Madre Vaca’s Ambitious Take on Schubert

from the Amazon.com Web page for the album being discussed

Madre Vaca is a jazz collective that explores a wide variety of music, recording the results of those explorations on their own record label. The title of their latest album, released this past Friday, is Winterreise, which was conceived as a reflection on Franz Schubert’s D. 911 song cycle of the same title. Schubert’s composition, the most ambitious of his song cycles, consists of 24 songs, ten of which were selected by Madre Vaca for the album. The front-line musicians are Juan Rollan on saxophone, Steve Strawley on trumpet, and Lance Reed on trombone. Rhythm is provided by Jonah Pierre on piano, Jarrett Carter on guitar, Mike Perez on bass, Benjamin Shorstein on drums, and Milan Algood on other percussion. Shorstein was also responsible for preparing the charts based on the Schubert score.

Note that this octet lacks a vocalist. Shorstein has not prepared new arrangements for a jazz singer to take on any of Schubert’s songs. The only vocal track is “The Sun Dogs,” which basically performs the penultimate song from the cycle, “Die Nebensonnen” (rival suns), as Schubert wrote it … for voice and piano. No vocalist is identified on the album cover; and my “educated guess” is that Shorstein himself was doing the singing. However, rather than discuss what the album is not, it is worth considering what it is.

Shorstein seems to have made some judicious selections in determining which of Schubert’s 24 songs would best lend themselves to jazz stylizing and improvisation. He presents them in Schubert’s 

“order of appearance;” but there is no narrative thread behind that ordering. Instead, Shorstein seems to have been interested in exploring a variety of different jazz styles, selecting a song that he deemed appropriate for each style he chose to exhibit.

This may be problematic for any listener familiar with the Schubert sources. D. 911 is so expertly crafted and so intense in its expressiveness that even the slightest hint of a theme is likely to evoke memories of the text associated with that theme. Each of Shorstein’s arrangements explores its own unique approach to interpreting the theme; but, as might be deduced from the combo’s name, much of the diversity dwells on Latin styles. Nevertheless, one of the more recognizable inspiring sources is McCoy Tyner, who shows up in “Frozen,” which is the take on “Erstarrung” (freezing) and (heavens be praised) has absolutely nothing to do with any Disney productions.

The listening experience, of course, tends to be shaped by first impressions. The opening track, “Goodnight” (which is also the title of the first song in D. 911), has strong connotations of incidental music for a play by Bertolt Brecht. This has the perhaps unintended consequence that a sense of irony pervades the entire album. Indeed, the vocal delivery of “The Sun Dogs” struck my own ears as reminiscent of Theo Bleckmann’s interpretations of Brecht songs, which were presented for San Francisco Performances at the beginning of this year. The good news is that “The Sun Dogs” came off as far more ironic than Schubert may have intended but also delivered far more intense impact than any of Bleckmann’s efforts, which seemed to have more to do with pretense than with irony.

There is nothing new about repurposing classical sources for jazz performance. Duke Ellington recorded arrangements of both Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (The Nutcracker) and Edvard Grieg (incidental music for Peer Gynt). However, this was music that already had “pops” familiarity. Aficionados of art song tend to be a more elite bunch with higher “standards of purity.” However, Ellington was the one who said, “It’s all music.” During the Renaissance, settings of the Mass texts would appropriate familiar popular tunes, repurposing them for different objectives. Madre Vaca has repurposed Schubert for an objective he could not have possibly imagined, and their results definitely deserve serious listening.