Several months ago, my estimable colleague Joe Milazzo started a thread here at Bags about the prejudices many listeners harbor toward the presence of vocals in freely improvised music. The general argument was a sound one. That the versatility and familiarity of voice as instrument should be effective tools in engendering it’s viability. With other vocal improvisors, say Jaap Blonk, the structures of language come into play. Blonk’s improvisations, while often as ‘out there’ as anyone’s, still seem grounded in an underlying architecture of organized, speech-like sounds. Minton prefers a more resolutely abstract canvas, using his vocal tract to produce noises often completely devoid of phonetic tethers.
Much of the time Minton seems to be responding to nefarious tortures inflicted on his lower extremities. There are action shots of him and Turner in the liners. But it’s as if the portion of the photo picturing the bed of hot coals scorching the tender flesh of his feet has been cropped out. What’s left is the resulting grimace of agony. It’s an image summarily translated to some of the music.
I found the shorter studio pieces of disc one easier going than the marathon concert hall improvisations of disc two. The former also have the advantage of engineer Steve Lowe’s immaculate sonics. The speaking-in-tongues histrionics of “Seemingly” start things off as Turner’s scuttling sticks answer a litany of hoarse gurgles, wet raspberries and fluttering chipmunk-cheeked whispers. “Reasonable” comes across as anything but. Turner manipulates what sounds like concave cymbal creating weird resonating sound waves while Turner engages in a sustained Tuvan-like throat drone before diverting into a bout of gagging reflexive cries that sound uncomfortably like air being released piecemeal from an engorged balloon. By scouring the surfaces of his kit on “Somewhat,” Turner calls up what sounds like short-wave radio static, Minton responds with hollow rasping gusts of breath. And so it goes through another eleven cuts with the only truly predictable element of the music being its relative unpredictability.
“Civil” opens the second disc and clocks in at attention-sapping thirty-two plus minutes. “Adequate,” which follows, annexes another twenty-three. These two pieces bring out both the indulgent and ambitious aspects of the music in boldest relief. They also find the two improvisors slowing things down and making more prominent and impressive use of space and silence. The increased temporal girth also uncovers passages of decreased sensitivity between the pair, but it’s amazing how often they end up in synch. A quartet of boisterous miniatures closes the set out starting off with Minton sounding like a deranged kabuki actor atop the militant stick clatter of Turner on “Supposedly.” Much to everyone’s surprise he even sings a few swinging verses of “Lady is a Tramp” Sinatra-style on “Frankly.”
The two gents look perfectly innocuous in their static portrait shot away from music making. It’s a guise swiftly shattered when they stand/sit poised in front of the mics. These two create sounds shared and individually that are as recalcitrant and reductionist as they come. It might be the preferred cup of tea for some and there are admittedly many “how did they do that?” moments. In the end though, I left the experience feeling a bit confused and feeling as if my ears were abused in much the same manner as Minton’s hypothesized feet.
So the “vocals in improv” debate rages on. This entry by Minton and Turner is likely to elicit just as polemical response as any that have preceded it. As with anything in the subjective arena of musical appraisal, it all comes down to individual taste.
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