Otherlands
Stephan Crump launches a new trio; PH attempts some distant musical connections
Albums discussed in this post:
Star Mountain, by Otherlands Trio, featuring Stephan Crump, bass, Darius Jones, alto saxophone, and Eric McPherson, drums
Watercress by S. Carey (available in digital and vinyl)
Ascending, by the Nunnery (also available in digital and vinyl)
Though this is a new band, the collaboration between Stephan Crump on bass and Eric McPherson on drums goes back at least ten years, with the Borderlands Trio that includes the pianist Kris Davis.1 The new element is Darius Jones on alto saxophone, and the way I keep wanting to describe his presence is through some synaesthetic image as of a starburst—the selection of a bright orange and pink set of abstractions for the album art seems right on. Whereas my memory of Davis in the band was that she mostly eased her way—with the utmost patience and skill—into the sonic textures of the trio, Jones is often just as happy to enter with a full forte, either a brash melodic line, or with some pitch-less texture or sonic gambit.2
That happens here, at 1:15:
One of the more miraculous qualities of the ensemble is that Jones can play like this—brashly, with abandon, with room-filling energy that is harder to capture on the recording but was easy to feel live—and yet one feels not a hint of domination or swagger or attention-hogging in this playing. This quality of non-domination is perhaps explicable by the space he leaves between phrases: that space is helping the relationship between all three musicians remain a conversation of equal partners. This is not a solo!
The non-domination is also perhaps explicable as a sequence of musical events. McPherson starts this piece with ideas on the drums, a bit of chatter that has no obvious pulse or steady rhythm. Crump enters on bass, also playing bursts of phrases that don’t imply steady time, until after a bit McPherson decides to play a steady rimshot pattern.3 When Jones enters, at full volume, he also plays rhythmic figures that resist steady time and feel like snippets of chatter, though they also alternate between staccato phrases, with abrupt endings, and phrases that have a sweetened tail of vibrato angling downward. But as things start to progress, it feels like the roles are remaining poised to go anywhere: the space Jones leaves allows us to hear Crump’s bass lines (as in lines played on the bass as well as the more familiar meaning) for the rhythmic and melodic potential they bring, as well as to hear Jones’s phrases as bass lines.
Eventually we realize that as this groove thickens and deepens, Jones is also quite happy to land phrases that sound like perfectly placed blues figures, and to ascend as the energy of the group builds, finally rising into the upper harmonics, noise, and sound-cluster regions of the saxophone.
If you aren’t ready yet to purchase this music (though why would you wait?), you can check out a good deal more of the band on Crump’s YouTube channel, Papillon Sounds. You can watch “Diadromous” being recorded in the studio, as well as the longer “Metamorpheme” (16 minutes) and the shorter “Lateral Line” (4 and half minutes). And, Crump has also released one of the sets from the Jazz Gallery show I attended: just over an hour of new music.
Way back in the early days of this stack, I recorded a running log of observations of one piece by the band Twin Talk. I haven’t done that here, but in case this kind of orientation might help curious listeners, I have included a written log of observations about the 16-minute “Metamorpheme” at the end of this post.
Now for a bit more theorizing about why I find this music so captivating. It might be that the band melds musical worlds, particularly joining the kind of music that is interested in new sounds, in pressing and expanding what counts as music, with a deep sense of groove, which I guess would be inclusive of what people in jazz call “swing.” That is to say, it combines the alien (or at least the alien to a musical context) and the familiar.
So, on the on the one hand, we’re bringing into close listening settings sonic material that is so fresh it seems to escape preconceptions and emotional associations. I wrote in the past about some music making like this that I have encountered lately at the Hungry Brain Sunday sessions in Chicago, but Otherlands also feels akin to the music I was listening to intensely further in the past, when the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) was performing in Chicago as often as in New York.4 I’d be in a concert, say Tony Arnold singing a new piece by a Mexican composer, and I’d say to myself, I’ve never heard a human voice do anything like this.5 Sometimes I would leave their concerts literally hearing the world in a new way, newly attuned to sounds I’d never paid attention to.
But on the other hand, this band is also just as interested in “grooving,” in the sense of coming together around a pulse, though the character of this pulse, the way it “undulates,” feels entirely their own.6 It’s completely fascinating, all the more so to see unfolding in front of you in real time. But the groove is also primal and seems at least to radiate a sense of the universal. It’s as familiar as anything can be, even as it might be a familiarity we have forgotten until we’re in its grip.
That word familiarity brings me to the last moves I’d like to make here. S. Carey is the stage name used by Sean Carey, longtime drummer for Bon Iver, and known in Eau Claire as a benevolent creative force supporting many exciting musical endeavors. He just released a new EP, Watercress, which among other things supplies me with the definition I was seeking for “EP,” in that it is a 20-minute group of 4 songs that nonetheless feels complete unto itself, a sonic world fully realized, that just happens to play out in four songs instead of an album’s usual 8 or 10.
I think it can seem to classical music lovers or jazz heads or devotees of the avant-garde that “popular” music traffics in a kind of cheap familiarity, or a flattering familiarity: that the reason it is broadly (or more broadly) popular is because it is basically rejiggering old formulas to deliver something that seems new but really isn’t. But, at least for musicians like Carey (and I’ll also mention The Nunnery again in this context), all of that couldn’t be further from the truth. Check out this song, and be sure to get all the way to the third minute (or skip there if you must!):
I know, there are a lot of differences: it sets a beat right at the start, guitars play, the groove gets more layers, and then vocals enter. But I also note all the harmonic atmosphere at the beginning: I first noticed this kind of messing around in Coldplay, when I first checked out that band 10 years ago. If one pulled that guitar out of the mix, it might sound as daring and experimental as some of the sounds Darius Jones pulls from his saxophone. (This moment from the center of “Politik” is what I mean, a guitar note that strains against the harmonic background, and hovers between harmony and abstract atmosphere.) I guess we have a lot more tolerance for noise and sonic textures abstracted from the forms of songs, as long as that abstraction is in the form of guitars and their associated distortions?7
But most of the way to minute 3 in “Honey-eyed,” the abstraction takes over for a bit, and the groove breaks down and it sounds like we’re fading off into some atmospherics as things peter out—but then—no—the atmospherics continue and we start to recognize they are metrical, that a pulse continues. And then a shaker comes in quietly. More sounds, more layers, a bass line. Words too—but now so quiet that it is exceedingly hard to make them out . . . “maybe in a past life . . . all the time we wasted.” Because my childhood is being actuated, I think of the long tail of Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up.” But I guess maybe the better example would be “Optimistic” to “In Limbo” from Radiohead’s Kid A—because the long ending just becomes the beginning of the next and last song, “Anchorage.” This last one might be my favorite—it starts with fishing imagery—known to be close to Carey’s heart (see the New Yorker profile).
OK, but the point is: I am feeling a patience in the way this music develops that reminds me of the extreme patience and openness, and that lack of agenda or fixed point of arrival for Otherlands. Are you with me? As far as I know, Carey constructs his music over time, adding layers sometimes with instruments, sometimes through programming, but all ultimately assembled in software. If it’s an organic process—and the results sure feel that way!—it’s one where the technology of sonic manipulation has been integrated—through years of experimentation and trial and error—into that process.
But the overall effect too is of making space, extended space, for things to happen—without predetermination—allowing musical events to emerge from the void, from who knows where—I made the same point last week about the second half of The Nunnery’s record. I guess it’s up to you to let me know whether it’s possible anyone else sees these folks as kindred spirits.
And as promised a rough blow-by-blow commentary on “Metamorpheme.”
In D to start! The opening reminds me of the opening of A Love Supreme.
2, a groove starts—hard to tell where it starts—and gorgeous lyric lines from Jones
3:40 major 7th
4:00 different length phrasing disrupts/bends the groove, and then it comes back—rhythmic ideas from Jones get picked up: steady eighth notes; then groups of triplets displaced across the beat
By 5:00 we’re in a 6/4 groove with hits on the and of 6, built on the same pulse
At 6, it’s almost a swinging line.
Then superimposed tuplets of 4 from Crump
Then 4 swinging with and-of-4 hits
At 7, Crump starts playing a walking line against
Jones stops a bit later and Crump changes to arco
Then McPherson gets a moment to change things as the others pause
And Crump comes in with a different feel which McPherson, after a few moments, adapts to/incorporates
At 10:45 is where McPherson is doing hi-hat games with the little jingly thing (sorry for the technical jargon)—so delightful
Then Jones comes back in
12:03 Crump and McPherson come together on a little ostinato grouping of three eighth notes, and then suddenly there’s a kind of double time that has emerged, sort of walking but Crump is playing repeating patterns; Crump backs out to the figure in 3 for a second before re-arriving at the faster groove which then deepens around 13
Now a bit before 14 Jones refashions the groove around a repeating figure of eight 32nd notes over what is now a hard swinging almost-walking bass (still tied into a pattern rather than opening up totally). Crump keeps things poised however, moving to related 3 feels faster and slower than the new quarter note, before, at 15 or so, setting a new figure in 5 that EM accesses.
Then he starts to accelerate, I think, although it’s not clear to me that everyone is doing that—it gets a bit complicated at the end!
I touched on that band when I wrote about Crump’s Slow Water release.
This is really based on the Borderlands track that I have spent the most time with, “Super-Organism.” A quick look more widely around the discography shows that she kicks things off with plenty of brash gambits too.
And yet their sounds are perfectly matched, complementary, which I kept observing over an evening of hearing them play together, attuned to pitch and timbre, seemingly able to finish each other’s phrases despite the wide differences between the instruments.
Crump has two recordings that include ICE instrumentalist Cory Smythe on piano, with saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock. And I see now that Darius Jones is also a member of ICE! (I haven’t been able to keep as much track of their work since they become more New York-centered.)
I wasn’t able to find the program to this concert, but I did find an example of Arnold performing Kaija Saariaho with Claire Chase and Daniel Lippel.
I’m grateful to bassist Max Johnk for supplying that word!
This is the first time it has occurred to me, but it’s true isn’t it: popular music, rock music, has created a space for extreme sonic explorations around guitarists. I guess I could think of Hendrix playing “The Star Spangled Banner,” or the Edge on U2’s “Bullet in a Blue Sky,” which I heard playing in a grocery store recently, or, more decisively, the Nigel Tufnel guitar experimentation scene, where he uses a violin to play his guitar, and then pauses to tune the violin, from This Is Spinal Tap.