His home from the founding of the label in 1997 and the release of his Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra opus Sunrise in the Tone World, the great free jazz bassist William Parker raises two new albums this week on the Brooklyn bastion AUM Fidelity, which retains its commitment to transcendent jazz and elemental soul.
On the babbling ‘Five Angels by the Stream’ from Heart Trio, which finds Parker back alongside the pianist Cooper-Moore and his ‘rhythm twin’ the drummer Hamid Drake, a plunging vamp on the doson ngoni or hunter’s harp, the traditional West African griot medium, forms a rhythm section with Drake’s skittering percussion as Cooper-Moore’s homemade horizontal hoe-handle harp plays a sinuous and glistening melody. As cooing vocals become ever more babulus alongside the gambolling of harp and drums, ‘Five Angels by the Stream’ breaks through the rushes in the final third of the piece as the trio languidly yet cautiously scale the shore.
No stranger to poetic imagery, Cereal Music is nevertheless Parker’s first album of plainspoken word, with the vocalist and producer Ellen Christi handling the sound design as he buttresses his recitations with bass and flutes. Through pellucid reflections upon the nature of art and a prismatic rainbow-hued metaphysics, Parker offers flickering reflections upon his first breaths in a shoebox incubator in the Bronx, recites anti-war screeds and relays fond tributes to old friends, before with an ‘ah-ya-ya-ya, tati tati, toot toot’ he closes Cereal Music with an Afro-Cuban ode to the act of resistance, suggesting that ‘We were better off before we were better off. We were very civilised before we were civilised’.
Casting a wide net and emphasising her own voice on her new album Sentir que no sabes, the Guatemalan cellist Mabe Fratti is ever more wispy and quizzical, defining in the discussion of her record a moment of sweetened permeability ‘when you feel you don’t know anything and you are soft like jello and any fork can go through’.
She is joined for Sentir que no sabes by her partner and routine collaborator Héctor Tosta as I. La Católica, with Jacob Wick blowing trumpet, Gibrán Andrade back behind the drum set and Estrella del Sol of the shoegaze outfit Mint Field whistling background hisses and signal tones, as she summons up the improvisational stalwarts Atrás del Cosmos and Germán Bringas from her adopted home of Mexico City plus cult indie acts like Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine and Mazzy Star while also touching upon kindred spirits like Arthur Russell, Kate Bush and Joanna Newsom alongside fellow cello practitioners as far-flung as Lia Kohl, MIZU, Lori Goldston and Okkyung Lee.
Yet on ‘Quieras o no’ a vocoder and other electronic distortions are more redolent of the pitched organ and eulogising of the Purple Rain opener ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ by Prince. Carried over a plunging bassline and matching the sense of weightless freefall, Mabe Fratti’s vocal performance here is one of the best on the album, speaking of disaster in her native Spanish the repetition of which nevertheless calls to mind the poem ‘One Art’ by Elizabeth Bishop, which also lingers deftly on the cusp of a secret implosion or precipitous defeat.
On her first extended play to feature her own compositions, the classically trained bassoonist Rebekah Heller juxtaposes skronking and bluesy free jazz with wry odes to anxiety, like the lissome and ironic ‘My voice’ whose cooing chorals boast of her conservatory training while betraying a fraught strive for perfection and a fear of being seen, as Heller struggles to detach her own musical expression from a litany of influences.
‘This is my history, and this is my voice’ she proclaims, ‘worshipping at the altar of every other composer, always filtering my art through someone else’s voice’. Then over cawing seagulls on ‘Fiction’ she unloads a barrage of breathless ‘what ifs’, before the final hush of an ‘ode to Joy’ which is both subtle and sophisticated, lulling and sibilant (from the concrete borders of fields full of gold).
Little paint daubs in the form of dial-up harmonics make for an elegant and variegated canvas on the title track and centrepiece of Jessica Ackerley’s upcoming album All Of the Colours Are Singing, with her electric guitar accompanied by the lush strings of Concetta Abbate’s viola, Walter Stinson who plays a triumphant and almost euphoric upright bass plus Aaron Edgcomb’s pulsating percussion.
Casting between improvisational jazz and the scuzzier margins of alternative rock, the guitarist Nels Cline and his Wilco bandmate on drums Glenn Kotche, the bassist Darin Gray who with Kotche is one half of the longstanding duo On Fillmore while serving as Jim O’Rourke’s low-end of choice, and another percussionist in the form of the everywhere man Chris Corsano, whose rip-roaring solo album The Key (Became the Important Thing [and Then Just Faded Away]) also landed this week, band together as the Saccata Quartet for the cicada buzz and relentless bric-á-brac of Septendecim.
There’s a real lustre to the second side of The Blue Hour by Loren Connors and Alan Licht, as the tenebrous and waterlogged chords of Connors who makes a rare outing on the piano are joined by the weighty strums of Licht’s guitar, a ballast which steadies the course while channelling the forgotten bluesman Jackson C. Frank’s lilting and spectral ‘Just Like Anything’.
Culled from a second night at London’s experimental hotspot OTO where the duo celebrated thirty years of playing together plus the release of their atonal live document At The Top Of The Stairs, the first side of The Blue Hour commences with Connors on the piano stool for the first time in their long history of collaboration, his staggered keys and Licht’s gnarled slides adopting shadowy forms, before Connors stands up and summons a whole cathedral of fumy and haunted feedback. Then as the keys become more scratchy or seep out in big inky splotches as the second side of The Blue Hour draws to a close, plucked strings laden with distortion carve shapes and radiate from within the fog, plaintive yet restful, half in love with easeful death even as the tandem churn without end.
For the seasonal musicians of Fuubutsushi, the confluence of rootsy Americana and spiritual jazz is unusually verdant.
Chris Jusell occasions the aching strains of his violin, which are sometimes folksy and fiddle-like, with spurts on the marimba, vibes and mandolin, while Chaz Prymek wields a wealth of guitars whose spectral shapes sometimes stretch towards breezy Hawaiian melodies, an airing out of regional flora buttressed by field recordings which also takes in the Mountain Prairies and the Midwest.
Between ruminative piano chords and subtly distorted synthetic throbs, plus discursions on the harmonica, accordion and clarinet, Matthew Sage’s steady drum patter might slip into cavernous rolls while cymbals ripple and billow, strewn with a soft brush. And the saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi cuts through some of the rustic charm with his winnowing and searching reeds, adding a full-bodied sonority to Meridians, which more than ever foregrounds his cherubic voice.
Recorded by distance, Meridians reflects a disparity in time zones, with the four sides of the album given the labels ‘Pacific’, ‘Mountain’, ‘Central’ and Eastern’ which approximate their moods and themes. Close-miked, the quartet’s missives evoke that iconic ECM sound with some of the smooth crossover appeal of the Gondwana Records cohort, a post-rock approach to timbre and texture and the watchful lyricism of Sage’s recent collaborative album with Joseph Shabason and Nicholas Krgovich. Meanwhile their decision to publish Meridians exclusively via Sage’s own Cached.Media imprint exemplifies what they characterise as a ‘farm-to-table, grassroots approach’.
Early tracks on Meridians steer between the Sigur Rós matrices of ‘Hamilton’, glacial and almost glossolalic, then the cosmic jazz of ‘Distance Learner’ which at moments summons the funk shimmer of Lonnie Liston Smith or the celestial whirlpools of Goran Kajfeš Tropiques. Opening with the crunch of foliage underfoot and a tremor of sentimental strings, the Star Wars expanded universe-referencing ‘Tenel Ka (First Crush)’ soon stretches out into an elegant 7/4 groove as Shiroishi delivers a generous saxophone solo which is picked up by Prymek on the electric guitar.
A poignant tribute to parenthood, ‘Light in the Annex’ closes through the hushed static of a baby monitor, the accordion at the end of ‘Nora Nora’ winds the track in the manner of the bal-musette, while ‘Barrel Duet’ is duskier, a tumbleweed Western with a doleful and attritional violin plus droning accordion, drags of saxophone and the susurration of Sage’s chimes and sticks.
‘Wonder Years’ offers a tender and yearning vocal before the track is saturated by queasy organ licks, ‘Spent for Light’ surges through the atmosphere leaving us with the debris and one eye towards the horizon, and the title track nestles in the bosom of Jusell’s violin before bass clarinet and smeared stretches of accordion put out the candle, like a brass snuffer which reaches out with one last jingle before smothering the tremulous flame.
Scott Wollschleger’s music has been described as ‘Morton Feldman meets Thelonious Monk meets H. P. Lovecraft’ by the pianist and critic Ethan Iverson, whose reckoning has never been more apt. For his latest chamber suite, which comprises three duos and a solo, the self-styled brontal composer piles up microtones and glitchy repetitions, charging his dolorous transgressions and violences with a characteristically animated sense of fun.
After the silent screams and siren calls of the three duo pieces, manifested through trembling strings, soprano vocals and pitch pipe clusters plus headlong keys menaced by a muzzled and sputtering trombone, ‘Secret Machine no. 7’ plays out like the limpid aftermath, with a wiry violin whose melodic ark ekes upwards before starting over again, slender and tenuous like a pair of tweezers plucking at the filaments of a thread. Concluding the album with a solo from Miranda Cuckson, for this piece the low G string of her violin was tuned down a minor third to E while a metal mute was attached to the bridge, facilitating in the words of the liner notes ‘delicate fades to niente’.
Around the halfway mark tremolo smears, dizzying three-dimensional pizzicato and scudding slides wash across the screen, as sublimated and contemporised baroque airs take on the impish character of a picaresque. Then in the last moments of ‘Secret Machine no. 7’ these squibs burst forth and scamper deftly over the horizon, as Wollschleger’s quavering Between Breath lets go of the what goes bump in the night horror theatrics, embracing the shimmer of Annihilation, a science fiction phantasm or a fractal freak.
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William Parker, Cooper-Moore and Hamid Drake – ‘Five Angels by the Stream’
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Fuubutsushi – ‘Tenel Ka (First Crush)’
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Jessica Ackerley – ‘All of the colours are singing’
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Loren Connors & Alan Licht – ‘The Blue Hour’ (Part II)
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William Parker & Ellen Christi – ‘We Were Very Civilized’
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