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DAMAGED IN TRANSIT by Steve Swallow, Chris Potter, Adam Nussbaum (067 792-2)
[ review of: DAMAGED IN TRANSIT by Steve Swallow, Chris Potter, Adam Nus...(067 792-2) (junk)
]Initially, it’s hard to figure out why this is such a terrific CD. After all, the instrumentation is standard stuff – tenor sax, electric bass and drums. No piano, but it has been years since the absence of a piano in a small jazz group was regarded as an innovation. The tunes, all written by bassist Steve Swallow, are conventional hard bop and post bop, with a few blues and ballads, and one calypso. Nobody plays “outside” (or at least stays outside), and there is no obvious experimentation of any sort. So this should just be a good solid trio date by three jazz pros, right? But instead, it commands the listener’s attention from the first track to the last. The abilities of the three musicians certainly have something to do with that. Tenor saxophonist Chris Potter is truly one of the best young players on the scene right now. He has the facility on tenor to toss off fluid hard bop lines worthy of altoist Charlie Parker, but most often he adopts the staccato swagger of the “other” giant of the tenor, Sonny Rollins (as opposed to much more widely imitated John Coltrane). The calypso, especially, brings Rollins to mind, as Rollins has had a special fondness for calypso tunes throughout his career. Swallow is his usual lyrical, elegant self, demonstrating why he is still one of the masters of the electric jazz bass, and drummer Adam Nussbaum is crisp, cool and self-contained throughout. Recorded live at several venues during a 2001 tour of France, the music comes across as traditional in its basic form, but the group continually purshes the tradition around, mixing styles, tempos and interactive strategies. Four pieces open with Swallow’s silky unaccompanied electric bass, two with Potter’s unaccompanied horn, one with Nussbaum’s drums and two with the full trio. Solos commence in unexpected places (or not at all), and one player sometimes drops out, which provides creative duet opportunities for the remaining two. Rather than “trading fours,” i.e., alternating with four-bar solos, Nussbaum and Potter “trade twelves” on one piece, i.e., alternating every twelve measures. Finally, even though Swallow doesn’t deign to honor his nine original compositions with real titles (they’re simply called “Item 1, D.I.T.,” Item 5, D.I.T.,” etc.), they are much more than basic riffs or chord progressions. In fact, Swallow displays the scores of each of the nine pieces in lieu of conventional liner notes, which makes one wonder why he didn’t bother naming them – especially when some of them (like “Item 3, D.I.T." and “Item 7, D.I.T."), have gorgeous melodies, and others (like "Item 4, D.I.T.," "Item 5, D.I.T." and "Item 9, D.I.T.") have a very satisfying complexity. Overall, Swallow has succeeded in tapping into some sort of timeless jazz essence on this CD, where the more superficial aspects of music culture (trends, personalities, gimmicks, etc.) are left far behind. And instead of marking time with a typically nostalgic glance at the jazz tradition, Swallow & company demonstrate the continuing viability of the older forms. Calling this one a bona fide contemporary classic wouldn’t be much of a stretch.
Posted by Bill Tilland at 03:12, 29 Mar 2004
Milli Tonverka by Einoma (VFORM031CD)
[ review of: Milli Tonverka by Einoma (VFORM031CD)
]Einoma (the alias of Icelandic duo Bjarni and Steindor), apparently can’t get no respect. BBC Music Online recently put together a rather extensive review of the Reykjavik music scene (“Reykjavik Underground”), and unless my tired old eyes deceived me, Einoma (and its constituent parts) didn’t even rate a mention. And yet their second full-length CD on Vertical Form is, like its predecessor Undir Feilnotum, an adventurous and fresh take on glitch techno, and a worthy addition to any cutting edge techno collection. Percussion and rhythm is Einoma’s strength – both the sampling and the programming. Their sampling has a characteristic cold industrial sound, but the ambience is brooding rather than confrontational. Clanking chains, water pipes, old steam radiators and other metallic and or watery sounds come to mind, along with vague impressions of things being ripped and twisted. These organic sounds are nicely integrated with a more purely electronic vocabulary of twitters, squeaks and thumps. Rhythmically, Einoma straddles a line between heavy-handed 4/4 industrial excess and stuttering stop ‘n’ start abstraction; they’re too variable and complex to qualify as IDM or anything else that would find a place on the dancefloor, but you can follow them (usually) without a score(card), and sometimes they kick into a legitimate toe-tapping groove. In other words, they’re somewhat to the left of Orbital, and somewhat to the right of Autechre at its most extreme, i.e., certainly not predictable and not always easy to follow, but rhythmically grounded nonetheless. The most noticeable difference between this release and their last effort is a greater use of synthesizer drones and, on one piece, ethereal wailing from a female vocalist. The increased use of the drones (and the insertion of an occasional melodic fragment) doesn’t exactly transport Einoma into a warm and fuzzy new age world, but it does tend to temper their brittle austerity, replacing alien otherness with a more open-ended sense of mystery. Whether or not you regard this as an improvement or a loss of focus will depend upon your musical tastes, but both this new CD and their previous one are well worth acquiring – even if no one seems willing to create (let alone jump on) an Einoma bandwagon.
Posted by Bill Tilland at 05:15, 16 Feb 2004
The Ducks and Drakes of Guapo and Cerberus Shoal by Cerberus Shoal (NEI0028)
[ review of: The Ducks and Drakes of Guapo and Cerberus Shoal by Cerberus Shoal (NEI0028)
]A third installment in Cerberus Shoal’s so-called “split CD series” on the North East Indie label out of Portland, Maine, Ducks and Drakes pairs Maine’s own unclassifiable folk/rock/whatever aggregation Cerberus Shoal (the constant) with London’s equally unclassifiable Guapo (the variable). Having encountered the music of the two bands elsewhere, I would be foolish to attempt any general description of what they represent or do, as they are both wildly eclectic, po-mo, tongue-in-cheek and proudly non-commercial to their core. But on this offering, at least, Guapo contributes a thick, wobbly seventeen-minute organ drone piece with sliding pitch (titled “Idios Kosmos”), layered with all sorts of free-form percussive undercurrents and eerie, wailing overtones from cello, guitar, bass and electronics. The musical chaos that ensues is strangely exhilarating – at least to these ears. Even less predictable host band Cerberus Shoal provides a spoken word piece, inexplicably titled “a man who loved holes,” consisting of variously manipulated voices and an overlay of sampled, looped fragments. The surrealist text of this piece, which is helpfully printed out in the liner notes, suggests a literary synthesis of Lewis Carroll, Shakespeare and James Joyce, (e.g., “We seek the canisters, ripe with liquids and solids and miniature friendships…long toothed and breathing the moist oxygen of eyes.”), and it qualifies as engrossing and even occasionally profound even while making no objective sense at all. The primary narrative voice is initially altered for a “Darth Vader” effect, but other, less dominant voices take over the narrative periodically, including a chirpy Roy Rogers/Dale Evans soundalike cowboy duet. Sometimes the narrative turns into a chorus, with other voices, treated and untreated, providing a counterpoint – including a clear, very normal-sounding female soprano. The larger musical context of this text is equally fascinating -- rattling percussion, reverbed cackles, drones and looped patterns, snippets of unrelated conversations, insect clicks and the humming of distant machinery. Sixteen minutes later, the piece ends the way it began, with the reverbed cackles and two-note synthesizer pattern. What does it all mean? Who knows? But it’s an interesting journey.
The third and last piece on the CD appears to be a collaboration, as it is attributed to Guaperus Shoalo and titled “Kdios Iiasmos, He Two Loved Holes.” However, the joke may be on the listener, as this “collaboration” appears to be a re-run of the opening “Idios Kosmos” (which, by the way, is Greek for “personal reality”). Both pieces clock in at a little over 17 minutes, and both have essentially the same textures and sonic components. Maybe the second version is remixed slightly. Maybe Cerberus Shoal makes some modest contribution to the second version. And maybe not. But it doesn’t really matter, because if you got lost in the musical universe of “Idios Kosmos” the first time around, you can get lost in it all over again. And if you were bewildered the first time around and wondering what the hell was going on, you have another chance to get tight with Guapo’s own personal reality.
Posted by Bill Tilland at 03:31, 09 Jan 2004
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