Gavin Bryars: Three Viennese Dancers (ECM New Series 1323)

| Tyran Grillo

Gavin Bryars
Three Viennese Dancers

Pascal Pongy French horn
Charles Fullbrook percussion
Gavin Bryars percussion
Arditti String Quartet
Recorded February 1986, Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The opening moments of this seminal disc encapsulate Bryars in a nutshell: restrained yet so full of life. A murky prologue drags us through reverberant waters, never quite breaking the waves of percussion above. Like the tides, sustained tones caress the coasts of our attention with invisible rhythm. If one were to record a wind chime, slow it down to a languid crawl, and submerge it in a tank, and if we were outside that tank with our ears pressed against the glass, straining to feel the vibrations with every inch our bodies, we might approach an analogous sound. Despite the lack of discernable melody, the mood is thick, fading into the silence whence it came.

String Quartet No. 1 (“Between the National and the Bristol”)
The result of a 1985 Vienna Festival commission, this quartet allowed Bryars to look beyond the insular world of his main instrument (the double bass) and into new territory. Having never written for string quartet, Bryars was faced with the task of both expanding upon the intricacies of his instrument while being faithful to the dynamics of this new medium. On the title, Bryars says:

During the time that I was working with Robert Wilson on The CIVIL WarS I undertook research into the life of Mata Hari in order to find text for an aria. One night in 1906, unknown to each of them, the three most famous dancers of the period were staying in Vienna. Maud Allan was at the National, Mata Hari was at the Hotel Bristol, and Isadora Duncan, another reference within the quartet, was staying in a hotel “somewhere between the National and the Bristol”.

While one might easily dismiss the anecdotal underpinnings of the quartet, they do add a splash of color to its monochromatic canvas. The instruments seem to enter in procession, with the violins in the lead. Each layer of the quartet is clearly introduced, as if each were its own string in a larger instrument, speaking as one story between worlds. The music here is fairly minimal and at moments puts me in mind of Michael Galasso’s wonderful album Scenes, also available on ECM. With the same grace that embodies so much of his work, Bryars traces his path in arcs. The quartet evokes a European city in pastiche. Violins raise a call to arms and, with one foot firmly planted in the arid terrain of imperialism, sound an alarm of imminent histories. We become privy to the sentiments of a young girl who has grown up in an oppressive regime and who must now choose between life and death, between family and freedom. She wanders the lamp-lit streets, glistening with a fresh spate of rain, and she despairs because she has lost something more than her grounding: her identity. The state does not beat her with its fists, but oppresses her with its presence of mind, even as her not-so-distant memories haunt her with promises of a better life. But then, we are suddenly lifted away from this scene in a swish from cello to violins, whereupon the narrative slips into a bizarre sort of dance—one that sways and tilts in conversation with gravity. It is the twirl of slippered feet dotting the landscape with steps as yet undiagrammed. The passage of time becomes contested as strings ascend once more into new harmonic possibilities.

First Viennese Dance
This third piece nears the 20-minute length of its predecessor and is scored for French horn and percussion. Again, we get a broad swell of gongs and liquid tones. Tubular bells resound in our ears as metallic clusters glitter like handfuls of coins dropped into a fountain. Like the prologue, this music is murky—so much so that even the trebly glockenspiel is diffused in a haze of post-production. Unlike the first string quartet, the structure of this first dance is so amorphous that all potential themes are stretched to the point of misrecognition. By the time we get to the end of any melodic line, we are so far from the beginning that we forget it. This music is more atmosphere than motive, flickering somewhere between an unknown future and nostalgia. Bryars is able to elicit from these acoustic ingredients a sound that is almost electronic in taste. In contrast to Bryars’s earlier The Sinking of the Titanic, however, the music represented on this album seems to have no specific vessel. It is, rather, the aura of a war-ravaged city yet to be built, much less destroyed.

The album ends where it began, plumbing the depths of clouded waters, leaving us to recede ever downward into a heavy darkness. This is an album to be experienced with closed eyes.

<< David Torn: cloud about mercury (ECM 1322)
>> Jan Garbarek: All Those Born With Wings (ECM 1324)

Meredith Monk: Turtle Dreams (ECM New Series 1240)

| Tyran Grillo

ECM 1240

Meredith Monk
Turtle Dreams

Meredith Monk voice, piano, organ, mini-moog, casio
Andrea Goodman voice
Paul Langland voice
Robert Een voice
Julius Eastman organ
Steve Lockwood organ
Collin Walcott organ, didjeridoo
Recorded June/July 1982 and January 1983 in New York and Ludwigsburg
Engineers: John Kilgore, Thomas Lazarus / Howard Kaufman, Phil Lee, M. Monk, M. Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher and Collin Walcott

The shell of Meredith Monk’s Turtle Dreams is, like that of its eponymous animal, of cellular design and impenetrable strength while also housing a fragile heart within. This turtle’s heart is the album’s rhythmic center, represented through the regularity of the organ that opens the title track. The instrument is stripped of effects, direct and without pretension. We meet a voice that might be described as eerie, yet which with a few deep listens reveals its sobering honesty. A second vocalist mimics these incantations. Their combined syllables feel precisely notated and yet free, as if passed down orally rather than through the written page. Eventually the voices rise into mechanical sirens, becoming protracted and devoid of the regularity that has spawned them, until they bubble and froth. The organ stops suddenly, leaving vocal trails to flash and fade like shooting stars. Notes ululate and dance, congregating like insects—dispersed with the wave of a hand, only to return in greater chorus. The first movement ends with return of the two voices, only now slightly askew and in freefall, as other voices rise in countermeasure before fading against the organ, which continues its commentary before deciding on a contentious chord.

The second movement, “View 1,” introduces a sharper pianistic sound. The music is so precise and so cyclical that it almost resembles that of video games, which must also be open-ended so that it can be looped seamlessly (and potentially endlessly) to match the imagery for which it was composed. A single voice comes in, post-processed with a shallow echo, presaging a similarly processed keyboard that slathers the music with nostalgia. Against Monk’s private songs, two voices interject like teasing children. The electric piano then signals a shift in narrative. No longer is the human voice responsible for telling us the tale, but is instead co-opted by silence, reminding us that the same realm which guards our cherished past is the same realm from which arises the most hurtful things. A modulated synthesizer shows its face before bringing the movement to a close.

Next is “Engine Steps,” in which timed silence breeds an unusual industrial rhythm, like a conveyor belt carrying things to be stamped and shipped out into the universe.

A diminutive voice laces the following “Ester’s Song,” a brief peek into the mind of a child at play.

“View 2” signals the organ’s final return, carrying upon its back the same choral cargo. The single voice, the narrative voice, becomes divided, speaking of ancestors, each of whom casts a single lure into Ester’s mind. Her hair grows, but her face stays the same.

The title of the album as a whole, aside from being rather evocative, also might just be the most accurate description of the mood contained therein. For what is a turtle, if not a living being whose body is its home, whose life is lived in and near water, and whose dreams must also be liquid, submerged, and full of the sounds of the marsh. As with much of Monk’s compositional work, what we get on this CD is only half the journey, complimented as it is by dance and imagery. The brief clips available online don’t seem to do justice to the overall shape and feel of what I am sure is a far more inclusive live experience. Nevertheless, the descriptive power of Monk’s wordlessness is staggering, and albums like this one continue to enlarge the scope of linguistic possibility. I can only hope it might do the same for all who listen.

<< Denny Zeitlin/Charlie Haden: Time Remembers One Time Once (ECM 1239)
>> Bill Frisell: In Line (ECM 1241)

Meredith Monk: Dolmen Music (ECM New Series 1197)

| Tyran Grillo

ECM 1197

Meredith Monk
Dolmen Music

Meredith Monk voice, piano
Collin Walcott percussion, violin
Steve Lockwood piano
Andrea Goodman voice
Monika Solem voice
Paul Langland voice
Robert Een voice, cello
Julius Eastman percussion, voice
Recorded March 1980 and January 1981 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher and Collin Walcott

Like much of Meredith Monk’s work, the atmospheres on this album are as foreign as they are familiar and comprise a vivid testament to the staying power of her compositional talents. When I first heard Dolmen Music as a teenager, I thought of it as folk music from lands that had yet to be discovered (admittedly, this interpretation was shaped by an oft-cited description to the same effect). Listening to it anew, I prefer to think of it as music that comes from a place so deep within, so familiar, that we tremble to hear it blatantly exposed. Monk’s music is all about the voice: it extends from the voice, begins and ends in the throat, reveling in its elasticity, its pliancy, its fragility.

Gotham Lullaby
Over a sparse layer of four-note arpeggios, Monk sings and squeals, tracing her swan song in the dust. Sustained tones hover in the background just out of reach as her voice ebbs and flows along a wordless coast. This is a lullaby of trees, if not for trees; a dream of darkness between branches and the decay of leaves falling past the city’s edge; a place where the wind can still be felt…

Travelling
This little journey springs to life with a rollicking piano laced with ritualistic drumbeats. Monk carries full weight in her confident ululations. The emergence of a rain stick adds an air of ceremony, where the piano becomes our circle and Monk the medium who channels voices of the dead in a semblance of life. Words dissolve, wetted by the trickling of monosyllables, grunts, and cries. Monk converses with her self, as if the piano were not another voice but a landscape in which the voice has found purchase. She casts her lot into the chasm at her feet as one other voice takes up the call, floating like a severed head in the ether, its mouth agape to expel the song of its birth and its death.

The Tale
A thread of piano and mouth organ supports a series of vocal beads in which we get our first and only discernible words. Over this conformist backdrop, she proclaims:

I still have my hands.
I still have my mind.
I still have my money.
I still have my telephone…hello, hellooo, hellooooo?

And between these seemingly innocuous interjections, she riddles our attention with rhythmic laughter against the sound of breaking glass, the detritus of the living.

I still have my memory.
I still have my gold ring…beautiful, I love it, I love it!
I still have my allergies.
I still have my philosophy.

This is not the voice of the insane, despite what its many disjunctions might have us believe. It is the voice of a larger social body gone awry rather than that of a single individual corrupted by its oppressive infrastructure.

Biography
This is the most emotional composition on the album and makes me stop what I’m doing every time it comes on. It is a keen in reverse that scrapes the interiors of our lungs. Peeking out from the deepest recesses of articulation, Monk sings as if in mourning. Her utter abandon allows her access to divine control through the very lack of her desire to control. In doing so, she looses the strictures of emotional conduct, shedding the outer walls of her physical makeup. She cries as she sings, intoning and droning. Her register strays into animal territory, as if intent on communicating to any and all creatures that might be listening. She runs through this vocal catalog, as it were, as a way of rearticulating the nature of her supposed loss and the comportment of its breathing remnants. This piece in particular rests on a razor’s edge, seemingly content on lying back and letting the world press down until it is cleaved in two. She wakes and walks, a divided self, into the night.

Dolmen Music
The last 24 minutes of the album are dedicated to its title piece, and what an epic journey it is. Dolmen Music unfolds liturgically, as delicate as it is persistent. A cello breathes into our ears with soft harmonics: introit. Women’s voices evoke the fundamental phonemic underpinnings of language. This language is not primitive so much as formative, spreading its vocabulary across space and time. Male voices process, lilting with “Ahs” that degenerate into a sort of ritualistic aphasia constrained only by time signatures. The cello returns: communion. The congregation partakes of a musical host and drinks vocal wine. And in the ecstatic peace that follows, Monk’s voices gather energy and speed with evangelical fervor. The voices work in canon, floating even as they crash into the limits of meaning.

With this album Monk reinvigorated the linear song, the sole/soul singer, the monophonic performer. With the barest resources, she and her highly trained ensemble gave us an eternity of sounds. Dolmen Music makes a stunning addition to any music collection not only for its audible dimensions, but also as an art object, for it boasts one of the most perfectly suited covers in the entire ECM catalog.

<< Thomas Demenga/Heinz Reber: Cellorganics (ECM 1196 NS)
>> Steve Eliovson: Dawn Dance (ECM 1198)

Gateway (ECM 1061)

| Tyran Grillo

ECM 1061

Gateway

John Abercrombie guitar
Dave Holland bass
Jack DeJohnette drums
Recorded March 1975 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

With this record, John Abercrombie both repaved and detoured from his staid path. He could hardly have been in finer company, and the combination seems to have fanned all sorts of flames within him. DeJohnette and Holland string an array of tightropes across which Abercrombie balances his way into previously uncharted territory.

“Back-Woods Song” evokes a mood that would come to define some of the later work of Bill Frisell. To be sure, the sound lives up to its name here as it awakens like an alligator poking its head above some swampy surface. Holland solos wonderfully here, after what some have rightly remarked to be a rather “creepy” turn from Abercrombie, ricocheting delightfully off the cymbals. This is very muddy jazz: viscous, opaque, and teeming with unseen life. “Waiting” is essentially a slow trek for bass that ushers us into “May Dance,” in which Abercrombie’s fingers frolic across the fretboard. Thus he brings a clear sense of continuity and of dynamic energy, scraping away at the surface of possibility and peering into its inner depths without fear of censure. The ensuing frenzy of activity resolves into a delicate bass solo, during which Abercrombie takes a much-needed breather. Holland cleverly mimics Abercrombie’s style, underscoring that same cluster concept of note value and melodic ascendency. “Unshielded Desire” is exactly what it claims to be. It starts with a percussive bang like the finale of a fireworks display and Abercrombie runs with all his might to capture every dying spark as it trails in the sky. The music goes around in spirals, flirting with a center it can never reach no matter how far down it goes, until it is like a compass gone haywire in the Bermuda Triangle. Next is “Jamala,” the most downtempo cut on the album. This is a moody masterpiece and a fine lead-in to the magical, epic, and incendiary “Sorcery I,” which rounds out the set.

I actually fell asleep the first three times I tried listening to this record. For whatever reason, its quirky energy seems to have had a soothing effect on me. Odd, seeing as I cannot imagine a more invigorating guitar trio. Abercrombie has such a distinctive sound and it has to do not only with the amplification and choice of instrument (or pairing thereof), but more importantly with the fragmented aesthetic he brings to his playing. Abercrombie is a “sensual” musician—that is, a musician of the senses. He seems to rattle his own bones, bringing to his improvisation a sense of detached wonder. Those looking for the laid-back Abercrombie may find this an unexpected outing. I do think it’s worth taking a chance on, however, as the freer moments herein might very well surprise and inspire. Despite a seemingly haphazard approach, Abercrombie remains tightly knit to the music’s immediacy. His is an electric sound that stays close to its acoustic roots, while Holland’s solos rise and fall, never straying from the core beat, as if strung to DeJohnette’s limbs.

It’s difficult to explain this kind of jazz to someone who has never heard it, and almost as difficult to describe it as someone hearing it for the first time. It is chameleonic music of the highest order. The wealth of possibility represented here in the art of improvisation expands the ear, the mind, and the heart of the listener, cracking the window of one’s worldview open just that much more to reveal the joys of lived experience. And maybe that’s what jazz is all about: experiencing the human spirit and the infinite ways in which it contorts itself to the tune of some intangible creativity.

<< Ralph Towner: Solstice (ECM 1060)
>> Collin Walcott: Cloud Dance (ECM 1062)

Pat Metheny: Bright Size Life (ECM 1073)

| Tyran Grillo

ECM 1073

Pat Metheny
Bright Size Life

Pat Metheny guitars
Jaco Pastorius bass
Bob Moses drums
Recorded December 1975, Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The tunes on Bright Size Life, Pat Metheny’s first studio album as frontman, tell a story that begins at the outskirts of Jim Hall, traverses the vast plains of the American Midwest, and ends smack dab in the middle of Ornette Coleman. From the moment fingers hit strings, we are launched into the luscious warmth that would come to characterize an ECM era. Flanked by the late Jaco Pastorius on bass and a cymbal-happy Bob Moses on drums, Metheny carries the brunt of the record’s melodic thrust. Positively overflowing with gorgeous circuitousness, organic inversions, and unwavering execution, Metheny and his sidemen make it sound as if it were harder not to produce such flawless synergy. With the obvious exception of his solo efforts, this is Metheny at his barest. And while his larger group projects tend to stray into more fusion-oriented territory, here we get a trio of musicians whose sensibilities, no less intertwined, arrange themselves into a more consistent rural flavor. There is something unmistakably outdoorsy about Bright Size Life. One can’t help but want to pop this music in the stereo during a long drive or cross-country trip, and maybe even have it in one’s ears during a hike (assuming that such digital trappings aren’t antithetical to the activity). An utter delicacy of phrasing and controlled abandon is what makes Metheny such a joy to listen to as he weaves his monochromatic web. Even during those moments in “Missouri Uncompromised” and “Omaha Celebration,” which swell into ecstatic fervor, Metheny exercises stylish restraint, as if pushing too far might break an already fine thread of articulation. Slower numbers like “Midwestern Night Dream” put Metheny in a more supportive mood, spinning a web of chords in equity with his fellow musicians. The bass adopts a more chorused presence, hopping over Metheny like a frog on lily pads. “Unquity Road,” along with the title track, foregrounds a composed doorway into an improvisatory wonderland, looking back regularly to its origins, as a child would its mother. Metheny closes out the set with “Round Trip/Broadway Blues,” an Ornette Coleman medley that seems to write its script as it goes along, until the vanishing point swallows and spits us out whole.

Bright Size Life is suitably recorded, with drums given the widest berth beneath the evenly spaced leads. Pastorius has plenty of opportunities to strut his stuff on center stage, and it is astounding to hear how he manages to thread every needle that Metheny fashions from the ether. At times, guitar and bass walk hand-in-hand, while at others one trails the other. Listening to this album is like tracing a map in sound. As followers, we may not know the next phase of our journey and can only trust that our guides will come through in the end. Metheny and company deliver above and beyond in this respect, with plenty of unexplored terrain left over to do it all over again.

Many consider the 1970s to be jazz’s deadest era. With records like this, ECM sufficiently laid that myth to rest. Listen and find out why.

<< Gary Burton Quintet: Dreams So Real (ECM 1072)
>> Jack DeJohnette’s Directions: Untitled (ECM 1074)

Keith Jarrett: Arbour Zena (ECM 1070)

| Tyran Grillo

1070 XKeith Jarrett
Arbour Zena

Keith Jarrett piano
Jan Garbarek soprano and tenor saxophones
Charlie Haden bass
Mladen Gutesha conductor
Recorded October 1975, Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The moment I lie in bed and begin listening to this album in my dorm room for the purposes of this review, my suitemate launches into a volatile argument with his girlfriend. As their loud verbal match breaches the gap under my door, I trace its implications across the geography of Arbour Zena. I think about the fallibility of relationships, about the trials and rewards of a musical life, and about the often contrived ways in which we attempt to validate our own experiences through the art of others.

Against a backdrop of accusations of infidelity, “Runes” blooms to quiet life with a slow orchestral tremolo. Jarrett disturbs the crystalline stillness with shafts of light and the bass falls like thick droplets as the orchestra turns to the morning sun, treading lightly upon the water so as not to disrupt its surface tension. The piano fades, leaving Haden to amble along the banks, skirting the limits of our visible world. Jarrett returns as if back from a foraging expedition, peering carefully into the scene laid before us as he unfurls a background of epic dimensions. He then pulls the orchestra in a new direction, leaving the bass to contemplate the fate of its own path. At first, we aren’t sure if the two are even connected. Perhaps they will join again, we wonder. Jarrett’s intimate piano improvisations dip their toes into waters familiar to fans of his solo work. Yet for all the music’s scope, we don’t so much travel as burrow deeper into the recesses of indecision until Garbarek’s entrance wakes us. In its own strange way, the music does resolve itself as these disparate voices achieve harmony over time. Where Luminessence was a conversation, “Runes” feels more like a narrative that jumps from one character’s head to another. It is also very difficult to picture the music, for Jarrett works in emotions here rather than in images. These aren’t simply the antagonistic ramblings of a polemicist, but rather the careful scripts of one whose relationship to determinacy is as complex as life itself, fragile as the flutter of breath over reed that ends the piece.

“Solara March” draws its plaintive curtains back to reveal an orchestra and bass. This is but the preamble to some stunning passages in which the piano touches off a lush tripping of orchestral sound while the bass seems only to meander, as if content to face an oncoming storm. As Jarrett plays a linear melody on the keyboard’s higher register, the bass continues to murmur in the background, as if unaware of its own critical potential. Garbarek injects some liveliness halfway through the “March.” With a characteristic buoyancy, Jarrett nudges us toward an opulent climax. The music finds its stride and renders worthwhile our disjointed path to getting there.

The third and final piece, entitled “Mirrors,” reflects a keening orchestral introduction, segueing into an extended meditation for piano and strings. As improviser over his own orchestral writing, Jarrett draws from the same threads and with the same colors, whereas his other improvisers mix their hues on an entirely different palette, if on the same canvas. With Jarrett leading the way, Garbarek has a much easier time fitting into the constantly shifting puzzle of the former’s evocative presence: the din of a distant flock of birds conveyed by the wind from an unseen field, or perhaps the sound of waves flitting in and out of our audible range. The lack of bass here is somehow comforting, leaving Jarrett and Garbarek to glide ever more assuredly across the album’s opaque surface. During this movement my suitemate’s girlfriend shouts, “That’s it! We’re through,” leaving behind not only a silent partner, but also emptiness in what would otherwise be a Saturday evening filled with laughter and sounds of lovemaking bleeding through these hollow walls.

This album is strangely recorded. The orchestra is given very little breathing room while Haden stands aloof, sounding as if he were recorded in a separate room and eased in later at the mixing board. In many ways, the bass is our mediator, our interpreter between languages and worlds, operating as it does a subliminal space. The music on Arbour Zena is diffuse, composed of blurry snatches of memory. There is nothing incredibly arresting about it. It doesn’t invite the listener and only barely acknowledges that it is being heard, playing not even for itself. It is like a dance missing a few steps, a garden with a trampled flowerbed and only a few unblemished specimens holding fast to their roots. It is the liberation of desire from the trappings of its own desire to be desired. Jarrett’s fellow musicians are rather well suited to this project, for to provide such continual commentary must be a challenge to even the most skilled.

Since writing this review, I am happy to report that my suitemate and his girlfriend have gotten back together, and I have taken to listening to Arbour Zena anew as an expression of hope—a musical talisman of emotional harmony in an unsympathetic world.

<< Kenny Wheeler: Gnu High (ECM 1069)
>> Tomasz Stanko: Balladyna (ECM 1071)

John Abercrombie: Timeless (ECM 1047)

| Tyran Grillo

Timeless

John Abercrombie
Timeless

John Abercrombie guitar
Jan Hammer organ, synthesizer, piano
Jack DeJohnette drums
Recorded June 11 & 12, 1974, Generation Sound Studios, New York
Engineers: Tony May and Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

On Timeless, guitarist John Abercrombie spearheads a session with keyboardist Jan Hammer and drummer Jack DeJohnette for a melding of minds in the first degree.

The trio kicks things off in high gear with “Lungs,” a heaping pile of kindling set ablaze by Hammer’s high-octane staccato, DeJohnette’s explosive hi-hat, and Abercrombie’s unusually frenetic fretwork. A sublime energy is maintained throughout and the payoff is supremely satisfying—all the more so for its brevity, as the music suddenly changes avenues just a few minutes in. Hammer relays between organ and synth, keeping the pace (and the funk) through trailing guitar solos that send notes like cosmic fingers flicking galaxies into outer space. The organ smolders quietly in the background before clinching a new groove, which Abercrombie laces with lines flanged just right for the mix. It all ends in a game of musical jump rope, with Abercrombie skipping over the alternation of drums and organ. “Love Song” is true to its name and is the first of two exquisite conversations between piano and acoustic guitar. Just as the organ trailed long rows in the soil of our attention, the piano comes as a welcome rain for our crop and the guitar like the sun that infuses it. This brings us to “Ralph’s Piano Waltz,” a highlight of these six fine offerings. Like the album as a whole, this track is a superlative balancing act. It’s a construct so seamless that if you don’t find your foot tapping during this one, you might want to make sure it’s still attached. The electric leads speak in their respective languages, but also mimic each other along the way. “Red And Orange” is what might result if Bach had survived into the 1970s as a closeted jazz musician, and is another standout in a set of many. “Remembering” is an alluring chain of tableux and the second of the two duets. Abercrombie sustains details the piano seems content to ignore, loosening those threads from their weave. We end with the title track, which builds slowly from a synth drone peppered with guitar musings to a full-on embrace of space.

This evergreen stands tall in the ECM forest. There is no sense of competition, only mutual reveling in a distinctly nuclear sound. One could easily call it fusion, but if anything it is fused with itself, for it has created every element it seeks to combine. Timeless indeed.

<< Dave Liebman: Drum Ode (ECM 1046)
>> Paul Motian: Tribute (ECM 1048)

Keith Jarrett: Luminessence (ECM 1049)

| Tyran Grillo

ECM 1049 CD

Keith Jarrett
Luminessence

Jan Garbarek tenor and soprano saxophones
Strings of Radio Symphony Orchestra Stuttgart
Mladen Gutesha conductor
Recorded April 29 and 30, 1974 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineers: Kurt Rapp and Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Having come to know Keith Jarrett primarily through his astounding improvisatory skills and classical interpretations, this recording marks my first time encountering him as composer proper. On the one hand, I feel as if setting Jarrett down on paper somehow limits his potential (note, for instance, his understandably longtime reluctance to publish a score version of the lauded Köln concert). On the other, Jan Garbarek is given such free reign of the icy territory into which he is deployed on this recording that he is able to channel Jarrett’s essence to its fullest. It’s difficult to imagine Jarrett’s music being any other way.

Any work for soloist and orchestra may be likened to a conversation in which the former introduces topics for the latter to work through “verbally.” At some point this dialectical relationship begins to take on a life of its own in the recording process. Yet in listening to Jarrett’s compositions one gets not conversation but conversion, a real-time transfiguration through which music implodes rather than expands. Garbarek doesn’t engage with the orchestra so much as traverse it, lifting and dropping his weighted feet across its rosin-dusted expanse. If there is dialogue to be found here, it’s entirely internal.

“Numinor” eases its way into the listener’s field of vision, across which Garbarek uses mournful reedwork to draw a series of jagged constellations. The orchestra sometimes bleeds, as if it were a cloth sheared by the edge of these gritty ruminations. Garbarek shouts with his instrument, treating it more as an extension of his voice by which the placement of his fingers articulates syllables in lieu of notes. Although we might not recognize the language, something intelligible comes through. In spite of some inspired solo passages, the music remains decidedly horizontal: every step forward is countered by one step sideways. There is, however, an incredibly moving scene in the final passage of “Windsong” where the saxophone blends into its surroundings, sharing an intimate moment of continuity made all the sweeter for its unexpected cessation. The title track, which closes the disc, is playful and romantic, slaloming its way through triadic signposts. The mood is contradictory, Garbarek engaged in two entirely different dialogues in a semblance of one.

Overall, I find Luminessence to be a challenging listen. Not because the music is particularly modernist, but because Jarrett makes so visible the often hidden dynamics of authorship we come to take for granted. As one who is continually enlarging the notion of musicality in everything he touches, Jarrett provides us here with an unabashed document of the compositional process. It is the audible equivalent of looking at the master’s sketchbook. I also find this album to be quite dark in spite of its glowing title, like a hidden shadow beneath the unturned page. It is an album that erases as many words as it inscribes, a memoir of images rather than prose. All of this makes for an effective, if threadbare, project. There are very few motives to speak of, which is liberating, as one is never subjected to the often-dominant reprise, nor to the subservience of secondary themes. Notes are sustained in ways they couldn’t have been sustained before, ending as abruptly as they began. This process is illustrative of the title’s clever play on words, a symbiosis of color and opaque desire.

<< Paul Motian: Tribute (ECM 1048)
>> Keith Jarrett: Belonging (ECM 1050)

The Gary Burton Quintet with Eberhard Weber: Ring (ECM 1051)

| Tyran Grillo

1051 X

Gary Burton Quintet
with Eberhard Weber
Ring

Gary Burton vibraharp
Mick Goodrick guitar
Pat Metheny guitars
Steve Swallow bass guitar
Bob Moses percussion
Eberhard Weber bass
Recorded July 23 and 24, 1974 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Before I get into this review, I’d like to take a moment to share my process:

As a busy grad student, listening to music for pleasure has become an increasingly difficult luxury to sustain with any regularity. In addition to my undying adoration for ECM, one major part of my motivation for starting this blog was a desire to reinvigorate my listening life. To that end, I have taken to giving one album per night my undivided attention as I go to sleep. I keep a digital voice recorder by my bed and speak whatever impressions come to mind. I then transcribe these comments the following morning and pare them down to something coherent. Any of my regular readers will notice that my review production has slowed down as of late. This is due to the fact that I have been preparing for my M.A. thesis defense and am heavily sleep-deprived as a result. Even so, I have attempted to listen when I can and continue with my audio review logs. Due to the aforementioned sleep deprivation, however, fatigue has begun to take its toll on my cognizance. This became especially apparent as I was recording my review for Ring. It began benignly enough with my usual laudatory ramblings, but as I sat down the following morning to transcribe, I realized that I had almost no recollection of the second half of what I had said, having uttered it in a stupor of half-sleep. I have since removed the odder bits, but would like to share a few verbatim examples for your (and my) amusement:

One almost feels or gets the sense of joy, for in that concept of joy there are also children…. There are clouds and unwashed apples and trees floating in the sky…. Next year it will be different, somehow pleased by the authorities while people such as I will be behind bars…

Whether or not these comments impart any deep insight into the music at hand might very well be arbitrary. Still, I cannot imagine having said such things without some sort of provocation. This experience makes me question what kind of background noise I must be filtering out before coming up with anything at all intelligible. Thank you for indulging this tangent and, for what it’s worth, here’s my highly filtered version:

Gary Burton is in a class all his own. On the vibraharp he is pliant yet unbreakable with a certain flair for the understatedly powerful. Among the present company, he is perfectly at ease. No one tries to overpower him, and despite his melodic dominance he never looms for too long, receding into as many shadows as he casts. There’s not a single pretentious note to be heard; the flow between and within tracks barters its way across smooth waters. This is a nocturnal album all the way.

In the opening “Mevlevia,” flanged guitar provides a yielding current of sound upon which Burton and Weber are able to lie back and drift. “Unfinished Sympathy” is more than just a clever play on words, but is also a gorgeous vehicle for Goodrick’s rolling solos. Its structure is built around a recurring guitar motif, which indeed feels unfinished as it circles around a flower it can never pollinate. It is a short and sweet diversion into a vaguely grasped thought. “Tunnel Of Love” is a languid journey toward something that is apprently fated but which is actually uncertain. A warm bass solo arises from the murky surface that surrounds us, threading our path with its own braided thread. A lilting guitar in the background plucks steady notes from the air, balancing them atop slowly rolling spheres. “Intrude” begins with a drum solo that flitters like a dragonfly skirting the edge of its known domain. A certain jouissance works its way from the outside in before petering out into the last few drops of cymbal, at which point the ensemble kicks in with a six-stringed groove tugged along by bass and the now recumbent drums. The delicacy from before is implicitly maintained, even as the static builds in charge, at last defused by a premature spark. “Silent Spring” feels like the most composed piece in this set, and in that sense it refuses to take its own simple pleasures for granted. The bass flickers its way into recognition like a blown-out candle in reverse, telling what it knows to be untrue, a musical fabrication in disguise. “The Colors of Chloë” produces another superb bass solo in the midst of a first-rate groove, which seems to climb up and down stairs before settling on the black and the white of its own private chessboard.

In short: listen to this album and love it.

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