Moment's Notice

Reviews of Recent Recordings
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Charles Hayward + Han-earl Park + Ian Smith + Lol Coxhill
Mathilde 253
Slam CD528

Mathilde 253 is one of those ‘name’ groups that sprang fully-formed from a single playing moment - in fact the very moment at London’s Café Oto last April that is documented on this debut CD – but seems to have been around for much longer. As far as the individual players are concerned, trumpeter Ian Smith is now a significant figure on the Emanem axis of British improvisers; news that Mathilde 253 are shortly to tour Ireland with Wadada Leo Smith has certain comic potential but also prompts the thought that a second trumpeter, even a distinguished international guest, might be gilding the lily. Ian Smith is a formidable technician and a profoundly intuitive music maker, with the ability to deliver exactly the right sound, or very often the right sonic texture, at the psychological moment. An ideal group or ensemble player, he seems remarkably free of ego in performance, often preferring to wait out passages before delivering a tiny killer stroke. One knows that this was a Miles Davis stratagem, but it’s the other Smith he resembles most completely, though some of his articulations here sound as if they might be influenced by Bill Dixon.

Guitarist Han-earl Park is a musical philosopher. He works in a variety of fields, develops low-intensity electronic devices, often for context-specific performances, and like his playing partner never insists on grabbing the spotlight. One of the delights of this live session is that one very frequently can’t distinguish who is making particular sounds. There’s not much idiomatic guitar-playing, though Park is very much in the Derek Bailey rather than the Keith Rowe line; he uses relatively orthodox technique to unorthodox ends.

Drummer (and occasional melodica player) Charles Hayward is perhaps the best known of the three, largely due to this role with pioneering, Camberwell-based This Heat, one of the most experimental ‘punk’ groups to emerge on the London scene during the late ‘70s. The group’s sessions for John Peel and the bootleg of their 1980 concert at the Institute of Contemporary Arts are key documents in British creative music of the last thirty years. It’s fascinating to find Hayward in this setting, taking up the mantle – different as they were – of the late Steve Harris. Mathilde 253 has something of the guttural authority and generosity of gesture one associates with Zaum, which Harris led until his untimely death. They also make a specific virtue of building other musicians into the group language. Leo Smith is on the face of it a surprising addition. Lol Coxhill makes more immediate sense. An immensely thoughtful, but eternally self-effacing player, he slots in here for just the two final cuts, ‘Aachen’ and ‘Oaxaca’, and in a curious way acts as a kind of chorus/facilitator, summing up and simplifying aspects of the group language, rather than challenging or antagonising it, as guest players very often do.

It’s a long set, but has sufficient underlying momentum to pass with deceptive speed. It takes an alert listener to distinguish occasional quietuses in the process with track endings, and there is a moment between ‘Ishikari’ and ‘Jixi’ when it sounds almost as if one aspect of the previous piece has been filleted out for more sustained attention. Smith favors long mongrelly growls and scales that ascend and descend in illogical ways, like the stairs in an M C Escher print. Hayward has a very distinct sense of time underneath the freedom. It’s not untypical of British free drummers to imply some kind of steady pulse. Eddie Prévost does it, John Stevens did it far more often than anyone supposed, Tonys Oxley and Levin almost always do. I’d have picked Hayward out as a Brit even if there had been no accompanying details.

This is an exciting new venture for him and for the others. One can reasonably expect unexpected things from Park, who is a delightful shape-shifter and Smith always repays the closest attention, and claims it with sudden open-horn breakouts if the fabric of the music gets too smooth and uninflected. Great stuff and a disc that reassert’s Slam’s importance as a free music imprint.
–Brian Morton

 

Oliver Lake + Christian Weber + Dieter Ulrich
For A Little Dancin’
Intakt CD 172

At least one of every musician’s most formative gigs is as a member of an audience. That’s the case with Zürich-based drummer Dieter Ulrich. He was in the crowd that was blown away by saxophonist Oliver Lake’s electrifying 1977 Willisau festival performance with Michael Gregory Jackson and Pheeroan akLaff, released as Zaki on Hat Hut. Nearly thirty years later, having compiled a strong journeyman’s CV with Day & Taxi and others, Ulrich and bassist Christian Weber played a club date with Lake, presumably a one-off going in. However, the chemistry was considered to be exceptional by all, and a 2009 tour was organized, including a coming-full-circle set at Willisau. For A Little Dancin’ was recorded in studio mid-tour and it reflects that point where initial enthusiasm is morphing into familiarity, resulting in well-meshed interplay that frequently throws sparks. Lake composed all but one of the album’s ten pieces (the title piece was penned by Ulrich); his hallmark fusion of angular themes, irregular forms and deep blues feeling is present in each of them. They require a full spectrum of tactics from Weber and Ulrich, from laying down springy grooves to fleshing out thematic materials and improvised spaces in a co-equal manner. Weber’s presence is a bit surprising, as he is more likely heard in non-idiomatic, electronics-laced settings; but he supports counter lines on pieces like “Backup” with a plump sound and his occasionally pugilistic attack fuels blows like “Spots;” more importantly, he complements the balance of power and agility Ulrich achieves sound-wise with a small ride tom and bass drum. They don’t have the decades-reinforced gravity of Reggie Workman and Andrew Cyrille, Lake’s partners in Trio 3; but this is not Trio Second String, either. The proof is in Lake’s playing – his sound is as piercing as ever, his trademark spikes in intensity continue to be hair-raising, and his lyricism remains lean with only a trace of sentiment. Anyone who can run with Oliver Lake deserves credit; double or triple it for anyone who, like Ulrich and Weber, inspires Lake to make an ensemble an ongoing concern.
–Bill Shoemaker

 

Dave Liebman Group
Turnaround: The Music of Ornette Coleman
Jazzwerkstatt JW 079

Dave Liebman is the great communicator of contemporary jazz. Though hardly a revolutionary himself, it has been his task and, one suspects, his pleasure and privilege to disseminate its most radical ideas in a form that is both accessible and uncompromised. Almost no aspect of the music, from fusion to free, seems to have evaded him and his discography is now very large indeed, ranging from the intriguing syntheses of Lookout Farm and Quest (two singularly underrated co-ops with which he was associated; the latter has been active again of late) to his own classic Drum Ode (which represents a singularity in jazz recording if not playing – all that percussion! where to place the mics? how to find a balance?), exercises in unaccompanied saxophone which seem more important every time they come out of the box, and, more recently, a steady attention to the lessons of the great modernists.

It’s hard not to have the highest regard for Liebman, not just for his dogged work-rate but also for the quality of his musical perception and awareness of jazz history. He’s almost alone among recent observers in acknowledging the importance of Gato Barbieri’s intensely vocalised tone and altissimo work, and one trusts him equally when he turns his mind to the Gog and Magog of saxophone playing. Coltrane has suffused his work, both on tenor and soprano, for many years, and with fascinating results. It’s perhaps harder, at this stage, to detect an Ornette Coleman influence, though Liebman’s concern with vertical harmony has never been at the expense of melody and line, and on a number of recent records it was interesting to find angles of approach that suggested a growing interest in Ornette’s recorded legacy. I heard it on “Four on One”, of the best tracks on Five On One, a kind of super group encounter on Pirouet last year that saw Liebman working with John Abercrombie, Marc Copland, Drew Gress and Billy Hart as Contact, another collective bushel under which to hide his light. But what was obvious there was that Liebman’s distinctive chromatics actually put him much closer to Ornette’s language than might otherwise have been obvious, so Turnaround does seem like less of a stretch.

On this occasion, Liebman’s instinct for democracy within this very good band means that guitarist Vic Juris is effectively co-leader. The two share and exchange lead lines throughout, often with such a seamless accuracy that one takes a split second to realise that attack and stereo picture have both shifted. It’s a fairly unproblematic Ornette program, with older things like “Una Muy Bonita,” “The Face of the Bass,” “Beauty is a Rare Thing” set against the more recent classic “Kathelin Gray,” and less familiar lines like “Cross Breeding,” “Bird Food” and the opening “Enfant.” It makes for a fascinating opening gambit, because the time expands and contracts almost at will, a salutary warning that nothing in what follows is quite as it seems.

Most tribute albums are either instrumental karaoke or an attempt – successful or otherwise – to get out from under the shadow of the honoured original and do different. Liebman doesn’t really do either, and in the process he lays claim to this material in a new and exciting way. Tackling “Lonely Woman” on wood flute might just sound like a cheap distancing device: What’s this? Familiar melody, but surely not? Yes, it is! With Liebman, though, one’s immediate instinct is that this is how it maybe should have sounded in the first place. He also very cleverly points us back to a more accurate reading of the early records, on which Don Cherry (egregiously) and Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell (less obviously) were mixed away into an undifferentiated background, which led to a longstanding failure to understand the internal dynamics of the ‘classic’ quartet. On the second half of ‘Face of the Bass’/’Beauty is a Rare Thing’, Liebman and Juris give the floor to bassist Tony Marino and drummer Marko Marcinko (who by this stage must be able to second-guess all of the leader’s needs) and they spin out a version of the tune that is utterly faithful to the original conception, but somehow more accurate even than Coleman’s original version.

Weird analogy, this, but British television documentary makers for years declined to use colour footage from the Second World War on the grounds that in the public mind, the past was monochrome. Some directors even had colour stock reprocessed in black and white to preserve that curious but pervasive illusion. Listening to Turnaround – and particularly that well-covered title track, which has attracted everyone from Hampton Hawes to, I swear, Oscar Peterson – is a little like seeing part of the musical past restored to full colour. Liebman has talked about ‘loaning’ a harmonic dimension to Ornette’s compositions. One sees what he means, but it sounds unnecessarily diffident. I prefer my analogy, particularly given the full-spectrum colouration that Liebman’s saxophones now possess. It has been strange to read recent reviewers speaking as if his disciplined eschewal of tenor happened only yesterday or the day before. There is now a clear continuity between the two horns, but also something quite specifically idiomatic to each of them, with soprano naturally leaning toward the overtone range of the double-reeds and tenor occupying a place that is comfortably within human vocal range. Neither instrument is, of course, obviously associated with Ornette or his music, though at points in the record, one recalls what Dewey Redman brought to this music during his time with the Coleman quartet, a kind of normative harmony at the centre. Liebman’s approach is, surprisingly, more radical than that, (centri)fugal, ec-centric, swooping from apogee to perigee with real grace.

One still might wonder why an artist of this calibre feels the need – other than a possible market need – to make records devoted to other composers’ work: Liebman also made a record of Coltrane’s blues lines. The answer is that this modern tradition is still very much alive to him, still unexhausted and not yet creatively assimilated. Like the great communicator he is, Liebman has taken up the challenge with fortitude and unfailing imagination. There’s work here for years to come.
–Brian Morton

 

Roscoe Mitchell + The Note Factory
Far Side
ECM 2087

The little big band tag usually applied to octets falls short in describing Roscoe Mitchell’s Note Factory; calling it a chamber orchestra is also off-point. That’s because boundaries-busting rigor and versatility is required of his wide-ranging compositions, evidenced by the four contrasting pieces that comprise this 2007 Burghausen Jazz Festival performance. The title piece is daunting, a half-hour traversing of muffled gasps and overtone-rich drones to full-throated exhortation. It is a particularly precarious proposition due to the sheer mass of sound that two pianos and two drum kits can produce, even without the explosive potential of twin horns and basses. Yet, pianists Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn and drummer Vincent Davis and Tani Tabbal produce such finely calibrated increases that the details of the low bowed moans of bassists Jaribu Shahid and Harrison Bankhead (who also plays cello) and the whispered harmonics and long tones of the saxophonist and trumpeter Corey Wilkes remain distinct in the mix. Such a long wind-up all but demands a downpour of intensity, and for a good while it remains in doubt whether the expectation would be fully met; in the interim, however, Mitchell parses out iridescent nuggets, particularly the initially timorous, slowly elongating trumpet and alto saxophone phrases that pivot the piece away from its haunting opening movement and towards line-based free polyphony. The horns lay out, giving the pianists an open field; urged on by the basses and drums, Iyer and Taborn ratchet up the intensity, trading hard-hitting runs. But, it is left to Mitchell to take the music to the boiling point, his soprano spooling out serpentine lines, its musette-like tone giving them a serrated edge. Wilkes quickly follows with trombone-low gurgles that ascend through the registers, culminating in ecstatic blasts that signal the piece’s surprisingly quick end. The sly opening ensemble of “Quintet 2007 A For Eight” works a completely different set of muscles.  Mitchell uses well-placed pauses and stabbing dissonant notes to offset the flow of the vernacular-rich material, the pungency of the resulting halting strut is dependent upon an exact reading of the score. “Trio Four For Eight” has a delicate notated opening, with dovetailing flute and cello lines gently supported by spare piano chords and malleted toms. The tranquil tone wafts into the ensuing sequence of small group improvisations, largely sustained by Bankhead’s elegant cello. The closing “Ex Flover Five” has a formal bearing, one that begins to fray with an increasingly turbulent piano duet. As the basses and drums heat up, the horns backdrop with short terse phrases and long tones; the last signaling a breath-catching moment of calm before Mitchell’s biting alto lines sends the ensemble careening to a final burst of notated material. Whatever you call Mitchell’s Note Factory, it should be accompanied by rarely used superlatives.
–Bill Shoemaker

 

Perry Robinson Trio
From A To Z
Jazzwerkstatt 085

It’s not difficult to explain Perry Robinson’s uniqueness as a jazz clarinetist – chalk it up to vast experience in improvisational settings (next year will mark 50 years since his debut recording on Savoy), a familial background in folk music and blues, as well as an early ear-opening encounter with the music of Arnold Schönberg (a strong presence in southern California where Robinson was raised), and his own curiosity with klezmer, Middle Eastern and other World Musics, all of which make their mark, explicitly or implicitly, on this newly issued 2008 session. The folk influence is represented by a dreamlike version of “Joe Hill,” the famous pro-union anthem composed by his father Earl Robinson, here featuring recitation of (a portion of) the lyrics, whistling, bass harmonics, soft drum patter, and a gentle clarinet rendition of the melody. Robinson’s clarinet staggers and swoons its way through “Mountain Soup,” an original blues in the style of a work song, and his “Funky Giora” (a reference to Giora Feidman, probably the most famous klezmer clarinetist?) draws directly on the modes, bent pitches, and sustained drones of Middle Eastern tradition. The Schönberg connection is not as obvious, but may be felt in the intervallic variations, in and out of tempo, of the jagged theme “Unisphere.” More likely, however, it comes across in the quixotical harmonic sense that also prompts some listeners to compare Robinson to the sublimely precarious Pee Wee Russell – evident in spiraling melodic contours that hinge on off-kilter notes and shift into surprising tonalities (as in “Sooner Then Before”).

It’s tempting to focus solely on Robinson’s deceptively wispy, asymmetrical solos, but this is a cooperative trio, meaning that longtime collaborators drummer Ernest Bier and bassist Ed Schuller receive an equal amount of solo space – the latter adopting Slam Stewart’s manner of voice echoing the bass line. Still, it’s no slight to them if the canny veteran holds the center of attention, as Schuller seems to symbolically acknowledge with his “From A to Z,” a two-part composition that could be interpreted as evoking both the clarinetist’s eccentric and sentimental sides. Endearing music.
-Art Lange

Hat Hut Records

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