Things we like: Tomeka Reid Quartet, Jason Robinson, Cecil Taylor

Friday brought bounty in the form of 3+3, the new album from the Tomeka Reid Quartet. The Chicago-based cellist-composer had just visited Texas with Myra Melford's Fire and Water Quintet, but that unit unfortunately didn't venture up to the DFW area. This is Reid's third album since 2015 (the second on Cuneiform) at the helm of this unit with guitarist Mary Halvorson (also a member of that Melford group), bassist Thomas Roebke, and drummer Tomas Fujiwara (a regular Halvorson collaborator).

While the Reid Quartet's earlier albums were showcases for the cellist's compositions -- a necessity for an artist who first came to prominence as a side musician (with Nicole Mitchell, Mike Reed, Anthony Braxton, and Roscoe Mitchell, among others) -- 3+3 puts the focus on the group's improvisational abilities and ensemble interaction. The spacious sound of this string-heavy band is more conducive to hearing the resonance of arco and pizzicato cello than some larger ensembles (not that Reid has any trouble making herself heard in such contexts). 

Reid's extended compositions run the gamut from gorgeously lyrical chamber music to loose-limbed swing to untrammeled improvisation. Relieved of her duties as composer and conceptualist, Halvorson does some of her finest recorded playing. Fujiwara sometimes careens into Elvin-via-Mitch Mitchell territory, and the leader demonstrates her outstanding command and distinctive voice on her instrument.

Also received Friday: Another disc recorded (like 3+3) by Nick Lloyd at Firehouse 12 in New Haven. Saxophonist-composer Jason Robinson is an artist I was only familiar with via a 2010 duet album for Clean Feed with pianist Anthony Davis, but he's been active since the late '90s, playing with the likes of Myra Melford, Nicole Mitchell, and Rudresh Mahanthappa, as well as leading his own expandable NYC-based Janus Ensemble. 

On Ancestral Numbers 1 (out May 14 on Playscape), he ruminates on genealogy and family history, inspired by the passing of his beloved maternal grandmother, who grew up in rural Arkansas and Texas before migrating to California as a teenager. Because Robinson's an abstract thinker, the ancestral experiences that inspired these pieces -- the Atlantic crossing, Ellis Island, westward migration -- aren't necessarily telegraphed by their musical content. 

Thus, "Malachi" evokes a journey through the American South using a circuitous post-bop structure, with a Robinson solo that veers into post-Ayler freedom. "Wattensaw," named for an Arkansas town that was a way station for Robinson's forebears, deploys an angular melody over a mutant fatback groove from drummer Ches Smith that gives trombonist Michael Dessen ample blowing room. On the title track, the leader and Dessen blow nimble contrapuntal lines before and after a brief but piquantly "out" solo from pianist Joshua White. The second volume of Ancestral Numbers is due on October 8.

Reviewing Phil Freeman's Cecil Taylor book reminded me of the plethora of posthumous CT releases, not the least of which are the complete Cecil Taylor in Berlin '88 box set on FMP ($125 digitally via Bandcamp, for those with deep pockets) and The Complete, Legendary, Live Return Concert at The Town Hall NYC November 4, 1973 (which includes the 90-minute main body of the performance of which Spring of Two Blue-J's was only the encores, a la Live at Leeds).

Back in March, First Visit Archive (the digital arm of producer Werner X. Uehlinger's Hat Hut enterprise) released Live at Fat Tuesdays, February 9, 1980, the complete recording of an hour-long set CT played at the NYC club/restaurant with a band of collaborators old and new: Jimmy Lyons on alto, Ramsey Ameen on violin, Alan Silva on bass and cello, Sunny Murray and Jerome Cooper (Revolutionary Ensemble) on drums. This was the same lineup and engagement that resulted in the 1981 release It Is In the Brewing Luminous. CDs of the set are now available on Hat Hut's ezz-thetics subsidiary via Squidco. How fortunate are we.

Jeff McLeod's "Not Good Enough"

Montgomery, Alabama, the Capital of Dreams, isn't a place I would expect to find experimental DIY psychedelic musicians. But I could be wrong. I spent six weeks there once, back in Y2K, attending Academic Instructor School at Maxwell Air Force Base. While there, I visited Maya Lin's Civil Rights Memorial and Hank Williams' grave (among British and French aviators who were killed in WW2 training accidents). My buddy Steve King (a C-130 loadmaster, not The Master of Suspense) and I spent evenings passing his acoustic back and forth, making up songs about our fellow students. But Montgomery's also the home of my old HIO collaborator Terry Horn -- and the subject of this piece, "multi-instrumentalist and goofy sort of musical experimentalist" Jeff McLeod. So in this case, I'm delighted to eat my words.

Jeff's career dates back to the '90s, when he was a member of the noise-rock band bert, who had an album produced by Steve Albini. He's a founder of the Alabama Improv Co-op and the Subversive Workshop newsletter/record label. He splatters psychedelic guitar skree all over Dynamic Negativism, a 2002 duet album with North Carolina polymath Bret Hart. He undertakes some of the damnedest impressionistic solo live Chapman Stick explorations I could even imagine on 2004's MUST: A Crackpot Life Study in Five Movements. 

On the other hand, he's also responsible for the gentle solo guitar tranquility (with a little reverb and eBow) of 2009 Dutch release Ever-Stretching Shadow. He also created a trio of electronic realizations under the Forethinking rubric, and a trilogy of recordings (Under Dim Self, Scalps of Gods, and Borne Down Upon, released 2011-2013) that employ sampling, synthesis, and McLeod's voice to express what was on his mind at that time. And I'm just scratching the surface here (working my way forward, slowly).

But now to the matter at hand -- namely, McLeod's current release, Not Good Enough, just released April 19 and available digitally or on CD via his Bandcamp page. McLeod says it's a "'proof-of-concept' album about [his] (unhealthy) relationship with musicks." I don't doubt that for a minute. The first thing I noticed when I cued up "Faking" (the featured track on Bandcamp), once I got past the dark, moody atmospherics of the intro, was that McLeod sings a lot like Daron Beck from Pinkish Black, minus the vocal F/X Daron's been known to favor -- a good thing in my book, since both men have distinctive low-register quivers, the perfect vehicle for conveying the aura of menace that Jeff does here. When McLeod takes off an a quavering, pitch-altered guitar solo, it sounds like a second voice shaking in terror.

Unlike lots of weird-music makers, McLeod isn't one to forego melody or thematic development, so on an extended instrumental like "Quaalude Eggs," the listener's free to turn off their mind, relax and float downstream and not worry -- Cap'n Jeff is steering the riverboat, from one diverting musical episode to the next. The harmonized guitars on "Old Ideas (modified)" put me in mind of the Allmans (the recently departed Dickey Betts being very much in my thoughts these days) or maybe Captain Beyond (the FM radio appearance of whose "Sufficiently Breathless" once rescued me from a very not-good LSD experience).

Taking it back to the top, the title track (which opens the album) returns to the headspace occupied by the aforementioned Pinkish Black, or maybe Scott Walker circa The Drift. "Nonaudience" is a nicely orchestrated blend of actual and virtual instruments, with McLeod's voice and guitar as colors in his artist's palette (or running down his canvas). Not Good Enough is proof positive that the advent of sampling and sequencing technology enabled great leaps forward in psychedelic music production by DIY tinkerers like Jeff McLeod (or closer to home, kindred spirits like Liquid Sound Company and Herd of Instinct). A sonic bath I could get in the habit of immersing myself in. I'd say it's plenty good enough.

FTW, 4.20.2024

Heavy rains forced many of the day's weed-related revels to move indoors or reschedule, but we had plans of our own: a night at Amphibian Stage to see Egla Birmingham Hassan's production of George Brant's historical musical Marie and Rosetta (with my buddy Darrin Kobetich providing offstage guitar alongside musical director Steven A. Taylor).

In recent years, the gospel singer-songwriter-guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe has received belated recognition for her musical innovations. Ray Charles always gets props for bringing the sound of the Black church into R&B, but Tharpe was fronting big bands in clubs and ballrooms as early as 1938. Her distorted electric guitar playing puts her directly in the line that leads from Charlie Christian and T-Bone Walker to Chuck Berry. Marie and Rosetta focuses on her relationship with singer-pianist Marie Knight, her late '40s-early '50s performing partner.

In Amphibian's production, veteran Dallasite Denise Lee and Chicagoan newcomer Denise Jackson inhabit the roles of Tharpe and Knight, respectively. They play pain for laughs (Tharpe's memory of white visitors to her childhood church raining "pennies from Heaven" on her as she sang is particularly poignant) and infuse their sanctified characters with earthy humanity, which they transcend when they raise their voices in song. Lee's Rosetta is assertive and shows a hard-won comfort in her own skin. Jackson's Marie starts out more tentative and conflicted, but grows in confidence before the moving conclusion. 

The briskly scripted, songful 90 minutes, with minimal staging, evoked memories of Jubilee Theatre back in Rudy Eastman's days in at least one Fort Worth theatergoer. Taylor and Kobetich previously worked together on Jubilee's It Ain't Nothing But the Blues, and the musical director's piano evoked the period's musical styles with harmonic richness. Metalhead-turned-acoustic improviser Kobetich did a great job of playing idiomatically correct stylings on National resophonic and Gibson electric guitars. Lee's stage presence is so commanding that it didn't even matter if you could tell she wasn't really playing.

There are four more performances of Marie and Rosetta, starting at 8pm this Thursday through Sunday. Highly recommended.

Things we like: Peter Van Huffel's Calisto, Ivo Perelman, Ernesto Diaz-Infante, Shane Parish

Bandcamp Friday #40 is coming May 3, then the program (in which the platform foregoes their cut of profits for a day, leaving all your coins for the artists) goes on vacation until September 3. A few suggestions for the suggestible listener follow.

After five albums with Gorilla Mask, an "angry jazz" band with rock dynamics, Berlin-based Canadian saxophonist Peter Van Huffel returns with something different: a bassless quartet called Callisto and a new Clean Feed CD, Meandering Demons. This time out, Van Huffel lays down his alto in favor of his baritone and turns his co-conspirators -- fiery trumpeter Lina Allemano, pianist/electronic musician Antonio Anissegos, and drummer Joe Hertenstein -- loose on a set of his finest compositions yet.

"Rude Awakening" opens with head-spinning loop effects on the bari before the band enters, playing an angular melody over an oddly syncopated groove, then Anissegos' electronics propel the band into '70s Miles territory. "Transient Being" is a darkly ruminative piece that creates a cinematic mood of unease. "Barrel of Monkeys" juxtaposes Andrew Hill-like impressionism with a shuffle beat. My favorite Van Huffel outing to date, and I'm now motivated to check out Allemano's work as a leader.

The next item under consideration came my way via a Discogs seller as a "something's extra." (Thanks, colinec!) Brazilian saxophonist Ivo Perelman is known for his work in the freeblow arena (particularly his collaborations with the estimable pianist Matthew Shipp). On Truth Seeker, released in February on the Polish label Fundacja Slucaj (who also have some archival Cecil Taylor items in their catalog, among other delights), he stands where Rollins, Ornette, and Joe Henderson once stood, at the helm of a tenor-led trio. Backed to the hilt by Mark Helias on bass and Tom Rainey on drums, Perelman undertakes some Rollins-esque thematic improvisation -- the result, he says, of switching to an MC Gregory mouthpiece, which focuses and directs his explorations in unaccustomed ways. An eminently satisfying set.

Latest from San Francisco-based guitar experimentalist Ernesto Diaz-Infante is a cassette, Amor Celestial, on the Albany, NY-based Tape Drift label, just released on April 5. The two-part dronefest starts out with Diaz-Infante obsessively repeating a fuzzed-out arpeggio like a one-man doom metal band over singing bowls, then interjecting stinging Sharrockian chaos-slide, which gives way first to slowly pulsing feedback, then gently chiming harmonics that build to crashing thunderclaps of metallic clangor. Second part opens with throbbing tanpura pulsations and tuneless strummarama like a kid who's showing you he knows how to "play" guitar before the arpeggio from Part One returns, albeit with less density. 

As I begin to dissociate, the strums give way to single note picking, and the slide returns, but ethereal this time, like the interstices between songs on Strictly Personal. There's even a little Jeff Beck-on-Yardbirds-"I'm a Man" choke-strum action, my pick for the angriest guitar sound ever, only here it's decontextualized to another ghostly memory on the trip. I even started to hear the Winkie Guards' chant from The Wizard of Oz in that drone. You get the idea. A groovy piece of DIY psychedelia, recommended if you'd dig meditating to a loop of the intro from Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride," or if your favorite Boris albums are Flood and Feedbacker. (Me too!)

Last but surely not least, my very own last month's Bandcamp Friday selection: Repertoire, the brand-new (drops May 10) solo acoustic LP from North Carolina-based guitar ace Shane Parish. Shane's one part math-rock nerd (ten albums and counting with the band Ahleuchatistas), one part Fahey-esque American primitive folk weirdo. He transcribed the music from Bill Orcutt's Music for Four Guitars and helped play it as a member of Orcutt's Guitar Quartet. (His Quartet-mate Wendy Eisenberg penned liner notes for this album, and they have a neat duet album, Nervous Systems, that they cut within scant hours of their first meeting back in 2018.) For his trouble, Parish got this album released on Orcutt's Palilalia label, and it's a corker (at least judging from the half-dozen tracks I got to download for having pre-ordered it last month, plus I've been watching two year old YouTube video of Parish playing Captain Beefheart's "One Red Rose That I Mean," also included here). 

Repertoire is a collection of Shane's reimaginings of other people's songs, and their provenance gives you an inkling of the depth and breadth of the guitarist's musical interests. Besides the Beefheart, there are tunes here from Ornette Coleman, Aphex Twin, the Minutemen, John Cage, Kraftwerk, Eric Dolphy, Alice Coltrane, and Sun Ra. Parish really digs Charles Mingus -- covers no fewer than three of the titanic bassist-composer's works, my current favorite being his countrified take on "Better Get Hit In Your Soul." Biggest surprise here is probably Fred Rogers' "It's You I Like," but it really shouldn't be, Parish being a good dad -- there's YouTube video of him and his kid with music from his earlier solo acoustic LP Undertaker Please Drive Slow, on John Zorn's Tzadik label. Dig it? Get it!

Phil Freeman's "In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor"

As of April 5, it's been six years that we've been living in a world without the titanic pianist-composer Cecil Taylor -- maybe the greatest musician of my lifetime (only Ornette Coleman and Pauline Oliveros come close, in my estimation). I only ever saw him play in person once, under suboptimal conditions (the contentious 1977 Carnegie Hall concert with Mary Lou Williams), but it left an indelible impression. 

Taylor worked the entire keyboard with an incredibly strong and percussive attack that involved both precise control and fierce abandon, unleashing crashing chords, dissonant clusters, and cascades of high register notes, riding a volcanic flow of energy. I was relatively new to jazz, but I didn't need to comprehend what I was witnessing to be affected by the intensity of the performance (people were standing up screaming in the balconies). At the time I compared it to being caught outside in a hurricane; only later did I come to realize that Taylor's prodigious technique was the result of a rigorous practice regimen, and that his compositions were highly arranged and rehearsed. The "force of nature" had intention. Over the years, listening to the records and reading A.B. Spellman, Amiri Baraka, Valerie Wilmer, Gary Giddins, and Greg Tate's scrawl on Cecil, I've come to understand a bit more about the artist and his process. But it still sounds like magic.

In his new book In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor (due for publication later this year on a date TBD), Phil Freeman -- co-founder of Burning Ambulance and a scribe whose scrawl has appeared in The Wire, The Village Voice, and Signal To Noise (RIP), among other estimable journals -- trains an analytical eye on Taylor's art, with details of the artist's personal life only included when relevant to the main narrative arc. This is respectful and appropriate when dealing with a subject who inhabited a persona that he used, at least in part, to keep outsiders at a distance. Freeman's a good reporter and researcher, a fan for 25 years who spent a couple of days with Taylor in 2016, and wherever possible, his text is based on his own experience or interviews with Taylor's living familiars (notable exception: Andrew Cyrille). When the author draws on published sources, they are scrupulously credited. 

Freeman traces Taylor's trajectory from his earliest recordings (produced by Tom Wilson and Nat Hentoff); the historic '62 sojourn in Scandinavia, in company of Jimmy Lyons, Albert Ayler and Sunny Murray; the band with Lyons and Andrew Cyrille, from their '66 Blue Note albums through Taylor's interval in academia and his mid-'70s re-emergence; the '78 band with Ronald Shannon Jackson (which I love as unreasonably as I do the '64 Mingus band); his late-'80s residence in Berlin, his collaborations with Bill Dixon and Tony Oxley, and beyond. I am now motivated to investigate some of Taylor's '90s and '00s work that I overlooked. 

I was surprised to learn that the percussionist Andre Martinez, who seemed like excess baggage in the 1991 Burning Poles video (with William Parker and Tony Oxley), turns out to have been a key element in Taylor's '80s bands (particularly the Orchestra of Two Continents). You might quibble (as did I) with some of Freeman's critical judgments: Did Rudy Van Gelder over-record the horns and under-record the piano and drums on Unit Structures? Maybe. Was Ramsey Ameen the indispensable member of the '78 band? I beg to differ. Then again, having spirited disagreements based on having heard the music is part of the fun of reading books like this.

Taylor saw written scores in standard notation as an impediment to music making; he used non-standard notation for his scores and transmitted the information orally at rehearsals. While Freeman covers this, one would have liked to read a bit more about Taylor's process of  preparing his musicians for performance -- but then, that would make this a different book.

Personal glimpses of the artist are fleeting, but poignant. In his upper middle class upbringing, Taylor was not unlike Duke Ellington, whom he admired. The influence of Taylor's parents can't be overstated. Taylor appears to have acquired much more of the culture from living in his mother's house than he did in schools, including the New England Conservatory (I can relate). His father's acceptance of his queerness gave Cecil a level of comfort with his sexuality that was probably unusual for the time (although it didn't prevent him from bridling when Stanley Crouch casually outed him in a 1983 Village Voice article). Taylor liked to party, and had a preternatural endurance for night life, but seems to have put his art ahead of personal relationships throughout his life. His exploitation by a corrupt associate after being awarded the Kyoto Prize in 2013 is a cautionary tale of elder abuse (it was discovered and reported by an Australian filmmaker who was making a documentary on Taylor). 

Taylor died intestate, and the fate of his estate remains in suspense. His place in history is unassailable. His music remains magic. And Freeman has written a highly readable book, worthy of its subject. 

Things we like: Max Kutner

I've written before that Max Kutner is my pick for the current working guitarist most deserving of wider recognition. I first heard him with the Grandmothers of Invention on the tour when they played the One Size Fits All album. Due to some kind of beef between drummer Chris Garcia and Napoleon Murphy Brock, their Kessler Theatre set that I witnessed was lacking my favorite track from that album, "Inca Roads," but that was hardly Max's fault. Between that tour and the release of his albums I've reviewed with Android Trio, High Flavors Quintet, and Partial Custody (whom I'm looking forward to hearing in person when they visit Texas in August), Kutner toured with the 21st century reunion edition of Captain Beefheart's Magic Band (show information and links to YouTube vids here). He also released a number of recordings with different ensembles that we'll be considering today.

Predating Kutner's involvement with the Grandmothers, The Royal Us had a unique take on "weird folk": acoustic instruments, playing traditional-ish arrangements, run through a synthesizer and laptop. (Imagine if Brian Eno had joined Steeleye Span instead of Roxy Music out of art school and you'll have some idea what's going on here.) Frontwoman Heather Lockie is an appealing song stylist and violist, Steven Van Betten is second guitarist and vocalist, and Brian Saia provides the electronic treatments. I have a pre-release CD-R of their 2013 release And You..., which remains digitally available via Bandcamp. Their take on the Child ballad "House Carpenter" (aka "The Daemon Lover") is truly surreal. 

The band Bubbeleh -- which included members of an earlier Afrobeat ensemble, The Sogo Takeover -- combined Eastern European Jewish folk music with jazz (from New Orleans to '70s Miles!), progressive rock, surf music, and whatever else the principals (Kutner and keyboardist Philip "Simcha" Rankin) felt like adding to the mix. The results are in keeping with Don Byron's more-or-less straight takes on the Mickey Katz songbook, John Zorn's mashup (under the rubric Masada) of Ornette Coleman and klezmer, and Ohioans Golems of the Red Planet's reworking of the Masada catalog as surf-rock-cum-VU. Don't let the goof-Yiddish song titles ("Schmutzy Glasses," "Grepse," "Simcha Boytchik Hintele") fool you into thinking this is a joke band; these meshuggahs play their tuchuses off, clarinetist Andrew Conrad, trumpeter Greg Zilboorg, and drummer Colin Woodford especially. And some of Kutner's echo-drenched excursions take him into Marc Ribot-doing-Jarmusch-soundtrack territory. Bubbeleh's self-titled 2014 CD remains digitally Bandcamp-available.

Of greatest interest here, because it's the closest thing to a direct precursor to Kutner's current outfit Partial Custody, is Evil Genius, a trio that teams Kutner's guitar with Stefan Kac's tuba and Mike Lockwood's drums. The result sounds like an agreeable collision of the Magic Band, Arthur Blythe's "tuba band" with Bob Stewart, and John Abercrombie's Gateway Trio. On their 2015 debut, Bitter Human, we hear the sound of expert musicians with fierce chops and a fair amount of humor, having fun playing off each other and comfortable enough to do so with abandon. Kutner penned seven of the album's ten tunes; my favorites are "Juke Prompt," which has an Afrobeat feel (shads of Sogo Takeover!) with an extended "out" section in the middle, and "(Share In A) Regional Meat Vision," which wends its way through several tempo changes and episodes of intense shredding.

Material for the second Evil Genius album, 2018's Experiments on Human Subjects, was largely composed on the road during the band's first national tour, and the music has a harsher, more rock-directed sound. Kac contributed seven of the 11 pieces, Kutner three, and Lockwood one. They kick the door open with Kac's Crimsonoid "Skateboarders Versus Security Guards: Double Agents in a Proxy War Between the Forces of Good and Evil" and follow it with the mutant funk of Kutner's "Tour de Stadt" (with the composer on bass, including a fuzzy solo). Other standout tracks include "Arctic Circle," which features a spiky Kutner solo, replete with extended techniques and ringing harmonics, and "Colonel Karl Marx and Keenan McCardell," a tour de force for Kac, with Kutner and Lockwood rocking ferociously alongside him. Now back to my digital copy of Partial Custody, which you owe it to yourself to hear if any of the above sounds interesting to you.

Things we like: Kory Reeder

To date, my exposure to Kory Reeder's music had been in improvising contexts, so after experiencing his Deep Listening workshop and collaboration with James Talambas at Dallas' New Media Contemporary last week, it seemed a good time to explore his catalog of composed works (over 100 to date). He's been posting compilations from his ten hours of archives on his Bandcamp page for free download monthly since July 2023. This quick overview will focus on commercially released recordings. 

(Random thoughts: Watching Talambas playing Ellen Fullman's Long String Instrument reminded me of the Extreme Slow Walk exercise from Pauline Oliveros' book Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice. When Reeder spoke of how living in the urban sound environment has caused changes in animal behavior, I thought of how, when I worked in a grocery store, it seemed to me that human infants' cries are higher pitched than those I remember -- perhaps because they have to compete for attention with cellphone alerts?)

To begin with, the cassette if the thought evaporates was released in January 2024 on Andrew Weathers' Full Spectrum label. The piece involves both improvisation and electronics. Reeder provides the players with brief, open-ended instructions, then uses a software patch with intelligent oscillators that manipulate the sounds they generate. The first side contains duo (flute and viola) and trio (flute, viola, and cello) versions, while the second contains three different septet versions (for flute, bass clarinet, violas, cello, and double basses). 

Snow is another January 2024 release, available on CD or cassette on Reeder's own Sawyer Editions label. It's a 30-minute piece for an ensemble of violin, cello, percussion, and piano. In the first part, the piano plays a simple melody with the occasional discordant note, while the strings comment. In the second, the piano and strings seem to shift roles, from foreground to background and vice versa. The overall effect is captured in the epigraph from the poet Louise Gluck -- the feeling of moving through a spectral landscape, with only fleeting and remote human contact.

Released in 2022 on the UK-based Another Timbre label, the 72-minute, nine-movement Codex Vivere is a commission for the avant-garde/experimental ensemble Apartment House. It has the widest tonal palette (piano, violins, viola, cello, bass clarinet, and bass flute) and is the most thematically developed work in this batch, evocative of wide open spaces and broad horizons. Three of the movements, including violin and piano concertos, exceed ten minutes in length. It's notable how sometimes, Reeder's acoustic winds and strings take on the timbres of electronic instruments.

Last under the microscope here is the earliest release: love songs/duets, from 2019, on the German label Edition Wandelweiser (a favorite of Reeder's). The length and leisurely pace of the pieces (shortest: 14 minutes, longest: 25) allow the listener to attend with extreme focus to the timbral qualities of the instruments (two bass clarinets; saxophone and bass trombone; two flutes; violin and piano) as they conjoin their sounds. This might be the best entry point for the uninitiated listener into Reeder's sound world.

Reeder's serene and spacious music, with its employment of skeletal melody and overlapping long tones, is highly conducive to Deep Listening: noticing the tones (and their overtones) when they start and end, hearing the spaces between them, shifting from focal to global attention, being aware of the spatial relationship between the listener and the sound source. It's a practice worth developing.

Modney's "Ascending Primes"

New York City really has it all, as someone once sang (now including earthquakes). The timeless appeal of the ultimate terminal city pulls creatives from all over. While the city's center of gravity might have shifted from uptown to Lower Manhattan to Brooklyn (and whither thence?), the Apple remains the epicenter of creative music in America. As a New York expat living in Texas, I would be remiss not to mention the vibrant local scenes in Houston, Austin, Dallas/Denton, St. Louis, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, etc. But for creatives per square mile, Gotham stands predominate. And such density raises the bar for innovation, and accelerates the interchange of ideas.

In this century, the city's most forward thinking musicians have blurred the lines between classical and jazz, composition and improvisation, clearing the way for all manner of productive cross-pollination. Ascending Primes, the new double CD from Modney -- a violinist (formerly known as Josh Modney), member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, and executive director of Wet Ink Ensemble -- is a stellar example of such a synthesis. It's due for a May 3 release on Pyroclastic.

The six Modney compositions included here utilize Just Intonation, a tuning system based on whole number ratios, as opposed to the divisions of the octave used in the more familiar Equal Temperament. (NB: I've wrestled with Harry Partch's Genesis of a Music, but only know enough about Just Intonation to get myself in trouble.) Modney says that the prime numbers in the system's whole number ratios have distinct sonic characteristics, which elicit different primal emotions. By juxtaposing Just Intonation with Equal Temperament and the timbres of voices and instruments, Modney seeks to widen the gap between consonance and dissonance, and explore "the potential for beauty and terror" within that spectrum. Each of the pieces on Ascending Primes is meant to embody the qualities of a different prime number. They are performed by groups of corresponding numbers of musicians, with the string players' instruments tuned to whole number ratios, rather than the customary fifths. 

Modney is a highly distinctive instrumentalist who employs a ferocious attack (showcased in the opening solo "Ascender") and enjoys quick-cutting between achingly gorgeous melody and harsh noise to create an effect like glimpsing a parallel reality (as depicted in the Ellsworth Kelly postcard collages that adorn the album's packaging). He uses a distortion pedal, controlled by a volume pedal, to accentuate the difference tones that occur when two notes are played at the same time. On the trio piece "Lynx," he and electronic musician Sam Pluta (whom I first heard on Ingrid Laubrock's Dreamt Twice, Twice Dreamt) respond to Mariel Roberts' cello lines. The string-quartet-plus-piano "Everything Around It Moves" contrasts dissonance (the tearing sounds and slashing strings early in the piece) with consonance (the solos from Kyle Armbrust's viola and Cory Smythe's piano), culminating in an ensemble section that builds to an uplifting resolution.

While the first disc is composition-focused, the two long, multi-part pieces on the second disc bring the players' improvisational abilities to the fore. For the 26-minute, four-part "Fragmentation and the Single Form," the ensemble expands to a septet, adding Charmaine Lee's voice and electronics, Ben LaMar Gay's cornet and synth, Dan Peck's tuba, and Kate Gentile's drums to the piano and two violins. As the piece begins, the strings repeatedly build tension to near the breaking point before Gentile's cathartic drumming releases it, and Modney's distorted violin drowns everything in white noise. An impressionistic interval from Lee and Gay leads to a section in metronomic rhythm, interrupted by percussion explosions and frenetic tuba solos. A succeeding series of solos establishes a theme, driven by Gentile's crisp propulsion, before it's once more overcome by noise. Then the theme returns minus the driving beat, rendered by Gay and Lee with string backing and tuba counterpoint. Modney takes up the theme before Gentile kicks things into gear, and you might be surprised to hear the entire ensemble rocking out (with solos from Gay, Smythe, and Modney) before the droning denouement.

The 33-minute, three-part "Event Horizon" features an undectet (that's eleven pieces, y'all), including improvising adepts Anna Webber (tenor sax), Nate Wooley (trumpet), David Byrd-Marrow (horn), Eddy Kwon (violin), Joanna Mattrey (viola) and Lester St. Louis (cello). The first part opens with an explosion of dissonance from Modney, overlaid with cascading notes from Smythe, giving way to an ensemble drone on all the prime intervals of D. Wooley takes a meditative solo, interrupted by percussion-led eruptions and undergirded by strings and horns playing a descending progression. The second part begins with violin and tuba playing a sparse backing for Byrd-Marrow's horn solo before the ensemble joins in. Then Modney and Smythe provide a dissonant background for Kwon's spiky improv. Webber and Wooley join with more pyrotechnics before all is subsumed in a drone, and the brass play an arrangement of a violin fragment from the first part. The third part begins with a fierce viola improv from Mattrey. More rocking out ensues, with solos from Webber, Wooley, Smythe, and Modney. Mariel Roberts and St. Louis improvise a cello duet, replete with extended techniques, then the piece (and album) ends on a 60 Hz drone -- familiar as heartbeat to players of guitars with single-coil pickups.

Reading this back, I realize that mere description sells this music short. Modney's music might be scientific and mathematical in its design, but it's meant to be experienced emotively and viscerally. It gives the lie to the belief that contemporary classical music is merely an academic exercise. Ascending Primes is the state of the art in creative music in 2024 -- highly recommended to lovers of all sorts of improvised music and even progressive rock, as well as new music aficionados. Also, this album, along with Ches Smith's Laugh Ash (produced, like Ascending Primes, by David Breskin) is proof positive, if any is needed, that Pyroclastic is more than just "a jazz label." (And to hell with genre Balkanization.) So there.

FTW, 4.5.2024

I went back to Southwest High School to hear the students from the Music and Sound Design Program of Choice perform their Spring Concert in the school's auditorium. (I'd been there the week before to hear them working things out in the school courtyard.) It was the last period on a Friday, and the kids who filled the room had bought $2 tickets to hear their friends perform. First downbeat was at 2:30, but program director Marco "Mr. Trillz" Petrilli had advised me to get their before 2:00 to ensure I got a parking spot (presumably because families would be attending).

The Is-ness Bizness band -- Emmanuel Aremu (drums), Darius Johnson (bass), Adrian Moore (keyboard), and Axel Aguayo (lead guitar) -- kicked things off, and an early highlight was "Is-ness," an original on which a pre-recorded track of the band (with pianist Luis DeLeon, absent on Friday) accompanied vocalist Alice (singing in Arabic), rapper/campus monitor Mr. Houze, and the horn section of Roberto Caldera (sax) and Tristan Anderson (trumpet). Alice sang the Arabic lyrics to the 1948 version of "Misirlou" and led her schoolmates in waving their phone flashlights over their heads in rhythm. Then a band consisting of Aguayo and Cristian Sanchez (guitars), Jackson ODaniel (bass), Hannah Stevens (drums), and Anderson (trumpet) took the stage to perform the Dick Dale arrangement of "Misirlou." The sound on this tune in the auditorium was much improved from what I'd heard outside the week before, with the two guitars' distinctive parts (Aguayo low, Sanchez high) more clearly audible. (Some mixing issues with the vocal mics were resolved as the show progressed.) Aguayo finished the set by playing his version of the Eddie Van Halen showpiece "Eruption."

Lead singer Kirey from the band Saira was absent from school Friday, but her bandmates Mali (guitar), Monserratt (bass), and Chloe (drums) performed sans vox and got big love from the crowd for their original and a cover of Christina Vidal's "Take Me Away" from the Freaky Friday movie. A nice surprise for me (not heard the week before) was the band Careless Romances, who had an interesting instrumentation -- vox, guitar, bass, drums, and keytar -- and played with real punk energy on Arctic Monkeys' "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor" and one other tune. (Their guitarist, Ranyia Clements, also performed emcee duties when Mr. Trillz was otherwise occupied.) The duo Silvet, fronted by Jackson ODaniel on guitar and vox, followed with more punkitude -- an original "Moonlight Envy" and a Misfits cover. ODaniel stayed up to play with ParaSights (himself, Jet on vox, Luke Lunsford on bass, Hannah Stevens on drums) on their version of the Misfits' "Teenagers from Mars," another show highlight which brought the guitarist from Careless Romances and the drummer from Saira out dancing, inciting their schoolmates to dance in the aisles (although a wide section in front of the stage was taped off to avoid a reprise of the previous year's mosh pit). DJ Amare Tutt ran the live mix and kept the energy up with his between-set selections.

The Is-ness Bizness band returned, augmented by Mr. Trillz on rhythm guitar, to back Tae (Tamia Washington), a powerful, soulful singer who projected strong emotion on two originals, "Autumn Memories" and "Happy for Awhile." An instrumental version of "Black Magic Woman" featuring Aguayo followed, setting the stage for the climactic set by Niyaa (Aniya Walker), an elegant R&B vocalist who performed three originals: "I Can't," "Faded," and "Silent Feelings." On the last two she was accompanied by a special guest, her producer and Southwest alum Money Reezy, and on the final tune, Is-ness drummer Emmanuel Aremu played live with the track -- my favorite moment of the afternoon. The band Cicada -- Mariana Cazares (vox), Gannon McDonald (guitar/vox), Preston Moore (drums), and Is-ness's Darius Johnson subbing for Mateo Perez (bass) -- had the unenviable task of playing up till the dismissal bell, which triggered a mass exodus from the auditorium. The band played on, though, showcasing McDonald's dissonant guitar and guttural vocal stylings. The show was well documented by students from Southwest's media tech crew, whose photos appear above.

Dallas, 4.6.2024

My first time in Exposition Park since the time I saw King Crimson with Jeff Liles and Dennis Gonzalez back in 2017 brought back memories of shows at Bar of Soap back in the 20th century. We were headed for New Media Contemporary, James Talambas's new artist-run gallery space, for their first collaboration with Denton experimental music mainstays Molten Plains.

The gallery is currently the home of Bay Area-based composer Ellen Fullman's Long String Instrument, an apparatus made up of a hundred 90-foot strings with a resonating chamber on one end, tuned in Just Intonation -- a system based on whole-number ratios, rather than the divisions of the string used in the more familiar Equal Temperament -- using C-clamps. The player walks between the two courses of strings, using friction from rosined hands to play long tones on them. 

Composer Kory Reeder opened the evening with an abbreviated Deep Listening workshop (a real one would last four hours, he said). Holder of a PhD from the University of North Texas, Reeder's had works performed by symphonies in Toledo, Fort Worth, and New Jersey. Since committing to living in Denton after completing his studies, he's been concerned with finding spaces for creative music performance not under the auspices of academia or nonprofits (although he has done both). Last month, he performed a 24-hour piece at a space in Dallas -- which required finding a site that would be available for 48 hours, to allow for setup and teardown, plus coordinating the teams of musicians who would perform with him (in sections that ranged in length from an hour to seven hours). "The easiest part was writing the notes on paper," he said. 

Deep Listening is based on the work and ideas of composer Pauline Oliveros. It's a practice and technique by which performers can learn to listen and respond to sounds in their environment. I find its meditative aspects and the idea of "walking as aesthetic practice" that Reeder spoke of (citing Francisco Careri's Walkscapes: Walking As An Aesthetic Practice as a resource) resonant with my experience of meditative practice. Reeder led us through a couple of Deep Listening exercises, and provided copies of one from Oliveros. Now I'm going to have to revisit her book Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice. (They say that the most successful teacher is one who motivates their student to want to learn more.) 

When Monte Espina sound checked, it was immediately evident that New Media Contemporary is a good sounding room -- much more so than one would expect from a space with concrete floors and walls. But the space proved to be very well suited to nuanced musical performance. I don't think I've ever heard the duo of Ernesto Montiel on tabletop guitar and Miguel Espinel on percussion, violin, objects, and electronic treatments more clearly, or been able to see what they're doing as well. (The most exciting part of their set was watching to see if Montiel's wife would be able to stop their baby daughter from rushing the stage to her father's arms.) As always, they provided a complex, ever-shifting soundscape.

Sarah Ruth Alexander's set was basically a presentation of her excellent 2023 album Fellowship of the Arid Plane, released on Reeder's Sawyer Spaces label and consisting of field recordings she made on the Panhandle farm where both she and her father grew up (in Lakeview, Texas, population 60, "and there's no lake!"). After a brief spoken introduction, Alexander's partner Stephen Lucas screened a video collage he helped her make using her photos and video from the site, with a soundtrack from the album that included the singing of religious songs with a friend from her high school days, sounds of wind, farm equipment, cattle, bees living in the wall of her childhood bedroom, and a climactic thunderstorm. ("Mother Nature is a fuckin' badass noise artist!") Fellowship is my favorite recording of Alexander's to date, and the combination of visuals and theater-quality sound is the best way to experience it.

The final set featured Reeder and Talambas playing solo pieces -- Reeder on arco bass with electronic treatment, Talambas on the Long String Instrument -- before improvising together. The pulsing overtones from Reeder's bass were hypnotic, and I think the audience benefitted from having done the Deep Listening exercises as a precursor to the evening's performances. The ritualistic movement involved in playing the Long String Instrument added to the mood of contemplation that the music's long tones created. All in all, it was an extraordinary evening of highly absorbing performances, and hopefully a harbinger of things to come.

Oak Cliff, 3.31.2024

Easter Sunday. Sleepytime Gorilla Museum was playing at Trees. We headed for The Wild Detectives to hear Trio du Sang -- guitarist Gregg Prickett's band with violinist Andrew May (Sounds Modern) and percussionist Bobby Fajardo -- play their first gig since the start of the pandemic, on a bill with a shadowy Houston duo called Ak'chamel.

On the way in, was pleased to encounter guitarist-photog-raconteur and all-around fine fella Paul Quigg, who just turned 70. Inside, I ran into drummer-philosopher Gerard Bendiks, who's now been collaborating with trumpeter Chris Curiel as Swirve for a couple of decades -- the last 15 years in tandem with the Mad Swirl poets' open mic. A couple of distinctive Oak Cliff characters who give the neighborhood its distinctive character.

Trio du Sang played a short but exquisitely paced opening set, performing their numbers back to back so no one could interrupt their flow with applause until the very end. May played an electrified 5-string violin -- I forgot to ask but I imagine he had an added low C below the bottom G -- with a ferocious attack and virtuoso chops, his sound redolent of gypsy jazz as well as Paganini. Fajardo played a simple array -- darbuka, frame drum, a couple of cymbals and a hi-hat, with a kick pedal for the box he was sitting on, which highlighted his silver shoes (this is entertainment, after all). Prickett played an amplified nylon-string, picking with fingernails, using extended techniques as well as playing propulsive rhythm and cleanly executed lines.

While the trio's sound is informed by May and Prickett's classical backgrounds, this was highly visceral acoustic music ("because that's all I've got," Prickett modestly said). Quite stirring as well, watching the nonverbals between May and Prickett, or feeling the groove when the guitarist's right hand locked in with Fajardo. Prickett's Mingus-influenced jazz ensemble Monks of Saturnalia remains on hiatus for the time being, but he has guitar duos with Paul Quigg and Jonathan Horne that we'll hopefully be hearing from soon.

Ak'chamel was something entirely other. When the time came, they donned their homemade costumes -- redolent of African and Native American, as well as Arabian traditional garb -- and transformed the corner of the bookstore into ritual ceremonial space. The taller musician controlled their pre-recorded loops using a huge pedalboard, and started out playing Chinese musette. The other musician played a floor tom (which he struck with great force) and hi-hat. At times, they both produced guttural vocalizations that reminded me of electronic Tuvan throat singing; sometimes the drummer sang unintelligibly through a megaphone. 

The horn player strapped on a Fender bass, and for awhile they came across like a primordial doom metal band. Ak'chamel operates in a space where the technical details of music lose relevance, and their hypnotic sound carries the listener away like a fever dream. The two dueted on wooden flutes, then there was an interval where the drummer uttered bloodcurdling shrieks through the megaphone, while his collaborator scraped away at the bass with a short bow. 

There was humor in their performance, too, as when the taller one picked up a can of some beverage to take a drink under his costume, or when he ventured into the audience to confront individual members. (I was one of them; later, out of costume, he smilingly told me, "I really got in your shit." All in good fun, I said, although I admitted that I couldn't recall another time when I was so happy not to be on LSD.) For their finale, the drummer stripped off the outer layer of his costume, strapped on a 3-stringed electric instrument, and they launched into what could only be described as a mutant surf-rock number. We left feeling mightily entertained, and at least stirred, if not shaken.