Alberto Braida and Giancarlo Locatelli – Nel Margine (Red Toucan, 2013) ****

By Troy Dostert

A beautiful record from two musicians I hadn’t encountered before—although they have a history of playing together since 1996.  They’ve released a couple of CDs prior to this one, and they also recorded together in a trio format with the late Peter Kowald (Aria – from 2005).  For this release, Locatelli (clarinet and bass clarinet) and Braida (piano) offer improvisations that have a strong compositional base, but which are open enough to explore uncharted terrain—albeit in a pensive, controlled manner.

Both musicians communicate in a sparse, deceptively simple language that doesn’t require a lot of pyrotechnics to impress the listener.  Indeed, what’s striking about these tracks is the way in which the duo is able to pack so much musical information into their unhurried and restrained musings.  The superb quality of their musicianship plays a big role in the success of the record.  Locatelli’s technique is flawless, and especially strong in producing soft upper-register passages, but always with a willingness to search out the melodic core at the heart of each tune, rather than relying on technical dazzle.  Braida similarly adheres to a “less is more” approach to improvisation, with a lot of softly ringing chords and open space in his playing.

Aside from the last track, “Dal Margine,” which is purely free (and considerably more aggressive than the preceding ten songs), each track is structured around a composed tune to anchor the musicians’ improvisations.  Each player gets credit for half of these tunes, but it’s hard to detect any noticeable differences in style between them; both Braida and Locatelli are clearly influenced by Monk, as all the melodies have that peculiarly Monkish characteristic of being both melancholy and playful at the same time, with a wry sensibility that always shines through.  In every case, the musicians’ understanding of each other is so developed that they can sound exceptionally free while staying loosely grounded in the foundation of the tune.  Part of their mission on the record, in fact, seems to involve blurring the lines between free and composed playing--and the result is frequently sublime. 

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Deep Listening Weekend: Deep Listening Band (Day 2)

Deep Listening Band: Great Howl at Town Haul (Imprec, 2012) **** ½

Deep Listening Band: Needle Drop Jungle (Taiga Records, 2012) **** ½ 

By Martin Schray

Although it is a long time ago I remember precisely when I visited Fingal’s Cave on the Isle of Staffa while being on a holiday in Scotland. It is like a natural cathedral, a unique place producing strange sounds due to the echoes of the waves and the wind and the twittering of the sea birds. Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s overture “The Hebrides” was inspired by this atmosphere. When I listened to The Deep Listening Band’s albums I was immediately reminded of this natural spectacle.

The Deep Listening Band are legendary American composer Pauline Oliveros (accordion, little instruments, voice), Stuart Dempster (percussion, trombones, didgeridoo, voice, cowbell, whistles, little sounds, breach conch) and David Gamper (percussion, flute, piano, toys little sounds, breach conch) and these albums, released to celebrate Oliveros’ 80th birthday, complete a quadrilogy of her releases together with “Then and Now” (also with the Deep Listening Band) and “Primordial/Lift” (with a larger group of musicians). “Great Howl at Town Haul“ and “Needle Drop Jungle” are both result of the band’s January 2011 residency and concerts at Seattle Town Hall which produced enough material for both a CD and an LP. The concerts were equipped with a special sound system using eight loudspeakers and four subwoofers surrounding the band and audience so that they had the impression that the sounds came from above and below them.

Moreover, the Deep Listening Band is not only about making music, it also transports a philosophy, namely Deep Listening, which is described by Oliveros as “listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what one is doing.”  The band’s website says that Deep Listening “explores the difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the voluntary, selective nature – exclusive and inclusive -- of listening”.

Both albums are perfect examples of this philosophy. On “Needle Drop Jungle” there are hundreds of different natural sounds, it is like a grab bag, a constant surprise, the more often you listen to it the more you detect (even in your body, it is a physical experience, as well). In “Landgrove” you can immerge in an acoustic world of clicks, rising and ebbing drones, breathing, little flute melodies, long trombone notes, chimes, accordion phrases, and piano sprinkling - it seems as if there was a whole natural orchestra at work. But it is never cheesy ambient stuff because there is always something dark and eerie in the background, which then becomes even more dominant in “Jungle Howl”, the second track. “Friday Mighty” is the most erratic and rawest piece (Stanley Kubrick might have used it as a soundtrack for “2001 – A Space Odyssey” if he had known it) before “Tomorrow’s Power” closes the album going back to scary ambient world of “Landgrove” again.

“Great Howl at Town Haul“ is only slightly different, again you have the impression that there are ten musicians playing for you or that there are at least electronics involved, the band plays with the conditions of the room, the notes seem to ricochet through it (“Great Horned Howl”). Here and there are single instruments in the foreground (for example the trombone), especially “Town Haul”, the first track, is of absolute beauty. You can also find minimal influences (“Great Haul”), elaborate new classical music (“Great Horned Howl”), the use of what they call “little instruments” and incredible drones (“Great Haul”).

Unfortunately, these albums will definitely be the last ones of this excellent group because David Gamper surprisingly passed away on September 27th, 2011.

“Needle Drop Jungle” is available as 200 gram double vinyl, it is limited to 500 copies. It comes with essays by the band and photographs by Michael S. Carlson.

“Great Howl at Town Haul” is available on CD.

Next to William Hooker’s “Channels of Consciousness” and Trio X’s “Live on Tour 2010” these are two more almost forgotten gems of 2012.


Listen to an older track here:

You can buy the album directly from the band.

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Deep Listening Weekend: Deep Listening Band (Day 1)

Deep Listening Band - Great Howl at Town Hall (Imprec, 2012) ****
Deep Listening Band - Needle Drop Jungle (Taiga, 2012) ****½

By Stanley Zappa

Immediately upon hearing the first seconds of Town Haul, the first track on Great Howl at Town Hall by the Deep Listening Band, one is reminded of music's wide tolerance and the many ways of being within it. Immediately there after one is reminded that more problems are caused than they are solved by musical taxonomy.

Though there isn't a spec of jazzy on or in Paulene Oliveros, Steward Dempster or David Gamper, all but the most craven free-bop tonalists and their apologists will acknowledge the Deep Listening Band's verve as improvisors and their advance intimacy with both common and so-called “outre” sonorities. Great Haul steps outside of that antiquated 12 tone, tempered cultural prejudice to which “Western” music so desperately clings. While doing so puts them outside familiar realms, those sounds, dear reader, are the sounds of music's future.

Freedom from those (or any) constraints, combined with a solid musical concept almost always equals a singular listening experience. On both Great Howl at Town Hall and Needle Drop Jungle it's hard to know who is doing what and how. This, like the inability to tell for sure what is improvised and what is written, does in fact make one listen deeper; not only is there no 12 or 36 bar form repeating again and again, also missing are familiar tropes that have become synonymous with familiar instrumentation.

That only 3 laborers, and not a dozen or more, generated the thick layers of sound on Great Horn Howl is a frightening omen in a music economy as much decimated as it was “transformed” by digital technology. Regardless, the promise and the glory of zeros and ones are celebrated in thoughtful style without ever giving in to factory preset convenience.

Needle Drop Jungle continues along this trajectory, though the general posture (as manifest in sonority and attack) is more tart and acidic than Great Haul at Town Hall. The ante has been upped, the gloves are off. Through tamber and attack, Friday Mighty offers a grandeur and tension unheard on Great Haul at Town Hall. Tomorrow's Power doubly so, while stepping even further away from the tempered scale than Great Haul.

There is a grace to both recordings often absent in realizations of music derived from written sources or reliant upon repeating chord progression that still obey and believe in “the rules of harmony.” There is also the feeling that music is being celebrated as opposed to the well worn, routine fetischization of Tin Pan Alley. 500 years from now, if there is still such a thing as music or people to listen to it, when set against colleagues and contemporaries, the Deep Listening Band will stand apart as unique in their visionary integration of the acoustic with electronica without capitulation or compromise. Lucky us, we get to listen to them now.

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Quat Quartet - Live at Hasselt (NoBusiness, 2013) ****½

By Colin Green

There is something very striking (pun intended) about the combined sonority of piano and vibraphone: a sharp attack, with rich, mutually sympathetic overtones; delicate interplay within a halo of resonance – a sound of both clarity and diffuseness. This has characterised such diverse ensembles as the Modern Jazz Quartet, the serpentine duos of Chick Corea and Gary Burton in the 1970s, and even Pierre Boulez’s “Sur Incises”, a study in overtones, writ large.

The Quat Quartet has its own, very distinctive voice, generated by what are in essence, four percussionists: Els Vandeweyer (vibraphone), Fred Van Hove (piano/accordion), Paul Lovens (percussion), and Martin Blume (percussion). The last three are seasoned improvisers, who need no special introduction, but Ms Vandeweyer was new to me. She is Belgian, studied classical percussion at the Royal Flemish Conservatory in Antwerp and jazz at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels and Musikhogskule in Oslo, and now lives and works in Berlin, where, according to her myspace entry: “she explores the middle ground between classical, jazz, and free improvised music”. On the basis of this recording, she is as exciting a vibes player as Chicago’s Jason Adasiewicz, and we need to hear a lot more of her.

The quartet were recorded, live at the Belgium Arts Centre in Hasselt, in June 2011, with an excellent piano (sadly, it can make such a difference), sympathetically captured in a beautifully transparent sound, that allows one to relish the full dynamic range of their playing, largely focussed on the upper registers: the soft decay of a cymbal; Van Hove’s scrupulously weighted chords; the fizz of a hi-hat; burnished trills from the vibes, against micro-rhythms in the drums.

On “H1”, the sheer gorgeousness of the quartet’s kaleidoscope of sounds makes an immediate impression – piano and vibes exchange arpeggios, then scurrying runs in a blur of notes – but there is a subtlety in the way the internal balance of the quartet is adjusted, as new ideas are introduced and elaborated.

The use of two percussionists is inspired: there is more than enough room for Lovens and Blume to underpin, punctuate and embellish the texture. On “H2” there is a small gong, muted, then let free to resonate, which plays against the soft resonance of the vibes; the piano’s strings are muted (held), producing a sound that almost parodies the vibes, over which there is an eccentric clockwork pattern on the drums.

This is not a mere academic study of timbre, however. All four revel in the novelty of their sound world, and there is real drama as the music unfolds, then suddenly changes focus. Most importantly, they appreciate the importance of understatement: when to hold back, or drop out. A fine example of the virtuoso listening – a term coined, I think, by Fred Frith – that is at the heart of creative improvisation.

“H3” begins with bubbling vibes, forming a trio of ever more elaborate counterpoint with the percussion – metal to wood, back to metal again. The piano takes over, with a blurred line in the lower registers, gradually unfolding across the whole range of the keyboard, as the music builds to a crescendo, with sparks from the vibes, and then gradually fades, with soft tremolos accompanied by what sound like miniature bells. Van Hove introduces gentle chords on the accordion, as the music ebbs into silence, as if in slow motion.  

“H4” is a perkier affair: staccato chords and fractured lines on the piano, a much spikier, non-resonant sound from the vibes, and criss-crossing from the percussion; music that is never allowed to settle. 
As to the name of the quartet, I don’t know if this is a contraction of “quatre”; an alternative spelling of the name of an African plant, whose chewed leaves are a stimulant (they do produce an intoxicating sound); or the Frenglish for “what?” – apparently cool in Montreal (please, no); or something else altogether. Not essential, but I’d like to know.

In the meantime, you can hear the quartet in full flow here (the sound is slightly weighted towards the vibes due to the camera position).

Can be purchased from Instantjazz.com. 

Watch/Listen:

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Rara Avis - Mutations / Multicellulars Mutations (dEN Records, 2013) ****½

By Philip Coombs

Trust your heroes. They are usually correct. Sometimes they are just too far ahead of you to understand them the first or second time around. Eventually they will reassure you why you liked them in the first place. Admittedly, I do long for another Vandermark 5 album, but I am in complete awe of what Ken Vandermark (reeds) has done since with the risks he takes and concepts he fleshes out. In this instance he teams up with Stefano Ferrian (saxophones) to blur 'what instrument is melodic' and 'what instrument supplies rhythm'.

On CD 1 (Mutations) of this two disc collection, with the help of some other young Italian musicians Luca Pissavini (double bass), Simone Quatrana (piano), and SEC_ (revox and instant sound treatments), they create not only a dense exploratory sound scape but a fully realized universe unto itself. It is a seemingly perfect world where there is no leader and it's residents all just get along. A great place where all the trash gets picked up and the mail gets delivered on time and all in accordance with its mission,and I never once missed the security of a drummer, as all members, and especially Pissavini and Quatrana, effectively trade off rhythmic duties throughout.

The sound treatments by SEC_ are by nature very digital and electronic but are used in a very organic way and with brilliant placement. Sometimes a quite hiss and sometimes it's like jumper cables from your car's battery to your ears. Either way it is addictive and a joy to revisit.

CD 2 (Multicellulars Mutations) is the best kept secret that wasn't kept. Here is where all of the road maps and engineering designs that went into the building of this place are kept. It consists of duos and trios of various incarnations of the five players that make up Rara Avis.  'Km', for example is Vandermark and SEC_ sparring in a duo setting but it also shines a light on this relationship that is so important on tracks like 'Genetic Drift' and 'Natural Selection'from CD 1. Knowing these interactions is of great benefit when you return to Mutations and re-live just how layered and complex it is. Both CDs work as cross references to each other, a glossary and a footnote, making each other a more enriching listening experience. Sort of like the Resonance box set but in reverse.

Yes, I am guilty of hero worship and Vandermark happens to be one of them for me, but this set isn't at all just about him. Certainly you can tell when he is playing but you can feel the equality in the contributions. They all have a great instinct to let the silences ring and yet never let a moment get wasted. One of my favorite listens so far this year.

Can be purchased from Instantjazz.com.

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Ross Hammond - Cathedrals (Prescott Recordings, 2013) ****½

By Paul Acquaro

Following up on last year's Adored, guitarist Ross Hammond's Cathedrals is another fine set of jazz rock folk free songs delivered by a top notch quartet: woodwind player Vinny Golia, bassist Stuart Liebig, percussionist Alex Cline, and Hammond himself spinning rootsy lines on electric guitar. This new collection not only picks up where the group last left off but takes their playing to an entirely new level.

In between the two quartet releases, Hammond put out a recording with his Revival Trio that explored African inspired rhythms and song structures. An experimental release, and to go out on a limb, a development that informs the opening tune, 'A Song for Wizards.' The track begins with some minimal guitar swells before a dense and earthy rhythmic pattern, played over a circuitous bass line, forms a foundation for Golia's folksy melody. The melody and Hammond's crunchy guitar lines swirl together in a melodic dance over the hypnotic and hard-hitting rhythm section.

The follow up 'Hopped Up on Adrenaline' is a scorcher. It kicks off with a dense interplay between Cline and Liebig reminiscent of Dark Magus era Miles Davis. Golia provides a tasteful contrast on the flute, digging in while Hammond adds some tonal cluster color. When Hammond lets go on the guitar it's with a nasty (good nasty) thicket of notes and chord fragments. Other tracks like 'Telescoping' and 'This Goes With Your Leather' sport fragmented melodies before descending into lovely heaps of improvisation, and the track 'She Gets Her Wine From a Box' has something that makes me think of The Trio with John Surman.

Hammond is generous with space, often taking a supporting role and giving his colleagues plenty of room to work. Golia's playing is excellent and he is a great partner for the guitarist to play off. Liebig's bass is solid and straightforward and adds a great counter motion to the songs, and what can be said of Cline's playing other than his feel is perfectly situated in the jazz-rock space that Hammond is creating. Cathedrals is accessible and energetic, spacious and layered, and a high point in a growing discography.

Check out Cathedrals on Hammond's Bandcamp site.

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Satoko Fujii Ma-Do – Time Stands Still (NotTwo Records, 2013) ****

By Monique Avakian

Time Stands Still marks the third and final release from the Satoko Fujii Ma-Do Quartet, comprised of Satoko Fujii (piano); Natsuki Tamura (trumpet); Norikatsu Koreyasu (bass) and Akira Horikoshi (drums).

Sadly, bassist Norikatsu Koreyasu suddenly passed away in late September, 2011, at age 56. Given his pivotal role in the group, the decision was made to disband.

The flavor and scope of this album is as poetic as the reality of life’s fleeting beauty. Listeners are gently, yet purposefully pulled through various states of being: here, I am a cloud; there a raging sea; later, I become a blazing fire raging further into the clarity of a calm and knowing breath of wind. And, as in the grander scheme of life, the Listener is at once central and at the periphery.

Overall, the emotional quality is plaintive, pleading, questing and questioning; again, sometimes with thunder, other times, as if wrapped in the slightest whisper. There is a lot of space and a lot of single note/single sound melodic exploration, true to the group’s intention. As explained on Fugii’s website: “Ma-do means window in Japanese. But ma also means the silence between notes. Fujii chose the name to show how the music opens to the outside (just like a window) and that silence can have more meaning than notes.”’ http://www.satokofujii.com/projects.ma-do.html

The group manages to be sparse and dense simultaneously, much like a fine haiku. The way each song links to the next is also very poetic in a macro-sense, perhaps even mirroring the earlier and more complex Japanese poetry form of renku, in which poets work collaboratively in a group to create and link verses. The linear linking from track to track here musically, for me, serves to give the free improv solid context, with the line threaded from beginning to end building, in real time, the structure upon which the musicians weave their complex textures. The album as a whole, then, is quite structured, but organically so.

Each track has its own unique and singular flavor, a testament to the high level musicianship offered to us here. My personal favorite is North Wind and the Sun (Track 2), with a narrative flow that mirrors Aesop’s Fable where the Sun and Wind compete to show the true meaning of strength. The quartet gives us a familiar melodic line that alternates with a sound-based percussive wash, deftly signaling the two characters. Round about 7 minutes, the group suddenly propels into a funky place that morphs into a piano extravaganza of pounding chordal exuberance. This is surprising and, therefore, supremely re-engaging.

Equally surprising is their decision to drive immediately into Track 3, “Time Flies”-- a move that illustrates the organic integrity of this foursome.

The last two tracks are especially interesting, again, even more so because of the way they link together. The adventurous Track 6, Broken Time, proves to be highly varied in rhythmic ideas, and again, becomes suddenly funky mid-stream. Here, the drummer stands out with unique cymbal choices. Some are trashy sounding, and others are very high pitched. Intriguingly, none of them ring out. Horikoshi’s drum tuning is also high-pitched and tight. Broken Time ends with the drummer soloing which is fitting to the subject of the tune as well as sonically arresting.

Next, Track 7, and this song, Time Stands Still, begins with the drums and, again, I am thinking in terms of lines that end in circles. This piece really involves my ear with contrast as Horikoshi switches to some lower sounding toms; but again, they are tuned very tight and dry. The trumpet comes in breathy and soft and low with lots of space and the bowed bass is very low and cello-like; very melancholy. After the piano comes in and they explore for awhile, I wonder, how are they going to get out of this? Slowly, very slowly, Fujii sets off into a series of chords with a very decisive ending point enhanced by the most subtle of decrescendos. The last chord is full of gentle, complex possibility, and like the greatest poetry, this final word leaves the listener yearning.

Read the Liner Notes.

Can be purchased from instantjazz.com


Video, “Fortitude”:

Video Interview with Satoko Fujii, 2009:

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Joe McPhee & Chris Corsano: Scraps and Shadows (Roaratorio, 2013) ****

By Martin Schray

In an after-show interview with Rainer Kern, the organizer of the nice annual Enjoy Jazz festival in South Western Germany, Peter Brötzmann answered Kern’s wish to invite him again for future festivals with the morbid but brutally true statement: “Yes, do that, but you gotta be quick, we die like flies”. Brötzmann was under the influence of John Tchicai’s death who passed away the week before, which was why the usually hardly sentimental Brötzmann dedicated the concert to him.

Joe McPhee is even a bit older than Brötzmann and he knows what the German saxophonist was talking about. He knows that if you want to celebrate people or if you want to salute them for their lifetime achievement you have to make things happen as soon as possible.

Scraps and Shadows is dedicated to seven great and influencial people for McPhee and Chris Corsano but two of the honored ones have already gone. Still, there are five dedicatees left to receive the tribute that McPhee and Corsano are more than willing to pay.

Scraps And Shadows is Joe McPhee’s and Chris Corsano’s sophomore album to Under A Double Moon, which presented McPhee mostly on alto saxophone, while this one here features him largely on tenor but also on soprano and pocket trumpet. The album was recorded live in Milwaukee in 2011 and displays seven pieces, from the tumescent “For Fred Anderson” or the tender soprano ballad "For Adrienne P." (a local bartender and artist) to the raging-full-on "For Han Bennink" in which Corsano imitates Bennink’s drum style. In general McPhee’s and Corsano’s approach is to include the style of the dedicatees into their pieces, for example Native American chants in “For Jim Pepper”, overblown energetic phrases in “For Paul Flaherty” or implied New Orleans blues in “For Kidd Jordan” - if the piece is dedicated to musicians. With its moanful sound “For Muhammad Ali” rather refers to a certain attitude or to a certain time, namely the 1960s with its racial tensions and violent conflicts.

Like their first collaboration the charm of this album lies in the clash of Corsano’s boisterous  yet subtle art rock drumming (he has worked with Björk, Thurston Moore or Massimo Pupillo) and McPhee's “pure R&B honk and fiery gusts of sheer overblown freedom” as Thurston Moore once put it.

Scraps and Shadows is available on vinyl only but the LP includes a free download.

Can be purchased from instantjazz.com

You can watch them in a performance from 2010 here:

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William Parker/Conny Bauer/Hamid Drake - Tender Exploration (Jazzwerkstatt, 2013) ****

By Martin Schray

In the late 1990s, when there was the big discussion between Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch on the one hand and Lester Bowie and the free jazz community on the other hand, in which Marsalis/Crouch claimed that free jazz is not jazz because it did not swing, I saw the Die like a Dog quartet (Brötzmann/Kondo/Parker/Drake) in a movie theater in Essen. It was the first time that I saw this rhythm section live – and boy, did they swing.

What they have done for free jazz in the last 30 years cannot be praised highly enough (for example their work with Fred Anderson and Kidd Jordan), for this kind of music they are what Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare are for Reggae or Bootsy Collins and Jerome “Bigfoot” Brailey for P-Funk – rhythm twins.

For this album they asked Conny Bauer to form a new and unusual trio, which has been a very good choice for several reasons: Bauer (like his younger brother Johannes) is an excellent trombonist, who was educated in the former GDR (and if you wanted to be a musician there you had to have a proper musical education), he has played with almost everyone in the European and American improvisers’ scene, and he is open for any kind of new experiences.

Tender Exploration reminds me of Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle, it’s an enormous metallic machine on spindly legs, walking like a toddler, but also steaming, mumbling,  panting, a creature full of energy, and inhabited by a fire demon.  “Drake”, the first track”, starts seeking for a structure almost clumsily, the band members seem to have to find each other. But soon they have a good chemistry and Bauer, who dominates this piece in spite of its name, adds his huge repertoire of techniques including German march and parade music, circus melodies, bop, new music and free improvisation to the complicated and varied rhythms. “Parker”, a four-minute-bass-solo-interlude, then functions as the bridge to “Bauer”, the last track, which exemplarily lives from the clash between Parker’s and Drake’s African jungle rhythms and Bauer’s European heritage. It is a constant puzzle in which the individual musicians try to uphold the structure in turns, Bauer with a rock riff played on the trombone, Parker/Drake with a tightly knit web of difficult rhythms leading into a marvelous duet in the middle of the track. Every now and then the whole thing is about to fall apart but they always manage to get it on track.

Nice album, definitely.

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Joëlle Léandre – Wols Circus (HUS, 112) ****

By Colin Green

Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schultze (1913 – 51) went under the alias “Wols” (a mispronunciation of his name by a telephone operator): he was German by birth, but lived his latter years in France, mainly Paris. He was something of a polymath: an accomplished fish breeder, photographer, writer of aphorisms, musician (he liked to play Bach on his banjo), but most notably, an artist. Wols lived in poverty, was shuffled between internment camps during the second war, and died of food poisoning while being treated for acute alcoholism. He achieved some critical, if not financial success in his life and was regarded by Jean-Paul Sartre as the existentialist painter par excellence, though I suspect this tells us more about Sartre, than Wols. For those who like labels, the French critic Michel Tapié, described Wols as the progenitor of what he called “L’art informel” – the European equivalent of Abstract Expressionism – though Wols would have been surprised by this. He was a remarkably self-effacing man, possessed of a dry wit. At one of Wols’ exhibitions, Sartre was said to have explained the artist’s work to his dog (at least someone was listening), whereas Wols wrote that his own dog considered him “an idiot” (I think he was joking).      

The title of this concert, given by Joëlle Léandre at La Maison Rouge in Paris in 2011  might come from a series of watercolours Wols produced in 1940 – circus rings populated by tiny Klee like, figures – or from an idea Wols set out soon after in a rather touching letter he wrote in English from an internment camp, in support of his application for emigration to the United States. “Circus Wols” was a grandiose – and largely unintelligible – multimedia synthesis of Surrealism, Nietzsche, Bach and Bacchus, which would explore the relationship between art, science, philosophy and human life. Like his emigration, this came to nought, and thereafter Wols studied the marine life and rock formations of the Mediterranean, from which he developed an idiomatic calligraphy, primarily through works on paper, but fully developed in his paintings. Wols’ etchings, rumoured to have been produced using the stylus of an old record player, are full of smudges balanced against microscopically precise, spidery scratches, enveloping what resemble fossilized organisms.  “A tiny sheet of paper can contain the whole world”, is one of his aphorisms.

The subtitle to this CD is “12 compositions pour contrebasse d’après 12 gravures de Wols”. The name of each piece corresponds to one of Wols’ etchings produced between 1942 and 1949 (most of his works were named posthumously, by his wife, dealers and friends). According to Tristan Cormier’s concert notes, Joëlle Léandre regards Wols as a kindred spirit – they share a “sense of circus which leads seamlessly from the farcical to the serious, from Bach to the banjo”. Interestingly, it would seem that these pieces are “composed” in the sense that Léandre has produced graphic scores, based on the etchings, which form the basis of her improvisations; she is clearly looking at something on her music stand in the video excerpts from the concert at http://vimeo.com/59198120.

Léandre has been long established as one of the great innovators and improvisers on the double bass – one is tempted to call her the “grande dame” – favouring solo, duo and trio formats, with a wide rangea of collaborators. She is a true virtuoso, never tempted by showmanship, and her rich vocabulary of sounds (arco predominates over pizzicato) and structural sense owes much to composers such as Xenakis and Cage, as well as improvised music.

Like Wols’ etchings, these are small works that explore condensed ideas, offering sharp contrasts in mood and texture, and on occasions a rapid escalation to extremes. “Drei Vignetten auf einem Blatt” is whisper quiet, with paper threaded through the strings, making a sound like the movements of dust. “Herz” breaks into an impassioned folk like melody, taken up by Léandre’s voice.  In “Stadtzentrum”, there are creaking sounds, scumbling double stops and a repeated three note figure, over which she whistles the blues. “Ohr” is introduced by a theme tapped out gently, col legno, which is then taken up, arco, and quite movingly, in a clear allusion to Bach (sans banjo).

There is also something of Wols’ fibrous energy in Léandre’s playing: “Kleiner Fleck” – reproduced on the cover – consists of a single note on the bass, accompanied by her voice, a tibetan like hum, that rises to a cry as she and the bass reach a crescendo.  In contrast, “Große Tache” is a long diminuendo, vanishing into near silence. The final piece “Die Stadt/Quer” alternates plucked figures, with repeated chords and glissando swoops, concluding with a percussion accompaniment from unnamed third parties, and the sound of a howling dog (Sartre’s unfortunate mutt?) and a breathless “merci”, from Léandre.

Like a print run from an etching, this release is limited to a numbered edition of 480. For those interested in pursuing Wols’ art further, there is a retrospective exhibition of photographs, works on paper, and paintings currently at the Kunsthalle, Bremen, until 11 August, transferring to the Menil Collection, Houston, from 13 September to 12 January, 2014. The catalogue is excellent. 

Can be purchased from instantjazz.com

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