One of the more innovative means of dealing with shelter-in-place conditions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic was the PLAGUE DIARY project initiated by jazz clarinetist Ben Goldberg. Beginning on March 19, 2020, Goldberg decided that he would record a new song every day and upload it to a Bandcamp Web page, which was given the title PLAGUE DIARY. Initially, each upload had only the date of the upload as its title. April 2, 2020 marked the first time that a track was given a dedication. Less than a week later, the first upload with a title in addition to the date appeared. By July there was an extended string of dedications, which continued for the remainder of the uploads. The day-by-day commitment began to thin out in February of 2021; and, as of this writing, the last upload took place the following month on March 13. That upload was number 216.
Since that time Goldberg has released two new combo albums, both of which are based on recording sessions the preceded the pandemic. In May he uploaded Eight Phrases for Jefferson Rubin, whose tracks had been recorded in 1996. This was followed last month by Everything Happens to Be., whose ten tracks were recorded in June of 2018.
Rubin was a childhood friend of Goldberg’s when they were both growing up in Denver. He became a sculptor and opened up his own school in Denver. He died in 1995 when his pickup truck malfunctioned while he was driving in the Rocky Mountains, and the Eight Phrases serve as Goldberg’s memorial gesture. He credits the music itself to his studies with Pauline Oliveros when she was teaching at Mills College. The recordings were made with a combo, whose other members were Larry Ochs on saxophones, John Schott on guitar, both Lisle Ellis and Trevor Dunn on bass, and Michael Sarin on drums.
In all fairness, it is not particularly easy to account for a memorial gesture when one knows little about the individuals involved. In the context of my own personal knowledge, I was particularly struck by the title of the second “phrase,” which was “Plain of Jars.” This refers to a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the north of Laos. My wife and I were fortunate enough to visit Laos. However, after our arrival in the capital Vientiane, we headed south to Pakse, were we had been scheduled to take a boat along the Mekong River. As a result, all I know about the Plain of Jars comes from the striking photographs on its Wikipedia page. I can appreciate how those jars would interest a sculptor; but, as a listener, at best I can associate Goldberg’s music with the “radical otherness” of that site.
That said, there is much to be gained from dealing with this music as abstract, rather than referential. Phrasing (in the general sense of the word, rather than its relation to the album title) tends to evoke the rhythms of conversational exchanges, rather than the metric structures encountered in more “traditional” music (as well as poetry). As in conversation, “thematic content” tends to flow from one instrument to another; and that approach to interplay is readily accessible to the attentive listener. The overall duration of a little more than an hour is never a strain on the willing listener, and one can arrive at the last of the eight tracks with a sense of having made a journey without any need to know what the destination was.
Cover design by Joshua Pfeffer and painting by Molly Barker for Everything Happens to Be.
Everything Happens to Be. can be approached with that same sense of an “abstract conversation.” The primary distinction of this second album lies in the instrumental sonorities. Goldberg plays clarinets in ranges from the low contra-alto to the sopranino register of the E-flat clarinet. Somewhat in the middle of this broad expanse of registers, Ellery Eskelin fits in with a tenor saxophone. Rhythm is then provided with Mary Halvorson on electric guitar, Michael Formanek on bass, and Tomas Fujiwara on drums. Fujiwara even gets to take the lead on the seventh track, entitled (appropriately enough) “Tomas Plays The Drums.”
Personally, I happen to enjoy wide expanses of register; but, to be quite honest, I am equally drawn to both the sonorities and the rhetorical stances through which they are delivered in both of these albums. On the other hand I have to confess that I enjoy the nostalgic humor of the final track on Everything Happens to Be. That is the “Eventide” tune by William Henry Monk to which the hymn “Abide with Me” is sung. This amounts to a tribute from one Monk to another, since the four-part harmony serves as the opening track of the Thelonious Monk album Monk’s Music. Thelonious does not play on this track, since the four voices are taken by tenor saxophonists Coleman Hawkins and John Coltrane, alto saxophonist Gigi Gryce, and trumpet Ray Copeland. Goldberg seems to have found just the right way to bow his head in respect to both Monks at the same time!
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