The Cellar & Point Bring Their Intriguingly Kinetic Postrock Sounds to Glasslands

A project originated by guitarist Chris Botta and drummer Joe Branciforte, the Cellar & Point are sort of Claudia Quintet meets Sleepmakeswaves meets Wounded Buffalo Theory. Mantra Percussion‘s Joe Bergen plays vibraphone, immediately drawing the Claudia Quintet comparison, which is further fueled by the nimble string work of violinist Chistopher Otto and cellist Kevin McFarland, who comprise one-half of the adventurous Jack Quartet. Guitarist Terrence McManus and bassist Rufus Philpot round out the band. The backstory – Botta and Branciforte as teenage buds in New Jersey, hanging out and blasting Rage Against the Machine – makes sense in context. Their debut long-player, Ambit, is just out from the folks at Cuneiform who have it up along with the rest of their vast catalog on bandcamp. The Cellar & Point are playing the album release show on a killer triplebill at Glasslands on Nov 19 starting around 9 with epically sweeping art-rock chorale the Knells and the alternately hypnotic and kinetic Empyrean Atlas. Cover is ten bucks; it’s not clear what the order of bands is but they’re all worth seeing.

The album’s opening track, 0852 is characteristic: tricky prog-rock metrics drive lush ambience with lingering vibraphone, slide guitar (and maybe ebow) and some artfully processsed pizzicato from the string section that adds almost banjo-like textures. Arc builds out of swirly atmospherics to a matter-of-fact march and then an animatedly cyclical dance with tinges of both west African folk music and King Crimson.

There are two Tabletops here, A and B. The first juxtaposes and mingles lingering vibes, stadium guitar bombast and lithely dancing strings. The second layers rainy-day vibes and strings with terse Andy Summers-ish guitar. There are also two White Cylinders: number one being a seemingly tongue-in-cheek mashup of brash jazz guitar, vividly prickly mystery movie textures and Reichian circularity, number two tracing a knottier, somewhat fusiony Olympic film theme of sorts.

If Ruminant is meant to illustrate an animal, it’s a minotaur stewing down in the labyrinth, awaiting an unsuspecting victim – one assumes that’s Bergen playing that gorgeously creepy piano in tandem with the eerily resonant guitars and stark strings. By contrast, Purple Octagon shuffles along with a more motorik take on what John Hollenbeck might have done with its vamping dynamic shifts – or the Alan Parsons Project with jazz chords. The somewhat dirgey, gamelan-tinged title track’s final mix is actually a recording of a playback of the song’s original studio mix made in an old rotunda in the Bronx in order to pick up vast amounts of natural reverb.

There are also a couple of reinvented pieces from the chamber music repertoire: a stately, wary Radiohead-like interpretation of an Anton Webern canon and a György Ligeti piano etude recast as a hypnotically pulsing nocturne. Is all this jazz? Not really. It’s not really rock, either. Indie classical, maybe? Sure, why not? Postrock? That too. Ultimately it boils down to what Duke Ellington said, that there are two kinds of music, the good kind, like this, and the other kind.

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Noir Unease and Cinematic Wit on Curtis Hasselbring’s Number Stations

A number station is a Cold War artifact, a mechanical voice broadcasting seemingly random words and numbers for spy networks around the world to decode. Curtis Hasselbring’s latest album, Number Stations works a deviously ambitious spy-versus-spy battle between his two main bands: the long-running New Mellow Edwards with Chris Speed on tenor sax and clarinet, Trevor Dunn on acoustic and electric bass and Ches Smith on drums and marimba, along with his quartet Decoupage with guitarist Mary Halvorson, vibraphonist Matt Moran and percussionist Satoshi Takeishi. Hasselbring is one of the great wits in jazz: that and an ever-present element of suspense take centerstage here. The whole ensemble has a ball with this. Ostensibly there are secret messages embedded in the music: the whole thing – gorgeously recorded by Hugh Pool at Excello – is streaming at Cuneiform Records’ Bandcamp page, fire it up and see what you can decipher!

Takeishi’s faux Morse code sets the stage for Halvorson and Moran teaming up with a mysterioso insistence on the opening track, First Bus to Bismarck, whose eerie swing brings to mind the early Lounge Lizards. Hasselbring’s moody trombone signals a loosening with an almost shamanistic, hypnotically percussive ambience. Tux Is Traitor anchors spiraling vibraphone in more insistent pedalpoint, an offcenter Speed tenor solo and some deliciously warped Halvorson lines, a spy theme on acid. Warped cinematics hit a high point with the droll, period-perfect kitchen-sink bossa and faux-shortwave flutters of Make Anchor Babies, inspired by Bernard Herrmann’s score to the 1956 Hitchcock film The Wrong Man.

With its no wave cinematics, punk rhythm and skronky guitar harmonies mingling with the vibes, Green Dress, Maryland Welcome Center 95 NB evokes mid-80s John Zorn. It’s Not a Bunny (how about these enigmatic titles, huh?) builds to a pretty standard funk groove, Halvorson adding background menace, Moran’s long, pensive solo signaling a woozy cross-pollination between the two ensembles. It’s the first example of the free, easygoing improvisation that the group builds on the following track, Stereo Jack’s, Bluegrass J’s, a playfully jousting round-robin.

The brief, coyly titled Avoid Sprinter brings back the punk stomp juxtaposed with lively ripples. The album winds up with a slyly uptight little gremlin theme: Hasselbring should sell this to the Simpsons or South Park folks for their Halloween episodes. You’ll see this on the best albums of 2013 page here at the end of the year if we make it that far

Haunting and Sunny Shades from Michael Gibbs and the NDR Bigband

Composer/arranger Michael Gibbs’ album Back in the Day with the NDR Bigband is a lush, richly eclectic, sometimes lurid collection of tracks recorded both live and in the studio at several sessions in 1995, 2002 and 2003. Gibbs conducts; the compositions here reflect his work as a film composer more than his fusion days in the early 70s. Although Gibbs’ long career, dating from the beginning of his association with Gary Burton in the 60s, encompasses a vast range of styles, the tracks here that resonate the most powerfully are the most Lynchian ones.

The album’s highlight is Jail Blues, a noir masterpiece, like a slow, symphonically arranged Bryan Beninghove number. Feite Felsch’s lurid alto sax weaves luridly over a marvelously creepy arrangement, Stephan Diez’ electric guitar adding doppler menace under the moody swells. The equally lush Antique punctuates Messianesque, sostenuto unease with shivery trumpet and an apprehensive Christof Lauer tenor sax solo over an almost rubato rhythm – it’s over too soon. Tennis, Anyone?, a wee hours mood piece, also sets Felsch’s brooding sostenuto lines against an uneasy Gil Evans-inspired backdrop. Round Midnight  takes its cue from the Evans arrangement but is more cinematic, less nebulous: if Miles’ big band recording was the definitive analog version, this is the digital one. And Back Where I Belong, by Bigband keyboardist Vladyslav Sendecki, also works a lustrous, pillowy angst jeweled with neat accents from the guitar and Sendecki’s own electric piano.

There’s lighter fare here as well. The inscrutably tuneful ballad With All Due Respect has Felsch working an incessant series of trick endings for all they’re worth. Billy Eckstine’s I Wanna Talk About You gets a lush slow drag rendition, Felsch taking his spirals to a logically carefree crescendo. June the 15th 1967, written for Burton, is a bulked-up New Orleans bounce as the Crusaders might have done it circa 1981.

Here’s That Rainy Day gets a jubilant oldschool arrangement, while Mosher, dedicated to Gibbs’ old bandmate Jimmy Mosher, works a warmly bluesy Miles/Gil ambience. And Gibbs’ old pal Burton is featured on three tracks here, including the lively opening and closing cuts, the latter being his old concert favorite Country Roads. It’s out now from Cuneiform.

Wadada Leo Smith’s Ten Freedom Summers: A Powerful, Shattering Magnum Opus

Without hyperbole, Wadada Leo Smith’s new 4-cd suite Ten Freedom Summers (just released by Cuneiform) is an important moment in jazz history. Thirty years in the making, it’s Smith’s magnum opus, an attempt to not only chronicle the entirety of the civil rights movement but to put it in historical context, beginning in 1857 with the Dred Scott decision and ending on a decidedly unresolved note with September 11, 2001. Smith makes it abundantly clear that this struggle is far from over: while there are many triumphant moments here, ultimately they disappear in a sea of unease. Along with segments here titled Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, 1964, and The Little Rock Nine: A Force for Desegregation in Education, 1957, perhaps Smith will someday follow up with The March from 116th Street: An End to Racial Profiling, or Arizona 2013: The Battle for Immigrant Rights. The suite has two defining qualities: suspense and spaciousness. The terse judiciousness of Smith’s Golden Quartet, Golden Quintet and the 9-piece ensemble Southwest Chamber Music is remarkable by any standard: in over four eclectic hours of music that spans from straight-ahead jazz to what might be considered indie classical music, they simply don’t waste notes. Although the suite is often robust and aggressive, the tempos themselves are usually glacial, underscoring the effect of innumerable pregnant pauses and several long, atmospheric, pianissimo interludes. As free and fluid as much of the interplay here is, the singlemindedness and purposefulness of the playing is stunning. It’s as musically compelling as it is historically important, a triumph for Smith (whose trumpet drives many of the crescendos with an understated majesty) along with pianist Anthony Davis, bassist Jon Lindberg, drummers Pheeroan AkLaff and Susie Ibarra along with the chamber orchestra conducted by Jeff von der Schmidt, with Alison Bjorkedal on harp, Jim Foschia on clarinet, Lorenz Gamma and Shalini Vijayan on violins, Peter Jacobson on cello, Larry Kaplan on flute, Jan Karlin on viola, Tom Peters on bass and Lynn Vartan on a variety of percussion instruments.

The opening contemplation of the Dred Scott decision illustrates a situation where the dam has broken and all hell is breaking loose, a tumbling fanfare with intimations of crowd noise. It rumbles, saws, alludes to a pending victory, circles more warily and ends with a guarded optimism. Malik Al Shabazz and the People of the Shahada (Smith’s titles are not lacking in specificity) balances elegantly spiritual-inflected piano with stately trumpet, low atmospherics and lots of pregnant pauses. The death of Emmett Till – and, as Smith emphasizes, his defiance and fearlessness – is memorialized by the Golden Quintet and orchestra together with a resolute insistence (particularly from Jon Lindberg’s bass) that moves into a warmly bucolic theme, then a series of foreshadowing interludes that culminate with a horrific crescendo, then eventually returns to a cinematic title theme of sorts: it is a shattering piece of music. Thurgood Marshall and the Brown vs. Board of Ed decision is illustrated by the most straightforward theme here, a swaying, funk-infused minor-key gospel/blues vamp anchored by the bass throughout a wildly tangential interlude that gives absolutely no indication of the payoff that Smith’s simple, magisterial trumpet will eventually deliver. The first disc ends with an epic, suspensefully optimistic, 22-minute tone poem on the theme of JFK’s New Frontier and the space age, an endless series of variations on a portentous, understatedly dramatic, optimistic motif that reaches all the way back to Richard Strauss.

Disc 2 begins with Rosa Parks, summery ambience over constantly shifting, expectant rhythms that eventually hit a rumbling crescendo driven by AkLaff. It ends well, and segues into Black Church, a potently brooding, funereal tone poem that may be an illustration of the aftereffects of a church bombing – or a bloodied bunch of protestors raising their voices together – or both. The voter registration drive during the summer of 1964 inspires Smith’s trumpet to rise with a rare carefree feel in contrast to wary, careful piano and bass, slowly swaying with an artful exchange of voices, ending with a moodily disguised funk groove. Even more clever is the on/off, in/out dichotomy as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 comes to fruition, through eerie Twilight Zone orchestration, outer-space piano and expectantly boomy drums, Smith finally pulling a massive theme together and then handing it over to Kaplan, whose flute cadenzas join with the orchestra in a colossal march to a screaming WAKE UP motif from the trumpet. Ambiguously as it ends, Smith leaves no doubt as to its impact.

The third disc’s opening contemplation of Freedom Riders scrambles with optimism and anticipation, bustling yet not cacaphonous, then takes a downturn to sad, resigned ambience before making its way up again, marked by some memorable boogie lefthand from Davis’ piano: it’s a vivid portrayal of dashed hopes and their renewal. The spacious, quietly fluttering meditation on Medgar Evers grows totally noir: the chilling conversation between Kaplan’s flute and Bjorkedal’s harp is one of the album’s high points. The suite’s quietest segment looks at the Washington, DC War Memorial Wall, stillness punctuated by the occasional drum, trumpet or piano accent that finally hits a brief, rather agitated moment that recedes quickly back into contemplation. An understated exasperation dominates Buzzsaw: The Myth of the Free Press, a series of variations on a descending progression that reaches in vain for a resolution and finally is allowed to hit the mark, Lindbolm then handing off to AkLaff, who then never lets it leave his grasp throughout a rustling solo. It segues into a depiction of the Little Rock Nine and their refusal to back down from the segregationists, a biting, minor-key bass motif at the center, Smith soaring and then spiraling over it as a defiant march comes together, as if to say, “We can pull this off!” Like most everything here, it ends opaquely, unresolved.

The final disc begins with a triptych titled America, Parts 1, 2 & 3, a fast, pulsing swing and then rumbling, animated bustle bookending an unselfconsciously beautiful, lyrical piano centerpiece. 9/11 gets both understated foreshadowing and an elegiac, rain-drenched piano-driven march rather than a depiction of the events of that dreadful day; then the Golden Quintet offers a wary, tensely spacious tribute to Fannie Lou Hamer, Smith’s trumpet against somber ambience that eventually takes on a more guardedly hopeful pulse. Democracy, if Smith is to be believed, is pretty much pandemonium, in this case almost fifteen minutes of it, imbued with a constant sense of apprehension: finally, the trumpet offers a weary hint of a conclusion and the rest of the ensemble follows, the twin drums winding it down. The suite ends with both the quintet and the orchestra joining forces for Martin Luther King Jr.: Memphis, the Prophecy, a horrifying, haunting depiction of the events of that fateful day, opening with a majestic, blues-infused theme that quickly gives way to a macabre motif that eventually makes its way from Vartan’s vibraphone to the bass, shifts to Bernard Herrmann-esque otherworldliness and then an ominous scramble that speaks to the confusion on the ledge outside the motel; it ends with a return to the bluesy majesty of the intro.

Like Ryan Truesdell’s recent collection of newly unearthed Gil Evans compositions, this album transcends any consideration of where it might stand by comparison to other albums released this year. Instead, consider this as a jazz counterpart to Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, a chronicle with artistic merit equal to its inestimable historical value. It ranks with the best and most important work of Smith’s fellow musical freedom fighters: Shostakovich, Umm Kulthumm, the Dead Kennedys, Max Roach, Marcel Khalife and Bob Marley, to name a few.

Wadada Leo Smith Does It Again

Forget for a minute that Wadada Leo Smith’s new album Dark Lady of the Sonnets, with his trio Mbira, is a summit meeting of three of the most compelling voices in jazz improvisation. More than anything, it’s a celebration of being alive. An intimately majestic, sometimes exuberant, warmly conversational album, it’s a must-own for fans of free jazz. Then again, that could be said about a lot of the Wadada Leo Smith, Min Xiao-Fen and Pheeroan akLaff catalogs. This particular session, recorded in 2007 in Finland and released worldwide just now on the reliably adventurous Tum Records label, captures the trio exploring Smith’s permutations on ancient Shona melodies from west Africa.

In the liner notes (which include comprehensive bios for each artist), Smith traces a line back from himself to Louis Armstrong, a connection that might not seem evident at first listen, but up close becomes very clear. Steeped in the blues as a child, Smith never lost that idiom’s terse soulfulness. What’s more, this album is remarkably rhythmic for a free jazz session, something that Smith’s cohorts here deserve credit for as well.

But first Smith goes back to a bell-like Miles Davis tone on the first track, Sarah Bell Wallace, a dedication to his mother, trumpet austerely calling for a dutiful response from spiky thickets of pipa plucking and rolling, suspenseful drums in turn. AkLaff’s signature drum sound, playing actual melody rather than simply rhythm, is in vivid effect here. It’s a warily soulful portrait of an indomitable woman who obviously knew suffering but rose above it and brought her family along.

Min Xiao-Fen, who is afraid of nothing and will play anything, is often the wild card here, bringing her signature sense of humor to Blues: Cosmic Beauty, a story of renewal. Peering up through Smith’s alternately flurrying and richly sustained, restrained lines, she swoops, dives and vocalizes a little, finally ceding to the trumpet on the chorus (much as there’s a great deal of improvisation going on, there’s a clearly defined architecture to all these works).

Zulu Water Festival, meant to evoke South Africans dancing on surface of a lake, juxtaposes a festive melody to a stately allusive groove and a strikingly spacious interlude held down by akLaff’s apprehensively nuanced, drony rumble. The title track, a Billie Holiday homage, puts the pipa player to work as a singer again, low and intimate as the conversation between instruments slowly rises, finally reaching bop fervor as Smith takes the trio out rattling and flurrying. The final track is a suite simply titled Mbira, a spiritually-inspired ballet based on Shona thumb piano music, with variations on a hypnotic circular theme. An animated dialogue between the three instruments swells and ebbs, with akLaff almost imperceptibly building to what seems like an inevitable crescendo with gorgeously nebulous washes of cymbals. Pipa, vocals and trumpet move from calm and sustained to agitated, Min finally swooping down coyly to meet Smith’s summoning call and then setting the whole thing ablaze with a forest of tremolo-picking as akLaff rumbles and leapfrogs his way out of it. It ends on an ambiguous note – maybe there’s a sequel lying in wait.

Also recently out on the Cuneiform label is Smith’s considerably more electric, aggressive and compositionally-oriented Heart’s Reflections double cd with his Organic band, featuring akLaff along with guitarists Michael Gregory and Brandon Ross along with a wide assortment of downtown New York types. Smith will be giving both of these bands a workout along with his Golden Quartet, Golden Quintet and Silver Orchestra as he celebrates his 70th birthday at the new Roulette space in Brooklyn on Dec 15 and 16 at 8 PM.

Dead Cat Bounce’s Chance Episodes Work Out Better Than Just OK

With their four-saxophone frontline, Dead Cat Bounce create the kind of music that sends toy soldiers sinking fast into a mug of hot chocolate – ok, that’s the most surreal of the cd booklet images, but it’s a good one. Their latest album Chance Episodes dispels any demons you can imagine. Who knew that a commission from Chamber Music America could yield such amusing and entertaining results? With their eclecticism, relentlessly droll, usually spot-on sense of humor and counterintuitive charts, the obvious comparison is the Microscopic Septet. When composer/bandleader Matt Steckler is in a more straight-ahead mood, some of the material here evokes the World Saxophone Quartet. But their sound is completely original and often absolutely delightful. The group also includes Jared Sims, Terry Goss and Charlie Kohlhase on saxes and other reeds along with Dave Ambrosio on bass and Bill Carbone on drums. As a Cuneiform Records band, they’re playing their label’s two-week extravaganza at the Stone on Nov 25 at 10 PM.

As you would expect from a band this irreverent, the song titles match the music. Take the opening track, Food Blogger: this guy is a madman! Steckler’s arrangements are meticulous, and pretty hilarious, all helter-skelter scurrying and big sarcastic crescendos with Goss gone OCD, Kohlhase (one of the great wits in jazz) climbing wryly and knowingly with his baritone before Steckler scurries and tiptoes on soprano sax.

Tourvan Confessional goes in an even more wry direction, its funky/bluesy charts lit up by cheery Kohlhase accents. A bright, bustling rush-hour scenario, Far From the Matty Crowd highlights Ambrosio’s hard-hitting, tuneful bass, Carbone’s out-of-nowhere bursts and then a completely unanticipated descent into hallucinatory quietness where Carbone once again gets to play ham and makes the most of it.

Likewise, Salon Sound Journal shifts from funky to swinging and then to an austere, semi-fugal wind ensemble passage. Bio Dyno Man – a mellow superhero who sounds like a Kohlhase creation – has Steckler’s soprano defiantly resisting any kind of resolution, an unexpected whirlwind with the whole ensemble and then Ambrosio matter-of-factly bringing back the slink. A cinematic mini-suite, Silent Movie, Russia 1995 morps from staggered march, to bolero, then to clave, with a laid-back Sims tenor solo with a playful Dexter Gordon quote. Watkins Glen – a racetrack, so those alto accents might be car horns – gives Ambrosio, who’s the secret star of this thing, a chance to air out his classical side, Steckler’s flute rising in contrast.

A blithely swaying, latin-inflected number, Salvation and Doubt evokes the western hemisphere of Either/Orchestra with Gil Evans-inflected swells and some deviously unfocused alto from Goss. There’s also Township Jive Revisited, a lively mbaqanga-flavored tune that eventually brings in a genially pulsing New Orleans vibe; Madame Bonsilene, contrasting astringent atonalities with Kohlhase’s solid, strolling underpinning; and Living the Dream, a funk song with a long, intricately joyous crescendo to take the album out on a high note.

Another cool thing about this record: the cd back cover includes credits for solos. That’s not an ego thing – it makes a lot easier for a listener to figure out who’s playing what, and how.

Very Devious News: The Microscopic Septet Is Back in Print!

There has never been a more devious band than the Microscopic Septet. You may consider yourself a bon vivant, but until you have danced – or at least wiggled in your chair – to the Micros at 2 in the morning, you are only a pretender. These two double cds comprise their complete recorded work through 2007: reportedly, there is also an album of all-new material on the way. You may know these guys from the theme to NPR’s Fresh Air, which their pianist Joel Forrester wrote in the early 90s. As purveyors of good times, exuberant wit and extremely subtle satire, their only real competition is genre-blending baritone sax-driven instrumentalists Moisturizer. Like that band, many of the Micros’ songs – and they are songs, in the purest sense of the word – have a narrative feel. They could have been the Spinal Tap of jazz – and in a sense they are – but they’re so much more. A typical number could start out as a slow blues, go doublespeed with a swing beat, morph into dixieland for a minute or two, build to a latin breakdown and then go out on a suspense film motif. When they first appeared on the New York scene in 1980, audiences didn’t know what to make of them. Were they fake jazz? A spoof? A straight-up swing band that couldn’t resist a good joke? All of the above is more like it. By comparison, the early Lounge Lizards were conservative.

In a terrific stroke of good fortune, Cuneiform Records has reissued the Micros’ complete recorded works on two double cd’s, Seven Men in Neckties and Surrealistic Swing. The first comprises their first album, 1983’s Take the Z Train, along with their lone ep, Let’s Flip! from 1986, in addition to with several outtakes from that session. The second includes their 1986 album Offbeat Glory and their lone cd, 1988’s Beauty Based on Science (The Visit) plus several bonus tracks.

Take the Z Train was recorded live in analog to two-track tape in a Chinatown studio chosen because it housed a piano that reputedly once belonged to Eubie Blake. The digital remastering here is brilliant: it sounds pretty much like the collectible album that the original has become. It’s the band’s defining statement. Influenced by Ellington and Fletcher Henderson’s ornate arrangements, founder and sax player Phillip Johnston added megadoses of his signature wit, and the band followed along, Forrester (who also writes a lot of their material) on piano, Dave Hofstra on bass, Richard Dworkin on drums (both of whom served as Rachelle Garniez’ rhythm section back in 90s), Dave Sewelson (later of the Sewelsonics) on baritone sax, Don Davis on alto and John Hagen on tenor. The album has what’s possibly their prototypical song, Chinese Twilight Zone; the spy theme Mr. Bradley, Mr. Martin; the fast, bustling Pack the Ermines, Mary; the latin swing number Kelly Grows Up and the absolutely brilliant True, a previously unreleased outtake that sounds something akin to Sun Ra covering a horror movie theme.

Let’s Flip! and the outtakes that follow it were recorded in concert in Europe. It’s the Micros at their most serious, although their energy is undiminished. In addition to Offbeat Glory, Surrealistic Swing includes two bonus tracks featuring John Zorn, who was their original alto player. Beauty Based on Science (The Visit) was originally released on Stash Records, who also did the Reefer Madness album; noted jazz critic Will Friedwald hooked them up with the label. Forrester’s latin and tango inflections come to the forefront here, particularly on the delightful Waltz of the Recently Punished Catholic Schoolboys, Dill Pickle Tango and Fool’s Errand. Over the course of these four cds, the band steals licks from the Mission Impossible, Peter Gunn and Summer Place themes, rearranges the Ellington classic Harlem Nocturne as a tango, and quotes from everyone from Louis Jordan to the Skatalites to George Michael. In all seriousness, as amusing as all this is, it’s also virtuosic and absolutely brilliant. Although the Micros didn’t go unnoticed by the mainstream jazz world during their 80s heyday, these two rediscoveries ought to vault them to the prominence they so richly deserve.