Nice package of music received from Jason Berry in Oakland CA, I think the third such package of goodies. Arrived 18 January 2023.
Nubdug Ensemble and Amanda Chaudary can do no wrong for me, witness my gushing reviews of The Machines Of Zeno, Blame, and Meow Meow Band in previous issues. To hear them both on this Split EP (PEST COLORS MUSIC 42.NEEP) is like an extra dollop of whipped cream on your ice cream fruit sundae. First, two pieces by Nubdug Ensemble, a song called ‘52 Pickup’ and an instrumental ‘A Chip and a Chair’, both luscious examples of the melodic and bright jazz-tinged music Berry is capable of producing with his talented players – including Steve Adams, Myles Boisen, Chris Grady, G Calvin Weston, and many other crack players drawn from the halls of art music, fusion, and free jazz. As they play, the group make it appear so easy, but I suspect Berry is adept at layering in many strands of complexity in these brief, concise, pop-song length pieces; the instrumental in particular executes more twists and turns than a Henry Cow Zappamobile taking a byway down Hatfield and The North (Paul Hanson’s bassoon is just one of many instrumental delights in this layer of the chocolate box). The song is delivered by Jill Rogers who sounds cheerful and engaged, yet the lyric she’s engaged with is one of perpetual defeat and frustration. “I feel so tired, so uninspired,” she points out to an uncaring universe, said universe depicted on the cover illo which indicates the playing cards of this 52 Pickup are simply a metaphor for grand forces of chaos and chance, beyond our control.
The same personnel, for the most part, appear on Amanda Chaudary’s three pieces (also catalogued as CATSYNTH RECORDS ACHS 5040). This talented composer and expert keyboard / synth player just exudes positive vibes in her music; about eight minutes of guaranteed smiles across the faces of everyone in the household, grumpy though they may be feeling. ‘Sam Sam’s Theme’ is like an idealised version of TV cartoon music (and for all I know may have been commissioned for that very use); and I’d like to see any other given modernist attempt something like this without falling flat on their faces as they attempt to “slum it” with popular culture. Chaudary not only pulls it off, but she flies away as gay as a lark. Conversely in ‘For Luna’, she seems to compress an entire catalogue of serialist tone-rows into less than three minutes, using her synth as a lexicon and aided by the woodwind and percussion section. Team Schoenberg may cry tears of envy into their beer on hearing this, but it availeth not; enjoy this witty deconstruction of academic modernism and its recasting into deceptively light pop. On ‘Merp Friend’ we have another entry in what I informally think of as her “cat fixation” (and see her side of the cover art), offering a melodic hymn of praise to the feline race with keyboards and rhythm section that seems to have descended from a 1970s heaven of record production – it can hold its head alongside prime records by Steely Dan, Hall & Oates, Todd Rundgren et al, along with a flawless horn chart that Tower Of Power would have sold their brass necks to procure. The whole EP is a joy, a life-affirming splash of colour and love.
The Myles Boisen item No Accident (SUSURRUS / PURLING S-Bgman | 04 / JSC4303) shows him working with prepared piano and e-bowed guitars, arranged in overdubbed layers. This talented fellow has appeared on Jason Berry’s records, and has played guitar for Tom Waits and John Zorn – also recorded with Fred Frith, the Splatter Trio, and even played on the Twin Peaks soundtrack. He clearly knows how to prepare a piano – another critic places him in the lineage of other West Coast US composers who pioneered “prepping”, starting with Cage – and catalogues his inserted objects such as screws, washers, and pieces of metal and glass placed inside the instrument. As for the e-bows, in fact only two pieces here demonstrate its application to the guitar strings, as elsewhere he situates it on the piano strings to get those powerful vibrations he craves. Boisen is also proud of the fact that none of the pieces here could be performed live (at least not without a small group of players and two pianos on the stage), and are in fact the result of careful overdubbing and solo composition. Did we say composition? Even Boisen himself isn’t so sure; the work “happened without thought or intention”, according to him, and yet it’s nothing to do with accident, chance, or even conventional experimentation. He seems to be saying he just turned off his brain and sat at the piano, having poured in a box or two of fresh goods from the hardware store. Actually, that process was just to arrive at the main elements, or “building blocks”, as he calls them; evidently a good deal of refinement and compression has taken place afterwards, in the selection and editing of these tapes. Quite nice results; I like the overall concision and brevity (most tracks around 2-4 mins) and the subdued, exploratory feeling of the record, often tinged with a melancholic aura. For me, it just sounds a shade too “nice”; if John Cage wanted to introduce rough edges, clonks, and many unpredictable events into the hitherto-unchallenged action of playing the piano, that ethos hasn’t directly affected Myles Boisen, who smooths over everything and comes out of the studio with a sort of modernist soft-focus chamber drone. Even the track titles lean towards the romantic, resembling chapters from a poignant love-story novella.
Also in the envelope, a 2-CD compilation ZZAJ: Jazz From The 23rd Century (NO LABEL), compiled by Jerry King and Dave Newhouse in 2022. With 17 tracks per CD, this is a generous helping of music drawn from international quarters – American, English, and Japanese artists are all represented, although admittedly the balance is tipped heavily towards the United States. It’s also much more than simply “jazz” – free improvisation, composition, chamber music and even offbeat songs are represented within its grooves. Our friends from Oakland are here on two tracks – one by Nubdug Ensemble, another by Amanda Chaudhary. Little point in listing all the names here (the purchaser is supposed to scan a QR code to get the full credits and notes); suffice to say I recognise about one-tenth of them, and so have found myself in the position of discovering a lot of new work I knew nothing about. In giving us this enjoyable sprawl of styles, perhaps King and Newhouse have an agenda to attempt to push the envelope of what can be deemed “jazz” in the first place. At least one track seems to me to express the spirit of the whole comp – it’s played by The Marmhelodic Rascals, and has a convoluted title which explicitly references the musical ideas of both Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, both of which are also presented in the music. Even the name “Marmhelodic” is a corruption of harmelodic, referring to one of Ornette’s more productive practices. As you may have anticipated, the track is played with gusto and vigour and at breakneck speed, probably by polymath Americans who are supertalented at rendering dense and complex passages with ease; but it’s also faintly “wacky”, as if saying to the listener “free jazz can be fun” by sugar-coating it with lots of Zappa-esque curlicues, circus romps, and fusion moves. There’s a small danger, perhaps, that the entire comp is tainted by this eager-to-please mode, a supposition which is borne out by much of the user-friendly music we hear. Still, it’s absurd to grumble in the face of such positive energies and bright, entertaining music.