Sounds that glide, beats that fracture
Mat Maneri Quartet, Dell-Lillinger-Westergaard, Ken Vandermark & Nate Wooley
Mat Maneri’s deepening connection with Lucian Ban
I became a fan of violist Mat Maneri the first time I heard him with his saxophonist father Joe on the 1995 album Get Ready to Receive Yourself (Leo Lab), which introduced me to both musicians. Their playing stood out right away even if I was kind of a numbskull about microtonality back then. So I guess that means I’ve been listening to Mat for 28 years now. Still, there’s something about his recent quartet album Ash (Sunnyside) that has grabbed me in a way none of this previous work, as much as I dug it. I’m not sure if it’s just me, or if he’s found a new sweet spot with this particular band—pianist Lucian Ban, bassist John Hébert, and drummer Randy Peterson—which frames his improvisational vision with stunning alacrity, tension, and continuity.
I hear Ban as the odd man out in the quartet—a more traditional voice despite his rigorous experimentations with the music of Romanian composer George Enescu—but I mean that neither as a pejorative nor a complete statement. For me Ban serves as an essential binding agent—with Hébert deftly chiming in with resonant feints and jabs—spreading gorgeous, shimmering chords and delicately pensive solo runs over the jagged, swerving, and halting playing of Maneri and Peterson, giving them a kind of liquid suspension. The drummer is astonishing on Ash. Peterson has been a kind of Maneri family drummer, dating back at least to the 1995 album mentioned above. His wonderfully draggy flow—a kind of more chaotic but no less patient, provocative timekeeper than Paul Motian—has always mirrored the angular, deliciously uneven phrases both Maneris deployed, almost completely translating their language to the drums. He’s always been a joy to hear, but the slurred yet bumpy stutter in his fills and the tonal bite of his cymbal work has consistently vied with the leader’s playing in how I’m listening, especially his incredible solo at the end of “Earth,” below.
Then, of course, there are the compositions: brooding ballad-heavy rep suffused with a hazy sense of loss and memory, as Maneri and Ban intended in planning this album, part of a trilogy that began with Dust in 2019. The pieces are dark and slow, a kind of intense rhapsodizing of memories evaporating over time. That makes “Brahms,” where he channels his memory of the Andante from Johannes Brahms’s Viola Sonata No. 1, Opus 120, creating a new work, moving around chunks of the piece living in his brain, into a self-contained marvel, with a discontinuitythat both adds great poignance and injects delicious tension. Emotionally, it’s more direct and sentimental than the rest of the album. Maneri’s playing is spectacular, with greater heat emanating from his attack than usual, but he’s also at his most lyrical, a quality definitely enhanced by Ban’s playing. The pair continued to work in shifting capacities, whether a trio with great John Surman or the pianist’s Enescu work, including his recent adaptation of the opera Œdipe, but nothing they’ve done has hit me as hard as Ash.
DLW gets anti-funky
There are times when DLW, the long-running trio of vibraphonist Christopher Dell, drummer Christian Lillinger, and bassist Jonas Westergaard, seems to overdo it on the research tip. Thanks especially to Dell’s theoretical writing, the prospect of hearing the trio can sound like taking a bitter medicine—it may be good for you, but it will taste bad going down. I’m not a fan of Dell’s more austere aesthetic, which clearly imagines this trio in the contemporary music sphere. There’s no question that the three musicians are talented, disciplined, and creative enough to thrive in that world if those chose to. I just can’t figure out why that’s such an aspiration.
But then Lillinger takes the reins—or it sure feels that way—with a recording like Beats II (Plaist), the second in a series that launched in January of 2021, interspersed with two volumes of Grammar. Those recordings feel like Dell’s dry counterpoint, regarding language—a crude reduction, to be sure, but a salient one. With a new Beats, I’m interested again. The twenty-tracks sprawl is basically an uninterrupted rhythmic study led by the drummer, but impossible without Dell and Westergaard. Complex, chopped-up rhythms morph constantly, spreading out in skeins of the sort of herky-jerk disruption that Lillinger has mastered. His music is like the anti-funk answer of US drummers like Damion Reid or Savannah Harris, bringing a cold-machine like precision that I find funky in its own warped fashion. I mean that in the most positive light.
The intricate interactions between these three voices is remarkable, but it served a purpose, turning rhythm into a kind of fractal video game. The music is meticulously notated and arranged, and there are dazzling sonic tricks such as woody double bass thwack by Westergaard immediately answered by a bass drum tone that the drummer explained as a “ high pitched open (not damped) bass drum hit” played very softly. To these ears it sounds halfway between a timpani and an electronic reflection of the opening bass note. The entire album is packed with these kinds of details, which are interesting in themselves, but prove more exciting in how they produce such neck-snapping beats. I don’t keep up on electronic music, but I would imagine few producers can match Lillinger’s ability, which has exhibited an increasing push-pull between head and body that seems to be a product of his partnership with the bassist Petter Eldh in Koma Saxo and Punkt-Vrt-Plastik. In fact, the random bit of dialogue in the killer “Element Violett,” which you can hear below, recalls a similar tactic in some Koma Saxo albums, where studio banter helps fill out the picture sonically and rhythmically. The trio will celebrate the release of the album with a performance Friday, September 15, at the Musikbrauerei.
Miscellany
The new episode of Nowhere Street, the montly radio show, will air in Berlin (88.4 FM) and in Potsdam at 4 PM Berlin time (10 AM EST). You can also listen live online at CoLaboRadio, and all programs end up being archived at the KM28 Radio mixcloud page, where you can also find the older programs of the program MOSS assembled by cellist Judith Hamann.
Nowhere Street Concerts presents Ken Vandermark & Nate Wooley at KM28
The first Nowhere Street concert of the fall happens Tuesday, September 12 at KM28 with solo and duo sets from trumpeter Nate Wooley and reedist Ken Vandermark. Their duo formed just shy of a decade back, and over that time they’ve maintained a fairly steady partnership with recordings and tours. They haven’t done much of the latter in recent years, for obvious reasons, but it’s nice to see them back together. As with countless other musicians, the pair used unusual means to record its fourth and most recent album Chicago Manual of Style (Superpang), which dropped in 2021, a mere month after making it in June, with its six pieces created remotely. The pair adopted a variety of exquisite corpse design constructions, all of which surface on the recording. There are two manifestations of each of these methods. With “Back and Forth” one player improvised a solo part, and then files traveled between them until each musician had laid down two performances, all of them in response to what had already been tape. On the “Horn Trio & Solo” pieces one of the musicians responds with a solo to a track featuring three overdubbed parts by the other. And for the “Time Pieces” each player laid down an improvisation of a fixed duration to match what the other did, with neither hearing the other part until they were mixed in a new work. Vandermark deploys several reeds, while Wooley occasionally adds live electronics. The music is deeply satisfying on its own—varied, multi-textured and seriously focused—but it’s also cool to see both musicians trying something a bit different from their usual methods. Check out “Brass trio with wind soloist” below. For the duo portion of tonight’s concert, however, the pair will experiment with material being developed for a new project inspired by Richard Serra’s Verb List.
Each musician will also present a solo set, a big part of Vandermark’s practice and the subject of two of his recent releases. The Field Within a Line was part of the Black Cross Series released by Corbett vs. Dempsey, a pandemic-driven project inspired by the various streaming concerts of improvised music that emerged during the early days of Covid. Vandermark recorded the 12 pieces here at his home over two days in September of 2020. As usual, every piece here features a pair of acknowledgements following each title, indicating a kind of headspace the reedist channeled, but he also notes the global upheaval during the era exerted an inextricable impact on his process with the work of various artists who fought for change—including Kerry James Marshall, Chantal Akerman, Betty Davis, and Jean-Michael Basquiat. In his liner note essay Vandermark quotes Basquiat: “If you wanna talk about influence, man, then you’ve got to realize that influence is not influence. It’s simply someone’s idea going through my new mind.” You can hear the multivalent “End the Giraffe Lottery (for Chris Marker and Agnes Varda)” below. There’s definitely a hushed sensibility on much of the record—not so much in terms of volume or abstraction—but it feels mournful and reserved in general.
He sounds a bit more like himself on Snapshots: Complete (Kilogram), much of which was previously released on a series of four 7” singles issued every three months beginning in March 0f 2021, the first three recorded in the reedist’s Chicago home, with a final set of pieces recorded outside of Gdansk, Poland at the country home of fellow reedist Mikołaj Trzaska, who runs the imprint. All of them sold out immediately. There’s a mixture of solo pieces, along with overdubbed tracks using his full arsenal of reeds (tenor and baritone saxophone, bass clarinet, and Bb clarinet), with various improvised lines coalescing with an impressively compositional logic. Each of the singles was focused on a particular country that’s impacted Vandermark’s music somehow: Japan, Poland, Brazil, and Austria. Below you can hear one of the Japanese, a concise two-part construction: “Heike (for Akira Sakata) / Raven (for Masahisa Fukase).”
Wooley has done his fair share of solo work over the years, too, but in recent years that practice has been either driven conceptually or compositionally. In the second category I’ve heard him deliver stunning performances of works by Annea Lockwood and Éliane Radigue, and more recently he commissioned Christian Wolff for the gem you can check out below, “For Trumpet Player,” released earlier this year on his own Pleasure of the Text label. That same label is about to release a heady four-CD box set, the latest phase in the trumpeter’s Mutual Aid Music project with Four Experiments. To be totally honest it’s a lot to take in, and that’s less about the three-hour duration than the weight of the ideas and the honesty of the performances. A slew of top-notch players straddling the worlds of new music and free improvisation invest in a variety of prescribed situations. There are actually a couple of Wooley solos within, I’m guessing tonight’s set will put the focus elsewhere. I hope to cover the box in this space soon.
Recommended Berlin concerts this week:
September 12: Nate Wooley & Ken Vandermark, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl-Marx-Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
September 13: Tobias Delius, Joakim Rainer, Nick Dunston & Ståle Liavik Solberg, 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin
September 13: Peter Ehwald Trio (with Matthias Pichler, bass; Andreas Pichler, drums), 7 PM, Tee Salon Iki, Böckhastraße 50, 10967 Berlin
September 14: Michaël Attias/Florian Müller/Phil Donkin/Oli Steidle, 9 PM, Zig-Zag Jazz Club, Hauptstraße 89, 12159 Berlin
September 14: Arnold Dreyblatt & the Orchestra of Excited Strings, 8:30 PM, Uferhallen, Uferstraße 8–11, 13357 Berlin
Septbember 15: Dell-Lilinger-Westergaard, 8 PM, Musikbrauerei, Greifswalder Straße 23a, 10405 Berlin
September 15: Helge Slatto & Frank Reinecke play Wolfgang von Schweinitz; Majeed Qadianie & Niloufar Mohseni improvise on various Persian dastgāhs, 8 PM, Musikfest Berlin, Philharmonie Berlin, chamber music hall, Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße 1, 10785 Berlin
September 15: Paroxysm (Roy Carroll & Werner Dafeldecker); Das B (Mazen Kerbaj, Magda Mayas, Mike Majkowski & Tony Buck), 8:30 PM, Ausland, Lychener Straße 60, 10437 Berlin
September 15: Marta Warelis/Aaron Lumley/Onno Govaert with Edith Steyer, 8:30 PM, Kuhlspot Social Club, Lehderstrasse 74-79, 13086 Berlin
September 16: O’pif (Steve Heather, Tobias Delius, Chino Shuichi, and Antonio Borghini) plays the music by Tristan Honsinger, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
September 16: Sam Dunscombe & Friends, with Julia Reidy, Judith Hamann and James Rushford, KM28, Karl-Marx-Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
September 17: Delphine Dora, Alexandra Spence, Felicity Mangan, Jana Imert, 8 PM, Arkaoda, Karl-Marx Platz 16, 12043 Berlin
Thanks for turning me on to Element Violett! Really distinctive stuff.