Hello, how about some music?
Few things less interesting than "jazz?/not jazz?" hand-wringing
Friends, I have been delinquent here. But before diving into another set of excellent jazz albums, I’ve written a couple of recent(ish) reviews of a couple great jazz(ish) albums over at Last Rites that might be of interest.
First, I reviewed Mama Killa, from the newly convened power(ful) trio of Ava Mendoza, gabby fluke-mogul, and Carolina Pérez: “no, it’s not jazz. It’s also not metal, nor yet again is it noise or drone or punk or post-rock. The only thing you can truly say this album is is a coming together of three voices who make a thrilling new chorus. Ava Mendoza is an avant-garde composer and guitarist who has played across all manner of musical sandboxes, and whose chosen instrument is as likely to churn into gutbucket caveperson blues as it is to scrape and squeal and shred like Joe Satriani tossed in a cement mixer. gabby fluke-mogul has a similarly heterodox approach to the violin, playing it clean or electric, wailing or whispering, in wild, scything solo improvisations or in deep conversations with others. Carolina Pérez has the heavy metal bona fides of the group, as the drummer for the bands Hypoxia and Castrator… yet her approach on the album, while certainly summoning up death metal’s righteous clatter, is altogether more nuanced and diverse than one might expect based on her prior pummelings.”
Check out the rest of the review at Last Rites here, and then head over to pick up a copy from Burning Ambulance.
And just the other day, I reviewed Enter the Misanthropocene, the second album from the noisy, metallic free jazz ensemble Abhorrent Expanse: “[this] music, then, will certainly evoke comparisons of similar artists and ensembles who have tread those same boards where metal and jazz stumble into a Sharks vs. Jets-style rumble – John Zorn’s Naked City and Painkiller groups, Australia’s Kurushimi, Ehnahre, Neptunian Maximalism, Chaos Echoes, and so on – but the most important thing is the mongrel movement of it all: Enter the Misanthropocene grumbles and groans, it oozes and clatters and slithers and jumps from the shadows. The midsection of the opening title track, for example, with its pillowy, cymbal-free buffeting of toms, feels like Aluk Todolo interpreting Einsturzende Neubauten’s Silence is Sexy, but then the closing minute or so rockets off into free-form guitar squall and hammering drums while the upright bass tries to walk itself right out of frame.”
Check out the rest of the review here at Last Rites, then grab a copy from the band via Amalgam Music.
Now onto today’s featured albums. I’m an overeager sucker for a cloying theme to unify a round-up, but I haven’t got one here other than “these are some albums I think are really quite nice and I hope you do, too.” Truly, though, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I do (or don’t) make “proper” space and time for music. Sure, one of the wonderful things about music is that, however you hear it, that’s how you hear it. On the bus, at a concert hall, shouted down by laughter with friends or muffled by tears in a cluttered room by ourselves: music is a part of the spaces we build.
But still, I can’t help sometimes feeling that I’m not doing it right. I’m very nearly constantly listening to music, but there’s a nagging sense that, hey, every album I hear, I should be hearing it fully (whatever that means). You can probably pencil in your own elbow patches and a thinking pipe in the mental image of some guy sitting on a leather chair in an immaculately appointed listening room. Maybe there are art deco coffee table books tastefully strewn. He listens twice, thrice, maybe four times in deep concentration. When you see him in your mind, do you think he knows that music better?
I think (and want) the answer to be “no,” but it still twists in me as a space of insecurity. Either way, though, here’s an important crux of it: as a listener (and as a writer), the best we can do is try to get beyond the question of “What is this music doing?” and into the question of “How is it doing this?” What we, as outsiders, can never know is: “Why is it doing this?” Yes, we can ask the musician, “Why did you write this? What were you thinking as you recorded it? What did you intend to convey?” But that suggests a fixity of lived experience as a listener that is altogether illusory. No matter how many times I might listen to a particular recording - the exact same arrangement of notes, the same historical document - I am never the same person each time, and therefore I am never hearing the same music each time. The great gift of music is that it walks with us. The experience of listening is always a subjective filtering of objective sound, so we remake it just as it remakes us.
Here are some albums that have walked with me lately.
Dan Weiss - Unclassified Affections
The nice thing about improvised music is that it seems to exist in two places at once: on the one hand, when you listen, there’s the thrill of knowing that this music could have been anything, gone anywhere; and on the other hand, there’s this idea that, given the players, the compositions, the recording - all that gooey history - it could not have been anything other than exactly what you’re hearing. Drummer and composer Dan Weiss’s latest album, Unclassified Affections, is a wonderful excursion into mystery, spaciousness, and tones so immaculate and pointillistic you can reach through the speakers to trace their lines.
Weiss wrote all eight pieces for this quartet rounded out by Miles Okazaki on guitar, Peter Evans on trumpet, and Patricia Brennan on vibes. Weiss’s compositions are long, arcing melodies often written for two or three of the voices in twitchy lockstep or close harmony. Brennan’s vibes often suffuse the songs with their glassy bloom of reverb, and even when Okazaki’s guitar or Evans’s trumpet run off into rougher explorations, there’s a softness and restraint that can turn the songs into something equally ghostly and comforting.
Even when a song puts the focus on a particular instrument, the quartet plays it like spokes off the same wheel. “Mansions of Madness” really showcases Evans’s range - at his lowest, he sounds like a bari sax, but he runs off into skipping arpeggios of spitting vocalizations and jumps huge intervals with legato smoothness. “Existence Ticket” lets Okazaki bring in some lovely, post-rock leaning twang, and even though Weiss takes the entire back half of “Holotype” for a drum solo, he mostly keeps his arms in tight, churning through bracingly taut tom and bass kick work that feels like a pillowy jackhammer operating several towns over.
“Consoled Without Consolations” opens with a brief, lovely arpeggiating theme that gets handed from Evans’s flugelhorn-smooth tone to Okazaki and then to Brennan, but when Weiss comes in, it’s with a curious slo-mo hip-hop beat. Right around the midpoint, Evans and Okazaki lock in, with the fluttering, overblown trumpet mimicking precisely the tremoloing guitar. Really, the key to this disarming and inviting album is that every pause, every spun-out lick that trades hands before you realize it, every cross-meter digression just makes your ear follow it further in. At around the 5-min mark of the closing track, Weiss switches into a straight-ahead breakbeat, which the band rides out for most of the tune until they unwind into a seriously beautiful, airy coda. Should we be blunt? This album is fucking great.
Ensemble Nist-Nah - Spilla
On Spilla, the Australian percussionist Will Guthrie, now based in France, leads the Ensemble Nist-Nah through nearly fifty minutes of some of the most otherworldly yet fiercely tactile music you can hope to hear all year. The ensemble - usually consisting of close to ten people - uses the instrumentation of traditional Indonesian Gamelan music alongside multiple drumkits to induce a trance state through tuned, percussive repetition that sometimes feel like one’s brain being massaged by a fluttering swarm of metallic crickets. That’s a really good thing, I promise.
Whatever you hear in these sounds depends entirely on your own musical history, but I hear things as disparate as the industrial music of Test Dept and Einsturzende Neubauten, the beatific ambient techno of Pantha du Prince and the Bell Laboratory, the abstract IDM of Autechre, and Tim Hecker’s spiritually parallel album Konoyo, made with a Japanese gagaku ensemble. But this music works best if you can approach it without predicate, without expectation, and just hum inside the vibrations it creates. The rustling clamor and din sounds, at times, like ships at dock sloshing and knocking into each other with the foggy lurch of waves lapping the shore. On some of the more pensive pieces, bell tones will just hang in the air like jeweled clouds, but on a song like “Pasang,” the movement of the ensemble feels just as indebted to West African music as to East Asian.
I recommend watching a live video of the ensemble performing, because it can add a muscular memory to the experience of listening to this studio recording. It helps to remind us that however abstract or mechanistic or windup toy-like this can sound, it is the product of hands and feet, wood and steel, strike and echo. The polyrhythms of Ensemble Nist-Nah become almost an instrument unto themselves, where the seemingly unpredictable rise and fall of tones and textures move together, then pull apart, like two moons orbiting a larger body, each fighting against and reaching toward the other. This core musical movement keeps reminding me of Italo Calvino’s beautiful Cosmicomics, and in particular the story “The Distance of the Moon.” This album is jaw-dropping.
Julia Úlehla and Dálava - Understories
Understories is an album deeply rooted in a specific place and culture, yet its breadth and piercing beauty give it a universal appeal, one that says, “If this music can so beautifully evoke the lived experience of someone else’s place and history, it means there is a music out there that can do the same for you.” Based in Vancouver, Dálava is a musical ensemble based in the folk music of Czechia, but they spin these old, simple songs out into skeins of alternately droning, ethereal, contemporary classical, ambient, noise, and churning psychedelic fragments. The anchor of Understories is Dálava’s vocalist, Julia Úlehla, whose great-grandfather apparently dabbled as some sort of Moravian Alan Lomax, collecting and documenting folk musics from his village a century ago. The ensemble’s musical shape is guided by Aram Bajakian, who builds these pieces primarily from guitar (but also adds piano, percussion, synths, and bass), and then it is given greater texture and depth by Peggy Lee on cello and Josh Zubot on violin.
The album is both haunting and haunted. Úlehla shapes and narrates each song with such a ghostly intensity that you may find yourself remembering a history you never learned. In its tactile groundedness and purity of tone, Understories sometimes feels related to the worldly darkwave of Dead Can Dance or the ethnomusicological phenomenon of Marcel Cellier’s Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares project, but while Úlehla does sometimes evoke Lisa Gerrard’s vocal tone, she uses such a range of timbre and intensity that it absolutely must be heard by fans of Diamanda Galás and Jarboe. Truly, Understories is a compelling reminder that the voice is an instrument, capable of just as much metamorphosis and mimicry as anything crafted by hands. On “The Way Down,” her voice quavers between timidity and quiet determination, almost crackling into hushed overtones that draw you in closer even as it feels like she’s drifting away, yet on “Phase Transition,” her voice rings out with strident ululations that seem to veer almost from laughter to despair and back, not to mention the vertigo-inducing illusion where her voice blends imperceptibly with the guitar as well as (I think) her own voice fed back through an effects pedal.
The entire album is a feast of sumptuous tone, hypnotic rhythms, and keening emotion. Bajakian’s piano on “Entanglement” is reminiscent of the Finnish neofolk greats Tenhi, and “Queen of Heaven and Earth” is achingly beautiful, with Lee’s cello a stately pulse above which all else hovers and drifts like the plaits of a willow tree crown stretching to meet the water. When the music tilts into more overtly ‘new classical’ terrain, you could easily imagine that you’ve stumbled across a lost entry in the ECM New Series, or something spiritually akin to Elina Duni’s Partir or Arooj Aftab. Yet Bajakian’s guitar often troubles the calm, jabbing and jostling to match the needs of the song, and when the music takes on a darker, more psychedelic bent, it reminds me a lot of Steve Von Till’s Harvestman project (and the Lashing the Rye album in particular). This is true of the slow, ominous build of the ten-plus minute “Way Up,” but also true of “Bowed Low,” which, with its utterly transfixing sandpaper guitar and fluttering string taps, is also a bit reminiscent of Quebec’s Menace Ruine. This is a gorgeous, riveting album.
Stephen Vitiello, Brendan Canty, Hahn Rowe - Second
Some of the finest listening experiences are born out of surprise. I went into Second thinking that, because of the other albums I knew on the Balmat label, it would be some kind of synthy/ambient abstraction. (On the ambient side of that fence, Patricia Wolf’s latest album on Balmat, Hrafnamynd, is a beautiful balm well worth your time.) Instead, this trio recording of guitar, drums, and violin is an absolute trove of opposites.
In truth, calling this an album of “guitar, drums, and violin” is absurd false advertising. Stephen Vitiello’s guitar improvisations and jam sessions formed the bedrock for each song, but then Brendan Canty (formerly of both Fugazi and Rites of Spring, and now also of the Messthetics) added not only drums but also bass and piano, with the finishing touches and overdubs courtesy of Hahn Rowe on violin, viola, 12-string guitar, and more. This makes Second sound like an academic exercise in sheer studio fuckery, but instead it’s volatile, impatient, and alive at every turn. “Piece 2 at 77bpm,” for example, almost sounds like if you took a Talking Heads song and stretched it out while giving the low-end a massive bump.
“First Improv” opens like a didgeridoo chorus of growling frogs, but then Canty’s drumming whips up such a hellacious thumping fervor that the piece almost becomes a stoner doom drone trip. “New Prepared Guitar” sounds like it will be a Vitiello feature, but instead Rowe’s string work layers in whines, harp-like plucking, twitchy, muffled pizzicato, and wooden body taps. “Rhythmic Rhodes” is a stretched-out dub, while “#6” is noisy, nervy, and streaked with Vitiello’s distorted guitar, sounding like something out of a Bill Laswell fever dream.
Although Second gets noisy at times, the effect is still of a paradoxically undisciplined focus. It’s as if each player is so intensely focused on the moment at all times that they just can’t be bothered. Play now, think later. The album moves through ambient, dub, post-rock, punk noise, Krautrock, and probably a dozen other things, yet it still feels like the unruly product of shared intention. A magical trip.
Zoo Too Trio - Poetry Legroom
It’s entirely possible that the warmly placid cover art for Zoo Too Trio’s Poetry Legroom album is doing a lot of the work for me, but to me this music feels animated by water. This trio session features Michael Cain on piano and keyboards, Keith Price on guitar, and Pheeroan akLaff on drums, and it is a mostly languid, friendly album that visits water in its many forms. Price’s guitar on the opener “O’Neil’s Bay” is like late afternoon sunlight dappling soft sand at the shoreline. akLaff’s cymbal work throughout the mystical chill of “Poetry Legroom Okinawa Children” is rain on a tin roof. The wistful ballad “Song 1 Day 1” is so slow it almost moves backwards, with Cain’s electric keys peppered gently by akLaff’s brushed snare and cymbals as if they are sculpting storm-swollen clouds in the distance.
“Waxing Gibbous” is a mysterious suspension that opens with what feels like free-association spoken word poetry set to sparse but insistent arpeggiations and pattering drums, as if you had cracked open a music box at the exact moment the music stopped. Eventually it opens up into a slow-driving two-step, almost a modal groove except it keeps moving up a half-step and then back, up and back. “Waltz for Gwen” is a Michael Cain solo that feels like pure Bill Evans homage. Poetry Legroom is a lovely album that is never in a particular hurry to get anywhere, instead reveling in the quiet work of planting a seed and watering it gently, using hands and patience rather than steel to move the earth. Water is like that, too.
The Westerlies - Paradise
The Westerlies are a New York-based brass quartet featuring two trumpets and two trombones. Wait, don’t leave. Did I play trombone in my youth? Do I have a psychological weakness for the mathematics of chamber music? Do you need the answers to these questions to be ‘yes’ before you consider diving into the liquid metal sheen of this warm, spit-shined album? Be better, everyone.
Paradise is certainly not a jazz album, but it also flexes its stylistic chops in broader directions than classical brass chamber music. Plenty of elements here feel indebted to the sort of music played by English coal mining brass bands, but there’s also an element of American folk melody, both in a ‘high’ sort of Aaron Copland vein and a rougher-hewn Appalachian twang. The compositions across the album are lovely, clockwork-intricate overlays of rhythm and close harmony, but my favorite thing about Paradise is that listening to it feels like an encounter with absolute roundness. The way the instruments swoon into each other makes the experience one of nearly all sustain, no attack. And although nearly every note across the album must have been meticulously planned, there are places where you can hear how the quartet likely came to these scores through play and improvisation. On “Louisiana,” for example, listen to the midpoint where the trumpets echo each other in such insanely close-lagged lockstep that you might mistake it for studio trickery.
“The Royal Band/Soft Music” traipses into an understated march, with percussion coming from some ambiguous source - maybe drums, maybe tapping on bells, maybe marching in place? - while on “Parting Friends,” the trombone is played with a barely-there buzzing exhalation that talks and mutters its way off-screen. “The Evening Trumpet” builds to an absolutely massive wall of sound with its trombone overdubs. On “Kerhonkson,” if you listen closely to how the music lives in its space, you can hear how it really makes use of stereo techniques - one of the trombones is panned all to the right, one of the trumpets is panned all to the left, and then the lead trombone and lead trumpet lines are mixed center-right and center-left, respectively. It sounds like a drily academic thing to think about, but not only does it give a more accurate illusion that you’re hearing the band located on a stage in front of you, it also allows your body to move through the music just as it moves through you.
If you’ve taken the time to read any of this, I appreciate you. Be well.