Noah Rosen - Trips Jobs and Journeys

Cadence Jazz Records 1152

The more I become familiar with his complete oeuvre, the more convinced I become that Andrew Hill is one of the greatest stratigraphers in the latest 50 years of improvised music. With his emphasis on large, brilliantly flecked chromatic blocks of sound, exploitation of contrary motion among the various component parts of whatever ensemble he is leading, (be it a big band or simply his own two hands), and a sense of syncopation that is all about sheer and slippage, Hill has, from Black Fire (Blue Note, 1963) to A Beautiful Day (Palmetto, 2002), demonstrated an unusual sensitivity to musical tension and release as a kind of tectonic process. Although never strictly a "free jazz" player, Hill's music is certainly a variety of energy music, yet one in which energy is released only after it has undergone a myriad of deformations and conversions.

Although Anthony Davis was perhaps the first pianist to pay any respects to Hill in his own composing and playing (Song For The Old World, India Navigation, 1978) it has only been in the last decade or so, with the arrival of "young" pianists such as Jason Moran, Vijay Iyer, John Bickerton, and even Simon Nabatov -- whose contributions to the little-known Blue And Grey Suite (Enja, 1994) by tenor saxophonist Matthias Schubert constitute a masterful thesis on both Andrew Hill and Mal Waldron -- has Hill begun to exert the kind of influence Cecil Taylor and Paul Bley had over a previous generation of improvising pianists. Perhaps it is because Hill's example holds out at least a possibility of instrumental Romanticism: a tonic to extremes of virtuosity and a means to organize many moods, from the contemplative to the exuberant.

Noah Rosen, who makes his recording debut with this disc of September, 2000 performances from La Fenêtre in Paris, has obviously gleaned much from a close study of Andrew Hill's work. The CD even bears an endorsement from Hill, who singles out Rosen's "material" -- one presumes his composing -- for especial praise, even though it would appear from Mr. Rosen's own annotations and, more importantly, from the performances themselves, that the bulk of this music is improvised without much reference to a written score. But it is Rosen's "touch" -- something of an indefinable concept, but one comparable with the “voice” we often say a specific horn player has on his / her instrument -- that may call Hill to mind for most listeners. Though, like Hill, he never pounds the keyboard, Rosen does make extensive use of the piano's capacity for changes in dynamics (even within a single note), thus making his forte passages sound louder than they actually are. His articulation is simultaneously pointillistic and fog-bound. His figures can resemble the partially-legible calligraphy left after an eraser has been passed over the figures chalked onto a blackboard: the smeared and broken notions from a Cy Twombly canvas or Mark Tobey’s “Drums, Indians and the Word of God” (1944). Rosen's chosen palette is full of dark colors -- purples, blues, burgundys, earth tones -- and often the hues are jarringly slurred one into the next. Didier Levallet (bass) and Makoto Sato (drums) complete the trio, but mostly they scribble sympathetically around Rosen. Levallet uses an out-sized chisel to scrape his remarks. Sato resorts to finger-paints; the drummer favors a pattering accompaniment and an set of percussive effects that call to mind hand drummers, thus a certain intimacy in the friction between skins.

A common theme links the two "Journey"'s and the opening "Trips" here. It's a brief, ascending-only-to-descend chorded phrase and Rosen nudges each re-voicing and variation of the motif towards a different kind of resolution. So that, true to his mentor's example, the music has tremendous internal diversity "First Journey" has passages of exquisite, minor-keyed tenderness in this respect, Rosen working in the mid-upper reaches of the keyboard. But the "Second Journey" is more troubled, as Rosen strikes hard against the inmost press of his chosen clusters. "Bon, Bref et Puis..." rumbles around atonality, but with ostinato patterns underneath making their own determinations, particularly near the end of the piece. Two-thirds of the way through "Trips", Rosen somehow develops a riff that mixes a boogaloo feel with pseudo-ragtime harmonies, whereas "Jobs" itself is almost a blues (note what occurs around the 12- to 13-minute mark).

As this last example suggests, the pieces on this disc are all quite substantial in length, and herein lies the recording’s greatest failing. These protracted pieces are, at one level, all about a slow, rubato approach to and retreat from stable harmony, or a kind of serial harmony. The real motion is between chords-- or scales. Any memorable melody that emerges in the process does so in the manner of an ulterior motive. A kiss on the hand that rises up the arm and then to the shoulder, settling then on the neck, and so on. One could argue that Rosen's approach allows for the most sensual exploration of the emotional consequences of each rendezvous, no matter how casual or fleeting. But, in doing so, a pretty impressionism envelops the boldness of the group's advances, and the music ends up only making oblique passes at ideas. Ultimately, Rosen elects to insinuate rather than startle. Perhaps problematically, he chooses a form of alienation -- his right, of course -- over the satisfaction that often seems so imminent in these performances. And each piece then begins to sound alike. Montage can be a pitiless aesthetic, because the method still accommodates allusions to the sequential, imposing determinism when perhaps the truth is that all causes are effects, and vice versa. So that, in montage, the complexity of the disjunctions between its various parts can be rendered more mechanical than is necessary, or is genuine. This is another way of saying that, as sensitively attuned to its own ravishments as it often is, Rosen's music still suffers from a slight disconnection between form and content. As long as the overall frame of each performance -- its duration and outline -- feels as arbitrary as it does to this listener, the individual forms (whether that be seductive body language, lozenges of light, the tattered leaves of scriptures that fill a geniza...) massed within that construct will continue to feel slightly haphazard and that much less involving as well.

All in all, Rosen’s debut is not an inauspicious one, but less for what it attains than for what it adumbrates.