Ben Goldberg “Eight Phrases for Jefferson Rubin” (BAG Production Records, 2021)

When last week I was listening to a clarinet in a concert of contemporary music, I was hit by how much dissonant this instrument was in that context, so I fully understood Eric Dolphy, one of my favourite multi-reedists, when he tried to be as scratchy as he could on bass clarinet. Above all, even if he studied the style of music I was listening to in that moment, his roots were dwelved into blues. So when I first listened to Ben Goldberg, I was in a way deeply fascinated by his touch.

But let’s start with a little bit of order. In the last issue of an italian magazine devoted to jazz there is an intriguing review of Goldberg’s last album, Everything Happens To Be, featuring a well known rhythm section to my readers: Michael Formanek on bass, Thomas Fujiwara on drums, plus the architectural guitar of Mary Halvorson. I didn’t wanted to review it since few time ago I wrote about Goldberg’s companions in full, but I promised to myself to spend some time listening to his music.

Ben Goldberg is an incredible musician. He studied with Pauline Oliveros and in some way her sensitivity matched perfectly with that of his pupil, as we will see during this review. During the lockdown Goldberg lost all of the concerts he was supposed to play, and so he started developing a musical diary published through his Bandcamp account. But this year he released a couple of intriguing records: the one with the trio mentioned here above, featuring also Ellery Eskelin on tenor saxophone, and an older album of previously unreleased material that will be the heart of this review.

The album is titled Eight Phrases for Jefferson Rubin. Rubin was an intimate friend of Ben Goldberg, a sculptor that curiously enough for a certain amount of time lived and worked in my own country, Italy. Sadly he passed away after an accident with his pickup truck. The music featured in this album is recorded by Goldberg on various clarinets, plus veteran Larry Ochs on sopranino and tenor saxophone, John Scott on guitar, the basses of Lisle Erris and Trevor Dunn, and Michael Sarin on drums.

The first things that came to my mind, even if it can seem a superficial description, is that Larry Hochs plays his sopranino saxophone, as an example in a piece like the initial Problem, as Steve Lacy was playing his own soprano: lots of edges, staccatos, various techniques used in order to give his instruments not a raucous but that quality of a tense sound, as typical of a music coming from jazz and an instrument whose lack of roundness need the players to be solved.

Obviously Goldberg is not playing here the part of a Steve Potts, with that characteristic stream of consciousness, but he is respectful of the atmosphere created by his pals and by his own decisions as a composer: an intense, meditative but not intimistic mood that can be related to what happens after a tragic loss. In his book Sud e Magia (South and Magic) anthropologist Ernesto De Martino described how music was used in south of Italy to help people to avoid madness after the death of a beloved parent, but in a way Goldberg’s music is intended to avoid concepts and actions related to catharsis.

Plain of Jars is, again, introduced by a saxophone whose melodic and harmonic structures will be for sure well known to the fans of the Rova, even if here there’s something different from the typical impetuousness of a quartet of reeds and a more direct orientation to explore all the possibilities of the instruments. Silence is a compositional tool widely used in this piece of music, and the single players are able to fill it with a respectful creative tension.

The piece titled Visited sees a unison of reeds and arcoed bass, and a consequent tension transmitted also through the dialogue between the other bass and the drums. Guitar weaves a dramatic and expressively urgent canvas, while the crescendo of the other instruments dramatizes music in a magistral use of distortion evoking the ghost of a Ronald Shannon Jackson. The clarinet behaves consequently, but the tension and release program sees the music reaching some peaks just to leave the soloists an aptly space of expression.

Eight Phrases, the other ten minutes long composition on the album, start with a clarinet statement added with sparse drums here and there. After, soprano saxophone crawls while the clarinet takes the role of the drums and the bass give the composition his right pulsation. Then a clarinet solo and another duet with the soprano leave space to some syncopated brushes and a bass texture, that after a while sees also the intervention of a gentle guitar. Another reed dialogue closes the piece.

Brace and Bits sees the clarinet sneaking out through the drums figures, rapidly substituted by a guitar solo. Drums and guitar continue together until clarinet and sopranino draw some lines at the horizon, depicting a vivid landscape. After some drums figures, guitar harmonics and the clarinet close. With Elements, it is time to leave some space to bass and sopranino, intertwining so well that the drums give only a few gentle brushes hits to add some little spices to the music.

Lost Touch sees Ochs mastering his tenor saxophone through a melody whose structure is well known to the lovers of jazz tinted with contemporary music, and the assertiveness of the tutti creates a dramatic bridge to the tenor’s wild, finally releasing the tension, assertions. All the instruments are finally living the opportunity to express themselves in a wild context, lowering the volume but not abandoning their creativity to underline the clarinet solo.

It’s time to close, and Snow is perfect for this purpose with his guitar melody: it’s like a night coming after a full, troubled day. This record can be the perfect introduction to a figure, that of Goldberg, and I invite you to recover also his debut with Kenny Wollesen in the Klezmer Trio, his compositions for Steve Lacy and the album by avant garde guitar hero Nels Cline New Monastery. I think one of the most satisfactory things about jazz and contemporary music is that when you meet a new pal, you really want to see how he behaves in different context: here there’s a new occasion to that.