New Music of Note 02/23/2021
Madlib, Excavated Shellac, Matthew Shipp & Daniel Carter, Enrico Pierenunzi & Thomas Fonnesbaek
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Madlib/Sound Ancestors
The way to think of this album is that Madlib created this music from bits and pieces of other music and sounds he heard and was inspired by. He's the idea guy, testing stuff out, creating hundreds of beats every month, thousands every year. That's like being on the receiving end of a garden hose full of music putting out new ideas constantly, but never being able to stop and examine some of the more interesting things that flow on by. There's plenty there that cried out for an album of material, but Madlib isn't the guy to do that, so his friend and fellow musical curator and creator Four Tet did it for him. For a couple of years, Four Tet went through hundreds of Madlib beats, picking choosing, and combining elements that not only put the tracks in perspective but also told a sonic story. The resulting album is Sound Ancestors.
Madlib is great at what he does, and that's why he gets the calls. He's a hip-hop producer, and he creates beats with an eye towards their use for rappers, but Four Tet (Kieren Hebden) is the one taking the tracks and stacking them together, playing them off against each other--creating an album, really. Because Sound Ancestors is, above all, a very listenable album. It doesn't get lost in its own cuteness nor does it scream 'look at my genius beats.' Nope. Sound Ancestors, like Moby's Play, is a distilling of the elements of one person's creation into a program that is a record--something you can put on and listen to from beginning to end and be entertained, inspired, maybe a little confused, but definitely not bored.
Madlib gets the best from his source material to create the feeling he wants. On "The Call" he uses Terry Britten's 1969 track "Bargain Day," putting the main riff on a repetitive groove. Elsewhere he uses traces of R&B, gospel, lofi hip-hop, jazz to create what sounds like the lost music of a people remote in time--the falsetto vocals of sixties soul group The Ethics float above the drums and other elements on "Road of the Lonely Ones" as though their energy is locked in time, looping endlessly for anyone who can hear it. They aren't ghosts, but their presence is ghostly.
Some of the tracks here sound perfectly within the realm of 'normal' music for those who listen to some of the more experimental seek to find freedom over, under, or otherwise outside the relentless beat. Some, like the title track, sound like field recordings of some kind, maybe old scratchy shellac records salvaged from someone's garage or cellar, and maybe they could be. But consider this: Madlib sometimes records the music he wants to use himself because he's perfectly capable of doing so, as he's ably demonstrated on Yesterday’s New Quintet and other projects outside the Madlib name. Once he's recorded the vibe he wants--maybe a whole track that sounds pretty good in its own right--he's free to manipulate that music in any way he wants, chopping it up, so that it becomes more source material.
The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and in my opinion, Madlib and Hebden have created a very listenable, entertaining, and detailed album that holds up to repeated listening as an album. Many digital creators have lost the ability to create a statement that is both highly representative of their art and of interest to the casual listener as well. Sound Ancestors is a standout, even in a discography as varied and prolific as Madlib's.
Various Artists/Excavated Shellac: An Alternate History of The World's Music
The invention of recorded sound satisfied the need for sharing music with others of certain social or political groups, so it could be a source of nationalist or ethnic pride, but it could also communicate to those outside the immediate, intended audience. In the U.S. two of the most popular types of 78rpm records to collect, blues and country grew from recording industry niches to which they realized they could sell 'race' and 'hillbilly' records. From the very beginning, these commercial recording companies realized that they could record music for local markets around the world. and they did so.
My own experience with foreign 78 records came in the form of two leatherette-bound albums of records from South American countries that my father had collected as a merchant seaman. When I say that they are albums, they are like old-fashioned scrapbooks or photo albums, with heavy paper folders for each record, bound together with heavy metal screws. They are the way people with more than a few records would store these discs, which were possessed of the level of fragility of, say, a clay tablet. With these shellac records, one mistake in handling was often all you'd get and the record would become broken, unplayable. It's amazing that so many of these records survive today because I was kind of given permission to play them at a young age. I had a portable record player, and in those days they had three speeds: 45, 331/3, and 78.
These records were meant to be sold and played with full knowledge that they wouldn't last. They were considered disposable items by the companies that recorded, manufactured, and sold them. But many of the records survived wars and local conflicts, moving with their owners across continents undiscovered for years in attics and basements, largely because collectors, for the most part, considered such records to be junk. This is collector's rule number one: people collect what they know and what they like. So, the 78s considered most collectible have been blues, jazz, Western classical, country, and comedy/novelty recordings.
What Excavated Shellac blog founder and curator Jonathan Ward has assembled here is nothing less than a sort of worldwide Basement Tapes--a secret history of music that was performed and recorded around the world in the years following the advent of electrical recording and the mediums of the wax cylinder and 78rpm record. He makes it clear that the recordings here are those that he considers to be the best or the most important, and which he likes. If someone were interested in collecting and indexing as much of the 78rpm music industry in a single country as possible, say India or Argentina, one might easily make it their life's work and still only come up with a portion of the whole which could still be heard first hand.
All 100 selections anthologized here are lovingly digitized and restored with clear mastering that gives them remarkable sound quality. Also included in this digital-only set released by Dust to Digital is a beautifully formatted PDF booklet of 185 pages. For every record (track) presented Ward provides some background on the music itself, information on the musicians (where available), the date recorded, and information on the label that released the record and a scan of the cover and label, just as he always has on his Excavated Shellac website. But there is more because Ward's humble blog became a rallying point of sorts for 78 collectors from around the world. Because there was no other authoritative source available discussing these records, Ward's writeups, which came to include information about the early recording industry in various parts of the world, began to be sought by collectors and researchers, leading to the previous two Excavated Shellac collections (Reeds and Strings) as well as this one.
There's a lot of great information here for armchair historians and musicologists, and certainly, we've learned that any music can catch on with people in this viral age (see Sea Shantys). It would take additional research to understand (to pose merely two possible lines of historic social inquiry) to what extent colonialism influenced what was and was not recorded or what the influence of radio was on local musicians who suddenly heard other musicians from distant lands or how political influence may have promoted or suppressed certain ethnicities or styles of music. As Ward reminds us, worldwide recording quickly became an industry with all of the financial input that suggests. The recording itself could serve researchers or historians or musicians but commercial recording companies weren't going to pay for a mere research expedition.
Taken together with Ward's excellent notes and the lovingly reproduced record jackets and labels as well as historic photographs in the .pdf booklet that accompanies the recordings, An Alternate History of the World's Music is a beautiful package well worth its $35 download price. As with the previous two Dust-To-Digital Excavated Shellac projects, this one is only available as a digital download.
Matthew Shipp & Daniel Carter/Dark Matrix
Shipp's piano playing is distinctive, much like two of his influences, Mal Waldron and Thelonious Monk. You know he's on the right track because his music, while still highly distinctive, sounds much less radical than it did even ten years ago. Multi-instrumentalist Daniel Carter has been on a number of previous tours of duty with Shipp, notably on Antipop Consortium vs. Matthew Shipp and the nu-jazz defining Nu-Bop as well as work with William Parker and a discography that is prolific and full of collaborators like Patrick Holmes, Federico Ughi, Spring Heel Jack, Yo La Tengo, Yoko Ono, and Gunter Hampel.
Free jazz improvisations rise and fall largely on the sense of intimacy between the musicians, and in this case, Shipp and Carter have a solid history on which to draw. That accounts for some of the record's success. Another is that the two musicians have agreed on a musical language that is relatively unhurried and insinuates rather than confronts its listeners. While there are some more frenetic moments during the lengthy "The Will To The Form," they register more as energy waves than any type of discordant, chaotic sounds. The shorter piece "Landing Takeoff" is also energetic, with boppish energy, while the other two pieces, "Dark Matrix" and "Element" are possessed of a quieter overall sound.
Also strongly bolstering the album's overall sound is the fact that Carter is truly a gifted multi-instrumentalist, able to play not only alto, tenor, and soprano sax, but also clarinet and trumpet with an equally beautiful tone on each instrument. His lonely trumpet anchors the title track's first half, defining its overall effect before giving way to a commanding tenor sound.
Some of my favorite duet albums are those by Richie Beirach and Dave Liebman, and this reminded me of some of what I like about those records while helping me to appreciate both Shipp and Carter more deeply as individual players. That sounds like a mission accomplished to me.
Enrico Pierenunzi & Thomas Fonnesbaek/The Real You
Piernunzi is the first to admit that he didn't seem a likely candidate to record a record that explores the pianistic concept of Bill Evans, and yet, it may be precisely because of some of the frisson between Piernunzi and Evans as pianists that the discovery of similarities and influences seem like major revelations.
Accompanying Pierenunzi on these explorations is bassist Thomas Fonnesbaek, and once again we have a duet performance by musicians who have worked together frequently in the past. And while the sounds that they create are different and more traditional than those summoned by Shipp and Carter, the hallmarks of their artistry are on display just the same. One cannot listen without hearing the shadow of Scott Lafaro, the bassist with whom Evans shared a strong bond and who redefined the role of the bass in a piano trio.
The setlist is made up of songs either composed by or with a strong association with Bill Evans, including "Only Child," "The Real You," "Our Foolish Heart," "Sno' Peas," and "Interplay" among others. Pierenunzi and Fonnesbaek present a program that is solidly within the realm of Evans-ville yet avoids sounding like some kind of repertory exercise. Whether you are a Pierenunzi fan or an Evans fan (or both, like myself) you'll enjoy this reassuring release like comfort food.