Peggy Lee - Echo Painting (SONGLINES May 18, 2018)

“…an enchanting mix…engages the heart with the simple, majestic wave of beautiful music…difficult to categorize, difficult to describe…with each subsequent recording, the music reveals itself as part of one long masterstroke.” (Dave Sumner, Bird is the Worm)

Peggy Lee, the Vancouver-based cellist whose playing shines in many contexts, from classical and contemporary classical to creative jazz and improv, is also an extraordinary composer and bandleader. She is known especially for her octets, The Peggy Lee Band (1998- ) and Film in Music (2009- ), as well as Waxwing (2007- ) the trio she co-leads with Jon Bentley and west coast guitarist Tony Wilson (a bowl of sixty taxidermists, Songlines 2015). This new suite for ten players was commissioned by Coastal Jazz and Blues and premiered at the 2016 Vancouver International Jazz Festival. Designed as a one-off, the project has since taken on a life of its own.

The idea, says Lee, was “to bring together some of my longstanding band members with some of the younger players that I had recently begun to collaborate with. I wasn't thinking about specific instruments really, just the players that I was excited about working with. The name to me simply speaks of our efforts to make sense of our world through artistic practice... And of course there are echoes of much of the music that has been meaningful to me over the years.” (She cites Carla Bley and Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra as inspirations.) With many colors to draw upon, the music is multi-layered and texturally varied, featuring driving rhythmic vamps, incendiary improvisation and sometimes achingly beautiful melodic compositions.

The writing was mostly intuitive: “I worked out a loose plan designating areas for solos etc. But specific arrangements came together once we started playing and the direction that the solos took was completely up to the musicians…This band certainly has a lot in common with the sound of the Peggy Lee Band with the horns (Jon and Brad are in both ensembles), but adding violin and pedal steel creates another dimension. The Film in Music band feels quite different from both of these in that it was inspired by a particular show (Deadwood) and was meant to feature free improvisation in a more prominent way.”

Lee sees the distinctions between jazz and classical in her performing and writing as fluid: “I still work with the Vancouver Opera Orchestra and the new music ensemble Standing Wave and I feel that all this music is related to the music I make with improvisers. If the music moves me, whether it's a great melody by Puccini or Ennio Morricone or a cool texture notated by Nicole Lizée or a Brad Turner solo, it's all music and I don't care what you call it.”

As for the CD’s coda, The Band’s “The Unfaithful Servant”, “that's just a song that I've loved for a long time and always thought it would be a great vehicle for soloing of the right kind. We started by doing it as an instrumental but when it was time to record, I thought it would sound great with Robin and luckily she was game.”

Incantation

Out On a Limb

A Strange Visit

Nice Collection

Snappy

Painting Echoes

Foreground

The Hidden Piece

Hymn

WB Intro

Weather Building

End Piece

The Unfaithful Servant

Brad Turner, trumpet & flugelhorn

Jon Bentley, soprano & tenor saxophone

John Paton, tenor saxophone

Roderick Murray, trombone

Meredith Bates, violin

Peggy Lee, cello

Cole Schmidt, electric & acoustic guitar

Bradshaw Pack, pedal steel guitar

James Meger, electric & acoustic bass

Dylan van der Schyff, drums, percussion & Yamaha RX-15 drum machine

Robin Holcomb, voice (track 13)

All compositions by Peggy Lee except tracks 7 (Bates, Lee, Schmidt, Meger), 10 (Meger, van der Schyff) and 13, words and music by Robbie Robertson

Recorded and mixed in 24 bits/96kHz

Patrick Zimmerli Quartet - Clockworks (SONGLINES April 6, 2018)

Completing a 25-year compositional arc, saxophonist-composer Patrick Zimmerli releases his new jazz suite Clockworks following the release in 2016 of his first quartet’s 1992 recording Shores Against Silence (with Kevin Hays, Larry Grenadier and Tom Rainey). Both records feature rhythmically and melodically advanced composition largely inspired by Zimmerli’s love of serial composers such as Babbitt, Carter, Stockhausen and Boulez, though still grounded in a jazz ethos. Both explore a different third stream direction in jazz that Zimmerli made his own right from the start, and that for all its complexities compels attention first and foremost as music to be listened to.

The very structure of Clockworks is a reflection and summary of Zimmerli’s artistic path, an attempt to unveil the process whereby music can retain its message even as its technical means become simplified. Compared to Shores his style has modulated into something that a broader swath of the listening public could relate to, and the new release integrates the earlier ideas into the later style. “My main concern back then was in forging a new path that had a foundation in the jazz tradition but that was completely original. Newness is less of a priority as I grow older than simply taking listeners on a varied and satisfying emotional journey.” Then and now he considers his ultimate musical message to be optimistic and positive: “That might be the biggest thing that sets my music off from ‘mainstream’ avant-garde jazz.”

Clockworks (a Chamber Music America commission) was written specifically for Iverson and Hollenbeck, who were already performing with Zimmerli in the early 90s. In fact, the impetus for composing the suite goes back to a decades-long argument he and Iverson have had about his music: “I think Ethan has always seen me as representing a kind of moralistic absolute in jazz, and he was a fervid admirer of my early style (heard at its most highly developed on Explosion (1995) and Expansion (2000) as well as on Twelve Sacred Dances (1995), a quartet which included both Ethan and John). When I started writing music that was simpler and more understandable to the layperson, Ethan was one of the very few who objected. He seemed to feel that I had watered down my style or somehow sold out. But from my perspective, my classical/pop inflected music (Phoenix, 2005) was not about watering anything down, but rather using a different set of tools to convey essentially the same message.”

About his musical collaborators Zimmerli says, “This whole project can be seen as a testament to what an amazingly good sport Ethan is. He understands and accepts me with all my offbeat artistic sense of humor. Proof can be found all over the album, where he takes the extravagant forms I’ve concocted for him and plays over them in a style that fits them hand in glove. His improvisations are effectively internal compositions in themselves, full of wit and charm and purpose. My favourite example of this is the absolutely loving treatment he gives to “Harmonic Variation”, where he plays that gorgeous opening chorus before playing the written portion. As for John, he is like the composer’s-best friend-drummer, he makes your compositional ideas sound better than they are, and he effortlessly does things that not only fit but enhance the compositions themselves. And I really love Chris’s sound and the way he supports a band, and his improvising is so subtle you hardly notice how organic his ideas are to the compositions.”

Clockworks, as Zimmerli discusses in his liner note, “uses time as its basic material, it is an attempt to give time the kind of satisfying shape it so often lacks”. From another point of view, though, “Clockworks can be seen as a kind of elaborate justification of my stylistic evolution. There’s an overall progression from the abstract to the melodic that takes place over the course of the piece, just as there has been over the course of my career. The evolution involves a series of permutations of the main theme, which is heard in its most explicit form on the last track. The exact same notes are used in the first movement, which is not very melodic-sounding and might even seem freely-composed. I used the melody itself as a series and made it the basis of “Linear Variation”, which is another of the more “out” pieces on the CD. Gradually the theme settles—it matures—into its singable self.”

Clockworks was produced Grammy award-winner Seth Abramson (Jazz Standard).

A Scattering of Stars (Distension Variation)

Pendulum

Metric Variation

Waltz of the Polyrhythmic Palindrome

Linear Variation

The Center of the Clock

Entropic Variation

Boogaloo of the Polyrhythmic Palindrome

Harmonic Variation

Windup

A Scattering of Stars (Theme)

Patrick Zimmerli, tenor saxophone

Ethan Iverson, piano

Christopher Tordini, bass

John Hollenbeck, drums

All compositions by Patrick Zimmerli

Recorded live to 2-track in 24 bits / 96kHz

Gordon Grdina / François Houle / Kenton Loewen / Benoît Delbecq - Ghost Lights (SONGLINES 2017)

SONGLINES WILL RELEASE  GHOST LIGHTS ON JUNE 9

Album Introduces New Quartet, Expanding Grdina-Houle-Loewen Trio with the Addition of Benoit Delbecq

Gordon Grdina, guitar, electronics

François Houle, clarinet, electronics, loopers

Kenton Loewen, drums & percussion

Benoît Delbecq, piano & bass station

“The threesome navigated through a wider landscape of sound with meandering lyrical passages, encircling eerie plateaus and sudden about-turns into wild abysses triggering raucous rides and accumulation of sound that went hazy and eventually dissolved…” – Henning Bolte, AllAboutJazz, (reviewing a performance of Grdina/Houle/Loewen at Jazztopad 2016)

But when they added Benoît Delbecq the music became something else again.

François Houle explains: “As Benoît and I were looking at opportunities for the duo [established in 1996], Ken Pickering [Vancouver jazz festival artistic director] suggested we merge this with the trio collective [formed in 2014, though its members have been performing in different Grdina groups since around 2004]. Knowing how Benoît’s playing fits into so many different configurations, I thought this would work nicely. I suggested he bring his bass station to augment the lower end of the quartet.” Two performances at the 2015 festival led to a return engagement in 2016 followed by a day in the studio. “The whole session unfolded quite spontaneously, with hardly any discussion between takes. Gord suggested we play my piece ‘Soro’ as he knew Benoît’s affinity for African rhythms in his piano approach. Benoît brought out “Broken World”, written shortly after the terrorist attack at the Bataclan in Paris. We tried it and found it to be a beautiful, haunting piece. The rest was completely improvised, and took us into the most unexpected musical spaces, with generous room for all to participate in the music making.” The longest take (not on the record) went on for 31 minutes!

So this is music that takes its time, as Benoît notes: “It’s music with slow motion, with nothing spectacular or demonstrative. But delicate…We let the flow of improvisation be at play and it held us in a creative mode…I think the strength comes from the collective aspect of the craft. This is why I play music – to share some states of grace with my peers; it’s an incredible feeling to experience a common way to conceive sound fabrics collectively.” François agrees: “It speaks to the really broad scope of experiences by this collective. We can move from one musical state to the next with seemingly little effort, while trusting that the others will not only anticipate the next move, but also pave the way for this to happen at any given moment.”

In music like this, texture is as important as structure, and electronics play their role in Gord’s playing, which features rich-sounding octave-doubling. François uses loopers to similar effect: “I'm interested in opening up the vertical range of the clarinet and treating it as a chordal instrument rather than a monophonic one. I consider my work with loops a sort of extension of my playing with two clarinets simultaneously.” Benoît doesn’t employ his looping software here, but his bass station has its own sensuous sine waves and filters: “It’s just a basic (two oscillators) analog synth made by Novation in the early 90s. I mostly use it in the lower register and I love the feel of it. I’ve always liked the mixture of electronics and ‘bio’ sounds such as prepared piano or regular piano…What I like in how the guys play is that we all sound like we’re processed even when we might not be using electronics, because our concern for sound production is very advanced.”

“Waraba” is dedicated to the late bassist (and kora and sanza player) Jean-Jacques Avenel, whose 2004 west African jazz release on Songlines, Waraba, Benoît produced. Benoît started working with JJ in 1998, and JJ was a member of the trio Delbecq 3 The Sixth Jump from 2008 until his death. “Anyone who played with Jean-Jacques and shared his love for African music has been deeply imprinted by JJ’s joy, expertise, and world-class musicianship…I still feel his presence when I play, and when I vamp layers on the prepared piano I could keep going forever, like Manding musicians who have another idea of time and duration in music…All of us in this band are strongly related with traditional music from all continents, and the momentum of the music we played found itself naturally.”

“Waraba” ends the record on a hopeful and almost joyous or at least somewhat peaceful note, but the music has moved though many other spaces to get there. The aesthetic is liminal: music that’s on the verge of becoming something else, crossing boundaries that are undefined and intuitive. This applies to the subtle way instruments and instrumental lines merge and separate, the range of harmony/atonality, rhythmic and energetic aspects (from near-stasis to turbulence), different emotional resonances – and finally the way the music engages the listener’s attention in a play of foreground/background, active listening and trance-like immersion.

More information on Grdina-Houle-Lowen can be found here.   Benoit Delbecq's website is delbecq.net. Read an interview with Houle and Delbecq about Ghost Lights on Songlines website.

Ryan Blotnick - Kush (SONGLINES 2016)

“Blotnick has an original and distinctive voice on the guitar…a great late-night album and a goldmine of inspiration for guitarists in a wide range of styles.”

– Delarue, Lucid Culture (Reviewing Solos, Volume 1)

In his new album of original compositions, East-coast guitarist Ryan Blotnick mines a bittersweet melodic/harmonic vein balanced by an African-influenced rhythmic elan. Conceived as an antidote to the more aggressive forms of New York jazz, Kush offers freshly-minted waltzes, haunting ballads and more than a touch of Frisellian Americana, as well as a variety of grooves combining jazz and African feels. Ryan comments: “I think a lot of ‘modern’ cats look outside of themselves for direction and this music is more introspective even though it reaches out to the audience very directly.” New York saxophonist Michael Blake (with three releases on Songlines, most recently Fulfillment), a longtime Blotnick mentor and collaborator, is the perfect foil, contributing his own blend of lyricism, heat, and harmonic depth. Also integral to the record’s success is the buoyant yet laid-back rhythm team of Scott Colberg, bass (Calexico) and RJ Miller, drums.

The album repays close attention for its subtle details while also rewarding listeners more attuned to moods than solos.

Blotnick has two acclaimed releases on Songlines (Music Needs You, 2007 and Everything Forgets, 2009) and a self-released solo guitar record (Solo, Volume 1, 2012) praised by the New York Times for its “intensely thoughtful design”.

After 10 years in New York he moved back to Maine in 2015 to give himself more space to deepen his connection to his playing, and began performing a weekly gig in a trio with RJ Miller.

They looked for ways to combine the aesthetics of ambient music (sampled loops and hypnotic grooves) and the more direct language of jazz. “When we were workshopping this music we were also playing RJ’s music (check out Ronald’s Rhythm on Loyal Label), and he was trying to break me out of a certain way of thinking. 

RJ wanted the music to simmer and just keep expanding as opposed to my natural inclination to sort of tell a succinct story and then step back. Alice Coltrane’s music (e.g. Journey in Satchidananda) is a great example of this – it doesn’t register as a series of solos and I think it has a lot in common with West African and possibly Indian classical music that way.

I think RJ’s playing on this record has a constant variation that is really hard to pull off the way he does it. The groove is always very much there even if he is playing all around it. I see it as an extension of what Paul Motian and Ed Blackwell have contributed to the music.”

Among the inspirations for Kush Blotnick cites guitarists Jacob Bro (“Lunenburg”), Ali Farka Touré (“May Day”) and Marc Ribot, Alice Coltrane (“Kush”, “May Day”), Billy Strayhorn (“Spring”), Wayne Shorter and Bill Evans (“Delaware”, “And Bright Snow”), Fela Kuti, and Niger’s most popular band Tal National (“DX7”). Ryan is a member of New York’s Akoya Afrobeat and has performed in South African saxophonist Duke Mseleku’s groups. 

“Afrobeat is an amazing synthesis of West African and African-American musics. Playing with Akoya put me deep in the rhythm section where I was stuck with one rhythm line for the whole twenty-minute song. At first it felt like jail time but after seven or eight years I found some freedom there! I guess the main thing with African music is that every style has its own rhythmic fingerprint that goes way beyond anything you could put down on paper.

When the music is passed down from generation to generation there is a subtlety about how to place accents and how to feel certain rhythms that gets lost in music that is passed down in writing…I always try to simplify my music to the point where it is memorizable – I also think it speaks to the audience more directly this way.” Lee Konitz is another mentor figure: “He tried to get me to think about where the note starts – does it start in the fingers? Or the heart? Or the brain? I didn’t really get what he was talking about at the time but I think I understand it better now…When Lee plays he lives and dies with each note but it is also not forced – it is very heavy yet still light at heart.”

As for the title: “Kush was a club in New York where I first met Michael Blake when I was sixteen, on my way to freshman orientation at William Paterson. He was playing with Ben Allison and Jeff Ballard and it really sent my friend Ned Ferm and me through the roof. Also, the bass line of ‘Kush’ is based on a middle-eastern rhythm [in 17/8] that Duncan Hardy showed me called “Khush Rank” – I thought that was an interesting coincidence.”

01. Kush

02. Lunenburg

03. May Day

04. Churchy

05. Delaware

06. And Bright Snow

07. DX7

08. Spring

Ryan Blotnick, guitar

Michael Blake, tenor and soprano sax

Scott Colberg, bass

RJ Miller, drums

Special guest: Jonny Lam, pedal steel (2)

All compositions by Ryan Blotnick