Two From Kowald

Aria [Free Elephant 004]	Silence And Flies [Free Elephant 005]

Only with the hindsight of his inevitable mortality do the final years of Peter Kowald’s life feel anything like an ebb. He was active until the very end, even playing a performance earlier on the night of his passing, leaving the world abruptly and without fanfare. Tours, concerts and collaborations with an ever-evolving circle of peers were a regular part of his daily routine prior to the sudden finish. That sustained level of activity means a reservoir of music that still has yet to receive wide-ranging posthumous release. Enter the folks at Free Elephant who have welcomed the work of stewarding this legacy-rich archive. Kowald remains the focal point of their endeavors, but the umbrella is also open to encompass those in his immediate orbit as the first Free Elephant release, Gunda Gottschalk’s superb solo outing Wassermonde, substantiates.

Entries four and five in the modestly expanding catalog turn the lens back on Kowald. Aria visits him in the company of pianist Alberto Braida and clarinetist Giancarlo Locatelli and it’s a bit of a frustrating release. The program fluctuates between trio tracks taped in Milan just six days before Kowald’s demise in September 2002 and solo “Cantus” pieces rendered subsequently by Braida and Locatelli in the winter of 2003 and early spring of 2004. Though recorded later and registering at significantly shorter durations of two to three minutes each, these latter tracks serve as far more than filler. They succeed not only in fleshing out the set, but also leaven the often intricate and gelidly intense interplay of the ensemble numbers. The trio’s instrumentation aligns readily with Giuffre Trio precedence, but any semblance in conception and execution ends up only coincidental. Theirs is a more fragmentary and ultimately antiseptic lexicon of shared sounds.

Kowald actually seems a bit stymied by the positioned parameters of the program and the three together are similar tethered by the terse running times. The bassist finds the space to stretch on pieces like “Ricercar II,” carving out stout plucked clusters or bowing florid scurrying bursts, but at other junctures he relegates himself to almost pensive sounding embroidery. Much of it is punctiliously crafted, but points are scarce where he’s truly in a position to put his bull fiddle through the paces. Such bellicose eruptions of emotion don’t appear to be the purpose of this music. Indications arise in the way Locatelli and Braida wear their new music propensities prominently. Many of the tracks, both solo and in trio formation, revolve around incremental gradations in timbre and stoic repetition in irregular phrasing.

The three routinely exercise a preternatural ability in anticipating each other’s intentions, particularly on the “Ricercar” pieces. Locatelli chirps and clucks on both clarinet and its bass cousin, authoring porous lines out of stippled stutters. Braida exercises a comparably precise hunt and peck strategy at the ivories, repeatedly stabbing out dense and dampened block chords. Kowald is frequently left to caulk the cracks with muted harmonic patterns. A clinical austerity cloaks much of the action. It’s a mood that fits with the overriding chamber music schematic, but sometimes results in the side effect of a rather bloodless and severe body politic. This disc holds distinction as Kowald’s swan song studio session. Its relative asceticism, though perhaps fitting given the circumstances that would soon ensue, is made all the more nettlesome in lieu of the dramatic heights he was so frequently fond of scaling.

Silence and Flies documents a solo Kowald concert in the German village of Nigglmühle in late June of 2001 and finds him on more familiar footing. Removed from responsive sounding boards other than the attending audience he digs deep into his voluminous repository of extended techniques. The recital breaks into two spellbinding slabs of music. The first clocks at just over three-quarters of an hour while the finale occupies temporal space just beyond twenty-two minutes. Both pieces carry an episodic essence as the bassist’s fingers stroll from one callus-abrading idea to the next. Virtuosic arco play figures heavily into the first with Kowald sculpting a shimmering brocade of bow-point harmonics via tautly-wound horsehair cantilevered against steel-encapsulated string.

Concentration blurs a bit near the ten-minute marker in a repetitive rut of whirring rotor-blade arcs, but Kowald soon extricates himself with a switch to strenuous bowing pregnant with an underlying propulsiveness. He also makes ample use of the percussive tactic of placing sticks between strings and fingerboard, parsing out deeply resonating rhythms that thrum and throb with the sanguine vitality of a human heart. It’s this ability to imbue his bass with a tonal girth far beyond the scope of most of his peers that truly situates Kowald on a pedestal of his own. Melodic pizzicato strums, leaking lyrical ballast, converge at roughly the mid-point and mark the exploration of another haunting folk-oriented motif. Thirty minutes in his digits scamper at a descending sprint, pecking out a perfect duck-row of spidery staircase notes. At other points his bass mimics the tonalities and traits of other stringed instruments: zither, komungo, koto, Aeolian harp, and bouzouki. Near the close a stretch of ethereal filigree harmonics hardens into coarse-grained drones and Kowald treats the audience to a preciously brief specimen of his throat-singing.

The concert’s second piece follows similar suit with the bassist annexing a few minutes to find his bearings, falling back on a replenishing swathe of grit-flecked arco watercolors that lack the dynamic breadth of what will follow. Beating bow sharply against strings he creates coursing field of rhythmic energy before turning to a deeply contemplative extended pizzicato reverie. Another section opens with what at first sounds like raining droplets of mercury bouncing off a corrugated roof, evolving into a prickly thicket of percussive dissonance. It’s as if he’s attacking his instrument with talons instead of finger-tips. Kowald culminates with a return to a somber motif from the concert’s first half, birthed on a bed of comet-tail harmonics. All told this is an eminently listenable master-class in the contrabass, one without any stilted sentiment or stodgy pointy-headed pedantry.

Both of these discs sketch the primacy and versatility of Kowald’s art with striking accuracy, but it’s the solo outing that truly touches the stature of superior. Listeners who visit either will likely find their ears properly primed for more. Free Elephant appears able and willing to oblige.

~ Derek Taylor