Spring Heel Jack
Amassed
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Spring Heel Jack
Amassed
Thirsty Ear, 2003
RiYL: DJ Spooky, Matthew Shipp, Spiritualized |
They make their point with impeccable grace in the lengthy "One Hundred Years Before," a pale fresco of abstract chaos that fluctuates like magma, releasing smoky filaments of melody from several centers of gravity. The piece is yet another essay in cubistic decomposition and fusion, but the duo's surgery has never been so lyrical.
Lead-off track "Double Cross" is the real manifesto here: a hybrid of chamber music, bebop jazz, and dissonant avant-garde music that relies on the infinite subtleties of the musicians' counterpoint. The virtual absence of rhythm (sparse beats wander in a quantum lactice) opens unlimited space and relinquishes harmony to imagination. The way soulful bass lines and cubistic trumpet balladry coexist is not music, it is magic.
The jazz element is stronger throughout the album, the frantic drumming and the petulant horns recalling a Soho loft circa 1965, replete with Albert Ayler's cacophonic bacchanals and liquid piano a la Weather Report.
Elsewhere, funereal bells and martial chords open "Wormwood." A sense of tension is built by free notes that get darker and darker, ever more distorted. The instruments join in a cacophonic symphony, while the ideology of the absurd cultivated by Pere Ubu in Art Of Walking weds the most nocturnal jamming of Jimi Hendrix.
The search for order is a recurring theme. Spring Heel Jack make a point of following the most daring and contorted route, as in the surreal ballet of "Duel," where structure arises from the primordial fire of the saxophone, the piano's minimalistic repetition, and the apocalyptic drumming. The geometric saxophone improvisation over a bed of guitar distortions in "Maroc" recalls a younger, colder Anthony Braxton. That quest culminates in "Lit," where the trumpet intones a tender psalm over a majestic organ melody, some musique concrete, and a moving piano motif. It's a post-psychedelic sonic barbeque that harks back to Pink Floyd circa Atom Heart Mother and constitutes the poetic core of the album.
The mesmerizing Obscured is a summation of all the techniques, styles, and ideas lavished on the previous seven tracks, with the addition of a soul and rock element that bestows on it a very "earthly" quality. Soul organ drones breathe over a jungle beat (a rhythmic pattern that continues steadily for nine minutes) while the instruments take shifts at howling their joyful desperation, thereby concocting one of the most exhilarating orgies in modern jazz.
PIERO SCARUFFI | Piero Scaruffi runs the exhaustive music database Scaruffi.com. A native of Italy, he has also been praised for his work on the General Theory of Relativity, formal theories of the mind, and artificial intelligence. And no, we aren't making that up.