Having filled the better part of this month with his werewolf project, this past Friday jazz clarinetist Ben Goldberg released a live trio album. Playing clarinets of different sizes (with particularly interesting ventures into the bass register), Goldberg performs with Nels Cline on electric guitar, and Tom Rainey on drums. The title of the album is THE ART SPIRIT and Bandcamp has created a Web page for both streaming and downloading. The three tracks of the album were recorded at a concert that took place on May 26, 2016 at The Owl Music Parlor in Brooklyn.
The entire album is a little more than 45 minutes in duration. In the spirit of my one encounter with a solo piano performance given by Cecil Taylor, that duration is divided into a long track that accounts for about half of the album, followed by a pair of shorter tracks to fill out the remainder. If the title of the album suggests the etherial, the titles of the individual tracks are very much down-to-earth:
- tree from the root
- branch from the trunk
- blossom from the twig
It may take me a while to identify any association between these titles and the spontaneity of the improvisations that one encounters on each of the tracks. For that matter, I am not sure that there was any motivation behind the album cover beyond the possibility that the three-dot motif suggests a multiplicity of trio jams:
More important is the diversity of dispositions that emerge from the immediacy of the players inventions. A trio tends to be just the right size for free improvisation, allowing each player to attend continually to the other players for prompts to venture into new directions. Furthermore, since the instrument sonorities are so distinctive, one does not need a “visual channel” to keep track of who is doing what. Most interesting is the breadth of diversity one encounters in that first extended movement, suggesting that the tree benefits from a generous number of roots exploring a rich variety of directions.
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