As of this writing, reedist Peter Brötzmann has almost
wrapped up his forty-eighth year of recording – a feat by no means
insignificant, given that a fair number of artists haven’t survived on this
planet as long as this statesman of German free music has been making records.
Brötzmann tends to split the difference between maintaining working units (as
much as he’s able in today’s fractured landscape) and building up new
partnerships, and while he’s held together small orchestras and mid-sized
groups for surprisingly long stretches, it is perhaps the duo in which one can
hear him work his craft in the most naked way possible.
Brötzmann founded BRÖ in 1967 to release his first record,
The
Peter Brötzmann Trio (later reissued as For
Adolphe Sax by FMP), in a small edition as
no German record company was interested in issuing his music. He followed up
the trio LP with the watershed octet date Machine Gun in 1968 before co-founding FMP in 1970. In 2003,
with the assistance of Eremite Records founder Michael Ehlers, BRÖ was
relaunched as a platform to issue limited-edition new recordings of Brötzmann’s
music, exclusively focusing on duets with percussionists. Like the original BRÖ
LPs, each edition also features a silkscreened jacket, albeit now pulled by
Alan Sherry. Mollie’s in the Mood,
the third in the LP series (there is also a run of six handsome CDs, none of
which duplicate the music on vinyl) joins the reedist with vibraphonist Jason
Adasiewicz, a striking young member of Chicago’s improvising scene, for three
improvisations. Adasiewicz started out as a drummer and brings a naturally
percussive, rather than purely melodic or pianistic approach, to the
instrument. Though his attacks are often chordal, they are jaggedly driving and
provide oblique tonal bedrock for Brötzmann’s garish, bluesy flights. The LP’s
midpoint, “’Round the Sun” finds Adasiewicz using long, bowed and reverberant
tones and tessellations of micro-patter in contrast to thick tenor
coruscations, and there’s ample space throughout for Brötzmann to slowly dig in
and play around with age-old themes.
Brötzmann and Swedish drummer Peter Uuskyla, a veteran of
saxophonist Bengt Nordstrom’s groups, first recorded together in 2001
with bassist Peter Friis Nielsen, and have since met numerous times in trio and
duo settings. The latest is this 2LP set on the young Swedish label Omlott,
which has also released Uuskyla’s solo music as well as reissuing part of their
previous duo disc, Born Broke, as a
single LP titled Dead and Useless.
Uuskyla is an incredibly limber drummer, economical and swinging in constant
funky inversions that ratchet the saxophonist towards a jittery stratosphere.
That’s not to say that Uuskyla can’t embrace the calm, metallic ache that
pervades Brötzmann’s music, matching bitter pathos with brushy piles and
accented silence. On the second movement of the title piece, unaccompanied tenor – the theme for Fred Hopkins
that Brötzmann often references – appears midway through, before Uuskyla
answers with darting rollicks. It’s a plaintive respite amid sheer, rolling,
grooving sound. Brötzmann’s largesse is given a thick, expertly carved pathway here,
and though he’s found numerous long-term drummer partners over the decades,
each bringing something different to the whole, this particular pairing is one
that I find extremely rewarding.
CACTUS TRUCK
Seizures Palace
When I saw Cactus Truck on their first US tour at a stop in
the now-departed Brooklyn venue Zebulon, their set was brief – about fifteen or
twenty minutes – and full of high-octane shred. Their debut record was about
the same length and by the time one got a chance to appreciate their meld of
post-Ayler preachy skronk and loose-string, gritty punk, the salvo was over.
The trio features Amsterdam-based American saxophonist John Dikeman, drummer
Onno Govaert and guitarist-bassist Jasper Stadhouders (Made to Break), and
seemed to have learned much from the less-is-more school of putting together a
punk record. But their latest, Seizures Palace (captured live at the Brooklyn venue of the same name) throws out
hardcore brevity in favor of a more typical forty-five minute disc, divided
into nine sections. In a way that’s perfectly reasonable – improvisations
should be able to hold for a length of time, and all three musicians can
maintain lines, interplay, and interest – and a longer disc allows them to
stretch out into tension-holding vignettes of fuzzed strumming (Stadhouders on
“Fetzer”) and unholy saxophone gales fed by Govaert’s twirling caterwaul. That
said, a part of me still wished for doling out the goods in bite-sized chunks –
say, a seven-inch EP with the shimmying rage of “Fourth Wind” backed by the elegiac
cries of “One for Roy.” But that’s not the band’s problem, and going by the
example of Seizures Palace, they
remain firmly ensconced as one of the tougher power trios active in current free
music.
EHRAN ELISHA ENSEMBLE
Continue
A graduate of Bennington College and student of Bill Dixon
and Milford Graves who has worked with trumpeter Roy Campbell, Jr., bassist
Wilber Morris and trombonist Bill Lowe, drummer Ehran Elisha’s most recent
collective offering joins him with his pianist father Haim, bassist Ken
Filiano, and regular partners saxophonist David Bindman and violinist Sam Bardfeld
on a program of eight compositions. The suite “Continue” is a full-band work,
while “Kiryat Moshe” and “Subway Sundays” are piano-drum duets, “Revadim” is a
piano solo, and the disc closer “Boui’s Elegy” is a percussion solo. While
undeniably “free music,” the title of Continue is apt, for these five musicians work within a parallel tradition. If
modern jazz drumming is derived from various combinations of Max, Roy, Blakey
and Kenny Clarke, free jazz percussion might be said to come from Graves, Sunny
Murray, Andrew Cyrille and Ed Blackwell. In this fashion Elisha shows himself
to be a student of Graves and Blackwell, with a bit of Cyrille’s lush economy
added on for good measure.
The title suite fills approximately 45 minutes over four
parts, hinging on constantly inventive, robust percussion belted to
supple, rhapsodic piano dissonance and Filiano’s tough, keening arco and
unflappable time. Haim Elisha approaches the keyboard with delicate, insistent
poise; like Matthew Shipp, his harmonies are transportative and complex, full
of bricked masses that evince a concentrated ripple outward, while Ehran adds
on shimmering waves in a field of interleaved tempi. Bardfeld and Bindman paint
in bitter, toothy swirls and dovetail in grainy, stretched commentary, though
the ensemble’s focus is primarily on the rhythm section’s lyric push-pull.
Ehran’s percussion is a consistent multidirectional rumble, heard to advantage
in a lengthy solo on the third movement of “Continue” and “Boui’s Elegy,” which
shifts from conversational song craft and taut refrains to dry tonal
explorations and choral studies across a six-minute span. Harmonically and
rhythmically powerful, Continue offers a
fascinating and beautifully crafted slice of modern improvised music – yet one
that isn’t without roots in song.
LUTHER GRAY TRIO
Drums and Horns, Horns and Drums
(
Skycap)
LUTHER GRAY
Lawnmower II
(
Clean Feed)
Perhaps less visible in New York than he could be, Boston
drummer Luther Gray has been a stalwart figure on that city’s improvisation
scene since the outset of the Millennium, working regularly with
guitarist/bassist Joe Morris, pianist Steve Lantner, saxophonists Jim Hobbs and
Allan Chase and others. Initially heard as a rock drummer in the catchy din of
Jenny Toomey’s DC-based Tsunami, Gray’s study of jazz and African musics has made him a
rhythmic powerhouse of subtle complexity, almost Blackwellian in his level of
unassuming invention.
Drums and Horns, Horns and Drums places Gray in a trio with Chase and Hobbs on a
program of seven tunes – including Toomey’s “Fall On Me” and an opening cover
of Bad Brains’ “We Will Not” that in its madcap bray approaches some of The
Thing’s punk covers. On the
title track, Chase’s soprano is a bent whirl atop Gray’s locked fluidity,
ululating chants and declamations that contrast beautifully with Hobbs’
low-key, dryly popping alto, leading into a stripped-down and slinky chorus
from the leader. “Sequential Failure” finds the trio in measured breaths, Gray
sticking mostly to glockenspiel and brushes and lending the proceedings a
sparse, coiled energy reminiscent of the Creative Construction Company. Gray,
Chase and Hobbs are resourceful musicians – in the words of Joe Morris, Chase
can “play anything” and that certainly applies to all three artists on this
disc, who move through a range of textures, emotions and ideas within a fairly
narrow instrumental palette.
Lawnmower’s first incarnation was with the guitars of Geoff
Farina (Karate) and Dan Littleton (Ida) in addition to Gray and Hobbs. Here the
quartet is adjusted to include bassist Winston Braman and violinist Kaethe
Hostetter on a program of collectively composed originals. Both violin and bass
are amplified – the violin is a five-stringer – and each musician lends both
discursiveness and a soaring, warm cast to the ensemble, Hostetter bent and a
half-step below the normal violin range to meet Hobbs’ dry curl, and Braman’s
concentrated parallel plod and syrupy noodle an interesting foil for Gray’s
steady, loose roll and delicate timekeeping. Among these parallels there is a
nod to folk music – it’s hard not to think of Appalachian string music in some
of Hostetter’s phrasing – and, with pedals and reverb applied, a bare-bones
pyschedelic drift on “Space Goat.” An ensemble that can meet with open
curiosity in a variety of forms, from harrier-themed density to a hymnal lull,
Lawnmower practices a rare genre-free empathy among modern improvised ensembles.
HENRY GRIMES
The Tone of Wonder
(
Uncool Edition)
By now, the departure and return of Henry Grimes is in
itself the stuff of legend, to say nothing of his status as one of the most
consistently powerful bassists of the 1960s. He got his start in the 1950s and
made a number of fine appearances with saxophonists Sonny Rollins, (Rahsaan)
Roland Kirk, and Tony Scott before diving headlong into free music where his
impeccable time often kept otherwise loose playing situations in motion. All of
his current activities are within the latter realm, far from the nascent
inside-outside approach that he once occupied and well apart from the
structuralist aims of many contemporary improvisers. One might call Grimes an
‘outsider’ in today’s climate, and the two solo bass and violin improvisations
that make up The Tone of Wonder
certainly encourage such a notion.
“Cyclic Passions” is the forty-minute opener and is worth
the price of admission alone; as a solo (and as a soloist), this music doesn’t
operate as others of its ilk – it’s not a solo symphony (think Journal
Violone), nor is it a run through of
various approaches to string instrumentalism and their attendant devices or
tricks. Grimes plays and plays, motoring in constant, unflappable expression,
whether utilizing a gritty arco – one can almost feel the grains of dried rosin
against the strings – or a spry, pizzicato rumble, occasionally switching to
sawing and scrabbling on the violin. That unflappability is something that
always marked his playing, a dry relentlessness that, in or outside of time,
was probably one reason he was called on to make so many sessions in the
halcyon days of New York avant-garde music. It can be difficult to sustain long
solo flights without a predetermined direction and both pieces on The
Tone of Wonder do fill the plate to
capacity, but there’s a poetic beauty in the colorful, isolated concentration
of hearing Grimes churn away, lost in music and creating a singular string
environment.
BOBBY KAPP
Themes for Transmutation
Drummer Bobby Kapp seemed to disappear after the close of
the ‘60s; during that decade he worked extensively with saxophonists Marion Brown, Noah
Howard and Gato Barbieri. His traipses across the world of improvised music
took him to Mexico and into nightclub singing and gigs with Dexter Gordon,
before returning to the world of free music in 1999 on a program of duets with
Howard (Between Two Eternities, Cadence
Jazz Records) that seemed to pick up right where they left off thirty years
earlier. While leading the Fine Wine Trio (with bassist Gene Perla
and pianist Richard Wyands) and reuniting with other denizens of the 1960s
vanguard, Kapp’s ability to lead a band of free players on a recording has
been absent from discographies, but that has been given a welcome change by
this document of four improvisations joining him with pianist Matthew Shipp,
reedist Ras Moshe and bassist Tyler Mitchell.
Kapp doesn’t necessarily approach
the date as the sole focal point – indeed, throughout his recorded legacy, his
tasteful and inventive drumming has been a carpet for others to ride, and this
is certainly true here, using mallets and brushes to spread out time alongside
bowed bass and refractive piano shapes alongside Moshe’s buzzing birdsong on
“Romance into Love.” Moshe is a player who has internalized a ton of music as a
listener and historian, yet engages his axes (tenor, soprano and flute)
beholden not to any one school – fleet and caressing at one moment, violent and
hackle-raising at the next, but building and stoking his lines with continuity
and intelligence. The album’s third piece, “Mystery into Awe,” is a prime
example. Shipp, while certainly well known as a leader-composer in his own
right, plays to the egalitarian nature of this disc and his motion acts to
support and feed the quartet. As a drummer, Kapp should be reinvestigated in terms of his contribution to the history of the music, and hopefully that will start with perhaps the first of numerous contemporary and future
appearances as a cooperative bandleader.
STEVE LACY
School Days
As I remember it, one of the first revelatory experiences I
had in listening to jazz was the understanding that a lot of music really
happens between the notes. Certainly that’s nothing Artur Schnabel hadn’t
already encountered, but as a late teenager this concept was new to me. I
recall having a conversation with a friend where the music of Monk, Braxton
(Creative Construction Company-era), and Eric Dolphy’s Out To Lunch (Blue Note, 1964 – specifically “Hat and Beard,” dedicated
to and inspired by Monk) presented itself as exemplars of the dynamic between
sound and space. Such a revelation seems now to be rather quaint, especially as
the musician-composers in question have so much more to their art than this
dialectical tension. Dutch pianist Misha Mengelberg mentioned to me a
few years ago “Monk was the architect, yes, but Herbie Nichols was… a
painter!” Nichols, a Mengelberg favorite,
was bebop’s storyteller, an evocative imagist, garish and playful, whereas Monk
designed frames into which musicians could fill in (or not) an environment of
their own design. Monk’s tunes are difficult, and even when played “correctly”
most interpretations sound far from “right.” One has to live with a tune for
quite some time, even if (and perhaps especially if) it’s out of another
composer’s book.
Soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy knew Monk’s music
extraordinarily well; he also knew Nichols’ music, Bud Powell’s, Ellington’s,
Cecil Taylor’s, and later, Mengelberg’s. Originally a player of traditional
jazz, an encounter with Taylor led him in a route that skirted bop and went
straight into the jazz vanguard of the late ‘50s, playing in Village coffee
houses and lofts alongside people like tenor horn player Tom Stewart,
saxophonist Tina Brooks, clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre, pianist Mal Waldron, and in
Taylor’s groups. Lacy’s first LPs as a leader were waxed for the New Jazz imprint in 1958,
with either Waldron or Wynton Kelly on piano, before convening piano-less
groups with trumpeter Don Cherry and baritone saxophonist Charles Davis. Lacy
was active but relatively underground within an already underground, albeit teeming creative music scene – working in sideman gigs that went buried for decades, or slightly less obscure appearances with
Gil Evans, the Jazz Composers’ Guild Orchestra, and a short but vital term opposite
Charlie Rouse in Monk’s band.
If one was trying to pen a Lacy discography towards the
end of the ‘60s, it seemed like a pretty wild leap from “qualified” bebop
sessions to the free music that he released after relocating to Europe in 1966.
Even then, he was far from our idea of a blisteringly avant-garde player. In hindsight, the cognoscenti knew that Lacy had a band that used the
repertoire of several pianists – mostly Monk, but also Taylor, Nichols and
Ellington – as grounds for exploration. Famously, when later asked about such projects, Lacy’s response was that Monk “helped [him] find a way to get to the
other side,” where lived his own unique compositions and a
logical path towards freedom. He and his cohorts found their own ins and outs of the "high priest of bebop's" compositions, but with a level of interdependent action that seemed parallel to bop.
Lacy's quartet featured trombonist Roswell Rudd, a musician
who had also made the leap from traditional jazz to free music, and a variety
of rhythm sections, the most celebrated of which included bassist Henry Grimes
and drummer Denis Charles. They cut demos that were shopped around to Columbia
and other labels, but nobody bit. It wasn’t until 1975 that a live recording
from the Phase Two coffee shop in 1963 was released on LP by Emanem; by then
Lacy was celebrated rather than criminally obscure, but his cohorts had at the
time either retired from music or were less visible. The program consists of
seven Monk tunes played with unbridled openness – they’re not really “free
jazz” but the music is incredibly free, reveling in the possibilities of each
tune and taking risks, landing with both feet on the ground while tearing
through a knot-maker like “Brilliant Corners.” This CD reissue also adds two
live cuts that Lacy recorded with Monk in 1960 – bassist John Ore, drummer Roy
Haynes, and Rouse fleshing out the ensemble. This is the first issue of School
Days to present the music in proper order, with the first two tracks absent a late-running Grimes.
“Bye-Ya” finds soprano and trombone in garrulous dialogue
atop Charles’ dry, shimmying West Indian rhythmic counterpoint, and there’s an
absence of fat in this bass-less take that opens the disc, Rudd’s slush acting
as a slippery harmonic anchor for Lacy’s winnowing excavations as
they wheel and tumble in rhythmic dances. Despite the attention given to
Charles’ squeaky hi-hat, his pot-stirring crispness and skating tom attack are
reminiscent of Blakey in an Afro-Caribbean mode, and the fours traded between
horns and drums are straight out of Herbie Nichols. Naturally adding in Grimes’
robust harmonic resources would change things up significantly, and as he
enters on “Monk’s Dream,” the rhythm section sounds warm, thick and spry,
Charles’ shuffling bounce thwacking off Grimes’ scumbled motion. One could
write entire poems about the short, trilling phrases that Lacy builds off of
the tune, in folksy investigations and pirouettes that, birdlike, use the
melody and harmony as a feeder.
“Brilliant Corners” is tremendous, both hornmen sliding and
growling on the theme at a tough clip, and Rudd’s subsequent choruses are
astounding, brightly burred athletic flicks and passages of knotty, blue
tailgate and brushy swing. In 1963 figures like Curtis Fuller and Grachan
Moncur III might’ve received more ink, but the expressionistic and elegant Rudd was
clearly one of the most intriguing trombone soloists of his generation. Lacy’s
subsequent upper-register flights and jubilant, quacking curls are pearlescent
refractions held high yet maintaining forward motion. Grimes’ pizzicato is in full flower as he recapitulates Lacy’s phrases with a robust,
woody motor – something not always recognizable in his free playing. “Monk’s
Mood” is wistful and golden, trombone and soprano imbued with a glinting
processional quality, Rudd eking out fluttery cries and furrowed jabs as he
arcs across changes, nudging Lacy with shapely accents. The set closes with a
tear through “Skippy,” introduced as a duo for soprano and drums, quickly
adding bass and trombone as the quartet volleys through the tune’s chromatic
descent, vocal elisions biting as Rudd catches some earthy funk aside Lacy’s
painterly corkscrews.
The inclusion of “Evidence” and “Straight No Chaser” by the
short-lived Monk quintet is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, the
music appears a bit choppier than it does in the hands of Lacy and Rudd and the rhythms play out almost didactically. Monk’s keyboard approach is
vertical, spiky and tough, an entire orchestra that Lacy’s fingers, breath and
brain respond to with austere elegance, perhaps not as assured as Rouse’s
plentiful, vigorous conjurings, but by the time “Straight No Chaser” rolls
around, he opens up, bouncing off the tune with a charge that nearly upends the
rhythm section. While not as barnstorming as Rouse, Lacy is already gaining
command of his own language vis-à-vis Monk. It’s an interesting contrast and
also obvious that the saxophonist is being put through his paces, something that makes this Carnegie Hall performance quite special.
There’s a lot to say about the comparison between this
group and the quartet with Rudd, chiefly in terms of how the later unit
had so clearly taken Monk as a linguistic vantage point and run with it. While Monk’s tunes were the initial framework, the music that Lacy, Rudd,
Charles and Grimes put into that frame was uniquely their own – Monkish, but a
new music. The line between
School Days
and the mid-60s ensembles that Lacy fronted with trumpeter Enrico
Rava, for example, is not that difficult to draw, though the latter are more aggressively open. More importantly, perhaps, is
the idea that the line between bebop and free music is also logical and present. As Lacy wrote in the sleeve notes to The Gap (America-Musidisc, 1972) of
the intense flurry that is “La Motte-Picquet,” “[it] is a station on the Paris
metro, composed a year ago and dedicated to the memory of Sonny Clark, who
liked this kind of tune.”
DAUNIK LAZRO/BENJAMIN DUBOC/DIDIER LASSERRE
Sens Radiants
(
Dark Tree)
The French trio of baritone saxophonist Daunik Lazro,
bassist Benjamin Duboc and percussionist Didier Lasserre create a hell of a lot
of racket for three musicians whose palette is quite slim, and are able to
create an environment of unresolved tension across the single hour-long title
piece, recorded live. This trio has appeared once on disc before, also on the
Dark Tree label (2011’s Pourtant Les Cimes Des Arbres), although Sens Radients is particularly remarkable in terms of how the trio
applies its tiered intensity. Lassierre is a drummer of minimal means and uses a
single snare drum and an array of cymbals for his landscape of scrapes and wet
shimmer, applied in jittering, narrow waves that serve to agitate the bellows
and whines of baritone saxophone and contrabass. Smacking and scrubbing his
lone drum, augmented by reedy pops and subtonal, motoring growl, Lassierre
solidifies the relationship between action and tempo, a declaration that is
picked up and expanded upon by the trio’s other members in quick succession. If
one takes apart the group improvisation and examines each unaccompanied
passage, one will find that the sparse, isolated phraseology that each musician
utilizes is something that expands outward, carried in conversation towards a
greater whole – skeletal logics that give the music maximum heft, reaching
toward a controlled martial scream amid roomy triangulation. I can’t say I’ve
heard anything like this group before, and that’s saying something.
MATTHEW SHIPP TRIO
Root of Things
MATTHEW SHIPP
I’ve Been to Many Places
JOHN BUTCHER/MATTHEW SHIPP
At Oto
While a continually active force in creative music since
emerging from studies with Dennis Sandole and Ran Blake in the late 1980s, the
last few years have seen pianist Matthew Shipp seemingly in a different place
with his art. He’s been a leader or co-leader of small groups since 1988, but a
decade and a half working alongside saxophonist David S. Ware (1949-2012) put
him more firmly on the map. With the disbanding of that quartet, perhaps
something was unlocked with respect to the pianist’s music. The resolve and
steady conviction that appears in his current work truly places it in another
area of refinement that, perhaps, only appears with age and experience.
The principal working unit for Shipp’s music is the trio –
an equilateral setting that has long been the bedrock for pianists as diverse
in approach as Bill Evans and Cecil Taylor. Shipp’s recent contributions to the
format feature drummer Whit Dickey and bassist Michael Bisio; Root of
Things is this group’s third disc and first
for Relative Pitch. Whereas previous discs have included separate soli for each
member of the trio, Root of Things
builds introductory statements by Bisio, Dickey and Shipp into the final three
compositions – the bassist’s deft, meaty arco and supple, pizzicato chunks a
six-minute entrée into “Path,” the leader weaving through choppy molehills as
Dickey’s cymbal pulse outlines the ensemble. Dickey’s dry, shuffling swing
introduces “Pulse Code,” setting up a theme-and-variations/elaborations master
class before bass and piano chase one another through sectional spaces. “Solid
Circuit” closes with the gradual evocation of a theme, coming into view through
fragmentary references and harmonic inversions that signal a cellular anthem.
With the rhythm section eventually locked into a rolled-off drive, Shipp nags
at a kaleidoscopic center, surrounding with emphatic shards and lyric tracers.
And for those who counter that “free music” can’t/won’t swing, the tension
between broken rhythms and fixed-time segments on “Jazz It” offers more than
enough sinewy grooves, albeit running them through a prismatic minefield. Shipp
has been rather vocal in his criticism of certain pop-jazz and genre-blending
pianists, but the takeaway from this record is that improvised music offers
enough aesthetic information to provide the “avant-garde” and the “populists”
with whatever tools they need.
To Duke on the other
hand presents snatches of Ellingtonia interspersed with pieces of Shipp’s own
devising, a program of eleven tunes performed by the Bisio-Dickey trio in a
cohesive hour-long set. A magnanimous figure whose work is at the very fabric
of much postwar jazz yet who, like Monk, Bird, Coltrane and Powell, is more
often referenced or interpreted than understood, Ellington has long
been a central locus of Shipp’s vocabulary, the Strayhorn chestnut
“Take the A Train” being a particularly frequent visitor to the pianist’s sets.
Here, and following a Mingus-riffed bass solo on “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t
Good,” Shipp wryly returns in crystalline fragments to the “A Train” core, then
spiraling out into clattering stomps abetted by Dickey’s allover cymbal
filaments and Bisio’s woody tug, and while Shipp has very little Cecil Taylor
in his playing normally, Taylor-ian romance is in full bloom alongside the
drummer’s Sunny Murray-like dry, swinging impulsions. As open and multivalent
as Shipp’s own music is, it’s easy to dive headlong into the complexity of his
spiritual and physical path, forgetting how much the song plays into this work,
gooey and broken apart in “Mood Indigo” but still undeniably present. Even in
“Dickey Duke” (predominately a drum investigation) and “Tone Poem for Duke,”
there is a healthy dose of lyricism and familiar gems of harmonic progression
amid piano-string tweaks and rhythmic shuffle. An unaccompanied “Prelude to a
Kiss” is gorgeous, at first glance played with reverent exactitude, until one
notices the ringing forms leaved through the composer’s full, halting
rejoinders, occasionally rendered with strident, Monkish stomps. “Satin Doll”
is given a kaleidoscopic push-pull of saccharine and steely while Shipp’s own
“Sparks” is a rough-and-tumble contemporary analog to some of the tensions
heard on Money Jungle (1962).
Given to orchestral mass and sinewy microcosms, as a vehicle for Ellington,
Strayhorn, Bigard and Shipp this trio is an incomparable unit.
I’ve Been To Many Places is the latest solo disc on Thirsty Ear, following 2012’s Piano Sutras, and
offers a program of seventeen short renditions of originals and standards, all
of which draw from previous Shipp recordings and groups. It’s not really a
career summation since each interpretation is new, but there is a sense that
he’s revisiting themes that deserve attention and expansion. “Summertime” is
granted a ringing architecture, resonant clusters and pointillist variations on
the tune’s familiar gospel-influenced center both reverential and
expansive, with the last minute sculpted into quivering masses (for a real
surprise, check the version of the Roberta Flack/Donny Hathaway hit “Where is
the Love”). “Brain Stem Grammar” is a flinty jaunt through Monkish near-ragtime
which, splintered into voluminous chords and scumbled recapitulations,
nevertheless is at the core of both tune and invention. “Tenderly” – a favorite
of David S. Ware – is a halting abstraction, wrapped in a swirl of low-end
fields that might recall Ware’s glinting tenor pillows, while “Brain Shatter”
chases itself down harmonic rabbit holes while flexing its robust trunk and
ensuring that the trails’ actions continually relate to a main path. Most of
these short pieces would emerge over the course of several suites in a live
setting, as Shipp’s concerts tend to feature two or three long improvisations
that weave in familiar works – a crystalline “Naima,” the skating, sly
references to Bill Evans in “Waltz,” or the stark, dusky romanticism of a tune
like “Symbolic Access” might be compositional bulbs that work their way into
(or out of) a longer suite. Hearing them as isolated vignettes that are part of
a common, threaded whole is a rather different experience. The recording
quality is also superb, with the instrument and player’s physicality front and
center – it’s rare to really hear the wood and keys of a piano, especially
outside the realm of audiophile classical recordings, and here these elements
are in service of Shipp’s extraordinary compositions and interpretations.
At Oto presents three soli and one duo between Shipp and British saxophonist John Butcher, recorded
at the venerable London concert space in 2010 and issued on the Fataka
imprint. This was their first meeting, although such a collaboration shouldn’t
come as too much of a surprise, since Shipp has also worked in duet with
vanguard saxophonists Evan Parker, Roscoe Mitchell, Darius Jones and Rob Brown, all of whom
reshape the instrument’s vocabulary. Butcher isolates and extends approaches
hinted at by Parker, and his harmonic wellspring is a natural foil for Shipp’s
area of expertise. Of course the saxophone and piano are different instruments
and unearthing harmonic corners within their mechanics requires different
methods – facial muscles, breath and valves in one and the use of body, key
pressure and foot pedals on the other – but if the processes differ, their
execution grants striking parallels. Both Shipp and Butcher utilize relatively
unadorned statements to begin with, subtly altering their shape to allow entry
into a broad range of areas, manipulating narrower sounds to create complex
structure. One wouldn’t think that it’s possible to bend notes on the piano the
way that Butcher does on the soprano or create the same sort of breathy
resonance that the saxophonist does with the tenor, but Shipp is a different
sort of pianist. His solo “Fundamental Field” picks up where soprano leaves off
on “Mud/Hiss” and twists lithe progressions against fluttering right-hand stabs
and voluminous refrains. The duo, “Generative Grammar,” is nearly thirty
minutes in length and while offering comparative architecture, only begins
truly reveling in play midway through – jovially sparring in a wry match, or in comely
turnarounds that brush and ricochet. Hopefully this galvanizing partnership is
just getting off the ground.
TIPPLE
No Sugar on Anything
(
Circulasione Totale)
The first Tipple record was released on FMR as
Tipples in 2009 and credited to the members of the trio,
Norwegian reedist Frode Gjerstad, percussionist Kevin Norton, and guitarist
David Watson. Tipple seems to have stuck as a name and their latest, No
Sugar on Anything, presents nine relatively
short (under ten-minute) improvisations. Norton, who utilizes an array of
mallet instruments, gongs and drums, is a fixture in the Gjerstad-helmed
Circulasione Totale Orchestra, and his controlled, muscular rattle often
creates an exacting spar for the reedist’s warbles and brays. Watson, who like Norton is
based in the New York area, is originally from New Zealand and
through a language of glitches and purrs he acts as a muted referee and
buttresses pillowy abstraction against clangs and high-pitched cries. On
“Additives,” he approaches a low level of particulate scumble against bowed
metal and clarinet harmonics that sounds more like a tenor guitar, moving into
shoveled sludge that support alto brays and resonant, sectional gongs on the
following “Or Manipulated” (spelled out, the titles of the nine cuts read “No
sugar on anything and no additives or manipulated ingredients make you feel
alive and ready to play”). As balanced, active interplay, the music of Tipple
is certainly lively and worth repeated spins.
UNNATURAL WAYS
Unnatural Ways
(New Atlantis)
To say nothing of how long it can take for a record to get
reviewed (ahem), the presentation of an artist’s work on disc is a tough
gambit. Even in today’s climate of being able to put music up online for
hearing almost as soon as it’s recorded, not to mention the plethora of tapes
and CDs, many self-released, available to the intrepid consumer, it’s still
challenging just to get proper documentation of one’s work out there. By the
time guitarist-composer and vocalist Ava Mendoza was able to find a home for
the music of Unnatural Ways, her working trio, she’d relocated from the Bay
Area to Brooklyn and completely changed the ensemble from one featuring
keyboardist Dominque Leone and drummer Nick Tamburo to current collaborators
bassist Tim Dahl and drummer Nick Podgurski. But the West Coast version of the
band is still a valid representation of Mendoza’s music and Ohio label New
Atlantis has done a fine job presenting it. Through seven tracks (the download
version contains nine) the trio keeps up a choppy, thick whorl of progressive
choogle, her flinty, warped shards and dry vocal delivery well matched by
Tambora’s delicate precision and Leone’s syrupy whine. Mendoza’s jazz chops are
juiced with tasty fuzz on a rather fetching psychedelic version of “Goodnight
Irene” (here titled “They’ll Get You In Their Dreams Irene”), though one would
be hard-pressed to call her a ‘jazz guitarist’ – rather, she melds
linguistic shreds of Frith and Kaiser to a natural core of bluesy, scummy
R&B, even on the Monkish title-track-of-sorts “Quit Your Unnatural Ways.” If the setting has changed a couple of years down the road, Mendoza continues
to mine this realm and hopefully living in New York won’t overly try her
natural, unhurried quirks.
