The 99 Voices of Kyle Bruckmann’s Dear Everyone

A trio version of Kyle Bruckmann’s Degradiant (I’m assuming sans voices) performs at Uptown Nightclub (1928 Telegraph Ave., Oakland) on Tuesday May 14, 2019 and at the Center for New Music (55 Taylor St., San Francisco) on June 13, 2019.

Kyle Bruckmann’s Degradiant — Dear Everyone (Not Two, 2017)

The introductory movement to Dear Everyone is called “Overt? Sure,” and the first words spoken, two minutes into the 7-minute piece, are “lather up.” That pretty much sets the tone — that, and the horns jackhammering like an alarm clock out for revenge.

At its core, Degradiant is a quartet — two horns, electric bass, percussion, and some electronics — mixing free jazz with heavy math rock. But its debut recording brings in a huge cast for a large-scale concept: 99 voices reading poems by Matt Shears. For bandleader and composer Kyle Bruckmann, it’s kind of a follow-up to “… Awaits Silent Tristero’s Empire” (Singlespeed, 2014), his zany, ambitious Thomas Pynchon tribute. Dear Everyone brings a similar touch of absurdity, again framed by Bruckmann’s own Pynchonesque flair for language and love of words.

The readers aren’t pros, by design, and Bruckmann’s liner notes suggest many of them were ambushed with the idea. The result is a collage of voices and tones, some smooth, some self-conscious: male, female, varying accents, and at least one child handling the big words with some adorable stumbles.

Narrators come and go rapidly,  sometimes overlapping with an intentionally confusing intensity, leaving fragments of ideas lingering in your ears. This effect can be mysterious or, as on “Significant Details,” a little silly.

Musically, Dear Everyone ranges from humorous to disturbing, mixing the planned-and-intricate with freewheeling improvisation. Bruckmann sometimes ditches his oboe for analog electronics for darker spells of uneasy tension, and Jason Hoopes (Jack o’ the Clock, Fred Frith Trio) turns up the acidity on bass for the tough-fisted math rock passages. It all mashes together gloriously on “Sound Byte Culture,” including a nifty Hoopes solo.

There’s a sense of fun throughout the 2-CD album, but it ends on a jarring note with “Recessional and Postlude.” It’s sparse and somber, with a slow electronic pulse backing two voices formally reciting a full poem.

An Explosion of Happy

David Dominique — Mask (Orenda, 2018)

A manic, cartoony jazz sound is always welcome, but sometimes it can be a little too much. Mask is full of tricky octet charts that toy with you: a theme will repeat way too many times, or slow down again and again to the point of absurdity. Grooves get cut off abruptly. Electric guitar makes a screaming appearance and then just vanishes.

It’s all executed with crisp, geometric precision, as on the staggering hot-jazz explosion of “The Wee of Us.” But you’ve got to be in the mood for this stuff. The joy in here is relentless, and the cleverness can start to grate, especially when Dominique plays games with repetition. Any song in this collection would be a delightful surprise if snuck into a mainstream set. Together, they teeter between exhilarating and exhausting.

Dominique means well, though. Mask amps up certain elements from his previous album, Ritual, and I do like where his ideas are coming from. There’s an upbeat sense of rebellion here, and a risky dash of humor.

The flute line in “Gotta Fumble” keeps shifting just slightly, for the kind of pleasant disorientation you get from prog rock. “To Dave Treut” is my favorite track, flipping between a buzzy sprint and a swingy, slower-tempo theme. A calmer soloing section features tangly improvising on viola while a steady beat soldiers on in the background.

That violist is Lauren Elizabeth Baba, who runs a big band of her own, the BABAorchestra. It’s a more concretely “jazz” project but it shares a touch of the irreverence of Dominque’s band and is worth hearing.

Jordan Glenn’s BEAK

Jordan Glenn — BEAK (Geomancy, 2018)

Jordan Glenn is a ubiquitous Bay Area drummer, playing in so many jazz/improv contexts including the prog band Jack o’ the Clock and his own pranskerish trio Wiener Kids. With BEAK, Glenn showcases himself as a composer, leaving the playing up to others. It’s a set of coordinated rock jams thick with guitar and percussion — four percussionists! Sometimes they combine for a glorious stomp; sometimes it’s an intricate exercise in counterpoint.

Compositions build off of riffs and rhy, with guitars (Will Northlich-Redmond and Grex‘s Karl Evangelista) drenched in fuzz and surrounded by hand drums. Mark Clifford’s vibraphone adds splashes of extra melody. The percussion barrage, so vital to the album’s overall mood, comes from Geneva Harrison on the drum kit and Robert Woods-LaDue and Robert Lopez on hand percussion. Max Judelson on bass rounds out the band.

Glenn’s trademark sense of humor is found more in the song titles than in the music itself. Sublime moments come in the trilogy of “Coda” pieces, with the easygoing odd-time beat of “Coda 2 – This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” and the lingering haze of “Coda 3 – The Games Chickens Play.”

Some of the album’s most satisfying moments are the quieter ones. “Coda 2” is worth another mention in that regard; it’s a slow burn, a moderate tempo that builds momentum as the odd rhythm latches into your brain. That said, the full-blast bombastic tracks are fun. “Flower Fashion Fantasies” announces the band: “We’ve got guitars! We’ve got four percussionists!” and builds into a frenzy. Later, the track returns in a higher-energy reprise.

Day of Noise 2019 Video

KZSU’s Day of Noise — 24 hours of live on-air performances in the studios of Stanford’s college radio station — came and went last month, but you can see and hear the whole thing. Jin, who’s videoed and photographed the event for the past several years, went all-out this time, with two cameras per studio and lighting filters to boot. The full 24 hours were streamed live in two 12-hour segments (YouTube sets a 12-hour limit on streams) that are available now.

Bonus: That’s my voice at the start or Part 2. I was asked to stall for time, to make sure no music got lost as we made the transition between video streams.

Smurph, who handled sound engineering for all 24 hours, made an audio recording of each act separately, and you can find those files on KZSU’s Day of Noise web page.

Surrealist Poet Jazz

Sheldon Brown Group — Blood of the Air (Edgetone, 2018)

Nate Chinen’s excellent book, Playing Changes, devotes a chapter to the many innovations of Jason Moran, including his visual art and his business model post-Blue Note. Among them is Moran’s practice of transcribing spoken word into melodies based on that fluctuating pitches and emphasis of the voice.

I can understand the fascination with exploring the necessarily melodic qualities of speech. I always appreciate the results even if I don’t fully enjoy them — as with many types of art, the process sometimes interests me as much as the final output.

Anyway, I doubt Moran was the first to try setting music to speech, and plenty of others have done it since.

But here’s Sheldon Brown doing something I don’t think I’ve heard before: He adds swing. On “Oraibi,” the two-part opener to Brown’s Blood of the Air, he sets a clarinet melody in step with Lamantia’s recital and gives it a bounce that creates the illusion of Lamantia himself swinging.

(Love the soaring Tyner-esque piano chords after the intro, too, and the feathery sung vocal — that’s Lorin Benedict‘s vocalese.

Blood of the Air is a tribute to Lamantia, and I admit, I dreaded the thought of an overbaked poetry-music casserole. But creative touches (such as a moody theremin introducing “First Star”), along with the bursting enthusiasm and spinning inventiveness of Brown’s band, keeps the mix fresh and intriguing.

Here’s the theme from “To Have the Courage,” built from another of Lamantia’s readings and sped up into a punchy ensemble line. The vocal here is Benedict again, inserting vocalese into the melody of Lamantia’s speech patterns. There’s something very meta about that.

A San Franciscan by birth who would later hang out with the Beat movement, Lamantia is described as “surrealist,” but he wrote in normal English phrases and sentences, not the random word clusters I was expecting. His recital voice is homey, less stern than I expected, with an affected accent, equal parts Oxford and Brooklyn.

Here’s a full Blood of the Air set from the group, performed at the 2017 Outsound New Music Summit, with Lamantia contributing via recordings. You can sample much of the album on Bandcamp.

Trio HLK

Trio HLK — Standard Time (Ubuntu, 2018)

You can see why Steve Lehman and Evelyn Glennie want to hang out with these guys. Trio HLK is full of glitches in the matrix, playing smoothly rapid clockwork music that’s full of hiccups. With all the start-stop unpredictability, it’s fitting that one song is titled “Stabvest.”

The effect comes from rapid-fire shifts in time signatures — take a look at the blips of 13/16 and 15/16 in the sheet music for “Extra Sensory Perception Part II,” below (full score available here). Pianist Richard Harrold, guitarist Ant Law, and percussionist Richard Kass run this obstacle course with slick aggression, with Law’s eight-string guitar doubling as bass. The effect is like a sped-up minimalism, with lots of jump cuts between phrases that are repeating but not really repeating.

The result is music that feels ultra-modern but still sounds pleasant, between the chiming jazz-club chords and the occasional acrid-but-friendly touch of guitar. “TWILT,” a brainy twist on a jazz standard (you can figure out which one), is a good demonstration of what the trio can do. But their guest musicians add some sparkling fun. Lehman add his angular sense of cool to three tracks, and Glennie dances airily on songs like “Extra-Sensory Perception,” a thrill ride that culminates in a hard-driving succession of rising chords shared by piano and guitar.

Here’s a video of the gentle Part I of “Extra-Sensory Perception,” followed by the more intense Part II.

 

Motoko Honda at CJC, Berkeley

Previously, I had only heard the experimental side of Motoko Honda’s music. That was in Los Angeles, where I’d seen her perform live in the improvised setting of Polarity Taskmasters, a quartet co-led by Emily Hay on flute and vocals.

But Honda has a classical background and a rigorous interest in jazz, and those sides take the fore with her band, Simple Excesses. The music is genteel enough to fit the programming at Berkeley’s California Jazz Conservatory, where Honda’s band was presented recently by the Northern California nonprofit Jazz in the Neighborhood, but it also had exploratory and subversive sides — creative fusion at work.

Late in the set, a piece called “Umba” really caught my attention. I remember Honda hammering away at fast triplets and continuing that pattern during Wright’s solo — manic stuff, until it ran into a shift in mood. This video excerpt, from a different concert in Los Angeles, must begin after that shift, but it gives you a feel for Honda’s skill at scattery jazz spontaneity applied with classical precision.

Getting back to the Berkeley show: Cory Wright provided a lead voice on a battery of woodwinds — saxes and clarinets, but also flute. One piece early in the first set combined piano and harmonized flute in a fast-running river of notes — a nice effect, sonically, and chiseled out with precision.

Like Wright, Jordan Glenn on drums was a familiar face that was good to see. (I haven’t been out to many shows in the past year or so.) He played a support role loyally, adding different shades of color and a spark of personality to each track. His spotlight moment came on “The Jumping Mouse,” the closer, where he and Honda dueled in a joint solo that had them bounding rhythms off one another with increasing intensity.

I hadn’t heard bassist Miles Wick before, but he was a strong presence throughout both sets. He got a long solo during the opening piece, full of rubbery melody; maybe it was the strength of that solo that prodded me to keep him in focus for most of the show.

Honda’s brand of jazz comes with a firm grip and confident strides in her chording and soloing, but we also got generous samples of her traditional classical side, the kind of piano evoking images of gentle snowfalls or wide, quiet fields. I’m thinking especially of one emotional piece about her late music teacher.

Jazz in the Neighborhood also supports emerging artists, granting them a stipend and a chance to perform with the concert artists. Under those auspices, violinist Eva Piontkowski sat in on a couple of songs, adding the airy melody that a violin can offer but also showing some edgy creativity in her soloing. She also got to play a challenging duet with Honda: a graphical score, around which they built a piece that was warm and lyrical but far from sappy. It later turned out this was Piontkowski’s first attempt at playing a graphical score, and she’d received no prior instruction — which is a legitimate and, if you think about it, once-in-a-lifetime way to perform this music.