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CALATO
John Cage: Variations + Four6
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In 1958, audience reaction to his piano concerto at the infamous 25-year retrospective demonstrated just how controversial John Cage still was. Much water has passed under several bridges in the intervening six decades. So often, performances of John Cage, no matter how expertly conceived, border on the reverent. In their new renderings of excerpts from Cage’s Variations series and the number piece Four6, the Argentinian quartet CALATO brings some of the anarchy back into the evolving Cage performance aesthetic while delving deep into the sonic possibilities opened by his pioneering vision.
The works come from opposite ends of Cage’s long career and involve vastly different notational models. In realizing them, CALATO guitarists Javier Areal Velez and Jorge Espinal, vocalist Agustin Genoud and drummer Pablo Veron combine approaches to sound that they’ve been refining since 2012 while adhering with requisite precision to Cage’s open-ended instructions. Annotator Andy Hamilton’s interview with the quartet is illuminating in elucidating the dichotomy between sonic freshness and interpretive rigor. Listening is at the heart of the group’s shared vision, and whatever sounds are employed, that mode of perception certainly aligns with Cage’s own. Demonstrating the full range of these infinite possibilities, CALATO present three pieces from the variations series, one version of the third, and several of the first and second. The four versions of Variations II bristle with energy and brim with a kind of aphoristic vitality, especially the fourth rendering, rhythm and electronic repetition banging their way toward and away from perception like bullies at an already swinging party. The sole version of Variations III inhabits a very different space, initially one of relative introspection but which nonetheless opens onto the occasional sound burst, slamming headlong into a funky Naked City vibe before fanning out into more pointillism. The number piece is the most sonically diverse and, to these ears, the most interesting from a timbral perspective. Bursts of squall and scree penetrate the spaces at strategic points only to evaporate with similar suddenness, eschewing the genre allusions of other pieces but maintaining the energy and fierce concentration over a wild half hour.
It’s the sounds that stir, that pump these performances full of new blood. They roil and surge, infected by the genre diversity attendant to long hours of immersion and improvisation. We are so used to Cage in the European Art sphere that the punk energy infusing much of this music, especially in the prepared guitars and amplified vocal timbres, takes an initial leap of faith to approach. In that, memories of Naked City’s swansong, Absinthe, are brought into focus, but CALATO’s sense of humor is directed more toward Zorn’s earlier days. Despite the pulses and throbs of electro-splatter and the genre-bending fancy-flights of full-boar improvisational tendency, we can hear, for example, the beautifully separated sounds and strands stipulated in the score of Four6, and this is the point. CALATO are both faithful and adventurous, and ultimately, the mixture of energy and rigor proffers a winning combination.
–Marc Medwin
Baikida Carroll
Orange Fish Tears
Souffle Continu Records FFL088
Trumpeter-composer Baikida Carroll had already contributed to two of the 1970’s landmark creative music albums – Oliver Lake’s debut LP, NTU, the Point from which Creation Begins (Freedom, 1976) and Julius Hemphill’s first date, Dogon, A.D. (Mbari, 1972) – before he made a record of his own. That album, the long out-of-print Orange Fish Tears, has now received the deluxe reissue treatment by Souffle Continu Records, with a facsimile sleeve and a booklet of previously unpublished session photographs by Thierry Trombert.
Originally recorded for the Palm label in June 1974 in Paris, where Carroll and other members of the Black Artist Group had been living in exile from the US since 1971, the album certainly ranks among the most assured leader debuts in jazz and should be considered on the same level as Lake’s and Hemphill’s. Carroll was hardly inexperienced. As part of the coalition of musicians, poets, artists, and writers who created the unique BAG aesthetic and as director of the organization’s big band, he was already a master of the new music.
Working with a quartet that includes saxophonist Lake, percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, and keyboardist Manuel Villarroel, Carroll emphasizes a collective group approach, careful integration of composition and improvisation, and a fine balance between musical elements. The title track is a collective sound piece that doesn’t so much tell a story as paint a picture. Hushed flutes, percussion, and piano glissandi create a scene of a forest before dawn. Phrases resembling bird song and scurrying percussion emerge as the forest awakens and a melody for alto and trumpet makes a short appearance before disappearing into the ambient sounds. The piece ebbs and flows quite organically; there’s no sense of a leader, just four players closely attuned to one another.
“Forest Scorpion” fuses African and African American elements in the album’s most viscerally exciting track. Vasconcelos, aided at times by members of the group on percussion, drives the music relentlessly forward. While the African roots are clear, they are not literal. Instead they suggest a heritage to draw on not rooted exclusively in Europe, an important enterprise for African American artists in the early ‘70s. The groove lifts the soloists into their most uninhibited playing on the album. Lake, with his hard obsidian tone, delivers a fiery jeremiad. Carroll juggles hot, growling bursts of notes with longer lines that hover over the bubbling rhythms. The composition is frantic and jagged, further emphasizing the confluence of the traditional and the modern.
Baikida and Lake go it alone together on Lake’s “Rue Roger.” They weave composition and improvisation together in unexpected ways with an emphasis on balance among textures and color, solo and duo passages, written and spontaneous, phrases of different proportions. It has a playful quality that leavens the serious musical innovations with lightness and joy.
“Port d’Orleans” deploys the quartet in a different way from the other pieces to begin with. The group starts by taking turns stringing phrases together, each one shaped and colored by the individual performer. They transition into simultaneous improvisations and solos as well. Lake’s solo falls like a heavy weight on his accompanists and every note of Carroll’s more pensive solo is saturated with feeling. The piece flares into a fearsome collective shout at the climax.
Carroll was one of the architects of the new music opened up by BAG but he’s been unfairly overlooked as the innovator that he is. This stunning album never got much attention when it was released and that’s certainly one reason for his lower profile. The reissue lets us consider its place among the most innovative and important albums of its day.
–Ed Hazell
Marjolaine Charbin + Eddie Prévost
Cry of a Dove Announcing Rain
Matchless MRCD113
When is a piano like democracy? Pianist Marjolaine Charbin examines the inquiry in her portion of the liners to this, her new duo recording with Eddie Prévost, comprising two concert sets from October 2022 and January 2023 respectively. What a conundrum! As if music’s sonic and historical complications didn’t place the requisite number of roadblocks in the writer’s path, democracy enters the fray! The answer, of course, is microcosmically myriad, like the notes themselves and the music they poeticize.
The recording is remarkable in its vividness. I usually end with observations about engineering and production, but in the case of music like this, such concerns become paramount. Listen to Prévost’s gong at 9:52 as its movement is captured in extraordinary stereo, and that’s not said lightly! The best part about that motionless motion is its intimate but definite circular trajectory, a moment in space caught within the limited space of a stage setup for two, as described by Emmanuelle Waeckerlé, who contributes the other text. Charbin’s piano emerges from across an imaginary but absolutely vivid isle in which sound and space converge. Each musician is given a stereo spectrum, space within a space to intuit, act, reflect and to react. 24:22 into the second set, after a lengthy listening pause, Charbin introduces pitches complementary to Prévost’s bowed sonorities. Prévost then matches her spiraling repetitions with staccati of his own. As the large peaks begin to flatten, deliciously light sounds emerge from the piano, presumably the inner workings Charbin describes in her notes. It’s one thing to read about them, quite another to experience their sinewy transparency, minuscule signposts along several paths of discovery. How glorious, how poetically just, how somehow inevitable, that a few minutes later, a collaborative open fifth evolves from those vast tracts of sound, one with barely audible tones bolstering its fragile existence.
Too many such moments fill these musical odysseys to catalog them, and then, bean-counting doesn’t make the casserole. That perfect mixture of ingredients brings it all together, like Charbin’s pianism that expertly avoids the cliches now, and unfortunately, associated with all manner of improvisation, gestures either too spicy or underdone when overused. Prévost’s sonic pallet leans more toward what we might expect from AMM, but having said that, which iteration? It’s all on display, from the stroked drumheads forming part of the second set, perhaps closer to the denser AMM of the middle 1990s, to bowed and otherwise cajoled silvery arcs and parabolas conjuring shades of Industria but present in much of Prévost’s work. Charbin is an orchestral player, rendering the entire piano an instrument of enormous power and exquisite subtlety far beyond its well-worn conventional language even while obliquely referencing it. Her sense of tempo and groove is as elastic as Prévost’s, and when they bow together, that awesome soundstage brims with a luminous vitality. The duo creates an environment of obvious conversation laced with dialogic evasion, unity of voice and purpose comingled, sometimes quite literally a liberation of voice in Charbin’s case, as witnessed nearly 20 minutes into the first set. Certainly, the disc can be summed up as voices in investigative liberation, fully participatory in the ensuing freedoms.
–Marc Medwin
Ted Daniel with Energy
Live at Ali’s Alley
Ujamaa 1006
Quiet as it’s kept, the lofts in New York during the 1970s were a hot bed of big band jazz. Most were rehearsal bands that were little known because they rarely, if ever, played in public, and others were large ensembles put together for a single project, never to play again. But they were legion. Instrumentalist-composers such as Sam Rivers, Makanda Ken McIntrye, Warren Smith, William Parker, Julius Hemphill, Frank Foster, and Hamiet Bluiett, to pick just a few, led big bands at one time or another. Some – Rivers, McIntyre, Smith, and Foster for instance – kept them going for many years.
Trumpeter-composer Ted Daniel convened his Energy Big Band as an occasional rehearsal outfit for several years until October 1977, when Rashid Ali gave Daniel and Energy every Monday night at his club, Ali’s Alley, replacing the Sam Brown-Art Jenkins Big Band Experience. Energy held forth at the beginning of the work week until September 1978, when Jaki Byard’s Apollo Stompers took over. (As mentioned before, there were many, many big bands at this time.)
Daniel has now released at double LP of Energy live at Ali’s Alley, recorded in May 1978 just prior to the end of their stay. After eight months of regular gigs, Energy was a tight-knit, boisterous group and they simply tear through the arrangements, more than living up to their name.
The charts feature some familiar new-jazz tunes such as Coltrane’s “Naima” and Pharoah Sanders’ “Upper and Lower Egypt,” but they are mainly originals by Daniel or pianist Eddie Banks. The arrangements are beautifully voiced and loaded with rhythmic punch, sturdy vehicles that not only inspire ensemble esprit de corps, but set the stage for soloists and some very fiery collective improvising. Daniel sometimes used hand signals and cues to change arrangements on the fly and keep everyone on their toes. But there are no formal breakthroughs in the music. However, the sheer joy, pride, and celebration of the music sweep aside any concerns about whether it’s “innovative” or “cutting edge.” Those concerns are meaningless in the face of its pure exuberance and humanity.
The two versions of “Celebration Part 1” are cases in point. The version that opens Volume 1, Side B features a blustery Joe Bowie getting excited on his trombone, a go-for-broke collective improv, and a full-throated reading of the tune. It’s clear that these guys just love playing together. The second is quite different in shape but at the same high level. It opens with a roiling percussion trio of John Betsch and Abe Speller on traps and Roger Dawson on congas, setting up the tune and then solos by guitarist Henry Robinette and a flamboyant Yousef Yancy on trumpet.
“Upper and Lower Egypt” alone is worth the price of admission. The band digs into Daniel’s arrangement, with its irresistible groove buttressed by full band riffing on Sander’s montuno motif. Joe Rigby takes a towering, heaven-scaling solo on both sopranino and tenor, breathing holy fire throughout, and trumpeter Chris Capers spends his solo time swooping in the stratosphere in an extremity of joy. Mixashawn Lee Rozie’s cascading, soaring soprano sax brings things to a fittingly uplifting close.
Never a flashy player, Daniel himself can be a more temperate soloist than others in the band, but he plays with great intelligence and feeling with a full tone over which he has complete control. His solos on “Naima” and “Song of the Salsa Spaceman,” are some of the hippest and most substantial on the set.
The conservative smear campaign against the lofts maintains that they were full of fakers who couldn’t play their instruments. The reality was far more complex, of course. In fact, there were an astonishing number of talented, well-trained players in the New York lofts on which big band leaders could draw. Ted Daniel and Energy are certainly proof of that. This belated debut album is a uncompromising artistic statement and an unadulterated joy.
–Ed Hazell
Anthony Davis + Kyle Motl + Kjell Nordeson
Vertical Motion
Astral Spirits AS227
The release of Vertical Motion in the run-up to the Metropolitan Opera’s staging of X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X is a timely – and way overdue – reminder that Anthony Davis is a brilliant pianist. Unfortunately, the decades-long road Davis took to become the premier American opera composer of our times has been at the expense of his output as a performer. As much as anyone, Davis represented an emergent generation 40 years ago, one that had digested the revolutionary impulses of the 1960s and the restructuralism of the 1970s, and were defining the last decades of 20th Century through music based on new relationships between notated and improvised materials. However, the enormous amount of time required to create a string of masterpieces like Amistad and The Central Park Five effectively truncated, for starters, a budding legacy of solo recordings like Past Lives, Lady of the Mirrors, and Middle Passage. Frankly, his few recordings of the past dozen years – Cerulean Landscape, his 2010 duets with Jason Robinson, and his performance of “Wayang No. 5” with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project on the 2014 collection Notes from the Underground – are simply not enough. We need more of Anthony Davis the pianist and we need him now.
However, this studio set with bassist Kyle Motl and drummer Kjell Nordeson does not necessarily signal that Davis is rocketing back. It was recorded in 2018 at the University of California San Diego, where Davis teaches and Nordeson earned his PhD months later that year. And, it is not a Davis album, per se. It is a collective effort; a welcomed reprise of “Lady of the Mirrors” is the pianist’s only contribution, the rest of the program comprised of two assertive Motl compositions and a robust improvisation. The level of interplay and the risk-taking evident throughout the album suggests that this was more than the occasional hang; with all three artists striking flints at every turn, Vertical Motion is one of those albums that capture a group vaulting to the next level. They had – and still have, presumably – the stuff of a going concern, which makes the half-decade lag between recording and issuance even more baffling.
Back in the day, the rap on Davis by the likes of Stanley Crouch was that his playing was too cerebral and mannered – not nearly enough swagger, muscle and blood and guts. That was debatable then, but not now. Davis unleashes great swells of sound with nearly concussive intensity at several points on the album, placing the quicksilver single-note runs and the keen sense of opening space for his collaborators through chiseled phrases that distinguished his playing 40 years ago in a fresh light. The difference between then and now may be that Davis then was on the epochal mission encapsulated by his phrase, “the ascendence of the composer.” With his flag planted on the summit of American opera and concert music, the unfettered energy of his playing on Vertical Motion suggests that Davis now feels free – at least in his spare hours – to play without regard to anything but the moment at hand. The results are invigorating.
–Bill Shoemaker