Of Tears, Of Privilege: Adam’s Lament at Lincoln Center

| Tyran Grillo

Adam’s Lament
Latvian Radio Choir
Sinfonietta Rīga
Tõnu Kaljuste conductor
Alice Tully Hall, Starr Theater
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
November 17, 2012
7:30pm

Of Tears…
It would be easy to paint the maturation of Arvo Pärt in the shape of a funnel. The Estonian composer was trained in the language of modernism but came to consolidate his musical foci into so-called “holy minimalism”—a catchall term that, while descriptive enough, ultimately defeats itself. In Pärt’s vision, minimalism seems better represented as pinpoints of light, stars that would be nothing without their limpid sky. Such mutual dependency is what makes the music sacred. We do better, then, to twin the funnel into an hourglass, endlessly turned by the hands and mouths of whoever bestows its truths to those fortunate enough to hear them. So we are when the Latvian Radio Choir and Sinfonietta Rīga, under the masterful guidance of Tõnu Kaljuste, present an all-Pärt program as part of Lincoln Center’s annual White Light Festival. Anticipation is high and met when the first strains of the Berliner Messe (1990-91, rev. 2002) touch our cortices. Composed on commission after Pärt’s emigration to Berlin, this setting of the Ordinary possesses a remarkable permeability. Around the standard texts and interjected Allelujas, strings sketch the thunder of conversion. Their pulse is elemental, hidden. Suspension awaits in Pärt’s setting of the Te Deum (1984-85, rev. 1992), the work that introduced me to its composer and which has since lived inside me. It develops motives like a book: knowledge that came before feeds into that which follows. A digitally sampled wind harp unfurls a constant and godly breath, piano dipping into the font of reason and stirring double basses to higher registers. Every crescendo equals stillness. We feel it in the soles of our feet, in the palms of our hands, in the stigmata of our collective memory.

Intermission brings about the surreal din of interpretation, snatches of recreated melody and soloists praised for the sake of proving knowledge.

Trisagion (1992, rev. 1994) begins the second half. Written in celebration of the 500th anniversary of a small Finnish parish, its title comes from the Greek for “Thrice Holy” and makes reference to Orthodox prayer and to the piece’s three core pitches. It is an overturned cup, spilling unspoken words. It is the beat of mortality. It is crystal, tarnished and restored. Also restored are the writings of ascetic Silouan of Athos (1866-1938), something of a touchstone of Pärt’s work and the red thread of Adam’s Lament (2009), the landscape of which resonates with suffering. Tears feed its soil as sunlight feeds the flora that grow from it. The mountains shiver, fauna likewise in their dreamless slumber. All the more appropriate that the musicians encore with Estonian Lullaby (2002, rev. 2006), bringing with it needed repose in an age so restless that only a child’s mind can contain its temper.

Of Privilege…
Nestled in the orchestra section of Alice Tully Hall, and in the most prayerful music I have experienced firsthand in years, I become uncomfortably aware of the allowances that brought us together. In the suffering of Silouan’s Adam lies the root of strife. How can Pärt not have this in mind when he has suffused his reading with the pain of the mortal body, its skeleton at once fractured and bonded by immeasurable sorrow? On this note, I must respectfully disagree with Zachary Woolfe, who in his November 19 New York Times review characterizes Pärt as having “defined a seductive vision of modern spiritual music, one that seeks to escape our world…rather than to embrace it.” I wonder if we are listening to the same music, for it is anything but escapist. Rather, it reminds me that I am experiencing an $80-per-ticket luxury even as innocents continue to die for nothing at the hands of self-interested regimes. Its surplus of beauty only serves to emphasize the rarity thereof. In spite of venue and context, the intimacy of the musicianship heightens my awareness of these realities. That their charge transcends the commercial trappings of the festival speaks to precisely the love that went into its creation, even if it does nothing to obscure the tightrope I walk in balancing appreciation with the hypocrisy of my inaction. I feel this acutely as, in the wake of a standing ovation, concertgoers debate the technical ups and downs of what they have just heard. With such effect still whirring inside us, what difference do a few glitches in the first half make?

In the toy chest of temptation, there is a kaleidoscope of shadow. Through it, one sees that the world has become sick with perlocution. Turning it in the hands only darkens its glory. It blinds us to those in need. Awareness, this music tells us, is not enough. One must also know the vitality of experience. Grace is not something to be won back through good deeds or mere contemplation, but felt when one no longer seeks it. When I seek Mr. Kaljuste instead and inform him that I will be writing this review, he humbly wishes me good luck. Yet I read a deeper truth into the statement. Without luck, I would not have been here. May I never forget that.

Let me know Thy touch,
that I may know of life.
Let me know Thy touchlessness,
that I may know the path.

Rena Rama: Landscapes (JAPO 60020)

| Tyran Grillo

Rena Rama
Landscapes

Lennart Åberg tenor and soprano saxophones, percussion
Bobo Stenson piano, percussion
Palle Danielsson bass
Leroy Lowe drums, percussion
Recorded June 1977 at Talent Studio, Oslo
Engineer Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Thomas Stöwsand

Saxophonist, flutist, and composer Lennart Åberg is among ECM’s sleeper talents. Having graced the label only as sideman to 1994’s Dona Nostra, his brilliance was saved instead for the limited JAPO imprint. On this record he is joined by fellow Swedes Bobo Stenson (piano) and Palle Danielsson (bass), both familiar to ECM listeners. Perhaps not is American drummer Leroy Lowe, who rounds out this incarnation of the quartet known as Rena Rama and played with the group from 1975 to 1983. Born 1944 on a Pittsburg farm, Lowe began playing drums in his high school marching band and later befriended such greats as Billy Hart in his quest for a personal voice. After a two-year period of study at the Berklee School of Music, he joined Otis Redding’s Big Band on tour. The rigorousness of this experience led him to renounce the lifestyle that came with it. In need of recovery, he randomly picked Oslo as a holiday destination and, after some shuffling around, ended up in Sweden, where he sadly died of cancer in 1999…but not before leaving behind a legacy spanning 30+ years. I note Lowe’s background not only because it’s worth telling, but also because it seems indicative of Rena Rama’s aesthetic: it spins a globe and plays whatever its finger lands on.

From the drum solo that opens the Stenson-penned “Enok,” it’s clear that Lowe was a moving force in this outfit. Colorful as an ice cream shop’s selection of toppings, he opens a spacious sound together with Stenson’s entrance, to say nothing of Thomas Stöwsand’s engineering, while Danielsson adds good vibes to the growing message. With this skyward energy behind him, Åberg need only open his wings and let the wind do the talking. That powerful tenor sheds its earthly weight in favor of a boisterous key that with its dancing unlocks gurgling leaps of intuition from Stenson. Danielsson offers two tunes. The composer’s darkly melodic intro in “Rumanian Folk Song” kicks into a light groove with Lowe along for the ride—the bed of the quartet’s energy. Stenson again scales the z-axis, landing only to relay his altitude to Åberg’s soprano. The latter, soft and sure, casts a gray spell. Throughout, the contours of the rhythm section are much like patterned cloth, wispy yet boldly imprinted. Stenson gives us the alphabet of “Circle Dance” before Åberg’s tenor puzzles it out into words and sentences. He is happy to wander far afield, knowing the band’s footprints will always catch up. A veritable tributary of invention. The reedman closes out with two compositions of his own. First is the soprano-infused “På Campagnan II,” which threads galleries of needles in single strokes of intuition. The pianism’s frenzied beauty and hip contributions from the rhythm section are surpassed only by Åberg himself. Those same infections spread in “Royal Song From Dahomey.” This caravan of purposeful melodizing is at once cold and warm and rains percussion on us as if in a desert without oasis.

Like most JAPO releases, this is another elusive jewel, but well worth the digging.


Sleeve back

Veljo Tormis: Litany To Thunder (ECM New Series 1687)

| Tyran Grillo

Veljo Tormis
Litany To Thunder

Veljo Tormis
Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir
Tõnu Kaljuste conductor
Recorded August 1998, Estonian Concert Hall, Tallinn
Engineer: Teije van Geest
Produced by Manfred Eicher

“I do not use folk song. It is folk music that uses me.”
–Veljo Tormis

Since the 1992 release of Forgotten Peoples, the first major survey of Veljo Tormis to be released outside of Russia, ECM has paved an international appreciation of the Estonian composer, whose choral output exceeds 500 pieces. More than number, it is the melodic and textual content of those pieces that asks of the listener attention to source, meaning, and atmosphere. Although so much of Tormis’s work is drawn from Baltic folk traditions, his project is more one of expression than of preservation. He paints a distinct amalgam of texts and motifs, so that what we are left with is a sonic trajectory that moves ever forward. There is no group more qualified to follow that trajectory than the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir. Under the direction of Tõnu Kaljuste, these intensely talented singers breathe the music on Litany To Thunder as if it were their own.

dear girls dear maidens
where shall we go before the night sets in

How Can I Recognize My Home begins the program with a runo-song. This form finds its charge in the pre-Christian beliefs of the Baltic Finnic region, linking stanzas in a two-part round. On the surface a paean to nostalgia, it is more deeply a cartography of origins in which the voice becomes the thread that grows thinner with life and snaps only in death. Between the fatigue of travel and the cold springs that gurgle in wait of parched throats, the moon shines through it all like a maternal eye.

When the boys sang on the ship,
the girls thought it was an organ playing.
They could not imagine that the boys of their village
could sing so well.

Singing Aboard Ship (1983) is an Ingrian-Finnish folk song that features a call-and-response framework welded tight by the contralto of Karin Salumäe. The EPCC’s restraint is in full flower here, lapping at vessel’s edge with the reverence of lips pursed to a holy relic. It is an important setting, for it proves the power of song to be a guiding light through adversity. That the Finnic peoples exiled by the Soviet regime in the wake of World War II managed to preserve this tale is testament to that very fact.

You are earth-born, I am earth-born,
we are both black boil.

The Kalevala-inspired Curse Upon Iron (1972) showcases Tormis’s uncanny ability to soak us in a feeling. With its shamanic drum and tense use of silence, it peers into the heart of elemental forces and further into the human condition, which too often seeks to render those forces into tools of harm. The words reduce iron to its blood, to the evil that is its parasite. They even draw a line of affiliation to modern warfare, to the bane of technology. The furnace becomes a symbol of hatred fueled by temptation. Tenor Mati Turi and bass Allan Vurma bellow its fires, sustaining themselves through (if not on) sirens and shrieks of indignation.

And I, the child, then learned and learned,
I, little one, picked up the words.

In the wake of this aural forge, The Singer’s Childhood (1966) emerges as one of the most ethereal choral compositions to ever grace the ear. It is not only that its relative beauties are gentle enough to break apart from a sigh, but also because its appeal to nature as a source of art pulls our eyes from the upward swing of industrial and social progress and returns them to the wealth of activity and inspiration we have yet to regard on the ground.

The sea has fed us, the sea has watered us,
the sea has taken away many men from us.

Songs Of The Ancient Sea (1979) is overtly programmatic. Its technical admixture of whistling winds, cackling seagulls, and calling of shipmates lure the imagination from land. This piece is akin to performance storytelling, whereby the listener is not only engaged but also implicated in the action. A particularly moving section comes halfway through, when the tenor soloist laments a brother’s loss to the waves.

A hundred swordless men,
a thousand sworded men,
all the men from under a hill,
from the black earth.

The Bishop And The Pagan (1992/95) tells of Bishop Henry, whose death by the hands of a Finnish pagan farmer in 1158 is told from both sides. On the one hand is the memorial feast in Henry’s honor; on the other, an alliance with the victor. History changes places like shuffled cards, each obeisance a faltering shadow of reconciliation. In its careful balance of monastic solemnity and outright vilification, the vocal weave grows more resilient the more it is pulled.

Pour, Thunder, pour

The 1974 title composition for male choir shares similar touch points of battle, turning them into emblems of sacrifice. The meadows, overrun with chaos, funnel like sand through an hourglass, leaving a perfectly formed mountain of time.

I stepped into the house
a chair was brought to me
made of the bones of my geese

The Lost Geese is the forlorn tale of a maiden who must look after the geese on her family’s farm. The task proves more difficult than she imagined, however, when her geese are chased by demons into a spooky manor, where she is offered a meal of her charge. She throws their blood to the earth, where grows a tree populated with wildlife. This and How Can I Recognize My Home comprise the Two Estonian Runo-Songs, composed between 1973 and 1974. Sung as purely as the words are crystalline by sopranos Eve Härma and Kadri Ratt to the unobtrusive commentary of Marrit Gerretz-Traksmann at the piano, they wander without pause.

Tormis’s vitality and aesthetic properties connect the peoples of this music as the shore connects land and sea, establishing a fluid relationship between fields of geography and tradition. Images transcend linguistic barriers. In so being heard, they live anew.

<< Jan Garbarek: RITES (ECM 1685/86)
>> Heiner Goebbels: Surrogate Cities (ECM 1688/89 NS)

A second look: Pirchner/Pepl/DeJohnette (ECM 1237)

| Tyran Grillo

Werner Pirchner / Harry Pepl / Jack DeJohnette

Werner Pirchner tenor vibes, marimba
Harry Pepl ovation guitar
Jack DeJohnette drums
Digitally recorded on a Sunday afternoon in June 1982 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Writing these reviews has been as much an opportunity to learn about the many fascinations of ECM (and music in general) as about myself. Part of that learning process involves reassessment. So far in my explorations of the label, there have been only two bumps in the road—no small feat for a catalogue of 1300 releases. One of these bumps was the self-titled record cut by Werner Pirchner, Harry Pepl, and Jack DeJohnette. Recorded on a Sunday afternoon in June of 1982, it came across to my ears as a one-off session that was perhaps better suited to remain in reissue limbo. Yet after posting a rare critical review, I incurred an unexpected backlash. Rather than let this underscore my defensiveness—which is useless, for how can one argue with another’s appreciation of art?—I took it to heart and have, over the past year, returned to this album on occasion to absorb its expressive secrets. The experience also revealed an imperfection in my system: because I am hearing so many of these records for the first time, and in my sometimes-overzealous efforts to reach synchronicity with ECM’s rigorous release schedule, I tend listen to albums only once before reviewing them. While on the one hand this gives (I hope) a freshness of feeling to my attempts at describing the indescribable, on the other it doesn’t always leave me prepared to expound upon an experience that may be a longer time in coming. I am also an ardent, if idealistic, believer that music tends to come into one’s life when it is meant to, but that sometimes its interest requires incubation. I simply did not give this date the attention it deserves.

“African Godchild” opens its eyes to a savannah dawn and draws us into a scene resonant with life. The depth of Pepl’s talent, now that I’m more familiar with it, is immediately evident in the spaciousness of his evocations. Pirchner matches that spaciousness on the inside, so that our understanding of it becomes unified. We can hear from this that the Pepl/Pirchner relationship is the nexus of the trio, the guitarist providing spider webs of support for the mallet man’s acute inscriptions. DeJohnette’s kick drum and cymbals add relief to their subtle crosstalk. The interrelatedness of foreground and background is deftly realized, especially as Pepl steps forth with an echoing solo, sculpting the drama with practiced fingers. “Air, Love And Vitamines” is perfect for an autumn afternoon. It is a prime vehicle for Pirchner, whose Jarrett-like inflections enchant at every turn and constitute the vertical to DeJohnette’s horizontal. The drummer balances the hidden urgency of this tune and blends seamlessly with Pirchner’s chording. After listless beginnings, “Good-bye, Baby Post” Pirchner leads the way into a resonant groove. Pepl acts the bass player’s part, even more so in his solo, before pinpointing the night with far-reaching flame in “Better Times In Sight,” for which Pirchner brings us back to earth but not to land, preferring as he does to skate the limpid waters of a forgotten sea.

I stand by my original opinion that the processing on Pepl’s instrument obscures what is already such a direct voice (compare this to the more organic buzzing of Pirchner’s marimba), yet I can understand the motivation for contrast. Ultimately, his gorgeous sustains and crunchy backing ring true in spite of the effects applied. And while I still think the recording levels could still use some tweaking, I have found a solution: listen to it loud.

This curious little gem may or may not hold you at first listen, but it does have the potential, like anything worth its salt, to endear as it endures.

<< Arild Andersen: Molde Concert (ECM 1236)
>> Dave Holland: Life Cycle (ECM 1238)

John Surman/Jack DeJohnette: Invisible Nature (ECM 1796)

| Tyran Grillo

John Surman
Jack DeJohnette
Invisible Nature

John Surman soprano and baritone saxophones, bass clarinet, synthesizers
Jack DeJohnette drums, electronic percussion, piano
Recorded November 2000, Tampere Jazz Happening and Berlin JazzFest
Engineers: Ralf Sirén and Ekkehard Stoffregen
Produced by Steve Lake and John Surman

Since first recording for ECM as a duo on The Amazing Adventures Of Simon Simon, multi-reedist John Surman and drummer Jack DeJohnette have maintained a connection that finds deeper traction on the seven enhancements of Invisible Nature. Surman gurgles his way through the organ drone of “Mysterium,” which combined with a plodding bass line sounds like the seed of Jan Garbarek’s RITES. It is a silvery tapestry unspooling in flourishes that escape our ken. The music is so much of its own world that to hear applause segueing into “Rising Tide” is jarring. It reminds us that we’re still on Earth, that what we’ve been hearing has come from human hands and breath. The fantastic sweep of baritone amid DeJohnette’s frenetic pacing here elicits a wide spectrum, and charts the same balance of delicacy vs. punch that makes tracks like “Underground Movement” and “Ganges Groove” such inspiring excursions. Painting his snare like the eye of a hurricane, DeJohnette crystallizes steady grooves for Surman’s cerebral and biologically direct highs in the former, while in the latter he paints with his tabla generator a scene as lush as it is arid. “Outback Spirits” makes gorgeous use of digital delay in a trip filled with cinematic tension, equal parts Nicolas Roeg and Stanley Kubrick. It is the elegance of uninhibited joy, the patter of the disembodied. A welcoming freedom of expression prevails. “Fair Trade” is the masterwork of the collection and shows the depth and breadth that these two legends are capable of when the gloves come off and all that’s left to feed on is fire. Between the crunchy baritone and DeJohnette’s astonishing ear for space, there is more than enough to savor for future listening. “Song For World Forgiveness,” the only piece not entirely improvised, floats a swanky bass clarinet on a river of lipstick and smoky alleyways: an homage to roots, to loves, and to new beginnings.

For all the trickery, there is at this album’s core a duo of infinite potential, one that walks a tightrope—blindfolded—across wide canyons. The nature of this music may be invisible, but man, is it ever audible.

<< Arvo Pärt: Orient & Occident (ECM 1795 NS)
>> Trygve Seim: Sangam (ECM 1797)

Brightly Does It: Serkin and Shanghai Dazzle

| Tyran Grillo

The Shanghai Quartet
Weigang Li violin
Yi-Wen Jiang violin
Honggang Li viola
Nicholas Tzavaras cello
with
Peter Serkin piano
Bailey Hall, Cornell University
Friday, November 9, 2012
8:00 pm

Reputations of internationally renowned ensembles are bound to influence our expectations; the immediacy of a live performance allows us to put aside the accolades and bask in the music. Such was the dynamic at Bailey Hall last Friday, when pianist Peter Serkin joined the Shanghai Quartet for nearly two hours of enrichment. The centerpiece was Chinese-American composer Bright Sheng’s Dance Capriccio, making its New York state premier. Born in the quartet’s namesake, Sheng spent seven years studying folk culture of the Tibetan borderlands during the Cultural Revolution before entering the Shanghai Conservatory and uprooting to the US, where he now teaches composition at the University of Michigan. The spirit of that research continues to inform his work, and the Dance Capriccio’s deft shuttling of western Nepalese Sherpa idioms through a loom of classical counterparts is no exception. Yet rather than oversimplify his craft as a fusion of “East” and “West,” as much press on Sheng is wont to do, we did better to take this newly commissioned piece on its own terms, as dictated by the very ones for whom it was written. The spectral qualities of its awakening were clear from note one, its eddies of ink and time as brooding as they were animated. This brief glimpse into the lives of an ethnic group rarely known for anything beyond mountaineering was a treat for jaded ears. The layering of rhythmic signatures, combined with challenging octave splits from Serkin, made for rich tonal brocade and many translucent, if not also transcendent, passages. Like a stormy sky enjoying its thunder, memorable flashes of brilliance marked its canvas.

Making a sandwich of the evening were two no-less-colorful examples of standard repertoire. Of these, the A-Major Piano Quintet of Antonín Dvořák made the deepest impression and paired naturally with Sheng’s montage. At its heart is the Dumka, a Slavic form of which Dvořák was particularly fond. As the jewel of the performance, it showcased the musicians’ superb dynamic control—even the single pizzicato strokes from second violinist Yi-Wen Jiang rang true. The Dumka’s characteristic balance between sadness and gaiety was embodied to the gills by Serkin and cellist Nicholas Tzavaras. The composer’s affection for the cello, outside of his concerto for the same, is elsewhere hardly so apparent, and its mind-meld with the keys formed the golden thread that began the piece and flowed through a landscape, pastoral yet pensive, toward an effervescent Scherzo in the Bohemian style. All of this seemed mere preamble to the gnarled Finale, in which Dvořák’s cellular approach and astonishing instinct for forested textures was clear as day.

The concert opened with Mozart’s String Quartet No. 17 in B-flat Major. Nicknamed “The Hunt” and so called for the first movement’s triadic evocation of hunting horns, it offered a conservative start to a concert otherwise roiling with emotion. These delicate considerations drowned in the swoon of the second movement, with its beautiful gilding from first violinist Weigang Li and permeable support from violist Honggang Li. The Adagio was the night’s first highlight and proved that these four bows are at their virtuosic best when given time to ponder. With so much elasticity to savor, we were won over by the enchanting syncopations of the final movement. Its winding circles of light, full of intent yet never cajoling, played a game of chase in lieu of capture. The quartet rendered Mozart just right: evocatively without ever being too theatrical.

Serkin, a player I’ve long admired on disc (not least for his duo recording with András Schiff on ECM), was splendid on stage. He plays like a violinist, wiggling his fingers for a cerebral vibrato effect, sculpting notes in their post-attack resonance. He also possesses some of the most elegant legato phrasing in the business. In combination with this world-class act, the effect was dazzling.

(See this article in its original form at the Cornell Daily Sun.)

Robin Williamson: Skirting The River Road (ECM 1785)

| Tyran Grillo

Robin Williamson
Skirting The River Road

Robin Williamson vocals, harp, guitar, whistles
Mat Maneri viola, violin
Paul Dunmall tenor and soprano saxophones, clarinet, border pipes, ocarina, moxeño
Ale Möller mandola, lute, hammered dulcimer, shawm, clarino, drone flutes, natural flutes, bamboo flutes, vibraphone
Mick Hutton double-bass
Recorded March/April 2001 at Gateway Studios, Kingston-Upon-Thames
Engineer: Steve Lowe
Mixed at Albany Productions Ltd, Cardiff
Engineer: Lawson Dando
Produced by Steve Lake

No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.
–William Blake

These words have it: despite the mystic winds he rides, Robin Williamson flies close to the ground. He keeps us in sight. He wanders as he speaks, voice rising like the morning’s rooster even as it plunges a laborer’s tools into wet concrete. It is a storm in a teacup, the laugh inside a tear. For his sophomore ECM date, the Scottish singer/songwriter joins musicians whose participation is as unlikely as it is inevitable. With multi-instrumentalists Paul Dunmall and Ale Möller, viol(in)ist Mat Maneri, and bassist Mick Hutton at his side, he trudges his peerless way into fifteen territories under the banner “Songs and Settings of Whitman, Blake and Vaughan.” It is Blake whose legacy weighs heaviest on the scale, reaching the value of an ingot in “The Four Points Are Thus Beheld.” On the surface a lesson in cardinal perception, it is more deeply a catacomb riddled with improvisatory petroglyphs. Dunmall on tenor paints the most dynamic of these while strains of hammered dulcimer pluck the invisible strings that loom the stars with acoustic force. This opens into rich and sharply defined border pipes and peaks in meteorites of sustenance. Like the compass therein, Skirting The River Road has four hearts, for one must add Williamson himself to the subtitle’s list of three. The album carries the lantern of its main title from his “Dalliance Of Eagles.” Resting on a fulcrum of bass and framed by a wordless circle, his verse swivels from past to future and back again at a single breath. “The Journey” unravels its eponym in a pathway of hard-won disregard that recognizes the privilege of its vantage point. Further, “The Map With No North” crochets from every utterance a life bound by the dried skins of wayfarers, casting its far twisted spells for our naked scrutiny. A masterpiece.

Another original, “West From California’s Shores,” adds a drop of dawn to this dusky crucible that delights me. Not only because I am only now discovering the varietal delights of Williamson’s craft, but also because the title takes me back to Fairfax, the small town in northern California where I spent the first twelve years of my life. His animated travelogue drapes smiles like garlands along the neck of experience and underscores the travels that have since taken me far from home. One of Fairfax’s most unforgettable fixtures was The Sleeping Lady, a café and music venue where my mother could be found singing from time to time, and where my father saw Williamson perform with his Merry Band in the early 1980s. Sadly, I was with a babysitter during the show. Aside from the colorful instrumentation, which included the haunting mandocello at the bard’s fingertips, my father recalls harpist Sylvia Woods shooting rubber-tipped arrows from her strings (much to the audience’s chagrin) while the band engaged in bawdy banter in between songs. Above all, he remembers a comment that Williamson made: “The band members and I feel that the best kind of joke is something you can barely laugh at.” We can hear something of that wryness in this tune, so distinct from its gorgeously dour surroundings.

Yet let us not ignore the awakening of “The Morning Watch/A Song Of Joys.” This Whitman/Vaughan diptych opens the program by splashing a ray of golden light across pasture, thereby setting the blend of Williamson’s fullness at the helm and the ornamentation of his crew. A buttery soprano lends notably warm hues to the spectrum on deck, while Maneri’s viola flicks his hairs with programmatic brilliance in “Here To Burn.” Another Blake setting, it sits like its protagonist at a box of masks and destroys them one by one, making note of each parched expression before it fades. “Abstinence Sows Sand” is yet another. It takes some of the Indian influence that imbued much of the earlier Incredible String Band experiments and spins it afresh in dyed reeds. And then, there is “Infant Joy,” with which, as a new father ten weeks into a lifelong journey, I cannot help but hum in sympathetic resonance. Its articulation opens the gift of new life and finds within it infinitely more.

“The Terrible Doubt/The Price Of Experience” is a dire prologue that casts shadows over idyllic life and brings light to the wick of death to which we all must touch a flame. Infirmity looms outside the door of every private joy. This is linked by a lively “Shepherd’s Tune” on pipe into the web of “The Spider,” which along with “The Fly” fills a grave with filamented ale. Whitman makes a late reappearance in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” His strong shadow claps a palm on our backs and guides us through the waters of its epic passage. Upon arrival, “The World Of Light” welcomes us: our immigrant soul turned inside out and signed by the promise of another livelihood.

Williamson doesn’t so much draw out notes as knead them into thumb-printed strands, so that by the end one remembers not the music so much as the histories it activates. Vibrato lies dead by the wayside, caught among the bramble of virtuosos who look on from their perches of fatigue. In its place, the rawness of forgotten things. Skirting The River Road is therefore more than an album. It is an interaction of the deepest kind. Every song is its own entity standing beside Time’s crystal, which with every turn catches the light ever so differently as children awaken to replace others in forever-sleep.

<< Charles Lloyd: Hyperion with Higgins (ECM 1784)
>> Paul Bley: Solo in Mondsee (ECM 1786)