Return Of The Son Of Forget-Me-Not: Brian Groder

An incurable ignorance initially caused me to remain perplexed in front of a sweet gift received by trumpet and flugelhorn player Brian Groder, whose music – believe it or not – I’d never met before extracting 2006’s Torque (Latham) from its sleeve. We’re talking about a record that was very well regarded in the noble quarters of the jazz megalopolis (looks like Downbeat had it winning a poll in 2007; that magazine is not read here but an award should count for something, one supposes). Needless to say the cat plays some fiendishly hole-punching phrases, which is all the more in evidence when your forward-looking associate is one Sam Rivers (on flute & saxes) and the rhythm section is both technically polished and powerfully built under the authority of bassist Doug Mathews and drummer Anthony Cole. In a word, Groder plus the Sam Rivers Trio.

The nominal leader epitomizes the kind of soloist that acts with the same precision of a cultivated glasscutter amidst unessential idealism and fake geopolitical revolutions. Translation: his ruptures are sharp as blades, getting from point A to point B with the necessary straightforwardness, no abstruse bullshit in sight. Just what’s really indispensable, nothing in addition, with a superlative instrumental command (OK, that was expected by players at this level of competence). The exchanges with Rivers - great solo from him in “Involution”, by the way - do emanate an elegiac scent of sorts sometimes (“Camouflages” comes to mind), although there’s usually less feverishness and more rationality at play throughout the CD. Certain striking parallelisms between the leader’s melodic cleverness and Mathews’ inspired arco lines are lyrically watertight, satisfying these grizzled ears in full. You know what? Downbeat was right – this is praiseworthy stuff.

Forget-Me-Not: Empty Cage Quartet

The systematic annoyances originating from delayed mail are a crucial characteristic of Italian routine, in particular as far as reviewing records is concerned. This explains the reason for which only recently I was able to take pleasure in listening to the brilliant Stratostrophic (Clean Feed) by the Empty Cage Quartet. The group consists of four youngsters whose mind is filled with serious ideas, expounded through eleven tracks that mix a multiplicity of coordinates and influences; essentially, their style can be placed in a province bordering on present-day jazz and rather curbed improvisation, with hints to Charles Ives-like superimpositions of different conjectures and junctures. Jason Mears (alto sax, clarinet) and Kris Tiner (trumpet, flugelhorn) are the composers, while percussionist Paul Kikuchi and double bassist Ivan Johnson build their contribution upon everything you would look ahead to by a technically dextrous rhythm section.

When an ensemble needs not to recur to metaphoric paraphernalia and short-lived tricks, we immediately realize that the direction is right. Quite often during the playback I found myself thinking of charts made of very long lines and exploded views, music leading to places where expectations are met without fretfulness and transitions are clearly visible. This sense of structural intelligibility, in conjunction with an evident respect for tradition, is the most considerable attribute of the album. We glance at the young faces of the artists in the inner sleeve’s picture, compare them with the maturity shown by these fairly challenging pieces, and all of a sudden the perspectives of jazz-derived languages look pretty bright, provided that one doesn’t start daydreaming about groundbreaking visions and on-the-spot innovations.

Holy Molys, Perverts And Communists

A few months ago I received The Holy Modal Rounders’ Live In 65 from ESP-Disk. The extremely funny liner notes, written by by John Kruth, are particularly explicative regarding the reaction caused by these songs in his father (and, one supposes, in many parents of that era), who called the duo of Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber with the names you see in the above title while whipping little John, sent home from school after being caught singing a depraved line from a tune (included here) named “Black Eyed Suzy”.

This is a fascinating, if lo-fi taste of a different response to pre-digested culture for someone like this poor man, grown in a mentally underdeveloped, mafia-ruled Mediterranean country where those who call themselves “satirists” are financed by the same government that they pretend to attack, "alternative" artists are politically connected and both "left" and "right" mean "thief". Under a mask of American roots music, HMR hit very hard at the conventions of regular families, spitting out wicked lyrics with the attitude of stray cats meowing and snarling against each other on a palisade. It might not be an unforgettable record for my own life, but I can identify with Mr.Kruth’s excitement. Idiots and human failures always construct an imaginary world in their head to survive, which is not what this nice pair sang about. Not at all.

Two On Formed

SLW epitomizes the “EAI super group”, consisting in fact of Burkhard Beins (selected percussion, objects), Lucio Capece (soprano sax, bass clarinet, preparations), Rhodri Davies (harp, electro acoustic devices) and Toshimaru Nakamura (no-input mixing board). No likelihood of failure, one would say, with names like these and indeed the self-titled CD delivers what promised on paper. Configurational clearness and rational advancement of the processes are among the qualities of the music expressed by this quartet. The timbral disposition tends to the “harshly high” register for the large part of the improvisations, yet that sensation of aural flagellation typifying some of the releases in this field is not in attendance. Each of the participants looks severely committed to their roles, the ensuing idea that of four unrelated instrumental lives being scrutinized along parallel courses, each independent from the other three, all still functional to a collective questioning of quietness - except for a brief noisier segment - in different, often surprising ways. A good example of how to go straight to the core essence of a sonic source without actually eviscerating its strictly acoustic content, and in this case the sum of the parts almost exceeds the substance of the single features. This could be a minor shocker for many people: it sounds as expected, but not completely.

A truly great record - perhaps even better than SLW’s, but it’s probably nitpicking - comes from Worwolf (Michael Vorfeld and Christian Wolfarth, percussion). Snake’s Eye - ever since looking at the sleeve and the track titles – refers to Sumo fighting, yet there’s no parallelism with bodily harm or physical contact whatsoever. The couple shares ranges and consistencies of their arsenals, tapping with bare fingers on a drum, scraping metals with an arco (I believe) and varied apparatuses, generating that typical aura of zinging pierce that becomes an indispensable presence after only a few minutes. The most remarkable episodes originate from the weighty resonance that Vorwolf set in motion through the harmonic shuddering of the skin, which at times reminds me of those moments of mental dislocation that, inescapably, hit this listener when the surrounding environment projects specific kinds of faraway rumbles, especially when that happens in the early afternoon. This unusual cross of acridness and suspension/floatation, emblematic of both players, is a key to the sort of inwardness which certain frequencies are able to stimulate as no word can. Forceful yet guarded music, a superb soundtrack for pre-consciousness to be spun frequently.

Formed

Shuffling Particles

There’s an enhanced CD among the recent releases by Ernesto Rodrigues’ Creative Sources called Drawings. The “enhancement” consists in a 55-minute MP4 video - Der Raum, by Arno Oehri – which shows the working processes between Scott Fields and German visual artist Thomas Hornung, who lives in Basel and spends about one hour every evening by making spur-of-the-moment drawings on A4 paper sheets, “typically in black but occasionally in colored chalk”, as per the guitarist’s words. The three collaborators first met in 2004 during a residency in the Swiss Alps, yet only after a while the American decided to dig out something from those sketches, converting them in a multi-page graphic score whose constitution is better explained by the composer himself in the liner notes.

Fields, one of the most interesting phrase scramblers in contemporary jazz also in more “regular” outings (check his efforts on Clean Feed), asks the listeners to play the 98 audio tracks of the disc in shuffle mode - the same method applied to Hornung’s 171 pictures, previously selected, when he performs this work live. This modus operandi is not really crucial for the ultimate result, as the severely fragmentary conciseness of the solos causes the whole to sound exactly as a haphazard reproduction of the initial program even when the record is played straight; I seriously doubt that a remote chance of memorizing this album exists. What needs to be noted is how brilliantly this man manages to conjure up a growing quantity of uncommon timbres, chordal surges, skeletal counterpoints and unclassifiable pitches from his axe (manipulated conventionally or through various kinds of implementations), elevating the music to a degree of consequentiality on a par with its pictographic complement.

In Search Of The Wolf Tone

Éliane Radigue’s Naldjorlak (Shiiin) might surprise a few listeners, but not the most clued-up ones. Violoncellist Charles Curtis, who spent many days at the composer’s apartment in Paris to work on this, explains that the primary feature of the piece is tuning the cello in a way “which seeks to consolidate, as nearly as possible, all of the resonating parts of the instrument”. All stringed instruments, more or less, can be put in this extreme condition via the “wolf tone”, a particular note that generates an uneven kind of quivering where the wooden and metallic components seem to disintegrate until they’re reduced to little shreds.

As opposed to the intensely pulsating analogue synthetic purr of masterpieces such as Trilogie de la Mort, this is perhaps the purest, rawest acoustic expression of the French artist’s vision. Curtis, an enormously sensitive player specializing in early minimalism (La Monte Young and Alvin Lucier being but two among the contemporary composers he habitually tackles), doesn’t let the cello shift from a range that’s possibly not wider than a semitone. Apparently frail yet sturdy tones are elicited by his arco in an upper partial-tinged Franciscan ritual for the ears. And when the wolf tone gets caught, the certainties about Radigue’s intentions are shaken together with the instrument’s molecules. I’d be curious to hear an interpretation of this composition by Jöelle Léandre on the double bass. My room would probably crumble.

Meaning What?

Temporary Fault is the title of a beautiful tune featured on 1982's I.O.U. album by Allan Holdsworth, one of my favourite guitarists (ironically, he plays a violin solo in that track). Holdsworth’s music from that period is informed by a profound awareness, constituting a plausible indication of a personal progress - a feeling I’ve always found impossible to describe through mere words.

This website is a place where writing on the stuff that I enjoy listening to on a daily basis will appear more as a “special diary” than a “collection of reviews”. Here I’d also like to make potentially interested readers curious on the subject of certain music of yesterday. That “yesterday” could be last month, three years ago or even decades earlier.

As usual, this writer is just looking to find additional ways to give relevance to artists who do something meaningful or at least interesting, or contribute to my own growth one way or another.