Umiak
Irrlicht
SWITZERLAND WIDE EAR RECORDS WER079 CD (2024)
Contemporary improvised music from three highly notable Swiss players, recorded in Germany at the MPS Studio.
The players are Eva-Maria Karbacher on the saxophones (soprano and tenor), Christian Moser on the oud, and Alfred Zimmerlin on the cello; unusual combination of instruments, and sounds, at least in this genre. I’d love to hear the cello on more improv (and jazz) recordings, and often hanker for the glorious times when Tristan Honsinger played with Derek Bailey’s Company, or Dave Holland’s duet with Bailey, and of course any record with the American genius Tom Cora. Zimmerlin can agitate the group with his sharp plucking actions, or lead them into a mesmerised state with his ambiguous, short bowing stabs. As to the oud work of Moser, I’m far from familiar with the sound of this instrument but if he’s playing one related to the lute family, that might account for these inventive and energetic string sounds, which sometimes have a metallic flavour which isn’t quite the same as a steel-string acoustic guitar, but more resembles a musical version of a tinsmith cutting away with his shears. But I think it’s also providing some form of percussive component too, which adds even more excitement and crazy rhythm to the lively hoot-footed performances. In this context, Karbacher might seem relatively conventional with her very fluid utterances – I’d say a more astringent take on Steve Lacy phrasing, with errant swoops and whooping darts borrowed from 1960s free jazz, but pressed into the pages of a butterfly album with due diligence paid to restraint and grace.
Quite short tracks; a welcome relief from improvising groups who require 18 or 35 minutes to document every nuance of their performances in an unedited start-to-finish manner. All acoustic too; the recording engineer Frank Baumann has been ingenious with his mic placement, and the instruments are as intimate as wild animals approaching you in a forest prior to giving you a good wash with their tongues. Much to admire in the way they leave space for each other, always working hard to achieve the right balance of sounds and actions; but now I’m paraphrasing the observations of Gaudenz Badrutt, who wrote the liner notes and provided a longer version of his hypothesis in the press notes. Well, since an “Umiak” is a boat used by the Inuit, Badrutt builds on the metaphor, making observations about navigation, changing positions, bodies of water, and (inevitably), the “voyages of discovery” made by the trio. The principle to which this boat must adhere is keeping one person behind the rudder, with the others doing the rowing; it’s not crystal clear how this specific dynamic is enacted by the Umiak trio, but the music contains multiple indicators of their success. (28/11/2024)