Natural Information Society here with their double album Since Time Is Gravity (zorn99 / MTE-78). The Society is a small free jazz group set up by bass player Joshua Abrams in 2010, a fellow who’s played in many American ensembles including Exploding Star Orchestra and ad-hoc groups featuring Hamid Drake, who also appears here on these Chicago recordings, as does Ari Brown – a 1970s Chicago veteran who joined the AACM in 1971.
Having started out with a “free jazz” tag, it’s more balanced for me to say that Since Time Is Gravity is also laden with influences from the American minimalism schools, and the works of La Monte Young, Steve Reich and Philip Glass are name-checked in the press and can also be easily discovered with the ears, woven into this gentle acoustic music with its slow forward movements, its repetitions, its unchanging compositional structures. But the music still retains a non-Western lilt, thanks to Abrams’ work on the guimbri and the harp of Kara Bershad, particularly on ‘Murmuration’ – making good the boast of “hypnotic healing music” we read on the press sheet. Indeed, even though there’s a strong horn and woodwind section, the hard-core skronk fan might be disappointed if searching for a free-form blowfest worthy of release on the BYG label in 1969. The way the horns are used and slightly echoed tends to align this album more with the works of Jon Hassell than with Archie Shepp.
Jointly released on Aguirre in Belgium and Eremite in the USA, packaged with a charming colour painting by Lisa Alvarado. (28/04/2023)