Return of the Guitar Man - The New York City Jazz Record

NEW YORK @ NIGHT
4 October 2011 | THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD
Photo by Jim Anness
Guitarist Michael Pisaro’s “Ascending Series (6)” on
Sep. 13th marked a sort of an end for two weeks at The
Stone curated by Erstwhile Records as well as a prelude
for the two-day Gravity Wave Festival, which featured
his quiet compositions and capped the run. The piece
- an exercise in silence and tonality in just under 40
minutes - was written for and played in duet with
trombonist Radu Malfatti, another devotee of stillness
in music. Each of the musicians was armed with a
timer, which kept them both in silence for the first
several minutes before Pisaro initiated a low drone
with Ebow and electric guitar, matched in short order
by a much higher tone (seemingly generated by
Pisaro’s laptop), then another extended low tone from
Malfatti’s horn. All of this came off like a tableau
against another rather appealing sound, which may
have come from the computer or perhaps water in the
pipes overhead. Three distinct tone fields - trombone
(low), guitar (low or high) and electronics (high), the
absence of sound perhaps being a dominant fourth -
seemed to work in strict but independent time
intervals. The elements were so few that it began to
feel like an unevenly measured round, each of the three
voices cycling in and out (variations within them were
few; occasional quick notes in the upper register were
the greatest alteration), sometimes occurring
concurrently. But even with the silence, there was
always the feeling of method, of a process at work.
- Kurt Gottschalk
Michael Pisaro & Radu Malfatti @ The Stone
Despite having played in duo only once before - a set
of less than 15 minutes some 10 years ago - the pairing
of saxophonist John Butcher and synthesizer player
Thomas Lehn at Issue Project Room Sep. 20th was a
natural. The two, of course, have played together in
other situations, most notably the trio Thermal with
guitarist Andy Moor of Dutch ‘rock group’ The Ex.
With the brash sound of the saxophone, it was tempting
to hear them as a duo of some sort or another: sax and
organ, sax and drums. But it proved easier - or at least
more economical - to give up on the idea of the horn
altogether. Butcher’s sax is his laboratory, the science
of air pushed through tubes his area of expertise.
Playing alternately unamplified, into a microphone
running through a volume pedal or a second mic
boosted to feedback levels, Butcher had access to the
whole dynamic range of the horn. Lehn, meanwhile,
was unusually understated for the first half of the set,
letting soft waves emanate from his synthesizer and
slowly build. The analog electronics rig is fantastically
malleable in his hands: the pair of decks, one altered
and bent with a circuitry card, proved capable of great
and sometimes excitingly propulsive sounds. When
Butcher switched to soprano, the energy was upped,
both becoming more percussive. So was it a drum duo
perhaps? By the time Butcher was playing his
mouthpiece with the flickering of fingers there was
little difference between sax, synth and drums anyway.
(KG)
Danish multi-saxist Lotte Anker has been working
with pianist Craig Taborn and drummer Gerald
Cleaver since 2003, with two recordings under their
collective belts. The trio musically reacquainted
themselves at Barbès (Sep. 7th), launching a mini-tour
to include the Guelph Festival on 9/11-eve. Anker
started on soprano sax with a throaty tone of shaking
vibrato and stuttered attacks, gradually bringing her
sound forward to a full boisterous resonance, moving
to alto mid-piece and ending the set on tenor. Cleaver
followed a similar arc, at first showing his mastery of
the understatement, playing barehanded or grabbing
for an unusual assortment of sticking implements
(baby rattle, telephone cord, sleighbells) and
‘preparing’ his kit in various ways to produce a
panoply of percussive textures, eventually building to
a rock-solid ten-beat pattern that pulsed with an avantmeets-Motown
sound. Taborn, the third ‘leg’ of the
improvising triangle can, like Anker and Cleaver, be
sparse and spare when the musical environment calls
for it, or let loose with both shotgun barrels when so
inspired. In many places his musical commentary was
merely implied or insinuated, but elsewhere his
energetic fusillades of two-handed passages decorated
with jagged ornaments filled every corner of the room.
The drums and bass played powerful hits together and
the group came to a vibrant climax just before ending
the first piece and again during a shorter ‘encore’.
- Tom Greenland
Cleaver/Anker/Taborn @ Barbès
On Sep. 9th, The Kitchen, a four-decade bastion of
experimental improv, began “Pioneers of the
Downtown Sound”, a mini-series curated by Rhys
Chatham to revisit and update its early years. Chatham,
most known for No Wave “guitarchestras”, opened
with solo cornet filtered through three channels of
digital delays in long-decaying overlapped loops,
building on a single pinched note, gradually adding
tones above and below, false-fingered trills and
squelched burps to construct a gurgling swirl of sound,
ending the minimalistic conconction on his knees, as if
in prayer, hands stretched forward to the fader knobs.
Joan La Barbara sang an etude of descending
exhalations immediately alternated with ascending
inhalations, accelerating and expanding each cycle,
adding multiphonics, then reversing direction to
reprise her opening gesture. “Twelvesong” featured
live-dubbed vocalizations (cat and bird calls, ripping
cloth, radio static, creaking doors, etc.) over a
pre-taped mix, like a Foley artist making an imaginary
movie soundtrack, capped by a spontaneous a cappella
piece. Pauline Oliveros ‘un-conducted’ the audience
in participatory vocal performance, then unveiled a
MIDI-controlled button accordion, triggering acoustic
bass, voice and brass samples in uncanny juxtaposition,
dramatically articulated, finally inviting Chatham
back onstage for a duet, his farted howling timbres
panning over and behind her muted brass and clarinet
patches. (TG)
Photo by Scott Friedlander