We're just talking

On Twin Talk: Katie Ernst, Andrew Green, Dustin Laurenzi

Oct 19, 2023

Twin Talk takes its name from a phenomenon the scientific name of which is cryptophasia, or secret language, that has been observed among some sets of twins (maybe as much as 50%). The name announces the desire of this group of three musicians to go as far as they can with “talking” in a musical sense. Sounds simple, right? Let me try to explain why it isn’t—or at least it isn’t for this group.

By the way, this post builds on what I wrote last week about the indie band Edith Judith, a project of Katie Ernst and Dustin Laurenzi, who are also two-thirds of Twin Talk.

Two sidelines: trios and multi-vocality

Just as a sideline, I recently heard from a booking person that they don’t like to book trios at their club—only quartets and larger. This made me scratch my head—three seems like such an important number for the history of jazz—how could that be inadequate? Maybe it’s just the visual—not having a “front person” to focus attention. It’s true that pianists are often not oriented physically toward the audience, so maybe it just doesn’t seem as compelling a spectacle. But I also wonder if the problem is feeling like the roles of the players are too set: the drums and bass keeping time, and the piano playing chords. Maybe these just read as “background” to some people.

Anyway, Twin Talk is a great demonstration of just how far three people can go, how musically full and fulfilling such a group can sound. The “talk” is rich, various, constantly shifting, and rewards as much energy and attention as you can give it. And I have some theories on how they achieve this.

Another sideline: in the class I have been teaching I was recently reminded of 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould, a movie released in 1993 and which I give some credit to for spurring my interest in Bach—and classical music in general. There are a few of the 32 episodes that I have never forgotten, and perhaps the most memorable was this scene in a truck stop:

The idea is that Gould is listening to several conversations at once, several voices at once, and that is parallel to the ability that he deploys when playing Bach: Bach the composer of multi-voice pieces where very often no voice is subordinated to another—each voice can be, at any given moment, as important as the next. As an example, take this:

This is the second fugue in the great two-volume compendium of Bach’s genius, The Well-Tempered Clavier, and it is one that I have learned myself. There are three voices here, and Bach gives listeners a chance to hear and follow each one by having them come in gradually with the same musical figure, one after another. Then the talk continues—with all three talking at once, their roles constantly shifting, sometimes joining together sometimes separating. Most pianists find this music much harder than—well almost anything else. But part of the difficulty, and maybe the most important part of the difficulty, is the mental task of holding these three voices independently and simultaneously in the mind. If you can do that, then you have a chance to attack the physical task of letting them speak through your two hands and ten fingers.

So, without making such a big deal out of it, I have come to believe that Twin Talk is up to something similar, mutatis mutandis, that is, noting that we have three musicians improvising on three very different instruments, rather than one musician playing composed and notated music on a piano.1 But my sense is that it is a value or a principle of this group to work against the usual set roles for their instruments in jazz. It’s particularly clear for the bass and saxophone. For example, in the first piece on their second recording, “Colorwheel,” the saxophone and bass constantly trade musical figures, then trade off who is first.

Listeners might notice that the bass is not only given equal musical room in this first track, but it is also higher up in the mix—easier to hear and follow than in many jazz recordings. My sense is that the bass has been elevated to a status as a voice equally important next to the saxophone, which typically would be both higher in pitch and volume, the obvious soloist. But the sense of equal sharing extends as well to Laurenzi’s style of playing which seems always as ready to support and accompany as to sing out over the top of the proceedings.

Listening to “Teddy”

Very often when listening to Twin Talk it is harder than usual to tell “where the solos are”—unless someone is actually playing alone (and that is not the usual meaning of “solo” in jazz). It is hard to tell if anyone is soloing, and yet things are happening: an initial motif is being filled out or complicated, energy is building or diminishing, timbres and textures are shifting (the concept of “color wheel” is apt in this regard): in other words, the music is alive and carrying itself and us forward. But there are often traditional ways of organizing the music that can be discerned with a bit of patience.

Let me take the tune “Teddy,” also from their eponymous Twin Talk album of 2016. This piece has an ABA form, with a line from the saxophone supported by the bass and drums, but with the bass indicating some fairly dense and searching harmonies—beyond what you would imagine if you heard the saxophone line by itself. Here as elsewhere, the bass is high in the mix—a voice of equal prominence to the other two—and in this initial statement of the composition, is doing as much or more to add expressive and complicating interventions to the music. Then we enter a more rhythmically charged B section built on irregularly grouped off-beats played somewhat in unison but now also offering more room for the saxophone to open up possibilities around the very simple melodic and harmonic material (two chords and two notes, I think).

As we come back around to the A section, the last two-bar segment gets looped—the kind of thing that would be usual if we were ending the piece with a “vamp,” but which is much less usual this early in the performance. But here the bass does take a solo, however with the saxophone continuing to repeat the final line, and also responding, along with the drums, in a supportive way to the bass. Then, “on cue” as I expect—that is, when Katie Ernst is ready to move on, and indicates this to the other musicians—we return to the B section with its simple harmony but irregular rhythmic texture. And now the saxophone takes a solo, the whole band gathering energy from the drummer’s switch to sticks from brushes, after which we return to the original form, and again to the coda from the A section which this time is a vehicle for the drummer receiving a bit more attention, taking a bit more of the lead until they are ready to bring the piece to a close.

So—an experiment!—I decided to record a version of that little discussion as a voiceover. So here’s that:

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And if you now actually want to hear the piece without my commentary, and at full volume:

I had not realized until I did the voiceover that the form of this piece is repeated just once: instead of repeating the form of the piece over and over for solos, the band found these ways to open up the form and just used those: once in the A, once in the B, and then again once more for the final A, and then that’s it. The result is something quite a bit more seamless, organic, flowing, than a you might be used to—but anyway, it shows off one of the ways in which this band is so very accomplished.

Please let me know if this is the kind of commentary on music that is useful to you, and if there are things that you would like me to talk more or less about, I would especially love to hear that!

ZLR

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