Alister Spence’s New Solo Recording

courtesy of Braithwaite & Katz Communications

Those that have followed this site for some time probably know that I know Australian jazz pianist and composer Alister Spence through his work with and for jazz pianist Satoko Fujii. The album Intelsat, which was a duo performance for the two of them, was his contribution to her Kanreki (60th birthday) Cycle of twelve new albums, one for each month of the year. Following the completion of that cycle, he composed the four-movement suite Imagine Meeting You Here, which was performed by the Satoko Fujii Orchestras in Kobe, Nagoya, and Tokyo.

This past July his Alister Spence Music label released what appears to be his first solo album. Filling two CDs, Whirlpool is a suite of 23 relatively short pieces. Each of those pieces has a relatively familiar word for a title. Each word then carries a parenthesized prefix, which turns it into another word. For example, the title of the very first piece is “(re)new.”

All of the pieces are improvised. Over the course of the entire album, Spence explores a wide diversity of performance techniques. These involve not only the keyboard but also the interior of the instrument. The result is a palette of timbres that runs the gamut from sonorities that one would expect from a piano to effects one would associate with percussion instruments. One might almost call the album in its entirety a “laboratory notebook,” in which Spence chose to document as wide a diversity of approaches to performance as his imagination would allow.

(Readers may recall that is one of my favorite epithets, having used it most recently for the solo PLAGUE DIARY pieces recorded on a day-to-day basis by jazz clarinetist Ben Goldberg.)

I must confess that I have not tried very hard to associate the sonic character of each track with the “double-barreled” title that Spence assigned to it. Instead, I found myself often thinking of how the past compositions of other composers and improvisers may have influenced Spence. In other words, the suite, taken as a whole, is a series of reflections on past listening experiences cast into present-day improvisations. In that frame of reference, one is free to approach the suite as music to be perceived “as a whole” or to sample different movements individually through processes of either chance or choice. Either way, listing to Whirlpool can serve as a journey of discovery; and I, for one, feel strongly that the journey is worth taking!