Reviews

Wolfgang Muthspiel: Dance of the Elders (ECM 2772)

| Tyran Grillo

Wolfgang Muthspiel
Dance of the Elders

Wolfgang Muthspiel guitars
Scott Colley double bass
Brian Blade drums
Recorded February 2022 at 25th Street Recording, Oakland, California
Engineer: Jeff Cressman
Mixing: Gérard de Haro (engineer), Manfred Eicher, and Wolfgang Muthspiel
Studios La Buissonne
Cover photo: Woong Chul An
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 29, 2023

After clearing a giant swath of land throughout 2020’s Angular Blues, guitarist Wolfgang Muthspiel, bassist Scott Colley, and drummer Brian Blade now construct a series of interlocking structures across it. With “Invocation,” we find ourselves immersed in a sound that is both familiar and forward-seeking. As the mist of spider-webbed guitar and glistening chimes resolves to reveal Colley’s blessing, the trio’s meditations offer glimpses of parallel dimensions before Muthspiel dips into a chord-slung melody, allowing us some oxygen in a suffocating world.

While we might expect a groove from this seeking spirit, more slow building awaits in “Prelude to Bach.” This vaporous studio improvisation surrounds us with memories, each unable to be captured for long before the next takes its place. Before we know it, we’ve morphed into the Bach choral “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded,” which holds together like a fresco and touches the soul with equal lucidity. As inevitable as it was unplanned, it cups a candle whose flame has stood the test of time.

Muthspiel has a natural ability to twist the blinds to let in a different configuration of light at every turn. The polyrhythmic title track likewise changes faces as fluidly as one’s reflection in a disturbed pond’s surface. The acoustic guitar speaks with sagacity and love. Before the final act, Muthspiel and Colley recede into hand claps while Blade applies gold foil to the frame.

“Liebeslied” is one of two cover songs (this from Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera). Muthspiel draws a tessellated swing from within the tune’s many-chambered heart. Colley renders his solo in charcoal while the guitarist sketches in quieter pencil in the background before switching to pastel for a final say.

“Folksong” takes inspiration from Keith Jarrett’s vamp-prone improvisations in the pianist’s Belonging period, exploring a chord progression to the point of melodic bursting, with Americana touches and hints of countless side quests. Muthspiel’s acoustic shows its breadth and cohesion, so much so that Colley’s gestures feel like an extension of the same instrument, giving us that sunlit joy of the mid-1970s when Jarrett was at his most exploratory. “Cantus Bradus” pays homage to pianist Brad Mehldau, last heard with Muthspiel on 2018’s Where The River Goes, and whose chromatism shines as a guiding light through spectral improvisations.

Not a single note feels wasted at Muthspiel’s fingertips. Whether caught up in a dance or bearing down directly on a virtuosic motif, he stands at the edge of a proverbial cliff without ever feeling the need to jump. Instead, he takes in the view and shares it with us all. This is nowhere so clear as in his rendition of Joni Mitchell’s “Amelia,” which closes the set with minimal expansion. Even absent of words, it speaks to the heart. The electric guitar is the softer brush in his artistic toolkit, allowing every bristle to sing. Colley and Blade are his tender allies, each a bearer of melodic and atmospheric truths for posterity.

2022 Generation Black: The Future Is Past

| Tyran Grillo

Drawing inspiration from a trip to Qatar in 2012, perfumer Stephane Humbert Lucas imagined a symphony of tinctures representing the city’s bridging of ancestral traditions and modern deconstructions one decade later. The result is 2022 Generation Black, a fragrance that lives boldly between these realms of cultural expression: on the one hand, safe and familiar, while on the other, daring and forward-looking. Such is the energy he brings to one of the most stimulating scents I’ve ever put my nose on.

The fragrance is a spiral of self-reflection with distinctly extroverted qualities. At first, this might seem contradictory, but upon further wearing, it settles into the skin’s natural chemistry, taking on the unique signatures of warmth and coolness as it seesaws between the two. Despite never harmonizing completely (assuming they were ever meant to), they speak of the self’s contradictory nature, at once physical and metaphysical.

When describing this fragrance, the initial flash of yuzu zest, black currant, and mint means that brightness lives at the tip of the tongue. The combination is so rich with life that one can hardly articulate the breadth of its embrace. There is an almost metallic sheen to it as if one were digging into the heart of the soil and tasting the very ore within. This is the outward dimension, fresh and inviting in its spectrum of flavors. But beyond that, there is a feeling that this isn’t just fun and games. Rather, there is a serious, even contemplative underpinning to it all waiting to be known.

Thus, it transforms itself to reveal a heart of Cambodian oud, where some inexorable truth makes itself known in an ongoing exhalation of sensual touch. Just knowing it’s there is enough to take comfort in every inhalation we offer in balance. Going one layer deeper reveals a darker nest of precious oud (a blend of agarwood, rose, and other florals), spices, and balsamic notes. It is here where we find rest as this olfactory journey comes to an end. Although not the longest-lasting of its kind, there’s something special about the ephemerality of its intensity that begs repeat wearings—and fresh discoveries.

Nicolas Masson: Renaissance (ECM 2846)

| Tyran Grillo

Nicolas Masson
Renaissance

Nicolas Masson soprano and tenor saxophones
Colin Vallon piano
Patrice Moret double bass
Lionel Friedli drums
Recorded November 2023 at Studios La Buissonne
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Mastering: Nicolas Baillard
Cover photo: Nicolas Masson
An ECM Production
Release date: March 14, 2025

A quiet sparkle, a pebble thrown into the water, and a band that regards every ripple with their art—so begins “Tremolo,” the first of 10 new tunes from saxophonist Nicolas Masson. With partners Colin Vallon on piano, Patrice Moret on double bass, and Lionel Friedli on drums, he crafts melodic prose poetry that opens its borders to the freedom of in-the-moment interpretation. His tenor has the quality of a dream struggling to maintain its form in the face of impending wakefulness. The tension between the two is where so much of this music lives: at once allied with the night while yearning for daybreak. Stretching its neck from the opposite direction is the title track. Speaking as much in the idiomatic language of feet that walk as in that of hands that create, it conveys its autobiography in linked verse. All the more appropriate that his previous album with these fine musicians should be called Travelers, for they all contribute their own stamps to this passport.

What makes the group’s interplay so endearing is the grace of their seeking spirit. In “Anemona,” for instance, they give themselves to the flow of Masson’s organic writing selflessly and not without a significant quotient of charm that lets childlike impulses come to the fore. In “Tumbleweeds,” the free improvisational bonus that follows, we encounter the deepest expression of their atmospheric capabilities. Like the equally brief “Moving On,” which finds Masson and Moret duetting in the half-light, it embraces uncertainty. That said, even in the more artful punctuations of “Subversive Dreamers” (a highlight for its under-the-skin them), we are never coerced into experiencing something outside the realm of lived experience. Such comforts are harder to come by in a world caged by division. And how can one not feel like a messenger bird with a broken wing, mended and set free by the soprano saxophone-driven “Forever Gone”? Tied to our foot is the message ciphered in “Practicing The Unknown,” where hope reigns. At the risk of belaboring the analogy, I wonder whether “Basel” isn’t the terminus of our flight. Its percussive tracery, soaring piano, and unforced sopranism show us the quartet’s heart.

If all the above is the body, then “Spirits” is the blood working its way through the veins. But despite the intimations of kinetic energy that it whispers, it all points to the conclusion in “Langsam,” which challenges the listener to find a better word to describe the mood of what we’ve just experienced.

When listening to Renaissance, it becomes obvious why songs on an album are called “tracks.” It’s because each leaves something physical that we can touch and follow, knowing the journey will be its own reward.

WAZAMBA: A Winter Treasure

| Tyran Grillo

Normally, when fire burns, its smoke rises to become one with the sky. The smoke of WAZAMBA settles inward to become one with the self. This deeply resinous masterpiece from Parfum d’Empire opens with a kiss of red apple before fingernails of Moroccan cypress and aldehydes scratch ever so lightly along the nape of our awareness. There’s no escaping its allure; no matter where you turn, its sillage follows with the gentle persistence of a shadow.

Kenyan myrrh, olibanum, labdanum, and plum create an echo chamber that feels prayerful in its intimacy. Thus, the experience of this perfume becomes more individual the more it develops. Like a song, it reveals its chorus after the opening verses—a comfort to return to as we move throughout the day, revealing new shades of meaning.

Base notes of Somali incense (a sagacious presence throughout), fir balsam absolute, Ethiopian opoponax, Indian sandalwood, and fern wrap the skin in the vibrations of time travel, stepping beyond the here and now to take in the scents of places long buried and yet to be built. Uncannily enough, it makes us feel as if we were the portal rather than the ones stepping through it, absorbing the world around us so as not to forget it.

Behind WAZAMBA is the nose of Marc-Antoine Corticchiato, whose approach to the sacred crosses as many borders as the ingredients that come together in its glorious ritual. By harmonizing such seemingly disparate elements and cultures, he creates a warmth that melts snow into rivers. It is lesson that anyone with a political agenda might learn from, exhaling the will to power and inhaling a desire to know oneself again as a child of God.

Kimberly Nguyen: Here I am Burn Me (Book Review)

| Tyran Grillo

to name something is
to know it

So writes Kimberly Nguyen in the opening poem of her visceral collection, Here I Am Burn Me. And yet, what becomes increasingly clear, page after blood-rimmed page, is that to name something can also be to unknow it—further to destroy it, colonize it, and erase its origins in favor of a master narrative. Nguyen bends that master narrative until it whitens, cracks, and snaps. Rather than rebuild something from those screaming fragments, she turns her back on their hollow breath to inhale a light fashioned in hands washed clean of their conspiracy. She rids herself not only of grime but also of the expectations placed upon her shoulders, already bruised from decades of trauma compressed into the occasional period. This is what she hears.

what’s the difference between war and its aftermath

A question without a question mark becomes a statement of truth. Such linguistic “errors” are highlighted throughout as markers of identity (or lack thereof), even as the tides of history crash against the shores of a geography one can never understand from a distance. Nguyen resists the water and flavors her soul with the salt that makes it fatal to drink yet life-giving to all else. Her voice echoes in bones and eyelids, earlobes and fingernails, ink and cane pulp. In the same breath, that yearning for water becomes explicitly self-defeating—a womb-like existence tempered by the enforcement of maritime mythologies. No matter how landbound we are, the threat of drowning is omnipresent. Thus, the act of writing is never unsubmerged but always subject to the same curling of contaminants. This is what she sees.

violence is not a language
we were born with

Our faith is demonstrated only by the object to which we stitch the threads of our fallible professions. We might have the fullest confidence in thin ice, yet we will fall through it to our deaths; we might have no assurance in thick ice yet make it to the other side without incident. Violence flips this dynamic. Men in suits and other forms of camouflage have confidence in the weapons they worship, some of which far exceed their expectations for destruction. Meanwhile, those coerced into deploying them tremble so that their bodies force an error when training grounds resolve into battlefields. Fire and flame are equal partners in this elemental give and take, each a reflection of the other from night to day and back again. Likewise, every tongue has a sharp side and a dull side, and in her vacillation between the two, Nguyen plants her feet firmly in the squish of their overlap. Shooting down every word traversing that slick surface before it can escape is laborious. This is what she tastes.

i’ll be the one-line poem you take a black marker to,
black out all the parts of me you don’t want to see

In the same way that some of these poems are footnotes, sprinkling their dead skin into places where primary content should never be relegated, Nguyen also sinks her teeth into science, physics, astronomy, and other subcutaneous layers of knowledge. Others are transmissions from outer space to inner, and vice versa. Still others are bifurcated, a conversation with the self, curling in a three-dimensional analogy of a four-dimensional dilemma. Behind closed eyelids, we encounter flashes of war, of Agent Orange, of fields ablaze, of eyebrows singed, of journeys interrupted, of soldiers remembered, of weaponry impossible to forget. And while communing with ghosts may be a privilege her father will not share, it is something she offers us maternally, sustaining the crossfire to lay it at our feet. This is what she smells.

a soft place for a sharp word to land

Rarely has such an apt description of the itinerant body been articulated. While the privileged among us spin a globe, close our eyes, and travel to wherever our finger lands, hers get tangled in a blur of ideologies, raking through cities, forests, and oceans as if they were nothing more than the topography of some enormous beast. Cuts and lesions allow navigation in darkness when torches fail to give up their ghosts. Snow is now skin, picked and collected as a record of self-harm as if to prove one’s aliveness by testing the body’s limits. This is what she touches.

you can love a plant and it can still wilt away

Grief is only the conscious delaying of one’s own demise, a reminder that every canon depends on death. The only way to heal an emotional wound is to scribble it out and write another one in its place, ad infinitum. In a world that feeds on lies, killing is the truest act, or so the powers that be would have us believe. Such is the script we follow to ensure success, living out dreams as if they were real, only to realize too late that everything we ever experienced happened to someone else. If a sixth sense is to be found amid the bramble through which we have been dragged, it is knowing that love is not a badge of honor but the thickest scab protecting us from further harm. Thank you, Kimberly, for tracing its contours with such care. We need more of this.

Here I Am Burn Me is available from Write Bloody here.

Al Andalus: For the Skin Within

| Tyran Grillo

It is often said that fragrances transport us. Indeed, some of my favorites—including Parfum d’Empire’s Wazamba, Jazeel’s Heyam, and the Incense Series by Commes des Garçons—have more than a resinous quality in common. Each is also intimately connected to the spirit of a place, whether in the regional specificity of its note profile (such as Wazamba’s Afrocentric symphony of ingredients from Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Morocco) or by force of suggestion in the name. Al Andalus checks off those boxes and then some. What puts this masterpiece from the Italian house of Moresque and the nose of Andrea “Thero” Casotti on its own pedestal is the inwardness it affords the moment I apply it. Never have I beheld a scent that pulls such a vivid constellation of time and place into me rather than me into it.

As the opening release of ginger embraces my nostrils like an old friend, it bears saffron and black pepper as gifts from afar. Despite the connotations of distances traveled, “exotic” and other outdated descriptors must go straight into the kitsch bin, making way for the more accurate word pictures of “bitingly warm” and “darkly gold-flecked.” The brocade of light and shadow that plays about its introduction is extraordinary. It changes during every inhalation—so much so that I wish I didn’t have to exhale in between.

As the hands on the clock go obtuse, then acute, a quiet comfort takes over. A heart of oud from Kalimantan Island shines like a candle in a blackout—which is to say, with unadulterated vitality. The slightest breaths of wind remind me of where this reunion began, hinting at slumber. Memories and stories lure my attention from the present while enhancing bodily awareness.

Tendrils of Haitian vetiver, French labdanum, and birch braid themselves until two become one, leaving a bed of wonder that smells of the soul. Only then do I realize I’ve been speaking to myself the whole time, curling inside out.

How appropriate, then, that Al Andalus should last 12 hours. Its diurnal character shifts from golds to greens throughout the day, foreshadowing the night with its sunlit opening. What begins with the excitement of an open-air market gradually turns dusky, becoming a scent for the skin within. Such an experience is rare in perfumery, and yet, here it awaits, a sky without a cloud but for the wisp of smoke in whose name it settles.

Shibui: Quint

| Tyran Grillo

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.

Quint is available from Bandcamp here.

Trio Tapestry: Our Daily Bread (ECM 2777)

| Tyran Grillo

Trio Tapestry
Our Daily Bread

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: Bordeaux Concert (ECM 2740)

| Tyran Grillo

Keith Jarrett
Bordeaux Concert

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.