Not since Jerry Seinfeld groggily awoke to witness Tim Whatley rebuttoning his shirt has someone enjoyed such an intimate relationship with their dentist as the one Marianna Maruyama relates here, as the writer and artist who presently resides in The Hague joins forces with the producer Hessel Veldman, whose primary role in the Dutch home-taping network of the eighties was explored a few years ago by Stroom on the compilation album Eigen Boezem.
Maruyama moved twelve years ago to the Netherlands from Japan, but on the spoken word album Salt and its standout track ‘Viktorija’ she dwells upon images and memories of Tokyo, from a plethora of old jobs whether accompanying people to onsen or providing the female voice for an automated water cooler to the photographs of local dentists’ offices which have been taken by a friend. ‘No one wants to think about dentistry as being a practice of touch’ she laments, adding that ‘in the name of professionalism all aspects of the sensuous are denied’. Yet she believes that a visit to the dentist’s office can prove an intimate and restorative and perhaps even a loving occasion, as she recalls:
how I came to him emotionally emptied and untouched, starved for touch, in great need of tenderness, and how he put his hands in my mouth for a long time and helped me as a stranger. He eased my pain and caused some too.
James Brandon Lewis engages in a stomping swoon, with the richness of his tenor saxophone offset by Chad Taylor’s limpid marimba figures and slapping drums while Josh Werner adds the funk through his bassy undercurrents, which serve increasingly to embed the groove on ‘Prince Eugene’, another intoxicating entry from their trio album Apple Cores which is due out in the first week of February.
Eiko Ishibashi blends city pop with chanson and the bal-musette as ‘Coma’ introduces her latest alternate reality. Whatever the headwinds M.I.A. shows that she still possesses one of the most distinctive voices in the game as she turns her penchant for rubbery slugs and mantra-like melodies to Christian themes. Yama Warashi unspools the title track from her extended play At My Mother’s Piano, which blends winsome variations with field recordings inspired by a trip to her family home in the Japanese city of Ashiya, attaining a kind of lilting yet plaintive tenderness which might call to mind the music of Emahoy or the Ethiopian classical pianist Girma Yifrashewa.
The tenor saxophonist Travis Laplante, guitarist Andrew Smiley and drummer Jason Nazary are longtime collaborators, having burst onto the scene as three-quarters of Little Women, an innovative noise jazz ensemble whose debut full-length Throat arrived back in 2010.
Amid so many various points of connection – from their work with the likes of Helado Negro, Kate Gentile and Amirtha Kidambi to their part in the groups Anteloper, Battle Trance and Happy Place – now the trio are joined by Nathaniel Morgan on the alto saxophone for their debut offering as Sun & Rain. The realisation of a project which commenced in 2014 when the quartet began to gather at Laplante’s residence in Vermont for semi-annual retreats and what is described as a ‘painstaking’ compositional process, across the five movements of Waterfall the ensemble shift dynamically between free jazz and post-rock textures on what is billed as an ode to nature, taking everything from rustling winds and still ponds to forest fires and tsunamis as its theme.
The new album by the Will Mason Quartet is described as ‘microtonal chamber jazz’ inspired by La Monte Young’s solo improvisatory epic The Well-Tuned Piano and modernist works by the painter Joan Mitchell and poet Wallace Stevens. That might make Hemlocks, Peacocks sound rather academic, but the record proves slinkily and sometimes queasily seductive as deVon Russell Gray plays two keyboards retuned to echo Young’s system of just intonation, while Danny Fisher-Lochhead and Anna Webber duet on their alto and tenor saxophones as Mason provides a riverbed of shakers and silt.
Doseone sets his gravelly and croaking voice – sometimes world-weary and sometimes menacing while occasionally sounding like a come-on gone awry – over beats by Steel Tipped Dove, as between the algorithmic laments of Open Mike Eagle and tongue twisters of Myka 9 the juxtaposition with the more detached tone of the Backwoodz Studioz honcho billy woods proves especially arresting. And the venerable Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy floats downstream on an ecological ballad with the Nashville veteran John Anderson, with the crooner Oldham saying of the collaboration:
One of my favourite recorded John Anderson performances is a duet he sang with Merle Haggard called ‘The Winds of Change’. It’s a minor-key ballad about climate change and over-development, the compromise of our environment’s integrity at the hands of humans. ‘Downstream’ though in a major key hits on the same ideas. I don’t know how to explain how it felt to witness this master of song bring, beautifully and humbly, his experience and expertise to bear on this little recording we were making. Anderson’s singing on the final verse has weight in it, and concern, and love.
James Brandon Lewis – ‘Prince Eugene’
Marianna Maruyama & Hessel Veldman – ‘Viktorija’
Yama Warashi – ‘At My Mother’s Piano’
doseone & Steel Tipped Dove – ‘Wasteland Embrace’ (feat. billy woods)
Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – ‘Downstream’ (feat. John Anderson)
