Robust Darkness in the Music of Szilard Mezei

Violist-composer Szilard Mezei favors a slightly darker palette than the norm. For a recent album on Leo, We Were Watching the Rain (which I reviewed for Cadence), his ensemble included the lower-registered sounds of the tuba, bass clarinet, and trombone. It may be the the less brilliant, more mellow range of the viola (as compared with the violin) has influenced the group sound he envisions. Whatever the case his music is distinctive in this way, and in other ways as well.

That Leo disc was without a rhythm section and the emphasis was on a chamber kind of sound. The recording we consider today, As You (Ayler, Download Series), includes bass and drums (along with tuba and cello). That addition gives contrast to the end result vis-a-vis the Leo session. It successfully propulses the group further into the free blowing, free rhythm areas of Szilard's stylistic outlook.

The Serbian-Yugoslavian born Mezei plays viola with a kind of presence that brings out the thicker, darker potentialities of the instrument, and of course that fits with the above. The compositions are at least equally important, if not paramount to his musical approach. They are brooding meditations that come alive, enhanced by the group improvisations and solo spotlights that occur as the music unfolds. Everyone in this ensemble is capable of sensitive interplay and that quality is one of the salient aspects of this strong set.

If I am not wrong, we have not heard the last from Szilard Mezei. Growth seems inevitable. As You not only shows the artists' potential. It is a fully formed, dramatic statement and a musical document that absorbs the sympathetic listener at every turn.

The Group "Transit" Scales Improvisational Heights

Some of the new improv/jazz out there today does not follow the head-solos-head format that has been so pervasive in the music. It goes somewhere else, and in the process breaks down the distinction contained within that format. Instead, the music takes what I'd like to call a "concert-gagaku" approach to things. I mean that there is a sensitivity to the combination of sounds and instruments (the "gagaku" part) and a sort of intuitive, mentally mapped-out approach to what each performance will accomplish (the "concert-improv" part).

Everything is a head and nothing is a head. All of it is soloing and none of it is. There is also an almost ritual fervor with which the musicians go about their art. Japanese gagaku is I think the oldest surviving example of such a music-making path. I refer to the heightened awareness of the importance of the sound emission of the moment as a kind of cosmic reality outside of everyday life, and the intense commitment to that reality. Whether the musicians involved would put it that way I'm not sure. It is that exacting ritualistic intensity of purpose that comes through to me on this end, regardless. And that makes for some extraordinary music.

I allude above to a new CD by Transit, called Quadrologues (Clean Feed). Transit is a quartet with Reuben Radding on bass, a player with big ears and the ability to execute what he hears. He did a remarkable thing a while ago. Once a month he offered a free download of an improv session, each with a different lineup of players, for an entire year. I've listen to them all and they give me great respect for his approach. (Google Mr. Radding's site if you want to hear them.) On some of those is trumpeter Nate Wooley, who makes up one-fourth of Transit here as well. Wooley most certainly is also a musician of discerning ears and carefully creative execution. He has done some nice work with The Magical Listening Hour, a wide-open chamber improv group with trombonist Steve Swell and others. Both Radding and Wooley bring to Transit that ineffable set of qualities I am talking about.

Nate and Reuben are joined in the group by drummer Jeff Arnal and alto sax man Seth Misterika. I don't believe I've had the pleasure of hearing either before but they add a cosmic energy and concept to the proceedings on a par with the others. The CD that results has a flow and musical logic that comes out of the immediate moment of the performance, yet stands up well to repeated listenings. It's as if the players had a clear mental map of the music they wanted to make, and then went ahead and realized it all in sound.

I was taken by Quadrologues. It has that certain something the best improv gives you today. I hope they continue to perform together and I get to hear it!

Cromagnon: Cave Rock Both Retro and Ahead of Its Time

1969. The rather obscure band Cromagnon completes their first (and only?) album. It comes out on ESP Disk. The world does not change discernibly. So you were expecting that? No. June 2009. ESP re-releases the album. The world does not change discernibly. By now nobody is expecting that.

The world turns on its axis today, like every day. “Cave Rock” won’t change that. However it is one of those supremely weirdsville sorts of records from ESP that helped define what underground music was all about, could be, and still is. Most of the album is a kind of collage-like freakout of grunts, groans, chants, sound effects and other oddities. It’s quite amusing and could only have been made in 1969.

On the other hand, there’s one cut, “Caledonia,” that is just incredible. I first heard it on a second wave ESP sampler and my yodeling friends and I were stunned. It’s that sort of a number. Bagpipes, throbbing guitars, pounding drums in a primitive mode and hoarse whisper-shout vocals. It is not to be missed. It manages simultaneously to be retro-psych, completely ahead of its time, and timeless. The vocal anticipates the sort of thrash and death metal croakings that gave a personality to some of the underground rock offerings of the ‘80s through to today.

That was so interesting about the ‘60s underground music scene. It wasn’t rigidly divided into genre camps and it was totally unpredictable. It often created innovations that influenced and partly determined the musics to come. Though excesses could occur, it was a much needed counterweight to the pop-pap hegemony that filled the airwaves most of the time. Listen to “Caledonia” and you’ll appreciate how it was, and could still be. Maybe it IS.

Tower of Power Live Set Unearthed

Funk. When it was new, the form had enormous power and the ability to liberate rhythm to a higher level of intensity. When I think of the music, I think especially of three bands. Of course there was James Brown and his associates. What he did from, say, 1964 through 1970 was to almost single-handedly transform the function of the rhythm section and the riffs that lay on top of that. Listen to "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag" with a fresh ear and you'll hear a landmark of the music.

Second, there was Funkadelic, who stretched the form and added new dimensions to what was supposed to be done. There were other bands too of course. But the third one that sticks out in my head is Tower of Power. Through a series of albums beginning with East Bay Grease through to Drop it in the Slot in the mid-'70s, they crafted incredibly tight arrangements that let the rhythm instruments groove freely. And those horns, they just were the best around for precision funkifying.

Now perhaps that kind of music has gotten a little tired. Blame disco, bad radio, blame endless luke-warm "jazz" performances by less-than-committed musicians that made funk into a commodity. (Now we aren't talking about Miles Davis here, he would be a fourth choice for funk innovators.) When you hear the music the way it was played in its prime moment, though, the excitement and vibrancy comes back again, provided you open yourself up to it.

Like with what we talk about today. Some 36 years after it was first captured on tape, TOP Records has released a two-CD set of Tower of Power live in a club in Boston, 1973. East Bay Archive, Volume One, brings the band onto your speakers as they sounded that evening. It is a quite decent recording, with a little bit of the room ambiance at play. They were on top of it. They play through their repertoire with just enough of the added adrenaline a live situation can bring out to make it a real pleasure to hear. There's a loose-tight contrast at play. The drummer propels the band a little harder than he might do in the studio, and the band responds with some spirited funk as only they could conjure.

It's a set the confirmed Tower of Power addict cannot pass up. And it's just plain old fun too.

Nik Baertsch's Ritual Groove Music: When is the Same Different?

The music perhaps unfortunately dubbed "minimalism" is an Amero-Euro development that draws heavily on world music traditions. Repetition is the key. And like all musics of this sort, the music distinguishes itself on what remains the same and, critically, what changes, how it changes and when it changes.

Like for example in some traditional West African ensembles, the group of drummer-percussionists set up a repeating groove and the master drummer improvises variations on top of that. Pre-minimalist composer Erik Satie wrote some pioneering works, and sometimes absolutely NOTHING was suppose to change, like with the solo piano piece "Vexations," which consisted of a page of piano music to be repeated two-hundred-some-odd times, exactly the same each time. And that fits in with world music trance traditions. With constant sameness, you enter an altered state. You get high. Like if you say "pumpernickel" fast 30 times in a row, the word starts to change in your head sometime through around the 5th time to the end. It puts your head somewhere else. And it just drives some people nuts.

Minimalist pioneer La Monte Young often has set up a drone and had the drums and soprano sax, for example, create endless variations around a narrow set of scalular figures, rhythms and tones. Early Steve Reich compositions emphasized repeated parts gradually going out of phase and then recombining in a new set of repetitions. Philip Glass, early on, tried the additive and subtractive approach. Repeating phrases were lengthened or shortened over time, new notes were added or the same notes were repeated in a different sequence. Then again, all minimalism sometimes just changes abruptly to a new set of related repetitions.

All this brings me to the music of Nik Baertsch, which he aptly calls "Ritual Groove Music." First, a piece of news, then I'll talk about his first recording. The entire catalog of Nik Baertsch's Roninrhythm Records, including various Baertsch ensembles, solo work and the work of some of his associates, is now available as digital downloads through Iapetus Distribution/Unsung Records. And of course the CD versions are also still available.

Now on to the first release, by Nik Baertsch's ensemble Mobile, created in 2001 and titled Ritual Groove Music I. Like with African music, the groove is all important. It runs in various guises throughout the entire recording. Drums, winds, Baertsch's piano (which occasionally is manipulated in the manner of John Cage's prepared piano, that is to say altered by string dampening and placing objects on the strings), all get busy creating interlocking grooves of repetition, then they may add quasi-solo parts over that or contrasting figures. The music can build, or it just simply can change from one groove to another. Like the Australian group The Necks, the afro-groove aspects of rock and jazz have something to do with the music, clearly. Baertsch, at least on this first volume, rocks out and gets funky at many points. So many listeners will not find it alien, rather somehow familiar.

After saying all this, I should emphasize that though Baertsch's music is squarely anchored in minimalist sameness, yet you would not mistake his music for that of someone else. It's different. There is a hugely rhythmic component. The ritual part of the music is the trance-like effect of the repetitions; the groove part of it is what may make you want to get up and shake your whatever. This first volume does those things very well. I found myself entranced. You probably would too. Download it or get the CD if you are so inclined. Take a look at the Ronin site: http://roninrhythmrecords.com/.

What's Good is Sometimes Boring Too

Now I love Latin jazz when it's done right. I was fortunate in my listening regarding this on two counts: 1.) My father somehow ended up with a Xavier Cugat album when I was a kid and I listened to it almost religiously. 2.) My older brother lived in Puerto Rico for a long while and he turned me on to salsa during its glory years. Those Fania Records were important to me, though nobody else in my neighborhood shared my enthusiasm.

From there I went on to Machito and Diz in his Latin mode, and so forth.

So a Dave Valentin CD has crossed my desk. It's a High Note record from 2006, Come Fly with Me. Valentin plays a beautiful flute. This recording is packed with it. The Latin jazz numbers are mostly on a high plane. But there are moments of slickness too. . . commercially oriented numbers that give a bad name to the whole endeavor and are apt to show up on some jazz radio outlets as exemplars of the art. The title cut is an example. It's good; it's well executed; but it does not have enough texture, no rough edges. That bores me.

But hey, there are times on this disk when everyone burns, like on "Enciendido." I wish there were more of them. But kudos for Valentin and his flute anyway!

New CD with David Bond, Dewey Redman, Marshall Allen

Vineyard Records is about to release The Key of Life, a new CD that features a couple of live sessions with saxophonists David Bond, Dewey Redman, Marshall Allen, Andrew White and drummer Eddie Blackwell, as well as some significant others. It delves by association into the legacy of two great traditions in Modern Jazz: the Ornette Coleman school and that of Sun Ra. It's a scorching 80 minutes of fine music.

I wrote the liner notes to this one, so that's all I'll say. . .

Check the David Bond website at www.davidbondjazz.com to find out about the release date and/or to order it.