From Paul Robeson, Otis Redding, Joni Mitchell and Simon & Garfunkel to Tyla, TLC and Boyz II Men there is hardly a shortage of songs which evoke water, literal or figurative, from still pools and rolling rivers to gushing precipices, from contemplative docks to collapsible bridges and from vaporous mists to the muggiest sweats. The parlance of jazz with its free interplay can sometimes heave with watery terms, whether one is waxing lyrical about piano cascades, saxophone squalls or percussive eddies and swirls. Thales the first philosopher thought that everything was water, while Heraclitus saw a world in flux and sagely observed that it is not possible to step into the same river twice. But on listening to Stephan Crump’s latest album Slow Water, the first parallel which comes to mind is James Joyce’s penultimate Ulysses episode ‘Ithaca’, which he described variously as a ‘mathematico-astronomico-physico-mechanico-geometrico-chemico sublimation’ and an impersonal catechism, the ‘ugly duckling’ of the book and yet of all eighteen episodes his very favourite, a tactile late-night comedown full of warm cocoa, the lengthy exposition of County Wicklow and suburban Dublin reservoirs, shaving bowls and lemon-scented soaps in which Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus reach coterminous by pissing in tandem in the back yard of a row house at 7 Eccles Street.
What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?
Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its umplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: Its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.
There is something passive and impersonal yet tactile, generous and closely observed with Crump whose Slow Water we first follow as it traces its way haltingly downstream. Inspired by the book Water Always Wins by Erica Gies, which in the face of widespread drought, raging floods and perilously rising water levels spoke with scientists, ecologists and anthropologists, activists and indigenous communities to chart a course for a more resilient future, Crump assembled a stellar sextet of new music and jazz players whose wellspring runs deep and flows free. With his frequent collaborator Patricia Brennan on vibes, Joanna Mattrey on viola, yuniya edi kwon on violin, Jacob Garchik on trombone and Kenny Warren on trumpet the interplay is steady and patient, more ebb than flood, from the tentatively resolved morass of ‘Bogged’ to the slouchy communal barge journey of ‘Eager’ and the turbulent mixed sediment of ‘Hyporheic’, where the strings of Mattrey and kwon strain to reach the surface. ‘Dusk Critters’ carries some of the scampish liveliness of Hayao Miyazaki’s susuwatari, famous from My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away and otherwise known as soot sprites or dust bunnies, here led by the spry droplets of Brennan’s vibraphone which are offset by the hapless, smudged pursuit of Garchik and Warren’s brass. Letting his talented ensemble set the scene or stir up sand and silt, Crump is never afraid to sit back and wait for the particles to settle.
The prolific bassist – who is part of the Borderlands Trio with Kris Davis and Eric McPherson, and has collaborated with Mary Halvorson, Tyshawn Sorey, Ingrid Laubrock and Vijay Iyer while featuring on Cory Smythe’s speculative ‘transmutation of weather and grief’ after the Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach standard ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ – bears his own intimate relationship with bodies of water, having grown up on the banks of the Mississippi in Memphis with its gleaming delta before transformative experiences with the Puget Sound off the northwestern coast of Washington, the wild Missinaibi which drops dashingly through the Hudson Bay Lowlands before emptying into the Moose River, the Onyar which descends from the Guilleries massif before crossing the Catalan provincial capital of Girona and the Gowanus Canal, a confluence of tidal wetlands and freshwater streams in the New York City borough of Brooklyn by which Crump has spent the last thirty years. The notes for Slow Water, which unrolls as a continuous 67-minute piece of music, cite John Luther Adams and his acclaimed orchestral composition Become Ocean, Wadada Leo Smith whose soaring trumpet has traversed America’s national parks and Great Lakes, and Ashley Fure whose The Force of Things continues to reckon with the climate crisis, with Crump deftly characterising both the spirit and the stylistic inclinations of his own work when he suggests that to right our relationship with water we must relinquish control to furnish the apt conditions for a ‘fertile wonderland’.
Slow Water then is a thoroughly captivating listen from the first crisply struck vibe or plucked bass, but it is also the type of record which demands no more attention than you’re ready to give it, willingly receding into the background if it suits your temper, the prevailing atmosphere or time of day. Swallow it down whole on a hydration spurt or in steady gulps like from one of those timed motivational bottles and you’ll reap the rewards in terms of a filtered mind and a ruddy complexion, but the album also functions well as part of the scenery, maintaining a baseline of health while invigorating the body with every sip, splash or dip. The first flow downstream soon buffets against a riverbank or babbles into a brackish estuary, as Crump possesses a scientific penchant for trial and error or investigative study, whether observing water muddied or treated, frigid or tepid, active or labelled and jarred. The array of terms and the watchful restraint of his compositions cultivate a kind of subterranean language whose instruments play on the cusp of vocalisation, with Slow Water therefore also serving as a sort of tranquil if not quite taciturn counterpart to another great environmental album by way of the babulus and dysfluent The Clearing by JJJJJerome Ellis.
Following the congealed strings and rubbery brass of ‘Mire’, whose loosely vibrating lips in academic or colloquial terms might otherwise be referred to as bilabial trills or blown raspberries, and the gaseous snuffles and snores of ‘Pneumatophore’, the piece ‘Euphotic’ picks up the pace, a dappled synthesis of bounding bass lines and brassy peals carried out by Mattrey and kwon and accented by the mottled splotches of Brennan’s vibraphone, which skirts and plucks up at the surface. As bass and strings play in vivid counterpoint, short swelling triumphal harmonies led by Warren’s trumpet give way in the final third of the track to a wind-down on the violin as kwon, Crump and Garchik embrace a bucolic and restful dusk.
After all, this is Slow Water. The creeping and even somewhat furtive ‘Fen’ serves as a push through dense wetlands, ‘Sediment and Flow’ scurries towards anxiously sustained tones, and the swirling hiss of ‘Outflow’ over Crump’s treading bass ups the sense of portent or trepidation as tense strings are accompanied by whinnying squibs of foghorn brass. After the brief ‘Meiofauna’, an admixture of baroque and folkish fiddle trills whose title refers to those small benthic invertebrates who inhabit marine or freshwater environments, Small Water draws to a close with the sagging yet stately ‘Bend’, a shabby genteel. Also a paean to the greatest song in the Walt Disney catalogue, bass, brass and vibes sustain the melody while the throbbing strings of kwon and Mattrey encourage a steady pace, the rapid back-and-forth rowing of the violin keeping the bow of this boat from being submerged while the trumpet stays by the stern and serves as a rudder, an air of tremulous anticipation whose expectancy is carried by glistening vibes gradually encompassing the ensemble, who trundle along in the shared understanding that the next adventure is just around the cusp of the river.
