Cover of the new Snowy Egret album (from Amazon.com)
Last night at the SFJAZZ Center, the Joe Henderson Lab began its weekend series of concerts called Exploratory Composers with a visit from pianist Myra Melford. Melford led her Snowy Egret quintet, whose other members are Ron Miles on cornet, Liberty Ellman on guitar, Stomu Takeishi on bass, and Tyshawn Sorey on drums. The group was formed in 2013 in “response” to the “call” of Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire, a uniquely conceived history of the Americas organized as a vast collection of brief stories filling three published volumes. Those stories span a vast spectrum of genres with newspaper articles at one end and outlandish myths on the other.
Like Galeano, Snowy Egret does not confine itself to the boundaries of different musical genres. It finds its own way across a truly cosmopolitan landscape for styles and forms that transcend the confines even of how the music is notated. The group’s first album, called simply Snowy Egret, was released in March of 2015. Yesterday was the release date for the second album, The Other Side of Air; and last night’s concert selections were organized primarily around tracks from this album including its two-movement title composition.
The Galeano project was initially conceived as a multimedia production; and there is a sense in which Snowy Egret itself takes a “mixed media” approach to music-making. The group is less of a well-blended quintet and more a convocation of five independent voices. Every now and then a pair of those musicians might exchange gestures or seek to parallel each other; but, for the most part, the music is all about the individuality of each of the voices.
This can sometimes lead to problems of balance. Sorey’s drum work, most of which involves adventurous arrhythmic departures from any sense of a steady beat (thus finding new paths beyond those discussed at the end of last month in examining the work of Andrew Cyrille), tended to punctuate his departures from that beat with aggressive dynamics. His dynamic levels had a tendency to reduce Melford’s piano work to inaudibility. Ellman, on the other hand, often kept his contributions to aphoristic brevity (perhaps inspired by Galeano’s collection); but his amplifier made sure that those brief moments never passed unnoticed.
To the extent to which this music could be called “thematic,” the themes tended to emerge from Miles’ cornet work. His passages tended to unfold over time, sharply contrasting with Ellman’s contributions. Furthermore, there were many moments when Takeishi’s electric bass seemed to be providing Miles with a continuo, above which he could unfold a collage of relatively familiar pitch sequences integrated with highly imaginative alternative techniques.
Taken as a whole, Snowy Egret left the impression of a group that was determined to get beyond what audiences expected of a listening experience. This left me wondering whether the experience of listening to the album would bear much resemblance to what appeared last night as exploratory spontaneity. My thoughts then turned back to Galeano and the ease with which he could discourse about his unorthodox writing style to a Book TV interviewer. For all of the distinctive (and often sharply contrasting) sonorities, there was clearly a similar ease of discourse in how the group approached each of its selections last night. That was enough to leave me curious about further listening opportunities for those selections.
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