Joe Fonda to Release New Quartet Album

Some readers may recall that I first became aware of bassist and composer Joe Fonda through my commitment to keep up with the albums released by the highly adventurous jazz pianist Satoko Fujii. Sadly, my most recent encounter dates all the way back to April of 2022, when Fujii and Fonda jointly released their Thread of Light album. However, this past September I learned that they would be releasing a new quartet album entitled Eyes on the Horizon on Long Song Records; and that album is now available for pre-ordering both the compact disc and digital download through a Bandcamp Web page. The release date will be this coming Friday, November 15.

Wadada Leo Smith, Joe Fonda, Satoko Fujii, and Tiziano Tononi (photograph by David Apuzzo, from the Bandcamp Web page for this album)

Fonda conceived this seven-track album as a tribute to trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. Smith performs on this new Eyes on the Horizon album along with drummer Tiziano Tononi joining Fonda and Fujii. Fonda serves as leader of the quartet providing composed content that allows an abundance of opportunities of improvising. Nevertheless, there is frequently (but not always) a restrained rhetoric, which allows Fonda a fair amount of flexibility in his bass work. However, Smith tends to lead the way with his trumpet phrases; and Fujii tends to support Smith’s leadership with more keyboard restraint than I usually encounter!

Where jazz is concerned, I tend to associate the adjective “cerebral” with jazz artists such as Andrew Hill and those that sail under his flag. Nevertheless, there is an intense focus among Fonda and his quartet colleagues that comes across as just as cerebral as Hill’s approaches to improvisation and invention. Furthermore, there is a haunting sense of quietude that allows the attentive listener to appreciate the abundance of angels in all of the details. This is an album that is likely to reward over the course of many listening encounters.

Wadada Leo Smith’s New Electric Band

Many readers probably know by now that Wadada Leo Smith celebrated his 80th birthday on December 18, 2021. That date marked the beginning of a prodigious number of diverse releases over the course of 2022. One of the first to be released was A Love Sonnet for Billie Holiday, but there were less-expected collections such as The Chicago Symphonies, a seven-CD set of twelve string quartets, and the five-CD The Emerald Duets, each CD pairing Smith with a different colleague.

Cover of Fire Illuminations (photograph by Einar Falur Ingólfsson)

Smith’s embrace of unlikely sources of diversity has followed him into his 81st year. Today sees his latest venture in the form of a digital-only release of Fire Illuminations. To record this album he assembled a new ensemble called Orange Wave Electric. This is an all-star electric band whose members include guitarists Nels Cline, Brandon Ross, and Lamar Smith, bassists Bill Laswell and Melvin Gibbs, electronic musician Hardedge, percussionist Mauro Refosco, and drummer Pheeroan akLaff.

The album consists of only five tracks and lasts for a little under 50 minutes. The two long tracks are both a little over 15 minutes in duration. The first of these is “Ntozake,” the opening track named after the poet Ntozake Shange, best known as the author of the play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf, which won an Obie Award in 1975. (Reasonable minds may differ; I never got beyond the line “I am a poet” being repeated too many times!) The second is “Tony Williams,” the fourth track named after the drummer in the quintet formed by Miles Davis in 1964, which lasted into 1968. After leaving the quintet, Williams formed the Tony Williams Lifetime trio with John McLaughlin on guitar and Larry Young on organ.

Two of the tracks are reflections on Muhammad Ali. “Muhammad Ali’s Spiritual Horizon,” a little under four minutes in duration, is the second track on the album. The final track is “Muhammad Ali and George Forman’s Rumble in Zaire Africa” and is about twice as long. The remaining track is the one that evokes the album title. “Fire Illuminations Inside Light Particles” is about four and a half minutes long.

According to the advance material I received, Smith associated the “Fire Illuminations” composition with “the transformative nature of fire itself, and its foundational role in the development of human civilization.” However, I have to confess that I was drawn more to the second half of the title. As an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), I learned of the “ambiguity” of light: Some of its properties were, indeed, those of particles; but others could only be explained as the behavior of waves. This is not to suggest that the music is ambiguous. Nevertheless, there is some sense of “notes as particles” in Smith’s phrasing, while the electronic accompaniment is decidedly wave-like!

Let me be clear, however: one does not need a Bachelor’s degree from MIT to appreciate the inventive approach that Smith takes to his trumpet work or the electronic “environment” in which his thematic lines evolve!

Wadada Leo Smith’s Box of Five Duo Sets

Readers may recall that this past Wednesday saw an article discussing the seven-CD set of the first twelve string quartets composed by jazz trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. That article began by observing that the album was one in “a series of releases on his ‘house label,’ the Helsinki-based TUM Records.” The day on which the quartet collection was released also saw the TUM release of a five-CD collection entitled The Emerald Duets.

Wadada Leo Smith and Andrew Cyrille (photograph by Enid Farber)

For the most part, all of the duets were scored for trumpet and drums. One of the drummers, Jack DeJohnette, joined Smith on the last two of the CDs in the set, entitled, respectively, Freedom Summer, the Legacy and Paradise: The Gardens and Fountains. The drummers on the first three CDs and the respective album titles are as follows:

1. Pheeroan akLaff: Litanies, Prayers and Meditations
2. Andrew Cyrille: Havana, Cuba
3. Han Bennink: Mysterious Sonic Fields

While all of the CD titles suggest narrative infrastructures, it would be fair to say that the performances themselves have more to do with reflection than with denotation. Indeed, one of the compositions, entitled “The Patriot Act, Unconstitutional and a Force that Destroys Democracy,” is performed with three of the drummers: akLaff, Cyrille, and DeJohnette. Given the diversity of the CD titles, it would be fair to say that each of those performances emerges from its own context. The same can be said of the two performances with akLaff given the title “Meditation from the Heart.” (The remainder of the title involves the nouns “beauty” and “beloved,” which reverse order between the first and second performances.)

In the overall context it would be fair to say that Smith put as much literary effort into naming his CDs and their tracks as he put into his duo performances with the albums’ respective drummers. His choices of words are highly personal, so much so that many listeners may be a bit perplexed about any connection between words and music. However, my own opinion is that the words do little more than provide the listener with some sense of context, which may then facilitate the connotations of the music itself in both solo and duo realizations.

It goes without saying than none of the tracks in this collection can be dismissed as sit-back-and-listen music. However, if focused attention is both necessary and sufficient, the listener should be willing to accept that it only arrives to those willing to engage in repeated listening experiences over some extended period of time. Mind you, such an approach applies just as much to encounters with the late string quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven or the almost microscopic compositions of Anton Webern. (My own first encounter with this methodology involved the second string quartet by Elliott Carter.)

It is worth noting that the concept of “music-making” shows up in the booklet texts provided by both Smith and Vijay Iyer. I like to invoke the phrase “the music is in the making” to encourage listeners to put aside “physically static artifacts” such as scores and liner notes. Music only emerges through the immediacy of listening itself. While the five CDs in this collection are “static artifacts,” there is still a spontaneity that can be teased out every time one of the tracks is played. Even when one becomes familiar with any specific track, one may still come to terms with the spontaneous actions behind the capture of a performance for the sake of producing a CD track.

Twelve String Quartets by Wadada Leo Smith

Readers may recall that the highly inventive trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith celebrated his 80th birthday this past December. This occasion was celebrated by a series of releases on his “house label,” the Helsinki-based TUM Records. Two of those releases were discussed on this site on the occasion of his birthday, but there have been subsequent “anniversary” projects.

One of these involved recordings of Smith’s first twelve string quartets. TUM releases these as a seven-CD set around the middle of this past month. The description of the release suggests that this is not a “complete” collection. Indeed, there are currently three quartets that have not yet been recorded. Their sequence numbers are significant, since the quartets were inspired, respectively, by the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments to the United States Constitution, all proposed and enacted in reaction to the Civil War.

Many of the preceding quartets have similar semantic connotations. These involve titles attached to either entire quartets or individual movements. However, it would be fair to say than none of the labels or associations conceived by Smith are referentially transparent. The same can be said of the many sources that Smith acknowledges in his “Reflections on the String Quartets” essay included in the accompanying booklet. Indeed, those reflections cite influences that reach as far back as Ludwig van Beethoven (no surprise) all the way up to currently living composers such as Tania León.

That said, the attentive listener will probably be hard-pressed to identify any of those sources for reflection. This is because Smith’s approach to composing these quartets has its own radically unique method. The composer elaborates on his technique in the final paragraph of his booklet essay:

Most of the pitched music events in the score have been reduced to long, short sonic relationships and are not metered or time-based events, and speed and mobility are an individual and collective act. A notion of invisible evolutionary forms and inspiration permeate the ritualized space.

One might almost say that the foundation for each of these quartets is one of expository verbal declamation, even if words themselves are absent.

Ashley Walters, Andrew McIntosh, Wadada Leo Smith, Shalini Vijayan, and Mona Thian (photograph by Kat Nockels)

The twelve quartets in this collection were all recorded by the RedKoral Quartet. The members of the ensemble are violinists Shalini Vijayan and Mona Tian, violist Andrew McIntosh, and cellist Ashley Walters. However, in performing the twelfth of the quartets, all of them play viola. Also, in the performance of the sixth quartet, entitled “Taif: Prayer in the Garden of the Hijaz,” Lorenz Gamma replaces Thian as second violinist. That performance also includes Smith on trumpet, Anthony Davis on piano, and Lynn Vartan on percussion. The fourth, seventh, and eighth quartets also include additional instrumentation.

All of the performers seem to be keenly aware of Smith’s composition techniques as described above. Nevertheless, it is likely that the attentive listener will require some time in adjusting to those techniques. My guess is that such adjustment would be just as challenging when listening to a performance in recital than it would be in listening to these recordings. This should come as no great surprise.

I am sure that I am far from the only one to have adjusted my listening skills to the six string quartets of Béla Bartók by listening to recordings made by the Juilliard String Quartet. For that matter, recordings are just as valuable an asset in getting to know the late Beethoven quartets. Personally, I hope that these RedKoral recordings will be just as valuable in preparing me for yet-to-be-experienced concert performances of this repertoire.

TUM Birthday Releases for an Octogenarian

Wadada Leo Smith reflecting on the approach of his 80th birthday (photograph by Dominik Huber)

Exactly one week from today, the highly inventive trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith will celebrate his 80th birthday. In preparation for this event, his “house label,” the Helsinki-based TUM Records, released two new albums a little less than a month ago. One of these, The Chicago Symphonies, consists of four multi-movement symphonies that Smith composed, each filling a single CD. The other is a single CD entitled A Love Sonnet for Billie Holiday. This is a trio album bringing Smith together with Vijay Iyer on a variety of different keyboard instruments and Jack DeJohnette on percussion. The album consists of five tracks, the first of which is the “Love Sonnet” that Smith composed. Composition duties are shared by all three of the performers on the remaining four tracks.

Each of the four symphonies is performed by a quartet, and each is named after a precious substance. For the first three of the symphonies (“Gold,” “Diamond,” and “Pearl”), Smith is joined by Henry Threadgill on winds, John Lindberg on bass, and DeJohnette on drums. Lindberg and DeJohnette also perform the final symphony (“Sapphire”); but the fourth member is saxophonist Jonathon Haffner. All but the second symphony consist of five movements. “Diamond” has only four.

Other than having a multi-movement structure, there is little that is “symphonic” about these four pieces. Rather, taken as a whole, the collection amounts to a “memory book,” providing a framework through which Smith could reflect on both his influences and the activities that emerged from those influences. As one peruses the movement titles, one encounters reflections on the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and the influences of Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. However, the “Gold” symphony also reaches back to the years prior to Smith’s birth, reflecting on Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, Lil Hardin Armstrong, and Baby Dodds.

Nevertheless, reflection is not a matter of citation. All of the music is very much Smith’s own. If there are any explicit citations associated with the names that arise in the movement titles, they may very well be little more than engaging accidents. Only in the final symphony does Smith shift from musicians to two historical figures. The “Sapphire” symphony is the only one with a subtitle: “The Presidents and Their Vision for America.” Only two of those presidents are cited. The first two movements address Abraham Lincoln, while the last two evoke Barack Obama. Since this is a five-movement symphony, the middle movement brings the two of them together under the title “The Visionaries.”

While all four of the symphonies may be described as “historically inspired,” there is no attempt to structure the movements according of the narrative of that history. I prefer to think of the full cycle as a sort-of “acoustic museum,” each of whose “rooms” provides an “exhibit” of some aspect of Smith’s past. The listener is then free to make his/her/their own decisions about how to approach (or, for that matter, interpret) each of those exhibits.

The Love Sonnet album, on the other, is not so much “about history” (to the extent that any of the music is about anything) as it is a meditation on an “encounter” between past and present. My guess is that the first impressions of listeners to the opening track, Smith’s “Billie Holiday: A Love Sonnet,” will be DeJohnette’s extended solo percussion work before either of the other two musicians are allowed to “say” anything. I came away wondering whether or not Smith was being a bit prankish, because I do not think I have ever listened to a Holiday track in which the drums come to the foreground! On the other hand, those with a robust acquaintance with the Holiday discography will probably recognize at least some of the “micro-motifs” in Smith’s trumpet work that can be tracked back to tropes from Holiday’s songbook.

Smith’s other contribution as a composer has the longest title on the album: “The A.D. Opera: A Long Vision with Imagination, Creativity and Fire, a dance opera (For Anthony Davis).” Davis is about two month’s shy of being a decade younger than Smith. However, he appeared as pianist on seven of Smith’s albums.

His real interest, however, has been the composition of operas on African-American themes, such as X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X and The Central Park Five. This would explain the significance of the title of Smith’s composition. Unfortunately, I am not familiar enough with any of Davis’ operas to tell, one way or the other, if Smith’s treatment of Davis involves the sorts of “micro-motifs” encountered in his reflection on Holiday. More interesting to me is the extent to which Iyer’s work with electronics provides a composition more palatable than what I have encountered in just about all of his piano performances.

Two New Wadada Leo Smith TUM Box Sets

Bill Laswell, Wadada Leo Smith, and Milford Graves (photograph by Robert I. Sutherland-Cohen)

Over the course of this year, the highly inventive trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith is celebrating his 80th birthday, whose actual date will be this coming December 18. This coming Friday the Helsinki-based TUM Records will release a pair of three-CD box sets, both of which are now available for pre-order through Amazon.com. As its name suggests, Trumpet is a solo collection, which features four multi-movement compositions and a diversity of singles dedicated to colleagues and friends. The three CDs in the other collection, Sacred Ceremonies, present two duos and a trio. Smith is joined by drummer Milford Graves, who died this past February 12 at the age of 79, and bassist Bill Laswell. Smith plays with Graves on the first CD and with Laswell on the second CD. The final CD is then devoted to the group playing as a trio. Here, again, there are reflections on other individuals; but there are also what might be called “thoughts about humanity,” as in “Social Justice–A Fire for Reimagining the World,” which is the opening track on the trio CD.

All of this makes for a lot of listening. I have now progressed beyond my own “first impressions,” following up with “revisiting” encounters. Perhaps what is most important is that there is such a wealth of detail, particularly in Smith’s own work on both of these collections, that just beginning to get oriented around Smith’s vocabulary is a major undertaking. Personally, however, I have found that undertaking consistently rewarding, particularly when each new listening turns up subtleties in intonation, phrasing, or extended techniques.

I also have to say that the occasion of Graves’ death led me to focus on many of the details of his duo CD with Smith. I came away with the impression that Graves was particularly sensitive to pitch in at least some of the drums included in his kit. Smith was clearly aware of how Graves made those pitch selections, and could work around them as he played against the percussionist’s onslaught of eccentric rhythms.

In the Trumpet collection I was particularly struck by Smith’s decision to create a suite around Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon. I first encountered that film in my student days and have been consistently hooked on it throughout the decades that followed. For those unfamiliar with the work, it involves a murder which is described by a variety of different witnesses, each of whom relates the account in a different way that is totally inconsistent with all the others.

Smith’s suite is about 25 minutes in duration and is less interested in that “dissonance” of narratives and more interested in reflecting on the director’s efforts. Thus only the fourth of his piece’s five parts, which lasts only two and one-half minutes, involves “The Memories and Reflections,” while the opening part, entitled “The Film,” is almost six minutes in duration. Indeed, the longest part is the second, lasting about eight minutes. Entitled “The Killing,” it seems to suggest that Smith wanted to provide the one element that Kurosawa deliberately avoided, an omniscient observer capable of providing the “absolute truth” in contrast to the accounts of all the witnesses. (I have to confess that it is difficult for me to avoid speculating over whether Smith’s suite was a “response” to the “call” of Oliver Nelson’s The Blues and The Abstract Truth album.)

To be fair, I have to confess that I have developed my own techniques of sense-making when it comes to listening to Smith’s performances. My guess is that he would not object to this as a “listening strategy” (at least to the extent that he is willing to tolerate bringing a strategy to a listening experience). Over the course of a variety of encounters with his albums, I have come away with the impression that he wishes to provoke thought from his listeners without concern for what thoughts are actually formed, let alone articulated.

Wadada Leo Smith Honors Rosa Parks

1955 photograph of Rosa Parks with Martin Luther King, Jr. on the left (photographer unknown, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Regular readers may know by now that avant-garde trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith has been recording his albums with TUM Records Oy, which is based in Pohjankuru, Finland. In December of 2017, this site reported on his solo album Alone: Reflections and Meditations on Monk; and this past Friday TUM released a more extensive retrospective project. The title of the album is Rosa Parks: Pure Love, which Smith describes as “an oratorio of seven songs.” Smith himself prepared the words for six of the seven songs; the remaining one, “No Fears,” sets the words of Parks herself.

As might be guessed, the resources for this oratorio are far more extensive than that of the Monk album. Smith selected three vocalists, each with a different ethnic background, to perform the songs themselves: African-American Karen Parks (whose biographical statement does not indicate any relationship with Rosa), Asian Min Xiao-Fen, and Latina Carmina Escobar. Instrumental resources are relatively extensive. Smith himself leads the BlueTrumpet Quartet, whose other members are trumpeters Ted Daniel and Hugh Ragin and cornetist Graham Haynes. They are complemented by a string quartet called the RedKoral Quartet, consisting of violinists Shalini Vijayan and Mona Tian, violist Andrew McIntosh, and cellist Ashley Walters. (Readers may recall that Walters performed compositions by both Smith and McIntosh on her debut album, Sweet Anxiety.) In addition, Min contributed to the instrumentation with performances on a pipa. Finally, rhythm is provided by the Janus Duo, consisting of Pheeroan akLaff on drums and Hardedge on electronics. Finally, the score also calls for the insertion of excerpts from recordings made between 1969 and 1977 by members of the Creative Construction Company: Anthony Braxton, Steve McCall, Leroy Jenkins, and Smith himself.

Given the tensions that arose as a result of Parks’ refusal in Montgomery, Alabama to give up her bus seat (in the “colored section”) so that a white passenger would not have to stand, it is impressive noting how much of Smith’s oratorio involves a rhetoric of calm serenity. However, by all accounts, this would be consistent with Parks’ own personality. Yes, there are no shortage of dissonances among the instrumentalists; but the vocal lines seem to rise above those tensions, as if to evoke the spirit of non-violent protest espoused by Martin Luther King, Jr. and his colleagues.

It would be fair to say that Parks herself has become an iconic representative of the struggle for equal rights for all in a supposedly democratic society. Last year she even received the honor of being the subject of a Doctor Who episode, in which the Doctor (played by Jodie Whittaker in her first season as the Thirteenth Doctor) and her companions were faced with the task of making sure that she boarded that bus in Montgomery at just the right time. This left me wondering, however, whether Parks is now more recognizable as part of popular culture in the United Kingdom than she is in the United States, particularly at a time when the hostility of unbounded nativism has become more hostile than it has been for about half a century.

I used to know a futurist (yes, that is what he called himself), who said that he liked to believe in “strong opinions weakly held.” We now seem to be living in an age of strong opinions held with even greater strength; and, more often than not, those opinions are grounded in unbridled malice. Where civil rights are concerned, I doubt that Smith’s music will have much impact on those malicious opinions. On the other hand it may remind the rest of us that trying to fight fire with fire just gets more things burned.

Chicago Avant-Garde Jazz in Eighteen Volumes

At the end of this past November, ECM released a 21-CD box set with an accompanying 300-page booklet entitled The Art Ensemble of Chicago [AEC] and associated ensembles. By the time ECM recorded this group’s album in 1978, it had established itself as the most significant ensemble to emerge from the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), founded in 1965 to serve as a Chicago “response” to the avant-garde “call” from New York sources such as the “New York School” of John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff. (Major individuals to come out AACM included composer/performers such as Anthony Braxton and Henry Threadgill.)

My own first encounter with AEC did not take place until the second half of the Eighties. I was living in Los Angeles at the time; and KPFK ran a program on Saturday mornings that went a long way towards stimulating my tastes for what I now call the “bleeding edge.” (It also convinced me that there was far more to the avant-garde than I had been getting from John Schaffer’s New Sounds programs on WNYC in New York!) I suspect that, when it came to going over the top as wildly as possible, the only precedent for AEC that I could imagine was Sun Ra and the Arkestra groups he had formed. Fortunately, AEC visited Los Angeles while I was living there, giving a concert in Royce Hall at the University of California at Los Angeles. So, as had been the case with my Ra encounters, I had a good opportunity to appreciate the group as a visual, as well as auditory, experience.

AEC members Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell, Malachi Favors (Maghostut,) Lester Bowie, and (Famoudou) Don Moye (photograph by Ralph Quinke, courtesy of ECM Records)

The ECM release consists of eighteen albums, three of which consist of two CDs. They involve both studio sessions and concert recordings, the latter usually including wildly appreciative audience responses. However, only five of those albums show up in the Discography list on the AEC Wikipedia page, hence the need for the conjunction in the full title for the collection.

Four of the albums were produced under Bowie’s name, with another four under Mitchell’s. There is also an album by Wadada Leo Smith, another AACM member. Smith never played with AEC; but one of the three tracks on this album, “Tastalun,” is dedicated to Bowie, who appears as “guest artist” on that track. Then there is the “Transatlantic Art Ensemble” album that brings Mitchell together with British avant-garde saxophonist Evan Parker. Finally, the collection closes with three Jack DeJohnette albums. While my own first encounter with DeJohnette was at the Village Vanguard, he is an AACM member. He is joined by Bowie on two of the albums and by Mitchell on the third.

Thus, what we have amounts to a “historical record” of how Chicago-based avant-garde practices both emerged and dispersed over a period of about 35 years. AEC figures in the first 23 years of that period, concluding with a 2001 tribute album for Bowie, how had died in 1999. However, as early as 1981, Bowie was beginning to venture off into directions of his own (some of which involved some retrospective speculations that manage to be both affectionate and funny at the same time). For his part, Mitchell collaborates with not only Parker but also, in a 2007 session, with two pianists familiar to ECM listeners, Craig Taborn and Vijay Iyer. In other words, rather than being just a “chronological history,” the collection amounts to a narrative, which is as fascinating for the agents involved in that narrative as it is for the music-making actions they take.

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.

Ashley Walters’ Debut on Populist Records

Album cover designed by Claudia Doderer (from Amazon.com)

This past October, populist records, a new music label based in Los Angeles, released the debut album of cellist Ashley Walters, which is entitled Sweet Anxiety. In her prefatory remarks for the accompanying booklet, Walters writes about being inspired by the “Sequenza” composition that Luciano Berio wrote for solo cello. This was the fourteenth (and last) of a series of pieces, each of which involved the exploration of nonstandard techniques for playing a different instrument.

Berio’s piece, composed is 2002, is the oldest of the six selections that Walters performs on Sweet Anxiety. Indeed, the album could just as easily have been called “Beyond ‘Sequenza,’” since it showcases the efforts of four other composers, all of whom shared Berio’s interest in departing from conventional cello sounds. In “order of appearance” those composers are Nicholas Deyoe, one of Walters’ close colleagues, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, who teaches at the California Institute of the Arts, Wadada Leo Smith, with whom Walters plays as a member of the Golden Quintet, which recently visited San Francisco, and Andrew McIntosh, leader of the Formalist Quartet in which Walters also plays. (Readers may recall that, during her visit here with Smith, she also gave a solo recital at San Francisco State University featuring selections from Sweet Anxiety.)

By way of disclaimer, I should confess that I have had a long-standing interest in Berio’s “Sequenza” compositions, which goes all the way back to my encounter with a recording of the very first of them, written in 1958 for solo flute. However, since I have made my writing my primary occupation, that interest has focused more on performance experiences than on recordings. Not only is observing the exploration of alternative techniques as interesting as listening, but also I have developed an ongoing interest in how different performers deal with those marks that Berio ultimately committed to paper. I have been particularly engaged when the performer has some degree of mobility and can spread all of the score out across a series of music stands, thus make a “journey” through the composition at least slightly more than merely metaphorical.

Most interesting, however, is that each of these pieces amounts to an étude with a double objective. On the one hand there is the expected objective of endowing the performer with new proficiencies, the same objective that Frédéric Chopin had in mind when he composed his two collections of études, Opus 10 and Opus 25. At the same time, however, I have always felt that Berio also wished to acclimatize his listeners to the landscape of sonorities that he was exploring through those alternative techniques. Borrowing a timely phrase that John Cage would use for amusement, Berio used the “Sequenza” pieces to endow his listeners with “happy new ears.”

My thesis that Berio was as interested in his listeners as he was in the proficiency of his players tended to spill over to the other selections on Sweet Anxiety. I have to confess that this approach left me disappointed more often than not. Berio is a tough act to follow, meaning that it is hard to get beyond a been-there-done-that reaction to much of what the album has to offer. Indeed, this reaction applies not only to works that continue to exploit the sorts of techniques that Berio cultivated but also those seeking to explore the possibilities of remote overtones in the natural harmonic series. A piece like McIntosh’s “Another Secular Calvinist Creed” seems willing to let the composer’s gamut of overtones speak for itself, contrasting sharply with Lou Harrison, who knew what he wanted to do with melody, counterpoint, and harmony and then worked out the necessary mathematics to get the relationships of intonation that he needed.

I also have to confess to having experienced a “REALLY!?!” reaction after reading Smith’s booklet notes for his contribution, “Sweet Bay Magnolia with Berry Clusters.” Much as I enjoy my recordings of Smith’s music (which I think I have sensibly sorted across the classical and jazz shelves holding my collection), I found myself raising a Spock-like eyebrow upon reading the following sentence:

The whole piece should be thought of as the emergence of a flower, in this case, a magnolia flower.

Perhaps my skepticism was cultivated by the fact that the booklet page with Smith’s words faces one with one of the score pages. (I am assuming it was not the entire composition.) Trying to reconcile what I was reading (both words and notation) with what I was hearing made me feel as if I had fallen into Whiskey Tango Foxtrot territory!

Nevertheless, I am definitely glad to have a good recorded performance of “Sequenza XIV” at my disposal. I shall also be curious as to how I react to the other tracks on this album, since I rarely listen to a single track in isolation. Perhaps, with further exposure, my ears will be more receptive (if not “happier”) in their encounters with the new generation of composers showcased on this album.

Wadada Leo Smith’s Monk Album

Wadada Leo Smith playing his trumpet, photograph by Tom Beetz, from Wikimedia Commons (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)

Those who follow this site regularly probably know by now that one week from tonight The Lab will host the beginning of its two-day CREATE festival dedicated to avant-garde trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. Note the absence of either “jazz” or “classical” as a modifier for “avant-garde.” Smith’s approaches to making music show little regard for genre boundaries; and the programming for CREATE will have him leading five different ensemble performances. It will also include a performance of his twelfth string quartet.

However, Smith’s solo work is as significant as the diversity of ensembles with which he has performed (and, presumably, will continue to perform). As a result, one of the more significant events in the recording industry (at least to me, if not to those who compile the GRAMMY nominations) was the release by Finland-based TUM Records Oy of Smith’s solo album Alone: Reflections and Meditations on Monk. Of the eight tracks on this album, four present Smith’s interpretations (reflections) of compositions by Thelonious Monk that are now regarded as standards. The other four are new compositions by Smith that “meditate” on Monk’s life, as well as his music.

These days it is difficult to find a seriously inventive jazz musician (regardless of instrument) who does not single out Monk as a significant influences. (Part of my “sample set” for this assertion comes from attending the jazz events given under the San Francisco Performances Salon Series, which always conclude with the performer(s) participating in a Q&A session with the audience.) Having listened to Monk myself at the Village Vanguard when I was first trying to get my head around jazz practices, I can appreciate the iconic status that was granted to him after his death (as well as before by many serious jazz practitioners).

Nevertheless, this is a jazz album; and, if Smith were to play Monk the way that Monk played Monk, it would not be jazz! What is important is that all four of the Monk tracks are based on some of the most familiar tunes associated with Monk. These are, in order of appearance, “Ruby, My Dear,” “Reflections,” “Crepuscule with Nellie,” and “’Round Midnight.” In each case the tune is recalled with the same clarity one would encounter in a classical theme-and-variations composition, after which Smith goes his own way, paying more attention to the spirit behind the tune than to the notes themselves. Thus, if these are “reflections,” the “mirror” has been distorted by Smith’s own musicianship; but the “image” is always there, even if in the background, rather than the foreground.

The meditations, on the other hand, take biography as a point of departure. However, just as Smith goes his own way with Monk’s tunes, his thoughts about Monk’s life can depart from the “historical record.” This is particularly the case with the last of the four meditations, which Smith entitled “Monk and Bud Powell at Shea Stadium – A Mystery.” The notes about this piece that he provided for the accompanying booklet say the following:

This composition is a mystery that came to me in my sleep as is often the case with my compositions. It could be about the two of them at Shea Stadium, or perhaps not. Maybe they took a day trip to the stadium just to check out the new space with Bud Powell having recently returned from Paris to New York – just to sit on the bench and smoke a cigarette. Or, maybe, they actually went to see a ballgame. Or it could be something of a deeper, more mysterious meaning.

Smith then concludes his statement with a cryptic reference to Monk’s “Misterioso,” which may do little more than loop back on the appearance of the noun “mystery” in the title.

We now live in a cultural context that recognizes that neither Monk’s compositions nor the recordings of his performances deserve to be relegated to the status of “background music.” We approach this music with the same attentiveness summoned when listening to any one of the string quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven. Serious jazz listeners always brought that attitude to a performance, even when it was taking place in a noisy club. To some extent the legitimation of jazz as a concert experience owes much to the formation of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in 1965; and Smith’s AACM membership probably inspired him to found his own Creative Construction Company in 1967.

Half a century later, serious jazz listeners do not have to contend with adverse environments as much as they used to do. This has been particularly advantageous for Smith, not to mention some of his Monk-inspired partners in jazz-making, such as Vijay Iyer. There is much to be mined from Smith’s “reflections” and “meditations;” and his solo album will definitely hold up to multiple listening experiences for some time to come.

Cellist Ashley Walters to Preview Recording

Cellist Ashley Walters (photograph by Todd. H. Carlson, from her Web site)

Last month the Los Angeles label populist records released a solo album of six performances by cellist Ashley Walters, who is also based in Los Angeles. This recording has not yet found its way to Amazon.com but Bandcamp has created a Web page that supports streaming, download, and the purchase of a compact disc. The title of the album is Sweet Anxiety, which serves as a reflection on one of the two tracks that emerged from her decade-long collaboration with composer Nicholas Deyoe, entitled “another anxiety.”

Next month Walters will come up from Los Angeles to give a recital at San Francisco State University (SFSU). She has prepared a program based on the contents of her album, which will include “another anxiety.” She will also perform the fourteenth of Luciano Berio’s Sequenza compositions, the one written for solo cello, a pioneering piece that explores a wide diversity of non-standard approaches to playing the instrument.

Walters will be in the Bay Area because she is currently touring with the great adventurous jazz improviser, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. (Details about Smith’s visit to San Francisco will be coming shortly.) As a result her recital program will feature Smith’s “Sweet Bay Magnolia with Berry Clusters,” which he wrote for her and is also included on her Sweet Anxiety album. The recital will also include “Plainsound-Litany” by Wolfgang von Schweinitz, who is currently teaching at the California Institute of the Arts. This is a study in intonation based on natural harmonics, which requires non-vibrato tuning and playing techniques in order to emphasize the resonances of double-stop playing.

This performance will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, December 12. It will take place in Knuth Hall, which is located in the Creative Arts Building at SFSU, a short walk from the SFSU Muni stop at the corner of 19th Avenue and Holloway Avenue. Tickets are free, and no advance registration will be required.