Literally Otherworldly, Entertaining Sounds From Sarah Weaver

OK – you open your new album with an almost nineteen-minute drum solo. Career suicide attempt?

Actually, Gerry Hemingway’s performance of Sarah Weaver’s gamelanesque hailstorm of a composition is vastly more interesting than most drum solos, and in a way it sets the stage for the entertainment to come on her latest, deep-space inspired album Synchrony Series. It hasn’t made it to the usual spots on the web, although there are bits and pieces at Weaver’s youtube channel..

Bombast is happily absent; what we get is a a very subtle upward drive from a steady drizzle on the cymbals and some neat accents on what seem to be extremely detuned tom-toms. People with short attention spans will not be able to handle much of this music, but for those dedicated to what Pauline Oliveros called deep listening, it’s a treat. It’s very psychedelic, by the way.

Long before the lockdown forced musicians to use the web to collaborate, Weaver was patching in people around the world to create ensembles that otherwise never could have existed. There’s some of that here on the record. The second number, Symmetry of Presence features bass trombone legend David Taylor playing a ridiculously funny series of ideas through an increasingly surreal series of Weaver’s effects – although his vaunted extended technique really gets a workout before the electronics kick in. So much of this kind of music is mannered and fearful: this is 180 degrees from that.

An allstar eleven-piece ensemble play the darkly sprawling, practically forty-minute suite Interhere, a soundscape in the AACM tradition. Min Xiao-Fen’s spiky pipa first takes centerstage over Mark Dresser’s keening bass overtones and the massed horns of Taylor, trumpeter James Zollar, soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom, reedman Ned Rothenberg, bassoonist Sara Schoenbeck and oboeist Julie Ferrara. Denman Maroney’s piano introduces icy menace; it’s not clear what or who pansori-influenced singer Yoon Sun Choi is addressing, if at all. More than a hint of franticness; squirrelly dissociation; Tower of Babel chatter from all points; quasi-baroque lockstep; ominous swells on the low end; cold spring desolation fried into 5G microwave shriek: does this feel vaguely familiar?

The album’s disorienting fourth number is just the composer on vocals and Joe McPhee’s trumpet, running through a maze of effects, challenging both themselves and the listener to find a calm center. The final, practically hourlong epic was recorded by most of the large ensemble here, bolstered by an online cast utilizing samples from the Kepler space telescope.

These melodies, created by the orbits of stars and planets millions of miles away, have a stately, gamelanesque quality that validates Johannes Kepler’s theories about celestial harmonies, but almost droll oscillations as well. Is humor implicit in the physics of planetary and solar mass? It would seem so. The musicians respond to those motives with a playful aplomb, bringing to mind Gil Evans as his most celestial as well as Anthony Braxton in galactically tectonic mode – as well as the most primitive video games.

The long liftoff sequence midway through is a lot of fun; the outer-space drift elsewhere is just as entertaining, while the increasingly pensive exchange afterward is a sobering reflection on our ultimate place amidst the dust of stars. This magnum opus has a lot to get lost in.

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A Rare Bass-and-Vocals Album and a Joe’s Pub Release Show from Kavita Shah and François Moutin

Considering that singer Sheila Jordan has made bass-and-vocal duets such an integral part of her hall of fame career, it’s no surprise that her protegee, Kavita Shah would release an album full of them. Most of the tracks on her latest release, Interplay – streaming at Spotify – are duo arrangements with bassist François Moutin. The two are playing the album release show this May 30 at 7 PM at Joe’s Pub; cover is $20.

Beyond Jordan’s obsession with the format, recordings of just bass and voice are rare. It’s impossible to know for sure, but bass-and-vocals albums are even rarer: Jordan’s catalog included, it’s hard to imagine more than a couple dozen of them ever having been made. Two from recent years are especially noteworthy. Singer Lauren Lee’s Velocity Duo with bassist Charley Sabatino put out an especially playful one, Dichotomies, in 2015. The benchmark for the format, at least in this century, belongs to singer Jen Shyu and bassist Mark Dresser’s transcendent, phantasmagorical 2011 release, Synastry. How does the new one by Shah and Moutin compare?

For one, it’s more of a study in contrasting voices – Moutin percolating and Shah simmering alongside – than an attempt to pull together a cohesive whole. And it’s a mix of originals and standards. The duo open with one of the latter, You Go to My Head, which is all about dichotomies, in this case Shah’s assertively full-throated, bittersweet delivery against Moutin’s tightly unclustering lines that veer in and out of swing time. Their take of La Vie En Rose follows the same format, if more swingingly, at least until Shah starts scatting and then Moutin takes a bubbly, straightforward solo.

The first of the originals, Coming Yesterday pairs Shah’s energetic airiness against ageless nonagenariian pianist and longtime Moutin collaborator Martial Solal’s alternately saturnine and sprightly piano. Moutin incisively shadows Shah’s stately delivery throughout the catchy, recurrent vocal riffage of Bliss. The contrast in Falling in Love with Love, one of the more contiguous numbers, is between Shah’s blissful interpretation versus Jordan’s grittier approach – at 89, she can still hit the high notes!

A Shah original, Aigue Marine also features Solal’s uneasy close harmonies behind her tropical angst; it’s the album’s strongest track. Her resonance and melismas over Moutin’s stabbing pulse in Dafnis Prieto’s Blah Blah carry its tango-jazz intensity with full-band power. Similarly, the album’s most retro number, Utopian Vision, has plenty of swing and gusto despite the stripped-down setup.

Shah’s steady vocalese pairs with Moutin’s strolling lines in the album’s title track, up to a jauntily flurrying bass solo. Shah vamps on ukulele in the tropical-flavored The Provider’s Gone. The album closes with Peace, another collaboration with Jordan, shifting in and out of waltz time, Shah the ingenue alongside her mentor’s calm, wise intonation.

The Velocity Duo Entertain With Just Bass and Wordless Vocals

On one level, the Velocity Duo‘s new album Dichotomies – streaming online at singer Lauren Lee’s site – is avant garde to the extreme. On the other, it’s very accessible and irresistibly fun. You’d hardly guess that just vocals and bass (that’s Charley Sabatino on the four-string) could be this entertaining. The duo are playing the album release show tomorrow night, May 6 at 6 PM at the Whynot Jazz Room on Christopher St.; cover is $10, and there’s probably a drink minimum, the venue site isn’t clear on that.

Rare as bass-and-vocal albums are, the obvious recent point of comparison is singer Jen Shyu‘s 2011 masterpiece, Synastry with bassist Mark Dresser. Both that album and this new one have a dramatic flair, but where Shyu goes for pointed sociopolitical commentary and knifes-edge theatrics, Lee goes for mood and ambience with frequent bursts of humor. And where Shyu writes lyrics, Lee sings vocalese, which raises the conversational factor with Sabatino (who is an equal even if he’s not centerstage in this collaboration).

The album title says it all: the three first tracks are Apathy/Desire, Awe/Melancholy, and Disappointment and Joy. Again, as these titles indicate, Lee and Sabatino are working contrasts rather than opposite extremes. Sometimes the two take separate roles, other times working in tandem to bring each emotion or mix of emotions to life. The first track seems to be the former, Lee’s carefree, soul-infused flights and occcasional detours into jazz scatting contrast with Sabatino’s close-to-the-vest, almost claustrophobic minimalism. The second is airy and spacious: Sabatino’s punchy, percussive, incisive lines give these tunes a much-needed drive. The third sets a bittersweet, jazz-tinged Lee against Sabatino’s steady, dancing low-register lines.

Likewise, Elation/Woe pits Lee’s blithe scattting – the album’s most straight-ahead jazz passages – against Sabatino’s somber, rustically bluesy lines…until he goes up the scale and joins the fun. Holiday/Death – what a contrast, huh? – pairs Sabatino’s furtiveness with Lee’s operatically-tinged leaps and bounds. Hunger/Satiety is both the album’s most outside moment and also one of its funnier ones, while on Insecurity and Substance Sabatino once again anchors Lee’s LMAO attention-deficit attack with his gravitas until he too can’t resist getting in on the joke.

Lee’s sarcastic noodling on Narcisissm/Selfless is even funnier – it’s hard to see where if at all a contrast comes in. Skeptical/Naive also goes for laughs, but far more subtly, at least til midway through. Likewise, the bass/vocal tradeoffs in Tranquility/Cacaphony are more low-key. The album winds up with a strange and thought-provoking dichotomy, Uncomfortable/Placid. These short, most likely at least half-improvised vignettes transcend the question of whether or not this is jazz or indie classical or whatever mix of genres it might be: it’s just good, fun music.