Summer Breaking
Tyshawn Sorey, Clara Lai
Last week I mentioned that things really slow down in Berlin during the summer, and despite a strong batch of concerts happening here in the coming week, it’s been pretty sleepy of late. This week I write about a couple of new recordings, but there aren’t any show previews. Later this week I’m headed to Lisbon to attend the Jazz em Agosto festival, which runs for 10 glorious days, so I’ve decided to take next week off here at Nowhere Street.
Tyshawn Sorey’s endless mutability
I think only a numbskull would’ve ever doubted the swing bona fides of Tyshawn Sorey, who’s spent much of the last decade establishing his gifts and rigor as a composer, but he’s certainly erased any possible doubts with a series of recordings over the last year. A few weeks ago he dropped Continuing (Pi), his second trio recording with pianist Aaron Diehl and bassist Matt Brewer, a follow-up to last year’s Mesmerism, and a relative to the sprawl of the 3-CD set The Off-Off Broadway Guide to Synergism (Pi), a trio with Diehl, bassist Russell Hall and guest alto saxophonist Greg Osby. Each of the recordings is built around jazz standards of various stripes, whether tunes from the Great American Songbook or pieces from the likes of Miles Davis, McCoy Tyner, Ornette Coleman, Billy Strayhorn, and Thelonious Monk, but all of them are shaded in radically diverse ways. Mesmerism was the most compact and traditional, while the set with Osby was the most virtuosic and hard-swinging, a breathless collection clocking in at just under four hours. They are both excellent, but Continuing, which contains four extended performances, is my favorite.
According to the press materials Sorey looked to the 1963 McCoy Tyner Trio album Night of Ballads and Blues (Impulse) as a sort of blueprint—a unfussy model of precision and depth—but Sorey and company dug much deeper, offering a kind of heartfelt homage to several silenced heroes of late, pianists Ahmad Jamal and Harold Mabern, and saxophonist Wayne Shorter. Sorey’s album opens with “Reincarnation Blues,” a sleek Shorter tune that appeared on Buhaina’s Delight (Blue Note), a classic from Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers when the saxophonist share the frontline with Freddie Hubbard and Curtis Fuller—the album was cut in late 1961, but not released until 1963. The new treatment reduces the tempo and leans more into a luxuriant blues groove, and while it may seem more relaxed at first blush, I hear a group that’s more locked in than ever, one full of trust and intuition. Diehl and Brewer each take generous solos while gently comping and prodding one another, while the leader simultaneously relishes the inexorable vitality of the group’s blues feeling and holds it together with deceptive ease. Diehl delivers a marvelous second solo during the final third of the performance that raises the temperature, increasing density, volume, and action with his partners in a perfectly proportioned escalation that eases back on the strength of another, full-bodied statement from Brewer (who coincidentally did an excellent job holding down the bass chair when Immanuel Wilkins and his quartet rolled through Berlin last week). Check out the track below.
A reading of Jamal’s “Seleritus'' is masterful, with Diehl cleverly reharmonizing the tune and the group offering a three-minute intro that builds tension, as the pianist chips away at the melody, adding complexity bar by bar, while the bassist maintains an insistent pedal point pulse. Suddenly, the rhythm opens up with an unlimited vista, morphing into the kind of circular groove made famous by Jamal’s unfuckwithable trio featuring bassist Israel Crosby and drummer Vernell Fournier, the percussionist Sorey deftly channels in his own way, reconfiguring that rolling quasi-exotic groove in a way that injects enough subtle energy, forcefulness, and endless variation to keep the ballad lively over the course of 15 exquisite minutes.
I would say it’s my favorite performance here, but then where would that leave the trio’s take on “Angel Eyes,” where a molasses-slow tempo pushes the tune to the breaking point. In some ways the pace might be the most virtuosic thing on any of these three albums. Sorey doesn’t join the fray until three minutes have passed, allowing Diehl to stretch the sorrowful melody out over a deliciously slow, skeletal bassline. It’s a slow-motion rhapsody that becomes almost unbearable until the drummer finally strikes a cymbal, introducing a near-frozen groove that only reinforces the tune’s sense of longing. Sorey comes in and out, but the pace never really changes, turning the performance into a kind of sonic tightrope walk where one false move can send the whole enterprise crashing to the ground. I’ve often thought about how spare Sorey’s playing was in his old trio with pianist Cory Smythe and bassist Chris Tordini, but somehow he’s even more minimalistic on this track, guiding things with a breathtaking rigor while also relying on the instincts and timing of his cohorts. The album concludes with a funky take on Mabern’s “In What Direction Are You Headed,” an obscurity that appeared on Lee Morgan’s final studio album. The drummer opens up his attack, jacking up an imperturbable soul jazz groove that seems to be on the brink of exploding from heat, a kind of flipside to the restraint on the previous tune. Assuming anything from Sorey is always a fool’s errand—and he’s got a bunch of projects from the compositional end of his spectrum on the near horizon, including a premiere with Yarn/Wire at this October’s Donaueschinger Musiktage, but, man, I would love to hear this trio live, especially if they would stretch “Angel Eyes” into an entire set.
Discovering Clara Lai
Most of the recordings I’ve heard from the relatively young Portuguese imprint Phonogram Unit have been worth my time, but one particular album released back in March has stubbornly stuck with me, grabbing my attention on first listen and pulling in my attention and admiration more with every spin. I’d never heard of the Spanish pianist Clara Lai until I encountered her trio album Corpos, but it’s such a strong statement that I’ve been gradually digging around her older material, including some fine playing Common Ground, an album by a quintet led Lisbon reedist José Lencastre, as well as a terrific quartet recording under her own leadership called Creciente (UnderPool). But nothing has hit me as hard as Corpos, which features bassist Alex Reviriego and drummer Oriol Roca. She lived in Lisbon for a few years, which is where engagement with improvised music blossomed, although she’s back in Barcelona. Straight out of the gate there’s something hefty and beautifully tactile in the music her trio produces. Using some kind of piano preparation, Lai conjures deliciously blocky sounds, with the fat-toned, deeply physical sound of Reviriego and the chunky grooves of Roca. Despite the sonic weight and sharp edges heard on the group improvisation “Corpo colectivo,” which you can hear below, the music projects a simultaneous sense of propulsion and an almost confusing buoyancy. I’m not quite sure how they do it, but it certainly helps that they achieve such a unified aesthetic.
The musicians seem to toggle from jazz to sound-driven experimentalism without a hiccup, so once I started digging around it was no surprise to discover that the pianist maintains a duo with the experimental guitarist Ferran Fages and that the bassist is a member of the intense improv trio Phicus (with Fages and drummer Vasco Trilla), which has dropped albums on both Astral Spirits and Tripticks Tapes. It’s always good to see those lines blur. While there’s nothing mainstream about the trio, it’s hard not to miss the influence of Cecil Taylor in its sense of space, wild dynamics, and fitful gestural activity. Lai eschews his more celebrated energy and use of clusters. In fact, what’s so fantastic about the recording is how much silence is deployed and how each instrumentalist carves out a disparate sonic terrain. “Corpo III” opens with elliptical piano phrases, loaded with portent and restless tension in glassy chords, potent pauses, and jagged articulations across the instrument’s entire range. Eventually she introduces some subtly damped strings into the fold, which presages the entrance of the rhythm section. After following suit with the pianist’s splintered meandering, the trio suddenly locks into hurtling, steeplechase-like composed material, swelling and receding in devastating fashion. Lai also muck around inside her instrument on “Decreciente | Creciente,” an extended sound exploration featured tangles of clean and prepared strings coalescing with the bassist’s grainy, odd-shaped arco exclamations and the drummer’s bowed cymbal cries, all combining to generate something closer to sound art than jazz. I’m excited to hear more from Lai, and this discovery only disabuses me of my perpetual fantasy of getting a genuine grip on what’s really happening in music today—it’s a Sisyphean task, but getting pushed back down the mountain by a boulder like this music makes it a worthwhile struggle.
Recommended Berlin concerts this week
July 26: Greg Cohen with Fabiana Striffler, Declan Forde & guests, 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin
July 26: Pivot (Liz Albee, Chris Heenan); Germaine Sijstermans, Eric Wong & Koen Nutters, 7 PM Hošek Contemporary, Motor Ship HEIMATLAND, close to Fischerinsel 3, 10179 Berlin
July 27: Aliya Ultan, Camila Nebbia and Kevin Murray, , 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin
July 28: Ned Collette; Sham, 7:30 PM Freilichtbühne Weißensee, Kleine Bühne, Große Seestraße 10, 13086 Berlin
July 29: Batila & the DreamBus; Etuk Ubong & the Etuk Philosophy; Layé Okún 7 PM, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Paulette Nardal Terrace John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10, 10557 Berlin
July 29: Combo Chimbita, 8:30 PM, Schlueterhof, Humboldt Forum, Museumsinsel, 10178 Berlin
July 31: Hunter Brown; Julián Galay; Eric Wong & Quentin Tolimieri, 8 PM, Petersburg Art Space, Kaiserin-Augusta-Allee 101, 10553 Berlin