The Last of the Eight New Goldberg Albums

Cover of the album being discussed (from its Bandcamp Web page)

Readers may recall that yesterday’s account of the seventh album in clarinetist Ben Goldberg’s 8 Albums on August 8 releases consisted of quartet performances. This morning began with listening to the last of those eight albums, entitled Rock Band. This is another tongue-in-cheek title introducing a quintet led by Goldberg. He is joined on the front line by trumpeter Andrew Stephens; and rhythm is provided by Spencer Hoefert on guitar, drummer Hamir Atwal, and Michael Coleman in charge of multiple synthesizers. Coleman also managed recording the tracks at Figure 8 Recording, after which he took charge in mixing and mastering at Rocketship Sound, both located in Brooklyn, New York.

According to the advance material I received, Goldberg asserts that Coleman “is my favorite musician on the planet.” This says a lot about his enthusiasm for synthesizers, which I can appreciate personally. It may also explain why the very first sound on the very first track of Rock Band comes from a synthesizer.

I was an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when Robert Moog sold his first synthesizer. By the time I was in my senior year, I had my own desk at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, run by Marvin Minsky. Minsky, in turn, thought it would be a good idea to add a synthesizer to the laboratory resources; and one of the earliest models of the Buchla Modular Electronic Music System showed up in my office.

Unfortunately, I have no idea what technical resources Coleman used for the recording of Rock Band! That said, I appreciate how Coleman was able to blend his performance with the other four musicians. This is important, because one of the most interesting things about Rock Band is that an attentive listener will realize that none of the eleven tracks establish any distinction between foreground and background. Instead, all five of the performers know exactly how to blend their respective approaches to jamming, with the result that each of the eleven tracks has a unique journey of its own.

Personally, I rather enjoyed the fact that, in the wake of the diversity of instrumental combos encountered in the first seven albums in this collection, the last one should emerge with the “novel introduction” of an electronic synthesizer. One might even say that diversity was the “through line” across all eight of Goldberg’s albums. Mind you, while I have been accustomed to listening to entire operas by Richard Wagner for longer than I have been writing about them, I doubt that I would trying listening to this particular “cycle” in a single sitting. The problem is that, when I return to this collection of albums, making a single selection will be a hard choice!