Zeena Parkins – Mette Rasmussen – Ryan Sawyer “Glass Triangle” (Relative Pitch, 2021)

I became aware of Mette Rasmussen and her music about five years ago: after reading an article about her on an Italian newspaper I always buy because I can find some interesting articles on improvised music and cinema, where her work was presented as very interesting and if not innovative at least highly appreciable, I started searching for her work online through video and audio files.

I first listened to some of her solo peformances from 2015 since I knew that soloing is one of the most difficult setting for an improvisor, and I wanted to see basically if the praises about Rasmussen I read were really acceptable. I have to tell you the truth: I was a little bit disappointed. Rasmussen has a graspy, assertive tone, something every passionate listener of improvised music can love, but her language seemed a little poor to me.

I love solo performances by saxophone players. One of my favorite records back in the days was “For Alto” (Denmark, 1971), a double LP by saxophonist and composer Anthony Braxton. His first appearance to the world outside, this record seems to me even today one of the best statements on that particular instrument. Not superior, because music is not a competition, but worthy to stay near Ornette Coleman’s best works. 

I hate to put it simple, but if you wanna to express yourself on one instrument, you have something to say. Braxton in that record was saying it all. Ornette through his multiple settings was saying everything. Kaoru Abe was saying so much. Rasmussen, as far as I was able to hear, was a great sparring partner – I also saw videos where she was playing with musicians such as Thurston Moore or Chris Corsano – but when it came to solo improvisation, she was not expressing herself completely.

That was really disappointing to me, not because of some attack to my well refined senses, but because it happened in a period in which I was reflecting on how improvised music is mostly a music for men and made by men, for hystorical reasons I expressed here in this long article. So, reading about Rasmussen I had this little hope that things maybe were changing for the better. But Rasmussen was, and still is, a young musician, and everything can get better maybe with just a little time. 

Funny thing is, few time ago I was able to finally buy a copy of Peter Brotmann’s recent solo tenor improvisations “I Surrender Dear” (Trost, 2020) and things became complicated: this record, in fact, is not the same Brotz we’re able to hear from “For Adolphe Sax” until his Tentet. It’s not that Brotzmann has become sentimental, not at all. But the music on the Trost solo album is only different from the usual.

And so I thought about Rasmussen and her solo exhibition and I asked myself: have I missed or misinterpreted something? So this weekend I listened again to Brotzmann on solo tenor, and then I went back to Rasmussen listening her work extensively. And I find out she is improving, not only: but she came out this year in February with a great trio record on Relative Pitch, a New York-based label. So, what a better occasion to share my feelings and thoughts about this music with my readers? 

For those who don’t know her, Mette Rasmussen is a young alto saxophone player coming from Denmark but currently – at least this is what I read through multiple online presentations that are cut and pasted the one from the other – living in Norway. She studied at a local conservatory, but she brings always with her some books to study while she’s having some rest from exhibitions. Here’s some of the people she has collaborated with: Chris Corsano, Jamie Saft, Alan Silva, Mats Gustaffson, Paul Lytton, Thurston Moore and Goodspeed You! Black Emperor.

Usually compared to Albert Ayler and Gustaffson for her graspy, raucous and confrontational statements, Rasmussen gives her best – in my opinion, so I strongly recommend you to make your own listening to her in different contexts – in duo, trio or with other musicians. This album featuring Zeena Parkins on electrified harp and Ryan Sawyer (Marshall Allen, Boredoms, Thurston Moore, and many others) on drums can be considered one of the best way to start with. 

The first thing I noticed while handling this record are the titles of the compositions (“Nat Bygone, just biggone”). Irony is great thing, and if you think about Fluxus, in a way, I thought back at FIG, the Feminist Improvising Group, an ensemble you can find some recordings along the Internet, but that no one guiltily wants to reissue, as least as far as I’m informed.

The first thing I noticed while listening to the record was, obviously, the music. Alto opens with rapid and abruptly fractured statements. Drum figures and harp blowing answer back. Little by little, every instrument structures his own language, answering each other. Sax becomes dramatic and explodes, while drums and harp scratches contour it. After, harp and saxophone put themselves together, until alto designs little pieces of sound again, and so drums take the foreground while harp goes on the highest pitches. 

Here’s finally a sax melody on the lower and medium registries, launching itself at the end in ultra high grasping notes, with drums closing the piece with dust (“Begiunners, begges, beattle, belt, believers”). The second piece (the record consists actually of an entire concert aptly divided in six parts for the album) opens with the drums with the saxophone indulging; full and void dynamics here makes me think about compositions like “No. 2” by Henry Threadgill.

The mood is in effect more meditative, but the space here is handled with a more contemporaneous sensitivity – maybe we’re more deluded than we were in the Seventies – and so the saxophone is crackling on medium and high pitches, while drums depict different colors here and there. Harp becomes episodic, as Parkins doesn’t want to intrerrupt the dialogue from his pals. Then the sax melody makes stronger and dramatic statements on higher registries, and so the harp underlines them with scratches and semi-drones. 

Drums, as in the best chicagoan tradition, creates an atmosphere suspended between melody and rhythm. This second piece (“Nat Bygone, just biggone”) ends with the sound of wood from the sticks, little bells, and the diminuendo of the harp. At the beginning of the third piece, Rasmussen explores as much of the pitches and registries she can; even if she’s mostly on medium and high tones, even if what I feel is a lack of lyricism as present, instead, in some of the musicians she is quite often compared with – Albert Ayler for instance.

Zeena Parkins in this third improvised piece is the first sound source, and the conductor, so to speak, with sounds that seem to come from a theremin and that almost imitate a human voice. Saxophone fastens, while drums become pulviscular again as in Sunny Murray tradition – which is not bad for a musician coming from an alternative rock environment, snob as this assertion can seem. 

After “Flood of Trees”, the piece we have tried to describe here above, on “The crystal chain letters” drums come back with obsessive patterns, saxophone echoes as a short wave analogic instrument, then it brings you a melody on the medium and low pitches, while the harp brings back the last suggestions and drums again become like a little thick flood and sax comes back to high, trembling registries.

“Merlin and the gleam” is full of post-coltranian reminiscenses in the drums and sax interactions, the harp produces scratching sounds, and then Rasmussen shifts on the altissimo pitches: the other two musician give her complete freedom of speech, the climax becomes really intense and dramatic. After some other melodic hints by the harp and a new fragmentation of the drums, it’s the time for the closing “Melts into surface”. 

Here, Rasmussen becomes almost lyrical but without becoming really melodic. She suggests more than creating an atmosphere. Subjective as this description almost minute-per-minute can be, from it I can imagine the reader able now to see what’s good to me in Rasmussen music and what are her weak points, so to speak. Imagine them in a solo context and you got to my point.

On the other hand, it is difficult to imagine musicians, like the one featured on this record and the other Rasmussen’s collaborators relying on them for no o few reasons. I can only tell I’ll continue in listening to her music and following her evolution, since I’m really interested in living in something more than a comprehensive environment: it can be better to live in an environment where people can express themselves and improve without the difficulties we all as part of the human history carried with us until not that much time ago. 

Related resources: Downtown Music’s gallery for the Glass Triangle Trio.