By Gary Chapin
The Lowlands Bar is the home, on Mondays and Tuesdays, to enough amazing improvised music that it’s starting to accrue to itself a light Studio Rivbea vibe. As Tim Berne’s haunt to which he invites an extraordinary plethora of musicians, Lowlands feels like the room where it happens. Everytime I get a notice of an event featuring David Torn or Ches Smith or Tom Rainey, I sorely lament the fact that I live 400 miles away.
All the more reason to celebrate (!) Out of Your Head for recording at the venue and presenting us with this streaming only release, the debut in a series of live, low-complication recordings.
When Berne started working with Aurora Nealand some years ago, he told me, “She’s kind of a shaman.” Listen to the past records with the two of them — a number of groups of musicians, along with the trio Oceans And (with Hank Roberts) — and the shaman line comes to make sense. The swells and eddies of her accordion have an organic, chaos theory through line that works so well with Berne’s effusive improv.
Berne dives deeper into the shaman space by inviting cellist Aliyan Ultan to the mix. Ultan, aside from killing on the cello proper, shows an extraordinary ability to manually and electronically manipulate the envelope of that instrument, creating not only different sounds, but different kinds of sounds. On top of that you’ve got Craig Taborn’s keyboards, sounding like Miles era electric piano, to genuine cathedral rocking organ, to more synthetic waves. When Nealand’s accordion, Taborn’s keys and Ultan’s cello play together it’s like continents sliding over each other, generating earthquakes and mountain ranges.
The final two pieces of the puzzle are Tom Rainey, who has never sounded stronger, and Berne himself. Deflection Pool is — like the Oceans And trio — in the high abstraction range of the swing-to-noise scale. But at least twice the music reaches a fever pitch of quantity and quality where I said, aloud, “Oh, my f*&^ing word!” Everything in between those moments is just as fascinating and delightful, if not quite so shocking. Berne’s melody is the dark wonderful story that takes place on this dense transcendent planet. And Rainey’s drums! Rainey’s drums … well, metaphors are failing me. (“At last!” I can hear some of you say.) Five stars.
Looks Far Woman - Aliya Ultan (Kou 2026)
Looks Far Woman sits in one of my favorite subsets of the autre set: the solo cello recording. Since Tom Cora’s Gumption in Limbo(1987) I have had a deep affection for such things. Ultan’s song cycle is ritual, using repetition, melody, and out music in a trance-making way without ever becoming ambient. Her playing and electronics shape the envelope of the sound so that it alters the space of the listener’s room and fills it. I did not expect to be so thoroughly compelled to stop what I was doing and listen. Ultan’s approach is deeply spiritual, Looks Far Woman being a figure in her own mythology. These pieces unfold such stories, or maybe they draw them from you. Also, five stars.
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