Jazz and Improvised

Night’s Quietest Hour
Gordon Grdina’s Haram with Marc Ribot
Attaboygirl Records ABG-3 

Oddly Enough – The Music of Tim Berne
Gordon Grdina
Attaboygirl Records ABG-4 (gordongrdinamusic.com)

Guitarist/composer Gordon Grdina leads several ensembles, from home-based Vancouver bands to various international collaborations, each representing different aspects of his broad musical interests. These two CDs on his recent Attaboygirl label may be his brightest achievements so far, the first as a bandleader, the second as a guitarist.

Among his hometown groups, Haram, formed in 2008, focuses Grdina’s interest in traditional and contemporary Middle Eastern music. There are ten other musicians in the band, including Grdina’s frequent rhythm section of bassist Tommy Babin and drummer Kenton Loewen with an array of other distinguished Vancouverites, among them clarinetist François Houle, trumpeter JP Carter and violinists Josh and Jesse Zubot. Expatriate Syrian singer Emad Armoush is an essential and prominent component, bringing focus and a keening intensity to the melodies in the midst of tremendous rhythmic energy. Grdina plays oud here, bringing an idiomatic mastery to the Middle Eastern lute, while featuring guitarist Marc Ribot, whose distinctively sparse, edgy lines have marked collaborations from Tom Waits to John Zorn. The compound rhythms and essentially modal underpinnings support everything from delicate dialogues of guitar and oud and pastoral songs of longing, all of which will stretch to climactic ensembles that can merge Armoush’s vocals and a choir of singing musicians, all topped by the mercurial leads of Ribot and the other soloists, notably tenor saxophonist Christopher Kelly. 

Oddly Enough is a solo guitar recording exploring the music of New York-based composer/alto saxophonist Tim Berne, a significant figure at the creative edges of jazz whose works can fuse lyricism, tradition and an expanding complexity. For the project, Grdina has created a highly distinctive palette, playing classical and acoustic guitars, oud and dobro, but most notably a hybrid midi-synth electric guitar that aids him in creating distinctive polyphonic dialogues with multiple sonic identities. The results are as apt to sound like a band as a solo guitarist, and the first sounds heard on the opening title track suggest an electronically altered drum kit rather than a guitar. That might turn off purists, but persist and one is increasingly immersed in this dense work, an almost natural path for a musician as multi-voiced as Grdina. Enord Krad, the most complex of the pieces with oud, voices and reverb crashes travelling against its keening electric lead, is the most compelling of the works, mingling lyricism, angst and technology in subtle ways, before concluding with a sustained virtuosic and acoustic cadenza. The extended Snippet and the concluding Pliant Squids, filled with singing acoustic detail, fuse the distinctive lyric predilections of composer and performer in what may be Grdina’s most fully developed statement to date.    

Impossible Burger
p2p

Country Phasers
Kurt Newman

In the Same Room
Doug Tielli; Nick Fraser
Rat Drifting (rat-drifting.bandcamp.com)

In the early 2000s composer/guitarist Eric Chenaux created Rat-Drifting, as imaginative and distinctive as any label might hope to be, encouraging and embracing the most varied projects, often beyond genre. My favourite was Blasé Kisses by the Reveries, the trio of Chenaux, Ryan Driver and Doug Tielli who performed standards from the Great American Songbook with mouth-speakers and a mouth-microphone, literally inside their mouths, suggesting a submerged nightclub broadcasting from deep space: mysterious, funny and somehow transcendent. Now Chenaux is back, making Rat-Drifting’s brilliant and whimsical early documentation of Toronto music available again, as well as releasing new recordings, in download format. If the label has an aesthetic, it’s less about performance and more about capturing rare states of mind. The first three releases embody a special quality, an infectious empathy. Each is utterly different, but each is restorative. Each might happily share a Sun Ra title: Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy.  

The group 2P2 includes Karen Ng playing sax, bass, kalimba, synth, guitar, static, slide and stomach grumble, with Philippe Melanson playing percussion, electronics, field recordings, voice and guitar, along with Christopher Willes on synthesizers, gated tape loops, flute, tenor recorder, text-to-speech with the Melanson Family and Robin Dann adding voices. But the room isn’t crowded: it includes Toronto, Montreal, Cape Breton and Moncton. A pandemic project, it triumphs over isolation, giving its varied sounds attention, yet barely dusting them with intention, disparate and distant sounds gently joined in the ether. The liquid sounds of guitar and literal water heard on I are intimate, immediate, seemingly beyond authorship, while on the brief E, instruments are glimpsed through a wall of static.

The eponymous Country Phasers is a band of one, with Kurt Newman playing a just intonation harmonica, pedal steel guitar and electronics that include overdubbing, looping and percussion. It’s steeped in the sounds of country music, with the singing sustains and bending tones of the steel guitar prominently featured. The repetitions and sustained drones declare affinities with Terry Riley and Bill Frisell, while the clear, high pitches suggest Andean flute music, and the looping electronic lead of Julienne invokes bagpipes. Though a strange digital break-up occasionally occurs near an ending, e.g., Chiffonade, a second’s pause quickly restores the ambient order.

Trombonist Doug Tielli and drummer (and sometime-pianist here) Nick Fraser have enjoyed a long collaboration including Drumheller, a free jazz quintet that included Cheneaux, Rob Clutton and Brodie West, and which also recorded for Rat-Drifting. Active from 2003 to 2013, it was one of Canada’s most creative bands. With the two isolated In the Same Room, the emphasis is less on intense creativity than depth of feeling, mood and response. Tielli is as artful as he is vocalic, and he summons up his instrument’s great jazz tradition of expressive lyricism, whether elegant or rustic, sometimes suggesting Jack Teagarden or Roswell Rudd. Fraser is an artful partner, whether creating rhythmic dialogue and momentum or subtly supportive commentary.

Anders Koppel – Mulberry Street Symphony
Benjamin Koppel; Scott Colley; Brian Blade; Odense Symphony Orchestra; Martin Yates
Unit Records (unitrecords.com/releases) 

Mulberry Street Symphony is Danish rock musician and composer Anders Koppel›s fascinating musical take on 19th-century New York with its huge immigrant population. So many newcomers were pushed into crowded tenements and worked in sweatshops for low wages. Seven of the eight pieces on this double CD were inspired by the photographs of the “crusading photojournalist and social reformer, Jacob Riis.” The booklet that accompanies the set allows us to view the poignant and sombre photographs including Stranded in the City, Minding the Baby, The Last Mulberry and Bandit’s Roost. 

Just as the immigrants had diverse origins, the Mulberry Street Symphony combines a classical orchestra with a jazz trio of bass, drums and Benjamin Koppel (son of Anders) on alto saxophone. The orchestra and jazz ensemble play back and forth with Koppel›s saxophone weaving between these two forces with a clean and energetic sound. Tommy the Shoeshine Boy is a 20-minute piece which moves through many phases and we can imagine busy street scenes, the bustle of commerce and then a few short languid sections (perhaps Tommy gets to nap?) which emphasize the strings. By contrast, Blind Man is a delicate adagio piece with eloquent saxophone lines that weave between the orchestra’s strings and woodwinds. Mulberry Street Symphony is a complex and memorable reimagining of an important time and place.

Listen to 'Mulberry Street Symphony' Now in the Listening Room