Sounds hanging in the air, direct and disguised
Sarah-Jane Summers, Nils Økland & Sigbjørn Apeland, Valerio Tricoli
Dog days
Things really slow down during the summer here in Berlin, but work timelines mean that I’m much busier than usual, which has made it a bit trickier to devote the time and energy I prefer to give to this endeavor. I’ve only traveled once over the last two months, which has been a welcome respite, but for much of August I’ll be jumping around Europe to attend four different music festivals. I’m certainly hoping to maintain a weekly schedule for Nowhere Street, but I’m also quite sure that it will be hard. It’s almost certain that I will need to skip a few installments—apologies in advance.
Dang, Hardanger
Last week the latest edition of the Best Contemporary Classical column I write for Bandcamp Daily was published. There’s rarely room to cover everything I dig, and I try to spread the coverage around, which often means I can’t write about every single album issued by Another Timbre, but I did want to draw attention to another title released in the same batch that brought us fragments of reincarnation the phenomenal duo recording by Michiko Ogawa and Lucy Railton covered in the June column. In an interview with fiddler Sarah-Jane Summers published on the imprint’s website label proprietor Simon Reynell admits he had never heard of her before she submitted a recording, and he further confesses his lack of folk music knowledge. I had not heard of Summers either, but I gravitated to the album right away because she made all of the sounds with a Hardanger fiddle, the Norwegian violin outfitted with a set of sympathetic resonant strings.
Summers is actually Scottish, but she moved to Norway in 2010, developing a hearty folk practice, including many duo projects with her husband, the Finnish guitarist Juhani Silvola, who like her toggles between folk and experimental practices—he made a terrific solo album for Shhpuma last year called Wolf Hour Roundelay. Echo Stane features nine original pieces by Summers that bask in the rich harmonies of the Hardanger, elliptical melodies that leave plenty of space for overtones to ring out and complement subsequent lines. In the last couple of years I’ve been increasingly fascinated by the commonalities and collisions between Scandinavian folk traditions and experimental music that deals with alternate tunings. The music Summers makes balances the gorgeous tunefulness of Norwegian folk while scratching that insatiable itch I’ve developed for getting lost in billowing resonance. You can hear the piece “Shadow Half” below.
In the interview with Reynell she says she hasn’t witnessed much overlap in the audiences for his folk music and her more experimental practice, which she began to share with her terrific 2017 album VIRR (yes, I’ve been playing catch up). As Summers tells him:
Before I released VIRR, my first album of experimental music (in 2017), I wondered if I should release my more experimental music under an artist name, as opposed to my own name, which had become associated with traditional music. For many reasons, I didn’t. Using different names would only serve to further separate my different musical sides and potentially prevent me from seeking a way to merge them. A split musical personality is confusing for Spotify algorithms, but artistic integrity must win over algorithms.
I wish these musical worlds (all musical worlds, really) didn’t remain so isolated from one another. Sound is sound no matter how you slice it or dress it up, and while most of us grow up attached to song, Summers brilliantly occupies a liminal world where those two sides of the equation are constantly engaged.
The first Hardanger fiddler I ever heard was Norway’s Nils Økland, who has long pursued his own marriage of traditional folk and original music, albeit with a stronger focus on jazz and western classical music. He recently dropped a new duo album with long-time musical partner, keyboardist Sigbjørn Apeland, Glimmer (ECM), a long overdue follow-up to the 2011 homage they made to the legendary Norwegian fiddler and composer Ole Bull. The repertoire mixes original material from each musicians, including a couple of collaborative pieces, with traditional vocal tunes collected by Apeland, who stick with harmonium on this gorgeous recording. The music is far more contained and polished than the more improvisatory vibe from Summers, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t space for spontaneity.
Across the album the keyboardist lays out a ruminative, graceful foundation for the fiddler’s lines, but their rapport and connection when elaborating the often melancholy themes is just as stunning and satisfying as the solo sections. Apeland’s “Valevåg” is a fraught duet, where the sound of the harmonium being open and closed seems as important as the actual musical tones, and the pair never really disembark from the composed material, tracing out dark lines that move between unison and counterpoint. Apeland’s meandering lines convey a wonderfully queasy feeling, a sensation heightened by Økland’s gently snaking articulation. Rarely does such a subdued, concise piece of music hit as hard as this two-and-a-half minute marvel. Below you can check out “O du min Immanuel,” one of the traditional pieces, which sounds simultaneously hymn-like in its lyric delicateness and haunting in its emotional ambiguity. It’s a fantastic album that heard alongside the Summers recording highlights the versatility and beauty of the Hardanger.
Valerio Tricoli’s tape world
On Wednesday evening, July 19, Rashad Becker and Valerio Tricoli will present something titled “Hamlet : the seminal singleton” at Morphine Raum. I have no idea what this entails, but I have been enjoying a bunch of work released by the later over the last year, both in his guise as a composer as well as in an improvisational mode. I first heard Tricoli’s music many years ago through his membership in the excellent experimental rock band 3/4HadBeenEliminated with Stefano Pilia and Claudio Rochetti, where his instrument was a Revox tape machine, and that device remains his primary tool both as composer and improviser.
Last year he delivered the impressive Say Goodbye to the Wind (Shelter Press), three finely etched musique concrete excursions that were inspired, alternately, by a Samuel Beckett short story, DMT—the psychedelic found in ayahuasca—and a paper written by a 17th century German scientist about atmospheric pressure. I won’t pretend to have the foggiest notion about those connections, and I don’t think it’s at all necessary to appreciate the work, which he created over a five-year span at this home studio in Munich. There are some subtle contributions from a few instrumentalists—cellist Ecka Mordecai, reedist Lucio Capece, and vocalist Ida Toninato—but most of the sounds are sourced and manipulated with his tape machine, although the tail-end of “De Vacuum Magdeburgicus” features some surprising acoustic guitar strumming and singing from Tricoli. There’s a cinematic quality to the music even if any narrative quality appears garbled and non-linear. Sometimes there’s no missing the tactile presence of tape, as sounds speed up and slow down, as noises from the machine process enfold into the general mix, transmuted and modified by various electronic effects. I’ve found it desirable and easy enough to apply my own imaginary stories to the variegated sonic sequences conjured her by Tricoli. Below you can hear the lengthy opening work, “Spopolatore.”
There’s no concept behind the music on Der Krater (Room40), released this past June, beyond the meticulous, instinctual interactions of Tricoli and double bassist Werner Dafeldecker. The latter improvises, primarily with bowed lines but occasionally featuring some pizz accents, and the former takes those sounds and instantly warps them in hall-of-mirrors fashion with adept looping maneuvers. The back-and-forth action is impressive, with ominous, full-bodied sustained tones entering a sonic vortex and re-emerging seconds later transformed—smeared, unstable, clouded, and splattered with elusive electronic pointillism endemic to the Revox. Still, even without any sort of narrative framework the results are no less compelling and evocative—even if they are more monochromatic due to the performance situation—than the music on Tricoli’s solo album. I’ve found myself getting lost in the music with a similar kind of visual fantasia playing out inside my head, even if the machinations between the two are fairly easy to trace in real time. You can check out “Der Krater #1” below. I can’t predict what the performance with Becker, who has mastered many of Tricoli’s recordings, promises, but both figures are sound sculptors of great rigor and abstraction—I find it hard to believe it won’t be worthwhile.
RIP Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky
Just as I was sending out last week’s edition of Nowhere Street word arrived that the great German reedist Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky had died, age 89. As with many other figures from East Germany, the saxophonist didn’t break into the general consciousness of the jazz world as much as musicians from West Germany, who had far more mobility and access, so he was kind of a phantom as much as a free jazz giant. Incredibly, I was able to hear him play live twice during my time in Chicago, as a member of two very different big bands, both in 1987. He performed as a member of Alexander von Schlippenbach’s Globe Unity Orchestra at the Chicago Jazz Festival that Labor Day weekend, a performance that is burned into my memory as much for the negative reaction of the audience which was wholly unprepared for a fully improvised by a raucous big band. The Chicago fest is free, and citizens of the metropolitan area often catch jazz fever that single weekend. Globe Unity was followed by Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers, which meant that a lot of listeners there to check out the hard bop legend were utterly puzzled and angered by what preceded it. Honestly, I don’t remember the actual performance so much because it seemed like the crowd was about to start a riot, but the entire concert is available online (and below) as I discovered while doing a little research.
Later that fall Petrowsky returned as a member of the George Gruntz Concert Band, and while I distinctly remember seeking out his playing in that context—which veered toward a more straight-ahead—because of his place in European free jazz, he didn’t get a ton of space in a band that also included Joe Henderson and Lee Konitz. It was quite hard to track down albums by him in Chicago at the time, but I was also young and stupid and may not have been looking so hard. Much of his story was brilliantly and vividly told by scholar Harald Kisiedu in his essential book European Echoes: Jaz Experimentalism in Germany 1950-1975 (Wolke Verlag), which contextualizes his crucial role in the rise of East German jazz. He led many bands over the years, but it’s hard to top the long-running quartet he had with trombonist Conrad Bauer, drummer Günter “Baby” Sommer, and pianist Ulrich Gumpert, originally known as Synopsis and later called Zentralquartett. Below you can hear a piece called “Synopsis” from that band’s eponymous 1990 album.
Recommended shows in Berlin this week
July 18: Der Dritte Stand (Matthias Müller-trombone, Matthias Bauer-bass, Rudi Fischerlehner-drums), 8 PM, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)
July 19: Rashad Becker and Valerio Tricoli perform Hamlet : the seminal singleton, 8 PM, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)
July 20: Alogte Oho & his Sounds of Joy, 8:30 PM, Schlueterhof, Humboldt Forum, Museumsinsel, 10178 Berlin
July 21: Carl Stone, Bridget Ferrill, 8 PM, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)
July 21; Célia Wu, Nação Zumbi, Coco Em, ONA, 7 PM, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Paulette Nardal Terrace John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10, 10557 Berlin