Guillermo
E. Brown
SOUL AT THE HANDS OF THE MACHINE
Thirsty Ear Blue Series THI 57118.2
by Dan Warburton
"Regardless of genre, music trends are showing a growing complacency
to challenge convention. Feeling frustrated by this stagnancy, I realized
that by creating a series of records marrying jazz's many languages,
perhaps a new form could arise. The Blue Series attempts to do this
in a way that will, hopefully, challenge, probe, excite and perhaps
even anger listeners as we try to strip away conventions with a new
convention." Guillermo E. Brown's "Soul at the Hands of the Machine"
raises some key questions about the above-cited mission statement
from Thirsty Ear's Peter Gordon. How far can one move outside the
accepted framework of jazz (its instrumentation, performance and studio
conventions, concept of repertoire) and still claim to be "jazz",
as opposed to merely "jazzy"? Can "jazz" include slamming techno kick
drum beats and ProTools mangled vocals, and if so, in what context?
Brown, as a versatile and widely-read musician familiar with stylistic
developments across the board, is obviously in his element here, throwing
as many delicious ingredients into the gumbo as he can find, but is
the dish served up at the end of it all going to be able to take its
place on the soul food menu of the jazz restaurant? For example, one
of the innovations of dub reggae that was enthusiastically seized
upon by techno / trip hop / ambient was the splitting open of form
made audible by taking what would normally be considered as "background"
(bass, drums, horn arrangements, backing vocals..) and catapulting
it to centre stage by mixing down - even deleting - the "foreground"
(lead vocal). Whereas it took early dub masters such as Lee Perry,
Keith Hudson and King Tubby literally hours of painstaking studio
work to achieve, there are today throughout the world thousands -
maybe millions - of people with enough equipment (synths, samplers,
software) in their bedrooms to put the old Black Ark studios to shame.
Of course, what Guillermo Brown might cobble together in his bedroom
is far more interesting and musically cogent than something turned
out by some spotty teen in the middle of nowhere, but it runs the
same risks. Taking Daniel Carter's sax and placing it way back in
the mix (with reverb to boot) on tracks such as "Manganese" seems
to be an attempt to import dub methodology into the sphere of jazz
production, but ignores an essential difference between the hierarchical
assignment of roles within a jazz combo as opposed to a reggae band
- in jazz, the soloist is up front and centre stage, but the relationship
between soloist and rhythm section behind is more flexible (dialectic
if you will), more subject to change than that between a pop vocal
and its accompaniment (likely as not overdubbed after the vocals were
laid down). The impression given by many of the tracks on Brown's
album is that the fragments of flute and sax are relegated to the
status of mere embellishment - it's those dense pulsing rhythm tracks
(Brown's powerhouse drumming is more often than not backed up by FLAM's
hefty programming and mixing) that constitute the core of each piece.
Brown's lengthy thanks to all and sundry involved on the inner sleeve,
from girlfriend to grandfather, reads like any run-of-the-mill hip-hop
album, and tracks like "Inside the Purple Box" are just crying out
for someone to pick up the mic and start freestyling on top. It's
all very impressive stuff, and reveals a deep knowledge and understanding
on Brown's part of the wider world of popular music from 808 State
to Inner City to Ninja Tune, but surely "stripping away conventions
with a new convention" means going deeper into more dangerous territory
than this.
Christopher
Willits
FOLDING, AND THE TEA
12k 1021
by Dan Warburton
If a sound played in reverse is analogous to a piece of paper being
folded back upon itself, and the gentle click of colliding soundfiles
represents the crease that marks that fold, then Christopher Willits'
album is a veritable origami manual. With the exception of "Scrims."
(and that period is essential - punctuation is all-important here),
all the tracks on "Folding, And The Tea" revisit the same territory,
guitar lines looped back upon themselves to form intricate and disarmingly
pretty cats' cradles of unashamedly tonal harmony. The fragmented
surfaces of Daniel Lentz often come to mind, as does the sheen of
Stephan Basho-Junghans (when the guitar is more identifiable as a
guitar), but a more recent reference - and inspiration, it would seem,
for dozens of laptoppers - is Fennesz's "Endless Summer". It's all
surface, folding, clicks and cuts, but strip that away and you're
left with rather bland eleventh and thirteenth chords, and little
else. Just as the most beautiful piece of origami can be unfolded
to reveal itself as a perfectly ordinary piece of paper.
JUST
IN CASE YOU'RE BORED. SO ARE WE
dieb 13 / Pure / Siewert
JUST IN CASE YOU'RE BORED. SO ARE WE
dOc 004
by Dan Warburton
Is it too early to nominate this as Album Title Of The Year? Further
proof that Vienna is still where it's happening, this collaboration
between turntablist dieb13, guitarist Martin Siewert (both members
of Boris Hauf's Efzeg project) and Mego's Pure, here billed as "mobile
computing", is a superbly crafted example of what that great city
seems to be very good at these days: predominantly slow-moving, rich
(as opposed to merely dense) and rewarding electro-acoustical improvisation.
Though the cover art montages images of Death Valley (Zabriskie Point,
if I'm not mistaken), the Kansas of John Cage's "Lecture on Nothing"
comes to mind.. This is a listening experience analogous to that feeling
you get looking out of the window during a long train journey - fence
posts and wires close to the track fairly whiz by, while buildings
and trees in the mid-distance seem to drift along at a leisurely pace
and those mountains on the horizon hardly seem to be moving at all;
it's all a question of which plane you choose to focus on. Like Death
Valley, it seems to be arid and forbidding until you suddenly realise
that there are literally millions of things to experience. But you
can, if you prefer, gaze at the distant mountains. Unlike some of
the more claustrophobic recent offerings from Grob and Erstwhile,
this music admits the idea of relaxed (I hesitate to use the word
"ambient" though it did come to mind) listening as easily as repays
any attention you care to lavish on it. Just in case you're interested,
so am I.
SET
SAIL FOR THE SUN : MATTHEW SHIPP'S THIRSTY EAR ALBUMS
by Dan Warburton
The assumption of the generation of jazz musicians who cut their
teeth in the 1950s was that the free players did what they did basically
because they didn't have the necessary chops to cut it with the bop
cats (remember Charles Mingus' magnificent tirade stating that if
they put their minds to it, he, Clark Terry and Duke could come up
with a free jazz album that would blow Ornette and the others out
of the water?). While that may or may not be true (and begs the question
as to why Mingus thought a grounding in basic technique and repertoire
was an essential prerequisite), several musicians who emerged on the
scene as free players in the late 60s / early 70s have frequently
felt the need to go back to The Tradition, either to give it a friendly,
irreverent kick in the pants (Misha Mengelberg) or to recontextualize
it as part of a larger lifework's continuum (Braxton), but more often
than not to prove to the wider public that they can also play legit
as well as the others if they choose to. The problem is that most
of them can't. Since the teaching of jazz became legitimised
as a professional career option in the USA at the end of the 1960s
(a move subsequently widely emulated outside the States), American
universities and colleges have been producing literally dozens of
technically outstanding musicians each year, young cats who can sit
in with any established band in town and trot out the Real Book in
any key the leader chooses to name on the count of four. Of course,
none of these characters has more than an ounce of genuine originality,
and couldn't (wouldn't dare, wouldn't even understand why they should
even try to) produce music as extraordinary and on-the-edge
as, say, Frank Lowe's 1973 "Black Beings". And that's fine - it takes
all sorts to make a world, and if you're a painter and choose to spend
your time churning out godawful daubs of Notre Dame de Paris to sell
to gullible tourists in the streets of Montmartre, you probably don't
feel any pressing need to turn out a Pollock or a Rothko merely to
prove you're hip to what's happening in the avant-garde. And yet,
coming from the other direction, we have the pathetic spectacle -
pathetic in the real sense of the word, as in inducing pity - of free
jazz veterans thirty years on getting hopelessly lost trying to play
standards.
The question I'm getting at, which is the central preoccupation of
Thirsty Ear's Blue Series, is where does jazz go from here? Now that
a whole new generation of kids are getting into free improvisation
(thanks in part to the boundless enthusiasm of high-profile figures
like John Zorn, Thurston Moore and Jim O'Rourke), kids coming from
a resolutely non-jazz background who are more likely to be hunting
for a copy of "Alabama Feeling" than "Money Jungle", what does it
mean to be a modern jazz musician in America (or, for that
matter, anywhere) today? The answer - one possible answer - is to
return that Tradition and try to reclaim it from Wynton Marsalis,
whose smooth retro nostalgia for suits, ties and mid-60s Miles has
incensed a whole generation of musicians as much as it has delighted
the play-it-safe bourgeois marketplace and the major label sharks
who patrol it.
"Regardless of genre, music trends are showing a growing complacency
to challenge convention. Feeling frustrated by this stagnancy, I realized
that by creating a series of records marrying jazz's many languages,
perhaps a new form could arise. The Blue Series attempts to do this
in a way that will, hopefully, challenge, probe, excite and perhaps
even anger listeners as we try to strip away conventions with a new
convention." So writes Executive Producer Peter Gordon in a text printed
on the inside of the back tray card of each release in theThirsty
Ear Blue Series. Pianist Matthew Shipp, as curator of the Series,
is acutely aware of the risk involved, and his own output on the label
- five albums so far: "Pastoral Composure", "New Orbit", "Nu-Bop",
"Equilibrium" and "Antipop vs. Matthew Shipp" - has approached the
problem from different angles, with, as we shall see, varying degrees
of success.
"Pastoral Composure" (Thirsty Ear THI 57084.2), recorded on January
6th 2000, opens with "Gesture", whose G flattened-second tonality
(which could come straight out of Zorn's Masada songbook, another
path Downtown jazz chose to follow a decade ago and one curiously
bypassed by the Blue Series) becomes nothing less than a harmonic
prison whose walls Shipp and bassist William Parker seem content to
shore up with oppressive pedal points underpinned by Gerald Cleaver's
militaristic drumming. Trumpeter Roy Campbell is as inventive as one
can be under the circumstances, but when he finally runs out of ideas,
well, so does the piece. It's a curious and unsettling way to start
an album. The ensuing "Visions", a straight swinging D minor blues,
could quite easily have been penned forty years ago by Coltrane, and
Shipp, after kicking off his solo with a clear nod to Duke ("East
St Louis Toodle-Oo" in fact), pursues a resolutely boppish path throughout;
the heavy left hand reiterating the same chordal configurations coupled
with darting right recalls Don Pullen (who was able to move from bop
to funk to free more easily - Pullen recorded several outstanding
minor mode blues workouts with the quartet he co-led with George Adams).
Behind it all, Parker's walking lines are solid but nowhere near as
varied as what a Mingus or a Chambers - or even the Adams/Pullen quartet's
Cameron Brown - might have come up with, and Cleaver sounds rather
wooden in comparison to an Elvin Jones or a Dannie Richmond. One suspects
that had this selfsame recording been submitted to Thirsty Ear by
four unknown musicians from rural Slovenia, it might have been frisbeed
into the out tray after one listening. But this is Matthew Shipp,
one of the most talented and original pianists of his generation,
and William Parker, arguably the most well known (and certainly the
hardest working) bassist on the scene. What conclusions can be drawn,
then? As irony doesn't seem to be involved (there's no place for cheeky
subversives like Mengelberg and Bennink in this band), we're forced
to assume that these guys are playing it straight.
Shipp's take on "Prelude to a Kiss" is equally revelatory; whizzing
through the theme with its time-honoured chord voicings in almost
peremptory fashion, he takes the melody line and subjects it to a
brief contrapuntal workout before his trademark left hand thunks put
a stop to proceedings. He sounds almost relieved to rediscover the
theme and get out of there. In a way, there is a distancing involved
here that was not apparent in "Visions" (and Shipp is as good as Misha
at dismantling an old chestnut when he wants to be - I cherish fond
memories of a mind-blowing "Take The A Train" with William Parker
and Rob Brown at a concert I attended three years ago); rather than
appropriating the standard, making it truly his own (Monk's 1955 Ellington
covers inevitably come to mind), it's as if he's standing back from
the Tradition as an observer - here it is, I can play it straight
and will do so just to prove it, but.. what should I do next?
The title track finds Shipp in more familiar territory, piling up
fourths and octaves to carve his Aeolian mode out of the living rock
of Parker's turbulent bass and Cleaver's washes of cymbals and tom-toms,
while Campbell's flugelhorn soars above. While "Progression" returns
to mid-tempo swing with walking bass, the harmonic complexity of its
elegant head (Andrew Hill comes to mind) gives Parker and Shipp more
room to move about in, unlike the blues straightjacket of the earlier
"Visions". Then, surprise, the old traditional children's canon "Frčre
Jacques", which Shipp underpins with a relentless mid-register D pedal
until Campbell takes him way out. Here the theme is as well known
and recognisable as one of Albert Ayler's classic heads ("Ghosts",
"Spirits"..) and functions in precisely the same way, as structural
demarcation. It's intriguing that, after this, the full quartet is
not heard again - and the trio freebop of "Merge" is like a breath
of fresh air; freed from rhythmic constraints, Parker and Cleaver
shuffle along joyfully, providing the perfect supple backdrop for
Shipp's inventive soloing. Campbell sits this one out, but returns
on "Inner Order" to duet with Parker, before Shipp concludes proceedings
with a brief but eloquent solo, "XTU".
If "Pastoral Composure" is an attempt, conscious or otherwise, to
come to terms with a wide range of sub-genres within The Tradition
(Coltrane's blues, Hill's hard bop, Ayler's free gospel), Shipp wisely
chooses to narrow the focus on "New Orbit" (Thirsty Ear THI 57095.2,
recorded on September 14th 2000). The line-up is the same, except
that Campbell is replaced by Wadada Leo Smith, whose glorious wide-open
tone seems more adapted to the proceedings. This time the whole album
is carefully structured, with the opening title track returning three
times ("Orbit 2" and "Orbit 3" are solo readings of the theme, the
first by Shipp, the second by Parker, the closing "Orbit 4" a bass/piano
duet), and the Lydian G mode that permeates all four "Orbits" looks
further back in time than George Russell's celebrated concept - Shipp's
solo reading of the theme is almost medieval in its tonal austerity
(re-record in cavernous acoustic of Rainbow Studios, add one Jan Garbarek
and presto! ECM hit record). Fortunately Shipp intersperses his orbits
with material of a more diverse and challenging nature: on "Paradox
X" he remains inside the piano, accepting all the inherent risks that
can pose (unless you spend a couple of hours chalking the strings,
you're never quite sure exactly which note you're plucking inside
there). Smith comes sailing back on "Chi" (seems recording engineer
Carl Seltzer was more enthusiastic with the reverb than he was on
"Pastoral Composure"), and after Parker's brief tremolo orbit, things
really take off on "U Feature". Shipp sits this one out, but returns
in pensive mood on "Syntax", another lyrical modal reading that would
have Mr. Eicher reaching for the phone. Smith's languid vibrato, perfectly
supported by the reverberant acoustic, is ideal for a piece that unfolds
with gentle but implacable determination as if it had all the time
in the world to do so. There seems to be no pressure for the musicians
to compete here, neither with each other nor with serried ranks of
the jazz forefathers; this music creates its own space - and inhabits
it fully. The brief "Maze Hint" that follows is the perfect foil (maybe
you were expecting another "Orbit"?), providing the necessary breathing
space before the penultimate "Paradox Y", which, thanks to Parker's
intense bowed drones and Smith's razor-sharp muted work, takes the
album to new heights of intensity. The brief epilogue of "Orbit 4"
stands not only as milestone to show how far we've travelled on this
wonderful journey, but also loops us back to the beginning if need
be to relive the cycle. The pianist could not have chosen a more appropriate
title than "Orbit".
Well over a year went by before Shipp's next outing for the Blue
Series, "Nu Bop" (Thirsty Ear THI 57114.2), on which he was joined
by the ubiquitous Parker, saxophonist Daniel Carter, and drummer Guillermo
Brown (Shipp's stable mate from the David Ware Quartet) on drums,
and, last but most definitely not least, Chris Flam on synths and
programming. If, on "New Orbit", Shipp was happy to float through
space and time, "Nu Bop" brings him crashing back to the street. You'd
be hard pressed to find a Radio Raheem walking the streets with anything
from "New Orbit" blasting out of his boom box, but tracks like "Space
Shipp" and "Nu-Bop" might just cut it.
Let's just be clear for a moment here: if you're going to use synth
and drum programming on an album featuring musicians of the calibre
of William Parker and Daniel Carter, you probably shouldn't just plug
the boxes into a socket in the studio and hit the RECORD button. There
are two ways of doing it, the first being laying down the instrumentals
first and sticking the beats and scratches on top later. Risky, this:
real life musicians are nowhere near as accurate as drum synthesizers
when it comes to keeping time. (Don't believe that? Take one of the
world's greatest rhythm sections, Charles Mingus and Dannie Richmond,
in one of their most outrageously hard-swinging recordings, "So Long
Eric" from the 1964 "Live at Town Hall" album, stick it on your hard
drive as a .wav file, establish the opening tempo as accurately as
you can, programme in a straight 4/4 click track in that tempo to
coincide with the opening of the piece, press play and see who finishes
first.. try it.) The other way is to lay down rhythm tracks in advance
and then put live stuff on top, which is what I suspect Matthew Shipp
and the team on "Nu-Bop" opted for (this might explain why the rhythm
tracks cut out before the instruments on several cuts). Whether that's
the case or not, the fact remains that the rhythmic subtleties of
real drummers the calibre of Guillermo Brown are infinitely more complex
than what can be programmed into a machine - and there's still the
question of dynamics to consider: once those titanic beats
are up and running (in the title track, even more so in "D's Choice")
there's no way (short of remixing when it's all over) that a musician
can suddenly drop the volume and take his colleagues in a different
direction. There are glimpses of human life here - Carter's flute
and Parker's bass interlude, "X-Ray", for example, but for the most
part the beat is omnipresent and suffocating, if seductive and foot
tapping; there seems to be little room for genuine dialogue. If musicians
can find ways to combat hip-hop's relentless periodicity by superimposing
more complex metres that introduce rhythmic ambiguity and perceptual
danger, all well and good (Shipp achieves this in his solo on "Rocket
Shipp", but he's got some distance to go if he wants to compete with
Steve Coleman: a track like "D's Choice", with its interminable pentatonic
crashing chords - Bobby Few was doing this thirty years ago with Frank
Wright - doesn't seem to go anywhere). However, if the resulting polyrhythm
itself becomes just as much of a prison as the groove it set out to
subvert, then nothing much is gained: it doesn't take long to figure
out that the closing "Select Mode 2" is nothing more than a 20 + 8
beat cycle (16 measures of 5/16 plus 2 of 4/4). Instead of trying
to solo over the cycle, Shipp remains firmly anchored to the riff,
leaving Guillermo Brown to throw in a few energetic fills and runs.
It's not only a disappointing way to end an album, but a rather distressing
one, as it would seem to result in just the "stagnancy" that Peter
Gordon's mission statement set out to avoid. Then again, as Gordon
warned, I might just be one of those listeners who are angered rather
than excited by what they hear.
Matthew Shipp has threatened to go into retirement before, and is
doing so once more. The aptly-named "Equilibrium" (Thirsty Ear THI
57127.2) - Shipp deserves special credit for coming up with thought-provoking
and relevant track and album titles - seems to indicate that he's
at one of art's fabled crossroads, torn between taking the well-lit
street of hip-hop or the rubble-strewn back alley of free jazz. The
ordering of the tracks here deliberately juxtaposes the two styles,
acknowledging the fact that Shipp feels equally attracted to both.
The beautiful, crystalline modal fluidity of the title track (surely
the most gorgeous vibes / piano interplay since Gary Burton took on
Keith Jarrett 31 years ago!) is immediately challenged by the hefty
low-end groove of "Vamp to Vibe" - but behind the apparent contrast
of style and rhythm, there is harmonic common ground between the two.
The following "Nebula Theory" is a mysterious and melancholy landscape,
with Parker's mournful bowed lines supported by eerie clangs from
Khan Jamal's vibes. But why is Shipp sitting out so soon? He's back
in action on "Cohesion" (another purely modal harmonic structure -
this time Phrygian), but once again his right hand sounds to be trying
- in vain - to break out of the regular sixteenth-note grid imposed
by the beat, even if FLAM's programming is more discreet and supportive
of the drummer (Gerald Cleaver here) than it was on "Nu-Bop". Cleaver
exchanges sticks for brushes at the opening of the elegant "World
of Blue Glass", but even this apparently straightforward ballad is
not without its surprises.. What is that clang from the piano top
F at 1'03"? Did the pianist leave something inside the instrument
or is it FLAM sniping from the wings? The tempo remains relaxed but
there's a steadily building, almost scary intensity here, reinforced
by Parker's bass line and Shipp's dense left-hand voicings. Why the
next track, "Portal", made it to the disc is a real mystery - this
snippet of a jazz waltz (only 1'13" long) seems little more than an
introduction to a vibes solo from Jamal that fades out before it even
gets going. Leaving question marks hanging in the air, it's the perfect
introduction to the next track, "The Root", in which Shipp finds himself
right at the crossroads, layering his trademark dense polytonal harmonies
over an insistent percussion groove. Jamal's soloing jazz, and Parker
walks behind him, steadfastly refusing to play Bootsy, but that percussion
groove is most definitely funk. Not surprisingly perhaps, nothing
is resolved, and the track ends with Jamal's chords floating in space.
"The Key" once more finds the pianist absent, and while Parker and
Jamal keep the jazz home fires burning, there's a nagging edge to
Cleaver's swing that seems to be trying to break out of the matrix.
The final track, accordingly, is entitled "Nu Matrix", and opens with
some disturbing loops echoing into what sounds like a deserted subway
station; Shipp's piano is flanged and modulated into something truly
strange. Very few albums end so ambiguously; if Shipp is asking us
(and one presumes himself) where jazz goes from here, "Equilibrium"
provides no clear answer, but rarely has question been posed so eloquently.
Rewind to Peter Gordon's mission statement. If the Blue Series'
highly acclaimed Spring Heel Jack and DJ Spooky projects represent
one challenge to convention, by fragmenting and reconfiguring it,
another way of reclaiming jazz from the middle-class middle-income
middle-aged market is to take it back to the youngsters. That means
either going techno or going hip-hop, and, as SHJ's "Masses" and "Amassed",
impressive though they may be, are hardly techno propositions (imagine
the look of horror on the faces of those who bought them expecting
a return to the sleek drum'n'bass of "These Are Strings" and "68 Million
Shades"!), that leaves hip-hop. Shipp, as we have seen, had already
taken (tentative) steps in that direction on "Nu-Bop" and "Equilibrium".
Marrying jazz and hip-hop is nothing new; it's been on the agenda
of several musicians (and no doubt on the mind of numerous profit-hungry
record company executives) since Miles came back from the dead and
started covering Michael Jackson. Once DJs had exhausted the back
catalogues of James Brown and George Clinton for material to sample,
they turned their attention to the funky organ grooves of Blue Note,
creating a whole new movement (the unfortunately named "Acid Jazz")
and an unprecedented demand for original vinyls by Groove Holmes and
Charles Kynard - I know, I was one of those buying - backed up by
slick little slogans like "you gotta know Blue Note to dig Def Jam".
The generation of jazz musicians who grew up in the 1970s (i.e. with
JB and Parliament/Funkadelic ringing in their ears) took to funk like
fishes to water: Steve Coleman (and the various members of his M-Base
collective, including Greg Osby, Cassandra Wilson and Robin Eubanks)
was able to incorporate duple-time funk beats into his music without
compromising its complexity (try transcribing "Ice Moves" on 1990's
"Rhythm People" and you'll have a hell of job - but you'll be damned
if your feet don't stop tapping for a moment), and the funk gradually
displaced the jazz (a critical shift for Coleman was when he replaced
drummer Marvin "Smitty" Smith with Gene Lake), until the moment finally
came when the rappers themselves took to the stage. Coleman's 1994
EP "Tale of 3 Cities" marked a key moment in the genre, but in retrospect
perhaps neither the jazz public nor the mass market was ready for
the verbal skills of Sub Zero, Kokayi and Shahliek. Rap at the time
was descending from the lofty heights of Public Enemy and Eric B into
the gutter of gangsta's stupid and offensive expletives (and was to
stoop even lower before picking itself up just a couple of years ago
- only the Wu Tang seemed to keep it alive during the dark years of
the late 90s), and die-hard M-Base fans had a hard time hearing Coleman's
dazzling irregular metrics replaced by solid four-in-a-bar grooves
the rappers wouldn't get lost over.
Now that hip-hop has shaken off some of the MTV glittery trash of
Puff Daddy and Notorious BIG and Tupac lie quietly at last beneath
their tombstones, the re-emergence of intelligent lyrics and creative
producing means the time is about right to try again and reintegrate
it into the long-forgotten family home of jazz. "On the face of it,"
commented Shipp in a recent interview, "free jazz and hip-hop are
just things you would never consider being together. But if you really
look beneath the surface, there are points where they come together."
Perhaps somebody could persuade him to be a little more specific here,
for although the latter's antecedents in funk are clearly audible,
there would seem on the face of it to be little musical common ground
between the two, neither rhythmically (there don't seem to be many
hip-hop producers queueing up to sample Sunny Murray and Milford Graves)
nor melodically (when Public Enemy's producer Hank Shocklee wanted
a blast of screaming "free" sax, he sourced it from James Brown, not
from Albert Ayler or Frank Wright). So how has Matthew Shipp fared?
For those who have been waiting with bated breath for the long-awaited
collaboration between a major jazz figure once more threatening retirement
and arguably the most innovative hip-hop group of the past five years
now officially celebrating their own demise, "Antipop vs. Matthew
Shipp" (Thirsty Ear THI 57120.2) is something of a disappointment.
The opening "Places I've Never Been" samples Shipp's piled up fourths
and fifths and locks them into a regular four-bar two-chord harmonic
cycle that goes round the block eight times before the piano cuts
out to leave just the bare bones of a hip-hop track, bass, beats and
a dab of spacey synth. We're waiting for something to happen - and
it doesn't; the title presumably refers to what the music is searching
for rather than what it actually finds. On "Staph" the rappers check
in, but Shipp's contribution is once more limited to looped samples
of his right hand chords - the fabulous harmonic ambiguity of his
left hand that dynamized dozens of albums with David S. Ware apparently
has no place here. Maybe the Consortium had problems with "dissonance"
and asked for something more mainstream to rap over; if so, Shipp
provides it on "Slow Horn", which revisits Miles' "All Blues" (hardly
free jazz!), abandoning the triple time of the original in favour
of the inevitable 4/4 plod of hip-hop in the process. On "A Knot in
Your Bop", a 12/8 cycle of arpeggios goes round and round until a
somewhat unimaginative synth bass pops up half way through the track.
Not much else happens. "Sup" belongs to APC (Parker's bowed intro
sounds as if it was grafted on as an afterthought), but the rappers
lay out on "Coda", an elegiac if slightly sombre ballad improvisation
for Shipp and Parker. After some imaginative wordplay on "Stream Light"
(incorporating the same Shipp samples used earlier in "Staph" - a
quest for global coherence, or proof of paucity of material?), "Monstro
City" starts out with a muscular Shipp solo, once more built over
a two-chord jam, and when the rap kicks in one gets the impression
that the real album is at last finally underway, after several extended
introductions. "Real is Surreal" is equally encouraging, but a casual
glance at the CD player reveals that, with "Free Hop", time's up.
This last track is more bop than hop, and it's unclear what part APC
have played in the proceedings, apart from scrambling things up on
the hard drive at the mixing stage. Khan Jamal's vibes, normally so
clear and evanescent, sound particularly strange, and Daniel Carter's
trumpet is sent through several cavernous pans and echoes, but despite
such seemingly unnecessary post-production, the track still rocks
and actually manages to generate a head of steam (it's also the longest
piece on the album - by some one and half minutes) until the cute
"this-is-just-a-recording" trompe l'oreille of the ending pulls
the plug. One can hope that more sparks will fly on Shipp's forthcoming
release later this year with ex Co Flow rapper El-P.
"There have been people that combined jazz and hip-hop and stuff
in the past, but I think actually trying to take the real hardcore
essence of free jazz and the real hardcore essence of beats and hip-hop
and organically combine them, it seems like a fresh frontier," Shipp
commented in November 2002 to journalist Andrew Dansby, a quotation
that goes to the heart of the matter. What is the real hardcore essence
of beats and hip-hop? Presumably, at least, beats, i.e. more or less
regular rhythmic periodicity (it doesn't have to be basic and binary
either, as Steve Coleman's work has showed, even though it more often
than not is). And what, more crucially from Shipp's perspective, is
the real hardcore essence of free jazz? The problem with this latter
(and surely one of its strengths and most treasured values) is that
the words "free jazz", unlike "bebop" or "swing" or even "jazz rock"
do not describe one musicologically coherent and classifiable idiom,
but a multitude thereof. There is a world of difference between the
tightly organised composition of Cecil Taylor's "Unit Structures"
and the ecstatic blow-out of Arthur Doyle's "Alabama Feeling", between
Coltrane's "Olatunji Concert" and Anthony Braxton's "3 Compositions
of New Jazz", between the pastoral composure of Marion Brown's "Afternoon
of a Georgia Faun" and Art Ensemble's "Urban Bushmen". Shipp is, of
course, correct when he acknowledges that others have combined jazz
and hip-hop: want to hear a superb piano solo in a rap context? Try
"Driveby Miss Daisy" by Compton's Most Wanted. Elegant recontextualising
of Ellington samples? Try "Destination: Bakiff" on Jon Hassell's criminally
neglected "Dressing for Pleasure". Intelligent and virtuoso rapping
over complex funk metres? Steve Coleman's "The Way of the Cipher".
None of these albums are all that recent, which would seem to indicate
either that the objective of fusing jazz and hip-hop has already been
realised and the results deserve to be put on pedestals (and I'm not
prepared to accept that), or that there remains work to be done. There
is much to admire on "Antipop vs. Matthew Shipp", but the abiding
impression is of a series of sketches for something that might one
day become a finished painting. To return to the above hypothesis
of Shipp's being torn between two contrasting aesthetics, groove and
freebop, regularly cycling harmonic changes and melodically determined
structures, the street of "Nu-Bop" and the sky of "New Orbit", it
should be clear from the above which direction I believe he should
be going in - as the man said, "Space is the Place".
Darin
Gray
ST. LOUIS SHUFFLE
Family Vineyard FV17
by Dan Warburton
This splendidly rugged solo bass album is a distant cousin to Mike
Bullock's acoustic (well, sort of) bass outing "Initial" (on his Chloë
label), in that both manage to transport their instruments so far
away from their traditional habitats as to render them almost unrecognisable,
and thereby fresh and challenging. However, whereas Bullock's music
emerges gradually from background chatter in the genteel surroundings
of an art gallery, Gray's vicious monster has to be confined to the
relative safety of a home studio. For those out there who think solo
bass means Jaco playing "Portrait of Tracy", think again. That said,
if their titles are anything to go by, many of these nineteen brief
tracks would appear to be portraits. But if they are, they're portraits
Francis Bacon style, with garish colours, exposed twisted grins and
enough teeth to do a shark proud. "T.S. Eliot" starts out as lugubrious
and dismal as the writer became in real life, though there would seem
to be little biographical event in his life to correspond to the burglar
alarm maelstrom that explodes halfway through Gray's track. The bassist
sometimes favours long bowed sonorities, sometimes basks in the dark
reverberant gloom of low-end feedback ("Kate Chopin") but more often
than not goes for all out attack - and yet the silence he inserts
between his ecstatic splinters is just as electric as the noises themselves.
As a former Brise-Glace sparring partner of Jim O'Rourke and Kevin
Drumm, and frequent collaborator with Loren Connors, it's clear Gray
didn't pick up his phenomenal technique from playing along with Stanley
Clarke. Imagine a cross between Taku Sugimoto and Black Woman-era
Sonny Sharrock. Impossible you say? Well, check it out. Solo electric
bass albums are few and far between, and they rarely come as good
as this.
OgreOgress
John Cage
THREE2 / TWENTY-THREE / SIX / TWENTY-SIX
OgreOgress UPC 643157094623
John Cage ONEviolin
OgreOgress UPC 643157094425
John Cage FOUR4
OgreOgress UPC 643157094524
Morton Feldman VIOLIN AND STRING QUARTET
OgreOgress UPC 643157069027
Maria de Alvear FUERZAS
OgreOgress UPC 643157112921
by Dan Warburton
"It was part I thought of a movement in composition away from structure
into process, away from an object having parts into what you might
call weather," John Cage wrote of his later music in the 1988 mesostic
"Composition in Retrospect". A casual glance at the enormous Cage
discography reveals numerous recordings of the so-called "number"
pieces, which might give the impression they're in some way "easier"
(to execute) than some of his monumental earlier scores. However,
there's nothing more complex than weather, and truly great performances
of these at times austere pieces are thin on the ground. These releases
on the OgreOgress imprint provide ample proof that violinist / violist
Christina Fong and percussionist Glenn Freeman have succeeded where
several have failed in rising to the works' aesthetic challenges.
"Three2", originally written for Michael Pugliese
in 1991, doesn't specify instrumentation; Freeman's choice of long-resonance
metal instruments (mark tree, suspended cymbal, flexatone..) lends
the piece an eerie, frosty sheen. "Twenty-Three" dates from 1988,
and is scored for thirteen violins, five violas and five celli - hats
off to Fong for patiently multi-tracking eighteen parts (and to cellist
Karen Krummel for taking care of the remaining five) - whose sustained
vibratoless tones combine to producing a glistening microtonal icon
not unlike the earlier works of Horatiu Radulescu. "Six" (1991), only
previously available (in two different takes) on the much-trumpeted
Sonic Youth double "Goodbye 20th Century", finds Freeman's percussion
adrift on an ice floe in a three-minute Arctic thunderstorm, chilling
out with sleigh bells, bowed gongs and cymbals and ghostly rumbles.
One small gripe: a few more seconds' breathing space would have been
nice before Fong returns to the attack with "Twenty-Six", for no less
than twenty-six violins and lasting, yes, twenty-six minutes. Attack,
in fact, is absolutely the wrong word to use to describe how these
exquisite washes of sound appear; one wonders if Cage, great student
of Zen that he was, had the sound of the Japanese sho (mouth organ)
in mind.
"Oneviolin" finds Fong negotiating the physically
exhausting long tones of 1990's "One6" with
patience and rigour. Patience is what's required for the listener
too: the work was originally designed to accompany tiny pebbles falling
off a melting ice sculpture by Mineko Grimmer, and it's a shame Fong
couldn't have incorporated that added element of quiet danger in her
version. For convenience's sake the forty-six minute work is indexed
as three tracks, though exactly why a listener might want to skip
forward through this music is unclear (it's a bit like deciding to
run a marathon and then accepting someone's offer to give you a lift
halfway to the finishing line). "One10", one
of Cage's very last works, is, if anything, even more austere: the
violinist is called upon to play only natural harmonics. Every tiny
nuance of the sound as the bow passes across the strings is laid bare,
every miniscule and inevitable fluctuation of pitch exposed as bow
direction is changed. Take it from a violinist, this stuff is not
easy to pull off. The word is naked, which might explain the
elegant photography of Fong on the album cover (though what Cage would
have made of it is perhaps another question).
"Four4" was written for the four-man Amadinda
Percussion Group from Hungary (who released their version of the piece
on Hungaroton in 2000), and its four parts contain respectively 22,
16, 10 and 15 time-brackets each. Instrumentation is not specified
but numbered - the performer can choose which instrument a given number
represents - and Freeman has once more opted for sustained sounds,
not only the obvious gongs and cymbals but also rolled drums and rattles.
It's beautifully done, but you need time and concentration to get
the most out of it.
With the world-premiere recording of Morton Feldman's 1985 "Violin
and String Quartet", featuring Fong and the Rangzen Quartet, all of
the composer's monumental late (post 1981) works are now available
on disc for those with the time - and budget - available to appreciate
them. Each of these pieces has its own special colour (to borrow an
analogy from the world of painting he loved so much) deriving from
a kernel of harmonic material; in "Violin and String Quartet" the
whole tone (and its inversion, the minor seventh), particularly pitches
A and G, is the work's central motive, and the harmonic language is
accordingly less chromatic than in other late Feldman works (though
it should be said words such as "diatonic" and "chromatic" are pretty
useless as adjectives to describe harmony that is effectively both).
Compared to the beautiful but rather frosty readings of Feldman's
string pieces by the Ives Ensemble on hat[now]Art, Fong's discreet
but wistful vibrato and occasional use of portamento imbues the music
with a twinge of Romanticism that might not appeal to some po-faced
purists, but it serves both to differentiate Fong's playing from the
other two violinists and to underline the warmth and humanity of the
composer's work (both all too often overlooked). The rich soundscapes
of "Violin and String Quartet" are welcome proof that truly top-notch
performances of American experimental music do not have to be dry
and ascetic to succeed fully.
With typical razzle, the Village Voice's Kyle Gann describes Spanish-born
Maria de Alvear as "the most original young composer in Europe" (quite
a claim, and one we could happily discuss over several pages). "Fuerzas"
is a sixty-six minute span of unbroken melody written in 1994 (the
composer's stated interest in automatic writing leads one to suppose
that the notation of the work's eternally flowing homophony was improvised,
as it were), exquisitely performed by Fong on viola. De Alvear's quest
for shamanistic and the spiritual imparts a timeless quality to this
music that is beautifully enhanced by the warm and resonant acoustic
of the Basilica of Saint Adalbert (Grand Rapids, MI) in which it was
recorded. Deceptively simple but utterly haunting.
Anthony
Braxton
TRIO & DUET
Sackville SKCD2-3007
by Dan Warburton
The welcome reissue of another page in the Sackville back catalogue
- between 1974 and 1980 Bill Smith's label curated key releases by
Don Pullen, George Lewis, Roscoe Mitchell, Julius Hemphill and Anthony
Davis - features two distinct sides (literally so on the original
vinyl) of Anthony Braxton's groundbreaking work. "Composition 36",
on which he teams up (on clarinets) with Leo Smith's trumpets and
Richard Teitelbaum's Moog (all three also double on percussion) is
an intricate and elegiac exploration of timbre, acoustic and electronic,
that sounds as fresh and surprising today as it must have back in
1974. While this fabulous piece extends the jazz / improvised music
tradition by stretching it into the leftfield towards contemporary
classical, the original B side showcases Braxton's other attitude
to tradition, namely the pleasure of jumping right back in there and
pulling everything to pieces from the inside. Partnered by Dave Holland
(outstanding as ever), Braxton - on alto alone - takes apart "The
Song Is You", "Embraceable You" and "You Go To My Head" with exemplary
precision. His phrasing cuts beautifully across conventional barlines
and subsections as delineated by the form of the standard (Stuart
Broomer is right to compare these duets to Eric Dolphy's work with
Richard Davis) and Holland is with him every step of the way. A joy.
Grand
Mal
PERFECT FIT
Unsounds 03
by Dan Warburton
Grand Mal is a three-piece electronic improv trio consisting of
British-born percussionist, sound designer, sculptor and educator
Justin Bennett, Anne Wellmer on keyboards, drum machine and Powerbook,
and vocalist Stephie Büttrich, and the sixteen tracks of "Perfect
Fit" (ranging in duration from 1'33" to 6'52") form an accessible
and thought-provoking introduction to the diversity of their work.
Büttrich's multi-lingual texts range from strangled sound poetry ("Moeilijke
bijeenkomst") to breathy and beautiful jazz (a wonderful cover of
Charles Mingus' "Eclipse"), sometimes in the same song ("Peel me a
grape"). "C" (excuse my computer's inability to reproduce the encircled
"c" indicating "copyright") finds her reading extracts of copyright
law over a gradually assembling triple time techno beat, while on
"Schat" she sounds like a bizarre Dutch hybrid of an angry tomcat
and Donald Duck. On "707" her standard airhostess safety routine speech,
becoming progressively more feral and insane - imagine Laurie Anderson
morphing into Shelley Hirsch - will have you running for the emergency
exits. Not surprisingly, Wellmer and Bennett's percussion runs the
stylistic gamut from the abstract to the tribal, and the electronics
they lay down point all over the new music map from Bennink splatter
drumming to Erstwhile-style electronica, tablas, zithers and ARP synthesizers
combining to produce intriguing and highly enjoyable music. "Perfect
Fit" is a fine and superbly recorded album that richly repays repeated
listening, but if you organise your record collection along the same
lines as I do (distinct sections for jazz/improv, rock/electronica
and contemporary classical), you're going to have a hard time deciding
which shelf to put it on. Get a copy now and worry about that later.
Jason
Bivins / Ian Davis
BENTHIC
Family Vineyard FV20
by Dan Warburton
In the never-ending quest to "make it new", musicians who play instruments
with a long and varied tradition of performance practice are often
forced to choose between referencing that tradition (and accepting
the inevitable comparisons with past masters) or trying to go beyond
it into the uncharted waters of "extended technique". For a drummer,
that means coming to terms with the best part of a century of jazz
and thirty-odd years of improvised music, while an electric guitarist
has the awesome back catalogue of rock to contend with, not to mention
a whole string of innovative improvised guitar albums by the likes
of Alan Licht, Rafael Toral, Hans Tammen and Kevin Drumm (to name
but a few). But why choose when you can have both? Percussionist Ian
Davis, whose Micro-East Collective has produced some of the most varied
and wide-ranging ensemble improvisations to have come out of the US
in the past decade, is equally at home playing tight cellular structures
(the opening "Diving Bell" is a case in point) as he is working with
unorthodox playing techniques, and Jason Bivins (who also plays with
Micro-East) makes no deliberate attempt to avoid the electric guitar's
rock ancestry, but instead incorporates it effortlessly into the broader
context of his work. Curiously enough, Bivins' meaty power chords
and Davis' attention to polyrhythmic detail recall Tony Williams'
Lifetime on a number of occasions (minus organist Larry Young, of
course, if that's possible), as well as their later incarnation as
Arcana (with, you'll recall, Derek Bailey ousting John McLaughlin
and Bill Laswell replacing Young for added weight). At times these
guys build up such a head of steam you wish they could be joined by
both Laswell and Young. Elsewhere, on "Cold Seep" for instance,
Bivins makes exciting use of additional electronics, while Davis concentrates
on bowed and scraped sonorities - friction, rather than percussion
- but the fact that at the opening of "Bathysphere" bows are once
more to the fore doesn't stop Bivins from unleashing some tasty blues
licks later in the piece. Davis propels him forward with some agile
stick work that owes as much to Ed Blackwell as it does to muscular
free players such as Michael Zerang and Mark Sanders. All in all,
it's a rich and rewarding journey into the past, present and future
of guitar and drums, and another fine vintage from the cellars of
Bloomington Indiana's Family Vineyard.
GAP
- Gruppo delle Azioni Progressive
GAP
PLAYS THE MOST REQUESTED SONGS
Anubis ACD 029
by Dan Warburton
This is not, alas, the long-awaited move into experimental music
by the international clothing manufacturer (though I wish they'd sponsor
some of the shit): "GAP" stands for Gruppo Delle Azioni Progressive
and is a scorching Croatian free jazz outfit founded by reedmen Luka
Peršic and Jerko Valdevit in 1996 (joined here by cellist Jasen Chelfi,
bassist Dejan Potkonjak and drummer Borna Šercar), who've been busy
drumming up interest in improvised music in Croatia ever since - in
recent years their concert series has invited musicians as diverse
as John Butcher, Phil Durrant, Anthony Coleman, Joe Morris and Charles
Gayle, who insisted on sitting in with GAP on a visit last year. Morris
paid the group a fine compliment when he wrote: "The present generation
of saxophone players is mostly screaming at each other, whereas your
language is different: it has dialogue, polyphony and structure [..]
rarely heard [these days]". As you might expect, the music on this
album reflects a whole range of influences: raging free jazz ("Albert
is Back" - though he never went away), elegant Downtown-inflected
braziliana ("Sambo do Algiers", indeed!), plaintive Third Stream chorales
("Hrvatska Balada", "59"), plus a couple of traditional tunes craftily
arranged by Peršic and Valdevit. Chelfi's cello taps into the rich
vein of folk-inflected jazz left unmined since the death of Tom Cora,
and Valdevit's continuing interest in contemporary composition imbues
his works with a keen awareness of form and structure often lacking
in the multi-directional free-for-all that improvised music has become
in recent times. Having said that, John Butcher's passage through
Croatia three years back left Peršic with a taste for extended sax
techniques that he explores to the full on "La Notte Chiara 2", and
the twenty-five minute tour de force of "Duo 3B" explores nothing
less than the whole world of improv, from the multi-instrumentalism
of the AACM to the wacky toy piano funhouse of Alterations. There
must be some damn fine record shops in Croatia - albums as rich as
this make you want to go and check the place out.
Noël
Akchoté
PERPETUAL JOSEPH
Rectangle Rec AL2
by Dan Warburton
Four years after it kicked off with "Alike Joseph" (and two years
since the appearance of "Simple Joseph"), "Perpetual Joseph" marks
the end of guitarist Noël Akchoté's solo trilogy - trinity, according
to the press release, which mixes straight-talking fact, poetic extremism
and delicious downright pretentiousness in a way only Akchoté knows
how. Once more the venerable instrument is laid on the ground, with
Akchoté hovering over it like a reluctant surgeon (no lighter fluid,
please, this is 2003), conjuring forth slow, drifting clouds of irresistibly
beautiful feedback. We've moved on a bit from the grainy scuzz of
"Alike.." and the gentle schizophrenia of "Simple..", where the guitarist
seemed torn between playing Sachiko M or David G, to a world of ineffable
bliss where pure black hearts float gently across a snowy white field.
Akchoté once said he was interested in the concept of the disposable
record - use once and throw away - I'm hanging on to my copy of this
one, Noël.
Hecker
SUN PANDÄMONIUM
Mego 044
by Dan Warburton
After Kevin Drumm's awesome "Sheer Hellish Miasma", here's "Sun
Pandämonium" - seems the good people at Mego HQ are well-prepared
for the apocalypse and have decided on a pre-emptive strike themselves
- the cornerstone of Florian Hecker's album, "Stocha Acid Zlook" (21'22"
- over half the total album length) is right up (down?) there with
Drumm's "Inferno", starting out innocently enough but soon metamorphosing
into a seething, swirling volcanic mass of glissandi that Iannis Xenakis
would have been proud of. If Hecker had been invited to take part
in Asphodel's recent shoddy "Persepolis" remix project, he'd have
made a better job of it than the other "stars". On the recent magnificent
10CD box "Improvised Music From Japan", Yasuhiro Otani contributes
a piece for no less than fifty iMacs (!), but Hecker can blow him
away with just one.. After this central track, the remaining pieces
(the longest of which clocks in at a mere four minutes) inevitably
come across as afterthoughts, but are nonetheless fascinating and
accomplished glimpses at what the future of electronic music might
hold. You'll also be glad to hear that the album comes with a twelve-page
glossy olive-green booklet with absolutely nothing at all in it, so
you can amuse yourself making paper planes to throw at your neighbours
while you blast them to Baghdad with "Stocha Acid Zlook". Rock'n'roll
to go!
Evan
Parker's Electro-Acoustic Ensemble
TOWARD THE MARGINS
ECM 1612
DRAWN INWARD
ECM 1693
by Walter Horn
On both of these absorbing albums, the brilliant British saxophonist
Evan Parker, is joined by violinist/violist Philipp Wachsmann, bassist
Barry Guy, percussionist Paul Lytton, and the real-time electronic
metamorphosis and regurgitation of the sounds made by these gentlemen.
The electrical alchemists here are, along with Wachsmann, Walter Prati,
Marco Vecchi, and (on "Drawn Inward" only) Lawrence Casserly. Real-time
electronic manipulation of acoustic sounds is not exactly new (think
of Laurie Anderson's voice, George Lewis' "computerized duets", and
Boulez's phantom orchestra in "Repons"), but it is advancing in sophistication
at about the same speed as computer chess programs and children's
scooters. On these two disks (released, respectively, in 1997 and
1999), the results are, generally, lush and satisfying. It is noteworthy
that the earlier, and in my opinion, better, recording, "Toward the
Margins", provides more examples of what sound like carefully designed
ensemble pieces. There are not only fewer concerto-like pieces on
that disk, there is also nothing with the off-putting sound of an
early Davidovsky or Luening tape piece. About half of "Drawn Inward"
is very beautiful, but it suffers from the fact that where there is
no "out front" player there are dry spells. These weak patches are
usually pleasant enough, but they aren't memorable. It is only on
the deeply mysterious "Phloy in the Frame" that one finds a stirring
example of what might be called a "democratic vision" on "Drawn Inward".
With Parker's softly wheezing khene, it's like a night in a Louisiana
swamp: all that's left of the former Cajun residents is that ghostly
labored breathing. The other disk highlights have clear leaders: Wachsmann's
lovely plainsong on "Serpent in the Sky" and his romantic flourishes
on the title tune; Parker's patented circular chirpadoodledoo on "Collect
Calls", and "At Home in the Universe"; and Guy's lovely take on a
Gibbons/Dowland consort on "Reanascreena". The soloistic aspects give
"Drawn Inward" recording a slightly more traditional, if never "jazzy"
feel. In fact, during "At Home in the Universe" there is even something
like a patch of trading fours and twos (Parker takes the fours and
the electronics get the twos). In contrast, on "Toward the Margins",
there is usually no obvious leader and absolutely everything
is consummately beautiful. It may be that the newness of the technology
had worn off in the two years between the release of these disks,
so that it became easier to produce relatively nice stuff on automatic
pilot. Or it may have been that an intense melancholy had settled
over this talented group during the recording of "Toward the Margins":
so many of the pieces on it are not only haunting, but extremely sad.
There seems no equivalent over-arching emotion connected with "Drawn
Inward". Only on "Reanascreena" and "Serpent in the Sky" does one
senses the same sort of georgeous all-consuming pain that infects
all of "Toward the Margins". On other cuts from the later release
there is more of a meandering electro-acoustic ambience found on so
many recordings since Mr. Wuorinen won his Pulitzer. In addition,
the variety of warm (i.e. not Luening-style) sonorities is broader
on the "Toward the Margins". To give just one example, Parker's gong
on "Field and Figure" seems transformed into something like a baritone
horn. Finally, the earlier release comes with an extremely well-written
and informative 24-page booklet by producer Steve Lake on many of
the facets of the musical avant-garde in the latter third of the 1900s.
Both disks are shot through with enveloping niceties, but while about
half of "Drawn Inward" doesn't reach much beyond pleasant washes and
plonks, because of its consistent quality and delicate, plaintive
beauty, "Toward the Margins" seems to me one of the most important
documents of electro-acoustic music of the last decade.
Copyright 2003 by Paris Transatlantic
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