Sean Moran Small Elephant Band, Tusk

The Sean Moran Small Elephant Band is probably not something you would be likely to read much about in the magazine Guitar Player. I could be wrong. Why that may be is that this is a band that puts music ahead of individual virtuosity per se. Their album Tusk (NCM East 40136) tells the tale. This is chamber jazz but not in some rote way. The music has composed elements that work to frame the improvisations in the best sense--in that everything melds together in a modern art kind of way so that each number has intricately planned elements and spontaneous extrusions that work together beautifully like a single abstract expressionist canvas by one of the greats of the visual art world of mid-last century. Who is it that composed these numbers? I cannot say because the CD does not. I will assume that Sean Moran is the composer? What matters for now is that these composition-arrangements are exceptional.

And the band? A judicious choice of sensitive improvisers that work hard to get a group sound, an ensemble vividness. There's Sean Moran, of course, on nylon stringed guitar. He's studied flamenco I read, but quite clearly classical and jazz guitar as well. He has a subtle way and if you listen closely to him throughout you get much to appreciate. Michael McGinnis adds a great deal on clarinet and bass clarinet. He has great sound, plays his part in the ensemble with flair, and can give you some very modern soloing. Chris Dingman on vibes is central to the sound. He does his ensemble thing with care and artistry and when called upon plays himself to perfection. Reuben Radding on contrabass sounds great and of course we've been covering his playing for some time here if you look back. He excels in the structured composed world of this music and takes fine advantage of the open spaces he gets to do things with. Harris Eisenstadt is a brainy sort of drummer with beautiful feel (and a composer of great worth too). What he does here is an object lesson on how you can swing and rock with full feeling and force yet get a chamber feel that balances everything well.

So this is an album of wholes--a very whole sound, players that contribute each to the whole in wondrously special ways--and that isn't something I would say about many similarly constructed groups. The compositions draw upon new music, modernity, freedom, avant music without going in predictable directions.

It's a guitar player's album, yes. But there is a selflessness in everybody's playing here, an attention to the total outcome that leads to exceptional music. Stunning!

Dom Minasi Septet, The Bird, the Girl and the Donkey II

Dom Minasi doesn't play the guitar, when he is in a free zone, like there is a line to follow, like a drunk taking a sobriety test for the po-lice. He doubles back, clusters up, densifies, gets his small amp to harmonically distort, becomes a tunnel of electrified sound. In short, he is Dom Minasi, not somebody else, and he is an original.

You hear this and much else on his new release The Bird, The Girl and the Donkey II (UnSeen Records), and more-of-more as well.

It's a septet live, and they have a wonderful free-for-all going with collective clusterings in a meta-sense, solo power, rhythmic thrust and wash, Ascension-like climaxes and the BIG sound.

The cream of the NYC out kind of band is what it is. Dom, Matt Lavelle playing brisk, hot trumpet, and then three-reed-bliss from Blaise Siwula, Ras Moshe, and Remi Alvarez. The rhythm section gets full throttle--Albey Balgochian on bass and Jay Rosen drumming.

It's music of heat and lots to get your adrenalin pumping. Lovers of the heat-freedom need to catch it. It's New York avant at its finest. Go to Dom's site http://www.domminasi.com/disc.html and you can get more info, listen to sample clips and order a copy.

Alexandra Grimal Quartet, Andromeda

The avant echelons of the music often called jazz seems to be expanding continually. There is most certainly no one way to arrive at a group music. Alexandra Grimal and her Quartet, in the recent Andromeda (Ayler 127), gives us a distinctive take on the possibilities.

Alexandra writes and arranges a music of contrasts, quiet and sparse, then full and hard-hitting, solos, duets, trios and the full band in various settings, free and composed, and more besides.

The quartet is well-chosen. Alexandra plays tenor and soprano, Todd Neufeld acoustic and electric guitars, Thomas Morgan on double bass, and Tyshawn Sorey on drums. Each contributes strongly to the end result.

Tyshawn's drumming is something to listen to in itself. He is bold and orchestral at points, quietly subtle at others. Alexandra plays a thoroughly contemporary tenor and soprano, from the overblown rich overtones to the quietly breathy. Todd Neufeld is a model of understatement much of the time, always feeding band and listeners with lines and chords that are un-cliched and fresh. Thomas Morgan plays with detailed care, imaginative creativity and excellent technique.

The compositions for this album were put together while Alexandra was in residence at the MacDowell Colony in the US and have a well-wrought, open quality.

This is music that must be listened to closely. Its contrasts and twists will allude the casual listener, I suspect. Put the time in and you will find a most unusual quartet effort and an innovative approach to quartet improvisation-composition. Give it an ear!

Christopher Lapina, "Eclectic Eve:" Too Good to Be Called "New Age?"

When you accidentally stumble across a review as you are trying to find cover art, it can be off-putting. I try not to be influenced. Unfortunately as I was scrolling through the net I brushed against some kind of review--that is, of the CD at hand this morning, Christopher Lapina's Eclectic Eve (self-released). It confidently put this music in the category "New Age." Well I've heard this CD five times now and it is NOT new age. It's instrumental, and it's not jazz exactly. It's composed, arranged with some amount of improvisation but not a lot.

Christopher Lapina plays various keys and wrote the music. He surrounds himself with various instrumental configurations, different with every piece. So it ranges from just Christopher to duos to choir with combo.

The music has occasional world music aspects. It's tonal, has a little of a rock inflection much of the time, features some very nice guitar solos now and again, and more besides.

The point though is that the music is rather good. There are no vapid banalities to lull the listener into catatonia. It is music to be listened to, with some amount of seriousness. But of course I suppose it could also serve as music to ignore music by, but it's too good for that.

Certainly interesting. Perhaps not extraordinarily profound. It may be a hip equivalent to the space-age bachelor music that is making its comeback. Or perhaps not?? Or maybe it's mellow jamband? I don't know. It has a slight veneer of the smooth but it isn't after that crowd either, I don't think. And it has spacey elements. You decide for yourself what it is. Or forget that game and just listen.

Bruce Arnold and John Stowell, "Sonic Infestation," 2008

Today a look at the last of the series of CDs by guitarist Bruce Arnold that we have been covering (see previous posts), namely, Bruce Arnold and John Stowell's Sonic Infestation (Muse Eek 149). The album is subtitled "Electroacoustic Guitar Improvisations," and that is what we have here. These are a series of multilayered, acoustically manipulated duets for acoustic and/or electric guitars.

Sonic Infestations finds common ground in the musical space between players like John McLaughlin and Ralph Towner without actually straying on the usual turf of either artist. There are 11 fairly short sequences that total in an EP-lengthed playing time of 33-odd minutes. The electroacoustic manipulation often provides a third voice-texture via its interesting transformation of guitar sounds.

In the end this is an always-captivating venture into improvisational and transformational brightness. Arnold and Stowell play interesting dual improvisations and the electroacoustics complement the stringed immediacy with a dimensional depth that I find quite appealing. It is a good listen.

Biota's Mnemonists, Musique Actuelle 1990: Get Ready for Anything

A friend of mine about a year ago heard some of my music and mentioned the group Biota as someone I might like. I followed up and found their Mnemonists, Musique Actuelle 1990 (Anomalous 025) on the web. Mine was a used copy; I believe the Biotamusic site lists outlets where it might be found new. The album was commissioned apparently by Montreal's Musique Actuelle--New Music America. This CD was a byproduct, if not the sole objective. It's a band formed in 1979 in Fort Collins, Colorado as the Mnemonist Orchestra and they are in a league of their own. Or were? It is not clear how active they are. At any rate it is one of a number of albums they have made.

This one is an unpredictable, rather wildly experiment in electro-acoustic music. It combines electronic transformations of conventional music, avant classical, rock and/or folksy strains played on conventional instruments, and more or less pure electro-acoustics.

This is music so unexpected and different that you must hang with it repeatedly to get on its wavelength. Much of it has a dark soundcape-y quality; other musical events punctuate and perforate the matrix to shift the mood and provide a different sort of gravitational pull.

It is not music that meets you half-way. Rather you are invited over to their terrain to make your ears comfortable as best they can. In the end you get something you might not have bargained for, an unexpected find of otherworldy sounds that evolve and transform in the hour-plus playing time, taking you places you have probably never been. Those with a need to seek out the very different will find this to their liking, I'd imagine. If you find, for example, that early Pink Floyd didn't go far enough into the cosmic landscape, this is no doubt for you. It is fairly extreme but also extremely well done.

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.

Ursel Schlicht and Bruce Arnold, String Theory

A number of years ago the idea that a very acoustic piano and a very electric guitar (plus electronics) would fruitfully engage in a free-wheeling set of improvisational compositions would have been pretty rarified. A few years before that, virtually an unheard occurrence.

Today it is not that surprising. But then almost any combination of instruments is possible and sometimes even commonplace in the musical avant garde of the present.

When the results are as musically satisfying as the CD at hand, though, you have an uncommon event.

String Theory (Muse Eek 124) teams pianist Ursel Schlicht with guitarist Bruce Arnold. There are five duets on the recording, including a three-part "String Suite." All of it is quite engaging.

What strikes me about these improvisations is the highly imaginative inventiveness of both players, the varied atmospheric mood sequences and the attention to sound color. Bruce, his guitar and some sort of computer driven electronic device called the supercollider, gets blankets of sound that vary from the super quiet to the more turbulent. His individual line constructions are always interesting. Usel Schlicht plays inside and outside her instrument with a real pianism that explains why she has been gaining admiration in and around the New York area for several years. She too plays with a fresh sort of melodic-harmonic sense. Together they create a new music-free improvisation hybrid that has some of the power of the latter with the dynamic and contentual breadth of the former. These are improvisational compositions. Each segment seems thoughtfully preconceived so that there is both looseness and structure in play at all times.

There are parts that drive and more meditative moments. All of it seems inspired to me.

Highly recommended.

Elliott Sharp: Solo Electric Guitar, Played His Way

Elliott Sharp, guitar pioneer, composer and multi-instrumentalist, has always seemed to go his own way, in the process becoming a major presence in the now globally recognized downtown music enclave. He's successfully created Sharpesque interpretations of the blues, composed and performed exciting works for both small and large ensembles, hosted a web radio show of great diversity and discernment for MOMA's PS1 web site, among other things. He's also recorded a series of improvisations for solo guitar.

Octal Book Two (Clean Feed CFG 004) finds Mr. Sharp on his Koll 8-string electro-acoustic guitar, which has both conventional and bass guitar strings. Without overdubs he creates a kind of suite of guitar events, each concentrating on various avant and conventional techniques that Sharp uses. Some he has developed in his own way; others, like harmonics, feedback sustain, and hammerings, he adapts to his own purposes.

What distinguishes Sharp's music from some other unaccompanied solo avant guitar efforts is that each event to a lesser or greater degree concentrates on a melodic cell, scalular passage or quasi-riff. The music is freely articulated but not free in the stream-of consciousness manner. It is Elliott's strong sense of structure that gives the listener clear musical sign-posts through the avant sound thicket (at least that is so for me). Each is a semi-miniature impro-compositional gem. He does not eschew repetition, and much of the music features dynamically invigorating cascades of rapidly articulated repeated lines. This of course is a feature of Elliott Sharp's style and it is paired down to a single solo voice for this outing.

It shows that Elliott Sharp's motor-sensory brilliance has in no sense abated. He is vital still.

John Zorn's "The Last Supper"

January 23, 2009—The impressively prolific John Zorn has recently released his 22nd (!) volume of music for films, The Last Supper (Tzadik). It is scored for percussion and a small group of vocalists. That might not sound very exciting on the first blush of things, but this is no ordinary music. The vocals are in the wordless, post-Swingle Singer mode and much of what they sing is loosely in the hocket style, which some medieval composers and the Pygmies of the Congo region of Africa have in common. Hocket involves phrases where individuals or specific groups are responsible for particular notes in a phrase, in alternation back and forth. The results for this Zorn creation are repeating and varying lines where male and female vocalists work together to create mesmerizing and musically fascinating results. Zorn is no dogmatist so this technique is used but not overused. The percussion ensemble functions as a contrasting accompaniment to the vocals and also has spots where it takes over and provides layered rhythmic grooves that hypnotically reinforce a kind of primal quality that is apparently an important part of the film.

This music is not run-of-the-mill minimalism, new age tribal drum circle stuff, or anything else of the common run of musics that can be heard ad nauseum as backdrops for modern films or just as backdrops. Neither does the music sound like an afterthought to the film. It stands on its own as a very interesting and innovative musical space. I must say it’s one of my favorite things thus far this year and you should listen to it if you want to shake yourself out of the doldrums of everyday sameness.

New Music from Annie Gosfield

January 20, 2009—New York based composer Annie Gosfield could be considered my neighbor. I live just outside Manhattan and so am a part of the NY Metro sprawl. Since my tightened budget does not allow for cultural events or all but the most necessary commuting I don’t get into the heart of the city often and it is probably not likely I will make face-to-face contact with her in the near future. Nonetheless we both belong to an invisibly connected universe of cultural workers and, whatever it means, a New York sort of outlook on it.

Ms. Gosfield’s music is well represented on the Tzadik release Lost Signals and Drifting Satellites. Now I find myself responding to her music almost instinctively. Is it the shared aural and cultural values of this metropolis that make that possible? It could have something to do with it. But most importantly Ms. Gosfield has absorbed the vocabulary of modern music to speak it fluently and with originality, and that sounds a chord of resonance with me.

Her short quartet “Lightheaded and Heavy Hearted” comes off skillfully and sincerely as something that comes after late Bartok and brings a personal touch to the genre. The title cut, “Lost Signals and Drifting Satellites” is perhaps the most captivating of the pieces, combining thoughtfully constructed solo violin passages with washes of gongs, percussion and electronics. In its own way it reminds me of my youth and the local hours I spent listening to the family short wave for the sorts of static and bleeps that I believed were raw audio satellite transmissions. I don’t know the truth of that but this music reminds me of what has become of local sectors of outer space in the years following the heyday of the space program and those sessions I had with the radio. Parts of our above-earth space vacuum must be like certain abandoned industrial sectors of Passaic, NJ (I am thinking of Robert Smithson’s photoessays on the latter topic, done in the late ‘60s). No longer functioning as intended (the satellites drifting, perhaps long since out of service), they exist now emptied of their original meaning, there as a symbol of time passed.

The remaining two pieces further explore the sound poetry of where we are now through prepared piano writing of style and earthiness, effective string writing with gongs and percussion, as well as electronically processed sounds of nameless machines and power tools. Gosfield’s music is not exactly casual, but it certainly isn’t formal either. There is a wondrous, restrained expressiveness and interesting juxtaposition of sound classes, none of which wear out their welcome on repeated hearings. I do recommend this disk for anyone who would like to know something of where new music is right now. It’s here, looking backwards to the ended century and the close of the American Machine Age as well as forward to tomorrow and what that will bring. That’s somehow appropriate music for the beginnings of a new epoch.

Aiko Shimada Cannot Be Pegged But She Can Be Much Appreciated

Originally posted on December 19, 2008

Singer and songwriter Aiko Shimada does not produce music that is in any way what one might expect, whatever that could be. Her Blue Marble (Tzadik) release goes from piece to piece in a way that fascinates and enthralls. She can sing a rather tender song that is arranged for voice and small string group, she can traverse landscapes of breath, breadth and significance with a recurring guitar pattern and ambient drones interspersed with nicely wrought instrumental interjections while her multi-tracked voice waxes ethereal.

She also lets guitarist Bill Frisell construct tapestries of stringed moodiness that set her voice off dramatically. It’s another really nice one from Tzadik. They impress me with the widely ranging sorts of music they release and the taste with which they select the artists and pieces involved. Someone who likes Bjork may find Aiko a subtle counterpart to such vocalisms, only rather more gentle, perhaps. The music sticks with you after a few hearings. You might want to give a listen yourself.