Loitering with intent in the vicinity of a stool, Pat Thomas begins to pull sawing shapes out from the insides of his piano. Steep clusters make it sound like his instrument is tumbling wholesale down a ravine, and at times his keys and their hammered strings conjure images of a tumultuous violin section, as though the musicians were playing through their dying throes on the deck of a sinking ship or else stranded atop a passing iceberg. When everything quietens down it might sound like an already doomed passenger scraping on the door of a Titan submersible, as Thomas evokes a creeping yet ephemeral kind of desperation, curt and compressed. At such moments his music would suit the score of a horror film, whose serial killer with a lurching gait but swift flicks of the wrist stalks hull and bow or stakes out a preordained landing place.
This believe it or not is The Bliss of Bliss, the pianist’s latest solo work which takes the form of one long forty-minute-plus improvisation plus two shorter pieces as though tacked on at the end. Thomas has been searingly prolific over the past couple of years, collaborating on more than a dozen albums for small ensembles whether alongside frequent bandmates like John Butcher and Mark Sanders or hooking up for the first time with Han-earl Park and Lara Jones or the Blacks’ Myths duo of Luke Stewart and Trae Crudup for The Mythstory School which came out in March, returning with acclaimed works by Ų§Ų³Ł [ism] and Ų£ŲŁ ŲÆ [Ahmed], initiating new projects like X-Ray Hex-Tet and Fictional Souvenirs or expanding on his solo catalogue through The Solar Model of Ibn Al-Shatir, which continued his longstanding practice of imbuing his piano works with Arabic names and forms, and This Is Trick Step, an electronic album rooted inĀ experimental hip hop practises which he described as ‘an alternative universe where J Dilla and Morton Feldman collaborate’.
Whether he is summoning the spirit of sometimes overlooked inspirations like Ahmed Abdul-Malik and Muhal Richard Abrams, exploring the tone clusters and cosmic vibrations of the free jazz trailblazers Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra or seeking out something essential in the well-worn works of standard bearers like Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington the pianist always seems to have something new to say through his instrument, not least because his sense of rhythm owes just as much to insurgent genres like jungle and reggae which respectively influenced his earliest solo records or were part of the fabric of his youth.
Likewise the long title track from The Bliss of Bliss keeps the listener engaged but unsettled, never sure which way it might turn next. By about the ten-minute mark it sounds almost gimp-like or masochistic by virtue of a rubbery enforced muteness, then seems to scramble up some stairs in time for the campanile to thud out its carillon bells. Choppy tremolos surge and give way to more slender and rickety music hall or music box melodies, as though Pinocchio himself with all of his strings and wooden appendages was doing a jig and wishing upon a star. Banging col pugno with his fist or at least hammering out a few chords then playing runaway glissandos, Thomas finally settles upon a waltz before the ominous striking hand of a clock metes out the remaining time.
Of the shorter pieces ‘Twilight’ continues broadly in the same vein, through jagged rhythms with traces of a dance here or there. Named after the calypso offshoot, ‘Soca Time’ on the other hand turns his piano wholesale into a string instrument as Thomas runs up and down the range, from basses and cellos to violins and back again as stubby plucks vie with squeaky up bows and strain to find a shared sense of swing.
