Moment's Notice Reviews of Recent Media Gordon Grdina + Christian Lillinger
Duo Work, on the other hand, showcases a different side of Grdina’s work; where the prior oud-based album is meditative and moody, this duo recording is brusque and brash, a thrilling collaboration between Grdina’s electric and MIDI guitars and the virtuosic German drummer Christian Lillinger. This set continues the collaboration between Grdina and Lillinger, which has been documented in the quartet Square Peg (with violist Mat Maneri and bassist Shahzad Ismaily) and in a trio with Maneri, as heard on Live at the Armoury (Clean Feed, 2023). Grdina first recorded with a MIDI guitar on Oddly Enough (Attaboygirl, 2022), a solo album exploring the music of saxophonist Tim Berne. The instrument features synth pick-ups with MIDI controllers that allow Grdina to transform the sound of the guitar with a larger orchestral palette. The album features four of Grdina’s compositions along with numerous freewheeling excursions. Each of the set’s concise pieces were edited down from longer takes and manipulated in post-production. Although most of these numbers are fully improvised, Grdina alters his tone on each, providing sonic variety throughout the session. The cacophonous “Song One” sets the tone for the date. Grdina’s use of MIDI guitar adds a layer of jarring timbral complexity, an otherworldly quality complemented by Lillinger, whose rhythmic precision is expressed in blustery patterns. The music moves with unbridled energy and relentless forward momentum as Grdina adds multiple guitar parts to Lillinger’s frenetic barrages. “Ash” is even more hard-driving, with Grdina’s fierce fretwork goading Lillinger into manic punk jazz, while the frenzy of Lillinger’s rhythmic discharges on “Bunker” threaten to overshadow Grdina’s fuzzed-out riffs. Grdina and Lillinger engage in a focused dialogue, their chemistry palpable. On “Dissolution,” when Grdina speeds up, Lillinger matches his frenzied pace. Tracks such as “Impala” display the duo’s stamina, as they weave intricate patterns together. A few detours are taken, such as “Gerhard,” a vehicle for Lillinger’s exploration of abrasive texture, or “Big Blue,” Grdina’s spacey pairing of distorted guitar and ethereal electronics. But the session really hits its stride with “Encounters,” a seven-minute blast of coiled energy which eventually dissolves into an atmospheric conclusion. Together, Grdina and Lillinger embark on an uncharted journey that celebrates the art of highwire musical discourse. Grdina is a masterful chameleon, and Lillinger is the perfect counterpart for his anything goes aesthetic. There is a restless energy that runs throughout these twelve tracks, which clock in around 38 minutes. Lillinger’s often explosive drumming pushes the duo to extremes, yet multitracking allows Grdina to add layers to these pieces, making them more than just frantic guitar-drum workouts. With its mix of technical virtuosity and unbridled intensity, Duo Work should appeal to adventurous listeners of creative improvised music.
Alexander Hawkins + Sofia Jernberg
The album opens with the spacious “Adwa,” where Hawkins plays with considerable reserve. The simple chords unfold with elegance and enough variation to compel. Part of me wishes I knew other versions of this Ethiopian traditional piece (a background shared by “Gigi’s Lament” elsewhere on this disc), but I don’t feel at a loss. Jernberg has a really unique instrument, a strong soprano with real clarity and a slight reediness in her tone that’s really compelling. This is highly dynamic music, and it’s fantastic. The range of colors each coaxes from their instrument is astonishing. At times Hawkins’ piano sounds like an mbira (as on “Gigi’s Lament”) or marimba (the Swedish traditional piece “Mannelig”), whereas elsewhere he’s dark and bluesy like Mal Waldron. As for Jernberg, she be winsome and airy or full-throated at the drop of a hat. Nothing is gratuitous, though, as her commitment to the song is the primary thing. A particularly stirring example of their range is on the haunting Armenian threnody “Groung.” Jernberg’s keening voice is distilled loneliness set against Hawkins’ somber accompaniment, and as the song proceeds a palpable sense of longing rises with her into the most gorgeous, fragile falsetto. There is just so much color and dynamism on this record, but mostly a sheer emotional power that makes it very much stand out from the pack. There are dark clouds, thickets of metallic sound, the lightest melodic turns, and very much more. Their interactions are always assured, and expressive, and vulnerable, holding melody plain and pure or going for the growl (Jernberg, it must be said, employs split-tone singing very effectively throughout). It’s as impressive a testament to the power of the duo as I’ve heard lately, and an early contender for my best of 2024 list.
Izumi Kimura + Barry Guy + Gerry Hemingway
The three musicians pay recursive visits to areas both familiar and not, perfectly reflecting the multivalent nature of the music and its performing forces. After all, a trio is nothing more than a trope, a discursive convenience that may never behave as expected and even when it does transgresses preconceived boundaries. This aggregate’s conventionalities are rife with instigative abstractions, sounds in flux that complicate and implicate by turn, like Hemingway’s single and double-stroked cymbals on Kimura’s “Cloud Echoes.” Melodic and rhythmic as expected, they also inhabit harmonic spaces before Kimura’s gorgeous pianism and exquisite changes reenforce their magnetic hues. Another layer is added when Hemingway’s brushed toms and snare dialogue with Guy’s always perfectly executed pizzicato, “third-space” ornaments and slides accenting each harmony as the piece’s varied key centers are nearly established and discarded. Just as often, each sound proves singly transformative, like the final pitch Kimura plays, one tender note completely altering the mood. Guy’s “Gnomon” is a two-part form embracing the triangulated relationship between open harmonies, scalar repetitions, and syncopated klangfarbenmelodie. Initially, each malleable construct free-floats atop oceans of enriched space, anticipating the throaty low-register thrum and gradual tension build toward the increasingly frenzied and metrically fickle second half. The most openly Protean process informs “Underdrift,” the second Kimura composition on offer. While all instruments begin by occupying their requisite soundspaces, that titular “drift” ensures that by album’s end, Guy’s glissandi and Kimura’s upper registral extremes usher the music away from any traditionally hierarchical notions. Hemingway’s metallic timbres are the gateway to that final moment of transcendence. The trio’s first album, Illuminated Silence, presented many of these same contrasts but often in the more linear framework of rolling arches so often associated with the “free jazz” trio. This beautifully recorded sophomore effort raises the stakes with a more inclusive pallet of compositional techniques. Hemingway’s own The Unexpected is just such a radical sonic statement. Juxtaposing “trio” moments with so many other sonic signifiers, it encapsulates everything that makes the disc such a vivid and exciting experience. Dig Kimura’s diversely voiced chordal punctuations in the first section of The Unexpected, Hemingway’s four-part suite, each a wonder of weighted interruption as it sputters or slams against an intoned and rustling backdrop that evolves into a minor-modal excursion encircling and sometimes achieving a center. Kimura’s interregistral points and smears swarm that backdrop’s intermittent pulse and pitched throb, her varied and densely clustered articulations opening a space for Guy’s tremoloed interjections and Hemingway’s “New Thing” trapsmanship, but each event is deceptively concise. Repetition chases and unseats repetition in diverging cycles as each player is allowed some solo space in the labyrinthine context. A return to modality also brings back the trio in gently loping groove until, with a whimpering question mark, it’s all over. Most gratifying, though, is the piece’s opening, a sound initially hanging on the border of perception but fully present at 0:14. The single pitch becomes an overtonal dialogue, then a timbral plethora, then some combination thereof, a thing unto itself simultaneously negating its own identity and boundaries, a growing entity ironically remaining static while supporting and negating all occurring around it in similarly dialectical fashion. To call it a drone would limit it, but to call it anything else would ignore its fundamentally unified nature. It is both the outing and the return, proclamation and assimilation, a rapt journey embodying impermanence and its antipode. The liner notes, contributed by all three players, elucidate the music’s roots in cultural, political, and historical communication, on individual and communal levels. They are as impressive, as touching and as powerful as the music, a verbal congruence augmenting rather than narrowly defining the sounds and completing a superb package.
David Murray Quartet
Right from the get-go, Murray’s bravura display on the warmly effusive title track, dedicated to his wife, very much sets the scene. He adorns a tenor sound as rich as a full-bodied red wine with ecstatic tenor whoops, cries, and trills edging into a falsetto flourish. He’s at his most unfettered on “Come And Go” where, after a churning start resolves into a stop time line, he spins off on increasingly wild detours. But even here Sanchez, Stewart, and Carter’s energetically swinging accompaniment provides a safe landing for the reedman’s flights. Murray wields bass clarinet on two numbers, settling into a light Latin groove on “Shenzhen,” and on the sole non-original, erstwhile partner Don Pullen’s “Richard’s Tune” (dedicated to Muhal Richard Abrams), his throaty bubbling accentuates the Monkish aspects of the tune. That same cut is also notable for a playful introductory duet with Sanchez, hinting at the waltz to come. Indeed, you could dance after a fashion to much of this program, and you might find yourself humming some of Murray’s catchy themes to boot. Happily, those themes also provide the basis for much of the ensuing development. Sanchez and Murray enjoy the majority of the solo time, with carefully meted allotments for bass and drums. Sanchez navigates the changes in unexpected ways, and shines particularly building upon the earthy angular zigzag of “Am Gone Get Some” (reprised here from 2022’s Seriana Promethea). If you like your horses frightened, then this may not be for you, but if you prefer your steeds to be thoroughly put through their paces then this could fit the bill.
Evan Parker + Barry Guy
Those two syllables burst forth with the spontaneity and vigor that have defined the duo’s all too rare ventures on record as duo over the last four and a half decades, but of course, the duo resides at the heart of recordings nearly too numerous to catalog. For those cognizant of these two creative giants’ boundary-bending work on a seemingly endless array of projects, it should go without saying that the truth in toto is much more complex. Like the music emerging from early 1950s French serialism, each note embodies the vastness in implication of its genesis, but in the moment, Guy and Parker also embrace the various shades of timbre, dynamics, and microtone around and between them, chaining instant to instant by highlighting the freedoms each might entail. Guy and Parker’s combined syntaxes are immediately recognizable as individual entities, as the two solo centerpieces attest. Each player digs deep into an area while simultaneously exploring everything adjacent, sometimes ranging far afield indeed only to recapitulate in the most unexpected fashion. As is so often the case, on “Grit,” Guy’s bass is magically transformed into an ensemble merging timbral pointillism with cyclic multi-pitched percussives, but the widely spaced intervals at 1:23 relate back, if obliquely, to the rapid-fire arpeggiated descents with which he opens his astonishing miniature. Density then increases, each note a bridge to the muted plucks and knocks bolstering and surrounding it as buzzed tones signal a new but familiar terrain. To suggest that Parker engages similarly controlled freedoms while also defining areas of exploration is to posit, verily but incompletely, that Mahler and Bruckner shared a musical language. “Creek Creak[’s]” aptly homophonous title perfectly sums up Parker’s pithy gem, blooming from and nearly complete return to the inner exploration of a single pitch. Yet, via his ubiquitous circular breathing, he connects phrase to phrase with a natural series of atomic crescendos, a modified “Romanticism” similar to the points and waves informing Guy’s Fizzles and Symmetries, not to mention “Grit.” Each of Parker’s phrases is a line of points, each tapping into a tonal or sonic center while shaping its substance to his purpose. The two solos separate the third part of the titular triptych from its counterparts. It hardly seems possible that three relatively brief collaborative forays might present lifetimes in summary, but this is exactly what pours forth, and it would be folly hearing all this as anything but multiple generations’ triumphant commitment in encapsulation. I suggest headphone listening to sample each formal and structural nuance, a few of which must suffice here. The slow-burn birth and outreach of motivic tendrils opening the second part, so reminiscent of Birds And Blades’ meditatively glistening final studio piece, transitions in mere seconds to the increasingly “wordy” give and take Incision proffered in 1981. Guy’s always gorgeous glissando-heavy pizzicato bringing the final piece to life is complemented by the key-clacks and slap-back aerobatics of parker’s tenor. Those two instruments meld in miasmic mélange 5:05 into the first part, preconceptions of pitch, chord and melody made meaningless in the unity manifested only by similarly fostered symbiotic listening. The Hegelian back and forth at 8:20 harkens back to the interregistral leaps and melodically thorny Euro-free improv intricacies of the early Spontaneous Music Ensemble, where the two musicians planted the seeds fully flowering here. The recording is as superbly detailed as the humorously inflected applause following the final piece is well-deserved, but no description will pave the way for the sound in waves, troughs, sinewy scalar spirals, and spectacularly skewed returns that typifies these two languages in dialogic development, trope, and attendant history blurring with each polyphonic passage. That exuberant laugh was, after all, preceded by a fourth-based melody from Parker that may in fact be a quotation, itself anticipated by arco fourths from Guy, but this is bean-counting again. What pervades, what leads each gesture to the next and unifies it all, is that exultant energy, the rushes of wide-eyed innocent experience inhabiting the moment of creation, each moment a convergence of differing particulars, each extending the last with fearful logic while wiping the slate clean, and so it goes!
Tomeka Reid Quartet
Expanding upon the intuitive language established by her quartet with guitarist Mary Halvorson, bassist Jason Roebke, and drummer Tomas Fujiwara, Reid follows up the group’s eponymous debut, Tomeka Reid Quartet (Thirsty Ear, 2015), and sophomore effort, Old New (Cuneiform, 2019), with 3+3, the ensemble’s most adventurous recording yet. Having previously written mostly short, tuneful pieces, for this album Reid chose to compose longer numbers that reflect her interest in free improvisation. Flowing together like a suite, three lengthy excursions capture the ensemble in a constantly evolving, four-way conversation, where any player can assume melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic duties. Similar to a set that the quartet might play in concert, this studio recording gathers momentum over several distinct movements, as the group navigates dynamic shifts in mood and tempo. Working together for almost a decade, the group’s seasoned rapport enhances their interplay, elevated further by Reid’s newfound embrace of electronics; her expanded sonic palette can make it difficult to tell where her bowing and Halvorson’s fretwork diverge. Reid’s percussive pizzicato and sinewy arco converges with Halvorson’s signature pitch bends, quicksilver fingerpicking, and unique chording. Underpinning their intrepid exchanges, Fujiwara’s forceful but subtle versatility is complemented by Roebke’s protean technique. The opener, “Turning Inward/Sometimes You Just Have to Run with It” slowly builds to a sprightly motif with a swinging, cymbal driven groove that inspires vivacious statements from all, including Reid’s vociferous bowing; Halvorson’s spidery runs; Roebke’s plangent thrumming; and Fujiwara’s blustery trap work, eventually coming together in a cacophonous climax that highlights Reid and Halvorson’s electro-acoustic synchronicity. The winsome “Sauntering with Mr. Brown” opens with a pliant pizzicato solo by the leader, eventually demonstrating the unit’s practiced methodology of circumventing the traditional roles of soloists and accompanists. The finale, “Exploring Outward/Funambulist Fever,” begins with pointillist abstraction, episodically vacillating between spacious quietude and frenetic group improvisations that ultimately reveal some of Reid’s most lyrical playing on record. Maintaining dramatic tension until an abrupt conclusion, the quartet rallies after a roiling drum solo, transposing fleet call and response figures into dovetailing, unison themes. No other artist within the past decade has increased the profile of the cello in the contemporary creative improvised music scene more than Tomeka Reid. A consistent poll-winner, she was voted 2022 string player of the year by the Jazz Journalists Association and named a 2022 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, among other accolades. Beyond her improvisational prowess, Reid’s affinity for melody and her growth as a composer manifests in a harmonious writing style that keeps her quartet’s exploratory efforts accessible. While there is an irresistible thrill hearing Reid and Halvorson conjure a kaleidoscopic panorama of textures and timbres as they trade themes and variations throughout the date, it’s the collective efforts of the entire quartet that resonate most profoundly. With 3+3, Reid takes a major step forward as a keen improviser, refined composer, and magnanimous bandleader.
|