Slow water
Stephan Crump's new record
Records discussed in this post:
Slow Water, Stephan Crump, bass and compositions, with Patricia Brennan, vibraphone; Joanna Mattrey, viola; yuniya edi kwon, violin; Jacob Garchik, trombone; Kenny Warren, trumpet
Wandersphere, Borderlands Trio, with Stephan Crump, bass, Kris Davis, piano, and Eric McPherson, drums
It’s taken a bit too long for me to get to writing about Stephan Crump on this stack, but I’m grabbing this opportunity to catch up a bit with the occasion of his new release, Slow Water. Crump credits the book, Water Always Wins, by Erica Gies (2022), as an inspiration for the project. The book gives an introduction to the modern science of water, the history of animal and human interactions with it, and recent efforts to better align ourselves with its subtle power.
I have known Stephan a long time: we met in college in Massachusetts in the nineties, where he was a couple of years my senior, and already on the path to being a musician and living in New York. I idolized him somewhat at the time, and admired his courage to pursue a life in music. Then one day years later I read about him in The New York Times as part of Vijay Iyer’s trio. That must have been about 2012. Anyway we reconnected, and I eventually hosted him at my university to perform in duo with guitarist Mary Halvorson. It also gradually emerged that he overlapped and worked with other New Yorkers I knew, including members of the International Contemporary Ensemble, or ICE. That in turn has been part of a slow (like the name of this Substack), important process of understanding for me, where I have gradually seen modes of musical expression and artistic consciousness that I thought were separate, in fact connected, flowing into one another.
Flowing like—subterranean springs, groundwater seeping. So already I find myself falling into the concept of this album, its master metaphor, as one that can slide into all sorts of ways of understanding or talking about music.
As I’ve thought about it, and had some time to digest the music on this most recent release, it seems to me now that Crump is illuminating, elaborating more than just these pieces with the metaphor. But, just to establish for any skeptical readers a “proof of concept,” go ahead and listen to the first, introductory track on the recording. For me, this already sells the whole thing, and if you are like me you’ll want to go right over to Bandcamp to purchase the complete, unbroken, 67-minute “movement” of the piece.
There is no written score for this first track, just a set of instructions—which I acquired as they are available along with the complete score and parts for the record. (The piece moves back and forth between scored, written sections, and sections that are instigated by words or thoughts or images.) The instructions in this case basically say, to this striking group of instruments and instrumentalists (violin, viola, trumpet, trombone, vibraphone, and bass): play super-slow, “long tone textures” that undulate, while individuals can add “short swirls of current,” that might collect together into a “meta-current/groove . . . before dissipating back into the larger flow.” The piece then moves seamlessly into the next composed track.
I wonder when I read this about which comes first: the impulse to make music that aligns itself with rhythms and patterns that are so far beneath or beyond the attention of everyday consciousness? Or, is it the idea that leads one to uncover the musical impulse: as in, are the instructions descriptive or prescriptive? Is this music that in some sense resists or upends what people generally hear or listen for, or is it music that resides subconsciously below in many more places, many more moods or ways of being, than we might know?
As a description, it is useful to me in thinking back to another performance Crump created recently, with the Borderlands Trio, consisting of himself, Kris Davis on piano, and Eric McPherson on drums (there is no leader). Here is the (much lengthier) opening track of three on their second release:
When listening with a friend to this, we theorized the particular skill which all three musicians seemed to have in spades, namely immense, almost miraculous patience. That patience seems separate from but also to entail to some extent the giving up of individuality in pursuit of a group identity for a group improvisation, something that has fascinated me as well in recent years, both as I try to do it myself and as I observe it in other ensembles (like Gustavo Cortiñas’s Kind Regards band; see my earlier essay on that).
I also feel a connection to a general approach to music making that I have been lucky enough to witness recently, both with Shai Maestro’s quartet, and as well Melissa Aldana’s quartet. With Maestro and his collaborators it was in the foreground: at the beginning of his performance he announced that there was “no plan,” and the performance began with noises from instruments rather than notes. In discussing this approach with another friend, we felt that this opening gambit was about connecting with the room, the moment, joining a flow already in progress, rather than imposing a regime upon things. (Not that the opposite approach can’t be thrilling and effective: I think of watching Daniil Trifonov walk on stage and start playing Schumann’s Op. 17 Fantasy without waiting for the audience to quiet down or even reach their seats: it was a “here we go folks!” move the slapped people into attention.)
Back to “Super-Organism.” There is a moment that comes at about ten minutes in, when Davis starts to play patterns cascading down that imply chords, and suddenly the “form” of a traditional “piece” of music arrives, and passes in front of us, gradually descending, and while different inversions or multiplications of time and implied time are felt and expressed variously by Crump and McPherson. So should we perhaps think that other forms—all forms?—might have a similar origin? How much of music making that avoids the ten minutes leading up to this, unnaturally elides (restricts, shackles, dams) the process that takes us to this point?
(I have been thinking as well lately of Mahler’s obsessions with individual songs, and composing whole symphonies [the fourth, for example] in order to create a moment when a song arrives as he feels it should or could, a whole symphony to create the right context for the simplest of musical impulses.)
For me, this music speaks to a longing I wasn’t aware of. I long as well to find ways to access better these kinds of currents in myself and in the groups I play with, and, just as importantly, to find more spaces and audiences where, with expectations properly adjusted, attention for such music might be held. I’m not sure, when I was, say, a kid, I would have been able to stick with any of this—indeed, I couldn’t follow a lot of music: classical music was for me mostly an excuse for my mind to wander or get sleepy. And I’m also not sure what makes me so enthusiastic about celebrating music-making like this, “slow water” music, if we might call it that. But I do know that if an audience it brought to a moment of silence, following out a breath to its end, that seems almost always preferable to the raucous approval of speed or virtuosity or height of pitch—not that I don’t love all those things too at times. But when those are the only things that can pull in our attention, well, then, I think we’re missing out. And Slow Water reminds us that a very full evening’s worth of musical materials can be drawn forth without them.