Urs Leimgruber/Gunter Muller/ARTE Quartet - e_a.sonata.02

Urs Leimgruber/Gunter Muller/ARTE Quartet
e_a.sonata.02
For4Ears
1447

Urs Leimgruber had been previously working with the ARTE quartet (four saxophonists) for a couple of years before getting the idea to include Gunter Muller in the mix. Muller, as is his habit, took recordings of the musicians, processed and replayed them for Leimgruber, showing how his sounds would work in tandem with theirs. Typically, Muller renders the original sources virtually unidentifiable. Leimgruber then roughed out a compositional timeline for this sextet, sketching areas where certain playing combinations would occur, where Muller would improvise, where he’d do live sampling of the saxophonists’ improvisations, etc. Written parts for the reed players are scattered throughout. The result, a single 52-minute piece here presented in a live recording, is a sprawling, sometimes engrossing but ultimately frustrating work, one in which the sheer depth and imagination expressed in Muller’s contributions far outweighs that of his compadres.

It’s an interesting problem and part of it may simply be that I’m so attuned and partial to Muller’s musical conception that I’m irresistibly drawn toward his sounds at the expense of everyone else’s. At times, the most successful portions of the disc, the reeds lie low and almost evanesce, taking on the role that Keith Rowe often assumes these days, that of a canvas for fellow musicians to leave marks on, something that’s almost nothing yet, at the same time, crucially important. The saxophonists (who range from soprano to baritone, including an “electric saxophone”) do their best to sound un-saxophone-y although when the baritonist has a small feature about 30 minutes in, he (I’m guessing the first name “Beat”—shared by two of the musicians—is male) resorts to some tried and true, that is to say stale, avant-gardisms. The others also delve into such areas on occasion, generally in chirping territory. That old oil and water aspect once again rears its head: the difficulty of the saxophone merging with the electronics. Leimgruber has been attempting to breach this divide more and more often lately and, to the extent he sublimates his jazz-derived tendencies, he’s sometimes reasonably successful. But over the course of a 50-minute plus work, he (and the others) seem unable to sustain the requisite selflessness, to not regularly coalesce into the overall sound at the expense of so-called personal expression.

Muller provides some really marvelous work on his own and fans of his music may find the disc worth their while for that reason alone. The diverse nature of the sounds he evokes, the quiet, insinuating rhythms that evaporate almost before you’re aware of their presence and his endlessly colorful palette are truly wonders to behold. Also, as mentioned above, there are moments when everything meshes and you forget you’re listening to six musicians as opposed to simply listening to music (the end of the piece flickers out in a lovely manner, for instance). But as a whole, I’m not sure “e_a.sonata.02” is as convincing, as of a piece, as I wanted it to be.