Luisa Muhr finds a middle ground between scatting and vocalese, a sibilant and euphonic and for the most part melodious flow of sounds which always seem on the cusp of forming words but never quite find that resolution. The voice of the interdisciplinary artist – who has featured on five albums or volumes with the Playfield collective on 577 Records and has also collaborated with María Grand and Eric Arn, while her debut as a leader Teuflin/She-Devil arrived on Boomslang Records just last year, a structured improvisation which incorporates Faust in Goethe’s original German and is based on a handmade twelve-page graphic score – lies at the centre of Under Over World, a small ensemble session recorded in New York in April and released now in short order which also stars Playfield’s compere the great reedman Daniel Carter, the daring and dexterous bassist Kenneth Jiménez and Alfred Vogel on drums.
Like Muhr an Austrian native, Vogel the drummer and festival organiser is the founder of the Bezau label Boomslang Records, and he is all over its product from his duets with Peter Evans and Mats Gustafsson to more recent collaborations with such genre-bending iconoclasts as Sana Nagano, Camila Nebbia and Leo Genovese. Establishing a growing reputation on his instrument, Kenneth Jiménez has become a double bassist of choice for Juanma Trujillo, Michaël Attias and Francisco Mela while he featured with Caleb Wheeler Curtis and Hery Paz on the Samir Boehringer Sazzerac album Olympia earlier this year. And the prolific veteran Daniel Carter keeps up an endless stream of engaging work whose recent manifestations include several collaborations with Ayumi Ishito, a scintillating new trio project Dawn After Dawn, the captivating second volume of his New York City missive Shine Hear and a worthy role in the Silt Remembrance Ensemble headed up by Luke Stewart.
On the album opener ‘Go At It’ that boundless flow of Muhr’s plays out over the incessant four-legged bounding of Jiménez’s double bass and Vogel’s equally propulsive, somewhat rickety, helter-skelter drums as Carter on a flute wafts above the restless furore. After a spindly close, for the opening section to ‘No Spiral Is Just Vertical’ the bassist saws away at his instrument as Muhr strains to deliver a more languid vocal, soon resorting to more staccato or spider-bitten forms. Vogel winds up his pitter-patter of percussion while Carter’s simple woodwind evokes the Hungarian folk tárogató or even the Japanese koto as he adds horizontality to the composition and holds up a mirror in the sky, at once somehow reflective and plaintive while no less attentive to the present moment.
Muhr sometimes sounds like she is speaking in tongues and sometimes matches Carter’s folksy European airs or courtly East Asian comportment, her clipped phrases evoking an old-fashioned jazz chanteuse while at other junctures she summons up the alpine environs possibly of her youth and sounds all but ready to commence yodelling.
The sawing bass of ‘Portal Fetch’ creates a thick drone crested at the top by tinkling bells and buttressed at the low end by Carter’s trumpet. Muhr meanwhile almost sounds amorous. ‘Nostalgia In the Now’ features a more conventional accompaniment from the bass and drums, with cymbals, snares and the odd tumbling pattern as Carter plunks himself down on a stool by the piano. Chordal support and the odd run might seem to make for a more laidback composition, but the drums in particular seem bound by their own runaway or whirligig momentum as hits and kicks carry the rest of the ensemble along with them for a piece which sounds Latinate in terms of its rhythm and Muhr’s vocal delivery.
The New York City Jazz Record has described Boomslang Records as providing ‘a wild and wooly musical plunge into the unusual’, which goal and sentiment Under Over World duly shares. As the album begins to draw to a close Daniel Carter returns to his familiar clarinet and saxophone while Muhr takes her turn behind the piano. The instrumental piece ‘When You Just Sit Down and Do It’ blends a doleful horn with plangent keys, a springy and fidgety, slap-happy bass and drum rolls which reel into muted crescendos to make for a mottled canvas which grows in vitality. Beyond a few squalls and lively piano figures, the titular album closer then ferries a screwed drone from the outset. This time the drone is offset by shaking seed shells. Muhr presumably does not forego her made-up language but seems to sing about ‘rainbow signs’ and ‘rainbow sounds’ as the quartet with Carter on saxophone begin to deliver apocalyptic warnings, all fire and brimstone then full of shamanistic or Vodou-like spirits which are deftly shaken out by the end of the composition.
