Thinking about Chicago: part three
James Elkington (photo: Timothy Musho) / Tim Stine (photo: Santiago Covarrubias)
It’s a little astonishing to me that I’ve been writing about British expat James Elkington for nearly two decades now. During that time he’s made himself an integral part of Chicago’s musical ecosystem, working mostly as sideman and producer in all sorts of disparate contexts, perpetually improving everything he gets involved with. That list, in various roles, includes work with Eleventh Dream Day, Tweedy, Jon Langford’s Skull Orchard, Kelly Hogan, Brokeback, Steve Gunn, Joan Shelley, Nathan Salsburg, Laetitia Sadier, Richard Thompson, and Michael Chapman. When I first wrote about him in 2001 it was in conjunction with the debut album of his first American band the Zincs—he wrote, played and sang everything on that “band’s” Moth and Marriage. He soon formed an actual working band, which cut a couple more solid records, but as they began winding down in the late 2000s, he gradually became more interested in just playing music in a non-leadership role, exhausted by the administrative responsibilities that job usually entails. He thus became an increasingly ubiquitous player of refined taste, channeling his abundant chops and knowledge into ensemble-oriented endeavors.
A few years ago quietly returned to working as a singer-songwriter with the 2017 album Wintres Woma (Paradise of Bachelors), a lovely, lean, mostly acoustic collection of new tunes that slowly emerged from experiments with alternative tuning he engaged in to kill time while on tour with various groups. He played most of the instruments, but an impressive number of guests including bassist Nick Macri, cellist Tomeka Reid, percussionist Tim Daisy, and violinist Macie Stewart fleshed out some of the tunes. While the album was more introspective, poetic and attuned to the folk music of both his native and adopted lands than anything he did with the Zincs, from my current perspective its greatest achievement was recalibrating and reigniting his subtle talents. Elkington has never been a strong singer, applying his warm, conversational voice as a low-impact melodic tool subservient to his guitar playing. Nothing has changed in that regard with the wonderful new Ever-Roving Eye (also on Paradise of Bachelors), but the songs are more varied and distinctive, with more intricate band arrangements, and the singer has found a sweet spot for his vocals that feel much more naturalistic and generous. Added up, the project represents a huge qualitative leap.
Over the decades I’ve observed plenty of expat musicians gaining a deeper understanding and loving embrace of musical traditions and traits from their homeland years after they departed, whether Brazilian singer Vinicius Cantuaria or Malian powerhouse Rokia Traore, and on the new record Elkington follows that pattern with various threads of English folk music. His electric solo on the album’s opener “Nowhere Time” reinforces his ardor for the playing of Thompson, but in general he goes deeper in referencing the jazz-folk stylings of Davy Graham and the rolling elasticity of the Pentangle. His rhythm section of bassist Macri and drummer Spencer Tweedy might be the album’s secret weapon, giving the leader a springy foundation that doesn’t exactly swing in a jazz sense, but imparts an innate flexibility, lightness of touch, and undeniable harmonic and rhythmic platform that allows his deft picking plenty of space and gives it a magical propulsion. On the rollicking “Sleeping Me Awake,” a choked if poetic meditation on anticipatory fear, Tweedy rejects standard backbeats with a tom-heavy, bouncy romp, while on my current favorite, “Jim’s Late Lament,” he conveys that supple Pentangle feel while eschewing obvious cymbal patterns (check it out below). Tweedy has clung to a minimalist approach within his band with his father Jeff Tweedy, but his playing here unveils a stunning sense of economical invention that’s knocked me out over and over. The song also layers in some amorphous noise in the distant background, complicating its surface ebullience with seeds of doubt and terror. It’s a fitting soundscape for a song that toggles between a whimsical and a debilitating analysis of the narrator’s chronic tardiness. Being late is one thing, but dying before you’ve realized creative dreams is something else entirely. As he sings, “But no matter how I drive I know I can’t outdrive the hearse! / It’s sooner in my mind and getting later all the time.”
On “Leopards Lay Down Low” the breezy arrangements feature sparse vibraphone accents and a beguiling streams of flute and clarinet overdubs by Paul Mertens that convey a Mellotron-like glow, perfectly complementing the singer’s delicate, roomy warble, while the instrumental “Rendelsham Way” reverts back to the stripped down feel of his first album with a ruminative fingerstyle showcase limned by Macri’s simpatico, woody double bass, transplanting the American Primitive sound to a winding street in Elkington’s native Chorleywood. As I noted earlier his voice sometimes felt like another layer of sound on his Wintres Woma, but when his nasal, restrained singing on the title track seamlessly harmonizes with the violin of Stewart and background vocals of Tamara Lindeman (the Weather Station)—with subtle counterpoint from cellist Lia Kohl--it achieves perfection a la early Feelies music. Elkington seems to have profoundly settled into his own music here, with a killer band that feels tailor-made to his songs. He’s long been terrific at figuring out what he can do to improve the music of other bandleaders, but now he’s learned to do it for himself.
Improvising guitarist and North Dakota native Tim Stine moved to Chicago in 2008, about a decade after Elkington, via Cincinnati, where he studied at the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music. It took me until 2016 to really take notice of his music, but his first trio album with bassist Anton Hatwich and drummer Frank Rosaly blew me away, and I’ve been hanging on his sparse output ever since— I was honored to pen the liner notes for his terrific 2019 album Knots (Clean Feed), a quartet session with bassist Matt Ulery, alto saxophonist Nick Mazzarella, and drummer Quin Kirchner. That eponymous debut for Astral Spirits sounded like little else produced then or in the years since, with a tangled yet airy acoustic sound that played with time like taffy. As I wrote in a year-end jazz wrap-up in 2016:
Chicagoan Tim Stine plays acoustic guitar and writes knotty, seesawing lines that arrive in sudden rushes of activity—he often follows tangles of tightly clustered notes with measures of silence, sounding like Derek Bailey if he'd decided he wanted to swing again. Bassist Anton Hatwich and drummer Frank Rosaly impart a brisk energy to the music, avoiding clutter in order to give Stine a spacious platform for his heaving-and-retreating melodies. Most jazz guitarists play electric and augment their sound with a variety of effects, but Stine plays acoustic with no effects at all—just moderate amplification that gives his tone a bit more bite, and that only at live shows, not when he records. You can hear exactly what he's doing.
By the time that tape was released drummer Rosaly had decamped to Amsterdam, and Stine found a nice replacement in Adam Vida for some sporadic Chicago gigs—all of them impressive. Tomorrow the trio drops the follow-up Fresh Demons (Astral Spirits), which was cut in January of 2018 when the band’s original drummer was back in town for a visit. You’d think that the group’s long absence from playing as a unit might have diminished its electric rapport, but, in fact, the opposite is true. Not only does it feel like more of a band, but also all of the members get to express their personalities with more complexity and depth than on the debut recording. The opening track is called “Talking Slower,” which you can listen to below, and indeed, in general the tunes feel looser and more ambling, but within that context the trio is more laser-focused and connected. That opener has plenty of Stine’s trademark melodic tumbles, with flurries of cleanly articulated notes that rush and recline like excited speech, but even as his most animated and garrulous his improvisations remain utterly lucid, and they snap back into the “ink,” to use his own parlance, with disarming ease. On the other hand, “VVVValley” is, perhaps, the most explosive thing I’ve heard from the group, but ramping up the intensity in no way undermines the clarity.
Rosaly exerts a more profound presence across the album, whether explosive, tightly coiled sallies like the one on “882233” or eloquently melodic, dialed-down kit explorations as on “Object,” an amazing exegesis on small object tintinnabulation and rude clatter that simultaneously feels unencumbered by gravity and locked in with the tune’s spacious form. The same expressiveness is present in Hatwich, whose low-end presence offers a crucial counterweight to the leader’s brittle twang. “OTR” is a dynamic showcase of his improvisational imagination, plying subtle harmonics, bent notes, stop-motion tricks, and the full woody depth of his instrument in magnificent concert with Rosaly’s nimble cymbal patter. The trio reconciles tune-based improvisation with open-ended exploration as well as anything I’ve heard in recent years, and it saddens me that both Rosaly’s geographic distance and the current lockdown are preventing this trio to make further advancements (as if it needed more!). On the other hand, this recording suggests that absence has only enhanced the trio’s playing.
Today’s playlist:
Powerdove, Bitter Banquet (Fo’c’sle)
Eleanor Friedberger, Rebound (Frenchkiss)
Toshimaru Nakamura, Re-Verbed. No-input Mixing Board 9 (Room40)
Grouper, Grid of Points (Kranky)
Laurel Halo, Raw Silk Uncut Wood (Latency)
