Ingrid Laubrock – Purposing The Air

Whether the enforced solitude of the coronavirus pandemic compelled a desire for oral communication, encouraged artists sans collaborators to sit down with the written word or simply gave everybody plenty of time in which to try out new stuff, coming out of the back end there has been a profusion of vocal or spoken word jazz from William Parker and Joe McPhee setting for the first time their poetry to music to Ivo Perelman’s rare dalliances with a couple of outstanding vocalists in Fay Victor and Iva Bittová to Nate Wooley’s haunted song cycle Henry House and a couple of exceptional sets by Fred Moten, Brandon López and Gerald Cleaver, with the poet and double bassist forming a duo for the absorbing Revision which is also out this week.

Ingrid Laubrock grew up in a literary household, where she was often read to by her mother while her father was a Goethe scholar, and when she embarked on a musical career her first band Nóis 4 allowed her to try her hand at songwriting, as they played original pieces alongside arrangements of Brazilian standards which were typically selected by Mônica Vasconcelos, the band’s singer. In the years since Laubrock has become highly regarded for her compositional prowess as well as for her distinctive tone on the tenor saxophone, as she has led and collaborated in ensembles with the likes of Mary Halvorson, Kris Davis, Stephan Crump, Cory Smythe, Aki Takase, Zeena Parkins and Tom Rainey. Brink a duo album with her partner Rainey slid into view last fall while just last month the couple plus the bassist Chris Lightcap served the evocative and sometimes louche or angular compositions of the debut album by Nels Cline’s hard-grooving Consentrik Quartet.

In early 2021 however, still at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, when Laubrock was busily engaged with a master’s degree in music composition at Vermont College of Fine Arts, she began to conceive of a project for Duo Cortona, the husband and wife team of Rachel Calloway and Ari Streisfeld who perform contemporary music by way of Calloway’s mezzo-soprano and Streisfeld’s violin. Laubrock began to consider potential texts and determined to draw from the work of a living author, recalling an encounter at a party in 2019 with the poet Erica Hunt, whose recently published collection Jump the Clock seemed ripe for Laubrock’s ends.

Over the course of several years Laubrock continued to expand the project, eventually setting to music all sixty of the koans or fragments from Hunt’s text ‘Mood Librarian – a poem in koan’. Taking her own saxophone out of the equation, she summoned up three more duos to perform her compositions, unlike Duo Cortona comprised of musicians whom she had collaborated with in some capacity before. The virtuosic jazz vocalist Theo Bleckmann and the guitarist Ben Monder have been playing together as a duo since the late nineties, from No Boat to Bleckmann’s debut as a leader Elegy in 2017 for ECM Records and Monder’s sweeping three-disc Planetarium which was released in September of last year.

Meanwhile the Portuguese singer Sara Serpa, whose voice Laubrock admits is the closest to her own, and the pianist Matt Mitchell had worked together on Serpa’s interdisciplinary project Intimate Strangers, which was itself based upon the Nigerian writer Emmanuel Idum’s ‘part travelogue, part memoir, part poetry collection and part photo essay’ A Stranger’s Pose. And the freeform vocalist Fay Victor, whose voice Laubrock identifies as the closest in tone and manner to Erica Hunt’s, linked up with the cellist Mariel Roberts to complete the lineup, the only one of the four duos to have never previously performed together though they quickly found not only common ground but an easy synchronicity based on their shared technical mastery and spontaneity of approach.

The sixty short pieces of Purposing The Air were recorded in four separate sessions between the summer of 2022 and the summer of 2024, with the results effectively divided into four parts as each of the duos in turn tackle fifteen of Hunt’s koans and Laubrock’s compositions. The title of the album is paraphrased from its penultimate piece, ‘Koan 16’ as performed by Calloway and Streisfeld whose lyrics read ‘birds purpose the air / as you purpose / pen and paper’.

Purposing The Air opens with the last of the recorded duos in Fay Victor and Mariel Roberts, as on ‘Koan 28’ the freeform vocalist resolves the phrase ‘things changing into / what they are’ while whispering and susurrating over a droning cello. Then on ‘Koan 13’, an early standout, Victor recites with elasticity and circularity the lines ‘catch the ball / and now I throw it’ over the squealing of rubbed strings before ‘Koan 55’ rolls in ‘broken glass’ and other sibilant shards of expression. From short plucks and more jagged arco passages, beneath the ‘leaking container’ of ‘Koan 15’ the whinnying bows of Roberts sound almost like a harmonium or pump organ while ‘Koan 47’ is more bratty and punky in its delivery scrawled over the cathedral of a doom metal backdrop.

In pointillist fashion ‘Koan 11’ traces the shape of a ‘splashy curve’ while holding the crest of the wave at bay as Victor’s pregnant scats serve to demarcate the composition. If the track largely captures the dashing and sun-kissed style of the two players with their backgrounds in free improvisation – as Laubrock wrote fully notated pieces or provided her performers with looser word scores while also affording the singer enough room for a little extemporisation – then ‘Koan 38’ is more hermetic and defiantly melancholic as an enveloping drone waxes and wanes between growls and gulps, starts and sighs and the more gnarled or bellows-like grumbling of the cello, before Victor repeats ‘the sun pours through the window / but I won’t let a drop touch me’, a finely suggestive lyric.

Lots can happen within the brief one-to-three minute span of these tracks. On the babbling ‘Koan 46’ flayed strings peel off in all directions, while ‘Koan 39’ is one big shush. And if the vocal line on ‘Koan 38’ reminds me of Björk’s voice-led album Medúlla then the repetition of the word ‘holding’ over the looped cello of ‘Koan 43’ feels redolent of Grouper in more than name, on a project with few obvious touchstones or counterparts whose compositions are more than vignettes or variations but still might hew as closely to classical music with its waltzes and mazurkas as to jazz, while suggestively calling to mind everything from the 69 Love Songs of the Magnetic Fields to John Zorn’s voluminous and star-studded Bagatelles.

The fifteen duets between Sara Serpa and Matt Mitchell are more conventionally sung and maintain at first a brisker tempo as Mitchell’s lively keys supply Serpa’s lilting vocal deliveries. On the other hand ‘Koan 42’ proves darker as Serpa whispers ‘thinking of oneself, oneself’ somewhat furtively over roiling piano clusters while ‘Koan 31’ features the clatter of prepared piano, whose pulled and pinging strings give way to what sounds like a marble rolling down a flight of many stairs. There is also a dedication to Jaimie Branch, and Mitchell’s playing develops an undertow or briefly adopts the manner of a baroque harpsichord as Serpa describes heavenly spheres, silent bodies and ‘choices made in the dark’, the duo displaying an unfettered chemistry throughout with their own project reportedly scheduled for sometime later this year.

If the sprightly jazz singer and Zealous Angles pianist are a fledgling duo, the pairing of Theo Bleckmann and Ben Monder which now stretches back more than a quarter-century imbues Purposing The Air not only with a wealth of experience but with a certain thematic richness, as Bleckmann’s moonlit reveries summon up a bit of Lorenz Hart while Monder’s shapeshifting electric guitar stretches all the way from the limpid pools of Loren Connors to more driving riffs and mechanics. The restless ‘Koan 10’ for instance abounds in squalling and over-revved feedback, then on ‘Koan 24’ the vocalisations of Bleckmann land somewhere between Tuvan throat singing and the circular drone of a didgeridoo before he wheezes out ‘veeeyeeerbs eveiiiriiiwayer’ as the opening salvo of the phrase ‘verbs everywhere / except in this language’.

‘Koan 32’ features one of Erica Hunt’s most brusque lyrics in ‘Wake up / after a fashion / to ordinary collapse’ and the duo respond through an art punk treatment, with Bleckmann’s vocal rising from a barely audible whisper to gather urgency over Monder’s screeching guitar in a manner which evokes their fellow big city denizens the New York Dolls. On the other hand ‘Koan 45’ sounds like an homage to Milton Nascimento with its softly strummed but still propulsive guitar. ‘Koan 40’ – the longest piece on Purposing The Air at four minutes and seven seconds – straddles big moonlit waves with more than a glimmer of distortion, while ‘Koan 14’ features the curiously flatulent phrase ‘Thart in the arc’ and receives an accompaniment which is suitably ornate.

As a duo Bleckmann and Monder are rooted in a sound which is effulgent and even opulent, but they readily embrace bluesy and rock-hued atmospherics from the dusky reverb of Elvis Presley’s early Sun sessions to the frozen warnings of Nico, the more placid guitar licks of Bill Frisell and nineties slowcore with its dreamy intimacy or mellow restraint. Bleckmann recites the lines ‘So the body can tap dance / the box is turned over’ balanced adroitly between his own whistling noises and the buzzing guitar of ‘Koan 51’, before the duo reach their climax on ‘Koan 54’ through a tentative lyric, ‘No record is complete / still interested / in the subject’ which serves as a kind of threshold, interlude or stay against the thick fog of Monder’s music, a creeping cacophony.

Laubrock says ‘I wanted the music to feel like clouds floating in and out of a field of vision’. Even in setting another artist’s poetry, the very idea of a koan and her engagement with that form suggests something both meditative and elliptical or fragmentary, qualities which Purposing The Air possesses in abundance. It is not a careful record in the sense of being overcautious but it feels keenly constructed even as Laubrock blends compositional modes with more suggestive or spontaneous moments, a gambit almost necessitated by the characteristics of her assembled cast. Like any good koan, the music as well as her relationship to it as a non-performing composer is not confounding or dichotomous but judicious with an air of mystery, worked through and involved from the inside out.

Purposing The Air – which from her home in Brooklyn to her mother’s house in Münster, Germany and from a wintry hurricane which engulfed a concert hall in the town of Bodø in northern Norway to the bison plains of Wyoming to the pianist Sylvie Courvoisier’s home where she was tasked with a spell of cat-sitting, took Laubrock around three years to complete – proves in the end to be one of her most intimate records. You can dive in anywhere you like or play through one of the four sections, but across the album there is a certain drama, a piquant and present emotional tenor which makes it cohere as one piece.

The final pairing of Rachel Calloway and Ari Streisfeld as Duo Cortona are more operatic and take the odd baroque line, with ‘Koan 34’ featuring an expressive solo by Streisfeld who gnaws away on a string. ‘Koan 19’ blends sustained tones and more melodic passages with plunks and scrapes from his violin, as Calloway in her mezzo-soprano reiterates a plangent ‘waiting’. Softly bowed violin, now reduced to almost a rustle or whisper, carries us from ‘Koan 57’ to ‘Koan 27’ like a voyage through watery reeds to an open field and a hot air balloon, while ‘Koan 41’ traces a folkish theme which at times verges upon a waltz.

While the process of doling out the koans to the respective duos was for the most part intuitive, a few of Laubrock’s selections were more pointed or arch. The line ‘after ecstasy, laundry’ for example went to Duo Cortona as the married couple and the phrase ‘politic rage in’ reminded Laubrock of Sara Serpa’s own political activism – her multimedia project Recognition with assistance from the director Bruno Soares dealt with the Portuguese colonisation of Angola, interpolating text from the revolutionary Amílcar Cabral and her grandfather’s Super 8 footage while the score featured her voice alongside Zeena Parkins, Mark Turner and David Virelles – plus that of her parents during Portugal’s years of dictatorship. Sometimes it was the sound of the words themselves which led the way, as Laubrock explains:

For example, the ‘er’ sound in the words ‘verbs everywhere’ seemed a great vehicle for Theo’s extraordinary overtone singing. ‘Walking briskly, pulling each other by the hand’ suggested urgency and tight rhythm, as did ‘the sun sprints across the year’. The words ‘open up restless brick and swallow’ evoked an electronically enhanced swallowing of words by Ben Monder’s long-reverberating guitar sound and a treatment with Theo’s loop setup.

‘Catch the ball, and now I throw it’ suggested hocketing, where the singing and cello parts are never played simultaneously until the whole lyric is revealed. I use the natural speaking rhythm of the full line to create a rhythmic hook, while the cello part continues to wobble around it, occasionally syncing up rhythmically.
’Broken glass’ suggested Fay’s and Mariel’s high-pitched, spiky improvisations. My idea for ‘fit time to place, even the middle’ was for Rachel’s and Ari’s parts to share the same pitch, but in independent tempos, with extreme changes in tonal colour on almost every note. The line is repeated three times, with each iteration speeding up, before both unify in the final phrase. ‘Waiting to be worded careful’ required time to develop as a musical thought, whereas ‘noisy ice as the mind races’ suggested the opposite – ice cracking under one’s feet, the mind racing for a survival strategy.

Between careful phrases and graceful passages, spiky improvisations and the winding runs or whinnying drags of keys and strings, there is still room for rhapsody on Purposing The Air as ‘Koan 2’ heralds that soaring sun which ‘sprints across the year’ and wonders in the face of time’s onslaught and nature’s beauty just ‘who has time for sleep’? Calloway’s rapturous and clamorous vocal over the stringency of Streisfeld’s violin proves one final crest of the hill, as after a brief dalliance with the circling birds, by way of response ‘Koan 4’ – the sixtieth and concluding piece on Purposing The Air – features staccato sighs like an incipient yawn or sneeze or the compelling cries of a flamenco dancer, with Calloway delivering a dynamic and enigmatic vocal about learning from ‘the past of other’s mistakes’.