Steven Bernstein's "ResoNation Trio/"Ultra Resonance"

Photo by Andrew Blackstein.

It's hard to believe now how controversial Teo Macero's editing on Miles Davis' late '60s-early '70s albums like In A Silent Way, Bitches Brew, and On the Corner was when those records were new. Part of it was the innovation of the funk-and-rock inflected sound Miles was exploring at the time, but Teo's post-production work almost made him a co-composer (although Miles always claimed credit for his Directions In Music). The same kind of resistance met Bill Laswell's remixes of electric Miles on Panthalassa when they appeared in 1998. Times have changed to where an artist like Makaya McCraven -- a drummer and producer whose work involves remixing live improvisations -- has been selected to receive a grant from the Doris Duke Foundation.

On his latest release -- out on double vinyl or CD via Royal Potato Family on June 5 -- the trumpeter-composer Steven Bernstein and his longtime collaborator, producer Scotty Hard, start with a set of new Bernstein compositions played by a brand new ensemble, then deconstruct them into Something Entahrly Other. Bernstein's a longtime fixture on the Lower Manhattan music scene, and the mastermind behind both the genre-bending jazz quartet Sexmob (which just released a 2023 collaboration with NYC avant-garde icon Laurie Anderson on Nonesuch) and Millennial Territory Orchestra, known for its reinventions of a century of American popular music. 

With ResoNation Trio, Bernstein -- best known for his work on the rarely-heard slide trumpet -- takes up the valved trumpet in the company of bassist Scott Colley and drummer Nasheet Waits to improvise conversations around his compositions, which Hard, on Ultra Resonance, then reimagines at the cellular level. It's a bold, bracing listen.

Bernstein first heard Colley and Waits with pianist Andrew Hill. Colley's a busy bandleader and in-demand side musician whose big sound shows the influence of his CalArts instructor Charlie Haden. Waits has become a significant force with his own bands, in Jason Moran's Bandwagon, the collaborative trio Tarbaby, and Dave Holland's New Quartet. Bernstein is a melodic trumpeter in the mold of Don Cherry, Dennis Gonzalez, and Wadada Leo Smith. ResoNation Trio's performances unfold at an unhurried pace, with ample negative space, before building to fulsome grooves, Bernstein's lines swirling around Colley and Waits' sturdy propulsion. The first disc closes with the trio's take on the venerable blues chestnut "Sitting On Top of the World," which establishes continuity with Bernstein's earlier explorations of American songcraft.

The inspiration for Ultra Resonance came from Bernstein's exposure to Garvey's Ghost, the dub version of reggae great Burning Spear's album Marcus Garvey. Bernstein and Hard previously worked as co-composers on Sexmob's 2023 outing The Hard Way, but for the new project, Hard took ResoNation Trio's completed tracks as the basis for his work. While modern pop productions owe a lot to innovations that hip-hop originators borrowed from dub producers like Lee Perry and Scientist, the techniques of dub -- heavy remixing, emphasis on pulse, the addition of audio effects and snippets from other recordings -- haven't yet been widely applied to improvised performances. 

The spareness of ResoNation Trio's instrumentation gave Hard the opportunity to deconstruct the music to its constituent parts and reconfigure them in a form that still has the instruments' organic warmth and humanity. Unlike Macero and McCraven, Hard will lift a phrase from here, a drum fill from there, and recombine them into a completely new piece, slathered with atmospherics and added instrumentation -- including Bernstein's debut on Electronic Valve Instrument (EVI). The pieces he created take their titles from elements on the Periodic Table -- emblematic of the way Hard has transformed ResoNation Trio's music. His musical alchemy rewards attention.

Golems of the Red Planet's "Surf Masada"

You might think that no thread could possibly connect surf music, John Zorn, and Northern Ohio. But you’d be wrong. Start with the hijaz scale, common to Arab, flamenco, and Ashkenazi Jewish music – and surf rock. Add the knowledge that genre-bending composer Zorn played in a surf band as a teen. 

Since 1993, Zorn has composed 613 instrumental pieces – his three Masada songbooks -- inspired by Ashkenazi music. They’ve been performed as jazz (so authentically that original Masada Quartet bassist Greg Cohen got a gig with Ornette Coleman for his trouble), chamber music, hardcore, acapella, salsa, and Afrobeat. 

Now, Golems of the Red Planet – an Akron, Ohio, quartet that drank from the same well of inspiration as Devo and Pere Ubu, and recently played their first-ever live date at Jilly's Music Room in the Rubber City -- dare to perform the Masada songbook as surf rock, with a cello (and live, a violin) to lend Zorn’s melodies special poignancy. You’ll never hear great Jewish music the same way again. It's available digitally now, out on vinyl on Heyday Again Records June 12.

Golems are the brainchild of bassist Mark Allender (The Pointless Orchestra), who runs the Zorn-themed Masada World website. To help realize his vision, he recruited cellist Matt Reese (Trial of Lucy), moonlighting jazz drummer Bob Ethington (Unit 5), and Bob's Tin Huey bandmate Harvey Gold on guitar and keys. (In the '70s, Tin Huey were prog rockers in new wave clothing who made the mark early Pere Ubu strove to hit.) More recently, Harvey was part of an aggregation Nuggets garage rock compilation curator/longtime Patti Smith sideman Lenny Kaye assembled to play a Nuggets anniversary show at Cleveland's Beachland Ballroom.

Golems' arrangements and approach provide a more highly individuated approach to "radical Jewish culture" than, say, ethnomusicologist Hankus Netsky's Klezmer Conservatory Band, or even clarinetist Don Byron's African American take on the masterwork of Cleveland-born klezmer Mickey Katz. Surf Masada opens with an almost prog-rock take on "Hadriel" that gallops its way into a full-on, feedback-laden psychedelic maelstrom. "Mehalel" juxtaposes Gold's percussive picking, his notes slathered in chorus and delay, with Reese alternating counterpoint and unison lines on cello. It's a potent mixture.

On "Hutriel," Ethington takes a tricky and surprising approach to subdividing the beat while Reese states the theme, then Gold applies a fuzzy tremolo, giving way to a raga-like section where the drums play tabla-like accompaniment. What sounds like radio transmission noise (but proves to be a text from surrealist theorist Andre Breton) intrudes on the hauntingly spectral opening to "Paschar/Tzofeh," before the drums kick off a propulsive beat behind the theme statement. "Ziphim" starts with a nervous-sounding cello line; myriad dynamic shifts accompany the theme and variations, culminating in a series of descending, Who-like chords over a thundering drone before the recapitulation.

"Damam" opens with an intro straight out of a James Bond soundtrack, and includes a brief but memorably clanking, melodic bass line worthy of Roy Wood of Move/ELO/Wizzard fame (who made such a hallmark in his heyday). Pick to click here is "Hazor," with its catchy, repeating three-note hook, but "Re'cha" is no slouch either with its mutant Bo Diddley beat. 

What can one say? In a moment when weird instrumental music seems to be in vogue -- I'm looking at you, Angine de Poitrine, Khruangbin, and LA LOM -- these Buckeye boys might just have what it takes to make it. If not to Carnegie Hall, at least to Brooklyn. 

Things we like: Yvonne Rogers, Myra Melford/Satoko Fujii, Cecil Taylor Unit

I simply adore jazz piano records. And I have three new ones to edify and amaze me this month.

Like Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and Heather Cox Richardson, pianist-composer Yvonne Rogers hails from the state of Maine. Since landing in Brooklyn a few years back after studies at the Eastman School of Music and University of Rochester, she's garnered awards and commissions, led her own quartet, and performed regularly in ensembles led by Ingrid Laubrock, Adam O'Farrill, and Alden Hellmuth. 

Her new album, The Button Jar on Pyroclastic, was produced by the estimable Kris Davis before she stepped away from helming the label to concentrate on her own composing and performing. It's Rogers' first solo recording, named, she writes, for her mother's button jar, which taught her "to balance fair play with craft, and to find magic in the process."

Perhaps influenced by its creator's bio, The Button Jar's meditative and spiritual qualities put me in mind of Ives' Concord Sonata, while my wife said the lightness of Rogers' touch reminded her of Tin Hat Trio/Sleepytime Gorilla Museum founder Karla Kihlstedt's voice -- it's "conversational, rather than performative." As a composer, Rogers is a clear thinker, has good command of her materials, and shows lots of promise for the future.

Myra Melford and Satoko Fujii's history as a piano duo goes back to 2007 and the all-improv duet album Under the Water on Fujii's Libra label. Katarahi, on leading edge French indie RogueArt, features compositions by both performers (four by Melford, three by Fujii). Melford recently wowed Texas audiences with her all-star Fire and Water Quintet, while Fujii produces a steady stream of releases in a variety of contexts.

The pairing of the two artists is galvanic. Both are dynamic, assertive performers, wielding ample expressive technique, unafraid of space or dissonance. They play contrasting dynamics, intertwine swirling melodic lines, and churn up roiling waves of emotion. Overall, I haven't enjoyed a piano duo this much since I caught Kris Davis and Craig Taborn's Octopus for two memorable nights back in 2022. 

At times, Melford and Fujii's intensity put me in mind of Marilyn Crispell, back when she was in Anthony Braxton's quartet, the two of them sounding for all the world like the meeting of Cecil Taylor and Eric Dolphy that never took place, but should have because both musicians remain such perennial influences on their respective instruments. For me, it always comes back to CT -- my pick for the musician of my lifetime on days when Ornette isn't -- and lucky me, some new-to-me music from him just arrived the other day.

I owned the Prestige Great Concert of Cecil Taylor (the US issue of Shandar's multi-volume Nuits de la Fondation Maeght) back in the '70s, and in the pre-Record Store Day hoopla, was intrigued to see that Elemental Music, one of the labels for which reissue producer extraordinaire Zev Feldman works his magic, was releasing two other concerts from that famous tour. 

Now Fragments: The Complete 1969 Salle Pleyel Concerts is here, and it's stupendous. On CD, the relatively succinct, 50-minute evening set is sequenced first, with the slightly more diffuse, 90-minute afternoon set split at the 20 minute mark. In recent years, video of these concerts -- which were recorded for French radio and television -- has surfaced on YouTube, but because the sounds of the instruments are so distinctive, I actually find myself better able to focus on this audio-only document.

By this time, Taylor's appropriately named Unit with altoist Jimmy Lyons and drummer Andrew Cyrille had been together for three years, and their onstage telepathy shows it. They were in between their classic Blue Note albums and a sojourn in academia, Cecil's compositional concept was fully developed, and his accomplices knew their way around its contours well. Multi-reedist Sam Rivers, who'd joined them for the tour in between stints with Blue Note and Miles Davis and his own apotheosis on Impulse and at the helm of Studio Rivbea, sounds better integrated here than I remember, picking his spots to add tenor and flute interjections. Cecil's a force of nature, as he would remain to the end of his life, but this performance represents an early peak in his trajectory.

As Feldman's productions tend to be, Fragments is sumptuously packaged, with photographs from the concerts, an essay by Taylor biographer Phil Freeman, and reminiscences from Cyrille, Lyons' widow the bassoonist Karen Borca, Rivers' daughter Monique, drummer Jack DeJohnette (who was a member of Miles Davis' band that shared the bill with Taylor's Unit on the '69 tour), and pianist Matthew Shipp. But enough of this. Time to fire up the CD player and let those 88 tuned drums rip.