Cooper-Moore and Assif Tsahar continue to amass a reservoir of creative work on the latter’s Hopscotch imprint. After a couple of rewardingly eclectic duo albums, they hit genuine pay dirt teaming with Hamid Drake in a trio configuration and coming up with 2005’s Lost Brother. This new one tweaks the template slightly, trading Drake’s trap kit for that of Chad Taylor, a regular in the Chicago Underground projects of Rob Mazurek. The customarily stark line drawn cover art depicts a piano as holster for pistol, the slight irony being that C-M’s ivories are nowhere to be found in the set. The disc’s title cleverly conveys the players’ application of bargain basement electronics to add color their aural collages.
C-M’s diddley-bow lines wobble and bank like a ball bearing rolling up and down a length of irregularly grooved rail. His elastic patterns on the amplified one-string are often funky in spite of themselves, the chicken scratch strums of “Turn it Up” generating a chugging groove and then threatening to implode it through percolating repetition. The same tactic holds true on the even more slippery “Human Interface”, fuzzy string tendrils undulating atop a punchy backbeat as Tsahar riffs expressively on tenor. Taylor plays more consistently “in-pocket” than his predecessor, but resists predictability through a broad menu of beats. Tsahar once again wears his David Murray influences through the purring rasp pregnant in many of his phrases and a lithe dancing attack, most prominently on the somber shuffle “Money Wars.”
“Old Saint Peter” finds C-M’s singing a sardonic ditty through a vintage microphone set-up against a light calypso rhythm of brushed drums, stereo-channeled strings and overdubbed sax. “Electric Garden” blooms in a loose assemblage of amplified percussion, contact mic static and sibilating bass clarinet. “Bones” and “Misanthropes” traffic in more proto-elecrofunk, C-M’s diddley bow twice again obliterating any craving for a conventional bass presence with slab-sized vamps. The title piece joins mouth-bow, an instrument that lodged in C-M’s jowls strongly brings to mind Charles Burnham’s violin in its sliding tonal dexterity, with Tsahar’s didgeridoo drone. A chugging dub beat by Taylor completes the package. “True to Life” and “Refuge” center on luminous marimba rhythms and gentle winding braids of overdubbed reeds that easily erode jaded listener defenses. Along with its slightly older sibling, this disc is a decisive acid test for the argument that creative improvised music is far from played out.
~ Derek Taylor
Posted by derek on January 2, 2007 12:50 PMYou know, I can't begin to count the number of times I've seen a record review offered disc X as "proof" that free jazz/free improv/jazz/whatever "is still alive", "isn't dead", "there's still life in it", &c. (This isn't a complaint about you Derek or the review, just about a kind of stylized rhetorical move that I see constantly.) I know this provides a tidy way of wrapping up a review but it just strikes me as overused & phony. I know there's a strong temptation to get defensive about dismissals of the genre's relevance from various quarters (as its history gets longer & longer & its key monuments start to get further pushed back into the past) but in the end you have to just recommend the music on its own merits, to readers who've already got a strong interest in the genre.
Posted by: nd at January 2, 2007 1:14 PMYou’re right Nate; it is a pretty tired rhetorical device, almost on par with what I consider the king of clichéd review sign-offs: “rewards repeated listening.” But in this case, I intended it as shorthand for asserting how fresh this particular disc sounds. These three guys have tapped into a collective voice that really isn’t like anything out there at the moment, thanks in large part to C-M’s contributions. To drop another sentence bordering on the sloganish: so far, the well they’re dipping from seems far from dry. I’ve yet to tire of either this new one or Lost Brother. Sure, the genre of which they’re a part isn’t in any real danger of dying, but they’re definitely among those contributing strongly to its creative vibrancy, at least IMO.
You stated, “in the end you have to just recommend the music on its own merits, to readers who’ve already got a strong interest in the genre.” What about readers who don’t qualify under that condition? What’s the best way, in your opinion, to hook them? I’d argue that one good way is to speak to a given album’s unconventionality within a larger genre context.
Posted by: derek at January 2, 2007 2:26 PM"Rewards repeated listening" is a little different: it's a cliche but it is quite likely to be true. The other--claiming a recording represents new life for a dying genre--manages at once to be a cliche & also almost certainly false. One can't expunge all cliches from writing--usually the cure's worse than the disease--but one should avoid rhetoric that sounds patently false, I think.
Re: audience, well the rhetorical move in question already implies a reader who is familiar with the internal faultlines of the jazz & avant-garde music community (e.g., it implies the reader is aware of the polemics around later developments like e.a.i.). So it's not a move that even makes sense to use for a readership that's not familiar with the territory. -- Virtually all the reviews you or I write are for specialist mags & websites. I do write differently for the one nonspecialist mag (Exclaim) but it's mostly a matter of avoiding lots of namedropping &c.
Posted by: nd at January 3, 2007 5:55 AMI guess I’d say it’s patently false in a literal sense, but not in a subjective one. There are plenty of recordings that have “revived” or “energized” my interest in improvised music over the years whether they’ve had any measurable larger bearing on the genre or not. This is one of them. As to “rewards repeated listening”: it may be true, but it’s just as hollow a phrase IMO since the same sentiment can hopefully be inferred from specific assertions/examples in the body of the review.
As to the contention in your second paragraph, I’d argue that it’s not necessarily the case. There are fault lines in pretty much any musical genre. Pop music, for example, is continually, fielding false claims that it’s “creatively played out” as a genre. Same goes for blues, country, etc. As such, I think speaking to divisions (specifically or generally) in a musical genre isn’t necessarily going to fly over “novice” readers heads. You don’t need to be a “specialist” to have an inkling about these issues.
Posted by: derek at January 3, 2007 6:29 AMbesides lost brother, and it sounds like this disc too, i don;t know of other cooper-moore recordings where uses primarily or exclusively that diddly-bow and other non-piano stuff.
Are there other recordings that put that stuff at the forefront of his arsenal?
(I love that stuff, and will probably check this out despite my usual indifference to taylor's playing)
Cuke, I’d recommend checking out the two Hopscotch duo albums w/ Tsahar, Tells Untold and America. The former has no piano at all and the latter only sparingly, if memory serves.
Posted by: derek at January 3, 2007 4:13 PMI enjoyed reading the dialogue post review more than the review itself--
I think in any music, the twist on a formula has produced the best results {here with the "bass" role played so well by C.M>
kinda sounds like a happier version of tim berne's "THE SHELL GAME"
which is still the best bassless album out there-------
assif and crue have tapped something and i hope they further delve into it------
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