Ezz-thetics
a column by Since Covid settled over us, I’ve noticed these columns are more about relations amongst music and our psychic and social health than usual, and the relations of mind to musical forms, whether it has been the solo meditations of Sylvia Hallett in her garden or N.O. Moore in his circuits (PoD 72), Das Kapital in their robotics or Disquiet in their speech loops (PoD 74). This column is fixed on two recent albums recorded pre-Covid, Descension (Out of Our Constrictions) by Joshua Abrams’ Natural Information Society with Evan Parker (Eremite 74/75) and Nate Wooley’s Mutual Aid Society (Pleasure of the Text POTTR1309), dating from July and June of 2019, respectively. The two also share a certain sense of scale, something generally lost in the interval: Descension is a two-LP set that runs to 75 minutes; Mutual Aid Music is a two-CD set coming in around 82 minutes, the music in eight segments. I think of them as cicadas, sixty years in the hatching, musical visions that were fomenting, eggs laid well before most of these artists were born, but who nonetheless have picked up on essential long-range resonances, timeless as much as ancient, timeless though sometimes insistently rhythmic. These recordings summon up some of the most intense acts of early free jazz, in part through resemblance, but more significantly through the transmigration of ideas, feelings, spirits in sound.
Descension Joshua Abrams’ Natural Information Society is always more than it appears. You might mistake it for a kind of trans-cultural jam band, which it is, but what jam band takes on as many cultures (from Abrams’ ancestral Odessa to Morocco’s Gnawa people, the source of Abrams’ guimbri, a kind of bass lute) or possesses the rhythmic discipline of NIS, in this case sustaining and expanding interlocking motifs for 75 minutes. It’s also a composer’s forum, Abrams knitting dense works from minimal materials, oft repeated, subtly altered. On Descension, the NIS consists of Abrams, Lisa Alvarado on harmonium and effects, Mikel Patrick Avery on drums, and Jason Stein on bass clarinet, as well as Evan Parker playing soprano saxophone. The title of Descension will immediately and deliberately invoke Ascension, but for this writer the first relevant Coltrane piece is a blues recorded in the fall of 1960 called “Mr. Knight” (from Coltrane Plays the Blues). It didn’t get special attention from critics, but it got a lot from Coltrane, who a year later at the Village Vanguard, in what one might consider his greatest extended recording session, turned it into “India,” expanding the quartet of “Mr. Knight” first to a sextet and then, better still, to an octet, as well as expanding its pitch range to microtones. It followed from the big band piece “Africa” and the almost simultaneous “Olé,” crucial collaborations with Eric Dolphy, McCoy Tyner, and Elvin Jones that turned the jazz universe from lines running from New Orleans to Chicago and New York to a global network linking India, Africa, Southern Europe, and Brazil. In a series of stages, over a series of evenings, “India” would crack open the piano-friendly, tempered pitch modality made central to jazz by Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue by emphasizing its essential component of microtonality, the thing that makes modal music genuinely modal and highly, microscopically varied. Suddenly, jazz would be in touch with the global modal, the world beyond tempered pitch, always its legitimate arena, directly linking the blues of “Mr. Knight” to the global musical reach that makes a great veena player like S. Ballachander sound like his river might be the Mississippi as much as the Ganges (and conversely, the great slide guitar player Blind Willie Johnson, whose sacred blues are more intimately alive in “India” than in “Mr. Knight”). While the various Vanguard versions of “India” will expand the drone and add Garvin Bushell’s double-reed wail (credited as an oboe but likely an English horn; see Dave Wild’s “An oud is not an oud,” available online) and Ahmed Abdul-Malik’s strummed strings (credited as an oud but likelier a tamboura, ibid), the essential sonic quality of “India” comes from Coltrane and Dolphy treating the tenor saxophone range of “Mr. Knight” as a void between Coltrane’s soprano saxophone and Dolphy’s bass clarinet. The two instruments likely possess the most flexible pitches of any “orthodox” Western reed instruments; each at the symbolic register stretch of its family, the two blast and bend the micro-riff of “Mr. Knight” into a radically altered and expanded wail. The second informing musical event for Descension’s essential history comes from Randy Weston’s witnessing an overnight Gnawa healing session, recounted in his memoir, African Rhythms. Weston’s musical immersion would lead to working with the guimbri master Mahmoud Ghania and the adaptation of a Gnawa melody, first recorded as “Ganawa-Blue Moses” in 1972 and then in a far more compelling version as simply “Blue Moses” with Pharoah Sanders in 1991. Another crucial relation for the kind of depth involvement heard in Descension is Terry Riley’s In C, whether in its original 1964 form or in the 2013 version realized in Mali. In those strange historical modulations, Evan Parker and Joshua Abrams have been following the same paths, Parker at least since he heard Coltrane and Dolphy on their 1961 European tour and all their contemporaneous and subsequent recordings. Arriving again at the Café Oto in the spring of 2019, we have an uncanny symmetry, the wavering tones of soprano saxophone and bass clarinet, a rhythm driven by Avery and the insistent yet evolving ostinato of the guimbri, the interweaving modal figurations of horns and harmonium, sometimes even in the same register, with Parker’s special mastery of soprano overtones creating the illusion of still other voices, impossible phantoms of a freedom beyond time and causality. The effect also touches on Parker’s long-standing interest in African string musics, something touched on in his duets with Joe Morris (The Village, 2019). The first live recording of the NIS, this is a performance of extraordinary power and vision, its relationship to the music of John Coltrane almost always magical. Occasionally there will be direct quotations (as with A Love Supreme’s principal motif appearing at the end of part two), but this is not some kind of successful imitation. Rather, it’s genetic fraternity, Parker and Abrams, Stein, Alvarez, and Avery crossing boundaries, arriving in that special otherness, that same Interzone once called “India.”
Mutual Aid Music Nate Wooley has already made one powerful social statement in the past year, the sixth installment of his Seven Storey Mountain including a choir singing Peggy Seeger’s “Reclaim the Night,” an intense assertion of women’s right to live lives free of violence. That focus on meaning assumes another significance ‒ methodological ‒ in Mutual Aid Music. Though Wooley isn’t explicit about the source, the essential reference is to Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. Published in 1902, it’s a refutation of the social Darwinism that espoused “survival of the fittest,” countering with that principle of mutual aid, as the naturalist Kropotkin observed it among species in Siberia and traced it as a principle through animal and human cultures. It’s at the source of contemporary studies in altruism and empathy and, I would suggest, the principle most at work in the best of jazz and free improvisation, apparent when one considers the innate qualities of great music as different as that produced by the Ornette Coleman Quartet of 1958-1961, the Jimmy Giuffre 3 of 1961-63, or the Charles Mingus bands of 1960 and 1964. In emphasizing mutual aid, Wooley substitutes a moral principle for an aesthetic one, if such distinctions can be made, remarking in his notes, “it asks the musicians to take stock of their gifts and to ask themselves, in each moment, how the use of that gift will affect the community (ensemble) of which they are currently a part. ...This set of eight ensemble concertos...asks musicians to question what they add to the ensemble as human beings first and musicians second.” The work grows out of Wooley’s Battle Pieces, a quartet project begun in 2014 in which one member acts as improvising soloist while the other members choose from Wooley’s supplied composed materials to develop the work. Mutual Aid Music extends this method for surmounting the usual alternatives of composition/ improvisation, first doubling the quartet with four more musicians chosen from the New York “contemporary composed music” community. To the original quartet with saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, pianist Sylvie Courvoisier, and vibraphonist Matt Moran, Wooley adds violinist Joshua Modney, cellist Mariel Roberts, percussionist Russel Greenberg, and pianist Cory Smythe. The eight musicians play eight “concertos”: in each, one musician has a primary score; one improvises throughout, based on the other seven’s input; others adapt secondary materials that have been individually assigned. Wooley the conceptualist has effectively made each musician responsible for a work’s outcome in the way one chooses to make each transaction collectively meaningful. Clearly the work depends on the individual participation of each of these musicians to care, moment to moment, and the results are consistently rich, a singular work of continuous exchange that transcends the work’s individual segments, always remarkable, sometimes astonishing, everyone engaged in making the most expressive, organized and communicative music possible. What may be most remarkable is the way in which Wooley sets the tone for this work. In the first phrase of the music’s first segment, his trumpet is as immediate, as emotional, as anything in Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain, then he proceeds, always starkly, through sudden distortions, highs, lows, asides, blasts of air, each with a hint of mutation, transformations of mood and perspective a constant. Throughout this the members of the octet surround, support, buoy the trumpet’s utterance, creating a sense of support that continues through a middle section dominated by keening strings and fluttering pianos. When the trumpet returns, it seems restored, in some phrases almost playful, until the concluding piano notes suggest reflection on all that has passed. That sense of engagement, individual and collective, becomes a constant throughout this highly varied music, a music so deeply reflective that it always seems both composed and improvised and rooted in the constancy of mutual support. As the episodes continue, the resemblance of the textures to contemporary chamber music, heightened by the increasing prominence of the strings, combines with the insistent empathy to validate both Wooley’s conceptual framework and his choice of musicians with which to realize it. While something highly specific, the soprano/ bass clarinet pitch instability, and something more general, from the pitch/ drone/ exotica of tamboura and English horn to harmonium and guimbri, connects “Descension” to “India”, Wooley’s double quartet, its individually-led segments and the exploration of composition/ improvisation invoke more general parallels to Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, a sixty-year-old tangle still alive with possibilities, as well as the kind of mixed musical assemblies created by the Anthony Braxton Quartet of the 1980s.
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As perhaps with other things, it’s the music to which we’re most connected that is the hardest to talk about, because the issue initially seems as much about the nature of the relationship as the distinction of the music alone: conversely, one can approach that not as a unique, individual closeness, but the result of the way the specific music works. It may be that these musics, by design, are, quite impersonally, the musics that are most connective. In each case here, I’ve been driven to talk about other music, and ancient experiences thereof, in which the listening has resembled the hearing here. Listening to Descension or Mutual Aid Music, one is so intimately connected to the instant that the totality of the music’s experience becomes unknowable, as if Moby Dick is less about the experiencing of a whale than the experiencing of an ocean (in the latter stages of writing about these musics I have been interrupted by Anthony Braxton’s recent 12 Comp (ZIM) 2017 which presents the same issue at far greater temporal length). Scouring my mind to find the word to describe this instantaneous listening, I hit on “insistent,” followed by the word “immanence,” whether related to the sense of the divine being manifest in the world or to the sense of being contained by something. Absurdly, perhaps, the word that occurred next was “represencing,” which suggests a state of constant re-initiation into the experience of the present. It’s absurd, of course, because, as I soon confirmed, it’s the name of a Natural Information Society record, recorded in 2011 and released in 2012 and virtually the only use of the word I could find, until I hit on Adam Y. Wells’ The Manifest and the Revealed: A Phenomenology of Kenosis, published by SUNY in 2018, which suggests that there’s some pretty cutting-edge theology going on in Joshua Abrams’ music. The short takeaway from these works is that these musicians are rising to the larger challenges and possibilities of music. Whether it’s a two-LP tune or a two-CD suite, there’s something especially valuable in these large-scale assaults on the experience ‒ the phenomenology ‒ of time. They insistently remind one of the Braxton hour glass placed on the stage at the beginning of a piece. In part warning, it’s also a covenant, invitation to concentrated depth, no ordinary time but an encounter with sand, sign here of the sense of the infinite and its possibilities. © 2021 Stuart Broomer |