Jack Wright and Bob Falesch - Clang

2002 Zero Eggzie 0x-2bdf

From the first warm saxophone notes wrapping around even warmer piano notes, it's clear that this is no ordinary Jack Wright record. Then again, every Jack Wright record is a bit of a shock, so that's a rather nonplussing statement. A particular quality that distinguishes this one is a luxurious "chamber" sound, with the conventionally tuned notes of Bob Falesch's piano resounding at every turn. It plays a bit like a Roscoe Mitchell and Matt Shipp duet. Beyond this overall surface feeling, the disc is packed with Wright's trademark un-trademark-able flood of reed newness.

Enhancing both the surprising conventional aspect and the characteristic anti-conventional aspect, the stunningly vivid recording quality (courtesy of Bob Falesch's mysterious and elaborate machinations) makes this a disc that will seduce just about anyone plugged in somewhere to the broad spectrum of post-jazz improvisation; those already primed to savor the raw edges and unsafe trajectories of Wright's saxophone will do a double-take and then proceed to play the disc repeatedly, and those who are generally a bit queasy about this sort of thing will find their attention drawn beyond the details of Wright's playing and into the larger flow of conventionally rich and beautiful instrumental sound, finding the piano to be a counterbalance to any suspicious reed episodes.

Some qualification deserves to be made concerning the term "piano" here. Instead of a conventional acoustic piano, Falesch's instrument is a MIDI keyboard interfaced with music software, a setup he calls "metaPiano". As to be expected, he makes use of the consequent flexibility for processing in his work in general, yet on this record he restricts himself to a simulation of a grand piano with great acoustic samples, at least as far as I can tell. As a result of several centuries of being tastelessly overexposed (via the same cultural mechanisms responsible for table sugar, baked goods, television, professional athletics, etc) and servitude as the self-fulfilling icon for the militant and unrepentant fetishization of equal temperament, the piano is a truly objectionable and disgusting object that I'd love to see suffer forced extinction in a global mass burning ceremony. As such, I avoid piano music as much as possible within the constraints of sensible living, and hence lack the perceptual resources to find any significance in the distinction between a conventional piano and Falesch's version, although I can imagine that there may be others with ears more finely aware of the piano's acoustic nuances who would find this matter to be of greater interest. Actually, this silicon version would be great to have if we changed our minds or got sentimental after the mass burning.

Falesch's metaPiano concept is rather more interesting and complex than my description may suggest, so I recommend reading his own description. I've had the great pleasure of seeing Falesch perform improvised music (during High Zero 2000) on his metaPiano, and my impression is that he's gone quite a ways towards putting his ambitious concepts into practice. Looking through his intriguing catalogue of works, a person might get the impression Falesch is primarily a conceptualist and creator of notated and computer-constructed music, but to my ears Clang and his similarly explosive, varied, lucid, and nuanced disc of duos with Bob Marsh (mostly on cello, but also flute and voice), Co-Lage (a 1999 recording also released on Zero Eggzie and well worthy of a serious review in itself) reveals him as a deeply inspired pianist with considerable technical resources. While Co-Lage is especially recommended as a representation of both Falesch the pianist and Falesch the electronic experimentalist, the Falesch/Marsh duo disc Water Music is the one to check out to hear the truly bizarre, hazy, and subliminal side of both musicians and well represents the metaPiano sounding thoroughly unlike a piano. A live improvisation recorded on Philip von Sweck's University of Chicago radio program on June 25, 2000, it's an album of endearing mystery that I've never been blown away by, but have found myself playing repeatedly with a kind of unfamiliar and understated warm pleasure that never wears thin.

While you're visiting Falesch's rather attractively designed website, be sure to read his classic essay about Tatsuya Nakatani and Nmperign.

When compared to most of Jack Wright's other work, this duo with a conventionally played piano is a really unusual situation because of the timbral consistency and the overall evenness of dynamics and density in Falesch's playing. I think it brings out a more lyrical and long-toned side of Wright than we often hear, and it's yet more evidence of his versatility and depth.

"Prelude and Fluke" contains many passages where the interaction of the two voices is very clear, and would be a good piece to play for somebody who has trouble discerning togetherness beyond simultaneity in free improvisation. The piece begins with about 40 seconds of Wright alone, a striking passage with a sense of linear development through undulating melodies played in succession at various velocities, a contrast to the jagged discontinuity of most of his solo work. This is not to say that even in the short space of 40 seconds the line doesn't fall off a cliff a few times, however. This passage is also noteworthy in the way Wright manages to wring strikingly non-Western timbres from his soprano saxophone, an important aspect of his playing in general. I can't quite put my finger on what reed instrument he simulates here, but it's somewhere in-between a shenai and a kazoo, with the pitch inflection one would expect from such an approach. (Maybe it just sounds like a soprano saxophone?) In contrast to some of his other work, there's a large percentage of music on this album where Wright doesn't foreground his timbral flexibility, instead making use of conventional saxophone technique with subtle gradations between the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Following a pause after the clear conclusion of a saxophone phrase, Falesch enters the piece with a delicious three-note phrase on piano that Wright responds to with a single note of similar duration, volume, and decay as Falesch's third note, uniting the two instruments and setting the pace for the next few minutes. What is so exciting to me about these four notes is that Falesch's phrase unfolds with a self-contained logic, but at the moment when it can be savored as a stable formation it is forcibly re-stabilized as the trigger or prelude to Wright's note. This is the same sort of reconciliation of intra-phrasal clarity and multiplicity that I often relish in Morton Feldman's music.

After this wonderful event an appropriate pause is then taken, perhaps because the musicians heard it as a wonderful event. Wright then delivers two very rapid sub-phrases of two notes each, followed by a long tone. Because of the similarity of the notes within each sub-phrase, and the similarity between the two sub-phrases, there is repetition at two levels of structure. This combines with other structural elements that the present discourse is not positioned to identify to generate an unresolved initial segment of momentum that the long tone counterbalances.

This in itself is not some rare species of musical event, and in fact is probably a cliche at some level of abstraction, but it is noteworthy in at least three ways. First of all, it exists. Secondly, it happened. And additionally, Bob Falesch happened with it. It has a clarity and balance that is deeply rooted in the human musical experience, and it concurs with all sorts of tangible micro-structural complexities, like the breathiness of the second sub-phrase, the dynamic contours within the sub-phrases, etc. It also exists in the context of other musical events, such as the above-discussed four-note phrase, that prime the listener to engage it with focused attention. As such, a highly desirable aesthetic state can be attributed to its existence.

The fact that it happened provides insight into general methodological aspects of free improvisation. Specifically, it exemplifies a mode of sound-production that tends towards a minimality of effective structure. In this musical event, we find two instances of repetitional minimality, as both the intra-sub-phrasal and inter-sub-phrasal repetition are only two units in length, yet they are still fully functional as a source of the above-mentioned rhythmic effect. I speculate that this minimality is a result of uncertainty about each passing moment of sound-production, a mode in which the perception of a structural effect is acted upon at the earliest point of its emergence. While much free improvisation is clearly not conducted in this mode, it is probably quite common, and it goes a long way towards characterizing the music of Jack Wright.

As mentioned above, this event did not only happen, but also happened with Bob Falesch, who inserted a quick two-note sub-phrase of his own between Wright's second sub-phrase and long note. The result is that the role of Wright's second sub-phrase is unexpectedly mapped onto Falesch's sub-phrase, introducing a concomitantly faster tempo that co-occurs with the tempo internal to Wright's notes. If this don't float your boat, you ain't in the water.

Nothing could have prepared me for what happens two notes later, a mysterious sound shape from Wright's saxophone that feels like the channel has accidentally switched for less than a second and picked up a snatch of programming from another planet. It almost has the feel of a synthesizer swoosh that plays in reverse as soon as it finishes. This surreal phrase sits between reasonably ordinary parries and thrusts of piano and saxophone, as if nothing unusual had happened, although Wright does seem to attempt a follow-up right away, but it lacks the Mobius curves of its predecessor and comes out instead as a fairly ordinary, but still complexly detailed, long tone. Regardless of how much wonderment one intrinsically finds in this mystery phrase, it cannot be denied that it's mercurial in this context, a testimony to the potential of free improvisation to be unceremoniously revelatory. It is frankly inconceivable that someone would ever sit down in front of a piece of paper and prescribe such an event.

It should be noted that thus far into the piece there is no temporal overlap between the two instruments, a texture that dominates well into the next minute or so. This illusory simplicity of vertical structure seduced me into the above superficial discussion of a few transparent structures, but it should be emphasized that we have only dealt with a tiny fraction of the content in that segment of about 10 seconds. Over the next few minutes, the vertical structure of the piece reaches dizzying levels of density that would require hundreds of pages to even hint at, and many thousands of pages before that so we would even know how to talk. The best I can do here is say that any opportunities for music thrills in that short segment are multiplied not by a few hundred but by several million over the remainder of the piece. One general remark about the events in question is that, as with much free improvisation, the freedom from notationally induced pitch-centric dispositions facilitates the development of vertical relationships besides harmony. For example, there are continuously overlapping episodes of compatible, but not necessarily shared, amplitudinal motion (attack, decay, duration, etc), as if they are always going somewhere together, but rarely arrive at the same time or place. Heck, it's only two instruments; our brains can try to keep track.

In any case, this piece is an almost miraculously sustained example of joint structure-building. However, starting around the 7:01 mark, I have trouble consistently hearing relationships between the two instruments, as if the momentum of the piece finally seems to have thrown the two musicians into separate worlds. At times, Falesch's piano-ing becomes imbalanced in its aggression, attracting attention to itself at the expense of the musical whole. Needless to say, impressions such as this mainly reflect the listener's expectations, and it could be that I was unwilling to accept the expiry of certain interactional threads that had engaged my attention earlier in the piece. We all want to hear certain things.

While "Prelude and Fluke" is a remarkable piece of music, the rest of the album is equally remarkable, with hundreds of special events distributed throughout. In "Bee in your Boppet" they achieve controlled, light, and rapid forward motion that makes the piece's seven minutes seem much shorter. As each phrase flies by, I'm amazed that two people can achieve such an equal balance while continually reinventing their thematic material.

Titular kin "Clang 1" and "Clang 2" can be compared to each other in a general way, as they both adopt a slow, brooding mood, yet the former is the only piece on the disc I can't claim much enthusiasm for. It seems like they got trapped into projecting a certain type of emotion that sapped their creative energies, with Falesch's playing striking these ears as an endless string of cliches. In stark contrast, "Clang 2" is a stark masterpiece of restraint and emotional agitation, achieving an effect that "Clang 1" sounds like a failed attempt at. It was wise to make this the final piece on the CD, as it produces a state in which it is not possible to listen to another piece of music right away. Wright's playing between 1:35 and 2:09 is an example of the sort of simultaneous depth of feeling and fragile abstraction that I can't imagine coming from any other saxophone player I've ever heard. "Clang 2" should be heard by all fans of contemporary music.

Because it deals with many familiar phenomena, like pulse, momentum, long phrases, melody, etc, I find this to be an album that can be played all the way through without any loss of interpretative stamina, in contrast to some of Wright's other work from the same rough period (the recordings on Clang were made in late 2000 and early 2001), like Double Double; The Darkest Corner, The Most Conspicuous; Signs of Life; and Places to Go, which effect transcendental exhaustion with frightening rapidity and rank among my very favorite free improv recordings from any time or place. There's also a piano duo (with Wright on A=440 and Falesch on A=432) well situated in the middle of the disc, offering both timbral relief and continuity. This recording is a major achievement in both musicians' oeuvre, and I think most listeners would find it at least as rewarding as a Gratkowski/Gräwe or Parker/Schlippenbach duo.

~Michael Anton Parker

Posted by maparker on November 21, 2005 9:22 AM