Jazz
I have two new reviews up on All About Jazz: one of a recently issued live album of an older Sheila Jordan concert with Harvie S and Alan Broadbent, another of of Canadian pianist Marianne Trudel’s La vie commence ici, which should appeal to fans of ECM’s Nordic sounds. Click the covers to read on.
Ferhat Tunç review for RootsWorld
My latest review for RootsWorld online magazine is of Turkish singer Ferhat Tunç’s Kobani. Click the image below to read more and hear samples of this politically salient album, which was recorded at Oslo’s Rainbow Studio by longtime ECM engineer Jan Erik Kongshaug.
Wadada Leo Smith & Bill Laswell: Akashic Meditation
Soul-seeking trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and sought soul, bassist Bill Laswell, recorded live at New York City’s The Stone on April 22, 2014. A metropolis unto themselves, built by a masonry of interlocking musicality.
In this spontaneous set, listeners may open their eyes, only to find themselves behind another’s closed. Laswell slows the dance of time to near-stillness, so that every contraction of every muscle may be studied. Smith’s entry comes from within rather than from without, portioning flesh on scales counterweighted with virtue. Consciousness on either side denies the illusion of consensus reality and offers a purely sound-based alternative in its place. The psycho-sphere of these spiraling prevarications acts as glue for a jagged infrastructure.
Laswell has a leviathan’s heart for this stuff. His bass flashes and writhes with intrigue, far more than the sum of its plastic, wood, and strings. And because the machinations of that instrument rotate on linguistic axes, a sense of communication is vital to understanding his improvisational cartography. It is at one moment a bodhisattva of desert suns, the next a dying gamelan courting the moon. It listens to its own heartbeat and tracks the decimation of rhythms.
Smith, for his part, treats the skin as a palimpsest of discovery. His breath, the written word to Laswell’s speech, resonates through a brass menagerie of travel. As distant as he is present, he is a nomad in search of the next melodic attachment.
Distortions in both look back with forward eyes as regularity subsumes, is subsumed, and touches off a limpid and final spark after an elliptical net catches Smith’s reborn self.
The Akashic meditation is not a conversation but a conversion. A reverse alchemy that turns gold into lead. Here you will find no towering, canonical monuments, but only ruins of such raw power that every crumbling edifice yields the scripture of change.
(For more information, visit M.O.D. Technologies here.)
Milford Graves & Bill Laswell: Back In No Time
Drummer Milford Graves and bassist Bill Laswell, live at The Stone in New York City. Two stalwarts of their respective instruments, passing in the night on April 22, 2014. Separately: wanderers of this musical world, toting satchels of invention for the sonically weary. Together: architects of flexible structures to house the enormity of their collective imagination.
Laswell fades into frame riding a harmonic for the ages, organic and initiatory. His is the vertical signature. Graves, meanwhile, drops to the floor and rolls around in his drums, for all the horizontal motivator. These are the stirrings beneath the floorboards of your childhood, the magic of beings you always knew were there but were sworn against discovering by parents who didn’t know any better. Now they have emerged, ready to perform.
The actions of this duo are kinetic and headstrong. Like muscles of the throat, they twitch in anticipation of speech. Only words never materialize. Graves is, nevertheless, quite vocal at peaks of expression. His hi-hat is the measure of a defibrillating heart, around which sticks converge like bones. The mounting corporeality of his playing underscores the circularity of this meeting. Laswell rides the wave, respectfully and patiently, before chorusing his approval through improvisation.
The bassist’s densities match those of Graves step for step before cutting out to leave the drummer running wildly across the savannah, of which every plant is an instrument waiting for contact of feet and hands. Laswell rejoins sagaciously, exploring the flanged interior of a fallen vessel, whose engine must be resuscitated by clean attention. He attends to broken wires and gears, giving life by electric injection.
Short blasts of data, each made knowable by the gift of vibration, project themselves across the inner ear. Motivations fall victim to their own causes. Despite having been designed for harm, the musicians are here to put an end to that cycle with their heavy light. The passion of experience wins.
(For more information, visit M.O.D. Technologies here.)
Between Sound and Space: ECM Records and Beyond 