Born in Lake Forest, Illinois, Jason Kao Hwang's musical odyssey began with classical violin training. However, his eager exploration of jazz and improvised music long before the 1970s set the stage for a career marked by constant evolution and innovation.
Hwang's discography is an expression to his versatility, with each album offering a unique sonic experience. My introduction to his work came through a double CD featuring the supergroup The Commitment, alongside William Parker on bass, Zen Matsuura on drums, and Will Connell Jr. on flute and alto saxophone. In this ensemble, Hwang's improvisational style echoed influences from Leroy Jenkins and Billy Bang while incorporating flavors and techniques from Asian music.
The year 2022 saw the release of "Uncharted Faith" (Blue Coast Music), a collaboration with the late J.A. Deane. This album showcases Hwang's violin and its electronic treatments, creating a genre-defying sound reminiscent of Miles Davis's electric period from 1968 to 1975 in its innovative approach.
The following year, "Book of Stories" (True Sound, 2023) by the Critical Response quartet presented compositions deeply rooted in the New York free jazz scene, yet imbued with a distinct personality.
Given this diverse background, Hwang's latest solo effort, "Soliloquies," came as a delightful surprise. Tracks like "At The Beginning" and "Encirclement" reveal new facets of both the musician and the man.
This work stems from Hwang's desire to engage more deeply with his family history, particularly conversations with his father about their experiences in China during World War II. These musical 'soliloquies' serve as an extension of moments lost to time, preserved through memory and emotion.
Hwang's approach to the violin in "Soliloquies" is transformative, relying heavily on pizzicato techniques that reimagine the instrument's capabilities. Critics have likened his playing to a zither or a talking drum, highlighting the innovative nature of his performance.
The music defies simple categorization, weaving together Eastern and Western influences in a tapestry of sound that requires multiple listens to be fully appreciated. It's a testament to Hwang's ability to seamlessly blend diverse cultural and musical traditions.
"Soliloquies" stands as one of the most powerful musical and creative acts in recent years. Its deeply personal nature and unique sound recall Audrey Chen's "Runt Vigor" (Karlrecords, 2018) in its compelling individuality. This album represents a potential new direction for improvised music, challenging listeners to expand their musical horizons.
Jason Kao Hwang, who has collaborated with luminaries such as Anthony Braxton, Billy Bang, Butch Morris, Reggie Workman, and Henry Threadgill, has undoubtedly earned his place as a maestro in his own right. While his multifaceted career may defy easy categorization, time will likely cement his status as a pivotal figure in improvised music.
As his recent works demonstrate, Hwang continues to push boundaries and explore new territories. His career trajectory suggests exciting developments for the field of improvised music in the years to come, offering hope and inspiration for musicians and listeners alike.
It is almost a commonplace the fact that
“fusion”, born in the middle of the 1960s, burned itself after a fist and
beginning incredible, creative season leaving the most adventurous listeners
dry and thirsty becoming a catchy and more pop-rock oriented (i.e.: simplified)
style of music.
In fact, after the fist creative outputs
by the like of Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock as On The Corner and Sextant,
after incredibly skilled musicians such as Jaco Pastorius, after creating a
music that mixed the principles of improvisation with instruments coming from
all over the world like Trilok Gurtu’s tablas and tampouras, “fusion” became a
label for sometimes easy to create and to play music, sometimes cerebral and
unproductive experimentations.
The same thing happened with post-rock at the
end of 1990s, with band such as Tortoise giving originally life to a music that
was funk but also hardcore punk – at least in spirit – but that degraded in few
years into a mere juxtaposition of different elements in order to find out the
most rare approach to various notes, instruments and styles of music.
A complete different path, reminiscent of the
famous Loft
Era we talked about in the past, is that of a leader of those faraway days,
violinist Jason Kao Hwang. While for more info on him we recommend another
review of one of his last year works, one of the most important issued in
these times, this new album titled Book Of Stories (True Sound Recordings,
2023) is played by the Critical Response Trio.
The trio features Hwang at electric violin, Anders Nilsson at electric guitar and Michael
T.A. Thompson at drums. The music is flavored with funk and reggae hints
and spices here and there, but the compositions, all by Hwang, are anyway adventurous
enough to be interesting for all fans of improvised music, even non idiomatic,
because the most recognizable parts are in a way ‘abstracted’ and conducted
into climaxes or moments of rest that are fully dynamics and that can bring the
listener a lot of fun, being a mix of the ‘mental’ approach of spontaneous
improvised music and the more enjoyable characteristics of popular music
without being ‘populistic’.
This way, compared with the previous Hwang
release in duo with J.A. Deane, the album offers the listener another face of
the instrumentalist and composer way of understanding and exercise creativity,
likewise interesting and daring. Powered by the experience of the musicians
involved (Anders Nilssen played guitar with William Parker, Paquito D’Rivera,
Elliott Sharp and Ken Filiano among the many others, while Michael T.A.
Thompson was a solid drummer for musicians such as Charles Gayle, Joe McPhee,
Matthew Shipp, Henry Grimes and John Patitucci), the record is solid enough to
make you want to listen to it more than once.
The album opens with The Power of Many in the
Soul of One. Violin phrases, and subsequent silences, are interspersed with
rhythmic outbursts while the guitar arpeggios embellish Hwang phrases. A sense
of urgency and, together with it, a meditative quality, are mixing together in
what seem to be an attempt to create a dramatic peak that abruptly diminishes
into a more introspective, even if electrical, interaction.
A pedal change atmosphere leaving then space to
a beautiful drum solo, after which electric guitar explodes in different
rhythmic approaces on an atonal basis. After the guitar express itself in full,
it’s time for the effected violin to recall all the musicians involved into a
more meditative mood, played almost until the end of the track. Many nuances
and the overall approach makes you think about the Loft Era music, but played
through a more contemporary vision.
Music continues with Upside Circle Down, and
more than of the Lofts it it reminiscent of the first AACM experiments – I’m
thinking in particular to the first releases in the 1970s by Anthony Braxton
with Dave Holland on cello or Kenny Wheeler on fluegelhorn. Brief assertions
are interspersed with silence, inviting people to listen to the music and
themselves more carefully, but the drums’ almost funky groove creates a first
difference, almost a new idea of “fusion”, and a recontextualization of
experimental music from the end of the 1960s.
Guitar arpeggios create a magical atmosphere,
as you can listen through works such different but with a similar emotional
approach as In A Silent Way by Miles Davis and Andrew Cyrille’s Lebroba –
notably with two pairly sensitive guitarists as Nilssen like John McLaughlin
and Bill Frisell. A Silent Ghost Follows is a slightly shorter composition
introduced by the colors of mallets and a contemporary claim by the violin,
making us remember Anthony Braxton again or the AEoC.
This time the use of different pitches – the
violin looks for very high notes, the guitar opens up to middle tones –
captures the listener, again carried in a past era still harbinger of stimuli
for the future – the violin creates almost modern electronic textures into the
solid structure we depicted. Dragon Carved into Bone takes the same matter on
another temperature, with violin soloing on higher pitches and drums depicting
a more bustling sonorous landscape, while the guitar gently deconstructs a
melody into parts and pieces so to rebuild them together in another,
interesting shape.
More quiet parts are alternating with denser
structures, while drums nod to some reggae/dub or blues rhythms. Last piece,
Friends Forever, is an hommage to the musicians that in the past gave shape to
the music here present, through ages and through all the difficulties that
didn’t prevented anyway many of them from creating beauty. The piece is the
most melodical of the lotto, even if doesn’t lack the blues scrape but also the
sweetness typical of the genre.
Living on the other side of the ocean, I’m not
completely aware of what Hwang and friends future steps will be. For the
moment, enjoying this music is an unexpected gift that deserves to be shared
with fans of improvisation. The album has been released on June 30 this year
and is available also through the artist Bandcamp
page.
I have to admit it, this album comes in
the right moment in my shelves. A few time ago I bought for my collection a
double CD titled “Electronic Music – It Started Here ...” published by the
label Not Now, devoted to the reissue of old material in every field of
contemporary music, from the 1920s blues to jazz to contemporary music, and
this double CD was very interesting for me because it comprised two different
ideas of dealing with electronic sound.
On one hand you had people devoted to
abstractness, or with experimenting with new structurres if you want, as
Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Schaeffer, on the other hand you had composers
like Ray Cathode who used electronic sounds to surround piano melodies and Dick
Jackobs who loved to reproduce the melody of the famous italian song Volare.
This almost schizoid abyss and difference
between this two kind of idea of contemporary music helped me in understanding
how insidious is for a musician to write or execute electronic music. This
style of music can be the most volatile, the most abstract, and while a
composer as John Cage argued that musicians could help human beings in having a
new familiarity with everyday noise of a city life, it is true that electronic
and experimental music need some anchor points in order to not fear the
abstractness, or newness, they carry with themselves.
That’s why I truly believe Qi Gong, an
interesting way people from the Far East tried to discipline the body of men,
was a real inspiration form for J. A. “Dino” Deane, one of those figures you
feel a profound interest for when you meet their work. J. A. Deane was devoted
to electronic music and sound manipulation until his recent death in 2021, long
before this album was completed by his collaborator Jason Kao Hwang. But let’s
start from the beginning.
Jason Kao Hwang is an important figure in the
field of improvised music. His art speaks loud outside of the barriers we put
on art forms because we feel we can understand them better that way. In an old
review for a reissue on double CD of old and complete recordings by one of his
first bands, The Committments, featuring a young William Parker, I
wrote in my language that that music was “indespensible, vital music, an
expression of the human at its best like few others”.
Mr Hwang, a first generation descendant of
chinese immigrants, has been raised near Chicago and partecipated very actively
at the first season of the New York loft scene held by Sam Rivers. His music
was a bridge between the AACM school and the New York sound, fusing them
together in his playing both violin and viola. In a way, he continued
experimenting in the tradition of other great players of string insturments
like the late Leroy Jenkins.
Very active in the field of improvised music
since the 1980s, with this last output Uncharted Faith he poses his idea and
practice of music at high peaks of creativeness thanks also to his
collaboration with J. A. Deane. After Deane lost her wife Colleen Mulvihill in
2019, he left Denver in order to live in rural Cortez, Colorado. There he
finished a book titled “Becoming Music, Conduction and Improvisation as forms
of Qi Gong”.
Deane sent one copy of his book to Hwang in
2020. Hwang answered sending Deane copies of his music, and the two decided to
collaborate despite the pandemics. Hwang in this album plays a Tucker Barrett
solid-body violin, while Deane, who died before the album was ended,
contributes electronics such as Sensei Morph touch controller, Spacecraft
granular synthesizer software and Akai MPC Live Digital Audio Workstation.
Just to go back at the beginning of this
review, the album is in the tradition of great experimention with sound, but in
a way it is also concrete. In fact Hwang violin is filtered or played, I cannot
tell precisely but this is the impression, through a wah wah pedal like that of
Hendrix or Miles Davis during the 1970s, plus echo effects (but it can be also
Deane post-production). I cited Miles Davis not by chance because the first
thing I thought listening to Parallel Universe, the CD first track, was that of
listening to an abstract rendition of On The Corner.
Miles Davis during the 1970 was not only
exploring with timbres and colors from rock amplification, he also tried to
change the structure of music, asking for help to his collaborator Paul
Buckmaster who suggested him to use modular, i.e. repetitive, structures taken
from Karlheinz Stockhausen and Indian music. Davis did it his own way, taking
bass figures from funk after listening to Sly Stone music in particular but
taking it all to a more abstract level.
Not dissimilarly here, we have on the first
track of the album a distorted violin surrounded by small electronic sounds the
same way Davis played his muted and distorted trumpet surrounded by bass, three
drums and electric guitars. Hwang is not playing a direct melody and is not
mimicking Jenkins’ trills and vibratos, but he’s finding his own way to
communicate in a more abstract, but also very concrete, world of electronic
sounds: he tries to win the battle against abstractness, and possibly he and
Deane has won this battle.
On Singularity, the collateral electronic
sounds are not following or preceeding the violin, but kind of dancing around
it. There are moments in which you hear the violin alone, as a moment in which
you recollect your ideas, then you are pushed again in the flux of music where
some small sounds are used as percussions in order to give a more vivid
rendition to the violin’s ‘quasi-melodies’.
Crossing the Horizon is one of those pieces of
music in which you cannot tell what is the analogic source for music and what
is the electronic one, and this is his charm: the music has a great variety not
only as far as sound used, but also as far as volumes and colors. Sometimes
this piece of music reminds me of Laurie Anderson when she was playing a violin
without strings and with a tape recorded at their place, but no voice emerges
from Hwang, only abstract shapes.
In Shamans of Light you can almost feel a
strange organ depicting a liturgic armosphere, while the violin, here a little
bit more material than in the other tracks, at a certain point explodes and
leaves you with the sensation of a transfiguration. Speaking in Tongues is a
title that makes me think of texts I was reading about Albert Ayler many years
ago, that idea of many horns playing different things together at once, but what
we have here are different layers of sound, from a small melodic background to
the violin, effected as in the first track.
Finally, the long, almost 20 minutes of
Uncharted Faith start with small electronic and violin sounds developing into
almost musique concrète and what in pop music is called a wall of sound, with
the violin expressing a mysterious chant and the electronics answering with
what can seem a ‘fire of sound’, with small percussions in the AACM tradition
and after them a strange organ or piano, pushing the music on more concrete
territories without losing that aerial and abstract quality.
A record that grows undoubtely one listening
after the other, Uncharted Faith is a great attempt to push the boundaries of
improvised and electronic music forward, in territories that in other hands
could result more tricky, but that in Deane and Hwang practice are for sure
thrilling and demanding. If you decide to committ, they will leave you
satisfied and wanting for more.
