Ten more albums: Wind, Beauty, and Blues in a Kaleidoscope Superior

Well, it’s been a couple of years since I’ve posted anything here, and circumstances are still such that I can’t really go out an hear live music, let alone review it. So here are ten more albums I’ve heard in the last couple of weeks.

Count Basie: Good Morning Blues
Ancestral to a lot of today’s music (both “classical” and “popular”), and extremely creative. The title track features piano and trumpet solos that stretch the expressiveness of the instruments. The curators of this two-record (vinyl) set also set it up in a way seldom seen in anthologies of short pieces: the album as a whole has a “shape”. The songs are not only arranged chronologically (though partially), but: side one has big band numbers, side two has piano with bass and drums, side three starts to bring in other instruments in small combos, and side four (strangely labelled “Record Two Side Two”, a different system than the other three) begins with small combos but gradually brings back the big band. The last two pieces are for a very big (and loud) orchestra; a grand finale. It’s as if the Count himself planned this out as a multi-movement evening-long work, which he may have. Throughout, nearly everything is based on the familiar blues riffs, but everything keeps going in unexpected and often beautiful ways.

Miles Davis: Pangaea
Miles Davis and other jazz greats created this electric band that is a rarity: a jam band that doesn’t meander. Or maybe it meanders in the best possible way. The two 45-minute pieces are partially composed and probably conducted; pauses and shifts are coordinated and each improvised solo knows exactly when to stop. The result is a journey through a multifaceted soundscape (it’s fitting that the two tracks and the album are named after landscapes): driving rock-funk leads to magical skeins of African balafon; a flute floats over a web of hushed percussion and evolves into metal guitar. Listen several times: at first it’s like an adventure without a compass; by the second or third you’ll have an overall map but the moment-by-moment details are still surprising.

Toumani Diabate: Mande Variations
The delicate sounds of the kora: auditory dewdrops on an early morning spiderweb. If one listens closely, there are two koras and two styles of music: one, traditional pieces with long non-strophic melodies over ostinato accompaniments; two, freeform neo-impressionist improvisations played on a metal-stringed kora that resonates like a Celtic harp. Both are delicate, transparent, and beautiful.

Earthsuit: Kaleidoscope Superior
This little-known album of (Christian) reggae-rock (from 2000) is worth a revisit: it’s more than the boy band that it appears. Lyrics are often obscure but full of references; rhythms are off-meters as often as not (linking this to older “prog rock”); chord structures are derived from jazz standards. Snippets of Steve Reich minimalism complete the stylistic fusion. Somehow it all holds together and has a recognizable “sound”: a kaleidoscope superior with all the same hues.

Ensemble Organum (conducted by Marcel Pérés): Carmina Burana (The Passion Play)
The Carmina Burana manuscript doesn’t consist entirely of bawdy drinking songs; this “Gregorian” retelling of the crucifixion of Jesus is also there (though one bawdy song does manage to appear, as sung by Mary Magdalene pre-conversion). As always, Ensemble Organum’s interpretation is likely to be controversial: there is of course no particular evidence exactly when Gregorian chant evolved into the way it sounds presently, and no particular evidence how it sounded before then — so thirteenth-century chant (which was already a thousand-year tradition by that time) is open to interpretation. Here it’s given an “Eastern Orthodox” makeover with what’s been termed “Middle Easter warbling”: improvisational melismas overlaying the melodies and syllables of the chant. Recorded in a cathedral, a cavernous resonant space and the “authentic” location for this music, it results in lovely and evocative (and sometimes quite forceful!) echoes from a bygone century. This is especially true in the rare passages where the single melodic lines merge into harmony. The “storyline” cuts off before the Resurrection, emphasizing the sacrifice, leading into the possibility of later music in the same manner.

Morton Feldman: Why Patterns? Crippled Symmetry (Eberhard Blum, Nils Vigeland and Jan Williams)
Tiny gestures expand into giant canvasses of sound. Resonances emerge from, rail against, contain, and return to silence. Rhythms overlay in complex patterns. Overall, very quiet — yet very loud in context. This atonal minimalist music creates its own atmosphere and its own aesthetic. At the end, all reduces to a single note, lingering in a light-filled void, trailing into nothing and everything.

Haydn: Prussian Quartets (Tokyo Quartet)
At first listening: merely charming. The second or third time through: there’s extreme expression and complexity lurking beneath that “simple” exterior. The more you listen, the more you hear; the more you hear, the more you get drawn in. Two of my favorites are the very first track in the set (the first movement of Quartet no. 36), with its unexpected syncopations, and the very last track in the set (the fourth movement of Quartet no. 41); that quick repeated note on one of the violins anchors the piece through a series of episodes (some say it imitates the calling of a frog; I’m more inclined to hear it as a birdcall mixed with the buzzing of bees). Elsewhere there are charming melodies (often only a single, unfolding melody containing its own key-changes; a variation on the usually bi-melodic sonata form) and delicate nuances, played perfectly.

Photon Swim Break: Hazard II: Wind
Not particularly “hazardous”, this is dark ambient music derived from field recordings and phonography. The opening is particularly striking, where wave and wind sounds are processed to release their overtones (I am Not Sitting in a Room; Release the Kraken!) in a gradual accumulation of resonance.

Ryuichi Sakamoto: Beauty
There are plenty of examples of mixing (American or British Isles) folk music with rock and pop; here is another possibility. Japanese min’yo (a traditional style closely related to taiko drumming) mixes just as well with “pop” as other folk musics. Always surprising and often beautiful, and a proof (if you need another) that heterophony combines with chord-changes without a problem. The shamisen seems, here, to have been created to be a background rhythm instrument under keyboards and vocals. (There are also a couple of Afropop-fusion tracks in the middle, for which I have the same comments minus the shamisen.) Those positive statements aside, though, several of the songs have inane, pointless lyrics; and the “Chinese” version of Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” (played on the er-hu) sounds forced, particularly since they didn’t bother to re-tune the two instruments to match.

Word of Mouth Chorus: Rivers of Delight
One of only a handful of professional recordings of the American tradition of shape-note hymn singing, a loud, enthusiastic style of church music not particularly related to the more familiar Gospel music. The chorus sounds a little too polished at times (this is, in its original form, rough music), but delicate (!) beauty is often the result. The occasional solo passages are particularly exquisite.