Quarter Tone Voices: Cory Smythe’s New Language

Cory Smythe — Accelerate Every Voice (Pyroclastic, 2020)

Cory Smythe’s new album is inspired by Andrew Hill’s Lift Every Voice (Blue Note, 1970) which combined singers with a jazz quintet. This wasn’t jazz singing. It was a seven-person choir pulsing with ’60s energy, singing lines somewhere between classical song and soul music. On “Ghetto Lights,” the soprano shrieks threaten to go off the rails. It’s a fitting addition to Hill’s brilliant run of late-’60s albums.

Pianist Smythe advances the concept by making the vocalists his entire band. That includes percussion by Kari Francis, who also served as the album’s vocal director. The voices sing articulated wordless syllables — and it’s all in quarter-tone staves, so even the music itself is speaking an unfamiliar language. The polish of the professional vocalists is crucial, an atmosphere of clean precision, even during improvised solos. (I’m reminded of Bay Area vocalist Lorin Benedict, who performs silky scat singing with the deliberateness of a written language.) The voices form the body of the music, with Smyth adding bass flourishes and high-register sprinklings.

The voices often don’t glide as they do on, say, Einstein on the Beach. It’s a function of the syllables, which in some cases seem crafted to create bumps and textures. Like the quarter-tones, they fit together in non-obvious combinations awkward to the unacclimated ear, even as they sometimes dip into recognizably “jazz” motifs.

To play those quarter-tone notes-between-the-notes, Smythe usee a MIDI keyboard propped on his piano, and of course the singers had to learn to hit quarter tones as well. (I have no idea how easy or difficult this is.) The MIDI keyboard is a setup that Smythe devised while working on a project with Craig Taborn. It uses the piano’s frame as a resonating board, just as the piano’s strings do, which seems to help the tones combine and shimmer, enhancing that “spectral” effect.

Smythe, in a “listening party” webinar and interview held by Pyroclastic, was reluctant to “oversell” his quarter-tone inner ear, saying only that he’s been dabbling in the 24-note scale and is still building an intuition for it. That said, Accelerate Every Voice was not left to guesswork; the music is heavily scripted. Smythe told the vocalists precisely which vowel sounds to make and gave exacting instructions regarding tone durations and even soloing. Smythe and Francis worked out rhythmic patterns for vocal percussion, adjusting the lines to fit Francis’ style and strengths. This rigor is at the heart of the music, building a ghostly Alexander Calder effect on two “Kinetic Wind Sculpture” pieces, or grinding out the repetition of an organic clockwork near the end of “Knot Every Voice.” Songs tend to be short, two to five minutes — but they feel longer, as they’re dense with motion and alien information.

The closing track, “Piano and Ocean Waves for Relaxation,” is a departure. Its 19 minutes of dark ambience seem to come from the sounds of (and around) the piano: isolated, echoing notes, wooden clacks, the buzzing of a resonating low string. Eventually the piano disappears and we are left with a shimmering resonance, slowly surging and receding.

That track is inspired by Annea Lockwood’s “Southern Exposure,” a performance piece in which a piano is slowly dragged away by the ocean tide. Hill’s Lift Every Voice had a political bent, and so does Accelerate Every Voice; it’s Smythe’s meditation on climate change. In that light, “Piano and Ocean Waves” becomes less relaxing. It’s about gradual background changes that build until they become too obvious to ignore.

Help the Starry Plough

Having written about Barbès last week, it occurred to me that there are venues here at home that could use help too…

It’s not as though I’ve built a thorough list, but the Starry Plough in Berkeley came to mind quickly. Over the years, they opened their doors to creative music, willing to occasionally put experimental jazz or rock acts in front their usual roots-music and pub-music audiences. (A few examples: Toychestra, Amy X. Neuburg, Surplus 1980, Jack o’ the Clock.) Economic reality being what it is, those shows became more infrequent over the past decade, but I still remember the Plough fondly and still checked their listings once in a while, just in case.

They serve food but have no outdoor seating, so they’ll have to subsist on take-out for a long while. Small bars and clubs will be among the last businesses to reopen, and the Plough has set its GoFundMe rather high in realization of this.

There are so many other venues in a similar plight, and even if you have the resources, it’s difficult to support all of them. I’m just mentioning this one for the same reason Brooklynites are banding together for Barbès: The Starry Plough is a source of community, and I’ve had some really good times there. Maybe there’s a similar venue in your life. Understandably, not everyone has the means, but if you do, at least consider dropping them the price of the beer and burger you would have gotten.

Photo via thestarryplough.com.

Gordon Grdina: The ‘Resist’ Suite

Gordon Grdina Septet — Resist (Irabagast, 2020)

The centerpiece of Resist is the 23-minute title suite, where avant-jazz guitarist Gordon Grdina turns classical composer, armed with a quartet of strings and the saxophone of Jon Irabagon. When this album came out in April, I felt Grdina had succeeded in creating something meaningful — but now, amid the George Floyd protests, it feels even bigger.

The strings are the key. They open “Resist” with somber persistence — the sound of gradual, grinding progress. The powerful coda, though, is where Grdina earns his stripes — sweeping, cinematic music suggesting the weariness of battles hard won and new fights yet to come (that’s what I hear in Irabagon’s frenzied sax solo). To me, it’s the sound of steadfast pride and grim realism — or maybe it’s just a reflection of how I felt as the protests gained momentum.

The heavy mood in “Resist” comes partly from an emphasis on mid/low registers. Instead of a traditional string quartet, Grdina uses a violin-viola-cello-bass lineup (and incidentally, it’s Evyind Kang on viola and Peggy Lee, a creative music veteran from Grdina’s native Vancouver, on cello). The suite does have its playful moments, including a free-improv section in the middle, but it ends with a reflective moment of very low arco bass, a little bit comforting, a little bit ominous.

Resist is an ambitious departure, but it also draws on Grdina’s usual context of creative jazz. His recent work includes a couple of all-star pickup trios — one with Mark Helias and Matthew Shipp (bass and piano) and the Nomad Trio with Matt Mitchell and Jim Black (piano and drums). He’s also shown off his oud playing over the years, especially on a pair of albums by his band The Marrow.

The rest of the album Resist draws from those materials. “Resist the Middle” revels in the bustle of free improv, including Grdina on white-noise electric guitar, then coalesces around heavy strings and other-worldly voices by Irabagon on sopranino sax. “Ever Onward” is another piece featuring some weighty strings, but it also sets Grdina’s oud, a lonely frontier voice, in some spiraling duet work with Jesse Zubot on violin.

“Varscona” is the album’s touch of lightness. Irabagon leads a joyous trio jam with bassist Tommy Babin and drummer Kenton Loewen, then it all shifts into a free-improv attack with the rest of the band. The song ends with a surprisingly silly bit of vaudeville — which, again, feels prescient, because we could all use a little levity right now.

Songs for Barbès

Here’s something fun: New York City venue Barbès posted a month’s worth of video performances from musicians, little love notes to celebrate the bar’s 18th birthday (on May 1, 2020) and maybe draw a little attention to the Barbès fundraiser.

A jewel of Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, Barbès hosts a lot of music that would land in the “world” category. Eastern European or Latin American or African, traditional or modern, folky or jazzy or even classical — every permutation seems to come up. They also host frequent shows out of New York’s avant-jazz scene, which is how I got introduced. The bar is a tight squeeze on a crowded Saturday night, but it’s a cozy, welcoming spot, and for my friends who lived in that neighborhood for a few years, it was an anchor.

The homemade videos are all sheltered-in-place and often charming, sometimes including spoken well-wishes to Barbès. Ingrid Laubrock and Tom Rainey (who I believe are married) stitched together two improvisations for their four-minute tribute.

Jenny Scheinman, who was part of the early-’00s Bay Area scene, plays a friendly “Little Calypso” on violin. It still amazes me how much sound a violin can produce with so little actual motion.

The New Mellow Edwards, a quartet led by trombonist Curtis Hasselbring, recorded separately to produce their piece. Watch bassist Trevor Dunn — the look he gives to camera at the end is perfect.

Ben Monder contributes “Never Let Me Go.” The first comment on the YouTube page refers to Monder’s “impossible” playing, which to me is the perfect word. I’m impressed with the harmonic vocabulary of jazz guitarists in particular, but Monder is other-dimension-ly — I’m thinking especially of the gorgeous, baffling, dense chording on parts of his 1998 trio album Flux (with Drew Gress on bass on Jim Black on drums).

Finally, the ensemble called Anbessa Orchestra made a slickly edited video of their song “Lions.”

And so on. There are a few dozen videos stacked up on Barbès’ YouTube site, and they went along with a GoFundMe campaign that was successful but could still use a little more love.