Max Kutner's "Partial Custody"

My candidate for the American guitarist most deserving of wider recognition: Max Kutner, Las Vegas native by way of Cal Arts, currently based in Brooklyn. Kutner's toured with Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and Oingo Boingo legacy bands, and is a regular on the NYC free improv scene. Back in 2022, he released an excellent quintet album, High Flavors, featuring his own compositions, recorded and mixed by Martin Bisi, that almost nobody noticed. At the time, I suspected it was partially because the album was only available in digital format, and lots of scribes of A Certain Age tend to prefer physical media, still.

On April 5, Los Angeles-based Orenda Records will release Partial Custody, 67 minutes of music comprising six new Kutner compositions and an arrangement of Brian Eno's "Bone Jump." It's the debut recording of a new trio, also called Partial Custody, that includes Ben Stapp on tuba and James Paul Nadien on drums and glockenspiel. The instrumentation is identical to an earlier band Kutner co-led, Evil Genius. But the original material here is all new, written over five days in the run-up to the recording of this album. And Kutner relied on his bandmates to bring their own voices and ideas to the music to achieve its full realization.

To pull in those of us who are still geeked on The Romance of the Artifact, Partial Custody is being distributed in a unique physical format, as well as your garden variety digital download. Vegas native Kutner is offering the album in the form of a casino chip bearing a QR code which links to a folder containing the tracks; a 12" x 12" poster and album information sheet are also included with the chip. This requires a leap of faith on the artist's part that folks who buy the chips aren't going to share the code around. It's a kind of social experiment: by modeling trust, can one cause others to behave in a trustworthy manner? It says a lot that Kutner presumes goodwill on the part of his audience.

Fortuitously, the review link arrived during a week when I'd been thinking a lot about tuba-centric bands I recall from the '70s (Sam Rivers, Arthur Blythe). Stapp, a composer in his own right, has all the fluency and facility of, say, Bob Stewart or Joe Daley, and is equally expressive whether reading or extemporizing. Nadien's a deft and imaginative percussionist. Together, the three form a perfectly balanced orchestral unit and vehicle for Kutner's complex, knotty compositions. 

The ruminative tone poem "Whatever Else the News Has Planned" serves as the curtain-raiser. The guitar plays a wending melody, punctuated by snare rolls, until the tuba emerges as the solo voice. There's a lot going on here, and the music's density increases the farther you get into the album. After the brief "Going," the album hits its first highlight with "Exaggeration Holmes." 

Starting out with a mutant funk groove, the piece's statistical density increases (one wonders if Nadien can play glockenspiel and drums simultaneously live) before taking on a heavier aspect, then a lighter one. Next, Kutner unleashes a face-melting solo -- tonally and texturally similar to Frank Zappa's signature '80s sound, with some of the yearning quality of FZ's mixolydian meditations, but with a melodic imagination that's uniquely Kutner's. Supported by Stapp's burbling tuba and Nadien's exuberant crash and thump, the net effect is like stumbling on a meet-up between Zappa, Jack Bruce, and Terry Bozzio in the emerald beyond. When the groove returns and gives way to still more thematic and textural shifts, it's astonishing to remember that they're doing all of this with only three instruments. Magic.

"The Bell Mimic" is an ambient study, with Stapp playing cavernous long tones and Kutner entering the sound world of Nels Cline and Bill Frisell to produce sounds like shifting tectonic plates and some head-spinning backwards looping. I'll admit to never having heard the original version of Eno's "Bone Jump," from 2010's Small Craft on a Milk Sea album. (I kind of bailed after Before and After Science, but Kutner's enough of an Eno fan to have once played an arrangement of "Discreet Music" for solo electric guitar.) Partial Custody's version of the piece starts out juxtaposing hypnotic, minimalist repetition against discordant noise, building to a thunderous heavy clangor of effects-laden tuba and guitar, then winding down with some science fiction sounds. 

"Dancing to the Dead Beat" was the last piece written, on the eve of the sessions. Its sedately meditative opening serves as a showcase for Stapp's fluid facility. Kutner uses a clean tone to play with bluesy lyricism, but "out" -- like Grant Green on the moon. The piece evolves through more changes; a military waltz gives way to dub reggae before a punishing fuzz drone slashes its way in and drives the intensity up for a spell, before things wind down pensively to a unison close.

"Jet Plane" is the album closer, 24 minutes of relentless forward motion, repeating figures that are deconstructed, then reconstructed, and breakneck drumming. There's enough variation in the twists and turns the music takes that the time flies by as fleetly as Stapp's blinding runs (how can he play that fast on that instrument?) until all is subsumed under a wave of random oscillation, radio chatter, and feedback meltdown, and catharsis is achieved.

An early candidate for my album of the year, this is. Kutner says he wants to tour this band. I'm thinking interest could be found in Houston, Austin, Denton, and Dallas. We live in hope. Pre-orders happening now.