Are Tribute Albums Really of Interest?

By Stef

Who is really waiting for tribute albums? They are created with the best of intentions, to celebrate the music and memory of an admired and influential artist. On the downside, they are often the result of  musicians playing together without a shared vision on the sound they want to create, and with a performance that can never reach the level of the original. Tribute albums may be of interest to fans of the celebrated artist, but more often than not they are disappointments, and possibly even more to the interested fans.

The good thing is that they bring some older music back to your attention, and you will hopefully go to the original and enjoy its authenticity. Then you will understand why there is a tribute album in the first place.

But it is a sign of respect for the old masters, so who can be against that? True, yet on the other hand, why do you need masterpieces to be re-worked if the original is so good? Do painters make copies of Picasso's "Guernica"? Do writers re-write Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow"?


Dave Liebman & Joe Lovano - Compassion - The Music Of John Coltrane (Resonance Records, 2017)

No doubt Joe Lovano and Dave Liebman are wonderful sax-players, and the skills of pianist Phil Markowitz, bassist Ron McLure and drummer Billy Hart are among the best around. They were asked by the BBC, ten years ago, to perform to commemorate the 40th anniversary of John Coltrane's passing away. Not all material was released at that time, so today we get the unreleased tracks as a kind of 50th anniversary album.

The music is good. It is John Coltrane's music of course: "Locomotion", "Olé", "Equinox", and the long "Compassion". But then you wonder about the quality of it all. It falls short of the original ... and at quite a distance. Technically this is good, but it's not Coltrane, nor his band. Have you heard Coltrane play? The good thing about tribute albums is that you're forced to listen back to the original, and then you listen to Coltrane again, as I do now, at this very moment, playing Compassion, you're blown away by the man's incredible power, soul and expansiveness. Here is the man who lifted jazz out of the commercial confines of night clubs and bars and dance halls and gave it the status of "serious" music, as opposed to mere entertainment. Coltrane is the man who changed jazz from being just fun into something more existential, more spiritual, turning it into a complete listening experience. Then you listen back to Liebman and Lovano, and what you hear ressembles the original, but then with all life drained from it.


Sky Music - A Tribute To Terje Rypdal (Rune Grammofon, 2017)

American guitarist Henry Kaiser brought together a band to celebrate Norwegian guitarist Terje Rypdal for his 70th birthday, consisting of keyboardist and long time Rypdal side-kick Ståle Storløkken, bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, drummer Gard Nilssen, guitarists Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen, Even H. Hermansen, Hans Magnus Ryan, Finnish guitarist Raoul Björkenheim and Swedish guitarist Reine Fiske. Bill Frisell and David Torn deliver solo interpretations, Nels Cline and cellist Erik Friedlander play a duet. 

The opening piece, "Omen" by Frisell is as beautiful and calm as you can expect from the master. David Torn, like Frisell does not fall into the trap of trying to emulate Rypdal's sound, but gives his own personal rendition of "Avskjed". "What Comes After" is a wonderfully tense and meditative piece by Erik Friedlander and Nels Cline. I think it's the album's highlight, if only because they capture the spirit of Rypdal's music : desolation, expansiveness, emotional intensity and sonic inventiveness. "Sunrise", with Jim O'Rourke on guitar is also acceptable, but still a million miles away from the power of the original (with Jack DeJohnette and Miroslav Vitous). 

For all the other tracks you can wonder what the point is. Sure, the playing is good, and the guitarists lined up to play tribute to their role model know what they're doing on their instruments, but the overall musical vision and quality is quite well below the original. Tracks such as "Over Birkerot/Silver Bird Heads For The Sun" lack the sophisticated arrangement of the original with its sudden changes, its incredible power and darkness. 

The same can be said for "Rolling Stone", one of the most memorable tracks of Rypdal's masterpiece "Odyssey", which gets a lukewarm rendition here, again highlighting the fact that superb music is not only the result of having a strong composition, but also of performance and interplay. Where Rypdal created an incredible sense of space, leaving room for other musicians, taking time to build the pieces, here you have the musicians tumbling over themselves to show off their skills. You also need the musical vision, sensitivities and competence to make it connect with the listener. These guys know their instruments, but I wonder whether they understand the music. 

Various Artists - Celebrate Ornette (Song X Records, 2017)

On "Celebrate Ornette" we get a mix of various performances, one on which Ornette was present, at the age of 84, and even if he was not expected to perform, he still did (on the first two tracks). The performers are stylistically as widely apart as Joe Lovano and Patti Smith, Thurston Moore and David Murray, Laurie Anderson and Geri Allen. Of course, they don't all perform together but in various performances and bands, but even then, the musical unity is lacking. The performances are live, not well recorded and some of the performances are relatively chaotic and primitive, like you would expect from a jam band. That is unfortunately also the case with "Lonely Woman", a twenty-minute destruction of one of the most beautiful compositions ever, with a super band including Geri Allen, Joe Lovano, Branford Marsalis, Ravi Coltrane, David Murray, Wallace Roney Jr. and Denardo Coleman's quintet. Too many cooks spoil the broth. 

Some pieces are well rehearsed and performed as, with the Denardo Vibe, the band of Ornette Coleman's son Denardo, who turn "Blues Connotation" into a high speed fusion romp.

The more interesting pieces are the ones that go totally beyond Ornette's own style, as with the rendition of "Sadness" by Thurston Moore and Nels Cline. The two guitarists do something with the material. They make it all their own and bring something strong.

CD3 offers the best part of the album. It was recorded at Ornette Coleman's memorial after his passing away. The mood is of course completely different, one of reverence and sadness, with solo pieces by Pharoah Sanders and Cecil Taylor, a duet between Henry Threadgill and Jason Moran, a beautiful rendition of "Peace" by Ravi Coltrane and Geri Allen, an interesting duet between Jack DeJohnette and tap dancer Savion Glover. The "Lonely Woman" version with Joe Lovano, David Murray, Charnett Moffett, Al MacDowell and Denardo Coleman is more palpable than the previous one, but it still lacks the deepfelt soul and sadness that the composition requires. 

In sum, it's a little big of a mixed bag. I have the impression that this is just a quick collection of uneven material, with limited musical value. 


Various Artists - Tribute To Andrzej Przybielski Vol. 1 (Jazz Poznan, 2016)

The lesser known musician in this list who gets a tribute album is possibly Andrzej Przybielski, the Polish trumpeter who passed away in 2011, and who gets commemorated here by a selection of Poland's best musicians.

The band consists of Maciej Fortuna, Marcin Gawdzis, Wojciech Jachna, Tomasz Kudyk, Peter Schmidt and Maurice Wójciński on trumpet, Jakub Kujawa on guitar; Grzegorz Nadolny on double bass, and Grzegorz Daroń on drums.

We have reviewed some of Przybielski's later work on this blog before, and with enthusiasm. And I'm not familiar enough with the man's entire catalogue to be able to compare the tribute album with his original music. They perform four compositions by Przybielski and three collective improvisations.

The opening track, "Afro Blues", is not my kind of thing, I must say, with a strange loss of stylistic unity, in the shape of Kujawa's howling fusion guitar and the unison big band horns, too much showing off and not enough real music. The last track starts with a long text in Polish spoken by Przybielski himself, interspersed by some trumpet phrases, but of course for those who do not understand the language, this is literally meaningless, and for Polish people nothing more than interesting for documentary reasons.

Luckily, the rest of the playing is phenomenal, as in the hesitant and calmly growing "Free I", the bluesy "Free II", where the trumpeters take turn to solo over the slowest of tempi. "Arce" is a beautiful slow ballad, full of melancholy and sadness.

Surely Przybielski deserves a tribute, and I can only recommend interested listeners to find out more about him. It's great that his Polish admirers release a tribute CD for him, and with some more unity of style, this could have been a great tribute. Let's hope that Vol. 2 solves some of the issues of this album.

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Big Bold Back Bone - Emerge (Wide Ear Records, 2018) ****

By Derek Stone

Last year, Big Bold Back Bone released the perplexing and astonishing In Search of the Emerging Species. In that recording, the quartet scraped away the melodic and tonal associations of their respective instruments, often with unrecognizable results - Marco von Orelli’s trumpet became a sputtering tubule, a brassy extension of the lungs. Sheldon Suter’s prepared drums were a degraded pulse. Luis Lopes’s electric guitar crackled and fizzed. Travassos applied electronic noise in subtle strokes. That album revealed a group that was eager to tap into the raw physicality of the instrumentation they possessed; trumpets, guitars, drums, and analog electronics became alien artifacts that the players seemed to approach with equal parts curiosity and hesitation. 

Emerge, the group’s newest outing, finds them taking a similar, if more expansive, approach. One of the biggest changes lies in the presentation itself; instead of releasing one long track, they have split the album into several shorter ones. In Search of the Emerging Species (and it’s single track “Immerge”) was definitely not the most varied outing - nor did it need to be. With Emerge, on the other hand, the group have wisely decided to take a different approach, with the result that now they have given themselves the freedom to draw from different tonal palettes. While “Immerge” was a long-form exploration, with all the detours and circular movements that that implies, Emerge seems to be driven along by a more narrative flow.

As before, the players often seem to treat their instruments as bodily appendices, to be manipulated, fumbled with, and, at times, forced into odd contortions and tonal shapes. There are some surprises this time around, however. On “Tidings,” for instance, over an ominous wash of electronic scrapes and muffled percussion, von Orelli undertakes a brisk bebop solo. It’s jarring, like finding some decayed trace of human culture (a statue overgrown with moss, perhaps) in an otherwise barren wasteland. On the final piece, “Ground Found,” he takes a similar tack, darting minnow-like through the clouds of ink stirred up by Suter’s thunderous percussion, Lopes’s siren calls, and Travassos’s muted whirls. 

On other pieces, Big Bold Back Bone embrace the throbbing and minimal physicality that they utilized so well on their first release. “Silent Stream,” the opener, stays true to its title. Beneath von Orelli’s searching lines, Travassos’s electronics and Lopes’s guitar churn together, a pitch-black morass. “Sealust” cuts through this frothing mix of tones and textures and allows for the individual elements to be better discerned: Suter’s arrhythmic and clattering percussion, for instance, sounds like seashells being strewn along a rocky shore, while Von Orelli avoids full-throated phrasings entirely, opting instead for quiet gasps and spurts. 

Compared to the quiet intensity of the aforementioned pieces, the brief “Tentaculita” sounds absolutely gargantuan. Jagged shards of guitar and nervy, stop-start percussion propel the track forward; Travassos’s electronics shift tectonically underneath, while von Orelli veers between caustic expulsions and jittery cries. If the other pieces on Emerge came from trenches and geysers, “Tentaculita” is the sound of approaching the surface - predators and prey locked in a brutish dance. In its wake, “Mergulhador” (Portuguese for “diver”) is almost sublime. Lopes takes on a more skeletal and laconic approach, allowing Suter to fill up the empty space with loose clacks and peals that, despite how sparse they are, conjure up a great deal of tension. Von Orelli, meanwhile, offers up lines that are (for this recording, anyway) uncharacteristically melodious - they bob along in buoyant repose, belying the immense pressures underneath.

Emerge is sure to entrance fans of Big Bold Back Bone’s previous album, and it’s likely to win new fans as well. While it is by no means a turn towards accessibility, it is more digestible - perhaps due to the choice by the band to tackle shorter, more concise movements. Despite these “bite-sized” pieces, however, there is a sense of cohesion underlying the individual tracks, along with a sensation that you are being propelled forward by some ineluctable current. At the end, you may not feel that you’ve reached any destination at all - but you’re likely to find that the ride was well worth it. 

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Samuel Blaser with Marc Ducret & Peter Brunn – Taktlos Zürich 2017 (Hatology, 2018) ****½

 

By Chris Haines

Conventionally a jazz trio is generally seen as the minimum forces that would be needed to render the main characteristics and most important aspects of a tune. Rhythm, harmony and melody can be nailed down by a trio, providing at least the basic ingredients needed to make a good stab at the piece in question. However, the trio in it’s most traditional sense (say with a piano) and as a functional unit par excellence, has little resources left for additional harmonies, extra counter-melodies, colouration and ornamentation beyond what is idiomatic for the instrumentation.

Samuel Blaser’s trio on Taktlos Zurich 2017 eschews the more obvious musical elements, as much free improvisation does, in favour of such things as colouration, ornamentation as well as what appears to be an additional emphasis and concerted effort on space. At times the instrumentation of the trio is opened-up, such as on the very opening of the first piece ‘Stoppage’, where the trombone’s muted tones, a percussive bell-like sound, and guitar volume swells sound more in-keeping with a piece of Gagaku (ceremonial court music of Japan) that has been highly theatricalised. It’s not until about halfway through the twenty-four and a half minute track that a funky groove is introduced and the trio fall into a more traditional role of rhythm section and soloist, however, this is just an episode before the musical focus is shared around once more. The album contains five pieces across four separate tracks, three of them credited to Marc Ducret, one to Blaser, and the other, which is the second piece on the album, is based on a theme by the classical composer Stravinsky. This piece merges into another Ducret penned idea, ‘Useless Knowledge’, which continues to demonstrate the uncluttered vibe that hangs through all the music on the album, evoking a soliloquy from the trombone with just the most delicate colouration from Ducret’s guitar and Brunn’s minimal percussive ornamentations. Blaser’s ‘Jukebox’ starts with solo trombone, before being joined by sparse percussion, and guitar alternating between angular motives and fast unison passages with the trombone, at which point Ducret takes up the solo focus, again allowing for much musical space before Blaser brings in a different colour with a muted sound. The last piece, and second longest on the album, starts with a sustained violin-like timbre on the guitar, with the airy and spacious atmosphere reminiscent of the opening strains of King Crimson’s improvised piece ‘Providence’, before moving into another theatrical sounding form, not unlike a musical accompaniment to an imaginary Kabuki play, then settling on a riff which guitar and trombone both take turns to hold down, develop, and improvise over.

I’ve listened to this album a lot over the last several weeks, and it still has lots to offer, the intricate interplay between the musicians, doesn’t give up all it’s secrets lightly and still continues to give more as one attunes to the music’s and musicians’ level of interaction, which is meaningful with regard to communication and intent. There’s a lot of listening on this album between the musicians and that is clearly where the ‘musical space’ within this music comes from. Ideas seem to be offered with care, and a certain degree of ritual, before being carefully examined, utilised, developed and packaged with the greatest respect to each other’s playing. This is more than music; this is a musical ceremony of liturgical functioning embedded within a theatrical performance, where the emphasis on musical dialogue does the talking.

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Sons of Kemet - Your Queen Is A Reptile (Impulse, 2018) ****

By Martin Schray

In his book Black Talk from 1979, Ben Sidran shows how black music has expressed, consciously or not, its African 'oral' heritage, reflecting the conditions of a minority culture in the midst of a white majority. He tries to explain the cultural basics of black music and how the music itself supports these basics and preserves them. Oral culture is both medium and impulse of black culture, transcending formal analysis in order to pass on a specific experience and authentic emotions. His central thesis is that black music is not only an extraordinary aspect within black culture, it doesn’t just reflect it, instead it is of crucial, indispensable importance - in fact it’s the foundation of black culture. According to Sidran, oral culture as a means of communication is based on immediacy. One of the advantages of this form of communication (in contrast to "literate culture") is to interact spontaneously since you’re forced to improvise and react very quickly. Sidran quotes Huey Newton, a prominent member of the Black Panther Party, who claimed that the black community was based on activity, their members didn’t get their knowledge from books which is why black protagonists had to be regarded as activists.

Your Queen Is A Reptile, Sons of Kemet’s third album, stands in this tradition. It’s the band’s first one since the 2016 Brexit vote, and it directly attacks British nationalism, racism, social inequality and the monarchy. British society is presented as one of contrasts, illustrated by you (the whites) and us (black immigrants) - and even if this oversimplifies the social situation, it’s a powerful dichotomy in order to provoke. The image used on this album is the one of the Queen. The liner notes state:

"Your Queen considers herself our better; by right of blood, by way of lineage, by grace of conquest, by the reason of tyranny, by the confidence of tradition.  (…) Your Queen is financed by our taxes, which in turn validate the injustice of class and race discrimination of Great Britain. (…) We the immigrants, we the children of immigrants, we the diaspora, we the descendants of the colonized, we claim the right to question your obsolete systems, your racist symbols, your monuments to genocide. (…) Your Queen is not our queen. She does not see us as human. And we see ourselves as humans. We judge our worth, not by Christmas speeches or golden jubilees, but by deeds. Our Queens walked among us. Our Queens led by action, by example, our Queens listened."

Here Shabaka Hutchings, the 34-year-old saxophonist, bandleader and activist, offers his version of a royal family, juxtaposing visionary black women like Yaa Asantewaa, the Ashanti queen mother who fought against British colonialism in the early 20th century, longtime radical feminist and author Angela Davis, and his own great-grandmother, Ada Eastman, to the British Queen*.

Sons of Kemet’s music is very aware of black history. But for Shabaka Hutchings memory isn’t enough, Sons of Kemet’s music is "about finding ways of reinterpreting how we’re thinking about it." For him, black cultural history isn’t something he has to preserve, it’s the starting point for a new way of criticizing politics and society - in this case in the UK. In "My Queen Is Ada Eastman", the album’s opener, guest vocalist Joshua Idehen rants:

"I must admit, it's tough at times / But most don't like it, I dive in / This never never never never / Ending pressure piling on / I'm still here still unruly / All sound and all fury /All frown and all fury / All gas and all fury / No peers, no jury / Burn UKIP, fuck the Tories / Fuck the fascists, end of story."

All this is accompanied by a polyrhythmic groove. Apart from Hutchings the band consists of Theon Cross on tuba and Tom Skinner and Seb Rochford on drums (on three tracks Rochford is replaced by other drummers). The idea to integrate a tuba instead of a bass is reminiscent of the New Orleans brass bands, another tribute to black music history. It gives the songs a rhythmic fundament that bubbles rather than growls, creating a warmer, jouncing, and elastic sound.

Another outstanding track is "My Queen Is Mamie Phipps Clark," named for the social psychologist who researched the development of self-consciousness of black preschool children. Hutchings uses dub and Afrobeat elements in this song. Fronted by Congo Natty, who was one of the musicians that launched jungle in the early 1990s, the track quotes Ragga rhythms and the Studio One sound. A strong reverb is put under Natty’s vocals which echoes songs like "Ghost Town" by The Specials or "Freedom Sounds" by The Skatalites, supported by Hutchings’ Caribbean sax cries and Theon Cross’s grumbling, guttural tuba.

Every song on this album is pure fun, for example "My Queen is Yaa Asantewaa" with its dreamy jazz sax melody line which morphs into an pulsating improvisation reminding me of the John Lurie National Orchestra, or "My Queen is Harriet Tubman" with its joyful, mad sax excursions evoking Nigerian Jùjú music.

Last but not least, Your Queen Is A Reptile is Sons of Kemet’s first release on Impulse!, the label that was home to Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, and Pharoah Sanders (to name only the most famous ones) and which was re-launched a few years ago. This adds another dimension to Hutchings’ relationship with black music, being put in one line with some of the greatest names in jazz. Maybe this might get Sons of Kemet access to mainstream audiences, this album would deserve it. Move your ass and your mind will follow!

* Other black women/queens mentioned are Mamie Phipps Clark, Harriet Tubman, Julia Cooper, Nanny of the Maroons, Albertina Sisulu and Doreen Lawrence.

Your Queen Is A Reptile is available on double vinyl and on CD.

Listen to “Your Queen Is Ada Eastman“ here:

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Sonar with David Torn - Vortex (RareNoiseRecords, 2018) ****

By Paul Acquaro

Sonar is a mathematically oriented, rhythmically-based quartet from Switzerland, and recently, they've became a temporary quintet with David Torn adding a third guitar and his unconventional looping and sound manipulations to their newest recording Vortex. 

The core group is comprised of Stephan Thelen and Bernhard Wagner on guitars, Christian Kuntner on electric bass, and Manuel Pasquinelli on drums. Aside from playing with the band, Torn also produced the album, giving the group a big sound with deep bass tones and stratospheric guitar highs.

The opener 'Part 44' begins reminiscent of the gamelan inspired sound of King Crimson ala Discipline. 'Red Shift' kicks off with a heavy riff, and at a break, you can almost hear Adrian Belew begin to sing 'frame by frame/death by drowning." However, the group quickly switches modes to a lighter more ambient groove and slowly builds up to a majestic peak of sustain and inspiring dissonance. 

The track 'Monolith' offers a respite from the sometimes too precise time signatures. Spacious and austere at the beginning, the track builds very slowly, the guitars lock into a pattern with the bass and drums but leave plenty of room for the crunchy guitar that enters later. The title track is one my favorites, again the sense interlocking rhythms are a bit lower in the mix and a melodic loop full of mysterious intervals overlays the minimal drum work. When Torn (I assume) enters, he's soaring above the groundwork like an IMAX camera mounted to a bald eagle. 

So, while the group isn't new, Vortex is their 4th album, their sound is fresh and exciting. Dense but atmospheric, calculating but not quite math-jazz, give it a listen, it just may surprise you.

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Zeena Parkins - Three Harps, Tuning Forks & Electronics (Good Child Music, 2017) ****½

By Stef

One more album which should have been reviewed much earlier, one more album that demonstrates the power of music and the possibilities of creativity. Parkins is known from her compositions for dance, film and for her collaborations with a multitude of artists in jazz, pop and avant-garde classical music. She changed the boundaries of playing the harp, by adding extended techniques, and by her own custom-made electric harps.

On this album she takes it even a step further, inviting three other harpists, Nuiko Wadden, Kristen Theriault and Megan Conley to perform her music. It is not always clear who plays what or even when Zeena Parkins participates herself or not. Parkins is credited with playing harp, but also EBows, basting brushes, metal bolts, rubber/hard yarn and wooden mallets, 2 inch ribbon and electronics.

The music is special and very precious in a way. It is light-textured and well-paced. On the first track all strings are muted, which gives a wonderful playfulness to the interaction, with rhythmic complexities increasing the fun even more. "Determined", the second track, deconstructs the acoustic performance, electronically but not always, dragging the sound out for instance, or multiplying it into a myriad of little sounds, or creating wonderful contrasts between stretched tones and plucked strings, laying a dark foundation under otherwise innocent chimes.

"Mouse" changes the approach: it becomes like the soundtrack for a shy mouse getting out of its hiding place, tentative and hesitating, looked at with sympathy. It is fun and by itself full of changes of sound and perspective.

Ikue Mori joins on one track, "Tuning Forks" with her electronics, and I assume that Parkins is the other artist here. The sonic change is of course radical. The plucking of strings is replaced with stretched electronic tones, tuning forks resonating against the harp and other extended tones, possibly played on one string of the harp. The atmosphere is light, welcoming and at the same time bizarre, because a lot happens that defies definition.

"Drumming" starts with very rhythmic arpeggios, with complex changes for the other harps to interact with, sometimes at different tempi and harmonic shifts. It's title starts justifying itself after 2:30 minutes, when the instruments are used as percussion instruments, again with clearly composed interaction. The tune changes again to calm plucking, then sawing sounds take over, with insistent intensity.

We are far from free improvisation here, and definitely no jazz is to be discerned, but that doesn't matter. Parkins creates her own musical universe, one of inventive sonic chiaroscuro, in which sounds are used to give depth and perspective to other sounds, deliberately seeking contrast and unity, and by doing that offering us sounds that we've never heard before.

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While We Still Have Bodies - s/t (Neither/Nor, 2017) ****½

By Eyal Hareuveni

How one can create music of madness? Or music that will follow the process of a man who turns mad, in a far away, foreign culture and in a different era?

The New York-based experimental quartet While We still Have Bodies - trombonist Ben Gerstein, double bass player Sean Ali, sax player Michael Foster, and percussionist Flin van Hemmen, planned to record their debut album on the summer of 2017, but then was contacted by Chinese media-artist Cheng Ran. Ran asked the quartet to record music for his multi-video installation exhibition “Diary of a Madman” at the New Museum in New York. This exhibition borrowed its title from what is widely considered China’s first modern short story, written by Lu Xun in 1918. Just as Lu Xun’s story, the Ran’s exhibition comprised first-person narratives of a character at the margins of society who gradually turns mad.

Ran’s offer turned out to be an inspiring one. While We still Have Bodies has operated since its foundation in 2014 as a sonic lab that explores intuitive, sometimes unintelligible textures that challenged the musicians methods, routines, and perceptions. The quartet focused on experimenting with sounds that transcended the individual musical personalities, blending and contrasting sonic textures, long and immersive musical forms, and an integration of pre-recorded media (cassettes, radio, mp3 players, cellular phone) into acoustic textures.

The music for Ran’s exhibition was spatialized over twelve speakers that were spread throughout the gallery, providing an ambient soundtrack to the several separate but interconnected story-lines of Ran’s video-films. On the recording, each instrument has a left and right channel, thereby creating spaciousness and intensifying the overall feeling of losing your way and total confusion.

While We still Have Bodies prepared a single, extended improvisation, imbued with an enigmatic, ritualistic motives. The musicians act, all over the place, more often than play - in any conventional sense of playing, re-contextualizing their instruments and their timbral affinities, and their role as improvisers in the theme of the exhibition, as can be seen in the attached video. The arresting, yet very demanding outcome is a nuanced but totally spontaneous process of constructing and deconstruction of sounds. A non-judgemental process of integrating sounds into a bigger, deeper whole. All sounds - sparse, fractured, cryptic and more intelligible ones, noisy, acoustic, of low-fi electronics and of found objects.

And these sounds have an arcane quality and even almost hallucinogenic power. These sounds shatter inhibitions, open doors to new ways of listening, force you to relate to these almost tangible reality and invite you to embrace the unknown. The mysterious, vibrant trances shift organically into rattling, heavy resonating sounds, to tortured collages made of noisy tapes,to atmospheric soundscape and even raw and intense outbursts of muscular free jazz. While We still Have Bodies does not attempt to gravitate this sonic experience into a clear narrative, structure or rhythmic patterns, but this open, all-inclusive attitude does not interfere with the quartet collective and highly impressive senses of interplay and invention.

Warmly recommended.

Listen and download from Bandcamp.

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Quoan - Fine Dining (Orenda, 2018) ****

 

By Lee Rice Epstein

I want to start by highlighting the production on Quoan’s Fine Dining. This acoustic quartet’s debut, recorded live, is captured pristinely. There’s a lushness rounding the edges of the frame, so to speak. Brian Walsh’s clarinets (including bass and contrabass), Dan Rosenboom’s trumpets and flugelhorn, Sam Minaie’s double bass, and Mark Ferber’s drums each resonate in the mix, adding breath and life and a sense of motion to a set of both composed and improvised originals. High praise? You bet. The session was recorded in Highland Park, and Orenda’s building out a new studio this year. Except a lot of beautiful-sounding albums to start coming out of LA. The layers of care and attention run deep, underscoring the overall lightness and joviality in the group’s performance.

And then there’s the music, of course. Seven compositions (four from Walsh, three from Rosenboom) are woven together with five group improvisations, giving all the players plenty of room to stretch out. Several of the composed tunes run nearly 10 minutes, leaning into the players’ long history of performing together: Walsh and Rosenboom have played together, Rosenboom and Minaie are both in DR. MiNT, and Ferber played drums on Minaie’s 2017 album Heyo! That familiarity leads the players down some interesting paths, heard right out of the gate on “The Last.”

The opener has some echoes of Masada, with Minaie and Ferber locking into bouncing groove that segues into a fusion-style funk during Rosenboom’s mid-song solo. It’s one of the early moments on the album of players signalling a turnaround to the others. Walsh gamely responds with an unhurried solo, featuring some excellent runs. “Fist” opens with a fast, boppish melody in the Don Cherry vein, only to take a left turn after 15 seconds. This Walsh composition has all four players improvising on some kind of extended technique during the middle section, before the melody cracks back into place. The two brief minutes of the album is a nice breather, and I can see this easily getting longer in a live setting. On the following track, “216,” the horns play Rosenboom’s seesaw, sing-song melody, while Minaie and Ferber lay down a swinging, driving rhythm. Rosenboom and Walsh are such great improvisers and players that you can almost forget what excellent composer they are. The melodies on Fine Dining are often hummable earworms, and, like “216,” they lock instrumentation together in fascinating ways. On the closer, “Braids and Brooms,” Walsh cleverly features himself and Rosenboom solo, before layering the two in a strikingly emotional unison.

The mediative closer serves as something of a tribute to the format itself, the acoustic pianoless quartet, bringing it back to its birthplace, the city where Ornette first honed his sound, before he landed at the Five Spot. There’s over a half century of history in Quoan’s hour-long debut, nestled and tucked in the between the snappiness of the songs and sharpness of the improvisations.

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Bulliphant - Hightailing (Creative Sources, 2017) ****

By Stef

Belgian jazz is not known for its avant-garde leanings, with the possible exception of pianist Fred Van Hove, clarinetist Joachim Badenhorst and bassist Peter Jacquemyn. Drummer Teun Verbruggen and guitarist Dirk Serries luckily start getting more exposure internationally. Music education is still very focused on technical skills, less so on creativity. Luckily that is changing and this band is a nice example of that. Bandleader Ruben Verbruggen plays alto and baritone sax, Bart Maris plays trumpet, Thijs Troch synth and electronics, with Gonçalo Almeida from Portugal on double bass, and Friso van Wijck from the Netherlands on drums and percussion.

All twelve pieces on the album start with composed ingredients, opening up for structural improvisations, which reduces the average length of each track from one to five minutes. The pieces are all evocations of natural topics, as can be gathered from the album's title, itself a contraction of bull and elephant. More information we don't get, and in fact it doesn't matter. The music speaks for itself.

The first track starts with abrupt playing between trumpet and drums, joined by the sax and the bass, as a kind of duo versus duo interaction, with little bleeps from the synth suddenly taking over completely, supported by the drums. The trumpet adds a few sudden bursts, and the piece is finished. Short, disorienting, strange.

"Jungle Dew" starts with friendly flute-like multiphonics from the synth as an intro for a beautiful theme on the sax, with the trumpet in counterpoint adding depth, and the rhythm section hesitating to take their pace to a different level, but then deciding not to, leaving the floor to both horns to freely circle each other, until the flute-like synth repeats the intro.

"Mud Puddle" is a short interaction between sax and bass, clocking at 44 seconds. It's over before you  start thinking about it. So is "Echolocation Error", just over one minute, with electronics and trumpet jokingly creating a bat's sorrowful journey at night (or so I guess).

"Too Much Nectar" is luckily a little longer, offering the musicians the time to expand, even that concept remains quite restricted here. The first half of the composition is an almost unison single tone that's growing in volume and bifurcating into recognizable instruments, chattering and twittering as if drunk, then slowing down again into a shared quietness.

"Long Distance Migration" offers again a beatiful theme, penned by Bart Maris, and it is also more intense, with changing perspectives, and the collective creation of a sonic structure with various levels interacting and diverging again. It is also the most 'jazzy' of all the tracks.

It becomes fun again with "Male Combat", with the two horns playing in unison, then echoing each other, over the dark rumbling of the rhythm section, which takes over completely and the synth drives the music to insane levels, propulsed forward by mad percussion, moving seamlessly into "Female Reward", the next track, the chaos continues, then comes to a sudden grinding halt.

The album ends with a long piece, one is that is very inviting and open-textured, led by trumpet and electronics.

The overall result is fascinating. Despite Verbruggen's role as a leader, the sound is very collective, and the sax often leaves the lead voice to the trumpet. It's also fascinating because of the strange mixture between short ideas, compact delivery and humour in contrast with eery sounds and complex improvised interplay, while at the same time managing to maintain a strong musical coherence.

Listen and download from Bandcamp.

Watch the title song from the original performance.

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Heliosonic Tone-tette – Heliosonic Toneways, Vol. 1 (ScienSonic, 2017) ****

 

By Troy Dostert

Sun Ra’s Heliocentric Worlds album, released on the legendary ESP label in 1965, was an important record. Using an 11-piece ensemble, it was one of the first attempts to envision possibilities for large-scale collective improvisation, and it thus paved the way for later efforts like the Globe Unity Orchestra’s recordings of 1967 or the Jazz Composers’ Orchestra’s debut in 1968. Such projects are now commonplace in free jazz, so it’s easy to forget how path-breaking they seemed in the 1960s. Which is why Scott Robinson’s Heliosonic Tone-tette is doing a valuable service by releasing Heliosonic Toneways, Vol. 1, its 50th anniversary tribute to the first of the three Heliocentric Worlds records (Vol. 2 was released later in 1965; Vol. 3 wasn’t released by ESP until 2005).

The pedigree behind the making of this album is beyond reproach. Not only is Scott Robinson one of the foremost experts in today’s creative music scene when it comes to the sheer variety of his instrumental mastery—a trait which puts him in perfect position to approach the unique musical world of Sun Ra, who was renowned for his appropriation of a panoply of unusual and esoteric musical devices—but he also has joined forces with the ageless saxophonist Marshall Allen (now 93 years young) and Danny Ray Thompson, another multi-instrumentalist, both of whom have devoted many decades to the Sun Ra Arkestra during its earthly sojourn. 

As Robinson stresses in the liner notes, this release honors the spirit of the original album rather than attempting a re-creation of it. This is not a repertory exercise. At over an hour in length, it’s considerably more extensive than the original (which clocked in at under 35 minutes). But even more importantly, this album is purely improvised, whereas the original offered substantial sections that were composed; it was hardly a purely “free” recording, even while offering a startling departure from most large ensembles recorded during that era.

The original release got its power not from moments of collective fury or brash experiments in cacophony (although there are a few of those), but mostly from its deliberate, almost chamber-like exploration of texture and sonority. Its mood is mysterious and transfixing, but not generally a display of show-stopping muscle. In this sense, Robinson and his colleagues have indeed captured the spirit of the original, with music that has occasional bursts of raw energy but is more frequently intent to carry out restrained and patiently delivered musical statements—albeit with a heavy quantity of the mystery and otherworldly character of the ultimate space pioneer himself.

The music’s true imagination consists, therefore, like the original, in the distinctive moods it evokes and the unique sonority of the musicians’ instrumentation. Not only does Robinson play the actual bass marimba that Sun Ra played on his record (in addition to a host of other oddities, including a theremin, “power bore” bugle, and space magnets (!?)), but we also hear something called a waterphone (played by bassist Pat O’Leary), and even a dragon drum (played by drummer Matt Wilson). It all adds up to a remarkable assemblage of musical possibilities, and the group takes full advantage of them.

Keeping track of each instrument used becomes a bit fatiguing, so the best way to appreciate the music is to simply let it work its magic. Pieces like the opening segment, “Heliotone 1a,” are perfect in establishing the feel of the music, as the rich notes from the bass marimba begin to percolate and the rest of the band gradually joins in, creating a mélange of sounds that somehow cohere despite their being collectively improvised. Eventually rhythms develop, although they don’t become static, as the music has a constant sense of movement and restlessness. And the deep sonority of the music is always present, helped in large part to the low brass: Tim Newman’s bass trombone and Thompson’s baritone sax do a lot to supply the music’s resonance, and the strong rapport between O’Leary and Wilson deftly allows the episodic grooves to emerge spontaneously as the music unfolds. The ample use of electronics is another defining feature of the record, as floating strains of Allen’s Casio VL-tone or EVI make their appearance, as do Robinson’s Wurlitzer and theremin.

All in all, it’s a meaningful and well-conceived homage to the inimitable Sun Ra, one that’s soon to be followed up by the forthcoming Vol. 2 later in 2018.

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