If you’re as much of an ECM New Series fan as I am, you will likely have encountered the bewildering yet inescapable pull of Helmut Lachenmann’s masterful opera, The Little Match Girl. I reviewed the album here, and have just come across this wonderful article by Johanna Keller, who puts the opera in a broader historical context and gives us a sense of its staging.
My latest review for All About Jazz is of a concert held by Nik Bärtsch’s Mobile at New York’s Rubin Museum of Art in celebration of the band’s first ECM album, Continuum. Click the photo below to read on.
(Photo credit: Glen DiCrocco)
My latest review for RootsWorld online magazine is of multi-instrumentalist and former Kodo drummer Kaoru Watanabe’s modern take on traditional Japanese music, Néo. Click the cover to discover!
My latest non-ECM reviews are of two vastly different albums, both worthy of your attention. The first is Julian Julien’s Terre II, which has something of a Debussy-meets-jazz-in-a-dark-alley vibe, while the other is by the extraordinary young jazz pianist Megumi Yonezawa, who rides a wave of praise from Jason Moran into her leader debut, A Result of the Colors. Click the covers below to read on…
Nils Økland Band
Kjølvatn
Nils Økland viola d’amore, Hardanger fiddle, violin,
Rolf-Erik Nystrøm alto and baritone saxophones
Sigbjørn Apeland harmonium
Mats Eilertsen double bass
Håkon Mørch Stene percussion, vibraphone
Recorded June 2012, Hoff Church Østre Toten, Norway
Engineer: Audun Strype
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
U.S. release date: April 8, 2016
Since his 1996 solo debut, Blå Harding, Norwegian Hardanger fiddler Nils Økland has charted a range of melodic waters, always docking at the intersection of traditional and contemporary music. His relationship with ECM has produced a series of artistic statements, each more cohesive than the last. His first for the label was 2009’s Monograph, a solo album of great scope that led to 2011’s Lysøen, in duet with Sigbjørn Apeland. And now we have Kjølvatn, for which he has assembled a full band under his own name. Apeland rejoins the fray, here playing harmonium, along with saxophonist Rolf-Erik Nystrøm, bassist Mats Eilertsen, and percussionist Håkon Mørch Stene. Each has lived in that gray area between folk, jazz, and classical, and funnels his unique experiences into Økland’s sound-world like grains of sand through an hourglass.
Having worked with these musicians for years in some configuration or another (all except Nystrøm played on Bris, released in 2004 on Rune Grammofon), Økland revisits a trove of older material with special familiarity. A look at even a few of the tunes shows the breadth of his network. He wrote “Mali,” for instance, after attending a concert by Swedish rapper Timbuktu. The band’s profiles cohere evocatively in this opening piece, as in the album’s title track, a retroactive score for the 1933 Scottish silent film The Rugged Island. “Undergrunn” (Underground), too, feels quite integrated, arising as it did from a collaboration with the London Sinfonietta around folk motifs. Such diversity of origins suggests that Økland’s influences are as complex and fragmentary as life itself.
(Photo credit: Ellen Ane Eggen)
Økland employs a variety of open tunings on the album, each of which has its own special name. The “dark blue” tuning (D-D-A-D) is heard on the processional “Drev” (Drifted), wherein are bolded Stene’s percussive colors, and “Start” the so-called “troll tuning” (B-E-B-D#). In the latter, Økland combines ancient structures and modern minimalism, both of which he sees as relying on short motifs multiplied to form larger structures.
Økland has been increasingly inspired by the viola d’amore, which like his mainstay instrument has extra strings that vibrate sympathetically beneath the main four, and on tracks “Puls” and “Skugge” (Shadow) he draws a darker soul from this cousin. In the former piece, the heartbeat is evoked by Stene on kettledrum, while Eilertsen explores kindred frequencies. Over this, a flight from Økland’s bow touches the ocean with a wingtip in search of nesting territory.
Location matters a lot in Kjølvatn, which was recorded at the Hoff stone church in the countryside of Norway’s Oppland county. Økland’s go-to engineer, Audun Strype, captures the church’s resonant bounce, allowing the rougher, more organic aspects of the performance to exude clarity. One may hear this especially in “Fivreld” (Butterfly), an alluring piece of ambience in which the harmonium breathes like sunlight through foliage. Made for a ballet performance at Haugesund Theater in Økland’s hometown, it veritably dances.
Other references to Økland’s past are found in “Blå harding” and “Amstel.” Earlier versions of both appeared on the aforementioned debut. The first is something of a blues dedicated to his Hardanger fiddle teacher Sigbjørn Bernhoft Osa, while the second, which closes out the album, is greener, its organ-like harmonium reminding us of where we are.
Kjølvatn rarely bubbles beyond a simmer, but its flavors are all the purer for it. It’s a significant move in Økland’s career, and exemplifies an artist who, despite denying any underlying message, understands the value of careful construction. And in a way, that is its practice: to create art for its own sake, devoid of political baggage and free to roam in search of new and welcoming ears.
(See this review as it originally appeared in RootsWorld online magazine here.)
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 All About Jazz is of British saxophonist Gilad Atzmon’s politically savvy The Whistle Blower. Click the cover to read on.
My latest review for All About Jazz is of an Italian-Brazilian crossover project from trombonist Andrea Esperti. Click the cover to read on.
Between Sound and Space: ECM Records and Beyond 