Steve Swell - Music for Six Musicians: Hommage à Olivier Messiaen (SILKHEART RECORDS 2018)

From Stephen Rush's liner notes:

« What we have here is new music. Free music. Ellington and Armstrong were right in not wanting to call it anything else but Music. Why put it in a sub-category? This belongs with the best of any new music, period. And this new music is created (with the assistance of Swell’s scores and direction) by an ensemble that knows how to both play and listen geometric and mystical constructions: some preconceived by the skillful pen of Steve Swell and some spontaneously shaped and formed. Lean in. Listen again. And swim upstream and down with the band – it’s completely worth it. » 

Ann Arbor, July 2017

1. Opening 24:41

2. Sextet for the End of Democracy 12:26

3. Vautour Fauve 14:53

4. Joy and the Remarkable Behavior of Time 14:50

5. Exit the Labyrinth 09:27

Rob Brown alto saxophone

Steve Swell trombone, aerophone

Jason Kao Hwang violin, viola, electronics

Robert Boston piano, organ

Tomas Ulrich cello

Jim Pugliese drums, percussion

Steve Swell's Kende Dreams - Hommage à Bartók (SILKHEART RECORDS 2018)

From John Corbett's liner notes: 

« Trombonist Steve Swell's approach to a Bartók homage on Kende Dreams is a synthesis and it advisably leaves the encounter with the Hungarian a relatively loose and oblique affair, with specific points of convergence but an end product that feels more like it was inspired by the composer than obliged to adopt his methods. The seven tracks are creative music pitched at the highest level; as is that music's unalienable right, it absorbs and transforms things that it comes into contact with. So, unlike Milhaud's attempts to quote or characterize jazz, this is jazz eating and fully digesting modern classical music, turning it into something else completely. » 

Chicago, April 2015

1. Roswellian Folk Song 07:57

2. For Will Connell Jr. 07:51

3. After SQ4 09:59

4. Attack of the Mikrokosmos 08:12

5. Bartók Screams 13:40

6. Lent-Oh! 14:09

7. Ultima 08:34

Rob Brown alto saxophone

Steve Swell trombone

Connie Crothers piano

William Parker bass

Chad Taylor drums

Various Artists - Spirit of New Jazz (SILKHEART RECORDS 2018)

"We'd like to thank you at Silkheart for making the best compilation album of any kind that we've ever heard." 

Rick Petrie, WITR/FM 89.7 Rochester Institute of Technology, N.Y., April 1993

Through the long and rich history of jazz there have been a handful of labels that have defined their own jazz era. In the 1920s it was pioneering labels like Paramount and Vocalion, in the 1930s it was Decca and Bluebird. In the post-War era, with the creative burst of Bop and Progressive jazz, it was labels like Dial and Roost and Prestige and Blue Note that gave the musicians their first place to be heard. Now, in a new jazz era, it's a new label, Silkheart, that's giving us the sound of today's break-through musicians who are defining jazz in their time.

On Silkheart you'll hear artists like Charles Gayle, William Hooker, David Ware, Matt Shipp, Ahmed Abdullah, Charles Brackeen, Rob Brown, Charles Tyler, and Steve Lacy, and this is the only kind of music you'll hear on Silkheart. This is a label that's dedicated to the new music and its creators.

Silkheart is the result of a collaboration between two enthusiasts who have spent years hearing and evaluating what is happening in today's jazz. The studio production is in the hands of Keith Knox, who is well known as a jazz writer and critic and as producer of some of the most adventurous music to be found anywhere. He produced artists like Okay Temiz for the World Jazz catalog of Sonet Records, and he brought Charles Tyler to Storyville Records for two breakthrough albums.

The final decisions on what to record are made with his partner, Swedish jazz lover Lars-Olof Gustavsson, who spent many years in New York soaking up jazz in the era of loft music and free jazz. Lars seems to spend as much time in New York as he does in Sweden, and he is just as involved in the NewYork jazz club scene today. It is this personal involvement in the new jazz that makes Silkheart unique, and gives the music on Silkheart its immediacy in today's jazz world.

Sam Charters

1. Ahmed Abdullah Quartet - Reflections on a Mystic 5:12

2. Michael Bisio Quartet - A.M. 5.28

3. Charles Brackeen Quartet - House of Gold 9:04

4. Booker T. Trio - What a Friend We Have in Jesus 5:38

5. David S. Ware Trio - An Ancient Formula 5:45

6. Dennis Charles Triangle - Afro-Amer. Ind 7:15

7. Charles Gayle Trio - Eternal Now 7:32

8. Ethnic Heritage Ensemble - Ancestral Song 5:43

9. Joel Futterman Quartet - Reality on Edge 7:51

10. Rob Brown Trio - Escape Velocity 6:36

11. Dennis Gonzalez Quartet - Boi Fuba 3:03

12. Other Dimensions in Music - Spirits Rise/Fall 6:13

Matthew Shipp Quartet - Points (SILKHEART RECORDS 2018)

"What extraordinary originality. This delectable recording proves the vivacity and the persistence of free jazz." 

Xavier Daverat, Jazz Magazine, May 1993

"Skeptics who think so-called 'free' music lacks definable theme and variations would do well to listen to titles like Afro Sonic, a gentle yet confident piece of swirling beauty, and Piano Pyramid, in which Shipp's lower register work and Parker's bass, dark as shadows, take a sparsely noted theme through rustling variations. The group is also graced by the tart beauty of Rob Brown's alto, and Whit Dickey's sensitive drumming. Silkheart and Shipp should be proud." 

Reuben Jackson, Jazz Times, April 1993

Points 1 and 2 = Music as thought, language, image, paint. Matthew Shipp, composer, conductor, pianist and leader, cites the following influences in Points 1 and 2: Andrew Hill, Duke Ellington, Nina Simone, Hasaan, Scriabin and Debussy. There is in this piece an underlying sense and distillation of the jazz language and how it works. Its overall concept is to utilize the jazz ensemble to create a structured yet open-ended landscape, which, though impressionistic, uses a language common to jazz, infusing the work with a moody often ominously shifting atmosphere. Thus this piece, while creating events, has those same events dissolve instantaneously like vanishing points. Stability within the instability of the infrastructure is continually maintained.

There is a constant feeling of "tension and release". The events within this ensemble piece deal with obsession (i.e. search). The music reflects upon these events which are in themselves one event that is constantly rearranging itself. Some of these concepts come from the composer's deep involvement with mysticism. 

To achieve the type of quantum-poetic landscape that Shipp was seeking required other influences besides those cited above. One being the most adventurous of Herbie Hancock's electronic endeavors, though Shipp himself does not use electronics in any way.

Another is Coltrane's concept of Cosmic Music, without trying to imitate or duplicate Coltrane's sound. And still another is the Miles Davis Quintet of Shorter – Hancock – Williams – Carter. Specifically, Nefertiti, where the postbop sound is always present but remains conspicuously below the surface and is used as a constant manipulative force upon the top layers of the music.

Does this piece swing? Shipp replies with a definite "YES"... But it swings with a freely improvised manipulation of the language. Did the avant-garde of the sixties influence this music? Again the answer is "YES". But according to Shipp, his music and its structure is light years away. Though it ventures into areas not touched upon by most musicans of that era, it sometimes employs that period as a backdrop to further explore the medium's possibilities. He further states that this is not meant to negate their accomplishments nor to enhance his own, but he feels that overall his music is more multi-dimensional, as one might well gather from this recording.

Two painterly influences upon Shipp's work are: Jackson Pollock for his lyricism, space, organic form and body; and Mark Rothko for his chromatic color fields and religious brightness. Points absorbs the darkness with light, but does not consume it. It never allows one attribute to become so important as to outweigh another. 

Is this music more Intellectual than Emotional? Shipp states that, "It takes a lot of Emotions to be Intellectual", though one must sometimes exhibit what might be interpreted as detachment." 

What is the role of the conductor here?

"TIMING". Shipp goes onto explain that the piece was graphed out according to the language of each individual player (at the very least, distilled aspects of their playing) and then handed back to them on these graphs with each event having a specific numerical value. He conducted from the piano and had worked the conducting out in advance in the form of a kinetic grid which included and indexed the number of events, thus leading to the configuration of instruments coming together to create a musical force.

The piano orchestrally feeds the soloists material as in Ellington and Cecil Taylor, and also sets up moods for each section within the landscape. The overall effect is an intense foray into a dark world of myth and legend that is at once majesterial, decadent, and aboriginal. 

Points 1 and 2 are stories compiled and passed down through time. Distorted, eerie, hauntingly beautiful and brilliant tellings of logic, truth and illogicality. They are a part of, and an examination of, the Legend of LIFE and the LIFEforce itself. We are continually shown glimpses of what lies ahead but are never presented with any conclusive data. We are never told whether we will learn any more than we knew when we began out journey. We are hearing stories filled with lyrical fire, told at night. We are never made to feel safe, never given a moment's ease or a hint of reward, even at the music's most relaxed moments.

The players fill the landscape, but never crowd it or each other. Like all great tales this piece tempts us with reality while weaving a web of fabrication. Each long section is divided into smaller passages. Beginnings with no endings. Rob Brown's alto suddenly and almost imperceptibly announcing its presence, quickly building to short shrill calls, then just as suddenly fading into the thinness of a moon in the morning sky. Endings with no beginnings. Shipp's sudden shifts from bluesy to brooding to classically elegant, all hung like strips of short-circuiting lights.

All the pieces, like the puzzle itself, fade into non-conclusions yet give us an overall feeling of shaky fulfillment. All form a network that, in the end, leaves the listener content to be at home listening while infusing him/her with a deep sense of wanderlust. 

Shipp has incorporated an exoticism into his writing that is a perfect blend of African, African-American and European melody and feeling. His flourishes hint at Chopin. His singular blows to the ivories, particularly in the lower register (one of Shipp's favorite places to be), are like a tribal-drum laying the foundation.

The mood of the piece is the set in an Ellingtonian/Stravinsky-esque manner. Parker and Dickey create an intimate and often grating mixture of spatial swimming. Parker's bowing is magnificent throughout. The musicians turn round each other like hunters before the hunt, locked in the deliberate steps of a ritualistic dance. They rise and fall together and separately, in series upon series of never-ending cliffhangers.

This quartet is a fiercely integrated unit. There is a mutual give and take. The whole is equal to its parts. The soaring upward. The diving downward. The purpose and sincerity toward to the music is shared by all and is unparalleled by most working groups today. It brings to mind the tightness and precision of historic groups led by Coltrane, Ayler, Miles Davis, and Brubeck. The moods swing from the monastery to the madhouse within infinitesimal time-frames. We are led into a fathomless dark field of spectrum and spectres by harsh pleas and seductive whispers. The legend and search, like space and time, continue. The soul of the godhead is pierced. The unattainable goal is to share its secrets. To reach the light within, while remaining insulated by this deep camaraderie.

There is a new drive here. BOP, BLUES, BACH, and BEOWULF. 

Jazz as an art form possesses limitless possibilities. Only too often, however, musicians create artificial boundaries within that limitlessness due to constraining technical facility, lack of musical understanding or awareness, or simply to fit more comfortably into what is considered to be the commercial mainstream. 

Aside from a few notable exceptions, jazz has been trapped within these man-made walls of convention, almost completely devoid of experimentation. This music and the performers of the Matthew Shipp Quartet, have, on the other hand, pushed back another fold within that infinite space.

For Matthew Shipp, age 29, this endeavor denotes a hallmark in music and has been a satisfying extension of his thought. It is now time for you, the listener, to partake in this satisfaction. 

The other pieces on this date are as follows: 

Afro-Sonic: written with the primary purpose of augmenting African rhythm and showcasing the polyrhythmic improvising power of William Parker. It was inspired by Randy Weston and utilizes the repetitive thematic pattern of a talking drum as its backbone. A frenzied tapestry is woven through a fugue-like underpinning. It is the wild awakenings of night as both night and day intertwine and become one for an instant. Of major import to Shipp at this point in his career is the incorporation and extension of the structures of African music within the jazz ensemble.

Piano Pyramid: this piece Shipp indicates is to present the trio in a true tradition as "best exemplified by Bud Powell". It is strong and solid. Each layer is cemented by Dickey's brilliant brushwork and each brick carefully placed by Shipp and Parker.

About the musicians on this date:

Wiliam Parker is the veteran of the group and one of the foremost upright bassists in the world today. He is a fine leader and composer in his own right and has been the bassist in the Cecil Taylor Unit for ten years. Some recent recordings which feature him on this label alone, include Other Dimensions to Music (Silkheart 120), Breath Rhyme (Silkheart 122) which is Rob Brown's masterful trio date, and David S. Ware's trio (Silkheart 113) and quartet (Silkheart 127, 128) sessions. Parker's playing on this recording is exemplary.

Rob Brown has enjoyed a long musical association with Shipp. His playing maintains a lyrical sweetness, despite its overwhelming thrust and intensity. It always exhibits an exhilarating tension along with an unswerving beauty and dryness. At age 28, Brown carries with him a tradition that few dare venture into.

Whit Dickey, age 36. This, Dickey's first recording, proves a major breakthrough. It gives us back the security of knowing that drummers can speak and listen at the same time, never overpowering the other players, but always being heard. He bought his first drum kit in 1976 and later, after hearing Elvin Jones and Sunny Murray vowed to be a modern jazz drummer. Dickey's playing, like his own assessment of this music, is "loose, swinging and alive, yet allusive and full of mind-jolting surprises". He possesses the ability to weave two distinct yet complimentary rhythms together, within a given time signature. Dickey is a major new voice. 

Steve Dalachinsky
NYC/Paris, 1990/91

1. Points Number Two 20:45

2. Afro Sonic 05:40

3. Piano Pyramid 10:09

4. Points Number One 34:24

Matthew Shipp piano / conductor

Rob Brown alto saxophone

William Parker bass

Whit Dickey drums

Rob Brown Trio - Breath Rhyme (SILKHEART RECORDS 2018)

"Breath Rhyme establishes a high level of creativity right from the first few minutes of Firewalk and maintains it for over an hour. This is one of the best trio record I've heard in some time. It makes a strong case for Brown's place amongst today's better alto improvisers and is another unqualified winner for Silkheart. His Breath Rhyme is an artistic triumph." 

Carl Baugher, Cadence, May 1991

Watching this trio in the studio was fascinating. For a fledgling leader, Rob Brown was almost eerily calm. (Technically this is his second album, but his first – Sonic Explorations, co-led with pianist Matt Shipp, for Cadence Jazz – had been privately recorded and then sold. So this was his first real studio date.) Brown quietly went over cues and solo orders with his rhythm section, and proceeded methodically from one composition to the next without pausing for many playbacks. He was undistracted by the trickle of kibitzers and fellow musicians (like tenorist Frank Lowe) who stopped by to check him out. But when Brown took up his alto and hollered on his horn – he'd lean back, bending his knees and rising on his toes, like a basket player at the foul line – another side of him poured forth. It's as if there's a part of him down deep only music can touch.

Drummer Dennis Charles is animated by nature, but on the days this album was taped he was even more up than usual – the day before, he'd finished recording his own debut as leader (Silkheart SHCD 121). Listening to a playback of "Firewalk" in the booth, he did an ecstatic Monkish shuffle, letting out with an occasional "Oh Yeah! William!" or "Keep that one!" You can hear that enthusiasm in his drumming, just as you can hear his West Indian background in his beats and rhythm. You can hear the shape of a composition there too – Dennis called for a retake of one tune because he wasn't thinking of the melody when he soloed.

By contrast, William Parker is peaceful and steady – the band's anchor when Brown and Charles spin off on tangents. But like Brown, he may reveal another side when he plays – as on "Beehive," one of the greatest displays of manic/controlled bowing I've heard or seen. It makes a case for Parker as the greatest arco bassist in jazz (as do his overtone manipulations on "Stillness"). For that matter, he's one of the greatest jazz bassists, period. 

A few weeks later, Rob Brown sat in a park near his home on NY's Lower East Side, and talked about the road he's taken from Hampton, Virginia (where he was born in 1962) to fronting a trio with two of the best rhythm players in the music. This is some of what he said:

"When I started playing saxophone at 12 or 13, I took it for granted I'd always be a musician – I didn't think it was strange, I just wanted to play. I wanted to play in big bands. Then I got into bebop when I was in high school. I used to listen to Bird records, and read biographies of all the bebop people – I read Bird Lives three or four times, as corny as that book is. I wanted to get into everything that had to do with the music, expecially interview material – it'd give me ideas. Some books I read later that I really liked were A.B. Spellman's Four Lives in the Behop Business, Val Wilmer's As Serious As Your Life, Amiri Baraka's Black Music, which has a chapter on Dennis Charles, and J.C. Thomas' Chasin' the Trane, which has interview material with my teacher, Dennis Sandole." 

Brown spent some of his college years in Boston, at Berklee. "I took an ensemble performance class with John LaPorta. I learned a lot about attitudes toward music from John – not to be inhibited or afraid to make mistakes. 'You'll learn as you play so don't be afraid to go after something that may seem to be out of your reach.' Joe Viola was my saxophone teacher, and he gave me a lot of help with my sound. But they didn't have much of a direct musical influence – I was learning mostly from playing and listening to records. I listened to a lot of Sonny Rollins – not the trio recordings orginally, though now they're my favorite Rollins. And I listened to Ornette, though I'm not really familiar with his trio LPs. I was more into the earlier stuff, the Atlantics and the Hillcrest sessions with Paul Bley.

"The only teacher who had a lot of influence on me conceptually was Dennis Sandole. Three or four years ago, after I'd been in New York a year, I'd take the train to Philly once a week to study with him, for a year and a half. He's a really great teacher – Coltrane, James Moody, Art Farmer and Tommy Flanagan were some of his students. His whole method is very well thought out, very comprehensive. He takes musical materials and puts them together in endless ways, ever and ever more complex. He gave me a real framework to keep working on my own, putting in my own material.

"Before that, I'd studied briefly with Lee Konitz at NYU – less than a semester. But what he'd been trying to teach me was very different from what I'd been working on. Lee wanted me to play Louis Armstrong solos, and though I realized the value of that, I was headed in a different direction, and found that approach stifling at the time. I'd been listening to Albert Ayler, Jimmy Lyons and Roscoe Mitchell. I always liked Jimmy Lyons, but never considered him a big influence – I was much more aware of Cecil Taylor. Roscoe was one of my biggest influences in a way, though I haven't really listened to him for years.

"At one point I totally cut myself off from playing anything reminiscent of traditional jazz. I felt like I had to start all over from a totally different premise, that it was necessary to develop my own vocabulary from which to improvise." 

So has he done it? "Well, yeah. It keeps going on, keeps expanding. I've developed my own language, maybe not radically different, but personal. For one thing, I think intervalically instead of harmonically – dealing with strings of intervals. As in bebop, the emphasis is on the line, but my lines are created by how the notes relate to each other, not to a chord sequence. Sometimes I write tunes that have chords, but they're tetrachords – groups of notes that happen to fall into chords. 

"I try to employ variations on as many musical elements as I can – rhythm, dynamics, timbre. I don't think in terms of traditional timekeeping, but sometimes I think my playing is rhythmically like a drum solo. I feel like I've had to create my own drums with the saxophone. When you don't have a regular tempo under you, you have to create your own pulse to sustain itself. But usually I think about all this stuff in a more intuitive way. 

"I first played with William Parker about three years ago, in a trio with drummer Frank Bambara. We'd rehearsed, and then William called me to play in his big band. A little while later, I put together the trio for a gig at the Knitting Factory; that's when I first played with both William and Dennis. I'd known Dennis was around, and had heard him play and I knew he and William had worked together a lot, with Jemeel Moondoc and some other bands. They'd even rehearsed as a duo for a while. And of course both have worked with Cecil Taylor, though not at the same time.

"To me, William is one of the greatest bass players – I've seen him do a lot of concerts where he'd do some amazing things. He plays in a lot of situations, but some don't show his talents. Dennis is a very interesting player because he comes from a straightahead kind of sound – he really digs Art Blakey – but has stretched that out, thinking in other terms besides the traditional. He really listens, and he's fun to work with. Unlike a lot of drummers in free situations, he doesn't overbear. His playing is very honest, simple but sincere. His playing starts from ideas, not showing of his technique – it's very well developed.

"On the record, I wanted to do a couple of different things – to make it compositional, and for the compositions to vary conceptually to get the whole spectrum of colors. I wanted to avoid just playing in a traditional melody-solos-melody format. We do some of that, but it's not the only thing. I wanted to make it clear that every tune had its own character. Records bother me when the compositions sound different but all the solo sections sound the same. I like to set up textures in advance – to conduct the group through textural changes. So I give William and Dennis an idea, and they do with it what they want. I might give William a melody to play with me, or a written bassline in counterpoint to the melody. But he may change it, which is okay – if it works, it doesn't matter." 

As we were wrapping up, I tell Brown what I've already told you: that the bluesy, hollering energy in his playing seems to come from some remote place – that he seems to tap into something elemental and spiritual. "I would never try to say that I'm a blues player. I have nothing against it, I just don't think in those terms. If it comes off that way it's 'cause people are hearing something I really feel." He mulls it over for a second. "Yeah, there's a spiritual thing there, definitely." 

Kevin Whitehead 
June 1989

Alto saxophonist/composer Rob Brown's music suggests a direct link with the naked expressionism of the 60's avant-garde. The trio interacts in such an intuitive fashion that it conveys improvisation on a level which recalls Cecil Taylor's notion of music being organic, a living entity. Brown's unyielding devotion to his art is also reminiscent of John Coltrane's onemindfulness; so much so that even the titles of this session's compositions were afterthoughts. Brown's compositions deal with the music in and of itself, rather than through any reference to personal experience. Finally, his dry piercing tone connects with an array of 60's players (Ayler, Charles Tyler) in its hard and sensual directness. But, far from being the avant-garde's Wynton Marsalis, Brown is an original talent whose music adds onto 'the tradition', rather than simply bathing in its glory.

"I don't think in terms of 'free', I like Albert Ayler for his sense of melody and his folk references. But my playing is different from music of that era because of its emphasis on an equal share of harmonic development and variation." For added points of reference, Brown cites Charlie Parker and the great Philadelphia teacher Dennis Sandole as being instrumental in his growth. It is the quality of 'growth' that Brown best exemplifies, be it in the firmly mature sense that he has of himself as a young artist or his daunting lyricism in the searing music found throughout this session.

I hope that Rob Brown continues to evolve this music. I hope too that he continues to maintain the fixed, poignant melodies that lie at its heart, the harmonic richness that elaborates on the past. I also hope that he continues to play with the likes of Charles and Parker, of course. "I have to play with people I trust," he insists.

I trust that on those terms you will enjoy both Rob Brown's bright future, and the music at hand here. 

Ludwig Van Trikt

1. Firewalk 10:56

2. Stillness 06:01

3. Breath Rhyme 07:35

4. PB 10:51

5. The Light 04:49

6. Beehive 11:34

7. Awake 07:31

8. Escape Velocity 06:38

Rob Brown alto saxophone

William Parker bass

Dennis Charles drums