Album Notes

A Sense of Hospitality (by Alexandre Pierrepont)

It is astonishing that we do not more frequently represent music engaged in improvisation not only as a collaborative art but as one that is fundamentally hospitable. New participants, new arrangements, and new developments are always made welcome in it. Larry Ochs has long employed the time-honored tactic of forming groups and, as soon as they have found an identity, re-forming them. This restructuring normally arises internally, thanks to the continual modification of the rules of play and of the roles of the players. Ochs, a great player, a great installer of semi-arid climates for caravans of improvisers, likes to coordinate the action: “For me form precedes function. If I can’t see the big picture, that universe of sound within which a given piece will come to life, it is hard to organize the internal details. The great thing about the Sax & Drumming Core experience is that I have four special forms developed for this band. So I actually get to write pieces similar to other ones I’ve already penned, just like a jazz band-leader who works with “the changes”! It’s cool, and it really helps to get to the center of the music and probe and evolve.” Thus the four compositions on “Stone Shift” constitute new five-part explorations based on earlier three-part discoveries—save Abstraction Rising, which borrows an age-old strategy: the reconnaissances made by each player in turn, under the estimable escort of the percussionists, are separated only by the stippled line of a theme.

Restructuring also comes from external factors occasionally. Among musicians engaged in improvisation, the possibility of receiving a visitor is always present; we love the migratory ebb and flow. If we consider the principal coalitions forged by Larry Ochs over the course of thirty years, we can say that Rova has regularly been more than a quartet of saxophonists; What We Live more than a homogeneous triangulation between a saxophonist (Ochs), a bassist (Lisle Ellis), and a drummer (Donald Robinson); Maybe Monday more than a harmonious match between Ochs’ two, contrary wind instruments and the two irregular string instruments of Fred Frith and Miya Masaoka. And so on, up to the Sax & Drumming Core, founded in 2000 but officially become a place of welcome in 2007, when the three musicians from the San Francisco Bay area, the origin of the group, made common cause with the two musicians from Tokyo, the origin of its extension. The great revelation lies in listening to the welcome given by Ochs, Robinson, and Scott Amendola to Natsuki Tamura first, then to Satoko Fujii, on Across From Over. After five minutes of stubborn exchange between the three initial members of the group comes the moment when the trumpeter—whom one no longer expects—takes off on the wave of rising rhythms. Yet paradoxically, this is to better fold the music. Then comes the moment, this time as if from nowhere, when the synthesizer, while full of sap, overtakes the blowers to make the cymbals bloom. The quintet, meanwhile, as an entity, doesn’t make itself seen or heard until later, and, generally, it only shows itself here and there. Its points of access are more important. Let us not fear the word, which more and more is only valued out of context: the improvisers offer us a political lesson. The place made for the man or woman who passes through here, who immigrates there, creates a space of new magnetisms amidst all the forces present and absent (they plunge deeper into the unknown, according to Ochs). From this one may deduce that the sense of hospitality, in improvisational music, amounts as much, for he or she who is welcomed, to knowing how to take on flesh as, for he or she who welcomes, to knowing how to take (collective) flesh out, to re-learning to make oneself an apparition among apparitions.

Approaching Stone Shift and Finn Veers For Venus, the two most intricate compositions, it is good, finally, to remember the reason the Sax & Drumming Core was founded: to cry out, call forth, intone songs from beyond the voice. Larry Ochs is a striking and stricken saxophonist, with a sound sometimes inflamed (that’s when he detonates, with slim glowing-red torpedoes of notes, or with emaciated claps of thunder; that’s when he heaps assault upon assault on the two uprooted drummers, bursting the skins on their drums), sometimes ashen (and then he implores, he sinks into the bareness and sensuality, the herds of his tenor or sopranino are riddled with rhythms, he no longer crosses the drums erected like barricades; he has all eternity before him, and before us too). Orgiastic or charred, this sonority carries the richest impurities, joined by the willingly rambling keyboards of Satoko Fujii as if to improve the vertiginous modality of music engaged in improvisation. Knowing how to take on flesh, how to take flesh out, knowing how to keep out of each others’ way, how to telescope oneself, dancing together. There’s nothing like listening to Ochs when the two satellite-drums of Scott Amendola and Donald Robinson, in the astronomical sense, pass him the instruments with which to effect such states of grace. When he risks the dunes, despite his arsenal of oases. In this desert where a saxophone is an abandoned carapace within which a yellow snake glides, the water-snake of the voice—his or that of Natsuki Tamura, whose trumpet takes the form of a scorpion, has taken on the flesh of the “Woman with her Throat Cut” sculpted by Alberto Giacometti in 1932. And cries out, calls forth, intones songs from beyond the voice. Such are the caravaners, such are the Blues Shouters of the twenty-first century.