Ben Goldberg Among the Werewolves

For the better part of this month, jazz clarinetist Ben Goldberg occupied himself with recording a series of nine mini-albums, all organized around the topic of werewolves. The shortest of these was only ten minutes long, and the lengthiest filled a little more than twenty minutes. Each was recorded on a different day of the month, after which it was uploaded to its own unique Bandcamp Web page. The titles of the albums, the recording dates, and the Bandcamp hyperlinks are as follows:

1. January 4: The Werewolf of January 4
2. January 6: Werewolf of Today
3. January 8: Another Werewolf
4. January 9: Werewolf in Therapy
5. January 12: Lonesome Werewolf
6. January 14: Werewolf Ah Um
7. January 15: Good and Bad Werewolf
8. January 17: Story of a Werewolf
9. January 22: Werewolf Awareness

All of the tracks on all of the albums are solo clarinet performances by Goldberg without any “digital effects processing.”

This is not the first time that Goldberg has undertaken a major project of what might be called “solo reflections.” Readers may recall this site’s coverage of his PLAGUE DIARY project, which began on March 19, 2020 and continued on almost a daily basis through March 13, 2021 (with “gaps” increasing towards the end of the series). However, while the motivation behind the PLAGUE DIARY tracks could not have been clearer, the idea of motivation based on werewolves is much less clear.

One clue may reside in the fact that the noun “werewolf” only appears in the singular in all nine of the movement titles. Wolves tend to be social animals, known for packs that form for hunting and possibly for looking after the young. However, a wolf that “migrates” between “wolf behavior” and “human behavior” is probably far more solitary, a trait that surfaces in passing in the citing of wolf behavior in Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. Alternatively a clue may reside in the title of the final composition, which suggests that the entire cycle amounts of a werewolf’s journey to Abraham Maslow’s concept of self-actualization.

On the other hand I know too well from experience that overthinking an intellectual construct does little more than distract from listening. As was the case in PLAGUE DIARY, each day provided Goldberg with opportunities to explore different sonorities and the different techniques that give rise to those sonorities. Listening is likely to be most engaging if taken simply at the auditory equivalent of “face value.” If each of the tracks in this collection is a product of Goldberg’s own self-actualization, then each listener is free to find his/her own self-actualization simply by accepting the content of each “auditory stimulus.”