Sound and color

Just back home from The Stone where I could hear two very interesting sets with pianist Russ Lossing and drummer Gerry Hemingway, first in duet, and then in quartet with Loren Stillman on alto saxophone and Samuel Blaser on trombone.

I was absolutely excited at the prospect of returning to this avant-garde jazz hall (it has been my 3rd concert there, the first one was in 2010, with Sylvie Courvoisier, Thomas Morgan and Ben Perowski, and the second, last year, with Wadada Leo Smith and Vijay Iyer) to listen to Gerry Hemingway, and the cold rain falling on New York City did not diminish my enthusiasm. (Although I had to take care on the streets, for one could almost see nothing...) I feared I would arrive late, but Gerry Hemingway was still installing his tools, various sticks, small cymbals, woodblocks, as well as a cello bow...

I admit, it took me some time to appreciate the music. Of course, it was free jazz (so what?) and I couldn't really follow the stream of music. Both musicians were acting delicately and skillfully (no discussion) at creating sound, as a painter would spread brush strokes on a canvas—and actually, Hemingway was playing a lot of brushes, those drum sticks made of many (wire or plastic) strings that have a delicate and not very resonating sound... Color after color, something was emerging, sound was being shaped.

There is an eternal discussion about the nature of music (is it rhythm? melody? harmony?) and consequently about the role of each instrument in the shaping of the music. A related question is the way a given instrument should be used to produce sound.

None of the obvious answers was to be heard tonight. Russ Lossing sometimes stroke the strings of the grand piano with mallets, something almost classical in avant-garde piano music. I should have been prepared by the concert of Tony Malaby's Tubacello, that I attended with François Loeser in Sons d'hiver a few weeks ago, where John Hollenbeck simultaneously played drums and prepared piano, but the playing of  Gerry Hemingway brought me much surprise. He could blow on the heads of the drums, hit them with a woodblock or strange plastic mallets; he could make the cymbals vibrate by pressing the cell bow on it; he could also take the top hi-hat cymbal on the left hand, and then either hit it with a stick, or press it on the snare drum, thereby producing a mixture of snare/cymbal sound; during a long drum roll, he could also vary the pitch of the sound by pressing the drum head with his right foot—can you imagine the scene?

It is while discussing with him in between the two sets that I gradually understood (some of) his musical conception. How everything is about sound and color. That's why he uses an immense palette of tools, to produce the sounds he feels would best fit the music. He also discussed extended technique, by which he means not the kind of drumistic virtuosity that could allow you (unfortunately, not me...) to play the 26 drum rudiments at 300bpm, but by extending the range of sounds he can consistently produce with his “basic Buddy Rich type instrument”—Google a picture of Terry Bozzio's drumkit if you don't see what I mean. He described himself as a colorist, who thinks of his instrument in terms of pitches; he also said how rhythm also exists in negative, when it is not played explicitly. A striking remark because it exactly depicted how I understand the playing of one of my favorite jazz drummers, Paul Motian, but whom I couldn't appreciate until I became able of hearing what he did not play.

The second set  did not sound as abstract as the first one. Probably the two blowing instruments helped giving the sound more flesh and more texture. Samuel Blaser, on the trombone, was absolutely exceptional—go listen at once for his Spring Rain album, an alliance of Jimmy Giuffre and contemporary jazz—and Loren Stillman sang very beautiful melodic lines on the alto sax. The four of them could also play in all combinations, and with extremly interesting dynamics, going effortlessly from one to another. And when a wonderful moment of thunder ended abruptly with the first notes of Paul Motian's Etude, music turned into pure emotion.

Wadada Leo Smith: Ten Freedom Summers

Last Saturday (January 25th), I attended a concert by trumpetist Wadada Leo Smith in Vitry/Seine, within the Sons d'hiver festival, which serves as a pretext for this blog entry.

The first part featured the Anti Pop Consortium's machine-player HPrizm, accompanied by improvisers David Virelles (piano), Steve Lehman (saxophone) and Wadada Leo Smith (trumpet), as well by Emanuuel Pidre (visuals). I found this part a bit bland. HPrizm's music lacked inspiration, rhythm, and although the improvisers are remarkable musicians, it was probably difficult for them to build on a lame material. Steve Lehman saved most of it, I think, because his playing is very lyrical, and quite dense, so that he could made the music.

The second part was Wadada Leo Smith's Ten Freedom Summers — well, only a part of it, although they played for almost two hours.  Ten Freedom Summers is the title of a monumental series of compositions by Wadada Leo Smith: 19 pieces, lasting for 4 hours and a half, depicting those moments of American history where African american people fought for Freedom. The first piece,  “Dred Scott, 1857” recalls the story of Dred Scott, a slave who filed a suit at the Supreme Court to be able to buy his freedom, and lost, when the Supreme court ruled (1857) that people of African origin, whether slave or free, were not citizens of the United States —anyway, Scott had been freed the very same year by his new owner. The second piece is about the Montgomery bus boycott initiated by Rosa Parks in 1944. Two pieces are also devoted to the US presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, celebrating the New Frontier, and the Civil Rights act of 1964.

I had been introduced to Wadada Leo Smith's music thanks to France Musique program Open Jazz, when Alex Dutilh aired the piece “Kulture of Jazz”, from the Kulture Jazz CD. Most of the pieces of that disc are evocations of jazz through some prominent figures of jazz (Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler), African literature (Ayl Kwel Armah), or his personal life (Sarah Brown-Smith-Wallace). The “K” in the title, which reminds me of the Klan, already emphasized the fact that jazz is an African-american music of emancipation. That is the music that black people played, but didn't have the right to listen to.

In Kulture Jazz, Wadada Leo Smith is the only credited musician. He mostly plays the trumpet, an instrument that truly belongs to jazz music (although it is slightly less heared these days), but he also sings, plays percussions, as well as koto, a rarely heard instrument in this context!

For Ten Freedom Summers, he combines a jazz quartet (trumpet, bass, drums and piano) and the Southwest Chamber Ensemble, a 9-musician strings combo. The combo that was initially announced for the concert was Smith's Golden quartet (with Anthony Davis, piano; John Lindberg, bass; Pheeroan akLaff, drums), except that the bassist had broken his wrist and could not play. He was thus replaced by Ashley Waters (from the Southwest Chamber Ensemble) on cello. Consequently, but that's probably one of the miracles allowed for by improvised music, the concert sounded pretty much like the recorded music.

Anyway, both Kulture Jazz and Ten Freedom Summers are very different from other jazz pieces devoted to the civil rights movements that I know (such as Max Roach's Freedom Now. We Insist! whose “Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace” is one of the rare jazz pieces that made me cry, or from Charles Mingus's “Fables of Faubus”).

First, the music sounds different. For example, there is no rhythm section in Kulture Jazz, and almost nothing as such in Ten Freedom Summers. And the pieces are definitely not built on the classical form (rhythmic/harmonic) we're now used to, either from listening to classical music, or from blues, or from the modal pieces played by Miles Davis, John Coltrane and others in the 50s-60s.  Maybe not unlike latter pieces by Coltrane (Love Supreme, or Interstellar Space), Wadada Leo Smith's music is an abstract meditation about the place of an African-american musician in History.

Then, although some parts of the concert seemed to be improvised, it all looked as if they played the music as it is written on a score. This was the more surprising for the drummer who, most always in jazz music, is left to imagining by himself how he should bring his playing to the music being created. (When drummers have scores, that's rarely drum scores, but more often that of the bass player, or simply the main theme with the chords changes.)

Even Pheeroan akLaff was obviously playing the drums as written on the score, but the compositions gave him a quite interesting role in the development of the music. Wadada Leo Smith had written long solos for the drums which began or ended the pieces. In fact, since the group that night had no bass player, but a cellist who played with the bow — anyway, Lindberg mostly plays with the bow on the CD too — the other musicians are not given the explicit harmonic/rhythmic pattern that a “walking bass” can impose on the music, so there's probably no point for the drummer to play a definite swing rhythm, which akLaff did not do.

And within Wadada Leo Smith's mostly meditative music, that was akLaff's playing — sometimes forceful, or with traces of military marches — that reminded us that Freedom is a fight.

An everyday-fight.

Ari Hoenig concert

Among the three themes I planned to discuss, only math had some place here, and not a single word about jazz. Many concerts, though, and a few of them were good, but none really good to the point to grab a keyboard and write a notice.

Two of them were even a bit disappointing. One year ago, Wayne Shorter celebrated his 80th birthday with his quartet (Danilo Perez, John Pattitucci, Brian Blade) at the Salle Pleyel. But I found the music a bit cold. Only now do I begin to appreciate the CD Without a net that they published soon after.

In september, John Zorn celebrated his 60th birthday at La Villette with a kind of musical marathon: 3 concerts, 9 bands (even 10), some 5 hours of music. Alas. While a similar concert at Banlieues bleues in 2012 had been wonderful, that one was a great disappointment. Except for 3-4 bands (Holy visions, Acoustic Masada, The Dreamers, Bar Kokhba), the rest was boring (Alchemist), ridiculous (Song Project),  if not unbearable (Templars).


But I had the great pleasure to hear Ari Hoenig in Vincennes, with Gilad Hekselman on guitar and Noam Wiesenberg on bass. Ari is a nice young drummer from Philadelphia, with a very melodic touch; I had heared him twice at the Smalls (once with Pilc and Moutin, the other I don't remember!), and he is always very interesting. When I say that he his a melodist, this is not a metaphor. The last piece they played was Charlie Parker's theme Anthropology, and this is the first time that I heard the theme played on the drums. The introduction was rather variations at a slow tempo, but at some point, he played the theme at full speed, and that was really music! Incredible when you think that drums do not have many notes to offer; so for some strokes, Ari had to put his elbow on the drumhead, pressing strongly, so as to modify the pitch. There is a video on youtube where you can see him in action, playing Anthropology (at 7:44, you can guess what I'm talking about), you can also hear that on his CD Inversations. If you like that, his Punk Bop - Live at Smalls is also an excellent CD to listen to.

Enjoy!