Canadian improvising clarinetist François Houle and Swiss trumpeter Marco von Orelli are heard live at the Bird's Eye Jazz Club, in Basel, Switzerland, 2020 for eleven dialogs reminiscent of the work of John Carter and Bobby Bradford, though uniquely in their own modern language of chamber-oriented jazz through original compositions from both artists.
Label: ezz-thetics by Hat Hut Records Ltd Catalog ID: ezz-thetics 1032 Squidco Product Code: 31982
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2022 Country: Switzerland Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold Recorded at the Bird's Eye Jazz Club, in Basel, Switzerland, on September 20th, 2020, by Hannes Kumke.
"Beginning in the second half of the 20th Century, cutting-edge composers strove to integrate improvisation into their work, while the more pioneering exponents of jazz sought to devise new compositional means of expression. The divide between the two endeavors long seemed unbridgeable, except through constructs like instant composition, and improvisation being composition in the moment. The shrinking of what was once a chasm to what can now be likened to a crack in a sidewalk is largely due to an ongoing succession of composer/improvisers like François Houle and Marco von Orelli, who pursue multiple trajectories of experimental music.
A crucial concept in meeting this twain is restructuralism, introduced into the discourse of experimental music by Anthony Braxton nearly 50 years ago to describe the application of fresh, distanced, and potentially transformative perspectives to canonic bodies of work, be it a genre like bebop or the oeuvre of a single composer like Anton Webern. It is an approach predicated on the granular knowledge of the subject and the daring to, in Julius Hemphill's words, go splat.
Houle and von Orelli set a high restructuralist bar by referencing Tandem, John Carter and Bobby Bradford's duet recordings of the late 1970s and early '80s. Overshadowed by their celebrated quartet recordings and Carter's epic Roots and Folklore: Episodes in the Development of American Folk Music, the duets nevertheless documented the LA legends' nuanced and fluid interplay, and the tensile strength of their respective compositions, including staples of their quartet book. It is a bar Houle cleared more than twenty years ago with In the Vernacular: The music of John Carter, a quintet album that included previously unrecorded Carter compositions.
Restructuralism requires foregrounding a sensibility that speaks in the present tense; without it, the resulting music is little more than a name check, a merit badge of connoisseurship. Houle and von Orelli do this in stages, initially circumscribing Carter and Bradford's nimble interplay in the improvised "Tandem," and toasting Flight for Four with Houle's "Make That Flight." They then take another step by placing Carter and Bradford in a larger, diffuse field of associations. The three improvisations referencing Francis Bacon - "For F.," "Mr. B.," and "The Changeable Triptych" - are particularly illustrative, as there are parallels between the painter's often abrasive apposition of the figurative and the abstract, and Carter and Bradford's adding bracing, thickly textured streaks to well-formed phrases with off-handed ease.
In the process, Houle and von Orelli place Carter and Bradford in a decades-long trajectory of horn duets, one that includes earlier recordings like The Lee Konitz Duets and Albert Mangelsdorff and His Friends, and later milestones like Steve Lacy's albums with Steve Potts and Evan Parker. Each addition to such trajectories brings new elements to the table; in Houle and von Orelli's case, it is a palette including colors heard as often in contemporary classical music as in post-Coleman jazz. The ease and fluidity with which they accomplish this goes to a critical point entering into the 21st Century's third decade: What is heard as vernacular has greatly expanded since Houle's tribute to Carter, 1998 being towards the end of a decade marked by bitter ideological debate about what did and did not constitute jazz.
The efficacy of this expanded vernacular is dependent on how glints of disparate sources pop up and mix with other materials in a work. The stealth with which such moments are delivered, the flash of recognition they convey, and their equally quick decay into the overall fabric of the music, is essential. Houle and von Orelli make pungent associations throughout the album, yet their brevity and subtlety provoke questions - was that a nod to Jimmy Giuffre? a wink at Booker Little? William O. "Bill" Smith? Manfred Schoof? - rather than wave a flag.
As vivid as they are, these associations remain near the margins of Houle and von Orelli's music, equally subsumed by the strengths of their compositional lexicons as by their improvisations. Both can be credited as having what can be termed an interstitial sensibility, in that they prefer to create in spaces between established schools of compositional thought. However, Houle and von Orelli do not simply triangulate these disparate constellations; they compound them in a way that be likened to the making of salt, a critical restructuralist methodology.
Even a cursory revisiting of Houle and von Orelli's previous recordings confirms that the stark forum afforded by a horn duo strips their music to its essentials, their shared ability to make unorthodox forms and materials sing and dance being the most salient. Fresh, distanced, and potentially transformative perspectives abound on this album, and not just about the music of John Carter, Bobby Bradford, or any other artist; but, more importantly, the tug and pull between the continuity represented by tradition and eruptive revolutionary impulses. Tomorrow remains the question. François Houle and Marco von Orelli may not have definitive answers, but they put forward intriguing terms for ongoing dialogue."-Bill Shoemaker, January 2021