Michael Bisio, Melanie Dyer, Marianne Osiel and Jay Rosen – NuMBq

Introduced by a deft clangour of gongs and chimes then a few drum rolls which might suggest something in the spiritual jazz vein, the bassist Michael Bisio’s new album NuMBq proves something else entirely. From the moment those drums taper off and Marianne Osiel blows the first notes of her cor anglais or English horn – a sound which immediately evokes the famous theme from Antonín Dvořák’s folk and spiritual-inflected New World Symphony, as introduced by the cor anglais in the opening minute of the largo – Bisio and his small ensemble treat us to a contemporary take on third stream, that piquant commingling of jazz and classical music, which feels here almost wholly unique for its flowing forms and unusual timbres.

Perhaps there is not much between Dvořák and Bisio, the native New Yorker who readily spans styles but is probably best known for his longstanding collaborations with Matthew Shipp and Joe McPhee. When the Czech composer Dvořák left Prague for the National Conservatory of Music in New York City, a young facility which he served as director on a lavish salary between 1892 and 1895, his aim was to discover and explore the essence of American music in the same way that he had previously infused his work with Bohemian folk motifs.

Founded by the patron Jeannette Thurber, the National Conservatory was unusual for the time in seeking out female, minority and physically disabled students. Dvořák was introduced to the African-American spiritual tradition by the conservatory student Harry Burleigh, who became renowned for his baritone voice and as one of the first black composers to attain national recognition, with Dvořák in a contemporary interview in the New York Herald saying ‘in the negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music’. His student Will Marion Cook would become an early mentor to Duke Ellington, while another student in Rubin Goldmark proved an influential teacher, helping to guide the fledgling careers of Aaron Copland and George Gershwin.

For his cherished New World Symphony which he composed during his stint at the conservatory, and premiered at Carnegie Hall in December of 1893, the canny Dvořák reportedly changed the main theme from the clarinet to the cor anglais as it reminded him of Burleigh’s deeper and richer vocal register. As the woodwind section gets its first airing on NuMBq, the cor anglais of Osiel carries a plaintive and pastoral aspect but moves with a little more swing and is soon straddled by Bisio’s supple bass and the whirring of Melanie Dyer on the viola.

Between winding detours and Jay Rosen’s light percussion, which is flecked from a palette of rattles and shakers, cymbals and claves, ‘Elegy for MG’ keeps on returning to that languorous theme, whose golden haze is less redolent of a layabout than the rustic workaday. Dyer plays folkish melodies and at around 8 minutes and 35 seconds Bisio commences a rebounding, reverberating bass solo which gives dark momentum to the composition, swaddled in scratchy percussion, drum rolls and singular chimes then a buzzing viola and a more standoffish cor anglais, with the quartet handing over to the horn for a few final choked trills.

Born in Troy, on the banks of the Hudson River northeast of Albany, the bassist Michael Bisio spent thirty years in Seattle before returning to the east coast, where he was embraced by a sworn free jazz scene emanating out from the Lower East Side of New York City. Roused by the blues and some of its electric progeny, he counts Charles Mingus as one of his earliest and most enduring inspirations, and trained as a classical bassist while falling in with the pianist Bob Nell, the clarinetist Bill Smith who switched readily between classical and jazz contexts while sharing a long collaborative partnership with Dave Brubeck, and the trombonist Stuart Dempster who like Smith has straddled the minimalist repetitions of Terry Riley, the early electronic experiments and deep listening exercises of Pauline Oliveros and the free improvisational jazz of Joe McPhee.

By the beginning of the eighties, Bisio had been picked up by the trumpeter Barbara Donald who would exert a lasting influence on his musical outlook, as she and the tenor saxophonist Carter Jefferson steadily encouraged his independent creative spirit. When he finally arrived in New York City, between solo outings and sessions with McPhee, Stephen Gauci and David Arner the pianist Matthew Shipp steadily incorporated him into his revamped trio.

Their rich seam of work has increasingly taken a classical bent, with last year’s exceptional New Concepts in Piano Trio Jazz featuring everything from the offbeat blues and walking bass line of ‘The Function’ to the baroque counterpoint of ‘Coherent System’ and more classical refrains as Shipp hammered phrases from Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major into the roiling textures of ‘Non Circle’. Bisio has also shone on recent albums by Paul r. Harding and Ivo Perelman, with Vox Popoli Vox Dei from last August finding the bassist astride the formidable tenor saxophonist and the Czech vocalist and violinist Iva Bittová, nimbly and receptively filling in the gaps.

Indeed the ensemble on NuMBq boasts a rare depth of talent, with Marianne Osiel a first-call oboist who has played on sessions by George Massenburg, Roy Orbison and Judy Collins while the violist Melanie Dyer collaborated routinely with Salim Washington before branching out to work with the Amiri Baraka tribute project Heroes Are Gang Leaders, the legendary bassist William Parker, Elliott Sharp’s Terraplane and the Sun Ra Arkestra while she made her Mahakala Music debut with Birdsong alongside Chad Fowler, Shanyse Strickland, Sana Nagano, Ken Filiano and Anders Griffen just last year. The partnership between Bisio and the percussionist Jay Rosen meanwhile stretches back two decades as they made up two-thirds of the Stephen Gauci Trio before Rosen became an entrenched part of the Michael Bisio Quartet.

There is a sometimes striking similarity of tone to the bass, viola and English horn across the eight compositions and improvisations of NuMBq. In an interview days prior to the premiere of his New World Symphony, the composer Dvořák suggested a marked similarity between ‘the music of the negroes and of the Indians’ and the music of Scotland, which has typically been understood as a reference to the pentatonic scale but might also capture something more timbral, a shared penchant between the three cultures for keening laments and winnowing drones.

‘Broken Waltz’ is more bounding as Bisio’s bass races along underneath the screwed arc of Dyer’s viola and then Osiel’s more muted horn, while ‘Going Home/Amazing Grace’ offers a gutsy take on the vaulting Christian hymn-turned-spiritual, as a duet between Bisio and Dyer where the bass takes time to build up a head of steam while the viola cleaves the sky and captures shards of the melody through its folkish cries and sawing squeals. Bisio shifts from pizzicato plucks to arco drags in the final third of the composition, between whose disparate lines one might also discern traces of ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ or the ‘Landslide’ of Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac.

‘AC 2.0NU’ vents a gruffer bass as NuMBq shifts towards the jazzier end of the spectrum, with some yelping from the viola and horn while Rosen daubs with his brushes and relays a few marching band batteries from behind his drum kit. A mnemonic device for memorising the colours of the rainbow (mine growing up was always ‘Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain’), the opening moments of ‘Vib Gyor’ sound like a motorised gong bath or Buddhist ceremony as crashing chimes give way to a droning horn, and the piece becomes swampy and fowl-like through a few bird calls in the middle section before spurting forward again to encompass a few plucked strings and more rubato flourishes.

‘Medicaid Melancholy’ calls to mind the bassist Nick Dunston’s Afro-surrealist anti-opera COLLA VOCE with its chemically induced atmospheres, as though the viola and horn where engaged in a newfangled process of cloud seeding while Bisio furrows grooves into the contaminated soil, until the piece suddenly bounds and gambols into a clearing with a more impish passage before the close while Bisio without relying on slides or slurs maintains a loose and loping quality, reaching like Mingus with a certain adroitness into the very guts of his instrument.

Then the penultimate track ‘Densities Roy G Biv’, which contains another rainbow mnemonic, feels a bit slinkier and more urbane despite sharing many of the same elements, with some squibs of horn and shimmering metallic distortions on the viola alongside shrugging bells or woodshop and sawdust percussion as Rosen helps lead us towards a slapping climax. And with the only full improvisation on the record NuMBq draws to a close, through some last sparks from the viola as the horn seems to hang from the side of Osiel’s mouth, now even somewhat louche and lurching.