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FEATURE

Treader

Friday, January 29, 2010

Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith

Abbey Road Quartet (Treader)

Hayward/Coxon/Thomas/Taylor

About (Treader)

Treader Duos (Treader)

It’s about time the Jazz Mann reviewed some Treader product. In their distinctive, gold-animal-embossed sleeves the recordings on this label are as adventurous and idiosyncratic as they look, and of a uniformly high standard. Straightforward propositions are rare, however, as the two titles under consideration here attest. The label is a tonic, a prime example of music flourishing beyond the music industry. There is a clear unifying aesthetic at work that thrives on interaction with the external, where wildcard elements are injected into familiar relationships. The two titles under review exemplify the Treader strategy where an internationally-renowned geuest star is invited to front a group assembled from the multivalent London-centric improv scene. The label is run by John Coxon and Ashley Wales. It grew from their later, more improv-oriented ensemble recordings under the Spring Heel Jack banner, and through concert series such as the sorely missed sessions at the Red Rose club in North London.

My slow-burning appreciation of American trumpeter Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith has reached the point at which it’s an itch that must be scratched, and the Abbey Road Quartet CD fits the bill nicely. Although Smith has a low profile in the UK he is known through his collaborations with Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, and Derek Bailey’s Company. Recent recordings by his Golden Quartet (alongside Jack DeJohnette, Anthony Davis, and Malachi Favors) are well worth seeking out, but this new release on Treader is particularly interesting. Smith’s quartet features Coxon on Electric guitar (Coxon and Smith also recorded an earlier Treader disc, Brooklyn Duos), Treader mainstay Pat Thomas on piano and synthesizer, and the ubiquitous-in-London Mark Sanders on Drums, all of whom promise to put Smith squarely on his mettle. 
The first nine impressionistic minutes of the lengthy For Johnny Dyani features synth demi-drones floating impressionistically around Smith’s trumpet, but thereafter the harsher, more concise tones of piano and needles of electric guitar goad Smith to a brief flurry of aggression. By the twelth minute there are only Sanders’ brushed drums, but this stillness is punctuated by atonal samples. The tracks earlier moods are reprised, only more harsh and atonal.

For Ashley Wales is built from sequential surges of activity, dominated by the plangency of Smith’s trumpet undercut by warm washes of eerily mournful synthesizer. Sanders’ drums and Coxon’s guitar worry away at a sonic periphery they sometimes threaten to overwhelm. At under five minutes For Mongezi Feza is a skittish curiosity that somehow evokes the same mood as did Vernon Elliott’s music for those seventies knitwear aliens the Clangers, as the brightness of a xylophone adds welcome brightness to the record.

Coxon’s guitar initially prompts a tentative mood at the intro to For Grant Green, but Smith plays more imposingly and Thomas thereafter dominates with some high-pitched pitch-shifted synthesizer. A woozy atmosphere develops, which Sanders settles by stepping up the hit rate with a light touch. His drum intro to For Elton Dean establishes a brighter and more emphatic mood, a queer sort of march-time that’s buoyed by Thomas’ piano and synth. When these recede Coxon’s guitar insinuates a much more worrisome tone. Overall this music is irregular, restlessly shifting, mercurial, kaleidoscopically protean, and always mutable. Its transitional nature won’t appeal to everyone, but its creators chart fresh territory compellingly, and with a skewed but explicit emotional engagement.
The second of the discs under review, About, is rather clunkily if even-handedly attributed to Hayward/Coxon/Thomas/Taylor, but is essentially a product of ex-This Heat and latterly ex-Massacre drummer Charles Hayward’s wayward genius. The other three musicians—Coxon and Thomas again, plus Hot Chip keyboardist Alexis Taylor—all play mainly synthesiser, though Coxon also gets a credit for samples, and Taylor for electric guitar, drums, percussion, and shruti box (the latter being a wooden bellows instrument that is used to provide the accompanying drone in North Indian classical music). It is presumably Alexis Taylor who drums on Forgacs, since Hayward’s melodica is prominent on this track. Where Abbey Road Quartet is impressionistic and eminently thoughtful, About is all about the cerebrum letting go. Forgacs has a raggedy-ass, rough-and-tumble momentum which is both persuasive and great fun. Payne is less successful however, with Hayward’s rock-steady rhythm getting bogged down in its repetitions and outstaying its welcome. The fourth and final track, Relph, initially promises to be more thoughtful, but the groups’ impetus ineluctably picks up and bears them onwards, surging pell-mell to the album’s climax. 
It isn’t subtle, but About has a spontaneity, a carefree boisterousness and a disregard for genre that makes it absolutely compelling. It should certainly appeal to the more open minded fans of This Heat, and to anyone seeking a more rooted cousin to Kieren ‘Four Tet’ Hebden and Steve Reid’s Exchange Sessions. I had a lot of fun working out who the four tracks are dedicated to, and some online foraging took me to some interesting places. The following are no more than my best guesses, and may not be in the least relevant to the review, though I’d suggest the common ingredients of artiness, individuality, intelligence and conceptual clarity tells you something. The only credible candidate for Degraw‘s dedicatee is artist and Brooklyn hipsters Gang Gang Dance keyboardist Brian DeGraw. Forgacs will refer to filmmaker and multi-media artist Péter Forgács, sometime member of Hungarian music ensemble Group 180, who apparently championed American minimalist composers as well as fellow Hungarians such as Tibor Szemzo. Tracks three and four, Payne and Relph are probably dedications to Oliver Payne and Nick Relph, the British filmmaking duo who made a medium-sized noise in 2002 with Mixtape, an arty assemblage of “wild, trance-inducing loops”. It’s not hard there, at least, to see the parallel to the music of About.

Finally, also well worth checking out is a companion title, Treader Duos, which documents three saxophone/clarinet and drums duos by John Butcher and Mark Sanders, Alex Ward and Roger Turner, and John Tchicai and Tony Marsh respectively. The format is more tried and tested than those of the other titles I’ve reviewed, but all of the musicians are all masterly and the twenty-minute limitation on each set compells them to make their statements both innovative and compellingly direct.