Jazz

Speaking for Apollo: Peter Rühmkorf on ECM

| Tyran Grillo

PR

Peter Rühmkorf (1929-2008) was among the most influential postwar writers of his native Germany, winning every major literary prize for his prolific output of essays, poetry, plays, and prose. Yet despite having given spoken performances on stage with pianist Michael Naura and vibraphonist Wolfgang Schlüter for over three decades, his only appearances on record in such a configuration were captured via two rare ECM “SP” albums from the late seventies. I was beyond fortunate to be offered these two albums off the shelves while visiting label headquarters for the first time in Munich, and the die-hard fan will want to seek them out. Going beyond mere sound structure or program music, Rühmkorf was rather looking for something harmonious between the spheres of language and sound production, and on these long-out-of-printers I think got rather close to that ideal.

Apolloprogramm

Kein Apolloprogramm Für Lyrik (ECM 2305 801 SP)

Peter Rühmkorf voice
Michael Naura piano
Wolfgang Schlüter vibraphone, marimba
Eberhard Weber bass, cello
Recorded August 1976, Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The title of this first long out-of-print relic translates to “No Apollo Program for Poetry,” and indicates Rühmkorf’s interest in going beyond mere sound structure or program music. Rather, he was looking for something harmonious between the spheres of language and sound production, and here I think he was approaching that ideal. Rühmkorf further professes a downright biological need for poetry and skirts, in his darkly effervescent way, the line between emancipation and integration.

As with most of ECM’s speech acts, this one will be of little poetic use to those who don’t understand German. It should, however, be of immense value to the label’s fans for its musicianship. In addition to a rare early appearance by bassist Eberhard Weber (who also plays cello on one track), one is treated to some fine playing from Naura and Schlüter. Aside from two short tracks of Rühmkorf alone, the album is brimming with attractive makings of music. The trio activity of “Tagebuch” (Diary) establishes a grand, theatrical sort of precision with minimal means. Weber is robust and elastic as ever, sometimes climbing his way into the center and at others laying down club jazz atmospheres with Naura at the keys and playing us out on a bed of velvet.

For the most part, the playing is so illustrative that translations are hardly needed. “Hochseil” (Tightrope), for instance, balances Rühmkorf on a lone marimba that also carves helixes of reverberant post-production, while Weber’s percussiveness in “Zirkus” (Circus) builds like the tension of a trapeze act. And, whether steeped in the balladry of “Meine Stelle Am Himmel” (My Point In The Sky) or gilded by the flanged cello of “Elegie,” the poet rides an arpeggio of new horizons, only to culminate in the deeper finality of “Komm Raus!” (Come Out!).

Phönix

Phönix Voran (ECM 2305 802 SP)

Peter Rühmkorf voice
Michael Naura piano
Leszek Zadlo saxophone, flute
Wolfgang Schlüter vibraphone
Recorded March 1978, Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Thomas Stöwsand

Whereas on the previous album Rühmkorf stressed the importance of pathos with an air of resigned unrest, on Phönix Voran (Phoenix Preview) he chews the fat of inner strength in closer quarters. Adding to that claustrophobia—even as he installs a window view—is Polish musician Leszek Zadlo, who replaces Weber’s bass with saxophones and flute throughout, and to astonishingly cinematic effect.

Rühmkorf’s ever-practical enunciation cracks open the piano and vibes like an egg, thereby releasing the soft yolk of Zadlo’s flute in a cradle of light and shadow. This combination, a sparkling one, works again on the freely improvised “Selbstportrait” (Self-portrait), which inhabits its own unsettled text with an increasingly kaleidoscopic gravidity. The flute lastly appears as Rühmkorf’s only partner in the aesthetically beat poetry-inflected “Allein Ist Nicht Genug” (Alone Is Not Enough).

Elsewhere, the saxophone takes precedence of sound and space. The opening reed tones of “Auf Einen Alten Klang” (An Old Sound), pure and singing, find natural traction in the Naura/Schlüter nexus, then dance freely as Rühmkorf works his narrative labor into a material image. Zadlo and Naura share one duet in “Paradise Regained” for a vivid portrait of night. Yet the fullness of the project’s vision is best realized by the entire band. Highlights in this regard include the deliciously titled “Ich Butter Meinen Toast Von Beiden Seiten” (I Butter My Toast On Both Sides), a lovely track with the wherewithal to hold its prose like nourishment in the belly, and the sweeter onomatopoeia of “Impromptu.” And as finality lands again in the bustling farewell of “Tagelied,” we begin to realize that perhaps it is the voice that accompanies the music, not the other way around.

While it might not always seem so in the thick of things, in hindsight the connections between speech and instruments are to be found not in meanings but in shapes. Naura’s music, which comprises the backbone of both sets, already has such a solid narrative arc that Rühmkorf is an intuitive fit to manifest its dips and climbs. Gems, these are.

Maria Pia De Vito, et al.: Il Pergolese (ECM 2340)

| Tyran Grillo

Il Pergolese

Il Pergolese

Maria Pia De Vito voice
François Couturier piano
Anja Lechner violoncello
Michele Rabbia percussion, electronics
Recorded December 2012, Auditorio Radiotelevisione svizzera, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The life of Giovani Battista Pergolesi (1710-1736), cut tragically short at age 26 by tuberculosis, nevertheless made an immeasurable impact on the world of Baroque music and, as evidenced here, beyond. Already a successful opera composer by his mid-20s, Pergolesi would leave behind his final work, the Stabat Mater of 1736, on his deathbed. As Il Pergolese, singer Maria Pia De Vito, pianist François Couturier, cellist Anja Lechner, and percussionist Michele Rabbia have responded to the Italian composer by modernizing him at a crossroads of jazz, folk, and improvisation, De Vito going so far as to translate texts from the Stabat Mater into Neapolitan. The latter move yields pieces by Couturier inspired by that same masterpiece. His “Amen,” like the album as a whole, treats the development process as a precious use of time: only after Rabbia’s airbrushed percussion and additional electronics take hold do the darkly rolling piano and forlorn nightingale of cello share a canvas. The affirmation itself fluoresces under De Vito’s care before carrying over into Couturier’s jazzily inflected chords, by which he sets up Pergolesi’s processional “Fac Ut Portem.” De Vito rides the ocean waves of its drama, craving sunlight but drinking only storm. She then dips back into the Marian text with “Dolente.” Resonant percussion and birdlike vocals give Couturier the space to lull us into the song proper for a lachrymose yet, by virtue of the Neapolitan language’s delectable syllabic flavor, somehow blissful repose.

IP

From Pergolesi’s first comic opera Lo frate ’nnamorato (The Brother in Love) come two arias. The achingly lyrical “Ogne pena cchiù spietata” rests on a bed of piano and cello. Into this gorgeous scene steps De Vito like another Maria—Farantouri, that is—but with a little more maple mixed into her oak. Even after she fades, traces linger on as Lechner and Couturier are joined by Rabbia’s tapped hand drums. “Chi disse ca la femmena,” on the other hand, is a more straightforward melody that turns into folkdance and best explores the band’s rhythmic possibilities. A similar carpet of development unrolls itself down the corridor the “Sinfonia for violoncello,” which holds its own in a landscape of shifting tectonics. With archaeological care and glass tools, Rabbia chips away at Lechner’s caged pizzicati as if they were relics in need of recognition. That they most certainly get in the return of Couturier, who with an empathic analysis tells the backstory of their unearthing. And as Lechner’s bow sings its arco song, it resuscitates a Baroque heart to a calm yet glorious rhythm. “Tre giorni son che Nina,” a wildly popular song of the Italian Baroque attributed to Pergolesi, is another thing of beauty. It opens in raindrops before Lechner puts bow to string and follows a river breached from a dam of mortality.

Some freely improvised tracks round out the program. “Fremente” winds itself around De Vito, whose bubbling lines run wild in the realm of possibility, while “In compagnia d’amore I” and its sequel evoke Luciano Berio’s Visage and a voiceless chasm, respectively. Whatever their guise, the musicians of Il Pergolese pose their emotional statuary in accordance with the moment at hand, turning everything they touch into intimate theater, with De Vito as the heart, and the trio as the soul.

(To hear samples of Il Pergolese, you may watch the EPK above or click here.)

Dans les arbres: Canopée (ECM 2278)

| Tyran Grillo

Canopée

Dans les arbres
Canopée

Xavier Charles clarinet, harmonica
Ivar Grydeland electric guitar, banjo, sruti box
Christian Wallumrød prepared piano, harmonium
Ingar Zach gran cassa, percussion
Recorded June 2010 at Biermannsgården and April 2011 at Cafeteatret, Oslo
Engineer: Thomas Hukkelberg
Produced by Dans les arbres

If you were to look only at the musicians and their instruments on paper, the music of Dans les arbres would not likely ooze into your mind as it does once you hear it. Xavier Charles’s clarinet indicates classical foundations, while the harmonica next to his name might imply a more itinerant spirit. Ivar Grydeland’s electric guitar and (prepared) banjo reveal a natural born picker, but the sruti box (an Indian drone instrument bellowed like the harmonium) reaches farther afield. Christian Wallumrød will be the most familiar name to ECM listeners. Anyone in possession of his albums will have a leg up on what to expect and find nothing out of the ordinary to see a harmonium also at his fingertips. Finally, percussionist Ingar Zach stands out for listing the gran cassa (orchestral bass drum) as his primary instrument. And indeed, its cavernous thrum is a foundational voice throughout the quartet’s second ECM spelunk.

In my review of the first, self-titled Dans les arbres album, I compared their sound to that of the short-lived Japanese outfit Nijiumu, whose elusive Era of Sad Wings remains the pinnacle of such freely improvised work. This album approaches that ideal even more closely.

With such kindred track titles as “La Fumée” (Smoke), “L’Émanation” (The Emanation), and “L’Immatériel” (The Immaterial), it would seem to make little sense attempting to parse that which cannot be parsed. In this resonant gong-space, we are surrounded by creaking toy chests. Their keyholes burn with shadow and are wonders to behold in the attic light. Downstairs pacing betrays the parents of children who have hidden themselves so long that they have become part of the house. Bells and bowls and other glowing things float like tones of the inner ear made manifest in the form of dust particles and the wings of dead moths. Deep drones and breathy harmonics share only what they embrace, while the in-betweens reach from their wombs, only to withdraw just before making contact with the outside world. Their lungs open as would any book, of which each brachial page swims with adverbs. Hints of machinery linger, but their pathogens are quickly neutralized by the system.

All that said, some of the most intangible cognates (e.g., “La Vapeur” and “L’Éther) name the album’s most tactile creations. In these we discover a heavier mortality at work, as if by means of an intimate machine, of which gears serve as bones and time the marrow that sponges them. Whether by the clarinet’s guttural awakenings or the bass drum’s deepest moon phase, the aqueducts of ancient cities are somehow resurrected only so that they might speak once more before dying, leaving only the metallic drip of virtue to show for their channeling. Like the spaces of “La Transparence” (Transparency), they are pregnant with afterthoughts in such a way that all internal things become external and vice versa, starving the illusion that there was ever a distinction in the first place.

(To hear samples of Canopée, click here.)

Kappeler/Zumthor: Babylon-Suite (ECM 2363)

| Tyran Grillo

Babylon-Suite

Kappeler/Zumthor
Babylon-Suite

Vera Kappeler piano, harmonium, toy piano, voice
Peter Conradin Zumthor drums, toy piano, voice
Recorded June 2013, Auditorio Radiotelevisione svizzera, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Produced by Manfred Eicher

How appropriate that the music of Babylon-Suite, which introduces Vera Kappeler and Peter Conradin Zumthor to a wider world of deserving listeners, should have been premiered in a Swiss hydroelectric power plant: it’s subterranean to the core. Although in the fullest sense recreated here for the studio, it retains every atom, at once surrounded by and transcending the stone enclosure of its origins. And while the backstory of this album’s inception is telling enough, drawing inspiration as it did from the Book of Daniel, Peter Rüedi’s liner note rightly warns us against taking this music descriptively. It was never meant as a Biblical illustration, but a reconfiguration of text into texture. And in an accompanying statement by Giovanni Netzer, who commissioned the piece, we find the suite described as one in a “long tradition of lamentations.”

Babylon Portrait

Although Kappeler is nominally the pianist and Zumthor the drummer of the duo, both switch roles as often as they abide by them, employing bodily voices, too, as moments strike them. This modus operandi is proven in “Das erste Tier,” which opens the suite with a quasi-ritualistic bass drum and barest breath in the piano’s lowest register. But nothing is what it seems in the Kappeler/Zumthor space, for what might elsewhere be a jolt of awakening is now the jolt of slumber: that moment when you realize you’re caught in a dream built on a graveyard of unintelligible syllables. Pianistic strands come forward as lit candles, at once stoic and trembling, reminding us that the cessation is an illusion fed on five-sense realities.

To speak of extended techniques is one thing. To hear those techniques speak for themselves is quite another, and it is in this vein that Kappeler and Zumthor’s instruments—whether novel as a music box or antique as a harmonium—inhabit every transformation of this Babylon. The caged wing beats of “Traumgesicht,” for instance, break down the fourth wall, only to reveal a fifth, so that ultimately desperation seems to be a precondition for all life. Like the two variations of “Bontempi,” they turn on axes of double meanings, lending them where they should exist but don’t. And so, if light means the absence of dark and a lack of substance, dark now means both the absence of light and the abundance of substance.

The album’s divination bones come in the form of four pieces marked “Tor.” Each is a Russian doll of gear systems, its skin tender as balsa, wherein cogs lock teeth in assurance of the future. Clock springs assume the shapes of prayer bowls, while a toy piano manifests the inner thoughts of outer automata. Only in the presence of explicit foundations do such mechanisms melt away, as they do in “Annalisa” and “November.” These respective compositions by Zumthor and Kappeler write themselves into codes of ethereal hieroglyphs and childhood memories. Even the Ukranian traditional “Ne Pidu Ja Do Lesa” punctuates its drunken dance by means of erasure, leaving nothing but the blank ear waiting for fresh inscription.

(To hear samples of Babylon-Suite, click here.)

Julia Hülsmann Quartet w/Theo Bleckmann: A Clear Midnight (ECM 2418)

| Tyran Grillo

A Clear Midnight

Julia Hülsmann Quartet
w/ Theo Bleckmann
A Clear Midnight – Kurt Weill and America

Theo Bleckmann vocals
Julia Hülsmann piano
Tom Arthurs trumpet, flugelhorn
Marc Muellbauer double bass
Heinrich Köbberling drums
Recorded June 2014 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

In his book Kurt Weill: An Illustrated Life, biographer Jurgen Schebera shares the following anecdote from behind the scenes of the composer’s renowned The Threepenny Opera:

“One day the lead, Harald Paulsen, who had previously played mostly in operettas and was an idol of Berlin’s female theater audience, insisted on wearing a frightful blue bow tie with his suit. [Bertolt] Brecht saved the day: ‘Let’s leave him as he is, oversweet and charming. Weill and I will introduce him with a Moritat that tells of his gruesome and disgraceful deeds. The effect made by the light-blue bow will be all the more curious.’ Thus the ‘Moritat von Mackie Messer’ (Mack the Knife) was born practically overnight.”

The story of Weill’s most well-known song is indeed illustrative of a life filled with sudden changes—none so dramatic, in the most multivalent sense of the term, as his fleeing of Nazi Germany to take up residence in New York. His transition, as one alliterative songbook title would have it, from Berlin to Broadway gave his music new audiences, just as his music gave audiences something new. Although it would be decades from his death in 1950 before his work would gain recognition beyond the handful of popular numbers, Weill has now become a household name in songs of the stage.

Pianist Julia Hülsmann carries over the same quartet—with trumpeter Tom Arthurs, bassist Marc Muellbauer, and drummer Heinrich Köbberling—from 2013’s In Full View and to that outfit welcomes vocalist Theo Bleckmann to celebrate Weill in America. The result of an invitation to participate in the Kurt Weill Festival held is Dessau, Germany, Hülsmann’s new project grew to prominence until it landed in ECM’s lap with every edge smoothed to jigsaw compatibility. Every new arrangement comes from within the group, with Muellbauer and Hülsmann taking most of the credit in that vein.

JHQ

Bleckmann is a natural tenor whose voice combines the smooth, pop sensibilities of French singer Louis Philippe and the intuition of Meredith Monk, with whom he has incidentally worked. (It’s Monk, in fact, to whom Bleckmann most overtly alludes in “Little Tin God” when he borrows the wordless lilt of the travelers from her Book of Days.) The song itself comes by way of Lost in the Stars, and concerns itself with the idolization of money over God. Looped, multi-tracked voices and dissonant clockwork pianism emphasize its lyrical unease, the full quartet emerging only to break itself down like a set into resonant finish. The lesser-performed “Your Technique” and “Great Big Sky,” both from the annals of the Unsung Weill, are equally haunting in their present guises. In addition to their delicate prosody, both feature colorful touches from the rhythm section and, in the latter instance, shine light on a largely forlorn set list. And even though “Speak Low” (from One Touch of Venus) occupies the opposite end of the obscurity spectrum, its retrospective mood and expository finesse align it well with the lesser-knowns. It is second perhaps only to the above-mentioned “Mack The Knife,” which in Hülsmann and Bleckmann’s ponderous co-arrangement takes on such lucidity as to become something of its own. Arthurs’s trumpeting makes noteworthy additions to this introductory track as well.

In addition to Brecht’s self-aware moroseness (as filtered through Marc Blitzstein’s superseding English adaptation), we are treated to other finely crafted lyrics by Anne Ronell (“Your Technique”), Maxwell Anderson (“September Song” and “Little Tin God”), Ira Gershwin (“This Is New”), Ogden Nash (“Speak Low”), and Langston Hughes (“Great Big Sky”). Hülsmann’s tracing and Arthurs’s muted trumpet transform “September Song” (from Knickerbocker Holiday) from oil to watercolor, while “This Is New” (from Lady in the Dark) spins its key changes like a web of attraction into a blissfully modal tail. Likeminded enchantments abound in two gorgeously realized instrumentals. “Alabama Song” (from Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny) magnifies the album’s pristine recording, cymbals glittering like magic, while “River Chanty” (from Huckleberry Finn) finds Arthurs at the helm, leading the quartet into melodious, full-on journeying.

Along the way, Hülsmann treats the unsuspecting listener to three original settings of Walt Whitman, including the album’s title nocturnal title track and the invigorating “Beat! Beat! Drums!” But it’s in “A Noiseless Patient Spider” that both the album and its roster find untold synergy. A little bit of fun in the studio adds to the poem’s inherent charm and surrounds the clear and present center with a distant piano and flanged voice. As with everything else taking place on this clearest of midnights, it epitomizes a tasteful interpretive license. And the end effect? Let’s just say that, even if you think you’re not a Kurt Weill fan, it’s hard not to reassess after learning to appreciate these songs, and the musicians’ brilliant augmentations of them, on their own terms.

(To hear samples of A Clear Midnight, you may watch the EPK above or click here.)

Eberhard Weber: Encore (ECM 2439)

| Tyran Grillo

Encore

Eberhard Weber
Encore

Eberhard Weber electric double bass, keyboards
Ack van Rooyen flugelhorn
Live recordings 1990-2007
Engineers: Walter Speckmann and Gert Rickmann-Wunderlich
Mixed and edited at Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines by Gérard de Haro and Sun Chung
Assistant engineer: Nicolas Baillard
Album produced by Manfred Eicher

Electro-bassist Eberhard Weber’s Encore continues where Résumé left off and is culled from the same tapes. As on the last album, a monumental achievement in and of itself, the music here came about during interludes played while touring with the Jan Garbarek Group between 1990 and 2007. Weber has fleshed out those solos in the studio with keyboards and, in a poignant surprise, the contributions of Dutch colleague Ack van Rooyen on flugelhorn. Die-hard fans will recognize van Rooyen from Weber’s 1974 debut, The Colours of Chloë, and will welcome his return for what will likely be Weber’s finale.

Weber

Weber’s instrument has been his dousing rod four decades running. The result of much customization and refinement, it took his playing in new and challenging directions, while also freeing him from the snares of its acoustic counterpart. Although he humbly sees the electric hybrid that would become his trademark as something of a mask behind which he learned to hide his lack of virtuosity, it’s plain to hear that he has defined a virtuosity all his own. Setting him apart is not only his sound, but also the robustness of his melodies. Whether created in the moment or meticulously crafted (every piece on this album, of course, being a combination of both), his songfulness captures something essential to the power of technology in the right hands.

As before, track titles are named for their places of origin. Rather than make any sort of emotional or thematic statement—aside, that is, from their indications of a musician’s traveling life—they serve as compass points in the relatively intangible cartography of musical development. What begins in “Frankfurt” as a thick, rubber-banded enclosure for van Rooyen’s low-flying lyricism and Weber’s own note thresholds ends in “Pamplona” with more primal, rhythmic tapping on strings and flashes of ageless energy. That said, we do well to avoid seeing these outer tracks as beginning and ending of a long journey. They are instead signposts made visible by the magical privilege of recorded media.

The range of Weber’s evocative power is on fullest display. At one end of the spectrum we find “Cambridge,” which swings its trunk like a gargantuan elephant, if not the arm of a person imitating one, before brighter, more playful textures take over. Subsequent modal explorations make Weber’s bass seem like a magnified oud shaped by a whimsical physics. At the other end are the enigmatic diversions at “Bradford,” a brilliant piece of clockwork rhythms and colorful shifts in texture, and a leaping carnivalesque from “Edinburgh.” Somewhere between the two are cinematic gems from “Rankwell” and “Klagenfurt.” Where one begins dreamily and sobers through van Rooyen’s soloing, the other twists a lucid dance into the stuff of fantasy, sending the flugelhorn off on a scouting mission into the unknown. There is, too, the stalking, catlike thing of “Sevilla,” in which rhythmic impulses skirt a line between realities.

Elsewhere, as in “Konstanz” and “Granada,” Weber unrolls richly woven carpets of synthesizer, so that by the time he exchanges telescope for microscope in “London,” we have that expanse thrumming already in our hearts. And even as we walk away thinking this may be the end of the line, we can rest assured that there is still much to learn by revisiting the past.

(To hear samples of Encore, click here.)

Vijay Iyer Trio: Break Stuff (ECM 2420)

| Tyran Grillo

2420 X

Vijay Iyer Trio
Break Stuff

Vijay Iyer piano
Stephan Crump double bass
Marcus Gilmore drums
Recorded June 2014 at Avatar Studios, New York
Engineer: James A. Farber
Assistant: Akihiro Nishimura
Produced by Manfred Eicher

“He often said that he would sit down at a piano someday and show me how jazz worked, and that when I finally understood blue notes and swung notes, the heavens would part and my life would be transformed.”
–Teju Cole, Open City

After his imaginative ECM debut, pianist Vijay Iyer returns to the label with bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Marcus Gilmore. Although in operation for over a decade, the trio still finds room to grow, and rarely in such giant leaps as those documented on Break Stuff. The title is Iyer’s mission statement: rupture as rapture. The music hanging from its rafters is theory in practice.

Iyer has been blessed with a peerless tonal command of his instrument. Like the greats that inspire him daily, his artistry is summed up in the word touch. His composing reveals another distinguishing characteristic: a penchant for tempering beauty with something obfuscated. This allows us to appreciate the role of either toward the consummation of the musical experience. Not everything, he seems to say, can be sunshine and roses. We also need moonlight and thorns.

VIT

The atmospheres of Iyer’s trio are remarkable for using such minimal means, and nowhere so evocatively than in the three avian-themed tracks peppered throughout. The well-rounded “Starlings” introduces us to this album’s freshly baked sounds. Already, two things are noticeable. First is that Iyer’s descriptive prowess is as formidable as it is organic. Second is that listeners are invited to bring whatever associations they might have to the music without judgment. What sounds like a flock overhead to one may to another feel like the city streets to another. “Geese,” in fact, proves to be as much about nature as nurture as it morphs from harmonic rumination into urban sprawl. Even the evocatively titled “Wrens,” which ends the album, reaches back with arms bangled in classical chord progressions toward sublime narrative origins. Between the latter two tracks is nestled one of the album’s heartfelt tributes. “Countdown” pays deference to John Coltrane, starting off small but playing big in some of the trio’s densest texturing on record. Gilmore reads between the lines like no one’s business and adds further grounding to other classics by Thelonious Monk (“Work”) and, in a Gershwin-flavored piano solo, Billy Strayhorn (“Blood Count”). In these one can hear the nakedness of Iyer’s creative process, all its trials and errors that occur in the name of seeking. His nod to DJ Robert Hood is likewise into its own negative spaces, laying microtonal harmonies over consonant foundations.

“Taking Flight” is another portrait of the musician’s world. Here, too, balance reigns, weighing on one pan constant travel and dislocation, but on the other the connections achievable only through performing. As indicated by its mixture of reggae and impressionistic touches in the higher register, this tune embraces whatever life has in store. Such openness imbues the remaining tracks with like spirit. Whether in the amethyst “Chorale” or the more ornamental “Diptych,” in both of which Iyer’s rhythm section makes subtle sweeps of brilliance, the trio rounds every angle to jigsaw fit. Yet none of the above is so confident as the title track, the sway of which recalls the opening scene of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, in which the director and Denzel Washington own the streets, clipped and shined.

Iyer is making the most effective music of his career, and there could be no better place for it to flourish than ECM. Like the missing note in the arpeggio of “Mystery Woman,” the affiliation has opened a gap of opportunity, thereby revealing experience as the most important form of improvisation there is.

(To hear samples of Break Stuff, you may watch the EPK above or click here.)

Lumen Drones: s/t (ECM 2434)

| Tyran Grillo

Lumen Drones

Lumen Drones

Nils Økland fiddles
Per Steinar Lie guitars
Ørjan Haaland drums
Recorded November 2011, ABC Studio, Etne, Norway
Recording and mixing engineer: Kjetil Ulland
Mastering: Christoph Stickel and Manfred Eicher
An ECM Production

Since his first ECM appearance on the Christian Wallumrød Ensemble’s Sofienberg Variations in 2003, and even more so on his 2009 solo effort Monograph, Nils Økland has served as a conduit between the then and the now. His latest project, Lumen Drones, finds the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle virtuoso in the company of guitarist Per Steinar and drummer Ørjan Haaland. Økland had previously collaborated with Steinar and Haaland, both members of the post-rock group The Low Frequency in Stereo, for a track on the latter’s 2009 album Futuro. That track was called “Solar System,” which best indicates the cosmic reach of this new trio. In ways similar to the band Mono, Lumen Drones cultures its motifs like bacteria in Petri dishes until they reach dizzying proportions.

LD

Chalk it up to ECM’s penchant for balance that often the most obscure, indefinable album covers sleeve the most clearly defined music, while here we have a rare animal encounter for music that is amorphous as the sun’s corona. Aside from two pieces—Lie’s webbed “Lux” and Økland’s ponderous “Keelwater”—this self-titled debut is comprised of collectively burnished hardwoods. “Dark Sea” comes to life without warning, as if startled from a dream, and draws us into a world of brushed drums, guitar, and fiddle. In wave after wave of memory, this unique combination sets a ghostly precedent. Even at its most enigmatic, however, the music that follows is so intensely visual that it’s near impossible not to accompany it with your own mental cinema. “Ira Furore,” for instance, unspools a single thread of cymbal from a tangle of heat-distorted guitar, while the fiddle pours its tenderness in a vain attempt to staunch the flames. The smoldering atmosphere recalls David Lynch’s Lost Highway in both its spatial and psychological desolations, tempered but never transcended by Økland’s soaring grammar. Further distortions abound in “Anemone,” which from deepest roots projects a bouquet of amplified thistles and burns by means of water. Yet the strongest inertia is to be found in the melodic progressions and folkish qualities of “Echo Plexus.” And with so much retrograde to appreciate, it’s no wonder we’re given some room to breathe in “Husky,” a brief and flowing duet between Lie and Økland. From here, it’s only a hop to “Svartaskjær.” Joining a free improv already in progress, it finishes with a jam band sensitivity stripped of all ornament. It breathes, cackles, and swivels its way into a 1970s bonfire, spreading ash all over its Technicolor skin.

Some make mountains of out molehills; Lumen Drones makes molehills out of mountains.

(To hear samples of Lumen Drones, click here.)

Tim Berne’s Snakeoil: You’ve Been Watching Me (ECM 2443)

| Tyran Grillo

You've Been Watching Me

Tim Berne’s Snakeoil
You’ve Been Watching Me

Tim Berne alto saxophone
Oscar Noriega clarinet, bass clarinet
Matt Mitchell piano and electronics
Ryan Ferreira electric and acoustic guitars
Ches Smith drums, vibraphone, percussion, timpani
Recorded December 2014 at “The Clubhouse” in Rhinebeck, NY
Engineer: D. James Goodwin
Assistant: Bella Blasko
Mastering at MSM Studios by Christoph Stickel
Produced by David Torn

Alto saxophonist Tim Berne and his Snakeoil outfit stand poised and ready to strike on their third ECM excursion. You’ve Been Watching Me might just as well be titled “You’ve Been Listening To Me,” because it’s impossible to have wandered into Berne’s unmistakable ghost towns and not swear you’ve heard every poker game that went down in their saloons. As if the band weren’t tetrahedral enough, Berne welcomes guitarist Ryan Ferreira to his honed nexus of clarinetist Oscar Noriega, pianist Matt Mitchell (who also provides electronics), and drummer-percussionist extraordinaire Ches Smith. In this album’s press release, Berne speaks of Ferreira’s presence as “subtraction by addition,” and these musicians’ ability to open their sound by virtue of greater number speaks to the intuitiveness of this apparent contradiction. Producer David Torn, known to ECM fans for his own incendiary trips, further notes the role of space in the band’s improvisational purview.

TBS

In the latter vein, “Small World In A Small Town” opens Snakeoil’s postmodern borders to the possibility of transcendence. The late-night balladry of Berne and Mitchell forms a double helix that is equal parts playoff and championship before vibraphone and electric guitar place their thematic bets. Yet what begins in typical Berne territory soon veers skyward as verdant cymbals and sustained pianism ride a wave of panning satellite transmissions. Noriega’s clarinet pulls weeds as if from below, leaving room for Berne to sprout in their place some of his most beautiful playing on record. In return, Noriega draws a bow from klezmer strands and nocks an arrow of river water before letting it fly in slow motion into an originary cushion. The band rises like a golem, overrunning its cup with maxed-out levels of intensity.

Before taking that space walk, we start out with the recognizably jagged cohesions of “Lost In Redding.” Ferreira’s firewall of distortion is noticeable from the outset and gives the other instruments an indelible point of reference. Guitar and bass clarinet find each other in the swarm just as the band leaves them hanging like solars in desperate absence of systems. Multi-phonic squeals from the two reedmen and Ferreira’s crisp unraveling send a newborn piano out on its stumbling legs, gaining uprightness like a foal on the outside. Berne and Noriega find tenderness in the poignant “Embraceable Me,” which opens a direct line of communication between the listener and the listened. This irons itself out into a resonant space of timpani, piano, and edge-worn clarinet, while Ferreira goes splashing through martial orbits.

Much of what follows is fragmentary or, as one title would have it, “Semi-Self Detached.” The latter tune’s hazy flotation marries alto to echo until Ferreira unsolders the seams of time, thus unleashing Berne’s anti-tirade like the electricity from King Humpty Dumpty’s cracked sun. The compact yet strangely gradual “Angles” is the yolk within, just at the brink of rupture, while the title track, a through-composed refraction for solo acoustic guitar, diffuses the white around it. At the end of the tunnel we find the roller-coaster ladders and cinematic desiderata of “False Impressions,” another prime space for Ferreira seen through the darker glasses of vibraphone and alto.

One may speak of great jazzmen as evolving before our very ears with each successive release, but Berne’s case is a living example of an artist involving with age: not scaling an impossible mountain of ideals but boring through it to see how people live on the other side. What he returns with is something like jazz times ten, an advancement of such integral proportions that it might set your cells to stun. A phenomenal album, and Snakeoil’s highest proof mash so far.

(To hear samples of You’ve Been Watching Me, click here.)