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.
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.
The prodigious bassist Luke Stewart plays a slinky and stuttering melody on one of the standout tracks from the latest album with his Silt Trio, giving body to the signature over the shifting sediment of Trae Crudup’s drum set as Brian Settles on tenor saxophone performs a sensitive tightrope act. A community organizer in New York City and the District of Columbia, an eclectic noisemaker and one of the leading figures behind the comminglings and comings together of Blacks’ Myths, Irreversible Entanglements, Heroes Are Gang Leaders, SSWAN and Miserere, the bassist has collaborated with everyone from Archie Shepp, David Murray, Ken Vandermark and James Brandon Lewis to Moor Mother, Jaimie Branch, Patrick Shiroishi and Tashi Dorji, with the cover of Unknown Rivers characterising the sound of the album, an oblique, coiled and ambery lava flow.
Fresh from her work with Titanic and Amor Muere, the Guatemalan cellist and vocalist Mabe Fratti makes burgeoning and beguiling, sprouting and mushrooming blue screen pop with descending chords and an eighties synthetic sheen on ‘Pantalla Azul’. Building on the self-confidence which she gained from her breakthrough record Horizons, the saxophonist Jasmine Myra leads a smooth and sonorous ensemble with celestial overtones on Rising, stretching out the Gondwana Records house style, with a lissome flute, brushed snares and waltz time on one of the standout compositions exemplifying the old saying that still waters run deep. And for the title track of Reverse Bloom, the latest album for her small string ensemble, the violist Jessica Pavone with Aimée Niemann and Abby Swidler on violins conjure a bristling and spine-chilling drone out of their elegant and elegiac string progressions, a veritable turning of the screw.
Making waves around the We Jazz offices and Digelius record store in Helsinki ever since the release of the album opener ‘Unity In Diversity’ back in February, the Swedish quartet behind Goran Kajfeš Tropiques excel in their own idiosyncratic form of hypno-jazz which might summon equally the cascading spiritual glissandos of Alice Coltrane, the saxophone squalls of Pharoah Sanders, the shifting phrases and repetitions of the minimalist composers Steve Reich and Terry Riley, the new age ambiance of Laraaji and the frayed Teutonic borders of everything that falls under the auspices of kosmische. For their latest outpouring on Tell Us the quartet of Goran Kajfeš on trumpet and synthesizer, Alexander Zethson on piano, organ and synths, Johan Berthling on the acoustic bass and Johan Holmegard on drums are joined by the frequent Fire! collaborators Josefin Runsteen on violin and Leo Svensson Sander on cello.
The first tempered tones of Tell Us are given over to the elegant strains of Runsteen and Sander, whose bowed strings cut across one another slantwise and with curlicued ends, providing a little bit of torque and tension like the solemn shifting of household furniture, before wafting up into the aether as layered synthesizers and organ keys come in. As the strings and Holmegard’s brushed percussion take on watery tones, Berthling’s bass begins to rumble away in the background, like a boulder being shunted slowly from a tomb. Holmegard’s tumbling drum patterns encourage the ensemble to slip into a sumptuous groove, with the trumpet of Kajfeš rising last to make an appearance over the ebullient wash of synthesizers, playing an ascending sequence which is somewhat redolent of the fiery yearning of Donald Ayler and the world fusion of Don Cherry, with echoes of Miles Davis and John McLaughlin on Sketches of Spain, Bitches Brew and Mahavishnu as strings and brass elaborate their deft interplay. While drum rolls serve to cap Holmegard’s encompassing patter and the strings of Runsteen and Sander also take on a percussive character, Zethson’s keys strike a woozy note through pitch bending and rubato, as Goran Kajfeš Tropiques straddle the surf in a silvery swoon.
‘Magmatique’ opens with a slowly emphasised chord progression on the piano and a sinuous synth line, which are sent reeling by the swirls of Kajfeš’ trumpet and a few well-appointed jabs from Berthling’s bass. Background keys and tenuous shades of percussion give a slightly plosive, bubbling quality to the affair. It’s moody and languorous, with the trumpet remaining fairly muted as bowed cello and violin pull across the piece in short curtailed drags.
Then an organ melody and the affricative sound of Holmegard’s drums commence a deep groove. Strings smear like spectres over the groove, which comes predominantly from the keys and from Holmegard’s padded drum set, with overdubbed synthesizers chiming with the shimmer and plunk of water droplets but with the shape and sonority of a ladder, a swirling and limpid means of ascent. The trumpet picks up the ghostly refrain and gains body, as ‘Magmatique’ gives the impression of a spa, lagoon or water rapids hoisted up to an astral plane, a game of snakes and ladders and dissolving exteriors, the bleeding together of boundless infinity pools.
Finally the combination of synthesizers and trumpet on ‘Prije i posle’ – which translates as ‘before and after’ or ‘now and then’ – plays like a whorl of woodwinds, gently hypnotic, momentarily taking on the character of shakuhachi and shō before Holmegard’s racing percussion once more propels the groove. Burnished on the edges by synthesizers and violin, the bass and cello eventually arrive to form a brusque and slightly dolorous counterpoint. As the synths echo the pizzicato playing of the strings, the groove vortices, and in the final moments of Tell Us the bandleader Goran Kajfeš on trumpet blows out a resonant hymnal, pastoral and Arcadian before joining in with the Neptunal swirl.
Cutting a swathe through the contemporary landscape with a scorched penchant for Southern Gothic and Appalachian Horror, the Cacophonous Revival Recordings founder Samuel Goff structures his new album This Is My Body, This Is My Blood around three vignettes of his upbringing in a fervently religious household, with a charismatic father who was both pastor and snake handler and a disagreeable if well-meaning mother, who in a blood-strewn rage rips out chunks of the family Bible when her husband shacks up in a traveller’s motel with his brother’s wife, even though that selfsame Bible was one of the few fancy things they possessed. The glinting keys and stomping percussion of these spoken word narratives spills out into a molasses-thick stew or morass of genre diversions from musique concrète to thrash metal to shrill industrial noise with techno lashings that sits somewhere between Frozen Niagara Falls by Prurient and Adore by The Smashing Pumpkins, plus ritual chanting which might from one moment to the next be redolent of Tuvan throat singing or the dry heaves offset by microtonal percussive clanks and Dutch hardstyle of the rambunctious Javanese duo Raja Kirik.
A drummer by trade whose previous record was a call for diminished borders loosely based around the collection Spit Temple by the Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuña, with Goff’s bristling polyrhythms undergirding Camila Nebbia and Patrick Shiroishi’s duelling horns, for This Is My Body, This Is My Blood the artist plays keyboards and piano, turntables and electronics, autoharp and bass alongside a plethora of percussion from bowed cymbals to oil drums while accompanied by a retinue of instrumentalists. On the album centrepiece Goff recalls his mother’s words after the aforementioned biblical breakdown, her admission that ‘Faith quenches the violence of fire. But tonight I lost my faith’ serving as both sonic rationale and leitmotif. ‘Witch Spit’ utilises the slaver of 176 vocal tracks, while the closer ‘I’m Never Coming Back’ proves a long goodbye haunted by the voice of God, the creek Goff and his brothers used to play in, train tracks and the tree under which the author used to write, swaying from an overhanging branch or hovering in the middle ground somewhere between misty recollection and torched retreat.
Violaine Morgan Le Fur as Violence Gratuite makes a splash over grimey synths and bottle cap percussion, slipping in an effortlessly smooth vocal as a rickshaw carries the weight of her aluminium tail. From ‘sea like a mirror’ to ‘the air is filled with foam and spray’, the composer Christopher Cerrone and the nine-woman Lorelei Ensemble perform a siren tribute to the beauty and elegance of the Beaufort scale. And on the second single from their upcoming album Rectangles and Circumstance, seasoned collaborators Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion murmur on the cusp of a winning refrain over twinkling chimes and gently loping percussion, an ode to music in the form of a tender and dallying lullaby.
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J. Pavone String Ensemble – ‘Reverse Bloom’
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Goran Kajfeš Tropiques – ‘Magmatique’
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Samuel Goff – ‘This Is My Body’
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Luke Stewart Silt Trio – ‘The Slip’
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Christopher Cerrone & Lorelei Ensemble – ‘Beaufort Scales: VIII. Steps 7, 8 and 9’
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