Although Quint is the second album from Boston-based Shibui, it is also the first in what one hopes will be a longstanding relationship with Ronin Rhythm Records, the label of Nik Bärtsch, whose influence on bandleader Tim Doherty is as obvious as the stars at night (and just as beautiful to regard through the telescope of the ear). The core trio of Doherty on bass and percussion, Curtis Hartshorn on drums, and Céline Ferro on clarinets opens through the inclusion of Bradley Goff on keys, Derek Hayden on marimba (a key timekeeper throughout), and violinist Chris Baum. The latter makes his only appearance on “2.1,” which opens the first of five submarine doors. Through gradual appearances of percussion and bass clarinet, it travels from pianistic sediment to a glittering epipelagic zone. The final five minutes offer a glorious conspectus of the band’s relativity, offering plenty of opportunities for intake.
“2.2” is a chunkier groove, made all the more worthy of our mastication by the savory bass snaking its way throughout, while “2.3” offers a more pleasurable spectrum of delights, especially in the transfigurations of clarinet and piano between solids, liquids, and gases. The resulting states lean more in the direction of ineffability than concretism. Smoother textures await in “2.4,” where arid sands and moist breaths intertwine as equals. The bass is especially present, each note a trunk from which pianistic branches are given room to sprout. The marimba’s echoes tread like creatures too light to sink on water yet too heavy to be carried away by a breeze. Lastly, fluidity is the modus operandi of “2.5.” Here, the impulse to sing is never more than a step out of reach. Gritty electric keys give us a sense of inward focus and emanations of heat, weaving delicate cymbalism through shafts of shadow.
While fans of Bärtsch and other masterless musical samurai will surely rejoice over the rudimentarily numbered set list and modular approach, the uniqueness of vision rendered on Quint urges relistening. Doherty’s compositions are proof that instrumental discourse operates differently from speech. Whereas saying the same word over and over strips that word of meaning, Shibui’s aesthetic enhances clarity with every cycle. It also proves there is no such thing as truly identical reiteration in a world of constantly moving molecules and energies between them.
In an enchanting bit of coincidence, the album’s cover artist, Sevcan Yuksel Henshall, came up with the five circular gestures before even knowing its title. Such confluences are part and parcel of music that lifts the spirit with the same weight so that both appear to float in unison, forever suspended between firmament and fundament.
Joe Lovano tenor saxophone, tarogato, gongs Marilyn Crispell piano Carmen Castaldi drums, gong, temple bells Recorded May 2022, Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano Engineer: Stefano Amerio Cover photo: Thomas Wunsch Produced by Manfred Eicher Release date: May 5, 2023
Joe Lovano’s Trio Tapestry is one of the profoundest projects to grace ECM records in recent years, and for this, the group’s third round, we are welcomed into a chamber within a chamber within a chamber. This set of eight Lovano originals, each written exclusively for the project, draws from the wells of pianist Marilyn Crispell and drummer Carmen Castaldi, whose gifts of abundance unwrap themselves to reveal one grace after another.
“All Twelve” takes a 12-tone approach to the proverbial welcome mat, greeting us with open arms and closed eyes. Lovano takes liminal account of Crispell’s architecture, rendering an experience that takes two steps inward for every step outward. The ghosts of albums past linger with a loose developmental feel. Every motif, as much a child of atmosphere as of melody, works a speech-like filigree into every wall, sconce, and pew. Like “The Power Of Three” and “Crystal Ball” that come later, its introspections have the presence of someone who has absorbed the world to squeeze out only its most inclusive drops.
Despite an overarching solace, there is variety to be found. Where “Rhythm Spirit” is a heartfelt duet for tenor and drums highlighting breathy lows and delicate highs, “Grace Notes” floats the tarogato on a seascape of dreamy complexion, Castaldi’s cymbals hinting at a groove that never catches, buried instead in the crashing brine. On “One For Charlie,” Lovano returns to tenor with a monologue dedicated to the late Charlie Haden.
At the heart of this session are two balladic verses. The snaking indeterminacy of “Le Petit Opportun” and the title track’s potent lyricism give us plenty to savor even as they savor us. This is chaos theory in slow motion and proof that if this album is a match between day and night, the latter has surely won.
(This article originally appeared in the August 2023 issue of The New York City Jazz Record, a full PDF of which is available here.)
Keith Jarrett piano Recorded live July 6, 2016 at Auditorium, Opéra National, Bordeaux Producer: Keith Jarrett Engineer: Martin Pearson Mastering: Christoph Stickel Cover photo: Max Franosch Executive producer: Manfred Eicher Release date: October 14, 2022
Every new release of a Keith Jarrett recording activates something old—ancient, if you will. By this, I mean to suggest that his immaterial approach to a resolutely material instrument invites us to appreciate the synergy of being and non-being. To experience his notecraft, whether in person or via ECM’s relentless charting of his footsteps, is to understand that a physical body is required to interpret even abstract realities. And in the 13-part odyssey we have here, we encounter one of the most spiritual gifts to take flight from Jarrett’s fingertips.
From the same tour that brought such wonders to light as Munich 2016 and Budapest Concert comes this July 6th performance at the Auditorium de l’Opéra National de Bordeaux. In this spontaneous mosaic of waves and dissolutions thereof, he articulates an ocean’s worth of expanse. If Part I can be said to burst forth as if in need of being heard after a long silence, Part XIII intones the whisper of low tide. Between them, he unleashes a rhapsodic account of muscle and morality.
Flexibility is central to these pieces in the making, nowhere more so than in Part III. This breath of fresh balladic air is road music for the heart. There’s something painfully final about it, a tearful evocation of mortal ends. It also passes on hope to those left behind. Occasional dissonances hint at bittersweetness, always returning to the foreground with bits of the past polished and placed carefully on an altar for the future.
So begins a grand sequence of somber inner visions. Without ever losing sight of a certain playfulness of childhood (as in the spiral staircase of Part V), he navigates hymnal block chords (Part VI) and savory vamps with grace. Crooning his way through the valley, he ensures that beauty never becomes an idol. For while the lyrical fulcrum of Part VII, for example, veers into sunlight, Jarrett is quick to don the shades of Part VIII, bringing temperance such as only the blues can claim.
But if the feeling of farewell peaks in Part XII, it’s only because the destination is nearer than our point of departure. In such moments, we step outside of time, wearing it like a coat. We can reach into any pocket and pull out an episode of our lives, slicing away at infinity like a doctor in search of a cure.
For many, the term “field recording” evokes the greatest hits of natural sounds: ocean waves, rain, and birdsong. Indeed, one of the earliest field recordings dates to 1889, when an eight-year-old Ludwig Koch wax-cylindered the song of a white-rumped shama. In more recent history, anyone of reading age in the heyday of National Geographic may remember Roger Payne’s Songs of the Humpback Whale, inserted as a flexi disc in a collectible 1979 issue. Ten million copies of it were printed—more than any album ever produced in a single run. Payne’s classic and others like it endure for their scientific value, serving as springboards for studies of language and the potential for interspecies communication. They also spawned a robust environmental movement at a time when modernity was threatening to divorce humanity from nature. By the same token, microphones can get too close to their subjects, as in Hans Lichtenecker’s “archive of endangered races,” which documented descendants of the very peoples his comrades slaughtered in German Southwest Africa (what is now Namibia). Even the most benign anthropological motivations have fallen under retrospective scrutiny.
I will not be reviewing such projects here. Instead, I wish to examine—and, I hope, bring fresh ears to—a visceral stream of experimental field recordings. While tracing the origins of such an amorphous category can be difficult, an indisputable pioneer is Jeph Jerman, whose seminal work tops the list below. Kindred visionaries in this sphere of influence include Francisco López, Alan Lamb, and John Tulchin. I highlight their endeavors, subjective as my favorites among them are, in the interest of expanding their embrace of sameness through difference.
These recordings constitute a form of sonic travel to worlds at once internal and distant. Some are spliced and collaged within compositional frameworks in tandem with electronic and acoustic instruments, others manipulated beyond recognition, and still others presented as they are—but always with an aesthetic in mind, even if that aesthetic is simply to let sounds “happen.” Their significance cannot be overstated—not because they represent an overarching artistic ethos but precisely because they shun that motivation in favor of genuinely borderless spaces. It’s not often we can listen to a corpus of sounds without transfusing the blood of our politics and ideologies into it. Here, we can. Such comfort means more than ever in a world on its knees, wondering whether the healing will begin.
Jeph Jerman: Early Recordings ’81-’85
Also known by the moniker Hands To, Jeph Jerman first set out with his cheap cassette deck in the 1980s to document the act of listening while questioning its practices and apparatuses. What continues to fascinate about his recordings is how raw and curated they feel. And while some of his most unadulterated work (e.g., Beach Tree and Birds, 2001, A Pyrrhic Victory) is woefully difficult to track down, this compilation of early recordings is a grounded place to start. Lo-fi swaths of mostly industrial settings (e.g., “Metal Fabricating Shop, Colorado Springs”) reveal an unimaginable depth in the mundane.
Alan Lamb: Archival Recordings: Primal Image/Beauty
In 1976, Australian biomedical research scientist Alan Lamb first discovered the abandoned stretch of telephone wires that would define his artistic endeavors to come. Dubbed the Faraway Wind Organ, this massive vibrating skeleton loosed eerie songs at the touch of an air current, echoing since his childhood into a mature desire to record them. That he did, often for hours at a time, assembling choice passages into this otherworldly diptych. Whether whispering the mantras of uninhabited terrain or choiring like a Glenn Branca symphony, these requiems step out of time and ooze their way into the bloodstream.
Maggi Payne: Ping/Pong: Beyond The Pail
Maggi Payne is a venerated composer and multimedia artist whose output has largely focused on electro-acoustic constructions. Her field recordings of “dry ice, space transmissions, BART trains, and poor plumbing” congregated to astounding effect on 2010’s Arctic Winds, but 2003’s Ping/Pong: Beyond The Pail preserved another level of intimacy. Its two 30-minute tracks, recorded in a galvanized steel pail, offer complementary experiences of rainfall through the intermediary of the album’s eponymous vessel. The first catches the rain openly, while the second inverts the pail for a drum-like effect, sealing us in a metallic chamber without excuse for distraction.
John Tulchin: Location Recordings
This collection’s first track, “Fire Alarm From A Distance (Winter Park, FL.),” is indicative of John Tulchin’s questing spirit. It’s also one of the most haunting field recordings in readily available form and an entry into an album unlike any other. The pragmatic titles—“Metal Structure In The Desert (Dead Horse Ranch, AZ.),” “Log Partially Submerged In Water (Seattle, WA.),” etc.— only deepen the possibilities of interpreting them. Somehow, knowing what we are hearing makes it clear how much we miss. Thankfully, we have Tulchin to fill in those gaps with heartfelt portraits of time incarnate.
Quiet American: Plumbing And Irrigation Of South Asia
Quiet American, an homage to the novel by Graham Greene, is the sound manipulation project of San Francisco Bay Area artist Aaron Ximm. Plumbing And Irrigation Of South Asia is at once exactly what it sounds like and something else entirely. Nominally, it is a vast collection of field recordings of various community fixtures, such as a drainage pipe in Madikeri (India), a water pump in Khulna (Bangladesh), and a toilet in Kathmandu (Nepal). Other locations include Vietnam, Burma, Laos, and China. Beyond that, it is an unassuming travelogue filtered through the mesh of a respectful phonographic memory.
Jgrzinich: Insular Regions
John Grzinich is a sculptor combining found sounds and instruments of his own design. For this 2005 release, he gathered personal impressions of Mooste, a rural Estonian village. Insular Regions is among the more tactile albums in this guide’s category of interest. Its resonant intersections of wood, wind, and wire feel like a portal into another dimension. And yet, we are constantly reminded of their fleshly purview, which Grzinich sees no reason to hide. What we hear is what we get, even when we know it has been transformed through technology, because every electrical circuit runs on our conductivity.
Loren Chasse: Synthesis of Neglected Places
Loren Chasse is a humble public school teacher in San Francisco who seems never to have lost that childlike wonder for the world around him. Synthesis of Neglected Places was originally produced as a cassette in 1998 by the Unique Ancient Tavern label. Over the course of eight parts, it lives out every moment in the full knowledge that the act of recording will change its genetic makeup. As Chasse’s most crepuscular album, it speaks in tongues of light and shadow in equal measure, drawing out tasteful keyboard touches as if from within.
Loren Chasse: The Air In The Sand
Loren Chasse leaves behind precious recollections of experiences you never knew you had. That such dreamlike qualities are elicited from unabashed reality sets his work apart. The Air In The Sand shares the spirit of 2002’s Hedge of Nerves, which meshed the crackle of vinyl with sounds of the elements, expanding that aesthetic to welcome wider-reaching absorptions. By revealing the natural in the artificial and vice versa, he pays deference to the molecules common to all matter, guiding them in chorus even as they lead him in kind to voices hibernating until they can be amplified.
Francisco López: Addy En El País De Las Frutas Y Los Chunches
This first American release from Spain’s master recordist Francisco López is still his finest. With characteristic attention to otherwise-ignored wonders, he listens without a hint of imposition. From the patter of a Costa Rican rainforest to the pall of noises flatlined into a language unto itself, he exposes the moribund yet existentially beautiful underbelly of nature as a force of constant transition. Like his near-equal masterpiece, Belle Confusion 969, it reminds us that life is a field recording in process, ever adjusting its receptors to pick up on the machinations of our unstoppable progression into death.
Click on the sub-cover titles below to see my reviews of other vital albums in this loosely allied genre.
Ralph Alessi trumpet Florian Weber piano Bänz Oester double bass Gerry Hemingway drums Recorded June 2021, ArteSuono Studio, Udine Engineer: Stefano Amerio Mixed December 2022 at Radiostudio RSI, Lugano by Manfred Eicher and Stefano Amerio Cover: Fidel Sclavo Produced by Manfred Eicher Release date: March 17, 2023
Trumpeter Ralph Alessi returns to ECM with his fourth leader date for the label, this time with a newly minted European quartet that reflects his relocation to Switzerland in 2020. Alongside Florian Weber (piano), Bänz Oester (bass), and Gerry Hemingway (drums), he carves out a vivid baker’s dozen of original material.
“Hypnagogic” not only sets a tone but also establishes the album’s heart, the veins and arteries of which are traced with anatomical faithfulness by Alessi and Weber. It’s one of a handful of duo turns (including the subcutaneous title track) building on their nearly 20-year relationship as sonic allies. Abstract yet comforting, their dialogues feel like waking from a dream yet holding on to its fading tendrils. The effect is such that when the light of “Migratory Party” reveals a rhythm section trailing an even longer history, the band’s ability to balance independent voices and melismatic intermingling reigns supreme.
Both as musician and composer, Alessi creates constant washes of color. Whether in the groovier strains of “Residue” (a fantastic testimony of Oester’s talents) or in the nocturnal urbanism of “The Shadow Side” and “Diagonal Lady,” he navigates every moment as a director would a scene of actors improvising within a loose script. The latter two tunes have a three-dimensional feel that yields the album’s deepest magic.
When at its most forthright (“His Hopes, His Fears, His Tears” and “Everything Mirrors Everything”), the band swings forward and backward rather than side to side, while the dramatic resolution of “Hanging by a Thread” leads perfectly to the concluding “Tumbleweed,” bringing us back to where it all began.
(This review originally appeared in the April 2023 issue of The New York City Jazz Record, a full PDF of which is available here.)
Two Centuries is the second album from former ECM producer Sun Chung’s Red Hook label and may one day be regarded as its most defining release. As electronic musician Qasim Naqvi, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and drummer Andrew Cyrille put 11 of Naqvi’s tunes under their triangular microscope, the cells of our listening are magnified.
“For D.F.” opens with a political charge. Written for Darnella Frazier, who captured George Floyd’s murder, it uses distortions to evoke the white noise of our collective trauma. As subtle as this music is, with its near-comforting swells and honest lyricism, it offers not a moment of reflection but the reflection of a moment, a vivid gaze at a life lost on the brink of a society in turmoil. This is, perhaps, the deepest nuance of the titular centuries, the dividing line of which is drawn not numerically but on the shifting sands of justice.
What follows is a veritable tilling of melodies made possible as much through listening as playing. The foundation is often forged between Cyrille’s tools and Naqvi’s febrile choices of color. In fortifying each for harvest, they dip into disparate references. Hear, for example, the influence of Bryn Jones in “Sadden Upbeat,” while “Tympanic” recalls Sofia Gubaidulina’s String Quartet No. 4.
Contrasts in mood abound, ranging from sunlit (“Palaver”) to brooding (“Wraith”). “Bypass Decay” is of special note, chugging like a train against (and ultimately losing to) an encroaching night. Throughout, Smith speaks (e.g., “Spiritual is 150”) and sings (e.g., “Organum”) in equal measure, but always with a message to convey in the role of griot, reminding us of something spiritual, though severed from any particular tradition. As is evident in “Orion Ave,” where the free-floating hymn reigns supreme, faith walks these empty streets alone, trailing its shadow like a burden of care.
Enrico Rava flugelhorn Fred Hersch piano Recorded November 2021 Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano Engineer: Stefano Amerio Cover: Fidel Sclavo Produced by Manfred Eicher Release date: September 9, 2022
Pianist Fred Hersch makes his ECM debut in intimately grand fashion with maestro Enrico Rava on flugelhorn. Their meeting at Lugano’s Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI yields some of the most effortless jazz you’ll likely hear this year. Hersch’s opening embrace eases us into Antônio Carlos Jobim’s “Retrato em Branco e Preto” as if the set could open no other way, fanning expository poetry in place of lantern flame. An old-town quality prevails, navigating cobblestone streets on tiptoe yet never losing its footing.
Contrary to immediate expectation, this is followed by a free improvisation, which tempers the familiar with new shades of meaning. George Bassman’s “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” gets a delicate and rhythmically endearing treatment, while the title track by Jerome Kern is enigmatically transformed into a crystalline snowdrift of memory. Thelonious Monk’s “Misterioso” walks a fine line between dream and reality, giving way to artful abstractions that reveal two minds with lifetimes more to say, as do the originals that precede it. Whereas “Child’s Song” (Hersch) conveys innocence with a nostalgic, summery feel that harks to yesteryears, “The Trial” (Rava) renders an entanglement of spiral staircases and other modern architectural details. All of this leaves Hersch alone with “’Round Midnight,” floating into the promise of a new day, uncertain though it may be.
These musicians achieve the extraordinary by sounding like one unit without sacrificing their voices. They dance as few know how, unfolding a love letter one page at a time until only a wax seal seems appropriate to protect its contents from the sun’s bleaching touch.
Uli Kempendorff tenor saxophone Julia Hülsmann piano Marc Muellbauer double bass Heinrich Köbberling drums Recorded March 2022 Studio La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines Engineer: Gérard de Haro Mastering: Nicolas Baillard Cover photo: Thomas Wunsch Produced by Thomas Herr Release date: August 26, 2022
Although Julia Hülsmann has crafted a hearty sequence of trio records for ECM, including 2017’s Sooner and Later, there has always been something even more intimate and honed about her quartet with tenor saxophonist Uli Kempendorff, bassist Marc Muellbauer, and drummer Heinrich Köbberling, as is refreshingly obvious throughout “Empty Hands,” in which Hülsmann throws notes like petals onto the waters of life to see where they might flow. As they did on this album’s predecessor, Not Far From Here, these effortlessly attuned musicians navigate her sound with familial affinity. After “Made Of Wood” deconstructs the introductory mood, a melodic breeze wafts over the keys, carrying over into “Jetzt Noch Nicht.” Taking two forms—initially as a duet with Kempendorff, later as a swinging outing for all four—it delicately offsets tracks like “Fluid,” an emblematic realization of their capabilities that rejoices in the ongoing moment.
Muellbauer contributes three originals with a more geometric approach to time and harmony. In his “Polychrome,” the piano is a wavering shadow, the saxophone a refraction of light stepping sideways past us, while in “Wasp At The Window,” a locomotive whimsy ensues. The landscape outside our window remains the same, but its description changes along the way. Hülsmann’s ability to carry so much cargo in so fine a mesh is marvelous. Kempendorff and Köbberling offer a tune apiece. The former’s “Open Up” balances emotiveness and restraint, and the latter’s “Post Post Post” is a standout for its liminal expressivity.
No Hülsmann set would be complete without an ode to the popular canon, and her reading of Prince’s “Sometimes It Snows In April” is no exception. With charming comfort, it promises hope at the end of a long and harmful tunnel that none of us saw coming.
Paul Giger violin, violino d’amore Marie-Louise Dähler harpsichord, chest organ Pudi Lehmann gongs, percussion Franz Vitzthum alto Carmina Quartett Matthias Enderle violin Susanne Frank violin Wendy Champney viola Stephan Goerner violoncello Recorded January 2015 Chiesa Bianca, Maloja Engineer: Peter Laenger Guggisberglied was recorded 2021 in Walenstadt Cover photo: Jan Kricke An ECM Production Release date: August 26, 2022
The music of Paul Giger became a part of my blood when I first encountered 1989’s Chartres. Not since J. S. Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas had I understood just how architecturally robust the violin could be, to say little of 1993’s Schattenwelt, which introduced his violino d’amore, a custom instrument with five main and six sympathetic strings. If those early albums were temples of the spirit, then ars moriendi is a waystation of the flesh—if not vice versa. The ambiguity of such distinctions gives the album a timeless charge. Across the pages of its cavernous imaginings, Giger writes a real-time scripture of inspiration, building on echoes of lives before and since.
His mythologically tinged Guggisberglied, reinterpreting a popular Swiss folk song of unrequited love and the life one gives up in its name, follows a tracking shot of the human form, shifting in varying degrees of inevitability between innocence and decay. Cradled by the hush of flowing water, what we once saw as shadows are now the shadows of shadows. Such subtlety of framing and placement of subjects is possible only in one whose mind works as a camera. Giger looks within from without, the tones of other cultures beating his drum. The violin body is a percussive force, a multitracked orchestra of emotional instruments. Giger also plucks the lower strings in qanun fashion. Currents of molecular awareness caress the riverbank, praying for a peaceful transition into lifelessness.
The latter sentiment connects to the overarching title. “In the late Middle Ages,” explains Giger in a liner note, “a literary genre of devotional books illustrated with woodcuts flourished under the name ‘ars moriendi.’ They gave instructions on how to ‘die well.’The purpose of this tradition was to attune the soul to the ‘art of dying’ in order to save it for eternity. Music is also an ars moriendi, an exercise in the ‘becoming’ of a note, of ‘being’ in sound and of ‘passing’ into silence—or into an inner reverberation.” These concepts refer to a triptych of Tyrolean painter Giovanni Segantini, subject of the eponymous documentary by Christian Labhart, for which Giger wrote the music. Selections from that soundtrack take up much of the present album, including three stages of Agony. In the company of percussionist Pudi Lehmann (gongs, singing bowls, frame drum, and conch shell), keyboardist Marie-Louise Dähler (harpsichord and chest organ), and the Carmina Quartett, he builds a tower of wonder one layer of stone at a time until time itself is suspended. As ice dissolves into water and further into steam, the violino d’amore opens light to reveal its individual colors, loosening the bonds of the material within the immaterial through the inherent art of refraction. Zäuerli mit Migrationshintergrund is rooted in the Swiss yodel, harking to 1991’s Alpstein, albeit in far subtler clothing.
Transcriptions of Bach carry over from the film, including two for violin and harpsichord (the choral prelude “Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ” and the Largo from the Sonata No. 4 in c minor), angling the mirror of our lives into a cell of collective memory where melodies play on repeat. There is also “Erbarme dich” from the St. Matthew Passion, as sung by alto Franz Vitzthum in a breathtaking arrangement for violin, chest organ, and strings. Vitzthum’s beauties culminate in Giger’s Altus solo II, stitching ground to sky with threads of silver. In the harpsichord’s tactile light, a mournful catharsis takes shape. Like M. C. Escher’s Rind, it suggests a face. Whether forming, unraveling, or holding its own against a patchwork of clouds, its eyes remain fixed on memory.
Between Sound and Space: ECM Records and Beyond 