Remembering a Rapturous Annual Brooklyn Festival of Cutting-Edge Vocal Music

The annual Resonant Bodies Festival of avant garde vocal music ran from 2013 to 2019 at Roulette, and had just begun to branch out to other major cities when the lockdown crushed the performing arts throughout most of the world. This blog was there for the initial festival, and subsequent editions matched that year’s outside-the-box sensibility. Roulette’s vast archive still exists, and presumably everything from those often riveting performances was recorded. Let’s hope that there’s been enough resistance to the lockdown, and enough talent left in New York this fall to resume the series; if not, there’s a fantastic live compilation album featuring some of the highlights from over the years streaming at Bandcamp.

The lineup here is a who’s who of some of the most formidable new-music vocal talent out there. As was often the case with the series itself, all of the singers here are women, most of them composer-performers playing and singing solo. All but two of the tracks are from the festival.

Charmaine Lee‘s Littorals makes an apt opener. Her shtick is that she uses all the sounds in the international phonetic alphabet, plus some that may not have symbols. Part human beatbox, part devious infant, part comic, her solo performance will leave you in stitches. It sounds as if the mic is inside her mouth for much of this. This might be the funniest track anyone’s released this year.

Julia Bullock brings a beefy, soul-inspired vibrato to John Cage’s She is Asleep, Milena Gligić supplying muted, percussive microtones under the piano lid. Pamela Z’s highly processed solo diptych Quatre Couches/Badagada spins an increasingly agitated pastiche through a funhouse mirror.

Backed by clarinetist Campbell MacDonald, Sarah Maria Sun delivers Thierry Tidrow‘s grisly murder ballad Die Flamme, Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire recast as arsonist. Tony Arnold nimbly negotiates the multiple voices and disjointedly demanding extended technique of Jason Eckardt’s Dithyramb.

Arooj Aftab joins forces with pianist Vijay Iyer and bassist Shahzad Ismaily for En Route to Unfriending, a slowly unwinding, ghazal-inspired, melancholy tour de force from the 2017 festival. Iyer’s gently insistent staccato, evoking the ringing of a santoor, is masterful.

The title of Kamala Sankaram‘s slowly crescendoing solo electroacoustic piece Ololyga reflects a shrieking mourning ritual practiced in ancient Greece, which men reputedly scared off all the guys. Needless to say, the Bombay Rickey frontwoman pulls out all the stops with her five-octave range.

Another solo electroacoustic performance, Caroline Shaw‘s diptych Rise/Other Song is considerably calmer, with a gently incantatory quality. Gelsey Bell‘s Feedback Belly is one of the more imaginative and intense pieces here, drawing on her battle with the waves of pain she experienced during a long battle with endometriosis. “If there’s anything you take away from this, please take women’s pain seriously. There is nothing like having a women’s disease to radicalize a feminist in this incredibly misogynistic health system,” she relates in the album’s extensive, colorful liner notes. Manipulating feedback from a Fender amp inside a metal canister hidden under her oversize dress, Bell builds a strangely rapt, dynamically shifting atmosphere punctuated by pulsing electronic grit.

Duo Cortona – vocalist Rachel Calloway and violinist/vocalist Ari Streisfeld – perform Amadeus Regucera‘s relationship drama If Only After You Then Me, beginning furtively and ripping through many moments of franticness and sheer terror. The iconic Lucy Shelton sings a dynamically impassioned take of Susan Botti‘s Listen, My Heart, a setting of a comforting Rabindrath Tagore poem, accompanying herself energetically on singing bowls and metal percussion.

Anaïs Maviel plays spiky, circling ngoni on In the Garden, a hypnotically moody, masterfully melismatic retelling of the Garden of Eden myth. The album’s closing epic is Sofia Jernberg’s One Pitch: Birds for Distortion and Mouth Synthesizers. Is she going to be able to hold up through seventeen minutes of nonstop, increasingly rigorous falsetto birdsong-like motives…let alone without a break for water? No spoilers!

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Mara Rosenbloom’s Improvisations Draw Darkly on Avian Inspiration

Growing up on the Wisconsin prairie, pianist Mara Rosenbloom became an astute observer of nature. Her latest trio album Flyways: Murmurations– streaming at Spotify – looks to the migratory patterns of birds not only as a metaphor for jazz improvisation, but also for what humans can learn from them in general. Rosenbloom draws particular inspiration from how starlings interact in flight, operating in subgroups within a flock and changing leaders periodically. Where Rosenbloom’s previous trio album Prairie Burn was absolutely incendiary, this one is much easier to map: the focus is clearer and often rather dark.

Here she’s joined by Rashaan Carter on bass and Anais Maviel on vocals and percussion. They open with a brief jam of a prelude which worked out so well that Rosenbloom kept it for the record. Her fondness for the blues and disquieting modes immediately come to the forefront, echoed by a bubbling bass pulse. A second miniature is anchored by Maviel’s quasi trip-hop beat on her surdo drum, her wordless vocals soaring over her bandmates’ steady, circling clusters.

The album’s epic centerpiece is I Know What I Dreamed. Over almost forty minutes, the trio shift from warm, lingering minimalism to spare, neoromantic phrasing, portentous rumbles on everyone’s low end, jagged rises and dips between uneasily expanding circles and a rhythmic insistence that’s often as hypnotic as it is lyrical. The slow, swaying, Monk-inflected mood midway through is marvelous. Maviel takes poet Adrienne Rich’s text imagining a world free of exploitative relationships and negotiates between calm assurance and troubled melismatics that sometimes reach horror-stricken peaks.

“No one lives in this room without living through some kind of crimes,“ Maviel intones over Rosenbloom’s starkly repetitive vintage soul riffs in Dream of a Common Language, piano and bass drifting into an echoey wash. The album’s final bird takeoff themes revert to gracefully circling variations. Rosenbloom winds up the record with a saturnine solo version of These Foolish Things, dedicated to the late Connie Crothers, obviously an influence as far as improvisation is concerned.

Pianist Mara Rosenbloom Leads a Magically Hypnotic Trio at the Jazz Gallery

At the Jazz Gallery Wednesday night, there was a point where singer Anais Maviel unleashed a serrated, descending, diamond-cut glissando straight out of the Coltrane playbook while bassist Adam Lane pedaled a low E and pianist Mara Rosenbloom filled out the space between with a lingering lustre. Coltrane would have been hard-pressed to replicate that kind of precision. Maviel would do that later, and again the result was spine-tingling.

Rosenbloom came up with the night and the concept: to improvise on the theme of Adrienne Rich’s poem “I Know What I Dreamed.” It’s part of a suite loosely exploring the possibilities of love without exploitation. A challenge, musically or otherwise, under ordinary circumstances; more so by far in the post-2016 election era. To what degree did the music reflect that struggle?

Maviel did the heavy lifting and made it seem effortless, even when pushing the limits of her extended technique via meticulously articulated sputters, playful detours toward scatting or building an accusatory mantra with the poem’s title. Meanwhile, without missing a beat – literally  – she played taut polyrhythms on a tom-tom, whether with many shades of boomy grey or a rat-a-tat on the hardware. Was this a cautionary tale to hold onto our dreams lest they be stolen by the trumpies and their dream police? Maybe.

Lane was the center of the storm, whether pulling elegantly against Rosenbloom’s lingering center, bowing stygian washes or pulsing higher up the neck over the piano’s dense but sparkling chordal washes. Rosenbloom didn’t reach for the churning firestorm of her most recent album Prairie Burn, instead orchestrating what seemed to be very Indian-inspired themes. Has she been hanging with the Brooklyn Raga Massive? What a great collaboration that would be.

She opened with a classy, distantly bluesy Gershwinesque resonance and grew much more minimalist early on, with judiciously exploratory righthand against a steady river from the left. Tersely and methodically, she directed a series of wavelike crescendos, Maviel the wild card who’d push one over the edge without a split-second warning. Bass and piano were always there to catch it in a reflecting pool and then bring it to shore: sympatico teamwork as unexploitative love? Rosenbloom finally encored with a solo piece that reverted to echoes of both Gershwin as well as earlier, deeper southern blues, in a Matthew Shipp vein.

There aren’t any upcoming shows by this auspicious trio, but Rosenbloom will be at I-Beam on on Aug 11 at 8:30 PM with Guillermo Gregorio on clarinet and Omar Tamez on guitar; cover is $15. Maviel is at the Freedom Music Fest in Copenhagen, solo, on Aug 31.

Potential Fireworks at the Jazz Gallery This Wednesday

This Wednesday night, Aug 1 there’s an especially auspicious show at the Jazz Gallery for people who like adventurous but purposefully tuneful improvisation. Pianist Mara Rosenbloom, whose aptly titled trio album Prairie Burn ranked high among the best jazz albums of 2016, leads an unusual trio with singer/percussionist Anais Maviel and bassist Adam Lane. It’s an especially interesting lineup considering that Rosenbloom’s work, prior to that incendiary release, leaned toward Sylvie Courvoisier-esque elegance. Maviel is a similarly purposeful improviser and shares that low-key sensibility: contrasts in styles may create some memorable fireworks at this gig. They’ll be exploring themes inspired by Adrienne Rich poetry. Sets are at 7:30 and 9:30 PM; cover is $15.

Maviel’s latest album, spelled hOUle, is streaming at Bandcamp. The song titles are in the multilingual Maviel’s native French. Much of the music sounds ancient, although it may be completely improvised. There’s a shamanic, hypnotic quality to her spare, blues-infused melodies, just wordless vocals and percussion. It’s a more direct and somewhat darker counterpart to Sofia Rei’s playful adventures in vocalese.

The first track, Animots contrasts Maviel’s blithe, blippy scat-like delivery with a boomy, staggered, gnawa-esque beat. She begins the almost thirteen-minute epic Blues Feraille with nuanced variations on a simple minor-key riff with echoes of 19th century African-American gospel. From there she subtly shifts to uneasy chromatics as the rhythm coalesces, then goes in a sunnier but similarly hypnotic direction before bringing the music full circle with a muted suspense.

Bois, Or (Wood, Gold) #2, for vocals, bell and frame drum is quieter, more spacious, veering in and out of hypnotic rhythms. Scat-style vocals also take centerstage in the more spare, kinetic variations of the next track, Bois, Or #1. Le Vent (The Wind), a bodymusic piece, has a leaping, Nordic-tinged melody.

The album’s most trancey number is Gens de la Mer (Sea People) #1. Gens de la Mer #3, the album’s closing cut, features some neat implied melody and Maviel’s most dynamically varied delivery: it’s less watery than a series of sea breezes. This is good rainy-day chillout album.