For those interested, I have consolidated all six ECM radio shows I did last year for WKCR. The first five provide offerings from ECM’s catalog on a decade-by-decade basis, from the 1970s to the present, while the sixth is a special compilation of world- and folk-leaning favorites:
ECM by the Decades: The 1970s
ECM by the Decades: The 1980s
ECM by the Decades: The 1990s
ECM by the Decades: The 2000s
ECM by the Decades: The 2010s
ECM: Between the Lines
Now approaching its 10th year, Köln’s Klaeng Festival (Nov. 23rd-26th) has developed into a synaptic hub of local and international jazz talents. Fueled by seven musicians with a passion for seeking out the finest in improvised music, 2018’s incarnation brought out the collective’s most eclectic mission statement yet upon the Stadtgarten stage.
Throughout the three-day festival, a number of perennial themes clarified themselves. First and foremost was listening, as quintessentially expressed in the music of Clang Sayne. Led by vocalist/guitarist and principal composer Laura Hyland, the Irish band hung meticulously woven tapestries of song in celebration of life and death. Together with Judith Ring (voice/cello), Matthew Jacobson (drums) and Carolyn Goodwin (bass clarinet), Hyland crafted a tender yet restless atmosphere. Songs like “Thoughts from a Church Pew at a Mountain Cabin” and “The Round Soul of the World” revealed a lifetime’s worth of impressions with dirge-like pathos. Through it all, an awareness of silence as a physical substance of memory prevailed.
David Virelles and Marcus Gilmore showed us the art of listening within to bring meaning without. The pianist and drummer were more than that, as each had a modest arsenal at his disposal—Virelles on his Alesis MIDI keyboard fed with custom samples and Gilmore employing Sunhouse sensory percussion technology—to fill in the finer details.
Either musician could fill a room without these enhancements, which made their tasteful application thereof all the more joyful. Over the course of one long-form improvisation followed by something of a summary encore, the performance cycled through ambient grooves, massive block chords and solo relays in service of pathfinding music blurring the line between compression and decompression.
No mode of listening was as intense, however, as that brought to bear by bassist/vocalist Ruth Goller, whose Skylla (a new group playing its first live gig) gave pause to the relatively denser sound clouds preceding it. Flanked by the precise intonations and occasional aphasic turns of vocalists Lauren Kinsella and Alice Grant, Goller proceeded from humble intervals to unravel an intimacy so deep it felt almost blasphemous to be privy to its wonders. Bass kept things grounded in every sense, serving as an interpreter of dreams in a larger feedback loop.
Likeminded inwardness abounded in Of Cabbage and Kings, a local “neo a cappella” quartet who opened for drummer Leif Berger’s sextet and whose spiritual arrangement of Laura Mvula’s “Overcome” gave a taste of what could easily have been an entire concert.
Berger and friends spotlighted a second major theme of the festival: communication. Here the focus was on gestures, motifs and improvisational strategies. Berger’s band was catalyzed by alto saxophonist Fabian Dudek, trombonist Moritz Wesp, pianist Felix Hauptmann, synth wizard Yannis Anft and bassist David Helm. Half of the tunes were so new as to have only numbers for titles. Of these, “Zwei” and “Sechs” evoked an arid, desert-like atmosphere. The moodier “Basilica” was a highlight for its vivid evocation of sun, stone and glass while “Pflanzem,” despite its nonsensical title, proved Dudek to be a sensible improviser.
Further outstanding communication came from violinist Harald Kimmig, bassist Daniel Studer, cellist Alfred zimmerlin and pianist Philip zoubek, who over two long takes fleshed out a fascinating hour of free improvisation. Shifting between contemporary classical music (at times veering into darker, George Crumb-like territories) and jazz (as when Studer rubbed a drum brush across his instrument), every extended technique felt natural and inevitable and proved the humility of a quartet willing to be nothing more than the sum of its parts.
The festival’s communication ambassador, however, was Soweto Kinch. The British alto saxophonist lifted his trio with bassist Nick Jurd and drummer Will Glaser to postmodern heights across a set of six original tunes, followed by a freestyle rap built around words suggested by the audience. Kinch’s forays into hip-hop firmly placed the cornerstones of his politics, worldview and harmony-seeking personality. His original blend addressed salient issues of division without proselytizing, yielding the most audience-aware act of the weekend.
A final binding theme was synergy. Philm set the tone in this regard as the festival’s opener. Comprised of Philipp Gropper (tenor sax), Elias Stemeseder (piano/synths), Robert Landfermann (bass) and Oliver Steidle (drums), the band spoke in poetry rather than prose and brought unforced flow to fruition in chains of subtle explosions. The band carefully framed one scene after another, if only to allow dialogue to flow unscripted. Thus, piano and drums conversed from either end of the stage. Like a spirograph in sound, they embodied a dichotomy of chaos and order, revealing a depth of design in every turn of the cog.
The Buoyancy Band, a new outfit from pianist and bandleader Pablo Held, took synergy to an even higher level. Boosted by the flair of Percy Pursglove (flugelhorn), Kit Downes (organ) and Sean Carpio (drums), Held sparked one beautiful fire after another. Pursglove was a special treat, as his stratospheric improvisations recalled the late Kenny Wheeler in the most heartfelt way imaginable. Downes was another key presence, bringing depth to tunes like “Floater” and a remarkable translucence overall.
Synergy incarnate came in the form of Gilad Hekselman’s Zuper Octave. Joined by keyboard player Aaron Parks and drummer Kendrick Scott, the guitarist closed the festival with mostly original music that was on-point and welcoming. Between the fast-fingered “VBlues” and downtempo encore “Stumble,” the trio made magic seem like second nature. Parks held the most unenviable post, providing basslines on a Korg microKEY while playing Rhodes underneath. Hekselman’s writing represented one of the band’s many strengths. Whether in the beautifully arranged rhythms of “Tokyo Cookie” or relief-oriented “It Will Get Better,” his love of life was as obvious as the smiles he exchanged with his bandmates were plentiful. Theirs was a wisdom of experience most bands would take a lifetime to achieve.
If nothing else, however, 2018’s Klaeng Festival was about sound as substance. This was nowhere so obvious as in the venue’s slogan, printed on the door opening into the concert space: “We eat music.” If so, then everyone was surely nourished to capacity, leaving room only for the dessert of reflection.
(This article in its original form appeared in the January 2019 issue of The New York City Jazz Record, a full PDF of which is available here.)
Protean Labyrinth is a tunnel burrowing into the linguistic soil from which we all sprout. It’s a sensation best expressed in a handful of tracks bearing the title “Push.” Of these, “Push Four” is the most emblematic, a spontaneous ramble, which, like the album as a whole, achieves coherence by virtue of its passage through time—pushing indeed against the temptation of meaning in favor of instinctive understanding. At the center of this aphasia is vocalist Kyoko Kitamura, who doesn’t so much lead the band as strike it like flint on rock. Tenor saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, bassist Ken Filiano and drummer Dayeon Seok are chemically bound to her at every moment, tasting the air of possibility like a three-pronged tongue.
Despite the guiding scores from which the music is drawn, the quartet undermines any purchase of exposition. What starts as a bright groove one moment might morph into throaty sinews of darkness the next. That such changes occur without force or hierarchical touch is testament to these musicians’ willingness to smash their compass the moment it’s calibrated. The finest turns are “Deadbolt” and “No Exit,” both masterful containments of wildness. Each is a glass house filled with vocal stones—not thrown but handled so much that they’ve become rounded with care.
Kitamura’s voice, brimming with fierce humility, is central to these goings on. In “Lure,” each of her utterances is an Ouroboros of potential meaning sacrificed on the altar of its own becoming and in “Slide” she breaks out the vocal champagne, bubbling and frothing her way through a subterranean mythos. This is the underside of language, a sonic entity that grows and moves of its own accord.
(This review, in its original form, appeared in the December 2018 issue of The New York City Jazz Record, a full PDF of which is available here.)
If the music of Cecil Taylor was a continent, this album is a chain of islands. Divided in magnitude yet sharing the same creative waters, each of its pianists offers one of six eulogies in praise of an artist who knew no bounds and whose powerful life is held in the balance of interpretation.
Craig Taborn’s “Genuflect” plays out a dialogue between the ethereal and the earthly. His feel for texture is savory enough to be edible and recalls the soul-filling starches that were staples of the Taylor diet. This catharsis sits comfortably next to Sylvie Courvoisier, who brings her knowledge of the piano’s interior to bear on “Quauhnahuac” as a linguist would phonemes: that is, creating meaning out of elements that in and of themselves have none. Her anatomical precision elicits solace and strength in equal measure. The humbly titled “Minor Magus” finds Brian Marsella scraping away the dirt of grief in handfuls. It’s an unrelenting piece that speaks of a biography struggling to catch up with its departed subject.
“Grass and Trees on the Other Side of the Tracks” is Kris Davis’ song of spontaneity. By turns prayerful and spasmodic, it struggles to breathe of its own accord, like a pair of lungs fighting the influence of a respirator. Aruán Ortiz’s “Unveiling Urban Pointillism” may just be the body housing said lungs, pulling away from a dream so adhesive that one begins to question the value of waking at all. Anthony Coleman swings from the rafters of a written score (the album’s only). Its title, “April 5th, 2018,” dates Taylor’s death, veering into improvised corners of renovation. The most somber of the set, it is also the most traditional, sprinkling fragments of ragtime, swing, and pop into its brewing vessel. A fitting end to one whose posthumous legacy is just beginning.
(This review, in its original form, appeared in the December 2018 issue of The New York City Jazz Record, a full PDF of which is available here.)
Tord Gustavsen Trio
The Other Side
Tord Gustavsen piano, electronics
Sigurd Hole double bass
Jarle Vespestad drums
Recorded January 2018 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Peer Espen Ursfjord
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: August 31, 2018
Following the success of three earlier ECM recordings and reeling from the death of bassist Harald Johnsen, Norwegian pianist Tord Gustavsen decided to pursue other sources of light. Here his trio is relit, carrying over the torch of drummer Jarle Vespestad and adding the new flame of bassist Sigurd Hole for a veritable candelabrum of poetic originals, folk songs and church music. Although 11 years separates this from the last trio session, Gustavsen’s self-styled approach of “radical listening” is more vibrant than ever—a mood only confirmed by the crispness of this album’s engineering and the humbling interactions it documents.
(Photo credit: Hans Fredrik Asbjørnsen)
Like a prism, colors change throughout The Other Side as a matter of perspective. Upon first listen, I find myself drawn to an anthemic subtlety such as only Gustavsen can articulate. It’s all there in the inaugural “The Tunnel,” which feels like a slow-motion flashback into the deepest corners of my happiest memories.
A slight change of angle highlights the band’s newest member. Hole is an intrepidly lyrical bassist whose approach to folk tunes and hymns alike reveals a buoyant physicality of execution. His spirited contributions to folklorist Ludvig Mathias Lindeman’s “Kirken, den er et gammelt hus,” for instance, reveal a heart rooted deeply in tradition. His arco whispers in “Duality” and “Taste and See,” both of which float on softest beds of electronics, are haunting and precise and the continuity of his playing in “Re-Melt” is nothing short of romantic.
Another shift brings out the deeper hues of three Bach chorales, lovingly arranged in dramatic braids. Of these, “Schlafes Bruder” teases out great joy from solemn hymnody and frames butterfly-winged drumming. The piano solo “Left Over Lullaby No. 4” is yet another band of a spectrum that speaks for itself and, like the title track and the concluding “Curves,” has a classic feel that beckons us into Gustavsen’s back catalogue. All of which yields a life-affirming record and a profound leap of faith for one of ECM’s most indelible trios. Welcome home.
(This review originally appeared in the September 2018 issue of The New York City Jazz Record, a full PDF of which is available here.)
Mark Turner tenor saxophone
Ethan Iverson piano
Recorded June 2017, Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 7, 2018
Following two appearances on ECM as part of the Billy Hart Quartet, saxophonist Mark Turner and pianist Ethan Iverson return to the fold as a duo. Their speculative blend of chamber jazz is a nod to the Lennie Tristano/Warne Marsh school, yet every listen reveals layers of spontaneous design.
Marsh’s own “Dixie’s Dilemma” is a thematic centerpiece, which in its present form feels like a jazz message shot into space, scrambled by the universe and dropped back through the Earth’s atmosphere with exacting lyricism. The lion’s share of credit, though, goes to Iverson, who penned six of the album’s nine selections. Set opener “Lugano” is an ode to the place of its recording as well as the state of mind it conveys. It’s a feeling that could exist nowhere and nowhen else and finds Turner’s tone, fleshier than ever, sprouting wings from the spine of an aching altissimo. The title tune and darker “Third Familiar” are soundtracks of the soul while the tighter knots of “Turner’s Chamber of Unlikely Delights” unravel with playful extroversion. Against the cloudy backdrop of “Yesterday’s Bouquet,” a piano solo oozing with remembrance, the bluesier “Unclaimed Freight” puts a spirited ice cube in the cocktail. Turner’s contributions, for their part, constitute a binary star of personal expression. Where “Myron’s World” is a masterfully realized tangle of associations given credence by the profundity of their grammar, “Seven Points” is the album’s creative apex. Its balance between focus and surrender is indicative of open communication. Turner navigates every change of direction and terrain with eyes closed and heart open, yielding massive returns from investments of experience.
Although the musicians were recorded in the same room, they seem to inhabit their own planetary orbits. Bound by the gravitation of a serious whimsy, they finish each other’s sentences even as they begin to cast new lines into the galactic pond on which they’ve anchored their boat for an hour’s duration. And while their kingship may be temporary, whatever they’re tapping into is anything but.
(This review originally appeared in the September 2018 issue of The New York City Jazz Record, a full PDF of which is available here.)
Directed and filmed by Dorian Supin
Release date: October 12, 2012
In 2011, the Old Town Music School of Collegium Educationis Revaliae and the International Arvo Pärt Centre put on a student concert of Pärt’s music at St Michael’s Church in Tallinn. Playing Pärt documents both this historic performance and the rehearsals leading up to it, supplemented by interviews with the composer and his wife, Nora.
Said concert is a charming, in-depth survey of Pärt’s legacy, and of the beauty that gives it resonance. Many pieces on the program will be familiar to ECM listeners: organ works Trivium and Pari Intervallo (the latter arranged here for four guitars), Da Pacem Domine (arranged for four recorders), and the solemn Für Alina are standouts among them. Spiegel im Spiegel, for its balance of tension and prayer, is another. Throughout, a quiet respect prevails by way of a “local” feeling that cannot be replicated in the international concert hall. These melodies, however familiar, paint even more direct lines to the heart when so endearingly performed. Like fragrances in sound, they waft through the senses, following ancient channels of memory even while forging new ones.
Delightful surprises abound. First and foremost are “The Cycle of Four Easy Dances,” from the 1959 collection Music for Children’s Theatre, including the rarely heard “Butterflies” and the evocative “Dance of the Ducklings,” replete with dissonant splashes of webbed feet. Just as alluring is “I’m Already Big,” a children’s song composed when Pärt was a student. The focus on youth feels as poignant as it does inevitable, and makes indelible impressions in such choral settings as Veni Creator (a 2006 commission from the German Bishops’ Conference), Bogoróditse Djévo (a 1990 commission from Cambridge King’s College Choir, based on a Church Slavonic hymn to the Virgin Mary), and Vater Unser (composed in 2005 and based on a German translation of the Lord’s Prayer), for which the composer at the piano accompanies a quartet of singers.
Other highlights are Ukuaru Waltz, originally composed for the film Ukauru (1973, dir. Leid Laius) and performed on two chromatic kannels (plucked zithers), the aleatoric Diagramme (Pärt’s opus 11), and Variations for the Healing of Arinushka, a solo piano piece composed in 1977 while daughter Ariina was recovering from an appendix operation. Trepidations and hope of light breathe through every note.
Yet it’s in the rehearsals where Pärt’s humilities come out in full attendance. More than providing insight into the mind of a world-renowned composer, they reveal the soul of a man whose entire concept of art is nothing without faith in eternity. He understands the quality of sound, and the beauty of it being played with heart. If anything, and for that very reason, he’s more demanding of the children’s pieces, which in all their etudinal simplicity allow the interpreter’s soul to resound. During a rehearsal of “Butterflies,” for instance, he says, “It’s essential for the music to have some kind of secret. That’s the case of the butterfly as well. It’s a mysterious creature.” For him, the rudiment is sacred.
His music has materiality, and he treats it accordingly. Whether stressing the positions of a pianist’s hands while playing Für Alina or chiding himself for inclusion of inappropriate dynamics in the original score to “Dance of the Ducklings” (upon hearing which, he exclaims, “A beautiful piece. Did I compose it?”), he upholds the value of any given moment to shape something unexpected, personal, and true.
We encounter echoes of this philosophy in his conversations with Nora. In these, the subject of the interpreter is a red thread, pulling at questions of authority versus idiosyncrasy, and concluding that one must be both strong and gentle in order to play music with genuine feeling. “It has to be born in the soul of the interpreter,” he says, for in the body thereof is something concrete and in the metaphysical thereof is something ineffable. “The composer,” he goes on to say, “can learn a lot from the interpreter.” Most musicians, Nora agrees, are unresponsive to this suggestion. It’s like trying to explain how the sun shines. Hardship, Pärt adds, helps people understand this. Children notice it, too. Hence, the concert. They are straightforward, avers Nora, whereas professionals are contending with “a thousand different traditions.” Innocence allows performers to take notes seriously. She further likens music to the optical effect of two binocular images merging into one, a simile I would extend to the listener’s relationship to what’s being heard. Countless motifs out there are waiting to blend into our own. Let this film be a reminder of our openness to the spiritually healthiest ones.
Charles Lloyd
Arrows Into Infinity
A film produced and directed by Dorothy Darr and Jeffery Morse
Appearances by Lewie Steinberg, original bassist for Booker T and the MGs; Buddy Collette, musician and mentor; John Densmore, drummer for the Doors; writer Stanley Crouch; Michael Cuscuna, producer at Mosaic Records; drummer Jim Keltner; Robbie Robertson, guitarist, the Band; pianist Herbie Hancock; Arthur Monroe, artist and chief curator of the Oakland Museum of Art; Manfred Eicher; Jack DeJohnette; Don Was, musician, president of Blue Note Records; pianist Jason Moran; educator Herman Bossett; Jessica Felix, founder of Healdsburg Jazz Festival; educator and historian Phil Schaap; Dizzy Gillespie; Ayuko Babu, founder of the Pan African Film Festival; wife Dorothy Darr; Ornette Coleman; John Gilbreath, artistic director of Earshot Jazz; Ustad Zakir Hussain; drummer Eric Harland; pianist Geri Allen; bassist Larry Grenadier; vocalist Alicia Hall Moran; bassist Reuben Rogers
Release date: July 18, 2014
Oh, Forest Flower tell me, do.
How can I become like you?
Indifferent to the sham
That always changes and rearranges who I am.
From the Mississippi to the Hudson, rivers have run their courses through the life of Charles Lloyd. Like the 1938 flood in Memphis, Tennessee during which he was born, those waters have broken the levees of his soul, loosening sediments of buried pasts. With archival care, filmmakers Dorothy Darr and Jeffery Morse dust off and piece together as many of these as they can into a narrative of interconnected branches. Grafting these to the same flowering tree, they offer us an unparalleled glimpse into one of jazz’s most shade-giving griots.
The trunk of this story roots itself in biographically rich soil. From under the wing of Phineas Newborn, Jr., Lloyd emerged holding the feathers of others who walked before him. Like rhythm in Charlie Parker’s purview, he was liberated to articulate the minutiae of jazz traditions with a voice that was more than personal: it was organic. From moving to New York City, where Booker Little peeled away the Big Apple’s skin for an easier bite, and where he jumped into the pond of Chico Hamilton’s band, to the path of illumination he now walks, there’s more than a lifetime’s worth of creative impulses to map along the canvas of our wonder. Here’s an artist who offered his future at the altar of what came before, treating character not as a calling card but as manifestation of inner life.
Although typically associated with the tenor saxophone, Lloyd began as an altoist. He only switched to the deeper cousin at the urging of John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, who understood its range and possibilities. The suggestion was well taken, and Lloyd found himself once again broadening his wingspan. On stage with guitarist Gábor Szabó, in whose band Lloyd’s own compositions took flight, he developed more than a sound but a presence. After a brief stint with Herbie Hancock at Slug’s, then recording the album Of Course Of Course for Columbia (a reunion with Gabor that included Carter and Tony Williams), he joined forces with Keith Jarrett, Cecil McBee, and Jack DeJohnette. Hence, a creative explosion—if not also an implosion, as the sound was so introspective.
Lloyd soon found himself on bills with Grateful Dead (who were big fans) and Steve Miller, among others, and consequently drew appeal from younger audiences, kicking off a period of international touring and recognition. Along the way, he marked his trail with the classic Forest Flower (recorded live at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1966), stopping also in Tallinn, Leningrad, and Moscow to great fanfare (people applauded so long, DeJohnette recalls, they had to be stopped by authorities). In the face of a quick rise to notoriety, Lloyd was resolutely concerned with freedom, breaking racial, cultural, and artistic barriers at a time when Vietnam, social unrest, and the civil rights movement were swirling in the public imagination. He was on his way to becoming an artist without geographic or spiritual boundaries who played the note that should be played.
And yet, after such adventuresome projects as his Moon Man opera and a recording with the Beach Boys (Warm Waters), he feared becoming a product in and of an industry that demanded of him a “boring retelling of the truth.” All the while, he was searching for a “holy grail” in the music that was to be his salvation and his light. Disenchanted by the false gospel of stimulants, and with the music business in which they proliferated, he felt he owed a “debt to the tradition” and exiled himself in Big Sur to recalibrate his spiritual compass. For someone who, as Hancock put it, was “brimming with love,” it came as a difficult but necessary decision.
During this period of reflection, he often played music outside, in response to (and in conversation with) nature. He sometimes shared performance spaces with actors and poets in California, all the while “uninvited” to the jazz circuit. While the world was waiting for a comeback, artist Dorothy Darr was finding inspiration in his music for her painting. Having first met him in 1968, she saw in him an unrivaled depth of expression, a beauty without and within. In light of this, we may read this film also as a love story, of which music is but one leaf.
Then came the historic ECM debut with Bobo Stenson, Palle Danielsson, and Jon Christenson. Producer Manfred Eicher describes their encounter in the studio as an “innocent first meeting.”
Thus began a period of rejuvenation, including travels to India and the formation of Sangam with Zakir Hussain and Eric Harland, with whom he expanded his feel for the living flesh of improvisation. In the 1990s, Lloyd and Billy Higgins reconnected for the first time in four decades, first in their Acoustic Mastersrecording on Atlantic, later in their masterful Which Way is East. Higgins was adamant about putting his dear friend back into the public forum, never hesitating to remind Lloyd that he was a conduit in service of higher power.
The band with Jason Moran, Reuben Rogers, and Eric Harland (documented on Mirror) is another vital ECM touchpoint by which is articulated the importance of trust. To that end, Moran tells us that Lloyd represents something that is almost extinct. Whatever that something is may differ from one listener to the next, but to my ears it’s an underlying humility that burns like a pilot light in the depths of his horn.
If life is a cycle, then it is made of endless others. As if to confirm that philosophy, Eicher calls Lloyd an “artist in progress,” Geri Allen a “free perfectionist,” and Ayuko Babu one who transmits energy and joy to understand pain. However we choose to characterize him, he is one who plays that which he alone cannot articulate. Hence the importance of us the on receiving end to absorb his melodies like the food they are.
Of all the images in this film, an enthralling clip of Lloyd improvising with DeJohnette in a forest stands out for its unbridled expression. It emphasizes the destructive tendencies of nature, swallowing their music down a throat of wind and light. And yet, their expulsions linger in the heart long after the inevitable fade, for we carry them as echoes of unrepeatable moments. It’s a sobering reminder that our hearts are the most indelible archives of all, gateways into understandings without end. Perhaps, as Lloyd says, you can’t shoot an arrow into infinity if you’re always in motion, but his music shoots arrows into us until we are still.
Heinz Bütler
Manfred Eicher
Holozän
Heinz Bütler and Manfred Eicher
With Erland Josephson as Herr Geiser, Sophie Duez as Corinne, and Elevezia Barzan as Eine alte Frau
Music by J. S. Bach, Béla Bartók, Jan Garbarek, Paul Hindemith, Keith Jarrett, and Dimitri Shostakovich
Premiered in August of 1992 at the Locarno Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize
Produced by filmedition suhrkamp
Release date: October 30, 2009
Man alone is familiar with disasters, should he survive these; nature knows no disasters.
Based on Max Frisch’s 1979 novella, Man in the Holocene, Holozän is among the most poignant studies of solitude committed to celluloid. Manfred Eicher’s only foray into filmmaking put the ECM Records producer in collaboration with director Heinz Bütler. Eicher co-wrote script and compiled the music for this experience, the rewards of which are manifold.
It comes as no surprise that Bütler studied languages and has a degree in translation and interpreting, for his directorial style is a master class in inflections and retellings. We see it in the opening shot of water as strains of Bach waft through the air. The juxtaposition is more than coincidental; it’s inevitable, for the music of Bach is equally timeless, as much a repository for chronologies as the oceans themselves. We’re then faced with the Ticino mountains, their skin a yielding sponge for sunrays. It’s as if the landscape has been folded in half, the crease between them an uneven horizon.
Such quietude makes for artful contrast, and expresses the balancing act of life between sinking and floating. The low strings that follow with their grave tone seem to dig a grave in and of themselves: a pit of darkness wherein all beginnings must end. Herr Geiser (Erland Josephson) walks into his house, as if the mist congregated and pinched him out of ether. The interior walls are a gallery of curios: fragments of text, pictures torn from natural and unnatural histories alike.
Although his name connotes a geyser, nothing could be further from his temperament. He cuts up encyclopedias and history books, saving some and burning others in a fireplace, speaking more through the rasp of scissors on paper than the push of lips over esophageal air. He contemplates the emptiness of that which has been committed to external memory, piecing together a new narrative via pre-established ones. A thunder storm rumbles outside his window as he shifts through their psychological echoes.
That very sound hints at one of the film’s leitmotifs: namely, water in various states of unrest. Whether hanging like a curtain, collected in stagnant pools, or covering roads and less manicured paths, it’s both comfort and threat. For indeed, while he has taken refuge from that storm, the deeper one raging inside has real power to thrash him.
He is losing his memory, and collects things as if the words of others might be pieced together to mimic his own. He finds companionship in the vestigial, but seeks encounters insofar as he is able to from his melancholy perch.
The landscape harbors quiet menace in the eyes of this man, who looks with binoculars to be closer to it without actually being so. Even when a salamander wanders in from the rain, Geiser puts a magnifying glass up to it. The limpid gaze of this animal is the film’s only direct regard of the viewer, and shows the rudiments of Geiser’s intermediary technologies in making sense of nature.
He studies a map, knowing he’ll never place his feet along its paths, and at one point must open the balcony door and shout his name into the mist, lest he forget it. In response, the mist enters the room in confirmation of his flesh.
Fatigued by the cold, damp air, and by the menial chores demanding his attention, he creates others of circular purpose. He builds a house out of crackers, even as he eats its raw materials, destroying while creating, as if turning away from God’s generative almightiness. His almost-perverse interest in the journals of Sir Robert Scott of the British Antarctic Expedition, who along with his men died close to a supply depot when insurmountable weather prevented them from reaching it, betrays a butter-knifed masochism. He falls to the floor as images of natural disaster flicker on his TV, aware that the world might tear him apart at any moment. He exerts himself, doing exercises and limber moves, proving he still has a flicker of youth, but this only depresses him more. Physical memory, it seems, isn’t the same as mental.
That said, there are two other people in the film: an old woman who prays through her rosary, and Geiser’s daughter Corinne. We see the latter driving up the mountain with Keith Jarrett’s music as her fuel. The mountain looms in her window. Upon arrival, she sifts through his things in his absence, as he is climbing. She reads the words on his wall to glue his memory, and with it lights a shriveled torch in her own. She watches the mist. Meanwhile, her father is alone in the wilderness, alive with strains of Jan Garbarek. He wanders at night with a flashlight, seeing only the details of his focus as all else recesses into darkness.
Corinne reads from the same expedition journal. The end cannot be far. She fears for him. He falls asleep in a dilapidated building, only to awake at daybreak to find it was an old stone church. With a Paul Hindemith solo viola sonata brushing under her feet, Corinne talks with the old woman to find out where he went. He starts to make his way back, but stays to ponder among the rocks.
Eicher’s indebtedness to Andrei Tarkovsky is indelible in almost every frame of Holozän, and it’s by no coincidence that Josephson made The Sacrificewith the Russian director. And not only for the mist, cautious regard of faces, and slow pacing, but also for the ambience. One can almost hearthe mist, leaves, and air. The creak of footsteps, click of stone against stone, whispers of water in various collective states: these are a language of foley, of the interim. A space where space itself is a soul turned inside out.
Between Sound and Space: ECM Records and Beyond 