Month: November 2021

November’s round up features quiet and introspective duets with bassoon, extroverted radical music from a poet backed by fiery improvisators, and pastoral late night music from a sax titan. Rounding out this month are spiky guitar/piano duets, an overdubbed sax choir, and two albums that are pure audio comfort food (good for company at Thanksgiving)! Next month we’ll be working on the year’s best!

TNB Pick!
Sara Schoenbeck – Sara Schoenbeck
(released November 26, 2021)

Sara Schoenbeck in duet with:
Harris Eisenstadt – Drums
Nicole Mitchell – Flute
Nels Cline – Electric Guitar & Electric Bass
Roscoe Mitchell – Soprano Saxophone
Matt Mitchell – Piano
Mark Dresser – Bass
Wayne Horvitz – Piano & Electronics
Peggy Lee – Cello
Robin Holcomb – Piano & Voice

The sound of the bassoon is unique – there is nothing else like it’s earthy wooden tone, tangible vibrato and human-like humming sound. All of those flavors are on display in Schoenbeck’s striking album. The unusual sound of the bassoon is complemented by nine duet partners who are all stars that serve the music and share space equally. The way Schoenbeck deploys these duets for maximum variety and how these guests react to her are fascinating to follow. Music for the mind and the emotions, and one of this year’s best.

TNB Pick!
Irreversible Entanglements – Open The Gates
(released November 12, 2021)

Camae Ayewa – voice, synth
Keir Neuringer – saxophone, synth, percussion
Aquiles Navarro – trumpet, synth
Luke Stewart – double bass, bass guitar
Tcheser Holmes – drums, percussion

I was reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower when I put on this album and was struck by some common themes (imminent dystopia, racial injustice, revolution, religion and the form of the creator) and images (gates, seed, water, baptisms). I have no reason to think Irreversible Entanglements is connected to Butler, aside from some serendipity – but they’re both very impressive and speak to the here and now. The focus of Open the Gates is on the voice of Camae Ayewa (who also records as Moor Mother), which is a marvel – her sound and poetry are resonant, powerful and convey so much meaning. The rest of the band brings intensity, but smartly varies the arrangements and instrumentation.

TNB Pick!
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra – Promises
(released March 26, 2021)

Who thought that you could put avant garde titan Pharoah Sanders in a contemplative suite of ambient music with the LSO? Sanders has the most commanding tone anywhere, but the overdriven saxophone you’re expecting is replaced with a more laid back feel. There’s plenty of opportunity to marvel at just how beautiful his tenor is. Best to turn down the lights late at night and put this on – it casts a spell.

Sylvie Courvoisier & Mary Halvorson – Searching For The Disappeared Hour
(released October 29, 2021)

Sylvie Courvoisier – piano
Mary Halvorson – guitar

Two musicians who are always exciting in a program of duets. The album starts off with a bang – “Golden Proportion” is a collision of classical and avant jazz, riffing off a piano etude and then morphing into a dissonant interrogation of the first movement of the Moonlight sonata (!). “Bent Yellow” is another dialogue of musical forms which sees Courvoisier channelling Don Pullen while Halvorson plays sweet and sour contrast. Those are just two highlights, but there’s a lot of thought and flavors to behold.

Patrick Shiroishi – Hidemi
(released October 29, 2021)

Patrick Shiroishi – Voice, and alto, baritone, tenor, C melody, and soprano saxophones

Every time you check Shiroishi’s Bandcamp page, he’s dropped a new record – or three. Seventeen in 2021! Even more astounding is the excellence of most of his records such as the four Fuubutsushi Quartet albums, his solo album resting in the heart of green shade, and this record. Here Shiroishi plays multiple horns, creating trios, quartets, and quintets of overdubbed saxophone choirs. I could compare this to the World Saxophone Quartet, but Shiroishi’s sound world is personal to him, as is this project. Shiroishi named and composed this album for his grandfather Hidemi Patrick, who has jailed in an American concentration camp during World War II. Shiroishi says the music seeks to push “forward while acknowledging historical evil. . . moving towards a society where our children and future generations may live without fear.”

Ben Allison – Moments Inside
(September 2021)

Link to Apple Music
Link to Spotify

Chico Pinheiro (acoustic & electric guitar),
Steve Cardenas (acoustic & electric guitar),
Ben Allison (acoustic & electric bass), and
Allan Mednard (drums & percussion)

At TNB we look at a lot of OUT music – the musicians’ commitment to explore and play sounds and ideas that have never been performed are what progressive music is all about. But sometimes – I have to be honest here – you can get tired of all the squeaks, honking and squiggles. Some days music that is “thought provoking” or “challenging” just feels tiring and intimidating. When that happens, you just feel like you need a beautiful and purely melodic place to hang out and recharge your batteries. So put this album on, or watch them play live here. The dual guitars are subtle, quiet and enveloping and the compositions memorable and happy. Healing music that gets you ready for the next challenge.

Brandee Younger – Somewhere Different
(released August 24, 2021, Impulse! Records)

Link to Apple Music
Link to Spotify

Personnel – Brandee Younger – harp
Rashaan Carter -electric and acoustic bass
Allan Mednard – drums, percussion
Marcus Gilmore – drums, drum programming
Tarriona “Tank” Ball – vocals
Dezron Douglas- electric bass (#1)
Ron Carter – acoustic bass (#6,7)
Maurice Brown- trumpet (#2)
Chelsea Baratz – saxophone (#1)
Anne Drummond: flute (#1).

More comfort music – in fact Younger says “I hope it is enjoyable to listen to, not hard to listen to, nothing to be analyzed or over-analyzed.” There’s a lot to take pleasure in, from the spirited solos of the opening track “Reclamation” (harp, flute then sax), the beautiful melody and arrangement of the title track, and the presence of Ron Carter’s bass of “Beautiful Is Black” and “Olivia Benson.” Warm music for dark times.

Poster art from Villeneuve’s Dune

Music discussed:
Richard Pinhas – Chronolyse
(recorded 1976, released 1978, original issue Disjuncta, rereleased on Cuneiform Records)
Personnel:
Richard Pinhas – Moog P3, Polymoog, Revox A700, Mellotron, Guitar
Francois Auger -drums
Didiet Batass – bass

Link to Bandcamp
Link to Apple Music
Link to Spotify
Link to YouTube (“Paul Atreides” only)

Klaus Schulze – Dune
(1979, Thunderbolt)
Personnel:
Klaus Schulze – Electronics, Guitar, Keyboards, Synthesizer, Vocals
Wolfgang Tiepold – Cello
Arthur Brown – Vocals

Link to Apple Music
Link to Spotify
Link to YouTube

Dün – Eros
(1981, Soleil Atreides)
Personnel:
Jean Geeraerts – electric & acoustic guitars
Bruno Sabathe – piano, synthesizers
Alain Termolle – xylophone, vibraphone, percussion
Pascal Vandenbulcke – flute
Thierry Tranchant – bass
Laurent Bertaud – drums
Philippe Portejoie – saxophone

Link to Apple Music
Link to Spotify
Link to YouTube

With Denis Villeneuve’s version of Dune in the theaters, the story and themes of Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction classic are back in popular view. Really those ideas never left, and are no less relevant today. Dune has been among the most influential intellectual properties, and its preoccupation with the environment and imperialism are no less relevant today, themes deeply rooted in the science fiction universe. Not to mention Dune clearly gave birth to the Star Wars!

While Villeneuve’s new movie captures the needed visual awe, an ideal film version of Dune remains elusive – but not for lack of trying. One of the great “what if’s” of movie history is Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unfilmed adaptation, which would have boasted a cast including Orson Welles as the Baron, Salvador Dali as the Emperor and Mick Jagger as Feyd-Rautha. The art design was by Swiss artist H.R. Giger, and music was to have been by Pink Floyd and Magma!

Artist H.R. Giger with some of the visuals he created for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unfilmed Dune

Jodorowsky’s script went into pre production in the 1970’s, and would allegedly would have created a 10 to 14 hour movie (Frank Herbert visited the set and commented that the script “was the size of a phonebook”), but after spending millions of dollars designing the movie, the project failed to find a studio backing and evaporated. The version of Dune we lived up until Villeneuve’s was David Lynch’s much maligned 1984 version. Really, Lynch’s film is much better than it’s reputation (the actors are well cast and Sting is deliciously over the top) but the 1984 version is something altogether different than the source material.

For a book that has such a wide influence, it’s remarkable that an adaptation of Dune failed to materialize for so long – if you look at the movies. But music is another story! Perhaps that’s fitting; music is the most ineffable and elastic art form, and has a unique capacity to portray and communicate the themes and feelings that have eluded film interpretations. Musicians have been very inspired by Dune, with numerous tributes from funky CTI jazz like David Matthews’ Dune, to Iron Maiden’s “To Tame a Land.” However, there are three albums created before Dune was made into a movie that stand out for their quality and fidelity to the source – Richard Pinhas’ Chronolyse, Klaus Schulze’s Dune, and Dün’s Eros.

Richard Pinhas’ Chronolyse was the first of these albums to be recorded, and strikes this writer as a flat-out masterpiece. Pinhas is a fascinating musician and thinker, who is a trailblazer in both the electronica and prog rock worlds. In 1974, Pinhas received a PhD in Philosophy from the Sorbonne, where he studied philosophy. His dissertation was titled ”Science-Fiction, Inconscient et Autres Machins”, on the relationship of time manipulation, science fiction and analogue electronic music. In 1974 Pinhas also founded Heldon, creating his own Disjuncta imprint (one of France’s first independent labels) to release a slew of groundbreaking prog rock albums. Heldon interweaves Pinhas’s guitar with electronics over with bass and drums – we will have to feature their music in a future article at TNB!

In 1976, after the release of four Heldon albums, Pinhas took on a highly personal solo project – making an audio tribute to Dune. To capture that universe, Pinhas deeply explored electronica. After acquiring a Moog P3 and a new Polymoog to accompany two Revox A700s, Pinhas spent six months in his home studio creating his own sound world in response to the themes and ideas of Herbert’s novel. The result was the record Chronolyse, recorded in 1976, but not released until 1978.

Pinhas with a bank of the synthesizers used for Chronolyse

Chronolyse is an arresting listen right from the start. Side A of the record consists of 7 variations named after the female magician-seers of Dune, the Bene Gesserit, and a composition named after Duncan Idaho, the mentor of the prince. Pinhas does something simple yet brilliant here – each of the 8 tracks of side A starts with sounds in dialogue with each other – in the right channel appear cycles of electronic scales, and in the left channel a mechanical clicking which reminds the listener of the valve or keyboard action from an acoustic instrument, but here appearing in an electronic context. These effects create a dialogue between machine sounds and human made ones, a musical depiction of the struggle between technology and humanity. Very simply rendered, but deep stuff, which shows how well Pinhas has thought about the thematic and philosophical meaning of the source material.

Then Pinhas flips the script for Side B, which is entirely devoted to one 30 minute composition, “Paul Atredes.” The song is named after the novel’s protagonist and Pinhas challenges the electronic world he assembled in Side A by introducing his Robert Fripp-inspired electric guitar and Mellotron, and bringing in his band mates from Heldon (Francois Auger on drums and Didiet Batass on bass). The track builds mysteriously, and patiently develops the interplay between layers of electronic and electrified instruments against percussion. The results are impressive and a bit apocalyptic.

While Richard Pinhas has been influential in both the electronica and rock worlds, the influence of Klaus Schulze on music history is on another order. Schulze was the drummer in early versions of Tangerine Dream, and his real influence has been through his analogue 1970’s electronic albums, including classics such as X (1978), Moondawn (1976), and Timewind (1975). Impressively, Schulze created “electronic” music without electronics on Irrlicht (1972), where he took samples of string orchestras and manipulated the tapes of those recordings to make atmospheric drone effects. It’s hard to imagine the development of electronic music without Schulze, who created a personal sonic template and showed how cool a musician looks next to a tower of synthesizers and computers!

A trailblazer ahead of his time in Daft Punk mode

Schulze signalled his interest in Dune when he named one of his compositions “Frank Herbert” on his 1978 double album X. A year later Schulze followed with an entire album inspired by Herbert, 1979’s Dune. The music on Schulze’s Dune has a cinematic texture – very much a soundtrack released 5 years before a movie version of Herbert’s novel was realized. Here he employs a variety of synthesizers in duet with cellist Wolfgang Tiepold. The music features carefully programmed shifts in dynamics, dramatic waves of synthesizer and cello counterpoint, all crying out for a visual depiction to accompany the music. Schulze suggests the visual nature of the music in the cover photograph on the album – a snapshot the composer took of his television screen during a scene from the Soviet science fiction film Solaris. The reference to Solaris suggests Dunes‘ wide influence!

Schulze created the album cover at home by taping the letters of the title to his TV, and taking a picture of the screen while Solaris was on!

Arthur Brown appears on side B, reading and singing text written by Schulze. This element seems to be much maligned, but to these ears the music is strong throughout, and the Dune inspired poetry is another sign of the sincerity of this project. If you like the music here, try going backwards and checking out Schulze’s vastly influential electronic music – you will find the original inspiration for a legion of synthesizer-toting musicians here.

The influence of Dune has been just as strong on prog rock as on electronica. Taking their name from Herbert’s book, the French band Dün was active from 1977 to 1981, putting out only one album. However, that album, 1981’s Eros, has developed a cult classic status with fans of prog. Although the band states in a 2018 interview that they didn’t have a lot of gigs at the time, they must have practiced together a lot because the band sound is very confident and the musicianship is excellent.

Like a lot of prog rock, the band on Eros features atypical instrumentation: in addition to guitar, bass, keyboard and trap drums, the band prominently features flute and vibraphone. The approach taken to these instruments is distinctive as well – for example the flute playing eschews an Ian Anderson vibrato-heavy approach, and instead shows classical influence and technique. All the playing is quite advanced, as is the conception of the music. In the 2018 interview Dün described the music as “European advanced electronic music with a powerful rhythm section, complex harmonies, rich melodic lines and unusual structures”, which seems fitting enough.

Like the other albums we’ve looked at, Eros also shows a cinematic scope. The album consists of four extended tracks ranging from seven to ten minutes in length, each subdivided into sections which quickly change moods, tempos, textures and sonic approaches. Music arranged and choreographed for the changes of scenes, just no movie attached! The sound world is distinctive enough that a visual component is not needed, as with all of these albums, they evoke worlds through sound.

Dün playing live sometime in the late 1970’s in a gym (check out the Dün posters taped onto a basketball backboard!)

Richard Pinhas’ Chronolyse, Klaus Schulze’s Dune, and Dün’s Eros were all made at a time when our planet was going through the first shocks of an environmental crisis, the late throes of European colonial imperialism, and a global confrontation with technology. With these challenges in the air, Dune is a novel that begged to be adapted for a wider audience. It’s a real mystery that the novel went almost 20 years without any film adaptation. These three albums filled that gap, capturing the expanse, intensity and world building of the source material. Even with the Lynch and Villeneuve film versions of Dune with us, these albums remain a potent companion and reaction to a timeless classic.

Some notes and a confession –

#1: I’ve looked at but never read all of Dune! While Dune is so influential, I know I’m not alone here. The language and scope of its world may be thrilling but it’s a bit intimidating too. Especially with that giant glossary of terms in the versions I’ve looked at! However, I certainly intend to remedy this problem and read the whole book – when I do, that may provoke a new post.

#2: This post was inspired by the new Dune movie (which is good in many ways and you should see it in a movie theater if you can – the visuals are incredible). Additional inspiration is from the wonderful trailer put together by the Alamo Drafthouse, called “Wormsong: Dune’s Prog Rock Legacy and Beyond” which covers the music discussed here as well as other albums inspired by Dune. Check it out, it’s a lot of fun!

Music featured:
Billy Bang – Billy Bang Lucky Man
(released May 14, 2021 – BBE Music)

Link to Apple Music
Link to Spotify

Billy Bang – violin
with
Banhar Gong Group of Kuntum
Hanoi Symphony Orchestra
Duc Dau – Stone Lithophone (Dan Da)
Phu Dong Family Band
Trần Mạnh Tuấn – saxophone, with Sax n’Art Band

An excellent way to observe this Veterans Day is to listen to Billy Bang’s Lucky Man, which was released earlier this year, or to watch the documentary of the same name available here.

Bang, who died ten years ago, was a Vietnam veteran who served on the front lines for a tour of duty in 1966-7, arriving in Vietnam just before the bloody Tet Offensive where he saw active combat. After his service, Bang returned to the United States with real trauma from the war, which Bang said he tried to shake “through alcohol, drugs and music.” Music, of course, is where we connect with Bang and how he will be known to the ages – from the 1970’s until his death he was one of the leading lights in New York’s creative scene of improvisers, making fantastic recordings with Sun Ra, William Parker and under his own leadership.

Notable among Bang’s leader recordings are those he made to address his experience in war. In 2001 Bang recorded Vietnam: The Aftermath, with fellow Vietnam vets Frank Lowe, Ted Daniel, Michael Carvin, and Butch Morris. Bang composed all the songs on this album, weaving together Southeast Asian melodies with Western harmony and jazz improvisation. Three years later Vietnam: Reflections continued the same project with the same band, but adding Vietnamese musicians in a marriage of East and West with the goal of reconciliation and healing. For an example of how extraordinary Bang’s music from these albums is, try “Doi Moi” from Reflections.

Released posthumously earlier this year, Lucky Man sees Bang traveling back to Vietnam when the opportunity arose to play violin with various musicians around that country. Bang took a translator and played impromptu concerts with professional and amateur musicians alike. These encounters were fortunately recorded, and you can hear cross cultural musical pollination in real time. Bang also recorded interviews where he talks about the war and how going back to Vietnam affected his views on personal responsibility, being a veteran, and playing music in the country where he had been sent to fight 40 years earlier. This wealth of material is all there to explore on the 1 1/2 hour album and the documentary. Both are fascinating and quite moving.

Veterans Day is a chance to honor those who have served our country, but Bang goes much deeper, meditating on the personal sacrifice it means to be sent to war, and the responsibility and consequences that veterans, and all of society, carry for the actions our soldiers were ordered to take. With the opportunity to go back to Vietnam and try to heal wounds on both sides of this conflict, we have music and audio that bears witness to this extraordinary process. Lucky Man is a deep exploration of remembrance, love, reconciliation and healing.