Beyond Jazz Reviews

When it comes to genre classifications and Jazz, the duo of Charles Gorczynski and Charles Rumback tend to stray far out on the fringes.  What’s most impressive about their approach is that, both in collaboration and on individual projects, they show just how vast is the territory that comprises the fringes of Jazz.

On their duo project Colorlist, they situate themselves in that area where Jazz improvisation overlaps with the ambient drone of post-rock.  The result is music with a dreamy quality, the kind one could drift off peaceably to, except for the fact there is so much life teeming in the notes that accompany the thick ambient tones, that the music is more likely to keep the listener wide awake and engaged than it is to elicit sleep.  In that regard, their new release Sky Song falls right into place.

Your album personnel:  Charles Gorczynski (woodwinds, synths), Charles Rumback (drums, bells), and guests:  Josh Eustis (modular synthesizer), John Hughes (modular synthesizer), and Jeff Parker (guitar).

Their Colorlist recordings each have their own personality.  2008’s Lists led the conversation with talkative percussion, more of a light chatter than heavy verbosity, adding a greater sense of lightness to music that let ambient drones settle in like a thick fog.  On the other hand, their previous release, 2011’s The Fastest Way To Become The Ocean, the musicians gave the peaceful music a greater sense of urgency by tinkering with both tone and tempo… a sort of high-strung ambient disposition not unlike those strangely contemplative moments had while sitting still in rush-hour traffic.  The 2010 release A Square White Lie comes closest to Colorlist’s newest recording, with drones laid on thick, and a rhythmic element exploiting its seams to provide some contrasting aesthetics.

On Sky Song, the atmospherics are denser, and the percussion swims within its waters, darting about, endowing the music with the personality of a song within a song.

Opening track “Sun Song” goes a long way to illustrating what is to come.  The fluttering of saxophone develops into harmonic waves of sax and synths that lap against the shores of the tune, as cross-currents of percussion cause tides to change direction with a suddenness that seems only natural.  “Montreal” takes on a similar shape, but with a touch of melancholia adding a darker tone.

“Current” features guests Jeff Parker on guitar, and Josh Eustis and John Hughes on synths.  It begins with a seeming absence of structure, throwing out fragments of melodies, rhythms that elude pattern recognition, and harmonies that lack a subject… like a shadow with no source object.  But eventually the song coalesces, and all those fragments and pieces reveal themselves to be merely facets of a larger picture.  It’s a nifty transformation, and makes for a terrifically engaging song.

“Through the Fires” is, by far, the biggest display of intensity on this recording.  What begins as saxophone musings accompanied by a cadence of a pulsing insistence and a loose structure develops into an expansive chant, with saxophone wails and torrents of percussion vaulting this tune up to a sonic plateau that the other album tracks only hint at.

After that, “Where Will We Go” and “Waiting” is about as frenetic as it gets on this recording.  On the former, Rumback ups the tempo and Gorczynski builds a sense of urgency via synths and harmonic accompaniment on sax.  On the latter, Rumback sits out front and sends out flurries of rhythms that scatter across the surface of the song, while Gorczynski’s sax slowly rises over the song’s horizon.

The album ends with “The Safe Years,” a song representative of the entirety of Colorlist’s body of work… harmonic warmth, rhythmic chatter, and melodies that slowly reveal themselves and never in their totality, leaving some space for the listener’s imagination to fill in the rest of the picture.

A gorgeous, mesmerizing album.

Released on the Serein label.

Available at:  Bandcamp Digital & Vinyl | eMusic MP3 | Amazon MP3

*****

Other Things You Should Know:

Lots of stuff.  I don’t even know where to begin.  I became familiar with both of these artists via individual projects before discovering their duo collaboration with The Fastest Way To Become the Ocean.

Coincidentally, on the same day I began writing this review, I found an old draft I had begun, right around when I first started this site up, which gives an overview of the varied projects that Gorczynski is involved with.  I’m thinking I might finish that draft off, and include an overview of Rumback’s varied works, too.  Lemme see if I can’t knock that article off soon, get it posted up.  There’s a lot of great music to be found using both artist’s name as trails of breadcrumbs.

Cheers.

This is one of those albums that defies genre.  It’s a mix of jazz, folk, classical, post-rock, ambient minimalism, and any number of other potential influences that can be picked out from the soup of Oddarrang‘s singular sound.  Their previous album, Cathedrals, was featured on this site as part of its Something Different review series.  Their newest, In Cinema, dashes straight past the designation of Something Different and heads straight out into Beyond Jazz territory.

Recalling the pop-orchestral sweeping grandeur of post-rockers Cinematic Orchestra, the Oddarrang quintet, the lofty drifts and accelerations of alternative folk act Balmorhea, and the dramatic builds of indie-rock group Arcade Fire, founder Olavi Louhivuori culls together the music arranged for four separate films into one album soundtrack.  Moody at times, pensive at others, and replete with sudden surges of dramatic articulation that blow the lid off any peaceful scenes previously established.

Your album personnel: Olavi Louhivuori (drums), Ilmari Pohjola (trombone), Osmo Ikonen (cello), Lasse Sakara (guitar), and Lasse Lindgren (bass).

Louhivuori often adopts a comforting sound on drums, but on a track like “Missing Tapes from a Highway Set,” he slips into a martial cadence to drive the track forward.  Sakara’s guitar shapes both of the prominent hooks of “The Sage,” opening with a casual gait before shifting gears and charging forward with a head full of steam… yet no less caring with the embrace of the melody.

On an album of frequent bursts of intensity, it’s a pleasant turn of events that Pohjola chooses to emphasize the trombone’s delicate aspects… the slow soulful drift of trombone on the melody of album opener “Introducing” sets a tone of gentleness and warmth that carries throughout the album, even when the volume erupts in a torrent of sound.

Ikonen leads the way melodically on cello as often as it unleashes its harmonic warmth on tunes.  “Cultivate and Contemplate” sees Ikonen setting the groundwork for the rest of the ensemble to launch from, as well as aiding in the melodic development.  When “Self-Portrait” breaks into its second-half melodic frenzy, it’s left to Lindgren’s bass to provide some badly needed deep resonance to balance the bright and shiny notes that the rest of the quintet launches off into flight with.

Though having participated recently on more straight-ahead sessions, like those of the Alexi Tuomarila Trio and Claudio Filippini, it’s clear that those forays haven’t dulled Louhivuori’s particular creative form of expression as he returns to more familiar territory.

Just a beautiful, mesmerizing album.

Released on Edition Records.

Music from the Helsinki, Finland scene.

Cool album cover, and album photos, by Tero Ahonen.

Available on:  Bandcamp CD/Digital | eMusic MP3 | Amazon CD / MP3

Read the review of Oddarrang’s previous release Cathedrals, HERE, on Bird is the Worm.

Cellist Erik Friedlander has garnered several mentions in 2013, both on this site and in my weekly eMusic Jazz Picks column.  Most notably (to my mind, at least) is his contribution to Emilio Teubal’s Música Para un Dragon Dormido, especially on the two album tracks “El Acrobata” and “Un Dragon Dormido,” in which Friedlander’s presence is immensely delicate and evocative both.  There was his performance on Allison Miller’s No Morphine, No Lilies, in which he displayed no difficulty adopting Miller’s unconventional balance of hard-edged post-bop and fuzzy-warm indie-jazz pop characteristics.  Also, still, his cello on Francesco Cataldo’s Spaces had plenty of openings to express itself on the album’s meditative interludes.

And that’s just from this year.  Friedlander has also been a part of some wonderful music via his collaboration with John Zorn projects like Book of Angels & Filmworks, his work with Marty Ehrlich, Julius Hemphill, Tim Berne, and Ellery Eskelin, and a nifty guest spot on Vinicius Cantuaria’s under-the-radar gem Tucuma.  And that’s nowhere close to encapsulating his work.

I mention this all by way of introduction to a musician whose name you may not be familiar with, but who has been an essential part of the music you read about here on this site and elsewhere, who may not ever be a part of the spotlight but is a big reason it’s there in the first place.

Friedlander has recorded a handful of albums under his own name.  His newest is titled Claws & Wings.  This is introspective music, and it originates from a time of great introspection in Friedlander’s life.  Shortly after the death of his wife, who had suffered through a long illness, Friedlander went down from a fluke bicycle accident that made it impossible for him to use his cello for three months.  Laid up, and without the refuge of his creativity to help him through a very difficult time, Friedlander spent that time thinking… thinking about all of the things a person reflects upon when life is drowned in sorrowful moments, at a time of grief.

And then he rehabbed.  And then he picked his cello back up.  And then he began to play again, getting back into life at the same time he worked through his grief.  In effect, he documents that period of time on Claws & Wings.  The music reflects a state of introspection, of pain and also one of beauty.  It sounds very personal, and it sounds that way regardless of whether the listener possesses any knowledge of the music’s context beforehand.  That’s what art can do.  It can communicate so much, even in the vacuum of information.  That happens here.

Your album personnel:  Erik Friedlander (cello), Sylvie Courvoisier (piano, spinet), and Ikue Mori (laptop).

This album has the statuesque beauty of chamber music, the ambient distant warmth of minimalist post-rock, and the wry charm of folk.  This album features Friedlander’s cello, sometimes taking languorous sighs of harmonic brilliance, sometimes prancing lightly from one note to the next, and sometimes swirling about with the unexpected motion of mist on a stormy eve.

Friedlander is joined by pianist Sylvie Courvoisier, who, like Friedlander, has collaborated extensively with John Zorn (and appears on Zorn’s Femina, an album that still gives me chills when I hear it).  On Claws & Wings, she is Friedlander’s counterbalance.  She matches Friedlander’s sonorous expressions with a crisp driving cadence and icy piano lines.  When Friedlander’s cello adopts a feisty attitude, Courvoisier offers up quavering notes that coalesce into a thin blanket approximating a drone.  And when Friedlander’s cello washes over the tune with thick waves of melody, Courvoisier doesn’t express the melody so much as let it glitter from the surface of her chords.  Her use of a spinet on “Reaching Back” matches up against Mori’s space-age effects with an appealing historical classicism.

Ikue Mori adds laptop effects, little blips and beeps, the crackle of water boiling on the surface of metal, the shrieks of seagulls calling out across the lakeshore, the bended notes and warped sounds like light refracted through hanging icicles on a winter afternoon.  There is no clash between Friedlander’s and Courvoisier’s traditional cello and piano and Mori’s post-instrument device… the music develops organically, and their disparate parts fuse into one, as if laptop has been collaborating with cello and piano for centuries.  The music retains a sense of timelessness; the laptop doesn’t date it.  Worth noting that Mori, also, has a John Zorn tie-in… both with the Hemophiliac trio and with Electric Masada.

Just a beautiful album, of wide open spaces filled intermittently with all kinds of fascinating details.  It’s expansive music nesting in a very tiny area.

The album is Self-Produced.

Music from NYC.

Available at:  Bandcamp CD/Digital | eMusic MP3 | Amazon CD | Amazon MP3