My 40 favorite albums of 2019—part 4
Richard Dawson (photo: Sally Pilkington)
10. Joshua Abrams‘ Natural Information Society, Mandatory Reality (Eremite)
Excerpted from a Nowhere Street post:
On Mandatory Reality Joshua Abrams and crew bring a purely acoustic setting to the leader’s exploratory themes, and while his guimbri remains at the core of the music—reflecting his deep engagement with Morocco’s Gnawa tradition—the most obvious aesthetic overlay is classic minimalism. Naturally, Gnawan music is minimalist in its own distinctive way, but Abrams has beautifully merged durational investigation and microscopic shifts to the group sound, which is warmer and lusher than any of the outfit’s previous work. The music unfolds at molasses speed, and that leisurely pace is essential to how each extended piece works, with changes occurring so slowly that it’s hard to identify the transformations. This brand of minimalism helps the listener end up in a much different place from where they started without necessarily gleaning how they got there.
9. Kris Davis, Diatom Ribbons (Pyroclastic)
Pianist Kris Davis unveiled her full range on this shape-shifting effort, using a core trio with drummer Terri Lynne Carrington and turntablist Val Jeanty and a slew of heavy-hitting guests (including Nels Cline, JD Allen, Marc Ribot, Tony Malaby, and Esperanza Spalding) to survey a dazzling variety of settings. I’ve often noted that debut albums sometimes bring out a desperate need for artists to show off everything they can do, but Davis has established her rich diapason over many years, album by album, project by project, so there’s nothing flashy about what she’s doing here. In fact, it’s remarkable to witness such a high-caliber musician achieve such a breakthrough as she approaches 40. Breakthrough is probably the wrong term, though: it’s not as if Davis has finally cracked some code (although this is the first time I’ve heard her engage so directly in some of the funk-driven settings), but what I hear is an artist who’s fully absorbed and assimilated a vast amount of knowledge and ability, and now finds herself in the rare position to apply those ideas on a much wider scale. Regardless of the setting or style, Davis remains true to herself, building compositions from often microscopic materials and expanding them, while masterfully finding new ways to operate and interact.
8. Matana Roberts, Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis (Constellation)
My review from the Quietus:
The fourth installment of Matana Roberts’ ambitious 12-part Coin Coin cycle reveals an artist at the peak of her powers, accruing and assimilating ideas at an astonishing clip. Working with a nimble, flinty ensemble—including Land of Kush guitarist-oudist Sam Shalabi, multi-instrumentalist Hannah Marcus, drummer Ryan Sawyer, and bassist Nicolas Caloia—that’s able to reflect her polystylistic vision, the music focuses on tales from the titular city, translated from the artist’s own bloodline into a first person perspective narrative marked by brutal racism. Using a mixture of traditional notation and graphic scores, Roberts and her cohorts wend through a melting pot of approaches that mirrors the vibrant, variegated stew of Memphis musical history—including highly effective passages of folk-derived material, with rustic fiddling by Marcus—all held together by the leader’s serrated alto saxophone and her increasingly assured singing. The performances are marked by the sense of struggle and triumph embedded in the story, as tension builds and releases in cathartic rushes.
7. Øyvind Torvund, The Exotica Album (Hubro)
Excerpted from a Nowhere Street post:
This year few recordings have provided more joy than The Exotica Album (Hubro), one of Norwegian composer Øvind Torvund's most fanciful creations. BIT20 Ensemble, a superb, versatile contemporary group from Bergen, commissioned the piece for a performance at the Only Connect Festival in Oslo back in 2017. The composer sought to convey the feel and sound of the acridly fake 50s exotica of Martin Denny, Les Baxter, and Esquivel that returned to vogue during the 90s, twining it with the meticulously produced early electronic music that began thriving around the same time. But Torvund isn't interested in a flip mash-up or post-modern pastiche--instead he weaves seemingly incongruent elements into a gorgeously cogent whole, which each aesthetic brilliantly drawing out idiosyncratic qualities of each component. It's idea-packed, but it's also fun as hell and oddly addictive. These days it's rare for me to want to play a record right after it's finishing, but that's been happening a lot with The Exotica Album. BIT20, conducted by Trond Madsen, performs Torvund's orchestrations with flair and warmth, going deep into lush romantic flourishes without an ounce of irony. Later, saxophonist Kjetil Møster and synthesizer player Jørgen Træen laid down a series of dazzling overdubs, taking the piece convincingly out of retro territory.
6. أحمد [Ahmed], Super Majnoon [East Meets West] ( Otoroku)
My review from the Quietus:
On its relentless second album this intensely focused quartet, formed to pay homage to the singular Sudan-born bassist and oudist Ahmed Abdul-Malik—who worked with folks like Art Blakey, Randy Weston, and Thelonious Monk—arrived at its own form of ecstasy inspired but unbound by its namesake’s musical aesthetic. Drummer Antonin Gerbal and bassist Joel Grip sculpt a throbbing groove that cycles like a turbine even as it perpetually shifts accents and flow, giving pianist Pat Thomas—the criminally overlooked London improviser who issued a slew of fine recordings in 2019—and saxophonist Seymour Wright a slippery foundation for chiseling simple motifs in a zillion, spellbinding variations. It’s all a form of jazz minimalism that gets seriously under the skin—needling, pushing, and exploding—over an extended period with the pianist and reedist masterfully in sync with one another and the rhythm section.
5. Aldous Harding, Designer (4AD)
I can’t think of an another artist who simultaneously confuses the hell out of me (granted, much of this cognitive dissonance has been generated by her consistently bizarre, beguiling music videos, but her elliptic lyrics rarely end tidily as they pile on gripping images, sounds, and unexpected twists) while creating sounds that are not only impossible for me to resist, but which grow more pleasing and satisfying with every listen. The stunning voice of Aldous Harding grabbed on her debut album, but this third missive reveals an astonishing depth as singer, songwriter, and thinker that I wouldn’t have anticipated back then. The first couple times I heard Designer I thought there were different guest singers, only to realize that Harding was able to modulate her pipes in thrilling, utterly natural ways—moving from the crystalline coo of the gorgeous opening track “Fixture Picture” to the low-toned questioning in “Zoo Eyes”—frequently reshaping her voice to inhabit some very disparate settings. John Parish produced the record and together they created stunningly effective arrangements. In that sense Designer is the best “rock” album I heard all year, seamlessly weaving together nine divergent vignettes.
4. Petter Eldh, Koma Saxo (We Jazz)
My review from the Quietus:
Swedish bassist Petter Eldh has spread his talents widely in recent years, whether holding the low-end down for Django Bates or Kit Downes’ Energy, but he showed the world something new with his first project as a leader. Joined by the remarkable German drummer Christian Lillinger and three top-flight Nordic saxophonists—Jonas Kullhammar, Mikko Innanen, and Otis Sandsjö—he applies his deep love for J Dilla in remapping post bop with hip hop production techniques without muting the expressive heft of his ensemble. He uses the tart blend of horns as modeling clay, sometimes accenting the reedist’s engagement in fiery multi-linear improvisation, sometimes smearing their harmonies into a luscious sound mass, all set within irresistible melodies penned both by band members and overlooked Nordic composers like Edward Vesala and Matti Oiling. Eldh mixed the session for maximum propulsion and heft, underlining his own pointillistic, jabbing lines and the meticulous time-fracturing of Lillinger to forge a sound that convincingly reconciles boom bap with abstract improvisational impulses. This isn’t a hip hop record, but Eldh has managed to inject its ideas within a jazz setting with a logic, musicality, and integrity that’s rarely been achieved before.
3. Catherine Lamb, Atmospheres Transparent/Opaque (New World)
Catherine Lamb’s music has been steadily creeping into my consciousness for several years, but it seems to have achieved critical mass in 2019, and that should only continue with the recent premiere of a new work by New York’s JACK Quartet, which will come to Berlin at the Pierre Boulez Saal on May 28, 2020. The bulk of this New World CD, performed by the French group Ensemble Dedalus, is occupied by "Prisma Interius IX," the final installment in Lamb's series—it's a genuine marvel. The CD package contains illuminating liner notes by Lamb associate Rebecca Lane, and her descriptions go a long way in explaining the composer's goals. This is music for both performers and listeners to be enveloped by. Lamb has long been fascinated by prisms, and she explains how moving a crystal changes one’s perspective as one hits upon a new facet of the object. I can't really say how the musicians technically achieve this effect, but I can certainly hear it, and that understanding greatly heightens the beauty and depth of the music. The CD also includes a series of brief pieces from "Overlays Transparent/Opaque." The overlays in the title refers to the degrees of presence an individual musician brings to a particular note sequence, but rather than tracing the shape with the expected soft-loud-soft progression, the performer is asked for "a shift in perception from transparency into opaqueness, where the core of the sound becomes clear, or less clear, to reflect 'the presence of the relational material between instruments.'" Toward the end of her essay Lane hits upon another key observation, which has helped me grapple with Lamb's wonderfully peculiar sound world—treating this sort of music as a unique strain of atmosphere. "Being of the air, sound also has no surfaces and so in this sense can be called an atmosphere, like the weather. It moves in us and around us. But sound or more specifically, tones, can also be the carrier of an atmosphere of feeling. In this sense, musical works, as collective experiences, can generate a home for the emergence of such atmospheres."
2. Anna Webber, Clockwise (Pi)
My review from the Quietus:
One of the most promising and rigorous reedists and composers in New York for half-a-decade now, Anna Webber achieves a dazzling apotheosis on Clockwise, fronting a septet as versatile as it is technically strong. Her thorny compositions are distinguished by endless corkscrewing, contrapuntal, and harmonically ambiguous lines that can suggest the hands of a clock revolving in opposite directions. The braided, dizzying lines of cello and reeds on a track like 'Idiom II', where they collide with an almost martial rhythm & brass figure, are representative of her knack for astringent contrasts. Webber has already mastered arrangements stuffed with contrasting impulses and textures, creating a gut-punch tension that rarely resolves. Players like pianist Matt Mitchell, trombonist Jacob Garchik, percussionist Ches Smith, and cellist Christopher Hoffman (who excels playing the similarly complex music of Henry Threadgill) all thrive in toggling between precise ensemble passages and high-wire improvisation.
1. Richard Dawson, 2020 (Weird World)
The last thing I expected from the singular British folk-rock-improv polymath Richard Dawson was an equally hilarious and trenchant blue-collar exegesis on the horrible state of the world, all set to outsized pop-rock steeped in 80s production excess. With withering, humorous detail Dawson spends the album ruminating on quotidian struggles, whether at home, in the office, or on the street—with a mindset toggling between narcissistic and empathic—to say more about the fucked up condition of the planet and humanity than any newspaper story, movie, or novel could in this day and age. He maintains a brilliant balance, injecting the prefect touch of bile into a workaday deliver that nonetheless teems with compassion. His singing has never been more beautiful or meaningful, nor his melodies more memorable and fun, his guitar playing more simpatico, and his deep connections to British folk tradition still shine through even when unfurled within a swollen hard rock settling, as on “Jogging.” I’ll admit that some of the wry stylistic overdrive can test my patience, but the way he goes all-in throughout, I’m defenseless to stop myself from being pulled along for the ride. I don’t know why Dawson hasn’t become an icon yet, but I’m committed to following his peculiar genius anywhere it goes.
Today’s playlist:
Dénes Várjon, De la Nuit (ECM)
Eva-Maria Houben, Breath for Organ (Second Editions)
Eartheater, IRISIRI (PAN)
Cucina Povera, Hilja (Night School)
Mike Cooper, Tropical Gothic (Discrepant)
