Volume 24 Issue 5 - February 2019

solos are interspersed with ensemble sections
and melodic fragments.
Highlights include Looking Up which
begins with Ragnelli’s subtle drum intro.
Then Au plays a beautiful looping melody
over clever rhythmic punctuation, an ostinato
bass pattern interrupts before the melody
returns and leads into an elegant piano solo.
Red Herring begins with a syncopated minor
melody over funky and jagged beats. As the
piece progresses, Pentney’s Prophet Rev2
adds an ominous texture for some additional
tension. The piece winds its way down
a number of genre alleys (as its title suggests)
and is ultimately satisfying and not at all
misleading. Wander Wonder is an exquisite
album that balances introspection with some
terrific solos.
Ted Parkinson
Autoschediasm
Karoline Leblanc; Ernesto Rodrigues;
Nicolas Caloia
Atrito-Afeito 010 (atrito-afeito.com)
!!
Autoschediasm
(the term indicates
something improvised,
offhand or
casual) presents
a three-segment
collective improvisation
created
by Montreal-based
pianist Karoline
Leblanc and bassist Nicolas Caloia and
Portuguese violist Ernesto Rodrigues. All are
accomplished improvisers, but each brings
different threads: Leblanc’s background
stresses the classical avant-garde; Caloia’s
career emphasizes free jazz; Rodrigues, who
leads several distinct improvising orchestras
in Lisbon, has championed free improvisation
for over 30 years, appearing on scores of CDs.
While the title suggests something
casual, the music sounds appropriate to
its Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal
setting, the trio bringing a high modernist
discipline and precision to the work. The
opening movement flows with an energy
that is dense and light. Sparked initially by
LeBlanc’s imaginative keyboard flights, in its
later stages it settles into a churning rhythmic
pattern that ignites Rodrigues’ radical virtuosity,
resulting in a flurry of microtonal lines
that sometimes create their own counterpart.
Offhand? Casual? The only thing that distinguishes
it from composed music is the challenge
of writing it down.
The second movement takes a contrasting
approach, developing little sounds, arising
discreetly, sometimes pointillist, at times
muffled, at others percussive, a gently
humming underbrush alive with detail. The
final segment moves from delicate sonic
events to a turbulent, vibrant world that
recalls the opening, a formal motion that
exaggerates a pattern evident since the early
classical era. It’s an act of “autoschediasm”
rich in taut attention to nuance and form.
Stuart Broomer
Pressing Clouds Passing Crowds
Kim Myhr; Quatuor Bozzini; Caroline
Bergvall; Ingar Zach
Hubro HUBRO CD 2612 (hubromusic.com)
!!
Initially commissioned
and
performed at FIMAV
in Victoriaville,
Quebec, Pressing
Clouds Passing
Crowds is a musical
rumination on
immutable nature and human disruption,
composed by Kim Myhr, the Norwegian
guitarist whose strums underscore the narrative
that ululates through this six-track suite.
Accompanied by Norwegian percussionist
Ingar Zach and framed by the harmonies of
Montreal string ensemble Quatuor Bozzini
(QB), the music shares space with the idiosyncratic
recitation by French-Norwegian
poet Caroline Bergvall. Her distinctive
phrasing helps set up a rhythmically charged
program where her vocal narrative adds as
much to individual sequences as the QB’s
intermittently buzzing glissandi, the percussionist’s
hand pops and vibrations, plus
the guitarist’s string strokes and spanks on
12-string acoustic, which constantly move the
theme forward. Moving efficiently through
word images that range among simple
instances of nature appreciation, chimerical
retelling of dreamlike surprises, and astute
allusions to political events involving refugees
and dangerous water crossings, Bergvall
sets up hypnotic sequences whose resolution
depends as much on the feints and fancies of
instrumental virtuosity as the players’ strategies
depend on her verbal concoctions.
With its echoes of folksay, impressionism,
stark improvisation and poetics, Pressing
Clouds Passing Crowds is a distinctive
creation which can be experienced more than
once – which is precisely what can be done by
listening to this CD.
Ken Waxman
Linger
Benoît Delbecq; Jorrit Dijkstra; John
Hollenbeck
Driff Records CD 1801 (driffrecords.com)
!!
Reshaping
improvisational
parameters, Dutch
alto saxophonist
Jorrit Dijkstra and
French pianist
Benoît Delbecq
add flexible oscillations
to the ten
performances here by also improvising on,
respectively, Lyricon and preparations for
synthesizer, aided by the flexible percussion
patterning of Montreal-based John
Hollenbeck.
With instrumental additions that can
process tones as they’re created, the
Europeans’ secondary voices multiply interactions
past standard trio voicings to suggest
enhanced melodic lyricism and rhythmic
vigour, often simultaneously. On Stir for
instance, reed smears and outer-spacelike
oral currents vie for supremacy challenged
by wave-form squibs and measured
keyboard chording. Unfazed by timbre multiplicity,
the drummer not only keeps a backbeat
going, most powerfully on Push, but also
bluntly asserts his agenda with individualistic
rolls and ruffs plus cymbal splashes there and
throughout the CD.
Dijkstra and Delbecq don’t just depend on
texture supplements as they aptly demonstrate
on Dwell, where irregular saxophone
trills and split tones confront a flowing
keyboard narrative plus inner piano string
stops; or on Stalk, where modulated piano
clusters create an impressionistic theme that
complements inchoate Lyricon echoes as well
as cursive beats plus drum-rim rubbing from
Hollenbeck.
Contrapuntal yet communicative, the
textural sound-melding throughout the disc
suggests that Dijkstra and Delbecq, who first
met at the Banff Jazz Workshop in 1990,
should collaborate more often. As it is, the
two, plus Hollenback’s fluid and inventive
patterning, have created a session over which
one can beneficially linger.
Ken Waxman
Eric Dolphy – Musical Prophet
Eric Dolphy
Resonance Records HCD-2035
(resonancerecords.org)
! ! When Eric
Dolphy died in
a diabetic coma
in 1964 at 36, he
represented a
special loss to jazz:
a master of three
distinct woodwinds
(alto saxophone, bass clarinet and
flute) whose exalted technical acumen and
creative intensity contributed immeasurably
to great recordings by John Coltrane, Ornette
Coleman, Charles Mingus, George Russell and
Oliver Nelson, among many others.
Musical Prophet is a 3CD set that expands
the 1963 sessions that produced the LPs
Conversations and Iron Man. Ranging from
unaccompanied saxophone solos (Love Me is
an expressionist masterpiece heard here in
three versions) to a tentet, from jazz standards
like Fats Waller’s Jitterbug Waltz (on flute)
to Dolphy’s own dense, swarming Burning
Spear, it’s the finest portrait of the breadth of
Dolphy’s genius available. There are no finer
examples of the “third stream” impulse than
Dolphy’s duets with bassist Richard Davis,
abstract weavings that press Ellington’s Come
Sunday and the standard Alone Together into
80 | February 2019 thewholenote.com