Two New Grdina Albums Released This Month

Readers may recall that, this past February Vancouver-based guitarist, composer, improviser, and master oud player Gordon Grdina released two new albums on his Attaboygirl Records label. A little less that two weeks ago, two more new albums were released, both of which present trio performances. The new Attaboygirl album is Pathways, on which Grdina is joined by pianist Matthew Shipp and Mark Helias on bass. This is the trio’s second album, the first, Skin and Bones, having been released in 2019. (That same year Helias and Grdina, playing oud, were also part of quintet called The Marrow, which performed at the Center for New Music on November 5.) The other album, Boiling Point, is the second recording of Grdina’s Nomad Trio, whose other members are pianist Matt Mitchell and drummer Jim Black; and it was released by Astral Spirits. (Readers should note that all album hyperlinks point to Bandcamp Web pages, since the attention of Amazon.com to Grdina’s recordings seems to be a “sometime thing.”)

When I first encountered the Nomad Trio on their debut album, my initial impressions quickly focused on the sophisticated polyphony, much of which involved Grdina setting the bar with his guitar work with Mitchell following suit at the keyboard. On Boiling Point the polyphony is just as rich; and, perhaps because my ears are becoming more and more adjusted to the trio’s inventiveness, I found that, even with unpitched instruments, Black could contribute to the polyphony through his own inventions of rhythmic patterns. I also found it interesting that both albums had the same number of tracks, similar track lengths, and roughly the same overall duration. Nevertheless, there is no question that each track on Boiling Point has its own innovative voice; and I anticipate future listening experiences through which I hope to discover further polyphonic insights.

Gordon Grdina, Mark Helias, and Matthew Shipp (photograph by Genevieve Monro)

Pathways, on the other hand, seems to involve an aesthetic shift that departs from both Skin and Bones and the Nomad tracks. The press release I received made note of this shift as follows:

Pathways reveals the trio’s collective evolution since 2019’s initial meeting, Skin and Bones. Where only two of that album’s seven tracks clocked in under ten minutes, the nine pieces on Pathways never exceed the ten-minute mark and rarely even approach it. The results are tightly coiled and laser focused, with abundant ideas packed into concentrated, intense bursts of creative energy.

Regular readers probably know by now my fondness for Buckminster Fuller’s injunction to make more and more with less and less. If Grdina and his trio colleagues have not encountered this injunction in Fuller’s writings, they are at least consistent with his spirit, even if they were not explicitly honoring it! Personally, I find the last sentence in the above quotation a bit over the top. I get a bit nervous when I encounter attempts to approach music in terms of “ideas.” I am more interested in the interplay between performer(s) and listener in terms of efforts to seize and maintain attention. Every track on Pathways strike me as an effort to establish its own attention-grabbing strategy; and I shall be curious to investigate whether that strategy continues to succeed over the course of further listening experiences.