Volume 25 Issue 3 - November 2019

creating hauntingly memorable sounds.
Saariaho also reveals her heightened sense
of the dramatic in Ciel d’hiver, a retelling of
part of the journey of the son of Poseidon,
re-orchestrated from her larger piece, Orion.
The appropriately smaller symphony
orchestra still manages to deliver the work’s
supple textures with consummate musicality,
allowing for the beauty of the mythic
narrative to emerge with compelling force.
On True Fire, Saariaho turns to perhaps her
greatest strength – the setting of poetry to
music. This work is performed by the great
Canadian baritone Gerald Finley, who
weathers the enormous difficulty of the vocal
writing with glorious ease. His vocal
outpourings, together with masterful
orchestral direction by Hannu Lintu, help the
poetry leap off the page.
Saariaho’s music
reappears on a
second disc also
featuring works
by two other
contemporary
composers, Steffen
Schleiermacher and
Michael Wertmüller.
The disc is titled Sturm (or Storm) as the
music is evocative of – poetically or otherwise
– atmospheric agitation appropriately
conjured up by the extraordinary contemporary
collective, Ensemble Musikfabrik,
joined throughout by soloing guest musicians.
In the case of Saariaho’s contribution, the
music translates parts of Shakespeare (The
Tempest) reincarnated in a cycle of songs
titled The Tempest Songbook and brought
to life by the lustrous soprano of Olivia
Vermeulen and the ink-dark baritone of Peter
Schöne. Schleiermacher’s Das Tosen Des
Staunenden Echos (The roar of the amazed
echo) captures an agitated journey, its turbulent
repeated gestures revolving theatrically,
breaking in waves and sounding like fluid
birth pangs in the very act of the enigmatic
composition itself. Wertmüller’s Antagonisme
Contrôlé is a fiery piece that roars between
the freewheeling worlds of jazz and avantgarde-music
styles as soloists, including the
inimitable saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, take
the music to dizzying heights.
Raul da Gama
Bird as Prophet
David Bowlin; various artists
New Focus Recordings FCR237
(newfocusrecordings.com)
!!
This is one disc
that achieves so
much more than
it sets out to do.
Bird as Prophet
(the composition)
is an amalgam of
Robert Schumann,
a Romantic with a
deep and abiding
knowledge of literature and philosophy, and
Charlie Parker, the iconic bebop genius who
revolutionized jazz – and, it may be argued,
all contemporary music. But it is the fingers
– and bow – of David Bowlin that drives the
music of the entire disc much further.
Bowlin brings so much more to the
music than mere virtuosity. Combining his
absolute mastery of the violin with inspired
interpretations, he lifts the black dots off the
page in an utterly beguiling performance
evocative of the very nature of human
endeavour and the mercurial vicissitudes that
go with it.
Bowlin’s instrument lives and breathes and
takes us to another world. It’s full of glinting
illuminations, mysterious depths, expectations,
frustrations, hopes and doubts, like
the lights and shadows of a quasi-Schumann
scherzo glimpsed by moonlight in a
forest. Using taped effects and partnered by
four other musicians (on three other tracks),
Bowlin creates passage upon passage of notes
that are at once perfectly transparent yet
gorgeously coloured. There’s also a sense of
tightly disciplined improvisation everywhere
in the music.
Finally, on the mesmerising Under a Tree,
an Udātta, an almost-nine minute musical
exploration of Sanskrit phonetics (Udātta is
the pitch accent of Vedic Sanskrit), he bows
out with buoyant, aristocratic grace.
Raul da Gama
JAZZ AND IMPROVISED
A Cheerful Little Earful
Diana Panton; Reg Schwager; Don
Thompson
Independent (dianapanton.com)
!!
In 2015, vocalist
Diana Panton
released I Believe in
Little Things, with
Don Thompson,
Reg Schwager
and Coenraad
Bloemendal. The
album has a lot
going for it: intelligent arrangements, strong
performances, and classic songs from sources
such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
Pinocchio and The Muppet Movie. While
Panton had released a number of records
previously, I Believe in Little Things was her
first children’s album.
Panton’s project continues with A Cheerful
Little Earful, a new album of jazz for kids,
which was released in October 2019.
Schwager and Thompson are back, as are
succinct arrangements of songs from television,
film and music theatre. Panton has a
gift for singing with simple phrasing and with
an unaffected delivery that places emphasis
on the melody at hand; this stripped-down
style works perfectly in the small-ensemble
setting with Schwager and Thompson, and
also focuses the listener’s attention on the
songs’ lyrics.
Like I Believe In Little Things, A Cheerful
Little Earful is being marketed as a “jazz
album for kids.” It might, however, be more
accurate to say that it is an album for adults
looking back with fondness at the music of
their own youth (and their parents’ youth,
for that matter; Happy Talk, the album’s first
track, is from South Pacific). But whether
Panton’s listeners are swept up in a rush of
nostalgia or experiencing these songs for the
first time, it’s safe to say that they’ll enjoy this
well-crafted record.
Colin Story
Zoning
Nick Fraser; Kris Davis; Tony Malaby;
Ingrid Laubrock; Lina Allemano
Astral Spirits (astralspiritsrecords.com)
! ! At times, Nick
Fraser has been
Toronto’s busiest
jazz drummer, but
he’s increasingly
involved in developing
his own
music and some key
international partnerships.
Among his projects is this trio with
New York-based saxophonist Tony Malaby
and pianist Kris Davis. For the trio’s second
outing (Too Many Continents appeared in
2015), they’ve enlisted guests: New York saxophonist
Ingrid Laubrock and Toronto trumpeter
Lina Allemano appear on the three
Fraser compositions included here.
It’s a hard-edged band with a disciplined
intensity that shows in each taut track, with
or without guests, a give and take between
form and freedom that often moves toward
form. The incendiary opening dialogue
between Malaby and Laubrock (he has the
warmer jazz tone; she’s responsible for the
weirder hollow harmonics and deliberate
bleats) is eventually drawn into form.
Throughout the program, tight-knit figures
are frequently employed to develop structural
tensions that will ultimately explode before
reassembling themselves.
Fraser’s Sketch 46, a dance between
restraint and expression, begins with the
most incidental wisps of sound: the lightest
piano flurries, a muffled cymbal, air through
a trumpet, saxophone plosives. These events,
increasingly pointillistic, gradually increase
in length and intensity, volume remaining
low, relations among parts sketchy. Eventually
the band activity expands to an increasingly
dense collective. Drawn into Fraser’s fierce
knitting drum figures, the horns emerge for
brief solo episodes, until a long-toned melody,
almost choral, emerges.
It’s just one crucial piece in this demanding
set of brilliantly realized works.
Stuart Broomer
thewholenote.com November 2019 | 85