Ashes & Diamonds III + Bach geek-out
Two more chances to hear this piece live
So, two more Ashes and Diamonds release shows for folks lucky enough to find themselves in France:
Dec 13, 2023 - Club 27 (Marseille, France)
Dec 14, 2023 - Sunside (Paris, France)
And, as promised, I have some more to say about this music! This is the “central theme” of Ashes and Diamonds:
You can hear it about a minute into the first part of the piece, played by Sam Weber on electric bass, as the rest of the band plays texturally and atmospherically around it.
And you can hear it again in the closing moments of the piece, after the Sturm und Drang of the section marked “Furioso”:
So, there’s a sense in which, the whole hour-long piece is drawn from those chords.
What could this mean, and how to explain it?
I spent quite a bit of time in my work on Renaissance poetry thinking about the ancient concept of furor poeticus, poetic fury, which can have positive and negative senses, but basically refers to versions of artistic possession by a spirit, where the artist cedes agency to a god or a daemon or what have you. In the negative sense, there isn’t enough agency exerted and the artistic energies run wild, or maybe it’s the devil in you, and it’s a big mess or maybe a debauched freak-out. In the positive sense (?), we cede our earthly concerns to allow the divine to speak through us.
Note: I find myself talking about gods and the spirit and divinity really a lot more since I have dedicated myself to music full-time. What I mean by it, I am not sure, but I often reach for George Eliot when I want someone stronger and smarter than I am to tell me what I am feeling about divine matters. I was remembering a moment from Middlemarch this morning, where her narrator comments, casually, almost thrown away, about her hero Will Ladislaw, “I think his own feelings at that moment were perfect, for we mortals have our divine moments, when love is satisfied in the completeness of the beloved object.”1
But back to divine fury: in many ways, it seems as though Ashes and Diamonds is oriented in a very different direction, not ceding the self to allow a blast of divine speech, but rather drawing out this story from steady contemplation of an object. I wonder if that sequence of chords could be considered an object of contemplation: what is this? Where does it want to sit? Where can it lead? And of course: what does this tell me about myself, about the nature of my world and my place in it? It’s more natural maybe to ask such questions of a mountain, or a snow-covered fir tree. But chords and sequences of chords are not less mysterious, no less expressions of cosmic as well as pedestrian forces and predilections and laws dimly perceived by us.
But now I’m thinking about how I would teach this piece, and it seems to me that a bit of commentary is in order. I won’t do the voiceover thing, not for a piece this long. But here are a few observations keyed to time stamps.
Adagio
0:00 Greg Ward’s playing in this section with its “fluttering effects” linking the piano’s flutter on one note and Kirchner’s brushwork—gorgeous. The arrival of the chords is somber, noble, and beautiful. (I had not previously felt moved to apply those adjectives to someone playing electric bass!) For me you can instantly feel the justification for the rest of the piece based on these chords—these are chords I wanted to sit with, spend some serious time with . . .
2:40 Ensemble writing begins, again with almost bowed-instrument energy by Ward leading on top. The rhythms are complex here, but don’t feel complicated. I’m strongly feeling Messiaen: the way fearsomely modern vocabulary is deployed with a sense of serenity and total lack of pretense: this is just a way, maybe the only way right now, to speak about serious things.
3:48 The piano is left by itself for the first time, executing dense harmonies in the right hand while the left hand comes in playing 3 against 4, first one voice, then 2, 3, 4, and 5, at one point 7 total with the right and and building to the first climatic arrival, where the piano plays the theme of chords for the first time with bass and drums.
6:54 More melodic development by the saxophone and piano have taken us to the first solo: Ward. Without noticing it, the harmonic and melodic material have created a form, with chords, and Ward is improvising over them: a slow modern jazz form. Not really a ballad, 15 bars with shifting time signatures and much dictated for piano and bass, although not so much that there isn’t room to develop and respond to Ward.
10:50 Solo ends, and Ward and Clearfield join for a unison line over the same chords—a “soli” section in the language of big band charts. And then part 2 of Ward’s solo, now over the theme of chords.
12:30 A return to the dense solo piano writing of earlier in the piece, and this time I feel resonance with another Messiaen piece—somewhere in the Vingt Regards? Or perhaps something from Ligeti’s Etudes. Anyway, the feeling is no longer serene, rather there is a sense of impending rupture, or of the various elements of the music pulling on each other until their unity cannot be sustained. And that is a great moment for a drum solo—which brings the “Adagio” to a close.
Gigue
0:00 This is where things got even more exciting for me pianistically. There’s a simple ostinato in the right hand and then this quite complex line begins in the left, which is doubled on the bass. After a while the right hand adds another, slower voice while continuing the upper one, while the left hand only gets more urgent, and more complications are added to the right. It’s a slow arrival of a Bach-level polyphony requiring massive independence and strength.
1:48 Kirchner’s drumming is masterful through this section. If you focus you hear him picking and choosing what he wants to double on the cymbals, all while feeling the gradual build of energy. When the sax reenters with a sixteenth-note line you realize he has already felt the further subdivision and we are in double-time.
3:20 After a drum solo over a vamp, we have a series of unison lines that recall the dance of fury movement of Messiaen’s famous Quartet, as well as lots of prog rock and fusion bands and some kinds of metal bands that are into similar stuff!
4:00 A modulation and things keep getting more serious (but also joyful—at least in live performance the pleasure of playing such complicated music well also radiates from the band irrepressibly even as the emotional character of the music remains clear), leading into another solo for Ward with Weber on bass over the initial ostinato (but in a new key).
Lento
0:00 And the ostinato leads us directly into this beautiful and moving space of the central movement. The piano plays by itself at the start, showing Clearfield’s familiarity with late Romantic piano (he included a Brahms intermezzo on his last solo record). But this feels like Berg or Schoenberg at moments too, or Brahms at his most austere: by 3:40, we listen to just a single line that seems to embody that in-betweenness for me.
4:30 Clearfield notes that this section sounds the most like his earlier compositions and recordings, and I agree. The same chords now provide the basis for a rubato, indulgent, flowing, lyrical group improvisation, and eventually soaring, heart-wrenching lines from Ward.
9:00 A new statement of the material from the beginning of the movement, now with the full ensemble. It does feel like a sad withdrawal from the warmth of what has just transpired, and also feels connected to the desolation of the end of the entire piece.
Passacaglia
0:00 Bass solo: there is a lot of material written for Weber to work with, and it’s a moment to reflect on the richness of Clearfield’s writing for bass. Not in the least an afterthought, it reflects his own substantial engagement with guitar and stringed instruments generally.
1:30 Sax and bass improvising together, another showcase of Ward’s whispering, confidential voice on his instrument, which is so satisfying with even the barest accompaniment.
4:20 Improvised piano solo! For the first time in the piece! Not that there haven’t been plenty of moments for the piano to shine with composed material thus far, but it is rather remarkable that it is on the fourth movement, and after everyone else has been given at least one solo, that we finally get to the composer stretching out. It’s a solo that reflects a great deal of the energy and vocabulary of the rest of the piece: lots of active polyphonic lines in both hands, as well as rapid runs in the right—and why not?
7:45 The piano solo “resolves” back into the dense counterpoint which we first heard in the Adagio, but now faster, finally joined by complex left-hand lines doubled on the bass, and finally, at 8:20, what is marked on the score as a “sax ‘noise’ solo.” The central theme is here, and Ward shows just what he can do with such instructions—a thrilling moment!
Furioso
0:00 Continues directly from the furious energy at the end of the previous movement. Naked aggression from the piano: high dissonances, rolled chords, all supported by drums. What comes next builds rapidly and goes by fast, and leads to a climax of solo piano at 2:33, which while a little less polyphonic is so fast it made audiences at both performances I attended hold their breaths and lean forward as one.
3:30 And it’s over: we’re in the space which to me so clearly aligns with the end of the movie Ashes and Diamonds. Indeterminate, desolate, possibly a new beginning, possibly ushering in hope, possibly the curtain coming down on everything. The same chords now in the upper register, ascending, fading.
And now for a sideline on Bach and poly-vocality. Let’s go:
Bach and simultaneous singing
There is a kind of ecstatic pleasure in marshaling more than one voice simultaneously, and the piano is among the instruments best suited to allow for this. (But I would argue because it is so well suited, it makes it that much easier to do it badly; but I’ll return to that later). I wrote about this before as part of my post on Twin Talk—and about one angle that the film about Glenn Gould provided, which was about the pleasure of hearing multiple voices simultaneously. And of course, most jazz folks will tell you that hearing is basically the whole game: you can only play what you hear. But there are clearly many levels of this “simultaneously,” and so I’ll try to unpack that a bit.
The most basic seems to be harmony: two voices moving together, separated by pitch. The next up seems to be call and response, a complication of which would be one voice holding a pitch while the other moves. This one is in Bach everywhere and is also something that lots of improvisers on piano do to varying extents. But beyond that is where two voices or more are moving independently and also fulfilling those earlier roles, in a continuously shifting fashion. So sometimes harmonizing with each other, sometimes holding still while the other moves, sometimes moving in ways that seem opposed for a time, only to rejoin later. There is also a tendency in western music for the top voice in any array to carry the melody, and for pianists this manifests in a stronger right hand: most pianists are used to carrying the principal vocal element of the music with their right hand, while the left hand plays a supporting role. But for Bach, this orientation is often thrown out entirely: lower and middle voices are just as likely to be the most important or most active at any given moment. And the constant change is a big part of the drama. This should go some way to explaining why playing a 4- or 5-voice Bach fugue is, for so many pianists, much, much harder than anything else they are likely to have tried to do.
Bach’s Goldberg Variations are a great starting point, and Glenn Gould’s two studio versions of the piece at the beginning and end of his career are still fascinating and moving to me, 30 years after having been introduced to them. YouTube has all the video, so here is just a “simple” variation, with just two voices, but two very much equal voices. You can see Gould with all his idiosyncrasies, his crazy-low playing position, etc. You can also seem him feeling the voices (and singing them) with extreme intensity, which then comes out in the playing. It’s pretty simple: he heard these voices as if they were an ensemble with the requisite number of individual musicians, and his hands and fingers became the outlet for this incredibly expressive, compelling singing.
(Part of the trick of playing Bach on a piano is that Bach’s various keyboard instruments often had more than one keyboard stacked in front of you; so having voices cross each other is harder on a modern piano: you also have to figure out how to avoid collisions!)
I think a lot of my fellow improvising pianists are interested in pursuing this kind of thing, and many of them have achieved remarkable success: that is, having a sort of “group improvisation” in your head which you then transfer to the keyboard—that, as opposed to singing a big melodic, lyrical line, and then having some nice ways of supporting it, with your left hand in varying degrees of subordination. Sullivan Fortner is amazing in so many ways, but in terms of polyvocality and equal strength between hands he is, well—he has been known to just take a solo with his left and hand let his right sit it out—for a pianist that’s fairly mind-blowing. I can’t find footage of that, but here’s something that can stand in—a solo on Thelonious Monk’s “Nutty” in duo with saxophonist Ben Wendel, where the creativity seems constantly, equally at play in the full range of the piano, and where the roles of right and left hand are gloriously unconstrained, and bursting with ideas, humor, maybe even a quotation from The Nutcracker? Would work on “Nutty.” Anyway, take a listen:
To go beyond two independent voices, things get that much more complex. I was fascinated to hear Daniil Trifonov talking about his process for preparing The Art of the Fugue, in which he said that he learned all the voices of every fugue individually and in every possible combination. So, with a four-voice fugue, say, he learned to play the soprano and tenor voices as a duet, as well as the soprano and bass, and the alto and tenor, and then groups of three, and then the group of four. What that gives him is the ability to bring out any of the four voices, and any combination of the four, for expressive purposes, at will. Trifonov is a performer who feels extremely in-the-moment, as though he is indeed improvising for the occasion the music he is playing, and thus makes the most familiar pieces sound new. Anyway here he is playing the first four-voiced fugue from the beginning of the collection:
OK, this has been a long post! I’m going to pause for now.
Chapter 37, page 363 of my Penguin edition.