In his five-decade career, finger-style acoustic guitarist Duck Baker has played in lots of styles, from folk (real folk, such as Scottish and Irish fiddle tunes) to blues to jazz, in the latter genre particularly focusing on bebop greats, with whole albums devoted to the music of Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols. But he has flashed an avant-garde side as well, and of course ESP-Disk’ was interested in exposing more of the latter work. This album of duos and trios with an all-star roster of players, mostly British, collects recordings ranging from 1994 through 2017.
1. Imp Romp 2
2. Shenandoah
3. Indie Pen Dance
4. East River Delta Blues
5. Ode to Jo
6. Duo for 225 Strings
7. The Missing Chandler
8. Tourbillion Air
9. Pope Slark
10. Signing Off
Duck Baker, guitar on all tracks
Derek Bailey, guitar, #3 (7/4/2002)
Steve Beresford, piano, #6 (9/18/2009)
John Butcher, tenor saxophone, #7 (9/19/2009)
Mark Dresser, bass, #2, #9 (1994)
Michael Moore, alto saxophone, #1 (10/10/2008)
Roswell Rudd, trombone, #4, #10 (1/9/2002)
Alex Ward, clarinet; Joe Williamson, bass, #5 (9/12/2010)
Alex Ward, clarinet; John Edwards, bass; Steve Noble, drums, #8 (3/7/2017)
All compositions created collectively by Mark Dresser (Del Dresser Music/ASCAP), Larry Ochs (Trobar/ASCAP/BMG) and Vladimir Tarasov (LATGAA)
Tracks Twelve Angry Jones and Three Jones Outside Ebbing, Missouri recorded live by Art Granoff in Berkeley, California, at the home of Harry Bernstein and Caren Meghreblian on May 28th, 2016
Other tracks recorded live by Tim Pinch in San Diego, California, at The Loft on May 24th, 2016
"I am doing what a woman can hardly ever do . . . , " wrote British world traveler Isabella Bird in an 1872 letter from Hawaii. "And I can fall, I can fall into anything." San Francisco Bay Area composer, acoustic bassist, and bandleader, Lisa Mezzacappa used those lines - and more from the writings of Bird and other women adventurers of the 19th and early 20th centuries - to fashion lyrics for her ten-part "panoramic song cycle for improvisers." Sung by the extraordinary vocalist Fay Victor, those two lines might also be taken to reflect Mezzacappa's place in the world of progressive and avant-garde jazz. With Victor's voice at the core, and musical ideas percolating up from the texts, Mezzacappa tailored the open-ended structure of Glorious Ravage to the gifts, sensibilities, and personalities of the individual musicians. That required her to develop a bigger compositional framework than she had ever built before, and one that could both reflect and refract the multifaceted stories and personas of the women she met in her research and meet the challenge of keeping the composition, in her words, "open to the kind of collective wisdom that emerges from any given musical community."
Mezzacappa has written that initial inspiration for her work "comes from a messy, unfocused, overwhelming, brilliant, seductive, and terrifying pool of sensations, ideas, gut reactions, intellectual concerns, moral ambiguities." From that pool has bubbled up something that retains many of those qualities, but that also manifests focus, chemistry, communication, and an emergent sense of both order and transcendence. Glorious Ravage is a musical exploration of what is possible. Soaring with it can trigger an experience of the sublime, similar to the altitude sickness that Isabella Bird, Ida Pfeiffer, and Annie Smith Peck fell into during their lofty adventures, an ecstatic mind state South Americans called veta or soroche. When Bird wrote in her letter from Hawaii, "This is the height of the last and most glorious ravage," she could not have foreseen that Lisa Mezzacappa would bring us another of equal magnificence.
All compositions by Mark Dresser (Del Dresser Music / ASCAP)
„Invocation Umea” and „Threaded” recorded live on 29th October, 2016 at Umea Jazz Festival / sound engineer - Johan Hyttnäs / producer - Maurice Mogard
Other compositions recorded on 17th February, 2017 at University of California, San Diego, Department of Music, Studio A by Andrew Munsey
Mixed and mastered by Andrew Munsey
Cover painting “Pavilion of the Eight Heavens” by Bahar Behbahani - BaharBehbahani.com
Featuring an all-star multi-generational cast with flutist Nicole Mitchell, clarinetist Marty Ehrlich, trombonist Michael Dessen, pianist Joshua White, drummer Jim Black, and newcomer David Morales Boroff on violin.
Featuring an all-star multi-generational cast with flutist Nicole Mitchell, clarinetist Marty Ehrlich, trombonist Michael Dessen, pianist Joshua White, drummer Jim Black, and newcomer David Morales Boroff on violin.
Mark Dresser makes music in a vast variety of settings and contexts, but the dauntingly prolific bassist always seeks to create space for the unpredictable play between form and freedom. On his new album Sedimental You, slated for release on Clean Feed in early November 2016, he’s assembled an astonishingly creative cast that embraces the intuitive and emotionally charged nature of his improvisational imperative. Riveting, playful and often revelatory, his compositions emerge out of a shifting matrix of specific musical personalities and the often dismaying swirl of current events.
Working with a supremely gifted septet, Dresser brings together emerging talent and revered veterans from East and West Coast scenes. In many ways, Sedimental You builds directly on orchestrational concepts he’s been exploring in smaller ensembles, and relationships he’s honed via telematic connections (which enable musicians in different locations to perform live in real time via high speed/high bandwidth links.)
None of the music is programmatic, but the porous nature of the compositions means that the world’s joys and woes seep in. Mocking denunciations and ache-filled reveries flow into open-hearted evocations of beloved colleagues, both departed and still very much with us. Dresser notes that he always writes with specific musicians in mind, “and I really had Marty’s clarinet sound in my ear. I’ve had lots of groups with Michael Dessen, who’s a virtuoso trombonist and an invaluable collaborator in my groups and telematic projects. And Jim Black is a force of nature, who I worked with most often in New York and on Japanese tours as the rhythm section for Satoko Fujii.”
Dresser started working with Nicole Mitchell after she joined the faculty up the road at UC Irvine, a relationship expanded by collaboration via telematics. He’s played several high profile concerts in her ensembles, and she’s become an important part of his West Coast quintet. “She’s a wonderfully open collaborator, a great soloist, with superb musicianship and a buoyant musical spirit.” Dresser says.
San Diego pianist Joshua White is a rapidly rising star who’s toured internationally with Rudresh Mahanthappa's Bird Calls project. With a potent array of influences at his fingertips, from gospel and spirituals to free improvisation, he quickly fell in with Dresser after the bassist moved to town and discovered “an amazing talent with incredible ears and intuition,” Dresser says. “He’s a fearless improviser whose musical instincts I completely trust.”
The album’s wild card is violinist David Morales Boroff, the youngest player on the project. In a serendipitous connection, he’s the son of esteemed folk guitarist Phil Boroff, who happened to give Dresser’s mother guitar lessons back in the 1970s. “David's got a freaky ear,” Dresser says. “I’d give him one of my tunes and he’d be at the piano reharmonizing it. He has a beautiful violin sound and a soulful lyricism that belies his age "
The album opens with “Hobby Lobby Horse,” a tricky tune built from bass line up with a derisive hitch in the groove. The title track slyly refers to the 1932 Tommy Dorsey hit “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You.” Drawing on the cadences of the original, he recalibrated the harmony to evoke its sound and mood. The heart of the album is “Will Well (For Roswell Rudd),” a startlingly tender piece that Dresser conceived with the trombone legend (and frequent collaborator) in mind. He first played the tune in a trio with White and drummer Kjell Nordeson, but this extended version brings out everyone’s sumptuous lyricism, particularly when Mitchell’s throaty alto flute winds around Ehrlich’s woody bass clarinet. “It’s an incantation of sorts for Roswell,” Dresser says.
Dresser’s strikingly beautiful tribute “I Can Smell You Listening (for the late Alexandra Montano)” evokes the boundless spirit of the extraordinary mezzo-soprano who contributed memorably on the 2005 Dresser/Denman Maroney album Time Changes (Cryptogramophone). An extended melodic line that rises and falls, fades and reappears, the tune features some of Ehrlich’s most ravishing clarinet work. He offers a different kind of lament with "Newtown Char,” a piece he created in response to the unfathomable massacres in Connecticut and Charleston, SC. Structurally and emotionally, it’s the album’s centerpiece, a plaintive unfurling melody keyed to the thick, woody sound of Ehrlich’s bass clarinet. The album closes with the brief, elegiac theme “Two Handfuls of Peace (for Daniel Jackson),” a celebration of the revered San Diego tenor saxophonist who died in 2014 at 77.
Amidst a steady flow of recent albums, Sedimental You stands out as Dresser’s most ambitious work as a bandleader. April saw the release of The Moscow Improvisations by Jones Jones, a volatile collective trio with Russian percussionist Vladimir Tarasov and ROVA saxophonist Larry Ochs. And in March the talent laden SLM Ensemble released Source (Liminal Music), a large group project co-led and conducted by Sarah Weaver featuring masters such as vocalist Jen Shyu, flutist Robert Dick, percussionist Gerry Hemmingway, and saxophonists Jane Ira Bloom and Marty Ehrlich.
Born in Los Angeles, Dresser has been a creative force since he first started gaining attention in the early '70s with Stanley Crouch's Black Music Infinity, a free jazz ensemble that included Bobby Bradford, Arthur Blythe, James Newton, and David Murray. He earned a BA and MA from UC San Diego studying contrabass with Bertram Turetzky. While on a Fulbright in Italy studying with maestro Franco Petracchi, Dresser was recruited by Anthony Braxton for his celebrated quartet with Gerry Hemingway and pianist Marilyn Crispell. Dresser made the move to New York in 1986 and spent a decade touring and recording with the reed visionary. A ubiquitous force on the Downtown scene, he worked widely with masters such as Ray Anderson, Tim Berne, Anthony Davis, and John Zorn.
A prolific composer and recording artist, Dresser developed many pieces for the Arcado String Trio, and Tambastics, while receiving numerous commissions and recording his original scores for several classic silent films, including The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
Since returning to Southern California in 2004 to join the UCSD music faculty he’s maintained creative relationships with many of his New York associates, though the move west coincided with his renewed focus on solo bass performance and telematic research. Recommitted to working with larger groups, he’s once again the catalyst for a roiling creative community, work that earned him a prestigious Doris Duke Impact Award in 2015. More than impactful, Sedimental You is music to recharge your ears, agitate your soul, and open your mind.
Simon Nabatov / Mark Dresser / Dominik Mahnig - Equal Poise (2016)
Halfway through last year the album was released ‘Projections’ of Russia, in Germany, to dwell pianist Simon Nabatov and American bassist Mark Dresser. “Projections” was recorded on May 31, 2014 in the LOFT in Cologne and on the same day is also “Equal Poise ‘down which the two experienced jazz musicians assisted by the young Swiss drummer Dominik Mahnig.
Nabatov and Dresser are so experienced that the setting in which they did not play their instrument seems to matter. Adaptability is phenomenal, but both also press undeniably their own (way) mark on the musical event. Fortunately does Mahnig on this record: he is remarkably present and plays in the service of the harmony of the trio.
The title ‘Equal Poise “is well chosen: there is equilibrium between the three musicians and the music they produce. As in the liner notes to the album is expressed, there are no predictable solo spots, no ego trips, no discernible stylistic dogma, only make the pure joy of the music of three like-minded souls. The trio makes these words completely true, but it also leads to interesting music? Well, you bet.
Triplet can superficial listening jazz sometimes neat, even elegant sound like the piano sounds in the opening of Full Circles, but tension built up and discharged and there is room for disruption. The musical structure is not free but loose and the game view is as free as possible within this loose structure. Excesses come welcome moments and tackle invariably paid off.
The technical skills of these three musicians are, not surprisingly. Nabatov plays with apparently playful ease one after another sparkling piano tune, thereby laying a refined sense of melody to the day. The dynamics in his playing is matchless; he knows, always well placed, firm and recover percussive, but even in those passages he shows his melodic class.
Dresser shows just like in ‘Projections’ highly versatile and accommodating as well as oppositional. His warm, round tone alternates with capricious bass-game. Mahnigs drumming is inventive without being too flashy; he uses the capabilities of the full drum kit and he also uses some attributes, but it is not a musical box of tricks which he opens.
Five pieces Equal Poise “and knows all five shows the trio how resourceful it makes music, how well they listen to each other and give each other space, all in order to achieve the best possible sound together as a trio. Of course there are here and some brief solo and duospots but which are ultimately in the service of the common game. The interaction is truly fabulous and Equal Poise ‘after’ Projections’, and with many thanks to Mahnig, the second grandiose CD Nabatov and Dresser in a few months time.
Being Playing is a musical landscape that organically unfolds as a meditative story. The form is abstract and closer to the way of a modern classical composer than of straight ahead jazz.
This recording is a personal milestone for each of the musicians and opens up a new musical chapter in their musical odyssey.
The musicians come from different musical backgrounds, but do nevertheless have a clear mutual idea of how music has it’s own strong inner life, without the appearance of the musicians ego.
Mark Dresser is a legend in American improvised music and groundbreaking on the double bass, which he has given an entirely new voice. After many years of living in New York playing with Anthony Braxton, Tim Berne, Ray Andersson and John Zorn, he is now a professor at San Diego University where he met Butch Lacy 35 years ago.
Butch played at the time with Sarah Vaughan’s trio but shortly after he moved to Denmark where he has been living since. He has transformed the Danish jazz environment in many ways with his playing, as well as his charismatic teaching at conservatories all over the country. Butch Lacy has composed for both symphony orchestra and big band, and his Very Big Band. A combination of both was an important musical experiment in Denmark.
Jesper Løvdal is too young to have been taught by Butch Lacy in Copenhagen, but he was highly fascinated by his spiritual playing from a young age and has been playing duo with him for 10 years. When Mark Dresser, Butch Lacy and Jesper Løvdal met for a concert in Copenhagen where magic occurred from the first sound, it was a necessity to go into the studio and bring the young drummer that originally brought Butch and Jesper together, Kresten Osgood. Osgood has his roots in jazz but plays with an universal artistic expression which lives very much in the present moment, and melts together with the rest of the band.
Being Playing is a musical landscape that organically unfolds as a meditative story. The form is abstract and closer to the way of a modern classical composer than of straight ahead jazz.
This recording is a personal milestone for each of the musicians and opens up a new musical chapter in their musical odyssey.
The musicians come from different musical backgrounds, but do nevertheless have a clear mutual idea of how music has it’s own strong inner life, without the appearance of the musicians ego.
Mark Dresser is a legend in American improvised music and groundbreaking on the double bass, which he has given an entirely new voice. After many years of living in New York playing with Anthony Braxton, Tim Berne, Ray Andersson and John Zorn, he is now a professor at San Diego University where he met Butch Lacy 35 years ago.
Butch played at the time with Sarah Vaughan’s trio but shortly after he moved to Denmark where he has been living since. He has transformed the Danish jazz environment in many ways with his playing, as well as his charismatic teaching at conservatories all over the country. Butch Lacy has composed for both symphony orchestra and big band, and his Very Big Band. A combination of both was an important musical experiment in Denmark.
Jesper Løvdal is too young to have been taught by Butch Lacy in Copenhagen, but he was highly fascinated by his spiritual playing from a young age and has been playing duo with him for 10 years. When Mark Dresser, Butch Lacy and Jesper Løvdal met for a concert in Copenhagen where magic occurred from the first sound, it was a necessity to go into the studio and bring the young drummer that originally brought Butch and Jesper together, Kresten Osgood. Osgood has his roots in jazz but plays with an universal artistic expression which lives very much in the present moment, and melts together with the rest of the band.
