Fighting Horror With Harmony

Jeong Lim Yang, Will Mason

I’m belatedly sending out this week’s newsletter from New York, where I touched down yesterday. After a week in Philadelphia I head to Chicago for this year’s Frequency Festival. The friends I’ve talked to since arriving remain in a stupor over the insanely cruel, performative, and destructive infiltration of the US by new breed robber barons whose only objective is to inflict cruelty while enriching themselves. It’s fucking dark. Music can’t solve these increasingly global problems, but it sure does give life some meaning while shit blows up. Next week’s post will cover two weeks..

Korean Bassist Jeong Lim Yang Slows Us Down

A few years ago the Brooklyn-based Korean bassist Jeong Lim Yang grabbed my attention with a bracing front-to-back treatment of The Zodiac Suite—as Zodiac Suite: Reassured, the brilliant concept album made by pianist, composer, and arranger Mary Lou Williams back in 1945. That set of compositions has been enjoying a well-deserved resurgence in recent years—including a pair of big bad adaptations in 2023 released just months apart by Aaron Diehl with the Knights and the Umlaut Big Band. Working with drummer Gerald Cleaver and pianist Santiago Leibson, Yang put her own spin on the music, simultaneously caressing and stretching the album’s indelible themes. Now she’s back with a new band on a superb follow-up called Synchronicity (Sunnyside), a collection of original material that makes a strong case for her versatility and her power as a bassist.

Randy Peterson, Jacob Sacks, Jeong Lim Yang, and Mat Maneri (photo: Jacqueline Kim )

She deserves credit for putting such an excellent band together. Pianist Jacob Sacks, violist Mat Maneri, and drummer Randy Peterson have all worked together in a different contexts over the years, with a shared sensibility that combines the microtonal system devised by the late reedist Joe Maneri and the draggy swing rhythms of Paul Motian. Of course, with players of this caliber those references function primarily as signposts rather than definition. All four reveal a gripping rapport, playing with time like it’s putty, as well as digging into uncommon harmonic terrain. On many of the tracks the musicians operate on elastic time scales, creating different rhythmic lines that are at once inextricably linked and seemingly independent. The title track, for example, features Sacks cycling through endless variations on a simple repeated phrase marked by an almost furtive sleekness, while Peterson spreads time across his kit with a light but thorny touch, juggling gentle snare friction and indirectly propulsive cymbals, melded in swelling rushes. Yang holds down the tune’s muscular, driving pulse on bass, which allows Maneri free rein. It’s the perfect setting for him, letting his bowed gestures expand and contract according at will, knitting in terse little phrases or unspooling luxuriously extended melodic shapes. In the end we hear a band that feels very natural together, filled with trust, confidence, and a touch of impishness. Check it out below.

Yang’s faith in her partners is laid bare on her “Ordinary Waltz,” a tender country-like form with a bittersweet melody played by Maneri. But once the theme has been presented the group operates freely, loosely shadowing the form, but taking all sorts of liberties that unleash deliciously ambiguous harmonies, rubato phrasing, and expert allusions to the theme. In typical fashion Sacks exerts a beautifully light touch—his solo on this tune is one of the album’s highlights—pulling out a lyric solo from an unsure foundation, and he’s followed by an emotive but controlled solo from the bassist, with a warm and woody presence that helps indicate how beautifully detailed the recording of the whole session is. The post-Motian meander of “Morning Glory” is a prime example of how that kind of free time can flourish in the right hands, while the extravagantly unhurried “Stimmung” seems to slow down every gesture, line, and pattern, as if giving us a granular perspective on how sound comes together and pulls apart. It’s incredible. It’s no less satisfying when the general approach is used to move in and out of focus on a standard, as the group does on a piece titled “Body Nor Soul,” which plays around with the theme from a similarly titled tune that’s well-known in jazz circles. The two Yang albums I know are far apart in every way, but the fact that she’s behind two disparate efforts that have riveted me in very different ways is no mean feat. I’m on the lookout.

Will Mason’s New Take on Just Intonation Jazz

Last September I devoted significant space and time to a growing phenomenon I’ve noticed in jazz and improvised music, where microtonality and different tuning systems have given the usual harmonic foundation of the music a wobbly kick in the ass, opening up blends that might initially sound off. For listeners who’ve only heard music in equal temperament this stuff can prove disorienting or sound wrong on first encounter, but once we adjust and treat the sound as it is, exciting possibilities open up, adding an almost psychedelic quality to the music, which becomes particularly exciting when it’s deployed in improvisation settings. Last month drummer, bandleader, and composer Will Mason dropped a new quartet album that’s been giving me repeated pleasure.

Will Mason Ensemble—Anna Webber, Danny Fisher-Lochhead, Will Mason, deVon Russell Gray (photo: Colleen Morgan)

I suppose I’ve been aware of Mason about a decade ago, around the time he released Beams of the Huge Night for the New Amsterdam. At that point the label was a bit more closely aligned with a post-Bang on a Can contemporary classical vibe, albeit one that let in various indie pop threads into the discussion. But Mason’s album immediately hit like an outlier, closer to jazz-rock than contemporary music. I know that I tried to get into the music a couple of times, but my fusion allergies ultimately prevented me from giving it a fair shake back then. For the last decade Mason has balanced teaching, composing, and performing—a difficult task in modern America. At the same time, Mason is an academic, not just a musician who turned to education to make a living. His own interests veer toward microtonality and free jazz, and everything I’ve heard from has triangulated between those two pursuits and his double-billed cap as composer/drummer. But it wasn’t until I heard his fantastic new album Hemlocks, Peacocks (New Focus) that I was fully pulled in by his music. Suddenly, that earlier music makes greater sense, establishing a clear continuum that’s reached an apex on this new endeavor.

I knew some of the players on Beams of the Huge Night—notably guitarists Travis Reuter and Andrew Smiley—the latter was a founding member of Little Women, and has a knack for nailing complex lines and patterns—but the music landed pretty far from jazz orthodoxy. Going back to it now I've been pleasantly surprised by certain things, such as the cycling microtonal riffing on the opening track “Finn,” which seems to anticipate a particular thread subsequently embraced by Horse Lords. Check it out below. The intricate charts articulated by those three along with oboist Stuart Breczinski, alto saxophonist Danny Fisher-Lochhead, singer Nina Moffitt, and bassist Dan Stein, go through endless peaks and valleys and ever-shifting topographies that accelerate and decelerate, and compress and expand with the meticulous focus on a new music ensemble. Over the course of an entire album the relentless energy and density can get a bit exhausting, but recent listens have actually proven exhilarating more than anything. Despite a certain egghead vibe, the commitment to Mason’s ideas is impressively complete, and at its most jacked-up it summons the wall-to-wall ferocity of the Flying Luttenbachers with a much more diverse timbre, toggling between the prog-rock attack and kaleidoscopic swirls of microtonal psychedelia. Still, despite the intensity, there are elements that feel a bit overblown, such as the dichotomy between the guitar-drums-bass core of “Door 6” and the way Moffitt unspools florid, wordless flights—a juxtaposition that feels incongruous rather than bold. Still, nothing stays in the same place for very long, so even when something doesn’t work for me, it's usually over in a flash.

When I first heard Northfield the debut by his band Happy Place I must’ve filed it away as math rock and given it little further thought. Back then the project was a twin guitar-twin drums quartet that vaguely recalled Little Women, the band Smiley played in alongside reedists Darius Jones and Travis Laplante, and drummer Jason Nazary. Revisiting it more than eight years later I find it more engaging that I remembered, with a strong compositional undercurrent that goes far beyond tricky time signatures and virtuosic precision. In fact, while the music is undeniably complex and requires some serious rigor to pull off with such exactitude, more compelling are the larger compositional ideas at play. Until recently I had never heard that ensemble’s far more ambitious and interesting follow-up Tendrils. It’s a corker, somehow colliding the more elaborate timbre of the Will Mason Ensemble, the group behind the first album I discussed above, with the post-punk drive of the quartet. The line-up changed quite a bit, with Kate Gentile taking the second drum chair, Dan Lippel moving into the second guitar slot next to Smiley, with vocalists Charlotte Mundy and Elaine Lachica expanding the group into a sextet. Those two both enhanced the paired conception of the project, offering more counterpoint and interplay (as well as singing actual words and melodic turns) than Moffitt was able to bring to Mason’s first album—through no fault of her own—and the dual guitar action was more compelling, too. Mason got stronger and more assured as a composer, and the upgraded musicianship helped.

The quartet on Hemlocks, Peacocks brings back Danny Fisher-Lochhead, who are joined by keyboardist deVon Russell Gray and saxophonist Anna Webber, an authority on this sort of approach as made plain in her excellent quintet Shimmer Wince. Gray actually plays two electronic keyboards “set at two pitch levels on two separate keyboards, one rooted on C and the other on 436Hz (a slightly flat A),” a decision based loosely on the tuning La Monte Young deployed on his landmark The Well-Tuned Piano. It’s Gray’s playing that really gives the music its strange harmonic quality, and both reedists have the seasoned ears and harmonic expertise to make hay from that setting. As if to set the tone, the opening piece “Hemlocks” is through-composed, an exploration of a tiny interval in which a hovering semi-drone rippling with bracing collisions of the keyboards and fluttering, twinned saxophone lines unfold over a rather static rhythm staked out by the drummer. The energy and dynamism hits much harder on “The Fallen Leaves, Repeating Themselves,” which is built around a fantastic saxophone duet with harmonies that move between just intonation and equal temperament, where some of the tightly coiled sax phrasing reminds me of Roma music, as if Ferus Mustafov has hijacked the session.

I can’t get enough of the sound and the shifting interplay all across the album, and all four musicians are convincingly locked in and super sharp. In the end the main problem I have with the album is an issue that crops up fairly often with music written in Just Intonation; there’s so much energy and rigor poured into the harmony that other parts of a composition end up lacking. One of the reason’s Webber’s Shimmer Wince is incredible is that her tunes are catchy and rock-solid, borrowing from post-bop orthodoxy while tripping the articulation up with the tuning. I have truly enjoyed this new Mason album, but I’m rooting for some more indelible,lively themes next time, which would not only raise the stakes and sharpen the interest, but it could inject some much needed energy, as too much of Hemlocks, Peacocks plods along. I’m not saying it needs to swing, but it could really use some drive. But right now I’m fully on board.

Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week:

February 11: Marlies Debacker, piano, and, Florian Zwißler, sound direction (Milica Djordjević, Marco Momi, Chiyoko Szlavnics, Jonathan Harvey, Alberto Posadas, and Franck Bedrossian), 8 PM, BKA Theater, Mehringdamm 34, 10961 Berlin

February 11: Yannick Gueddon, baritone, performs Karl Naegelen's Chaconne and Éliane Radigue's OCCAM XXII; Marianne Schuppe, voice, and Deborah Walker, cello, perform Aus dem Zeltbuch, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin

February 12: Ignaz Schick, alto and baritone saxophones, Julia Biłat, cello, Meinrad Kneer, double bass, Dudu Kouate, gesang, ngoni, African percussion, 8 PM, Panda Theater, Knaackstraße 97 (i.d. Kulturbrauerei, Gebäude 8) 10435

February 12: Exhaust (Camila Nebbia, tenor saxophone, Kit Downes, piano, and Andrew Lisle, drums), 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin

February 12: Ute Wassermann, voice, Andrea Parkins, accordion, electronics, and
Liz Kosack, synthesizer; MeoW! (Cansu Tanrıkulu, voice, electronics, Liz Kosack, synthesizer, Dan Peter Sundland, electric bass, and, Jim Black, drums), 9 PM, Kunstfabrik Schlot, Invalidenstraße 117, 10115 Berlin

February 14: Rebecca Lloyd-Jones, percussion, plays Sarah Hennies’ Thought Sectors, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin

February 15: Aida Shirazi, voice, sanṭūr, and electronics, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin

February 15: Peter Van Huffel’s Callisto (Peter Van Huffel, baritone saxophone, electronics, Lina Allemano, trumpet, Antonis Anissegos, piano, electronics, and Joe Hertenstein, drums), 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin

February 16: Dan Peter Sundland’s Home Stretch (Philipp Gropper, tenor saxophone, Antonis Anissegos, piano, electronics, Dan Peter Sundland, electric bass, and Steve Heather, drums), 9 PM, B-Flat, Dircksenstr. 40, 10178 Berlin

February 17: Andrea Parkins, amplified objects, electronics, and Yorgos Dimitriadis, percussion, electronics; Peter Van Huffel’s Callisto (Peter Van Huffel, baritone saxophone, electronics, Lina Allemano, trumpet, Antonis Anissegos, piano, electronics, and Joe Hertenstein, drums), 9 PM, Kunstfabrik Schlot, Invalidenstraße 117, 10115 Berlin