In his foreword to Music to Silence to Music: A Biography of Henry Grimes, Sonny Rollins recalls his first encounter with the young bassist in Philadelphia: “He seemed to hear and immediately respond…in an unbroken circuit between muse and man.” Likewise, German historian Barbara Frenz’s lovingly penned biography wires an unbroken circuit between reader and subject.
Frenz jumps improvisationally from reportage to interview. The resulting portrait is as multifaceted as the man himself. Grimes may not be interested in the anecdotal, but his memories yield a veritable résumé of iconic associations. By the early ’60s he was swimming in the deep end of New York City’s jazz scene, where collaborations with the likes of Albert Ayler unlocked his evolutionary potential. In 1967, just two years after his first leader date, he left the East Coast for the west and wasn’t heard from for nearly four decades. Grimes was forced to sell his bass in Los Angeles, where he sustained himself through odd jobs until he was rediscovered in 2002. He has been playing ever since, much to the glee of listeners and journalists alike, playing hundreds of concerts and surpassing even his own exalted reputation in the process. During the silence, he didn’t so much as touch an instrument. And yet, as Frenz makes clear, the music was always germinating inside him, along with a literary worldview that would feed back into his reprisal endeavors. His poetry is dark yet insightful and, like his soloing, focuses its attention on human interaction.
With this biography, Frenz has undone the misconception of Grimes as reticent ghost, arguing instead for his bold expressiveness while further emphasizing his versatility, go-with-the-flow attitude, and inner growth. His past contributions are obvious, but, as Frenz is quick to point out, his importance to the future of jazz even more so. Rather than an introvert who almost faded into obscurity, she wants us to see him as someone uninterested in attachments, living as he has—and always will—in the immaterial.
(This article originally appeared in the June 2016 The New York City Jazz Record, of which a PDF of the full issue is available here.)
Eight tunes from The Book of Angels make up Flaga, the 27th installment in a series exploring the parallel opus to John Zorn’s popular Masada series. His interpreters this time are pianist Craig Taborn, bassist Christian McBride, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey. “Machnia” puts listeners into the thick of things, highlighting the playing as much as Zorn’s prolific gift for melody.
What would appear to be a triangular relationship in theory turns into a pyramidal one in practice. The atmosphere is joyful and exciting and finds each musician grabbing the wheel in succession with idiosyncratic vigor. It’s a formula that leads to consistent piquancy in the remaining tunes, if at times dulled by the compactness of the engineering, which suffocates tunes like “Peliel” and “Katzfiel.” Other places it works beautifully, however, as in “Shiftier.” Here Taborn balances sacred and secular impressions, launching into his solos with territorial wanderlust. But not even a few misfires at the mixing board can reign in a double take on “Talmai,” of which the landscape is vast and the rhythm sectioning robust.
As may be expected in anything branded Zorn, abstractions are never too far away. Their wonders enliven “Katzfiel” and “Rogziel,” the latter recalling its composer’s fascination with the cartoon music of Carl Stalling. In this respect, the trio allows the spirit at hand to take the music where it needs to go, even if, like sand in an hourglass, every particle of improvisation eventually funnels into a steady passage of time. Which is not to say that reveries are absent: “Agbas” and “Harbonah” show sensitivity in kind, the latter an atmospheric gem that draws an arco bass thread through a stormy patchwork of piano and cymbals, teasing out the indestructible heart of the whole enterprise.
The way these veterans ease into and out of such eclectic themes is masterful, yielding a fresh take on Zorn that may just be the standout disc of the series and one that reasserts his position in the modern jazz canon.
(This article originally appeared in the June 2016 The New York City Jazz Record, of which a PDF of the full issue is available here.)
My latest review for RootsWorld online magazine is of Mahsa Vahdat’s The sun will rise, a Norwegian coproduction that follows the Iranian singer unaccompanied in various locations around the world. A moving album about the power of song. Click the cover to read on and hear samples.
My latest review for RootsWorld online magazine is of Russian-born singer Zulya’s concept album, On Love and Science. Click the cover to read more and hear samples.
Márta and György Kurtág
In memoriam Haydée
Játékok – Games and Transcriptions for piano solo and four hands
Piano Recital
Cité de la musique, Paris
22 September 2012
Márta and György Kurtág piano
Filmed September 22, 2012 at Cité de la musique, Paris
Directed by Isabelle Foulard
An LGM Télévision production in association with Cité de la musique
Producer: Sabrina Iwanski
Executive producer: Pierre-Martin Juban
In September of 2012, Hungarian composer György Kurtág and his wife Márta gave a concert at Cité de la musique in Paris to honor the memory of a dear friend, musicologist Haydée Charbagi (1979-2008). Their program, as adventurous as it was delightful, combined piano transcriptions for two and four hands, exuding such intimacy that it’s a wonder the audience didn’t just melt away from all the love in the hall. For those not present, this DVD bears witness to the Kurtágs’ unbridled passion for each other and the music that passes between them. The program’s bulk is culled from György’s own Játékok (Games), an ever-growing miscellany of dedications to the living and dead alike. It’s also a tribute to classical roots on the whole, as indicated by the composer’s transcriptions of Bach chorales—each a towering trunk among his otherwise microscopic foliage.
There’s something dark yet wondrous about the first dissonances that creep from the stage. Saying hello with a farewell, György approaches the score as if it were a poem (such philosophies were, in fact, the subject of Charbagi’s thesis). And perhaps nothing so omnipresent as poetry could express either the compactness or vigor of each brushstroke. As observer, Márta stands like an appreciative statue before joining him at the keyboard. At times, she caresses him on the shoulder after he finishes a solo, an unspoken signal to connect the dots.
Those very points of light sparkle in pieces like Flowers we are…, which in conjunction with the pantheonic Baroque selections enables a poignant contradiction: namely, that Bach’s music eminently looks forward while György looks backward, leaving us in the middle like the binding of an open book. His own responsory is as much a reflection of the one to whom it is dedicated (Joannis Pilinszky) as the composer who vaulted the form.
With most at or under a minute, these concert selections are rife with inflection. There are moments of staggering beauty, especially in the Hommages, such as the Hommage à Christian Wolff, with its tip-toed notecraft, the resonant Hommage à Stravinsky – Bells, and the Hommage à Farkas Ferenc in its multiple incarnations, each more nuanced than the last and ideally suited to the composer’s greatest interpreter, Márta.
Campanule, as with so much of what transpires, expresses the pregnancy of emptiness, and the potential for healing amid broken motifs. This would seem to be the underlying message also of playful asides such as the fierce exchange of single notes that is Beatings – Quarelling and the kindred Furious Chorale. Another elliptical piece, Study to Pilinszky’s “Hölderlin,” gives musical interpretation of a poem written for Mr. Kurtág and reinforces the concert’s overarching theme, while the dramatic (Palmstroke) and the programmatic (Stubbunny and Tumble-bunny) trip over one another in search of continuity.
Director Isabelle Soulard focuses on these passages in close-cropped framings, allowing the tender lattice of Aus der Ferne, written for the 80th birthday of Alfred Schlee, and the confectionary first movement of Bach’s E-flat major Trio Sonata (BWV 525) to shine all the brighter among this crowd of lamentations. For if anything, György’s art is about remembrance—a point driven home by the three encores, all of which reiterate pieces featured in the main program: the Hommage à Stravinsky and two of the Bach arrangements. Were it not for programs and obsessive musical minds, we might not even notice the repetition, as life consists of nothing but.
NIK BÄRTSCH’S MOBILE
Nik Bärtsch piano Sha bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet Kaspar Rast drums, percussion Nicolas Stocker drums, tuned percussion EXTENDED Etienne Abelin violin Ola Sendecki violin David Schnee viola Solme Hong cello Ambrosius Huber cello
Recorded March 2015, Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Produced by Manfred Eicher
U.S. release date: April 22, 2016
Swiss pianist and bandleader Nik Bärtsch makes no distinction between the old and the new, thriving instead on constant transformation. Freed of evocative titles, he writes in so-called “modules,” each of which combines through-composed and improvised material. This approach has yielded a series of albums for ECM under the name Ronin, but on Continuum he debuts his parallel ensemble, Mobile. Drummer Kaspar Rast and mononymous clarinetist Sha are familiar standbys, while percussionist Nicolas Stocker and a string section are the new recruits. Those familiar with Ronin will recognize certain tics in Mobile’s larger body. I ask Bärtsch to elaborate on their differences.
“Mobile is acoustic and Ronin amplified, resulting in different consequences concerning power, pressure, volume, and listening behavior (for musicians and audience alike). We recorded Continuum in close proximity with each other while the Ronin sessions had us in different rooms. Mobile is also a music ritual group and often plays long concerts of several hours or even days. In Mobile we include rhythmic strategies of contemporary classical music, for example in ‘Modul 5.’ The band’s name refers to a ‘perpetuum mobile,’ while Ronin is a ‘groove generator.’ Mobile creates groove equilibriums and orchestral maneuvers while Ronin attacks with a paradoxical mix of empty meditative roughness and strong rhythmic energy: Zen-funk.”
The ritual foundations of said “Modul 5” reveal the virtuosity of their execution with patience. The same holds true for “Modul 60,” in which strings interlock with their surroundings like stairways in an Escher lithograph.
On Continuum, Bärtsch has taken his craft one step closer to an ideal that, while perhaps unreachable, is more audible than ever. Beyond my own idiosyncratic impressions, however, the music of Mobile is rooted in the presence of its musicians, as anyone who has seen them live can attest. Movement would seem to be central to “Modul 29_14” in particular, a force of suggestion made by its pairing with martial arts in a promotional video:
The binary relationship between Rast and Stocker in this piece unpacks bits of code into full-blown programs. High notes in the glockenspiel, doubling those of the keyboard, activate those programs in one artful sequence after another. Bärtsch, for his part, is careful to keep his own perceptions grounded the physical body. “A musical pattern, rhythm, or resonating structure is a sensual movement,” he says. “Sometimes, when I am practicing intensively, I dream of becoming such a musical being: a pure resonating energy of movement. We are all dancers in the universe.”
And is this dancing indicative of the project’s classical leanings?
“The music might seem more ‘classical,’ since we give the impression of a chamber ensemble. In principle we work the same way as with Ronin: I compose a piece, which in the context of the group develops its own instrumentation and dynamics. But in one respect your reception is probably correct: there is less obvious improvisation than in Ronin, although ‘Modul 12’ is completely improvised, if on the basis of a modular, coherent structure.”
That latter module is remarkable for Rast’s brushwork, by which he smooths out a layer of gravel over Sha’s tunneling contrabass clarinet.
While most comfortable on the live stage, in this instance Mobile is uniquely bound to studio parameters. This does not, clarifies Bärtsch, equate to a reduction. “An album is a different genre altogether,” he notes. “It has and creates its own rules. But the group profits from the long-playing rituals, which leave us open to the situation of the recording: a new space-time continuum to be explored and created.”
To my ears, “Modul 18” is a well-rounded example of this brand of creationism. Its elements—metal, wood, air—come to life in a vibrational field of bowed strings against a repeating bass drum, Stocker shining like a constellation in its darker sky. Throughout “Modul 4,” too, the two drummers act as one as a high overlay of notes from Bärtsch foreshadows closure. Listening to such older modules, I can’t help but wonder how they’ve changed. Are they seeds for cultivation or do they become unique entities with every iteration?
“The modular way of composing allows a piece to evolve, while also retaining compositional coherence. The triangle of composition, improvisation, and interpretation should be connected and alive. Usually a pattern, piece, or musical strategy has more potential than you first recognize. You have to explore it for years through playing and observation. I see this as a natural, spiraling development forward into roots.”
Such is the modus operandi of “Modul 44,” in which Rast’s skins serve as palimpsests for musical poetry. The subtlety of his drumming is unexpected from such a robust figure. As in the gradual progressions of “Modul 8_11,” his interaction with the others results in so many orbits that the after-images of their playing form one glowing sphere. Despite the utter precision required to pull off this effect, a free-flowing, interdimensional quality prevails. If any message stays behind, it is Bärtsch’s own: “Trust your ears. They are the most sensitive antennas for the resonating inner and outer world.”
To experience A Moon Shaped Pool, the ninth studio effort from Radiohead, is to find treasure in a garbage can. It’s a beautiful rarity in an ugly world that appears when you least expect it. The album’s title alone indicates the contradictory forces swirling within its 53 minutes. Listeners cannot imagine such a pool because, from a terrestrial POV, the moon has no definite shape. It appears differently to us night by night, and even at its fullest shows no more than half of itself. Still, these musicians are up to the task of degaussing their waters in accordance with the phases, cupping hands to receive the wisdoms dripping from Thom Yorke’s mouth. Said pool is as amorphous as his singing, which ranges from waxing clarity to waning enunciation—not one in which to dive headfirst, but to ease into as a hot spring.
If the staccato pulse of “Burn The Witch” tells us anything about what we’re getting ourselves into, it’s that the Radiohead soundscape consists of consistencies. Where songs like this one stay crunchy even in milk, others were born to flop around, boneless and insecure. The witch hunt, for its part, is a red cross of medium and message. The tactility of guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s arrangement ensures that things remain three-dimensional from start to finish. The feel of keratin on woven gut and metal turns this musical inquisition into a flashing light in the neighboring village that never goes away. You stare and wonder into whose hands the mirror cuts, but no change of angle gets you any closer to discerning a face. The slackness of Yorke’s delivery belongs to the furniture of everyday life, where not every contour need be known in order to enjoy its function. The dust gathering beneath it is the ash of a dead messenger swept into anonymity by the broom of overlord politics. The fireplace roars, spottily as in the song’s video, trailing messages in the darkening sky, each a comet falling upward into extinction.
When Yorke paints the scene as “a low flying panic attack,” he hints not at faith but a watchful eye buried up to its pupil in denials of equality. The echoing chorus is a thing of such attraction that the flames begin to feel like your safest haven from oppression.
Electronic reverie and rounded pianism introduce the warmth of execution that butters “Daydreaming.” Yorke extends his body toward the blurry pessimisms of being fed upon and tasted. Boards of Canada-esque distortions yearn for a childhood in which the allergies of springtime actually meant something because they confirmed the platitude of staying indoors. Backward voices and strings snore like beasts grabbing handfuls of their own skin amid nightmares of wasting away.
The accompanying video is a revelation for revealing nothing. Its forced temporal adjacencies of spatially disconnected places leave much to be desired, for desire is its only valid emotion. In such context, dreamers can only be enablers, and at their center Yorke folds as the line “Half of my life” plays backward in the final laydown, very much aware that all of this is greater than the sum of our admirations.
And in your life, there comes a darkness There’s a spacecraft blocking out the sky
These opening lines of “Decks Dark” reveal a technological anxiety, half-quelled. Atmospheric blotting is a prediction of sunset, a faro-shuffled existence painstakingly restored to new deck order. Yes: decks not only of ships, but also of pasteboards—hearts and diamonds printed in the blood of expectation; spades and clubs in ashes of war.
The song further emphasizes a lingual idiosyncrasy, by which Yorke’s esses emerge as barest alveolar contacts. And it is a song about language:
Your face in the glass, in the glass It was just a laugh, just a laugh It’s whatever you say it is Split infinitive
The presence of choir, however, reduces potential roars to whispers.
All of which explains the acoustic matrix of “Desert Island Disk.” Obsessions with interface magnify the necessity of human language, and so the band must unplug them for hope of capturing them. This dust bowl is shaped in the studio, in post-production, in the very circuitry of the air. It is an affirmation of repetition as the locus classicus of psychological attachments. The feeling of ritual is out of sight, but blasts its Morse code across the windowpanes of the ears.
Waking, waking up from shutdown From a thousand years of sleep
So pining, Yorke succeeds in delivering a murder ballad where no one gets killed.
A wall stands between you and the destination you seek. It is “Ful Stop.” Peruse all you want for the missing el, but it will always tap you on the shoulder before disappearing. The laser blaster of ambiguity fires a few test rounds in order to gauge the thickness of communication, so that when Yorke exhales he knows exactly how to absorb the fumes on the uptake. He gives it to us straight (“Truth will mess you up”), compressing a coal of the stomach until it is a diamond of the mind.
Like the indefinable moon, “Glass Eyes” concerns artificial organs through which not even light may pass. A skipping beat and arcade progression give this song uplift, so that by the end Yorke has split into multiple voices. His falsetto is a bird on a wire, riding the shared border of floating and falling. “I feel this love turn cold,” he laments, never wanting to close his eyes until he is sure that others are gone from view.
Hence the return of panic, by now a leitmotif, in the self-pleasuring “Identikit,” which names a forensic tool used to draw composite portraits of criminals from a bank of predetermined features. It is connective tissue between fault and compliance. And as Yorke intones, “Broken hearts make it rain,” we think of monetary downpours imparting false images of who we are.
(Photo credit: Alex Lake)
The shared continuums of life are those we most abhor: our ability to slaughter, our want for personal gain, and our need to be remembered. Such are the conditions of a fashionable life, also running themes of “The Numbers.” A Jacob’s ladder of strings and strums captures the essence of adolescence in this prickly pear, shaken from its branch by daughters of ruin destined to become mothers of rebuilding, and by whose laughter the gas masks of subjugation will one day be fogged beyond use.
We call upon the people People have this power The numbers don’t decide
That this song was once known as “Silent Spring” is no surprise. Its well runs deep and its waters are thick with unuttered promises. And if we walk away from it thinking the system to be a lie, then we have fallen victim to that very thing. Such reminders of our constitutions are vital to holding this album in.
Like the Amnesiac sharpening that is “Knives Out,” “Present Tense” sings from a higher plane. Warped yet utterly literate, this bossa for supernovas thatches protection around the here and now, as if the very term were an abomination to evidences airbrushed between pulpits and podiums. The scrape of fingers on guitar strings is like the licking of a lion’s tongue across our collective backside: it grooms the hairs in perfect correlation but callouses the skin in the process. “It’s like a weapon” says Yorke of distance, which inters its social messages in fears of disability.
An electronica-oriented spin of the wheel lands on “Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor Rich Man Poor Man Beggar Man Thief,” where at last the internal vocation of thought is given an external wage. You hope for balance between animal behaviors, only to find predatory favor in an indigenism gone awry.
All the holes at once are coming alive, set free Out of sight and out of mind, lonely And they pray
Or is it “prey”? For will not all teeth know the stain of blood eventually? If resonance equals proximity, then Radiohead is an abandoned cathedral. And in its reliquary: “True Love Waits,” a macramé of pianos drifting into summer. The lyrics are a skeleton rocked in a glass case until it spins flesh and begins to cry. Yet the love Yorke professes exists in a haunted attic, where he opens a box containing the final words, “Don’t leave.” But leave we must if we are ever to approach this music again, holding a suicide note written in a temporal hand.
The alphabetized song list represents the arbitrariness of order and the systematic breakdown of communication into its consensus parts. More than a critique, it is a critique of critique, a hammer taken to one’s own reflection in honor of the fragment. The interruption of time by space, then, is far more traumatic than the reverse, for at least in the former’s violence one can be sure of having lived. Otherwise, the meanings of all works and adorations grow sour. Day jobs turn into night sweats, and dreams take on a visceral truth. Darkness is common to both, exclusive to its self-imagining, and holds your hand down the mountain path. At its end: a match. And you are the kindling.
Between Sound and Space: ECM Records and Beyond 