Moment's Notice
Reviews of Recent Media
(continued)
João Madiera + Magarida Mestre
Voz Debaixo
4 Da Record 4DRCD011
Carlos “Zingaro” + João Madiera + Sofia Borges
Trizmaris
4 Da Record 4DRCD013
For years, Portugal was barely on the map of improvised music in Europe. Violinist Carlos Zingaro was largely responsible for it not falling off the edge throughout the 1970s and into the ‘80s, working with, among others, Kent Carter and Joëlle Léandre. In the past twenty years, Rodrigo Amado, Luis Lopes, and their associates began to fill the ranks and gained international stature. Yet, improvised music communities require a deep bench to become impactful domestically, and not just the subject of the occasional notice in foreign outlets. Bassist João Madiera, percussionist Sofia Borges and vocalist Margarida Mestre are among an increasing number stepping up to the task, the resulting growth making Portugal’s one of the more interesting communities on the continent.
Voz Debaixo – voice below – is an intriguing collection of pieces that also employ Madiera’s guitar and field recordings. The project was instigated by Pierre Boulez’s question about poems: Are they to be sung or spoken? Using texts from sources as diverse as Lewis Carroll and Abel Neves – the poet/playwright/novelist who resisted the revision of his early works to comport with the New Spelling Agreement of 1990 creating a uniform Portuguese orthography – Madiera and Mestre created a rabbit hole for the listener to delve into and hear text morph and merge into vivid soundscapes. The bromide that committed listening yields a rewarding experience certainly applies here.
Recorded at Lisbon’s BOTA cultural center, Trizmaris makes a solid case for Zingaro’s standing in the full narrative of European improvised music, and his status as eminence grise among Portuguese improvisers. There is a cohesion throughout the four improvisations that suggest the trio is a going concern. Zingaro nimbly skitters, saws, and soars as the music swells and recedes. He and Madiera repeatedly meld textures, which Borges instantly highlights with just the right sound from her kit and auxiliary percussion. In the process, the trio cultivates a middle ground between assertion and reflection, an in-between space that is engaging on a moment-by-moment basis.
–Bill Shoemaker
Bill Orcutt
How to Rescue Things
Palilalia PAL-079
On paper, guitarist Bill Orcutt’s “with strings” album How to Rescue Things shouldn’t work. It jettisons all the conventions, history, and expectations the phrase might suggest: no large ensemble, no big-name arranger, no Great American Songbook, nothing that has made the “with strings” album a common trope in jazz and improvised music. Orcutt’s incarnation of the form is surprisingly simple: just him improvising potent electric guitar lines over samples, excerpts, and loops lifted from 1950s and 60s easy listening records. Think 101 Strings, the Ray Charles Singers, and Mantovani – the sorts of universally unwanted records that plague thrift shop bins. Cheesy strings, barely sentient choirs, harps, bells: what was once ubiquitous throughout middle-class America and now the schlockiest of the schlock turns out to be Orcutt’s perfect musical interlocutor.
On the title track, and generally throughout the album, Orcutt will repeat the same motive, working with it, cracking it to work at its truth. He will occasionally follow the shape of the string or choir line and diverge from there. There is a deep use of rubato. Certain notes ring out, left to hang and drift; others are worked through as fast as possible on the way to new ground. The solo harp on “Old Hamlet” resurrects itself in the spaces between Orcutt’s phrases to become an almost equal partner. The past finding new life. Throughout “Not Reconciled” Orcutt gently intones “oh my God.” In response to a discovered profundity? A personal loss? Or is it a simple prayer? The sung “amen” – complete with the closing amen cadence – would suggest the latter. Who are these nameless, forgotten women and men in the choir on “Pylon Pylon!,” whose “ah-aah-ah-aahs” and “ah-oooh-oh-oohs” provide the scaffolding and counterpoint to Orcutt’s sizzling, plasma-cutting sound – their voices usually left sitting in a dusty thrift shop bin, only to be rediscovered and repurposed? On “Requiem in Dust” Orcutt moves on from the choir, instead dialing in a soaring string section. His furious picking of a repeated note grates against the lush orchestration as if he is attempting to force the past into giving up its secrets. The final cut, “The Wild Psalms,” announces itself with an orchestral fanfare that is cinematic in scope. It has something of the feel of old Hollywood and is almost grandiose enough for us to forget that the moldering remains of old Hollywood have been paved many times over.
With this most unconventional “with strings” album, Orcutt has found beauty in the detritus of mid-century consumerism, tapping into something of an American melancholy. Using music from a period of that holds the greatest source of nostalgia for the American dream, Orcutt created a somber and deeply moving statement. At a moment where the dream of a better future is on the precipice of being lost, Orcutt suggests there are solutions yet to be found, musical or otherwise. How to Rescue Things: not so much a how-to manual but a guide and inspiration for imagining a newly possible drawn from things long forgotten.
–Chris Robinson
Ricky Riccardi
Stomp Off, Let’s Go: The Early Years of Louis Armstrong
New York: Oxford, 2025
As director of Research Collections for the Louis Armstrong House Museum, Ricky Riccardi has easy access to the mother lode, materials assembled over decades, including many recorded reminiscences and conversations, and Pops’ unpublished (or pre-edited) memoirs. Stomp Off, Let’s Go is the third, final, and chronologically earliest installment of his serial Armstrong biography. The influence of Riccardi’s 2011 debut What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years may be judged by current discourse about the All-Stars. Nowadays folks assert as if they believe it that late period Armstrong music is as great as anything he did in, say, the 1920s. Readers of online new-music journals may prefer the innovator to the entertainer, but even Lester Bowie reckoned with Pops’ 1963 “Hello, Dolly.” (You can blame producer Jack Kapp for the strings on that, but the banjo was trombonist Trummy Young’s idea. So Riccardi has told us.)
The author says he was motivated to write about Armstrong’s well–picked-over 1920s as additional materials kept cropping up: police-blotter newspaper clips; the files of dogged New Orleans researcher Tad Jones; an unfinished Lil Hardin autobiography she’d worked on with Chris Albertson; 1969 BBC interviews with Louis and with Lil ... Much of what Riccardi tells us is of a personal nature. Armstrong’s second autobio Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans revels in the rough and tumble and colorful characters of the old neighborhood, and Riccardi (echoing Thomas Brothers’ big-picture study Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans) fills in the rap sheets of Black Benny Williams and company. An article about Stomp Off in the Guardian focused on the many times Louis’ mother and sister were arrested on prostitution-related charges. Riccardi is Armstrong Booster Numero Uno, but has no reason to hold back about such family matters: the grinding poverty Louis came from (a world, let’s remember, where women’s work options were circumscribed) makes his rise the more triumphant. And those arrests play into old Storyville stories about the music’s carnal roots. (And fairly so: the music’s foundation is earthy. So-called dirty timbres are fundamental to jazz and the improvised musics derived from it). Riccardi carefully assembles all the facts he can find (assembled piecemeal, clearly – organization can be a little haphazard) which makes Stomp Off a new go-to when looking into the particulars of Pops’ first three decades. Riccardi’s not much for analyzing the music – we have the likes of Brian Harker for that – but he sketches a good picture of how Louis viewed his own playing, and how his contemporaries heard it at the time and in hindsight.
From testimony here, Armstrong had his concept before he had a horn. Pianist Richard M. Jones would recall that when Louis was a kid with his vocal quartet, he’d whistle the kind of phrases he’d play later. (He’d whistle later, too – when he and Lil were together, she heard him approaching home from a block away – again, whistling them before he was playing them: “all those riffs that he later made in his music, ... such beautiful riffs and runs and trills.”) He didn’t record “The Saints” until the 1930s, but it was in the repertoire at the Colored Waif’s Home where his musical education began. There he and friendly rival cornetist Kid Rena shared a precocious interest in high notes. (Later Louis collected records with dramatic high-note endings: Caruso, Sousa-band cornet Herbert L. Clarke.) His finishing school was Fate Marable’s band that played the Mississippi riverboats – where Louis learned to read and to negotiate varied repertoire. He quickly broke an incipient bad habit: inflating his cheeks when he blew, Diz-like.
The musical story really gets moving halfway through, when he arrives in Chicago and begins recording. Life up north: In October 1923 the Klan held a rally in Richmond, Indiana on the same day King Oliver’s band recorded there for Gennett.
His idolizing Oliver aside, we think of Pops as an original, but he comes from a oral tradition in an insular town where everybody was listening to (and learning from) everybody else and intellectual property issues were moot. (Dozens of New Orleans players of diverse instruments, Louis included, knew Alphonse Picou’s “High Society” clarinet solo. Decades later Bird and Konitz quoted it.) In Chicago and New York, Armstrong dispensed a little traditional New Orleans wisdom, if under his own byline. Sidney Bechet’s reaction to Louis’ solo on Oliver’s “Snake Rag” (and behind Maggie Jones on “Good Time Flat Blues”): “That’s Bunk” – meaning Johnson, about whose influence Louis sent mixed signals. Older NOLA horn players in the 1950s listening to “Cornet Chop Suey”: that fancy diminished-chord ending, he’s doing Buddy Petit! Sometimes the homage was explicit: he’d trot out King Oliver’s classic “Dippermouth Blues” from time to time (as in the movie New Orleans’ Chicago sequence), ditto Oliver’s “Jazzin’ Babies Blues” solo. He’d repurpose his own solos: a chorus Louis took on Bessie Smith’s “Cold in Hand Blues” returns, jauntier, on the Hot 5’s “Gut Bucket Blues.”
Notably absent from Riccardi’s New Orleans discussion: earthy cornetist Chris Kelly, often mentioned alongside Petit as an unrecorded powerhouse. Thus do figures fall by the wayside. Where the author does get down in the musical weeds, his readings are not always persuasive. He imagines Pops having a fit at fellow soloist Bechet’s scene-stealing on the first two-thirds of Clarence Williams’ second “Cake Walking Babies from Home,” lashing out when he can stand no more, where it sounds to me like Pop patiently waits his turn before getting the last word and decisively besting Bechet. Riccardi avers Zutty Singleton plays a prescient ride-cymbal beat behind Earl Hines on “Savoyager’s Stomp,” but his unwavering chick-a-boom is unpersuasive.
Where historical evidence conflicts, Riccardi generally does a fair job of sorting through the variations to arrive at a probable truth: when did Armstrong first blow a horn, before or after the Waif’s home? (Maybe before, but only tootling like a kid.) He’ll sometimes invoke the biographer’s “must have” – a locution to be trotted out when something looks likely but can’t be proved. (On Lil: “It must have felt surreal for Louis to have a wife who was in his corner ...” But is surreal really the word he wants?) Only once do I catch him fudging the facts. In a much-referenced 1970 reminiscence, “Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family in New Orleans, LA., the Year of 1907” Pops goes on about how his coal-cart employers the Karnofskys would sing “Russian Lullaby,” a tune Irving Berlin wrote in 1927. Riccardi says Pops simply put the wrong title to the tune (sung by his doctor) that prompted his recollection, but Armstrong quotes Berlin’s lyric at length. Four times. And at least once Riccardi succumbs to what we might call the Schaap Fallacy: treating any musician’s claim of anything as true. “Though he would later date his switch from cornet to trumpet as occurring in Chicago the following year [1925], section mate Howard Scott remembered it happening almost immediately after Armstrong arrived” in New York, all other evidence to the contrary.
Occasionally he misses what’s right in front of him. Riccardi notes that in 1927, Armstrong’s booster at the Chicago Defender, Dave Peyton, suddenly dropped him to take up rival Reuben Reeves – noting without comment paragraphs later that Reeves was then a member of what was billed as Dave Peyton’s Orchestra.
A Lil Hardin anecdote Albertson collected circa 1962 rang a bell. She describes playing organ in church as a youngster, applying such a lively beat the preacher “would give me a questioning look over his spectacles.” Nina Simone had told a similar anecdote in 1958, and both accounts curiously echo a scene in Nat King Cole’s 1957 W.C. Handy biopic St. Louis Blues, where the offender is a young Billy Preston glared at by bespectacled Juano Hernandez.
Any book with so much detail will yield arcane treasures. Armstrong would have a long career in motion pictures, and took to the medium early. Playing for silent movies at Chicago’s Vendome theater with Erskine Tate in 1926 – the gig for which he actually switched to trumpet – Louis became so engrossed in the on-screen literary adaptation The Sea Beast, he lost his place in the score when Ahab lost his leg.
–Kevin Whitehead
Anna Thorvaldsdottir
Ubique
Sono Luminus DSL-92280
There is in Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s rapidly growing corpus a sense in which sounds act as molten objects. These are neither the concentric angles and squared waves of Morton Feldman nor the tones extended into curved lines of Pauleen Oliveros. Thorvaldsdottir builds with round-cornered blocks, sculpting forms of etched lines tenuously carved in something durable but malleable. Depending on how it’s perceived, Ubique, a composition for quartet and electronics composed in 2022 for flautist Claire Chase’s Density 2036 commissioning project, either distills her orchestral music for chamber forces or enlarges a smaller ensemble past facile comprehension.
The music defies boundaries even as they are erected. All players in this crack ensemble have long reveled in the shadowy borderlands conjoining improvisation and composition, and they bring their expertise to this single-take recording. Chase, cellists Seth Parker Woods and Katinka Kleijn provide something akin to linear harmony around the sonorities and fractured lines with which pianist Cory Smythe seasons the eleven-part work’s polyvalent draught. Those harmonies transfigure time by transcending it, chronological and otherwise. If the piece arises from and returns to a protoplasmic and quietly thunderous no-tone, or is it all tones rolled into one, the work’s morphing centers and tropes demonstrate disparity to match. While something vaguely reminiscent of a loosely “modal” late Medieval or early Renaissance aesthetic pervades the second and eleventh sections as the two cellos interweave contrapuntal threads, Chase’s linear fragments adorn the third part with razor-sharp arpeggiations a la early Stravinsky or Ravel that leap octaves with dizzying virtuosity, rendering the title, itself a kind of root word, entirely apt. In the second section, a syncopated rhythmic propulsion, never recurring in quite the same way, brings notions of the dance to the piece, Chase now in sibilance and percussive mode. By way of exquisite contrast, Smythe’s piano introspections, deep inside the instrument, imbue the sixth section with what The Fall’s Mark E. Smith might have called an icy calm. Amidst cello drones, the succeeding glacial ruminations ultimately usher in a return of that gorgeously “mannerist” take on tonal center but now with superimpositions of the third section’s arpeggios from Chase and Smythe.
On repeated listening, the whole, a recurrence of similar recurrences, resembles nothing so much as a chamber concerto with Chase’s stunning vocabularies of tone, timbre, and everything in-between informing its core. Key clicks vie for prominence against a Protean backdrop of breath, vocalization, and pitch fluctuations whose juxtaposed boldness and subtlety reveal new facets with each audition. To these ears, the final section, when her low flute tones are nearly buried in the slowly evolving drones, only her tremoloed breathing surfacing through the music’s liquid interior, sums up the facility of her approach to the obvious challenges Thorvaldsdottir presents.
A word must be said about Meyer Sound’s Constellation acoustical system, essentially a fifth member of the ensemble. There are moments of blatant but sinewy-soft electronics, rhythmic digital sounds amidst the thunder, but many more undercurrents of sonic manipulation are also in play. They shape an entirely plausible environment that unifies the music while also enhancing its incessant mutation. This is music whose invention is worn lightly but never casually, simplicity masking vast quantity of felicitous complexity that never draws attention to itself. The 45-minute recording is a sumptuous listening experience from beginning to end, or is it better to suggest, riffing on Guillaume de Machaut, that its end approximates its beginning?
–Marc Medwin
Anna Webber
simpletrio2000
Intakt CD 430
Each new album in the budding discography of Canadian saxophonist, flutist, and composer Anna Webber sounds like a step forward in the nebulous intersection between avant-garde jazz and new classical music. The wryly titled simpletrio2000 is the third album by Webber’s Simple Trio, following the group’s sophomore release Binary (Skirl, 2016), and debut, Simple (Skirl, 2014). Initially formed in 2013, Simple Trio is Webber’s longest-running band. The ensemble, which includes drummer John Hollenbeck and pianist Matt Mitchell – both veteran composers and bandleaders – performs Webber’s intricate compositions with an attention to detail that is anything but simple, although the complex music is often delivered with a buoyant flair.
Each Simple Trio release has explored different facets of composition. Although rhythmic complexity has long been part of Webber’s arsenal, for the band’s third effort, she focuses on polyrhythms. The pieces are built on jagged, start-stop rhythms and the repetition of elaborate contrapuntal lines that lend the proceedings a sense of tension and release, rather than discord. Webber’s multi-sectional compositions often assign two musicians to notated scores while allowing the third to improvise. Although much of the music is spirited, the album includes moments of restraint that counterbalance more frenetic passages. The ten tracks also include short solo pieces spotlighting each member, providing additional moments of introspection amid tightly woven group interplay: the intervallic lyricism of “Fixed Do” for tenor saxophone; the dramatically hastening piano chord progression “g=GM/r2” (the formula for determining acceleration due to gravity); and the resounding tuned drums feature “Ch9tter.”
“Slingsh0t” opens the recording with chiming refrains that progress into a terse harmonic sequence underpinned by brisk tempos in oscillating rhythmic patterns. “Idiom VII” advances polyrhythmic dalliances even further, evoking phrases played simultaneously backwards and forwards as tempos rush and falter with impressive accuracy; the flute-driven “Foray” exudes similar microtonal drama. “Five Eateries (In New England)” evokes a range of Ivesian textures in Mitchell’s plunging lines, Hollenback’s angular groove, and the leader’s warm tenor. The pointillist opening of “miiire” and the slow burn of “8va” provide temporary respite, while the final cut, “Movable Do (La-La Bémol)” is built on a cyclical motif underpinned by a labyrinthine clockwork groove, as Webber and Mitchell take turns alternating lead and support positions.
Throughout the program, Webber switches between tenor saxophone, flute, and bass flute, directing the mood with an array of tone colors and extended techniques. Mitchell’s staccato chording imbues the music with a shimmering percussive quality, while Hollenbeck’s precise, orchestral drumming provides a solid foundation, irrespective of meter. Together these three offer a continued inquiry into the limits of Creative Improvised Music, tempered by a subtle sense of humor. Marking a decade since the unit premiered, simpletrio2000 confirms the group as one whose distinctive approach boldly continues to push the music forward in an unforced and satisfying manner.
–Troy Collins