Guitars twanging, ringing, vibrating
Black Duck, Fredrik Rasten, Mark Turner Quartet, Madness and Arrogance
Black Duck is a salve for fucked-up times
A couple of weeks ago Thrill Jockey released the eponymous debut from the instrumental Chicago trio Black Duck, a band consisting of three exceedingly versatile scene pillars who tend to quietly and subtly lift up projects more than they take the spotlight. All three musicians—Douglas McCombs, Bill MacKay, and Charles Rumback—have led projects of their own over the years. McCombs—known for his long-time membership in Eleventh Dream Day and Tortoise—dropped a beautiful solo record last year and has been the driving force behind Brokeback since back in 1995. MacKay, a jazz-trained guitarist, has made two lovely, deeply lyric solo records, as well as duo efforts with artists as disparate as cellist Katinka Kleijn, fellow guitarist Ryley Walker, and multi-instrumentalist Nathan Bowles. Rumback is a jazz drummer who leads a wonderful trio with pianist Jim Baker and bassist John Tate, and he dropped an ambitious album of his own tunes that bridged post-bop and pop with help from the late trumpeter Ron Miles as well as singer-songwriter Macie Stewart, among others. But he’s also played with loads of rock bands over the years, whether Steve Dawson’s Bonsai Funeral Wedding or Nina Nastasia. All three of them make shit happen and sound better in Chicago.
Black Duck emerged from informal, sporadic improvised sessions they played privately for nearly a decade, and the restrictions brought on by the pandemic seems to have led them to drill down on the collaboration, including some live gigs and this recording. As they set about planning the album they decided to include a few tunes to complement the improvised material, with each member contributing a piece. As McCombs explained in a recent interview in Aquarium Drunkard, “We had been improvising that whole time and without any real preconceived idioms, but we also had a pretty specific vocabulary that went in certain directions. We decided we would make an improvised guitar record, but also let each one of us also compose a song to put on the record for variety sake and to give it some different fields.” Whether written or improvised the music feels of a piece, and it’s been bringing me real pleasure over the last couple of months.
McCombs alternates between a standard electric guitar and a baritone guitar rather than bass, and his predilection for the atmospheric twang made famous by the Ennio Morricone spaghetti western soundtracks for Sergio Leone remains steady. You can hear it on his stunning “Of the Lit Backyards,” his original which opens the album—check it out below. It’s a beauty, with artfully entwined guitars that evoke a dreamy Americana nostalgia with the tonal magnificence of Tom Verlaine. McCombs is a deeply thoughtful musician who crafts his lines with painstaking precision, while MacKay tends to improvise more, making their blend especially enticing. Rumback deploys a more direct style, heavy on his toms with less cymbal play, but through every cycle he’s constantly altering his patterns, and the draggy vibe of his drum hero Paul Motian can be heard through the tune’s southwestern accents.
The improvised pieces are no less absorbing. “Foothill Daze” opens with shimmering, sustained guitar tones that ripple like fast-moving clouds backlit in the evening by the moon, with some gentle rumbles by the drummer to help push them along, and after two brief minutes the tone poem has expressed plenty. MacKay wrote “Delivery,” the album’s most dramatic tune, with meticulously shaped feedback, the twinned reverberant lines of the guitarists coming together and pulling apart with a sculptural sensibility, while Rumback raises the heat, spreading motion across his kit with impressive force. “Second Guess” is another improvised piece, with Rumback delivering a dazzling narrative flow that makes me think of Anton Fier’s ingenious performance on the Feelies song “Raised Eyebrows.” Meanwhile the two guitarists conjure lush washes of contrapuntal sound, both from glowing harmonies and stinging lines. The drummer wrote “The Trees Are Dancing,” another melodic gem where he is content to push things along with an economic, cycling pattern, while his partners make hay with his lyrical theme. Even at the trio’s most wide-open and aggressive, as on “Thunder Fade That Earth Smells” there’s an undeniable focus and cohesion, so even if Black Duck has carved out a rather specific soundworld, its possibilities seem genuinely expansive.
Fredrik Rasten’s music in bloom
One of my greatest surprises and delights since moving to Berlin four years ago has been encountering the music of Fredrik Rasten, a Norwegian guitarist that lives here, feet planted in several different yet overlapping stylistic communities. He’s maintained collaborative endeavors with folks from his homeland, often rooted in an expansive vision of experimental folk, playing in the excellent quartet Oker and working as a part of Volvur, the ad hoc ensemble of some of Norway’s most exciting, versatile artists conceived by violinist Hans P. Kjorstad in order to collaborate with Scottish folk singer Alisdair Roberts on the superb 2021 album The Old Fabled River (Drag City). He’s become a major part of the Harmonic Space Orchestra, the great Berlin collective focusing on music in just intonation, and then he’s developed a more personal practice in various duos with folks like bassists Egil Kalman, Vilhelm Bromander, and Jon Heilbron, and composition-driven work with Stefan Thut and Léo Dupleix.
While my earliest infatuation arrived through his playing in Oker, his knocked me out with an interpretation of the Chiyoko Szlavnics piece “Partial Response,” transforming a work composed for mezzo-soprano and two soprano saxophones into a multi-limbed guitar solo work. His sensitivity matches his resourcefulness, and his work explores the finest gradients of pitch and harmony. He’s been focusing a bit more on solo work lately, although he released an album documenting an extended, performance-oriented work for six guitars involving spatiality and dance. A recording of Six Moving Guitars (Sofa) was released in 2019, but the translation to pure sound felt a bit incomplete. More recently Rasten released a solo album Svevning (INSUB), in 2021, featuring two iterations of the title piece—the first of which you can hear below—where slow-moving, generally cycling arpeggios marked by ever-shifting pattern shifts, carve out a strange harmonic area, with a rainbow of overtones shadowing many of the phrases. Here and there Rasten hums, adding extra harmonic interference, and helping the music to open up further. It’s long-form music that feels static on first blush, but once the listener settles in there’s no missing the movement. Honestly, I didn’t appreciate the album the first couple of times I heard it, but after spending time with Rasten’s newest record, it feels like it’s started to breathe and take on new life for me.
A couple of weeks ago Rasten released Lineaments (Sofa), a solo album that collides many of the ideas from Svevning with the multi-limbed practice I witnessed him deploy with the Szlavnics performance in October of 2020. In fact, despite the message on the back of the CD declaring, “the music is played in real time without overdubs or major edits,” I had trouble believing there was no electronic manipulation.” Rasten lays out four guitar, plucking an acoustic and electric guitar in open tunings with a pair of additional acoustic guitars played with e-bows he controls with foot switches. Furthermore, he uses his voice again, shaping long tones that conclude in super simple melodic swoops, sine waves, and a metal chain placed across one of the guitars in the first of the two pieces. As with Svevning there are two variations on the same piece, built around different plucking patterns. But this time there is a multiplicity of layers, with those core arpeggios surrounded by increasingly resonant harmonies. The e-bowed tones and the sine waves tangle, as new effects blossom and billow outward, occasionally threatening to subsume the plucked guitar patterns. Five minutes into “Lineamant I,” which you can check out below, amid those cycling arpeggios and mewling e-bowed harmonies Rasten’s modest voice glides in, pushing ever so gently upward through tension and release with impressive beauty.
Ultimately, the music is built for immersion, a forest of hand-crafted resonance with subtle details that morph into new tonalities steadily but slowly. Isolated details add wonderful new dimensions, whether it’s the way the chain enters on the first track, initially an almost sizzling presence that begins to vibrate in widening arcs for a surprising rhythmic pulsation, or the unexpected silence that drifts through “Lineament II” some 13 minutes in, a kind of repose and slight redirection. Perhaps the most exciting about Rasten is his palpable openness and curiosity. He has lots of ideas and it’s been exciting to observe him broaden his scope, elaborate on ongoing interests, and grow without perpetually dumping what came before. In fact, I’ve loved tracing his path through sound, accreting, editing, and mastering.
Mark Turner Quartet’s cool heat
For several decades tenor saxophonist Mark Turner has been one of the most eloquent, thoughtful reedists in jazz, a player blending the cool of Warne Marsh with the poetry of Wayne Shorter. Last year he released his first quartet album in eight years with Return From the Stars (ECM) and it conveys his usual meticulousness, but within that attention to detail he yields a great deal of space and freedom to his bandmates, who match his precision. He sketches out loose schemes for his adroit rhythm section, retaining bassist Joe Martin—who’s now based here in Berlin—from his previous quartet album Lathe of Heaven (2014), and welcoming Jonathan Pinson into the fold. They serve a key structural role, but they function like free agents, given the ability to reshape form and intensity on the fly while holding things down. Trumpeter Jason Palmer is another new addition to the band, replacing Avishai Cohen, but he has a long history with the saxophonist. Turner has played in several of Palmer’s bands, where the music is much more direct, locked into post-bop modalities, albeit with uncanny imagination and a bracing attack. They have a remarkable bond, which enables them to float, collide, and cohere around Turner’s smoky themes.
My favorite parts of the record occur when Turner and Palmer improvise together, updating cool jazz methods with a stronger sense of mystery. There’s a loose echo of the Miles Davis classic “All Blues” on “Terminus,” where the horn men float and dance around one another with astonishing ease and alacrity, a practice requiring heightened attention. The Shorter influence is clear on the serpentine, extended form of “It’s Not Alright With Me,” it’s opening tenor line toying with a key melodic kernel from the standard “It’s Alright With Me,” but then the tune takes off its own winding path, a briskly swinging platform stoked by the rhythm section at its most agitated. Turner’s solo is a marvel, zipping through the changes in unexpected ways, as his knotty phrases accelerate and cut without ever surrendering clarity. Palmer follows with a knockout statement of his own, revealing his ardor for 50’s bebop heavy Clifford Brown, a quality further reinforced on the uptempo burner “Nigeria II,” which you can hear below. The band shapes a different vibe on the mercurial “Waste Land,” a dark-hued ballad with deftly carved out silences, halting improvisations, and measured turbulence. The quartet is on a brief European club tour that brings them to Zig Zag Jazz Club on Wednesday, July 5, on the heels a US trek this past spring, so I’m psyched to hear a well-oiled combo at the peak of its powers in such an intimate setting.
Madness and Arrogance celebrate new record
Last week I wrote about vibist Taiko Saito and cellist Johannes Fink, who are both working musicians in Berlin I discovered through Silke Eberhard’s Potsa Lotsa XL. Trombonist Gerhard Gschlössl is yet another member of the group, but I encountered his music when I was still living in Chicago, as appeared on numerous recordings of the Berlin scene released on Jazzwerkstatt. He’s not only a flexible player, agile in both post-bop and more abstract contexts, but he’s also a crucial community member who organizes the Jazz and Experimental Label Nights series at the Panda Theater, but he also operates Trouble in the East Records, one of the most reliable labels documenting jazz in Berlin. It’s through that imprint that I first heard Madness & Arrogance, Gschlössl’s duo with pianist Marc Schmolling. The duo released Approaching Eyjafjallajökull in 2018, a series of tightly-coiled yet highly interactive dialogues between the former’s garrulous trombone and the latter’s rangy Fender Rhodes and Wurlitzer. The duo’s timbre is quite unusual, with an appealingly metallic glint emerging from even the most lyric passages, and the interplay between them is impressive, as they respond to one another with quicksilver alertness and invention.
Last week the duo released its follow-up recording, a 10” vinyl record titled Twelve Against Many, which was recorded live at Panda in February of 2012. The music is fully improvised, but as the opening track suggests there are some fixed controls at work: “Twelve Against Many (E.D.O.)” is a serialist reference, with the parenthetical standing for “equal division of the octave.” Still, the pair seem utterly unconstrained by any system or approach, emphasizing dialogue more than style. On “Gamorrean Waltz,” which you can hear below, they settle into a warped kind of movement, with the musicians staking out a highly restricted set of pitch and tone that’s all about rapidfire give-and-take, like two slightly intoxicated folks trying but failing to march in lockstep. On “Escape From New York—Part II” they wax lyrical, settling into an intimate form of balladry marked by flashes of dissonance and percussive effects, as the trombonist seems to use a mute as a kind of hybrid drumstick/bow. Madness and Arrogance celebrate the release of the new record with a performance at Kühlspot Social Club on Wednesday July 5, sharing the bill with the duo saxophonist Camila Nebbia and percussionist Sofia Borges.
Recommended concerts in Berlin this week
July 4: Bells: The John Carter Project (Edith Steyer, reeds; Uli Kempendorff, saxophones, Gerhard Gschlössl, trombone; Rieko Okuda, piano; Joe Hertenstein, drums), 8:30 PM, Kühlspot Social Club, Lehderstraße 74-79, (HH links), 13086 Berlin
July 5: Mark Turner Quartet (w/ Jason Palmer, Joe Martin & Jonathan Pinson), 9 PM, Zigzag Jazz Club, Hauptstr. 89, 12159 Berlin
July 5: Madness & Arrogance (Marc Schmolling & Gerhard Gschlössl), Camila Nebbia & Sofia Borges, 8 PM, Kühlspot Social Club, Lehderstraße 74-79, (HH links), 13086 Berlin
July 5: Anna Kaluza Quartet, 8 PM, Panda Platforma, Knaackstraße 97, 10435 Berlin
July 6: Heroines of Sound Festival, 6, 8 and 10 PM, Radialsystem, Holzmarktstraße 33, 10243 Berlin
July 7: Chrisman, Makumba, Mazaher, La Perla, 7 PM, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Paulette Nardal Terrace John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10, 10557 Berlin
July 7: Heroines of Sound Festival, 6, 8 and 10 PM, Radialsystem, Holzmarktstraße 33, 10243 Berlin
July 8: Cucina Povera, Laila Sakini, Martyna Basta, 8 PM, Brücke Museum, Bussardsteig 9, 14195 Berlin
July 8: Heroines of Sound Festival, 6, 8 and 10 PM, Radialsystem, Holzmarktstraße 33, 10243 Berlin
July 9: Heroines of Sound Festival, 6, 8 and 10 PM, Radialsystem, Holzmarktstraße 33, 10243 Berlin
Thanks PM, rocking to F Rasten now.
Well said on Black Duck.
Really appreciated the piece on Brötz the other morning as well, caught me while I was still trying to get my head around it, and helped