Every time I hear of read about an artist such as Annie Clark – but it was the same with Beck Hansen during the 1990s – defined as ‘indefinable’, ‘elusive’ or one that doesn’t take into great account well refined identities, I usually think that, even outside of the box of postmodernism, this position is a great deal. In effect, having a persona that doesn’t correspond to your real self, or having your real self hidden, is something good for an artist.
I still remember an old, odd interview with Tom Waits in which the journalist – you can find this interview in the book Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters, edited by Paul Maher, Jr. (Chicago Review Press, 2011) in the chapter dedicated to the album Foreign Affairs (Asylum, 1977) – was, in his own words, unable to separate the persona from the real person, and Waits had to pass all the interview telling “I am not a drunkard”, basically. Strange and alienating.
So, when as an example Beck gave to the world the album Sea Change (Geffen, 2002) in which he was releasing custom love songs for the first time – even if some of these songs, like Paper Tiger, were heavily quoting Serge Gainsboug’s Histoire de Melody Nelson, and so once again far from a true ‘confession’ of personal feelings, that was enough to make his creativity loose part of its glaze, as anyone can listen from Guero (Interscope, 2005) on.
Strange as it can seem, the curse of having your own butterfly wings pin-pierced, just to use an expression Fernanda Pivano utilized to describe what Bob Dylan tried to avoid in all of his career, is something true. After all, this is something each one of us has experienced at least once in the era of the social networks. If you give all yourself to the world indiscriminately, you feel emptied, sooner or later.
I don’t know if people is obsessed by who the ‘real’ Annie Clark is – at least as far as I’m reading through reviews in my own country - because they’re bored or because they cultivate the secret desire to see another myth burning or falling; anyway, at least listening to her last effort All Born Screaming, the risk is avoided with great majesty and artistry.
All Born Screaming is an album of sui generis ‘pop’ songs – Clark’s technique is more that of drying her sources of inspiration, in this case industrial music as she herself expressed to the world in an Instagram post where you can find all the musicians she took inspiration from, from Throbbing Gristle to Nine Inch Nails, giving life to an expression of her own.
Obviously, you can find such diverse influences or better said assonances with the Byrds and David Bowie (Hell is Near), NIN (Broken Man), Bjork (Big Time Nothing), but at a first listening you’ll find yourself tied into a personal expression, artistically speaking. Ah, not the mention the fact that Clark, collaborator of such diverse artists as David Byrne and Taylor Swift, this time features at least Dave Grohl on drums in the track titled Flea.
In the end, more than an album of industrial pop, All Born Screaming is a collection of songs whose common ground is the desire to experiment and see how far you can go from your own perspective not renouncing to the pleasure of landing in different territories. And for once, who cares about who the ‘real Annie Clark’, who the ‘real personality of the artist’ is … after all, who is able to define him or herself? And so, why do we have to give artists such a thankless task?
Despite the recent good albums I had the opportunity to listen to featuring trumpet player and composer Wadada Leo Smith, like Andrew Cyrille’s Lebroba (ECM, 2018), I have read contrasting opinions about his last efforts. As far as it seems he was not so brilliant in a series of concerts the musician held in the U.S.: according to the reviewer, he was too fond on personal clichés, and he was even juxtaposed to James Brandon Lewis, the young guy to take a look at since he was showing, at the contrary, an interesting evolution.
Anyway, the cynic in me concluded that the reviewer was possibly tired of listening to Smith’s music and was enthusiastic about a younger musician. After all, many people got bored after a period if they don’t find the right stimulus. Anyway, finally Wadada Leo Smith, one of the most important composers to sort out of the A.A.C.M., the Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, has released and album in duo with pianist, organist and newly minted NEA Jazz Master – NJM Fellowship is an honour given in the United States to particularly innovative musicians since 1982 – Amina Claudine Myers.
The album is inspired by New York Central Park’s environment, as the title of the album suggests, but there are also compositions dedicated to Albert Ayler and John Lennon. The First composition, Conservatory Garden, opens with Myers’ melancholic meditation. Every note resonates aptly thanks to the great work by former ECM producer Sung Chung, thanks to whom even Smith’s trumpet gain echoes and specific colors as it happens to the piano.
Conservatory Garden is possibly one of the best compositions in jazz I have heard since many years, and it’s worth the price of the album per se. You will listen to a composition of contemporary jazz but with that quality that is sometimes difficult to obtain, since it’s a matter of accents. While listening to it, I can really understand what Smith was telling me ten years ago about connecting the head and the heart.
The trumpeter is more keen on incorporating Miles Davis influence into his own language – in the past Smith claimed to have dreamed of Davis also, to stress the strong connection with him and his language of pauses, silences, and with his almost muezzin-like calls – but it’s the quality of the music itself and the interplay, where each musician is able to dive deep into the emotional motivation of the other, to make the difference.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir sees Myers at a Hammond Organ, and since music is a matter of accents, we have a strong emotional shift from the first to this second composition, with melancholy leaving space to an almost subtle spooky feeling. Central Park at Sunset is even a more spacey and meditative, while the harmonic idea is verticalized becoming almost dolphian, even if Smith’s call maintains his spiritual qualities.
When Was is another step into an emotional journey, this time led by the piano only, that laps the territories of New Age – at least, of that part of contemporary music that laps New Age – without falling into it – thanks to some dissonances here and there, mostly in the second part of the composition - but this time I feel I can understand people who dislike this path into classicism. Luckily enough, the second part of the composition – almost a disharmonious fugue – is able to redeem the intentions of Myers.
The Harlem Meer is the most static of the compositions here involved: thanks to a trumpet that is soloing almost unaccompanied, we have the feeling of not being able to sort out of a strange dream. Albert Ayler, a Meditation in Light lives on the contrast between Smith and Myers music and the original evoked, so much thicker and denser. No one expects in the middle of an album like this a changing of the guards, anyway I will limit myself to observe that even Lacy and Waldron in some Black Saint/Soul Note albums were paying homage to Monk underestimating his angularity.
I don’t think Myers and Smith are asking for more attention from a wider audience, I suspect instead that the opportunities given to them by the recording process and output influenced their creativity bringing them to obscure part of the music they could give life to, making it all more monochromatic.
Finally, Imagine, a Mosaic for John Lennon is an even more rarefied, subtle composition. You can feel at a certain point how much Lennon’s efforts to contribute to a more just society are losing their breath, or maybe it’s just me, but up to a certain point I have the feeling the musicians are losing the point, closing at the right time before their music becomes too obvious.
Concluding, I would say that this album features some notable compositions, some of the most interesting in Smith’s and Myers’ careers, mixed with less well realised food for musical reflection. And while I’m meditating whether to look for a physical copy of the album, I’m happy I had the opportunity to introduce this album to my readers. After all, this is possibly not the right time for the perfect album or the complete masterpiece, but if you’re able to find a record with just some gems as in this case, I really believe you’re lucky enough.
Odd as it seems, now that I opened Complete Communion to other sounds like ethnic music, post punk and weird songwriting, I’m finally finding new interesting free jazz and avant garde musicians. In Portugal, as an example, there’s a nice scene whose key figures are double bass players like Joao Madeira or Gonçalo Almeida (who lives in Rotterdam), but also in New York you can find musicians who create valid outputs even if they’re not famous like the ones I have interviewed in the past for this blog.
Since in the past I also wrote about how sexist can be the jazz environment, it is with great pleasure that now I can introduce to you the quartet composed by multi-reedist Louise Dam Eckardt Jensen, pianist Carol Liebowitz, bassist Tom Blancarte, and drummer John Bernard Wagner. The performance of almost an hour comprised in their new album Ephemeris was recorded in March 2023.
When I first met the quartet, I thought about the large ensemble Italian Instabile Orchestra, since as this orchestra, the small combo was alive in the last ten years but had few opportunities to express itself as a whole, at the point that this record is their first official release on an album. Difficult as it is to manage a group of people improvising together and making money from this activity, this particular quartet features interesting music and is an interesting starting point to explore lesser-known musicians.
One can obviously think that living in New York is a thrilling experience, with the energy of the city fuelling your dreams and your abilities, but, apart from common thinking, the music you’ll listen in the album Ephemeris is meditative and able to build, minute after minute, a surprising melting of four different languages. The single musicians have their own specificities, so you won’t find in this review obvious comparisons with the most famous improvisors: I believe we can try to describe and listen to their music in a more interesting way.
The record starts with the more than 17 minutes of Gnomon. Percussions, piano and alto saxophone open the meditation. The melodies intertwine themselves in a pointillistic way before the bass enters, making every note a swirl of responses the one to the other. Briefer and longer statements, fragments of melodies, the usual gentle drumming of the piano or the dense melodic textures from the drums we are accustomed to hear in as avant garde concert are here as always.
But this time the key focus is on how much each one is able to sustain their peers, and how much a saxophone line can be surrounded by the drum sticks and the single piano notes, before the piano affirms itself with the reed snorting with decision, and so on in every possible combination from the four instruments, until the drums and the saxophone are left dialoguing in a nervous but gentle manner at the same time.
And then again, the fellows reunite in a new quartet configuration. This time is up to Jensen and Liebowitz to duet, even if Blancarte and Wagner are surrounding them with determined particles of sounds, in a crescendo that ends in a new drums statement. This time Jensen switches to the flute. The duo, opening a space which is not ethnic music nor free improvisation, is crossed by a bowed bass and rare piano notes.
The last three minutes of the composition are an attempt to give life to an organic life form, and it is what everyone with heart and ears would call ‘holistic’. The flute solo is finely articulated and its dialogue with the piano is something of interest even for people who is accustomed to free improvisation. Born In 1980, Louise Dam Eckardt Jensen is a Danish-American saxophonist, vocalist and composer, who divides herself into her two countries of origin, giving life to a music that reflects both.
Noisy and melodic at the same time, her music attracted the attention of such different musicians such as Peter Evans, Marc Ducret, Weasel Walter and Jim Black. Carol Liebowitz, not only a pianist but also a singer in her own right, focused on improvised music after studying classical composition at the High School of Performing Arts and NYU. She had as mentors musicians like Sheila Jordan and Sal Mosca – the latter one of the pivotal figures in the music of Lee Konitz, and praised also by Anthony Braxton.
Peers who enjoyed playing with her are Daniel Carter, Ken FIliano and many, many others. Praised by many jazz critics and reviewers, she accompanied herself in many records and concerts with bassist Tom Blancarte, born in Texas and with a twenty-five years career on his shoulders. Pivotal figure in the world of free improvisation in NY City through his work with Peter Evans and other lineups, he lives today in Denmark but continues to play in various formations like the Copenhagen-based quartet Tacticla Maybe.
Finally, drummer John Bernard Wagner lives in Lynbrook (NY) and has an important training curriculum that led him to be a teacher of music at the Green Vale School (a private institute in Long Island) beyond being an accomplished musician. It is useless at this point to describe all the tracks present in Ephemeris. In effect, I believe that my readers have enough elements to taste this music, an important step in the continuum of NY avant garde jazz.
Since one month ago Carol Liebowitz has published on Youtube a video performance of the quartet recorded just three days before the concert on the album, I’m happy to embed it here below and leave you in company of it. I believe it will give many of you the will to buy the album and enjoy some new and fresh sounds. Expect more in the future, since I’m putting my hands not only on the albums by the Portuguese scene I was referring myself to at the beginning, but also on a couple of books of interest for each avant garde music lover.
