Kate Gentile's "b i o m e i.i"

This year will be a big one for drummer-composer Kate Gentile. She and her frequent collaborator, pianist Matt Mitchell, have started a label, Obliquity Records, which will release two of the three albums she has set to drop this year. (Pi Records will release a triple album by Find Letter X, Gentile's electroacoustic quartet with Mitchell, Kim Cass, and Jeremy Viner, this October.) Flagrances, a set of "compositionally crafted improvisations" that teams Gentile with guitarist Andrew Smiley, has a July release date. Under consideration today is b i o m e i.i, a a piece in 13 movements, commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble, that premieres May 26 at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn.

Gentile's music is harmonically dense and rhythmically complex. Besides being a musician, she's also a gifted visual artist. She has a form of synesthesia where letters and words are perceived as colors. The titles for the movements in the piece are based on alphabetical preferences. After the music was written, Gentile created a glossary of invented meanings for the titles, and a backstory involving a biome on an alien moon. She cites musique concrete composer Bernard Parmegiani as well as fellow percussionists Ikue Mori and Ches Smith (his Congs for Brums project in particular) as influences on b i o m e i.i. Watching the video trailer she created for the album -- a fast-motion depiction of Gentile making the collage that appears in the album art -- the wriggling blobs of color reminded me of claymation artist Bruce Bickford's animations for Frank Zappa. Indeed, the music's intricacy and sonic palette recall Zappa circa Burnt Weenie Sandwich. But Gentile is clearly pursuing her own vision.

Joining the composer in the ensemble for b i o m e i.i are ICE members Jennifer Curtis (violin), Isabel Lepanto Gleicher (flute, piccolo), Rebekah Heller (bassoon), Ross Karre (vibraphone and percussion), Joshua Rubin (clarinet and bass clarinet), and Cory Smythe (piano). They give Gentile's scores a robust reading, and shift seamlessly between interpretation and improvisation. With b i o m e i.i, Kate Gentile offers us a world of ideas, teeming with life. I look forward to hearing more of her work.

Sylvie Courvoisier and Cory Smythe's "The Rite of Spring - Spectre d'un songe"

Reading an interview on the Bandcamp site -- which has been featuring some good writing of late -- with the estimable pianist-composer-educator Kris Davis reminded me of this recent release on her Pyroclastic label. As a musician, Davis is equally conversant in notated music and improvisation, and her label champions others who are similarly inclined, including her fellow pianists Sylvie Courvoisier and Cory Smythe. 

The Swiss-born Courvoisier has been a fixture on the NYC jazz scene for a couple of decades; I quite enjoyed her pandemic-inspired collaboration with guitarist Mary Halvorson, Searching for the Disappeared Hour. Courvoisier had the idea of interpreting Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring while performing with dancer-choreographer Israel Galvan. At one point in his La Curva, the dancer struck a pose that reminded Courvoisier of Vaslav Nijinsky, choreographer of the 1913 ballet of The Rite that caused a sensation with its Paris premiere. 

Courvoisier abandoned a planned solo arrangement of the piece when the Stravinsky estate would only allow piano performances of the composer's version for two pianos; saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock suggested Smythe as a collaborator for the project. Smythe has worked with composers Tyshawn Sorey and Anthony Braxton, and violinist Hilary Hahn, among others. His three Pyroclastic albums (the latest: last year's Smoke Gets In Your Eyes) are fascinating, oblique extrapolations from song forms.

The two pianists render a scintillating reading of Stravinsky's score, exploring the contours of the familiar themes and giving them a rhythmic thrust that's new and distinctive. "Spectre d'un songe," the piece Courvoisier composed in response to The Rite, is episodic and dynamically varied. While it's hard to pick out the specific bits of Stravinsky she's responding to, Courvoisier and Smythe intertwine their sounds and run the gamut of moods from ruminative to tumultuous -- two piano adepts from different places on the composing-improvising continuum, rediscovering and engaging with a masterpiece that's part of their shared inheritance.

Things we like: Lurch Purse, akaKatboy

It's a funny time for music consumers of a certain age, what with vinyl having become a luxury item. As geeked as I am on the Romance of the Artifact, $40 for an LP is out of my league, so recently I've been buying more CDs, but I realize the ecologically responsible way to hear stuff is digitally, and there are loads of worthwhile releases that you won't hear any other way. Of the streaming platforms, Bandcamp seems the least evil, in terms of compensating artists. Indeed, Bandcamp Friday (coming up May 5, August 4, September 1, October 6, November 3, and December 1), when the platform waives its share and artists receive 93% of your entertainment dollar, is the next best thing to the merch table, where you hand your folding green or plastic directly to the artist.

One worthy digital-only release this month is Don't Mess With Lurch Purse, the debut from Lurch Purse, a fiery trio of NYC-based improvisers, released on Kansas City-based Mother Brain Records. I first heard guitarist Max Kutner with the Grandmothers of Invention; he's recently been on a creative roll, releasing albums with the prog-fusion inflected Android Trio and last year's watershed composer's showcase High Flavors. Android Trio has toured with saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, and Lewis introduced Kutner to his fellow tenorman and occasional collaborator Michael Eaton. Eaton's impressive stylistic range covers modern, free, harmolodic, funk, soul and acid jazz, with collaborators including Dave Liebman, Bern Nix, Calvin Weston, Daniel Carter, and Adam Minkoff (with whom he's performed the music of Stravinsky and Coltrane, among others). The trio is completed by veteran drummer Kevin Shea (Talibam!, Mostly Other People Do the Killing). 

On "Crack Goblins," Eaton unleashes a barrage of '60s-style fire music (he's played Trane's Ascension with Minkoff) while Kutner lays down a bed of skronky dissonance (fitting for one who's toured with Captain Beefheart's Magic Band), Sharrockian chaos-slide, and distorto blasts over Shea's insistent sprung-rhythm clatter. It's bold, bracing stuff; imagine the Stooges' "L.A. Blues" with chops. (Recorded in Huntington Station, Long Island, near where I bought my first copy of Funhouse.) On "Five Years in a Concrete Egg," Lurch Purse undertakes more ruminative explorations which build to a fever pitch that threatens to explode into chaos, like a guitar pedal with a battery that's about to go south. Kutner inhabits the same effects-laden sound world as Nels Cline and Bill Frisell, but is more inclined to go "out" and stay there than either of those players is these days (on records, at least). "Boite de Lune" is, among other things, a drum concerto for Shea, and his running commentary unifies it the way Tony Williams' did "Mademoiselle Mabry" and "Out to Lunch." Better than coffee for opening your eyes first thing in the morning. 

Elsewhere on Bandcamp, akaKatboy is the alias of versatile bassist extraordinaire Matt Hembree. Born on a mountaintop in, um, West Virginia, Hembree grew up in Tennessee, playing in a family bluegrass band a la Charlie Haden. In college, he heard the Ramones and Replacements, and commenced rocking out. Since relocating to Fort Worth in the mid-'80s, he's played funk-metal (Muffinhead), pop-rock (Bindle, Goodwin, Henry the Archer), prog (The Underground Railroad), reggae (Pablo and the Hemphill 7), and various flavors of rock covers (the Odors, the Elf-Men, Stoogeaphilia), and written songs for theatrical productions (Kids Who Care, Teatro de la Rosa).

Hembree started his family late and these days he's mainly Dad, but he's been recording his own songs at home for years and recently, he's been letting some of them out for public hearing. Of the current crop, "It's True" is a bouncy reggae number that wouldn't be out of place in Pablo's repertoire. The prelude from "Concerto for Clarinet, Cello, and Orchestra" is the beginning of a classical piece, composed with orchestrating software. "Good Day" is a charming paean to domesticity and my favorite of the bunch so far (especially with the accompanying video), while the raging rocker "Bomb" sounds more like the work of the bare-chested berserker I used to stand next to onstage with the Stooge band. He's got a new one on the way that has, I swear, the hyper-present intimacy of a Taylor Swift song. It's nice to hear him stretching. I understand he's getting his trombone fixed. Wait till I ask him if he wants to learn Captain Beefheart's Shiny Beast album...