reviews

Andrew Raffo Dewar - Six Lines of Transformation

By clifford ⋅ October 8, 2008 ⋅ ⋅ commentellen

Porter 4006

Though reedman, ethnomusicologist and composer Andrew Raffo Dewar has been traveling in creative music and academic circles for the past several years, appearing on recordings under the direction of Anthony Braxton and Bill Dixon and working with improvisers as diverse as Jack Wright and Jessica Pavone, this Porter Records disc is his first date directing his own work. Notice that “leader” is not part of the equation here; his sideman appearances might call to mind an improvising-specific situation, both pieces are fully notated if decidedly open. Though the instrumentation on each is rather different – chamber ensemble of brass, reeds, strings and percussion versus eight Indonesian bamboo flutes – the idea of process remains central to both works. Each presents a central phrase that is then rearranged or disassembled (as in “Six Lines of Transformation”) or gradually reached before again being erased (as in “Music for Eight Bamboo Flutes”).

To play a music that is loose in ideation and that is drawn from processes of change and experience, calling upon interpreters whose language is improvisational and far from mechanistic is a matter of course. The chamber ensemble working through “Six Lines” includes trumpeter Nate Wooley, bass clarinetist Matt Bauder and bassist Andrew Lafkas, along with percussionsist Jennifer Caputo, flutist Jane Rigler and bassoonist Katherine Young. Lafkas, Bauder and Dewar are also alumni of Dixon’s recent orchestral works for the Aum Fidelity and Thrill Jockey labels. The piece begins with ascending lines and trills into which activities breaking down that upward motion are introduced – subtle percussive figures, darts in the corners, isolated actions that themselves become the basis for new movements and lateral spatial relationships. Perhaps it’s the centrality of flute and contrabass to the proceedings, but this writer is reminded of Max Schubel’s Son of Quashed Culch (Opus One, 1968), another process-of-experience for the players, albeit out of a different set of parameters than Dewar’s piece. Though Wooley’s guttural peals and subtones and Rigler’s percussive wisps could be drawn out for sonic significance, it is the group – or rather band – approach and how those relationships are tied to a notational system that is paramount.

“Music for Eight Bamboo Flutes,” on the other hand, suggests the subtle shifts of auditory landscape, organization coming into view a la Carl Stone’s Woo Lae Oak (Wizard, 1983/Unseen Worlds, 2007) or Folk Rabe’s Was?? (Wergo, 1968). Composed while Dewar was in Sumatra, this performance features experimental Indonesian musicians A.L. Suwardi and Pande Made Sukerta in addition to the composer and Andrew McGraw (whose wholly unclassifiable Kobalorasi was issued on Porter earlier in 2008), among others, on eight Balinese suling. Recorded in the open air, the blanket of night insects provides a secondary hum of activity as the flutists’ staggered cycles of notes comment like the collective chiming-in of the locusts’ call. Long-toned choruses build at the pace of relaxed breathing, but their timbre ends up on the dark side of familiar intonation, evoking something unnatural and perhaps plugged-in as the players bend notes around tense glisses. This is dense music, so “environmental” as to be enshrouding, and bringing into sharp relief the dissonances of experience.

~ Clifford Allen