New releases from the duo of pianist Kazzrie Jaxen and guitarist Bud Tristano and from the duo of pianist/vocalist Carol Liebowitz and saxophonist Birgitta Flick open cinematic landscapes of sound whose coherence, continuity, and complexities hang on a succession of momentary impulses. With the exception of only three tracks, the music flows not from the promptings of sheet music but from intuitive, collaborative improvisations that are as disciplined as they are unpredictable. This is not something that you will find yourself humming. Instead, it is music to immerse yourself in, the way divers immerse themselves in the ocean. The best description of this music and how to approach it that I’ve encountered comes from clarinetist Bill Payne: “Well, here’s a good way to look at it. If you just imagine the music as movie music—and you’re the movie—you’re set.”
Kazzrie Jaxen and Bud Tristano
Lenapewiattuck, River of the Lenape (New Artists Records)
A review
A suite of 11 fully improvised tracks recorded over the course of 11 years, Lenapewiattuck, the name the Lenape Indians gave to the Delaware River, takes that river as the source of its inspiration. Indeed, each recording session was preceded by a visit to, and sometimes a dip into, the river, whose voice has long been a healing and mentoring presence for pianist Kazzrie Jaxen. Her colleague, guitarist Bud Tristano, the son of pianist Lennie Tristano, also takes his inspiration from nature and, in his liner notes, speaks of developing music that reflects Claude Debussy’s “mysterious accord between nature and the imagination.” There is mystery aplenty in this highly kinetic work, which, despite the presence of only two instruments, has a symphonic breadth of sound and feeling.
The concept for the album—the music is arranged as a suite that follows the four seasons, with a prologue and epilogue—evolved around the music, rather than the other way around. Over time, new information about the river’s history and the earliest inhabitants of its valley shaped the musicians’ understanding of what they had recorded. Jaxen feels strongly that the project was shaped by unseen forces. It’s hard to argue with that, because the music feels as if it is coming not so much from the musicians as through them. Tristano credits this to their ability to let go of ego, allowing the feeling in the moment to dictate their playing.
Both musicians use the full palette of sounds available from their instruments over the course of the album. On “Prophecy of the Fourth Crow,” Tristano calls to mind John Fahey on a pilgrimage to Persia perhaps. On “Vision Quest,” he delivers a blistering, distorted blues solo, and he finds a most delicate touch on the prayer-like “Sacred Forest.” “I wanted to be like a big guitar hero like Jimi Hendrix and the other ones that came after,” he says, “but I couldn’t even get into a cover band.” The “failed rock guitarist”—as Tristano, tongue in cheek, occasionally refers to himself—nevertheless found a voice of his own and a microtonal mastery of his instrument, needing only the whammy bar for sound effects.
The classically trained Jaxen can generate waves of bass that hit you in the chest, as well as the most crystalline sounds in the upper registers. She uses the piano almost as a harp, with broken chords and extended arpeggios. She enters arpeggio heaven in “Ceremony: Song for the River of Time,” allowing the music to ripen into an act of compassion. Her playing, as well as Tristano’s, transcends genre, incorporating textures, styles, dynamics as the moment demands.
The sound is so complex and dense at times, that it seems there must be more than two instruments at work. Maybe they’re striking ghost tones off one another. However, except for the final, title track, which, overdubbed twice, comprises three pianos and three guitars, all of the music is coming from two instruments recorded without the benefit of pedals or other effects.
Immerse yourself in this river of sound, and emerge refreshed, enlarged, and illuminated.
Carol Liebowitz and Birgitta Flick
Malita-Malika (Leo Records)
A review
On Malita-Malika,* the pairing of the German saxophonist Birgitta Flick and the American pianist/vocalist Carol Liebowitz, both classically trained on their instruments, delivers a musical offering that captures the ear and the imagination from the very first delicate-as-lace moments of the opening track, “Moon.” Here we hear the fluid dexterity of Flick’s sax and the drama of Liebowitz’s piano that course through all 11 tracks, including 8 improvisations, 2 jazz standards, and an original composition from Flick that gives the album its name.
Flick’s warm and woody sound contains something wild at its heart—an animal quality from nature. A storyteller of expressive power, she maps stories from the heart in elegant lines buzzing with imagination.
Liebowitz’s touch—now delicate, now blunt, now muscular, now pensive—captures every nuance of feeling. She marches block chords across the soundscape in thrillingly incremental progressions and arpeggiates shimmering webs of colored sound into being.
Liebowitz’s vocal on two tracks—“Marionette/September in the Rain” and “You Don’t Know What Love Is”—reveals masterful phrasing and an affecting ache. She’s as accomplished a vocalist as she is a pianist, and these two tracks are among the album’s highlights. Flick’s sax wreathes itself around the voice while Liebowitz’s piano expands the songs’ possibilities. Flick delivers a beautiful solo, thick with longing, on “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” and Liebowitz’s piano splits the song open like a ripe fruit as her voice deepens the lamentation.
Other highlights include a hallucinatory excursion on “Visions,” which resolves into a lovely meditative calm; a heavy, humid, scented air on “Jasmine;” an agile delicacy on “Hummingbird,” with Liebowitz arpeggiating in the upper register behind Flick’s winged sax; and on “Sensucht,” a brief and haunting beauty.
What continues to astound is the continuity of the music and its coherence, despite the absence, on most tracks, of any guideposts. The logic of the music remains intact at every moment, even when the two might be at cross-purposes, as they are at the beginning of “Crossed Lines.” These aren’t conversations really, because in conversations, the participants typically alternate their contributions. Here, though, the music is delivered simultaneously by both. It’s more a seat-of-the-pants collaboration than conversation, and the music flows without resistance and without ego, riding on a trust that is rewarded moment after moment.
For listeners who give themselves over to the flow, Malita-Malika will reward them, too, taking them to places otherwise inaccessible.
* Click on this title’s link to go to the Amazon page where you can purchase it. If you click through and make purchases there, Musically Speaking will receive a small percentage of the sale. Thank you for your support.
© 2018 Mel Minter
These artists are magic
Wizards!