Christy Doran's New Bag

http://www.christydoran.ch
http://www.christydoran.ch/nb

The basic formula for Irish/Swiss guitarist Christy Doran’s group New Bag is similar to that of David Fiuczynski’s Screaming Headless Torsos: put a twisted lead guitarist at the center of the group, assemble a lock-tight groove section, and add a highwire vocal specialist for lyrics, dizzy unison lines, and a dash of pop accessibility.

Doran probably doesn’t give a crap if this music is called rock, jazz, or something else. For him it’s always been about the possibilities of his instrument: excited strings, electric sizzle tones, reverberating feedback, or loops that expand into the cosmos. Yet as interested in, and pulled toward, the ethereal as he has consistently been – since his playing in the collective Om with Urs Leimgruber to his partnership with Freddy Studer, the ABD and ADD Trios, Corporate Art, and others – Doran has always had a hard-hitting rhythmic sensibility. With a touch of early, gritty McLaughlin, Doran is always ready with the spiky repetition or the chugging riff; he can fill out a groove with a weirdly angular harmonic shape or a howl on the downbeat. In short: he’s just the player to elevate sessions like these.

The group’s first recording was 1999’s Confusing the Spirit (On Cue Records 001), where the basic lineup of Doran, versatile vocalist Bruno Amstad, electric bassist Wolfgang Zwiauer, and percussionist Fabian Kuratli was introduced. Like much of New Bag’s music, the eight pieces on the debut alternate between long open sections of highly processed textures and dense, interlocking groove sections (though some, like “Oil,” are nothing but texture). The band is tight like a fist, and the Zwiauer/Kuratli team is limber and responsive enough to follow the often unpredictable path of the two lead voices, who exult in crazed unison work just as much as they do trading jabs. Things never get extremely heavy – though there are occasional touches of power, such as on the introduction to “Paros” – but there’s always a sense of the emphatic here. And though the instrumentation and reliance on pulse might suggest otherwise, this band doesn’t rely on pop music conventions; instead, they sometimes recall the version of Tony Williams’ Lifetime with Jack Bruce in tow (though I dig Amstad a fair piece better than Bruce). It’s modern-day fusion, in the best sense of that term.

The second recording, Black Box (Double Moon 71022), adds Muthuswamy Balasubramoniam’s mridangam to the mix, though the basic idiom remains consistent with the first album. The newcomer’s contributions are particularly good on “Structured Clay,” and in studying his playing you get the occasional impression that the general rhythmic complexity of Indian classical music isn’t a bad touchstone for New Bag’s overall conception of structure. The opening “Sugarpie” is as close to a pop song as this band gets – complete with hooks and choruses – even though it contains some exploratory material (such as the vocal and bass tradeoffs in the midsection). Doran’s solo sections on this release are slightly more hard-hitting, and they recall his tough-as-nails work with Bobby Previte, Gary Thomas, and Mark Helias on Corporate Art: he integrates all the elements of his style, from huge echo-drenched loops, to ice-brittle shards of noise, to gnarly runs that lay the voodoo down (hear it all on the long closing track). Other highlights on this disc include “Written in Your Face,” whose slow-burn funk is garlanded by a host of tricky syncopations and shifting time signatures (and the confusing chorus “Tokyo is burning, but still they’re hurting” inspires Amstad to let loose with some of his most throaty hollerin’ of the date). And though some of the pop touches on this disc may seem a bit iffy, long, swirling excursions like “Caviar” make you forgive the band any excesses.

With their most recent full-length, Heaven is Back in the Streets (Double Moon 71031), New Bag has refined their sound and also interjected a lot more silence into their generally slamming compositions. The band linger longer on the pulseless psychedelic passages; they give more space for delicate interplay between Doran’s shifting arpeggios and Amstad’s vocal fancy (as on the atmospheric “Resounding”); and there are more pauses and hesitations written into the actual compositions themselves (even in the thrashiest numbers like “Digressions” and “No Rest for the Wicked”). Across these six tracks, New Bag ranges through a number of styles, from drifting ambience to punishing rock to high-octane fusion. The end result is something dreamier and airier than the previous two releases, coming across as some kind of cinematic travelogue set to music.

This band is a big hit on the European festival circuit, and you can really see why when you listen to these discs back to back. Along with groups such as Lucas Niggli’s Zoom, Doran’s New Bag is a fun combo whose explosions of genre deserve a wider hearing.

~ Jason Bivins