Joelle Leandre - Phillip Greenlief, "That Overt Desire of Object"--Bass-Reed Duets and Solos

So we are in a new week on a Monday morning at an obscenely early hour for avant music but yet I play what I am writing about as I write about it, and that's what I always do. If something still sounds good at 8:00 Monday morning, it sounds good. Period. That's what I tell myself as I write this review--for the CD That Overt Desire of Object (Relative Pitch 1002), by Joelle Leandre and Phillip Greenlief.

Ms. Leandre is a highly inventive, highly skilled avant contrabassist; Mr. Greenlief does the same with the woodwinds--here soprano, alto, tenor and clarinet. Together they conjure up some wonderful improvisations.

Both have excellent control and command of their instruments. Both can evoke convincing variations in tone, sound and pitch. Both do so here, collectively and singly. They also use their voices as a second color-sound supplement.

The extra-musical theme is that of greed. We've seen how it can bring us all to our knees. The music is in part about that--or to be more accurate it is a response to a meditation on what that can and does do--judging from Mr. Greenlief's remarks on the liners.

In the course of the program the two get a remarkably sympatico vibe going and both are limber and eloquent in their musical speech. For those readers who might not be overly familiar with the new music world, this is music that is sometimes called "free jazz." That doesn't mean that it is the music of tosspots or a_s over teakettle aesthetics. It means that they play music of a certain language with a certain degree of spontaneity. And they do it excellently.

Zs, "33": Brooklyn's Insistently Idiomatic Trio Logs in with a Double Seven-Inch EP

Brooklyn's trio Zs are a thing apart. Not just noisemeisters, not a simply free aggregate, they go their own way with a certain insistency. The double 7" EP 33 (Northern Spy 016) gives guitarist Ben Greenberg (who we recently discussed in the context of his solo opus Hubble Drums), tenor saxophonist Sam Hillmer, and drummer Ian Antonio a chance to shine in miniature. They respond with four brief slabs of anarchic cohesion . . . with structure in amorphosity, order in formlessness.

This is music of the lineage of AMM, MEV, Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Il Gruppo and other sound-oriented a-rhythmic improvisational ensembles. It is brutally brief, compact in extremis, telegraphically concise, an Occam's Razor slashing the sound to bits. Yet they manage to say four things that speak in abstractiveness, utter meaning in incoherency, find logic in the irrational.

That's something.

Sarah Bernstein's Unearthish: Duets with Satoshi Takeishi

Sarah Bernstein, as I wrote several days ago in my review of the first Iron Dog Field Recordings (see posting below), doesn't do what you expect. And after a while that "not doing" is a "doing." There is style in what she does.

Unearthish (Phase Frame Music 001), a set of duets with drummer-percussionist Satoshi Takeishi, shows you how. It proceeds along a kind of three-pronged axis, if you can get into that: there is the pan-world drumming percussion of Takeishi, focused pulses and feels using the drum set and all manner of percussion instruments; there's the violin of Sarah's, structurally central to everything as an improvisational pivot and compositional articulator; then there are Sarah's vocals, recitations of prose poems having to do with experiencing life on the personal and cosmic-connectedness level. She's not really like Laurie Anderson except that there is a personally performative aspect. It is a conceptual place where recitation, singing-chanting, vocal improvisation and abstracted personal narrative join with key violin parts and percussion synchronizations.

The Iron Dogs recording (thus far volume one) is heavier electrically; Unearthish is acoustic and more like a trans-world sort of music, music by a key ensemble of the griots of New York, so to say.

It's a kind of conceptual-performance art. It comes out of the anguish of the experiential present and the transcendence possible, a way out. And it has the stamp of originality on it . . . Sarah's . . . Satoshi's.

It seems to me that what Sarah Bernsetin is doing right now is important to the place we are in. And if that's so, it is important that she be listened to and appreciated as a part of the Zeitgeist of our present. In other words, this is something you should listen to a bunch of times.