Jazz and Improvised

At One Time
John Oswald; Henry Kaiser; Paul Plimley
Independent (henrykaiser.bandcamp.com/album/at-one-time)

This recording is an intriguing experiment in free improvisation created under COVID conditions, advancing a radical notion of the score. The music is developed on the work of an absentee guest: Cecil Taylor, the late pianist and composer who did as much as anyone to shape free jazz and improvised music over the past 65 years. 

Californian guitarist Henry Kaiser, Toronto saxophonist John Oswald and Vancouver vibraphonist (usually pianist) Paul Plimley all worked with Taylor and were closely involved with his methods of building music. Here they have developed the novel idea of each improvising separately with a series of Taylor recordings, heard on headphones, then combining the results. The result is a series of pieces in which we listen to three or four musicians (Scott Amendola plays drums on one track, Tracy Silverman six-string fiddle on another) all responding to the same inflexible duo partner, in effect an insistent composition in which each improviser is impervious to the other “performers” that we are hearing.

The music has a special coherence, based in part on the loyalty to the unheard Taylor, creating empathetic and coherent results. The most remarkable track is also the longest, the 27-minute Oceans Felons Salad with Silverman, the group achieving remarkable levels of illusory interaction through their collective fidelity to a missing inspiration. The quality of the music, as well as the imagination of its methodology, makes this one of the year’s most significant events in improvised music. Unusual as it may be, it’s somehow a great band.

Moves
Eucalyptus
Independent (eucalyptusjazz.bandcamp.com)

There’s a long history of jazz embracing popular culture, another of it pursuing experimentation. Sometimes the impulses converge, creating some very interesting moments. Toronto alto saxophonist/ composer Brodie West embraces both traditions with Eucalyptus, an octet with three percussionists that’s devoted to complex moods, 1950s Martin Denny exoticism and occasional free jazz expressionism, suggesting both Don Cherry’s forays into World Music and, more specifically, Sun Ra’s creation of dream states suggesting mid-century lounges suspended in space. 

The miracle of Moves, available as LP or download, is that Eucalyptus compresses such dreams into pieces less than six minutes in length. The opening Infinity Bananas has a drum pattern that is at once repeated and internally erratic, holding the angular shards emitted by West and trumpeter Nicole Rampersaud tightly in place. It’s in a Move resembles a film noir nightclub scene, West and Rampersaud weaving wobbly melodic leads through an underbrush of Kurt Newman’s trebly guitar, Ryan Driver’s clavinet and a languid Latin conga drum. Dust in the Wind is very lush, its repeating melodic pattern lapping over itself like waves on a beach. Rose Manor, more languid still and with a burnished brass trumpet solo, ends with a mysterious upward glissando, like an ascending sci-fi spacecraft. The concluding Lookie suggests a band lost in time and space at the end of New Year’s festivities, poised between the lachrymose and the parodic.  

At times an ironic flirtation with background music, Moves is always more than entertaining, never less than art.

Zurich Concert
Punkt.Vtr.Plastik
Intakt CD 380 (intaktrec.ch/380.htm)

Punkt.Vrt.Plastik consists of three of Europe’s most active and creative free jazz musicians in their mid-to-late 30s; Slovenian pianist Kaja Draksler, Swedish bassist Petter Eldh and German drummer Christian Lillinger. Eldh and Lillinger are active in numerous bands together (Amok Amor, Koma Saxo), each one an intense, complex, highly interactive, high-speed musical affair. Punkt.Vrt.Plastik is the traditional piano trio format placed under that same pressure, and Draksler is an ideal partner, similarly precise, technically brilliant, highly inventive and capable of being witty at the same time. Zurich Concert takes compositions from the group’s two previous studio CDs to the stage, opening them up to further elaboration while maintaining a certain taut discipline.

The set opens and closes with compositions by Lillinger, several of them brief, mechanistic complexes that can suggest drum solos transcribed for trio or fragmented Thelonious Monk compositions, repeated patterns developing more and more internal detail. Traditional melodic figures are common here, from each musician. Body Decline – Natt Raum combines two of Eldh’s compositions, moving from a rubato, trance-like longing to an insistently repeated traditional dance figure that eventually disintegrates. Similarly, Draksler’s Vrvica II develops tremendous tension through repetition, eventually giving rise to explosive free play.

Those repeating patterns arise in each of the members’ compositions, a shared insistence that can assume both manic and comic dimensions, an ongoing examination of the military band, the folk dance, the classical etude. It assures Punkt.Vrt.Plastik’s music a human dimension, making the results more stimulating than exhausting.

Dave Douglas – Secular Psalms
Dave Douglas; Berlinde Deman; Marta Warelis; Frederik Leroux; Tomeka Reid; Lander Gyselinck
Greenleaf Music (greenleafmusic.com)

Trumpeter/composer Dave Douglas’ Secular Psalms is a suite commissioned to commemorate the 600th anniversary of Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s Ghent altarpiece, Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, completed around 1432. Begun in 2018, Douglas’ creation was soon affected by the COVID-19 lockdown, necessitating online recordings including some collective improvising with Douglas, cellist Tomeka Reid and six young European musicians. It’s a multi-faceted work, with composed, improvised and quoted materials, even considering the court of Philip the Good of Burgundy in which the van Eycks worked; other artists present included the composer Guillaume Dufay and the poet Christine de Pisan, and Douglas has gone so far as to echo their works in the suite. Those 15th-century artists aren’t the limits of Douglas’ reach. In one brief lyric, he patches together Marvin Gaye’s phrase “Mercy, Mercy, Me” (twice), “Kyrie Eleison” and Psalm 59’s “but I will sing” with nine words of his own.

Leaving aside questions of taste and appropriateness, it’s an ambitious, insistently egalitarian work, with Douglas creating some expressive textures that mix chamber music sonorities with other instrumental voices. The merger includes the Agnus Dei with Douglas’ central, dark-toned trumpet variously counterposed to ruggedly rhythmic cello, percussively dissonant piano and jarring, fuzz-toned electric guitar. The collective improvisation of Instrumental Angels is accomplished, and there are moments of real synergy created under difficult conditions.   

After repeated listening, the work’s structure and contours may still feel unfocused, but one can salute an artist working under challenging circumstances to connect such diverse impulses. It may be the muffled, mutating cries and penetrating lyricism of Douglas’ trumpet that reverberate longest.