David Rothenberg, familiar to ECM listeners through his fascinating duo album with Marilyn Crispell, has constructed one of the most idiosyncratic vessels in which to sail the waters of improvised music. He excels at expanding his own terms to suit an ever-changing roster of natural musicians. The German field recording label Gruenrekorder is the host for this rather different collaboration, which combines Rothenberg’s clarinets with Turkish sound artist Korhan Erel on computer and iPad, along with nightingales fed live from the parks of Berlin. Anyone who has followed Rothenberg’s career will know of his mythical explorations of bird song in the book Why Birds Sing and its accompanying CD. More recently he has done the same with whales and insects, but the birds have been a regular point of return.
The liner notes of Berlin Bülbül (the second word being Turkish for “nightingale”) riff off these birds’ distinct ways of singing, which mirror jazz tactics in their abilities to lead, respond, and interpolate. The album is peppered with four live tracks, which through varied levels of construction proceed to tie as much as they unravel. This sense of push and pull, most vivid in such illustratively titled pieces as “Dark with Birds and Frogs,” leads to a fleshy palette of interspecies interaction and epitomizes the porosity of music as a communicative act. Rothenberg’s ability to manifest the intangible is perhaps uncanny at first, yet more organic the more one hears it, while the details of Erel’s live samplings, the rustle of human conversation, distant sirens and other errata of the city’s soundscape cinch a cord of continuity around them. As for the birds, chirpy and reaching down to microscopic levels of resonance, they are the champions of cohabitation, each more sagacious—yet whimsical!—than the last.
The magic circle of birds and breaths, looped back in on themselves in digital ellipses, is what this album is all about. And even in the studio, their spells bear fruit. Whether lurking in the John Surman-esque bass clarinet of “A Long Note’s Invisible Beam” and “Nachtigall Imbiss” or the clicks and wing-flutters of “Unearthly Untaught Strain” and “Her Pipe in Growth of Riper Days,” the overall texture is of swamp grass and urban concrete, of trees and asphalt rolled into one gorgeous mess of songs. Erel’s manipulations only enhance this effect by revealing the inner life of Rothenberg’s extroversions, and vice versa. And while these pieces may feel like vignettes, they are lives in miniature—full troves of existence with beginnings, middles, and ends. The granulations of “Omnibus” are just as insightful as the larger brushstrokes of “From That Moonlit Cedar What a Burst,” in which even deeper rhythms externalize. But, like the bluesy reverie of “Interfused Upon the Silentness,” it always ends in the sky, riding a purple cloud of thought into another dawn.
For this first installment of the “Realm” series of concept albums on the M.O.D. Technologies label, wherein artists are free walk their own paths even when those paths crumble from beneath their feet, Bill Laswell and Barton Rage combine heat sources to forge an ambient talisman that is sure to haunt you with its protections.
Hints of orchestras and long-playing melodies, each the ancestor of a solitary listener, learns the art of flotation right before us. Gloomy, perhaps, but only because darkness is sensed by the ears as light by the eyes. For in the darkness there is a sound which wilts at misinterpretation and blossoms when taken on its own terms. Barest hints of drumming flicker in and out of frame, while lower lines take shape as pure sonic reckoning, their compasses burrowing into skin unaware of their own mapping. A meditation made reality. This is “Mater.”
Clicking of cymbal and drum, an echo chamber that knows not the wrath of an open gate. Rather, it peers into the heart of things. The duo’s to-the-marrow methodology braids time signatures so tightly that the sun no longer reflects off them. A flash of song. An electronic insect attracted to pheromones emitted by throat and wrists. Laswell’s bass cannot help but lumber through the landscapes of its upbringing with sketchbook in hand. The confluence of machinery and sinews is the decoration, not the anchor, of this evolving tree, around which leaves dance in the wind like a child waiting for an embrace. This is “Waters of Mirage.”
Globular, uncertain arcs bow before a sacred dub altar, on which has been left offerings of star-bound digitalia. The signal is incomplete, its transmitter having broken eons ago in a moment of distress during some mission no one remembers. Synthesized trumpet breaths channel a chasm of death into automatic life, drinking in the scent of fortune to get away from the smoke. A pause before drum ‘n’ bass snakes shed their skins. A groovier test of faith through dance music for isolationists. This is “Triad Seer.”
A watery expanse larger than any ocean on Earth. A smooth undertow, amphibian and pliant. Funkier textures unfold wings of air, ephemeral yet alive. This is “Seraphim.”
A freer space ensues, prowling caves for want of ore. Weightless spaces intertwine with heavier drops of thought. This is “Beyond the Abyss.”
A melodic fractal, in the mode of guitarist Jeff Pearce, though with a murkier pulse. The finality here is heavy with cinema. This is “Nama.”
I haven’t been moved in this particular way since Mick Harris’s Somnific Flux, a 1995 collaboration with Laswell on Subharmonic. Such nostalgic threads also pull me back to Cypher 7’s Decoder (released the year before on Strata), bringing together past and future in a single, protracted blink. Let’s have more of this.
I have two new reviews up on All About Jazz: one of a recently issued live album of an older Sheila Jordan concert with Harvie S and Alan Broadbent, another of of Canadian pianist Marianne Trudel’s La vie commence ici, which should appeal to fans of ECM’s Nordic sounds. Click the covers to read on.
My latest review for RootsWorld online magazine is of Turkish singer Ferhat Tunç’s Kobani. Click the image below to read more and hear samples of this politically salient album, which was recorded at Oslo’s Rainbow Studio by longtime ECM engineer Jan Erik Kongshaug.
The Gurdjieff Ensemble Emmanuel Hovhannisyan duduk, pku, zurna Armen Ayvazyan kamancha Avag Margaryan pogh, zurna Aram Nikoghosyan oud Davit Avagyan tar Mesrop Khalatyan dap, dhol Vladimir Papikyan santur, voice Meri Vardanyan kanon Norayr Gapoyan duduk, bass duduk Eduard Harutyunyan tmbuk, cymbal, kshots, burvar, bell Levon Eskenian director
Recorded February 2015, Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineer: Markus Heiland
Produced by Manfred Eicher
U.S. release date: October 2, 2015
Since forming the Gurdjieff Folk Instruments Ensemble in 2008, musician and director Levon Eskenian has moved beyond delineations of the group’s namesake, even while staying truer than ever to the roots such an association implies. His ECM debut, Music of Georges I. Gurdjieff, drew from a well that had already been dug into the label’s landscape by Keith Jarrett and Vassilis Tsabropoulos/Anja Lechner, and deepened by Lechner’s subsequent duo with François Couturier. It was only natural, then, that Eskenian should turn his attention to that spiritual progenitor of Armenian classical music: Soghomon Soghomonian (1869-1935), a.k.a. Komitas.
Having appeared on Kim Kashkashian’s Hayren and Savina Yannatou’s Songs of Thessaloniki, among others, the music of Komitas has been something of a leitmotif in the ECM catalog, where its expressions of folk sentiment feel right at home, and nowhere so fully as on this first disc dedicated to him alone. As with Gurdjieff, Eskenian and his ensemble have gone as far back to into this music’s past as is conceivable, arranging it for the very instruments whose sounds first inspired Komitas to put pen to paper. Eskenian has, in essence, “re-composed” them as physical environments around on which listeners can walk to absorb every detail.
(Photo credit: Andranik Sahakyan)
Eskenian, for his part, provides—in both the music and liner notes—a loving account of Komitas, whose approach to diverse interests imbued his writing with metaphysical levels of beauty. Even when composing for western instruments, he would often notate with traditional instruments in mind, and so Eskenian’s instinct is in keeping with the origin story at hand. Komitas and Gurdjieff share one degree of separation by way of the latter’s student, Thomas de Hartmann, but even more in terms of philosophy, lifestyle, and artistic engagement. I asked Eskenian whether these connections had anything to do with how he put this album together.
“Gurdjieff sent de Hartmann to Yerevan, where he immersed himself in, held concerts of, and gave lectures on the music of Komitas. Later on, de Hartmann would found the Komitas Society with the goal of collecting and printing the composer’s music. There are some pieces in which Gurdjieff and Komitas used the same folk tunes. Both of them were truth-seekers. Like Gurdjieff, Komitas would also talk about vibrations. He consulted ancient manuscripts and believed in the healing powers of music, the effects of modes and how each string of the knar [a traditional harp], for example, had on a different part of the body. He taught movements rooted in ancient ritual dances of pre-Christian temples, and often referred to himself as a teacher of dancing. In all cases, I consider the music of Komitas to be an essential key for a better understanding of the music of Gurdjieff and of the many other classical composers who have based their compositions on folk motifs.”
Eskenian’s gentle and respectful assertions of the significance of this music further explain why the album seemed to take form of its own volition. Eskenian elaborates on the genesis of the project, which began with a suggestion on the part of producer Manfred Eicher to center a follow-up to his Gurdjieff debut around Armenian folk and sacred music:
“For many years I’d thought about the Komitas dances, to have them performed on traditional Armenian and ancient instruments. I knew the pieces long before my encounter with the music of Gurdjieff and they had always served as a reference for me, but arranging the piano scores for authentic traditional Armenian instruments was in fact a bold labor which required additional research along anthropological, historical, and ethnomusicological lines in order to have a certain level of objectivity that wouldn’t ruin his work. Manfred left me free to decide the program. During the recording session he was actively involved in creating a comfortable atmosphere in which the musicians might better hear their inner sound, and with the assistance of engineer Markus Heiland recorded these instruments in their full timbrous colors. During the mixing session, Manfred paid strict attention to the sequence of pieces, and to the ‘silent’ pauses between them. The album cover was also of his choosing, a beautiful photo and one of the first of biblical Ararat Mountain ever taken at the beginning of the 20th century.”
In his own briefer liner note for the album, Armenian composer Tigran Mansurian—onetime director of the Komitas State Conservatory of Yerevan—expands on the cultural iconicity of Komitas, whose piano pieces he goes so far as to describe as “documentary works,” preserving as they do the spirit of his Armenian heritage. The “Yot Par” (Seven dances) represent one such set of piano pieces, recalibrated here to suit the spectral qualities of Eskenian’s peerless ensemble. These dances are centered around the capital of Yerevan, the contentious city of Shushi, the village of Karin, and the Turkish provincial capital of Mush. Whether the binary star of bowed kamancha and hammered santur in “Manushaki,” the duduk and tar in “Yerangui,” or the pogh flute and tmbuk drum duet that is “Het u Araj,” each dance flows in measured contrast to surrounding tunes and highlights a different instrumental color. That same pogh flute, in tandem with oud, embodies perhaps the deepest entanglement of ancient impulse and contemporary realization in “Karno Shoror,” which is about as close to experiencing history as this music gets. Even “Masho Shoror,” another piano work newly fashioned, is rife with textures that feel much older than we can articulate by any other means. The present rendition cross-hatches the double-reed zurna with the santur’s metallic lines. At just under 12 minutes, it is an album in and of itself, gathering as it does many influences in a single hearth of understanding.
“I often think about this piece,” says Eskenian, “which was a series of mystical pagan dances accompanying pilgrimage to St. Karapet Monastery in Mush. The monastery was one of the main pilgrimage sites for Armenians and served as their temple even before Christianity. After the Armenian genocide inflicted by the Ottoman empire, when most Armenians were killed, this marvelous monastery was destroyed much like ancient monuments in the Middle East have been in recent years. It was a great loss, to be sure, but I reflect on the fact that we have these sounds and traditions encoded into the piano music, now brought back to their inspirational sources. Through this process, we are reconstructing something of what has been lost. I am grateful to be able to share this with the world: a piece of the past reaching out to us from unrecoverable times.”
Many of the program’s standalone songs are likewise rooted in nature, by which traces of what came before our current generation continue to thrive, changed but also essential. In the plough songs of the northern Lori region, such as “Lorva Gutanerg,” we almost don’t need to know that Komitas gathered such melodies himself and separated them like chaff from the wheat so that posterity might be nourished by their bread. The medieval influences are clearest in these examples, as in the fortune-telling motivations of “Mani Asem, Tsaghik Asem” (Praises to the flower) and, more so, the strains of “Hov Arek” (Dear mountains, send me a breeze), a high point in the album’s topography that accentuates the talents of santur player Vladimir Papikyan, whose virtuosity unites sentiment and form. Moving through lullabies and other pieces for children, as well as love songs, the ensemble touches on Komitas’s religious affinities in songs like “Havun” (The fowl of the air), in which two duduks express Christ’s Resurrection in metaphor. On the subject of ascendant beings, the pogh solo “Havik” (A radiant bird) evokes its eponym with purposeful flight. Breathy and full of charcoal in its palette, it recalls the sensory world of a Japanese brush painting, trees barely visible as splashes of ink in the background.
Despite any mystical characterizations one might draw around Komitas, it’s clear from this recording that the heart of his music runs on a fundamental energy. It’s the same energy that allows us to listen and to love, to seek out those things which connect us beyond concerns of the flesh. So much so, that no matter what form it takes, the music of Komitas occupies an immediately relatable realm of understanding. In this vein, listeners can look forward to an album of his complete piano music as performed by Lusine Grigoryan, who has worked diligently to reproduce every effect as indicated in the original scores. Where Eskenian has taken those cues to heart by transferring them the very instruments that inspired them, Grigoryan has accepted the challenge of expanding the piano’s vocabulary to suit the ambitious needs of these timeless melodies. The reconstruction has just begun.
(Click here to read the rest of my interview with Levon Eskenian for RootsWorld online magazine, alongside another review of the album by Erik Keilholtz.)
It’s not often you get to hear the world’s foremost ukulele prodigy. That is, of course, unless you’re Jake Shimabukuro, in which case you get to hear yourself every day. At Ithaca, New York’s Hangar Theatre on 15 April 2016, ears on both sides of the equation united to witness his artistry firsthand. The Honolulu-born star has singularly redefined the capabilities of this humble four-stringed instrument for new generations of listeners and, as evidenced by the handful of fans waiting to get their ukes signed after the show, players as well. As Shimabukuro himself said at one point between songs, “I bet you’re not having as much fun as we are up here.” To be sure, he gave back two parts passion for each of appreciation lobbed from an audience that was smiling ear to ear. Shimabukuro nourished his talents across a palette of 17 tunes, which together lent insight into the versatility of his craft and, more importantly, the dramatic spectrum of his art.
Of the many facets that one might admire about Shimabukuro, for me it was the emotional integrity of his gentler tunes, of which his delicacies were every bit as beguiling as the virtuosic showstoppers — and all of it enhanced by his musical partner Nolan Verner on electric bass. Two originals in particular, “Blue Roses Falling” (played solo) and “Ichigo Ichie,” were all the more impressive for their melodic strengths. His powers blossomed tenfold in their soil, releasing a spring-like fragrance not through the technical flourishes that inspired obligatory whoops of appreciation in surrounding pieces (though these were certainly worthy of our astonishment), but in the seriousness of his musicianship. Whether playing something meticulously through-composed or improvising a solo as he edged closer to jazz, every note counted. This was further evidenced by the compactness of his chosen tunes. Case in point was an arrangement of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which, being a staple of his live repertoire, occupied a realm all its own. As with his take on “Come Together” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” his ability to turn the familiar into something fresh and, above all, personal was assuring. The latter signature song was more poignant than ever in light of how far his career has come since a video of him playing George Harrison’s timeless ballad went viral in 2006.
With an ear for thick description, he gave every narrative a beginning, middle and end, sometimes riding on comforting and familiar chord progressions while at others venturing into atonal territories. Not to be forgotten, bassist Verner added a slick undercoat to the tried and true, and proved himself an ideal corollary to the star attraction’s pyrotechnics. Verner emphasized the harmonic adventurousness of Shimabukuro’s “Blue Haiku” and “Pianoforte,” while the improvisational whimsy of “Travels” showed the duo at its tightest. On the adventurous side of things, they offered a heavy reduction of Hawaiian composer Byron Yasui’s ukulele concerto called “Try Tone,” in which arpeggios intertwined around minor-second harmonies for a formidably tactile feel.
Even the more pleasant songs, like opener “Galloping Seahorses” or the smattering of island songs, including the popular “Kawika,” showed his equal footing across moods, from reverie to rock-out. Verner kept effortless pace throughout and enlivened the Rodrigo y Gabriela-esque “3rd Stream” with flexible infrastructure. Another highlight was Shimabukuro’s classic “Dragon,” which found him going electric for a cathartic solo. Still, at the end of the night, it was forlorn tunes (“Celtic Song” or “143,” for example) in which his distinctions truly shined, for by their colors was painted a landscape where memories, and their ever-changing shapes, are paramount.
(See this article as it originally appeared in The Cornell Daily Sunhere.)
Soul-seeking trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and sought soul, bassist Bill Laswell, recorded live at New York City’s The Stone on April 22, 2014. A metropolis unto themselves, built by a masonry of interlocking musicality.
In this spontaneous set, listeners may open their eyes, only to find themselves behind another’s closed. Laswell slows the dance of time to near-stillness, so that every contraction of every muscle may be studied. Smith’s entry comes from within rather than from without, portioning flesh on scales counterweighted with virtue. Consciousness on either side denies the illusion of consensus reality and offers a purely sound-based alternative in its place. The psycho-sphere of these spiraling prevarications acts as glue for a jagged infrastructure.
Laswell has a leviathan’s heart for this stuff. His bass flashes and writhes with intrigue, far more than the sum of its plastic, wood, and strings. And because the machinations of that instrument rotate on linguistic axes, a sense of communication is vital to understanding his improvisational cartography. It is at one moment a bodhisattva of desert suns, the next a dying gamelan courting the moon. It listens to its own heartbeat and tracks the decimation of rhythms.
Smith, for his part, treats the skin as a palimpsest of discovery. His breath, the written word to Laswell’s speech, resonates through a brass menagerie of travel. As distant as he is present, he is a nomad in search of the next melodic attachment.
Distortions in both look back with forward eyes as regularity subsumes, is subsumed, and touches off a limpid and final spark after an elliptical net catches Smith’s reborn self.
The Akashic meditation is not a conversation but a conversion. A reverse alchemy that turns gold into lead. Here you will find no towering, canonical monuments, but only ruins of such raw power that every crumbling edifice yields the scripture of change.
(For more information, visit M.O.D. Technologies here.)
Drummer Milford Graves and bassist Bill Laswell, live at The Stone in New York City. Two stalwarts of their respective instruments, passing in the night on April 22, 2014. Separately: wanderers of this musical world, toting satchels of invention for the sonically weary. Together: architects of flexible structures to house the enormity of their collective imagination.
Laswell fades into frame riding a harmonic for the ages, organic and initiatory. His is the vertical signature. Graves, meanwhile, drops to the floor and rolls around in his drums, for all the horizontal motivator. These are the stirrings beneath the floorboards of your childhood, the magic of beings you always knew were there but were sworn against discovering by parents who didn’t know any better. Now they have emerged, ready to perform.
The actions of this duo are kinetic and headstrong. Like muscles of the throat, they twitch in anticipation of speech. Only words never materialize. Graves is, nevertheless, quite vocal at peaks of expression. His hi-hat is the measure of a defibrillating heart, around which sticks converge like bones. The mounting corporeality of his playing underscores the circularity of this meeting. Laswell rides the wave, respectfully and patiently, before chorusing his approval through improvisation.
The bassist’s densities match those of Graves step for step before cutting out to leave the drummer running wildly across the savannah, of which every plant is an instrument waiting for contact of feet and hands. Laswell rejoins sagaciously, exploring the flanged interior of a fallen vessel, whose engine must be resuscitated by clean attention. He attends to broken wires and gears, giving life by electric injection.
Short blasts of data, each made knowable by the gift of vibration, project themselves across the inner ear. Motivations fall victim to their own causes. Despite having been designed for harm, the musicians are here to put an end to that cycle with their heavy light. The passion of experience wins.
(For more information, visit M.O.D. Technologies here.)
Jean Touitou, founder and designer of the A.P.C. clothing brand, wrote this song after the Paris attacks in January of 2015. It’s a curious, even tongue-in-cheek catharsis to a real tragedy that seeks desperate healing in a smile. With the involvement of H.D.R. (piano, synthesizer, drums, guitars, effects), Bill Laswell (bass, vibes), and Noam Levy (saxophone), Touitou sings the filling of a tripartite sandwich. Framed by the opening guitar riff of “Jingle Bell Rock” and an emblematic dub from Laswell, Touitou’s unstudied vocalizing might feel right at home on the runway, were it not for the motivations behind its realization.
It’s unsettling to hear Bobby Helms’s Christmas staple out of context, somehow flowing into its own bossa (super)nova as if there were no other words for grief. There is strangeness in these trees, through which the winds of aftermath flow like blood. Here is a dream that whispers to those who are still awake, a shadow behind the laughter. Only Laswell would find a dub lurking in this unremarkable specimen. His bass digs deeper with every scouring of surface, while ambient textures congregate around its roots. So is the linearity of time mocked and burned, its ashes spread across the lips of those who perpetrate destruction for its own sake. A repeating signal for a single bound in hyper-reflection.
This chain of seemingly unconnected events follows a cinematic realism of discomfort. If any message is to be taken from its flicker, it’s that the crust of observation is its own strongest defense against terrorism. It reveals the heart better than any surgery, for it must remain an idea. It must remain one’s own.
Between Sound and Space: ECM Records and Beyond 