ECM to Release Ten-Year-Old Recording Session

Jakob Bro playing his guitar (photograph by Hreinn Gudlaugsson, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

Ten years ago, guitarist Jakob Bro led a recording session for an album that will only be released this coming Friday. Taking Turns consists of seven tracks, all original compositions by Bro, who led a sextet whose other members were Lee Konitz, alternating between alto and soprano saxophones, Bill Frisell on guitar, pianist Jason Moran, Thomas Morgan on double bass, and drummer Andrew Cyrille. The tracks were recorded in Avatar Studios in New York, but they were not mixed for release as a recording until this past August. Mixing took place in Copenhagen with Bro working with engineer Thomas Vang at The Village Recording Studio. As of this writing, Amazon.com has created a Web page that supports only MP3 download, with the physical version scheduled for release at the beginning of next year.

Taking Turns is a new ECM release. Bro is no stranger to the label, having previously recorded Garden of Eden as a member of the Paul Motian Band and Dark Eyes as a member of the Dark Eyes Quintet led by trumpeter Tomasz Stańko. Those familiar with the label probably know that producer Manfred Eicher has a preference for meditative quietude, a disposition he has also cultivated in producing recordings of works by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. However, if there tends to be a “meditative mood” that one encounters through ECM releases, there is no question that different performers take different approaches to that mood.

I have been listening to ECM releases for over half a century. There have been critics that had accused it of minimalism at its most shallow. I am not one of them! My own approach to a successful rhetoric of quietude is one of still waters that run deep. To be fair, it may take several listenings to an ECM album to become aware of that depth, let alone plunge into it. Nevertheless, those that venture into this domain come to appreciate the richness of rhetoric that cuts across the tracks on any given ECM album.

Such listeners will probably come away from Taking Turns recognizing Bro as a new member in the “family” of ECM leaders.

The Bleeding Edge: 5/1/2023

This will be a relatively busy week. However, because most of the events will be taking place during the weekend, they have already been accounted for in the latest “busy weekend” article.  Those events are preceded by a special program for the first Outsound Presents LSG (Luggage Store Gallery) Creative Music Series event. The full list of already reported events is as follows:

• The documentary about Ruth Weiss screened by Outsound Presents with an “improvised overture” by musicians that had accompanied her poetry readings.
• The Old First Concerts recital by the Friction Quartet.
• Two duo performances at the Center for New Music.
• Two concerts taking place at The Lab.

As usual, the above hyperlinks lead to further information.

The one remaining event will be taking place at The Great American Music Hall, which usually does not venture out onto the bleeding edge. However, that venue will be hosting a residency of guitarist Bill Frisell. He will present a program entitled FOUR which (as expected) will involve three other musicians: Johnathan Blake (drummer), Gerald Clayton (piano), and Gregory Tardy (saxophone). The venue is located at 859 O’Farrell Street, between Polk Street and Larkin Street. The event will begin a 8:30 p.m. on Thursday, May 4, with doors opening at 7 p.m. A Web page has been created for purchasing tickets in advance: $58 for general admission and $70 for premium seating in the Gold Circle.

Andrew Cyrille’s Latest Quartet Album for ECM

I first became aware of the adventurous drum work by Andrew Cyrille when I started to listening to Cecil Taylor recordings. By the time I left Silicon Valley and began to focus seriously on the nature of listening to music, my interest in Cyrille shifted to his work with Trio 3, which I first began to follow when I was writing for Examiner.com. More recently, Cyrille made his debut as a leader of a quartet album recorded for ECM, which was released a little less than five years ago. The other members of the quartet were Bill Frisell on guitar, Ben Street on bass, and Richard Teitelbaum on both synthesizer and piano. The title of the album was The Declaration of Musical Independence.

Andrew Cyrille, Bill Frisell, David Virelles, and Ben Street (photograph by Arianna Tae Cimarosti for ECM Records, courtesy of DL Media)

This past Friday ECM released a new album of the Andrew Cyrille Quartet entitled The News. Teitelbaum has been replaced by David Virelles, but both Frisell and Street are still in the quartet. Virelles also contributes as the composer of “Incienco” and shares composition efforts with Cyrille in “Dance of the Nuances.” Ironically, my knowledge of Cyrille was limited to recordings until this past July, when he served as drummer in the video recording session of Karl Evangelista’s Apura, which I had the good fortune to attend. It was only through physical presence that I could appreciate the complexity of his polyrhythmic riffs; and, as I later wrote, the experience “left me wondering if Cyrille had grown an extra pair of arms.”

Parsing polyrhythms is no easy matter, particularly when listening is not supplemented by observing the performers. As a result The News is anything but one of those sit-back-and-enjoy-the-listening albums. Even when Virelles is contributing little more than chord progressions, the timings of the shifts from one chord to the next are far from predictable. The good news is that the mixing by Rick Kwan affords clear listening to all four of the quartet members throughout the entire album. Thus, the listener is free to direct her/his attention where (s)he wishes when encountering any of the eight tracks on this recording.

In other words The News provides an experience in which the act of “semantic synthesis” owes as much to “active listening” as it does to the efforts of the performers. One might argue that such “active listening” has always been a part of making jazz, perhaps even when the jazz is being made by a solo pianist. (The solo pianist that comes to mind almost immediately is, of course, Thelonious Monk!) However, the idea that the listener might also be a “maker” only began to emerge during that last half of the last century; and an album like The News makes for a highly satisfying encounter that rewards active attention from the listener.

ECM Releases Bill Frisell’s Latest Album

Bill Frisell and Thomas Morgan (photograph by Monica Jane Frisell, courtesy of ECM Records)

Guitarist Bill Frisell made his debut on ECM in 1983 with the album In Line. To call his approach eclectic would be the height of understatement. My greatest regret is that it took so long for his work to come to my attention. It was only when SFJAZZ presented his multimedia project The Great Flood, in which he provided music for Bill Morrison’s cinematic reflection on the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, in April of 2012 that I realized how much highly inventive work I had been missing. Then, almost exactly a year later, Frisell returned to SFJAZZ, this time participating in a multimedia interpretation of Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish.”

Fortunately, those experiences left me hungry to learn more about Frisell as a musician, rather than a partner in a multimedia project. I discovered that he recorded on a variety of different labels, performing with jazz musicians that were just beginning to show up on my radar. Now I do what I can to follow his work. I continue to be impressed by his capacity for invention and by the sources that trigger that capacity.

This past Friday ECM released Epistrophy, Frisell’s second duo album with bassist Thomas Morgan. The first was Small Town, which ECM released a little less than two years ago. Like Small Town, Epistrophy is a live recording of a performance at the Village Vanguard. Anyone who reads this site regularly should know by now that the album is named after one of Thelonious Monk’s more unorthodox compositions, and it is one that he probably played many times to Vanguard audiences. Indeed, that sense of Monk’s presence that remains at the Vanguard was reinforced when Frisell and Morgan decided to play another Monk tune in their session, “Pannonica.” However, while Monk used both of these tunes to seek out new directions in his keyboard work, Frisell and Morgan have repurposed them for their own approaches to performance on guitar and bass.

However, Frisell does not need to turn to unorthodox themes to prompt his own capacity for invention. He is just as comfortable seeking new directions through a folk song as familiar as “Red River Valley” or, for that matter, John Barry’s title music for the James Bond film You Only Live Twice. Nevertheless, my own preferences tend to be for music that is already forging into uncharted territory before Frisell works his own take on the source. As a result, I was delighted to listen to his performance of Paul Motian’s “Mumbo Jumbo;” but I was equally in hog heaven with his approach to Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life.”

Mind you, Frisell was not the first to turn to a cowboy song for inspiration. In 1957 Contemporary released the Sonny Rollins album Way Out West. Rollins, of course, is another jazz master closely associated with the history of the Village Vanguard; and Frisell claims that Way Out West was “One of the first jazz LPs I ever bought.” However, none of the tracks on Rollins’ album took on a folk source as traditional as “Red River Valley.” If anything, Rollins was poking fun at the Tin Pan Alley community trying to write better folk music than music that actually had folk sources. Frisell is clearly more interested in music so traditional that its source is unknown, and that seems to allow him greater breadth in the way in which he transforms that music into jazz fit to rub shoulders with the likes of Monk and Strayhorn.

Andrew Cyrille Leads Trio of ECM Veterans

Bill Frisell, Wadada Leo Smith, and Andrew Cyrille (photograph by Jesse Chung, courtesy of ECM)

This coming Friday ECM will release a new recording led by jazz drummer Andrew Cyrille. It is a trio album on which Cyrille is joined by Wadada Leo Smith on trumpet and Bill Frisell on guitar. The title is Lebroba, which is a contraction of Leland, Brooklyn, and Baltimore, the respective cities in which the three trio members were born. As may be expected, Amazon.com is currently processing pre-orders for those who can’t wait.

I first became aware of Cyrille through his work with Cecil Taylor. While Cyrille was well versed in providing a steady beat behind adventurous jazz improvisations, Taylor allowed him the freedom to discover and express a distinctive voice of rhythms that were as loath to establish a solid backbeat as atonality was to allow for a dominant-tonic cadence. Since his departure from Taylor, Cyrille has been consistently finding new avenues of musical expression through his percussion resources, pursuing a mission best described by the title of his debut album with ECM, The Declaration of Musical Independence. On that album he led a quartet that included Frisell. He is also the percussionist for Trio 3, in which he is joined by saxophonist Oliver Lake and Reggie Workman on bass.

The five tracks on Lebroba are not, strictly speaking, “committed” to arrhythmic drum work any more than they are committed to atonal lines coming from the trumpet and the guitar. It would be fairer to say that, just as the theoretical infrastructure of dissonance involves establishing ambiguities, many (if not all) of which are never resolved, ambiguity lies at the heart of how Cyrille deploys his percussive “themes,” which often reveal themselves with the rhetoric of hesitant conversation with the other two players. One might say that the music that emerges amounts to some kind of a quest, but one in which the journey itself is more significant than whether or not the goal is attained.

Over the course of those five tracks, each of the players has at least one opportunity to serve as “composer;” and “TGD” is basically a joint improvisation by all three of them. The most ambitious track, however, comes from Smith in the form of a suite in four movements (played without interruption) dedicated to Alice Coltrane. The track lasts seventeen minutes; and, if I have parsed the listing in the booklet correctly, the titles of the four movements are “Turiya,” “Alice Coltrane,” “Meditations and Dreams,” and “Love.” The titles of the last two movements clearly reflect on the music of Alice’s husband John (both his own music and tunes of others he particularly liked), while turiya is a Sanskrit word that refers to an integration of three states of consciousness, waking consciousness, dreaming, and dreamless sleep.

The overall rhetoric of the album is one of quietude. Even in the midst of bursts of energy, several of which emerge from the spontaneity of “TGD,” there is a sense that all paths eventually lead to serenity. To the extent that one can approach the entire album as a joint product of three composers and improvisers, this is music that strays from “established” practices of chamber music (even those of composers like Pierre Boulez and Morton Feldman) as much as it departs from “received wisdom” about jazz trios. As one who is perfectly content to throw category boundaries to the winds, I have to say I am fascinated every time I encounter a recording of Cyrille at work; and I come away wondering where his next recording project will take him.

Bill Frisell’s First Solo Album in 18 Years

courtesy of Sony Music

Yesterday Sony Music released Music IS, a solo album by jazz guitarist Bill Frisell. The number of combos in which Frisell has performed and/or led comes close to innumerable; but he has not made a solo album since Ghost Town, which was released by Nonesuch eighteen years ago. The title of the new album has a somewhat amusing backstory. Frisell has made a personal mantra out of the sentence “Music is good,” which he picked up from banjo player Danny Barnes. As he has put it in his own words:

Everything I need to know is that phrase, “Music is Good.” I almost called the album that, but then I thought that it might be too literal. It’s good to leave it open.

Ironically, the titles of the tracks on this new album, many of which have been previously recorded, are about as literal as one can get. Some, such as “Pretty Stars,” could not be more visual. Others, like “The Pioneers,” seem to have been conceived as evocations of familiar genres. Then there are memory pieces that identify either past colleagues (“Ron Carter”) or venues (“Kentucky Derby”).

Frisell seems to have no trouble inventing new melodies. He seems to do it almost every morning, the way many of us would take that time to read the newspaper (or, in this more “contemporary” world, scan our news feeds). All of his tunes get documented on single pages of staff paper. Again, Frisell has his own thoughts about the process:

I don’t know where the melodies come from. I try not to judge anything and just let them be.

After deciding to make a solo recording, Frisell booked himself to play for a week at The Stone in New York. He used those sessions to review all those pieces of staff paper that he had accumulated, finding his own distinctive paths from notation to performance. This prepared him to take his thoughts about performance into a recording studio. What came out of that studio is a collection of sixteen tracks, only a few of which are longer than five minutes in duration. Some are “straight” solos, some involve different forms of electronic processing, and a few are products of mixing multiple tracks.

Taken only on the surface, this album could easily be dismissed as “easy listening” or that blissed-out “new age” style that became associated with Windham Hill Records (whose catalog is now distributed through Sony Music Entertainment). However, for those willing to listen more closely, it should not take long to find the depth of these still waters, a depth that takes in the full richness of issues that arise when one commits to making music. Frisell may have approached Music IS as a sort of personal diary, but it is a diary offering much to learn to anyone willing to commit to giving it a serious reading.