Uncertain how to approach Quiet Riots (COL LEGNO WWE 1CD 29464), which feels like it might be a jazz record with its cover versions of Miles Davis and Johnny Mercer, but I might be mistaken. The label are pleased to bring together two musicians who you wouldn’t necessarily expect to move in the same orbits; a seasoned pro bass player Peter Herbert, citizen of the world (Paris, Vienna and New York) and performer in many contexts – jazz, orchestral, chamber, pop music, and recording sessions, even including work for Paul Simon; and Wolfgang Mitterer, an academic composer who studied the organ and is a renowned electronic expert in Austria. Further, we’re invited to savour the contrasts of jazz elements, classical, acoustic and electronic, likewise the very avant prepared piano of Mitterer.
I can see the musicians are pleased with stirring up these six “quiet riots” in the studio as they proceed to confound normal musical procedures, yet something fails to cohere for me. There’s not enough structure, no root note for safety, and despite oodles of technique and skill it feels like the players are meandering as they play their conceptual games. It might be something worth doing to lace your cool jazz playing with astringent atonal moments borrowed from 12-tone serialism, but Bill Evans did a much better job of this on his 1971 record The Bill Evans Album, with the well-integrated tone-row composition ‘T.T.T.’. On the other hand, there are moments when Herbert and Mitterer find their way into a mini-maelstrom of alien-ness that confounds their mannered control-freakery for a second or two, at which point the music then becomes kind of interesting. (19/12/2024)