The Great Lakes Suites [2CD]

Avant Jazz / Free Improvisation / Avant-Garde
premiera polska: 2015-01-30
kontynent: Ameryka Północna
kraj: USA
opakowanie: digipackowe etui
opis:
jazzarium.pl:
Ostatnie kilka lat to czas Wadady Leo Smitha. Jego aktywność jest wielka i zazwyczaj skutkuje płytami, co najmniej intrygującymi. Co więcej działa w różnych instrumentalnych i w ogóle muzycznych kontekstach. Piszemy zresztą na łamach Jazzarium regularnie o jego przedsięwzięciach. Oczywiście najbardziej popularnym, przynajmniej w Polsce, jest jak do tej pory jego najsłynniejsza formacja The Golden Quartet. No, ale nie ma co się za bardzo dziwić, grupa zgarnia bardzo prestiżowe nagrody albo jest do nich nominowana i wydała „Ten Freedom Summers” Wadadowe opus magnum i jednocześnie płytę podsumowującą lata jego aktywnej walki o prawa obywatelskie w USA.

Ale Ten „Freedom Summers” to już trochę przeszłość, choć band działa cały czas. Dzisiaj miłośnicy talentu tego wyśmienitego trębacza i filozofa improwizacji spoglądają w stronę nowego kwartetu, który swą nazwę wziął od nagrania, którym cieszyć się możemy od nie całych dwóch miesięcy.„Great Lakes Suites” ujrzał światło dzienne 16 września 2014 roku i zelektryzował jazzowy świat, jeszcze zanim ten usłyszał zawartą na płycie muzykę. Stało się tak przede wszystkim za sprawą składu. Oto obok Wadady Leo Smitha i znanego z The Golden Quartet basisty Johna Lindberga, w grupie znalazły się dwie inne ikony chicagowskiej sceny: Henry Threadgill i Jack DeJohnette. W ten sposób słuchacze dostali używając języka dzisiejszego dziennikarstwa kwartet megagwiazdorski. To oczywiście nie zawsze oznacza, że muzyka przez takie bandy gwarantuje prawdziwie megamuzyczny poziom. Tym razem jednak, przynajmniej w moim odczuciu, tak właśnie się stało. Jak głosi tytuł płyty cały muzyczny materiał, który tu usłyszymy to wielka muzyczna wypowiedź na temat Wielkich Jezior Ameryki Północnej. Jest ich pięć: Michigan, Ontario, Górne, Huron oraz Erie. Ale na płycie ścieżek dźwiękowych jest sześć. Ostatnią trębacz poświęcił jezioru ST. Clair, którego wielkim nazwać ni jak nie sposób, zwłaszcza w kontekście pozostałych akwenów, ale dla geografii i całego ich ekosystemu mającego znaczenie niebagatelne.Sporym jednak nadużyciem byłoby widzieć w tym zbiorze sześciu suit dzieło programowe. Sam Wadada od takiego pomysłu postrzegania swojej muzyki odżegnuje się. Wielkie Jeziora nie tyle zostały przez niego sportretowane, co stały się iskrą zapalającą kreatywną wyobraźnię. Ta natomiast nie podsunęła liderowi jakiejś szczególnie odkrywczej idei muzycznej i nie pchnęła na tory nieznanych muzycznych przestrzeni. Wręcz przeciwnie.Jest tak jak to zawsze u Wanady Leo Smitha bywało, kiedy stawał na czele własnych akustycznych grup. Najbardziej trywialnym byłoby opisać tę muzykę, jako nowoczesny, kameralny free jazz. Ta etykieta jednak, choć dająca się bronić, kompletnie nic nie mówi o tym, z jakiego rodzaju doznania dźwiękowe nas czekają.Magia zawartej na płycie muzyki bierze swoje źródło nie w koncepcji, ale ze sposobu, w jaki do materii muzycznej podchodzą jej wykonawcy. Majestatyczne współbrzmienia trąbki i saksofonu altowego wprowadzają nas w kolejne części płyty, potem zdarzenia rozgrywają się w najróżniejszych konfiguracjach od duetów po kwartety, ale bez pośpiesznych i głośnych erupcji, bez zawiłych fraz ani kulminacji rozumianych, jako eskalacja intensywności. Narracja płynie swoim wcale niespiesznym tempem, choć czasem od perkusyjnych spiętrzeń aż robi się gorąco. Nie mniej jest miejsce dla wszystkich. Nikt jednak, a już szczególnie Smith i Threadgill, tej ofiarowanej przez muzykę przestrzeni nie śmie zagadać. Chwilami odnoszę wrażenie, że jest ona z namaszczeniem przez nich celebrowana.W taki sposób grają tylko muzycy najwyższej próby. Twórcy mający wielki szacunek dla kompozycji i świadomi tego, że brzmienie i forma to sprawy tak samo ważne jak indywidualne umiejętności improwizatorskie. Te natomiast najbardziej dobitnie i najbardziej przejmująco uzewnętrzniają się, kiedy gra się tylko te najważniejsze dźwięki. To ogromne doświadczenie każdego z członków kwartetu pozwoliło im zamknąć w oszczędnych frazach, fascynujących brzmieniowych splotach rozpinających się na całą swoją mądrość wynikającą z wielu dekad bardzo poważnego traktowania muzyki.W swoim zamyślonym brzmieniu i niegłośnej intensywności muzyka z „The Great Lakes Suite” wywołuje niekiedy dreszcze i zdumiewa. I chyba w ogóle mogłaby nie być zadedykowana Wielkim Jeziorom. Wystarczy, że po prostu jest.
autor: Maciej Karłowski


THE GREAT LAKES SUITES

The Great Lakes began to form at the end of the last glacial period around 10,000 years ago as retreating ice sheets carved basins into the land and they filled with melted water.
The placement of the lakes at the top of the Northern hemisphere of the Earth serves as a huge cape or umbrella and symbolically represents a source of food and energy and a means of protection for the entire globe.

My inspiration for composing the music on The Great Lakes Suites is centered around the idea of the Great Lakes being located in the uppermost part of the Northern hemisphere and the fact that it took a long time for them to develop and form as a large body of water. My score reflects the idea of the flatness of the lakes´ surfaces. The lakes´ flatness does not, however, imply for me stasis or inactivity. What I wish to express compositionally is the simultaneous notions of the lakes being flat and their volatility as the fundamental characteristics of the Great Lakes. Restrained, yet explosive.

The other quality I wanted to express in the compositions was multiple sectional forms, ideally, thinking of each composition as being a suite or set of multiple pieces.
In The Great Lakes Suites, I was not concerned with the types and differences of species that make their home in this great body of water, but more with The Journey - transportation, transformation, communication and the principles of wave formations.

Traditionally, the Great Lakes have only five in their collection. I decided to add Lake St. Clair to their number and, therefore, my compositions features six Great Lakes.
My compositions for the five Great Lakes are dedicated to Petri Haussila, who comes from the land of a thousand lakes, whereas "Lake St. Clair," or "Lake St. Clair Lake Oliver Lake," is for Oliver Lake.
New Haven, Connecticut, May 1, 2014
Wadada Leo Smith


WADADA LEO SMITH
"There´s nothing like the Great Lakes," mused Wadada Leo Smith in August 2012, while on a plane from Austria to America following a performance with Muhal Richard Abrams´ Experimental Band. "Why don´t I compose a piece for the most fascinating, the most powerful, the most life-sustaining, the largest body of fresh water in the world?" As he was composing, Henry Threadgill reminded him that Oliver Lake is also a Great Lake.

Between the province of Ontario in Canada and six states of the United States lie four of the Great Lakes: Lake Superior, Lake Huron, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, the fifth Great Lake, Lake Michigan, is a long finger into the Midwestern United States. This chain of huge lakes has 21 percent of the world´s fresh water. In Smith´s grand suite, there is also the comparatively small Lake St. Clair, located in the passage between Lake Erie and Lake Huron, which has petitioned to become a sixth Great Lake, this, Smith suggests, can also be Lake Oliver Lake.

Three musicians in this quartet were born and spent their youths in cities near the Great Lakes, Henry Threadgill and JackDeJohnette in Chicago and John Lindberg in the greater Detroit area, whereas Wadada Leo Smith himself lived in Chicago near the beaches and harbors of Lake Michigan for several personally crucial years in the late 1960s. The Great Lakes they knew still bustle with shipping, fishing, sporting. There´s pollution, too - two of North America´s five largest cities are on the shores, as are six other major league cities, smaller cities and various industries. On the wide shorelines where cities and industry are not, vacation sites, forests, rugged lands and scenic areas are found. Long before the Great Lakes Quartet and us, the lakes were scenes of war - among Native American, Colonial, British and French forces, and between Iroquois and Algonquin-speaking peoples. For centuries before Europeans arrived, the Great Lakes were home as well as the route of commerce and communications between eastern and western peoples. And for a hundred millenia before life appeared, a vast glacier carved the lakes into the ground.

Yet, The Great Lakes Suites represent by no means program music or impressionism, there´s no portrayal of calm or stormy waters, of sailboats or islands, of ice or shipwrecks. The analogue is not Claude Debussy´s La Mer but rather much closer to the pure, direct beauty of his 1915 flute-viola-harp Sonata. In Wadada Leo Smith´s work, too, only the music matters, there are no external associations. True, the artist meditates on this world´s Great Lakes. What we hear, then, are beauty and purity from another world, Smith´s world. It´s a world with its own forms and bold sound colors and without the surface tensions of so much of today´s improvised music.

Above all else, Smith is a lyric artist. Everything else in his musical world - his composing, his improvising, his concepts of structure and form - flow from this fact. All of his composing and improvising "are one big connection." In a description reminiscent of the painter Picasso´s methods, he says: "I never set out to find out before I play, I discover that after I play, and when I´m composing, I never set out to know what I´m going to compose until I start taking notes and putting them into construction." His concentration on lyricism is self-aware. He traces his trumpet ancestry back even beyond Louis Armstrong, to the sensitive melodist Joe Smith, "the first really great lyrical jazz cornet player."

In Wadada Leo Smith´s trumpeting, there´s a fundamental sense of rubato behind his great freedom of motion. Silence as well as sound comprise Smith´s melodic lines. His spaces enhance the effect of his sounds and his phrases. The phrases contrast with each other, his lines move in distinctly shaped phrases. The sound of his trumpet moves, too. Basically, it´s a rich sound, full in all registers, which he varies with mutes and sometime vivid inflections. Hear his "Lake Ontario" solo, which starts with a marvelous, rough split tone, a note with undertones that make a little fanfare. While this solo has even more contrasts than a bop solo - sound, space, phrase shapes and directions, longer vs. shorter note values and phrase lengths, variable momentums from slow to moderately fast - Smith´s musical line flows gracefully, naturally. His enormous freedom leads to his sense of form: "I think that being a lyrical trumpet player means you can make extended melody that has the possibility of being a really large arc." His large arcs are ever so subtly and firmly made.

There are arcs of line in Smith´s composing. Always, he seeks balances of elements. Altogether, he composed 40 pages of music for The Great Lakes Suites, each CD can be listened to as a separate, satisfying three-movement suite. Most movements have several themes. He also composed parameters for his fellow improvisers-interpreters. Settings, textures change. For example, his opening movement of the second CD, "Lake Huron," includes eight distinct sections featuring different textures, mostly flowing one to another. An opening trumpet solo is in longer tones and a slow momentum over fast, busy bass and drums. After two themes by horns and rhythm, an alto sax solo is accompanied by variations on a medium-tempo bass-drums vamp, a tempo that continues under a second trumpet solo - hear how the three players spontaneously end this solo on the same notes. Threadgill also plays bass flute in this piece, and notice how many different sounds DeJohnette invents on his drum kit and develops into accompanying lines here and throughout The Great Lakes Suites. Smith´s quartet gives him so many subtle elements to balance in his textures and lines.

In his small 1973 book, notes (8 pieces), Smith wrote: "...each improviser creates as an element of the whole, only responding to that which he is creating within himself." "I still feel that way," Smith says. "When you do that, every voice in the ensemble can be heard for its own value. If you have three people or four or 25 people in an ensemble, every one of them should have a distinct way of being present, of manifesting what they´re doing in that composition and why they´re there. That´s what made special the orchestras of Duke Ellington and others from the past, where every personality in the ensemble means something and you can hear them."

What musicians! Smith speaks of "the kinesthetic energy that´s the spiritual dimension of the men who´re playing together, how they connect." In a very different way, Henry Threadgill´s playing in The Great Lakes Suites conveys senses of balance and of sound-space close to Smith´s rhythmic originality. Like most of his work in recent years, his alto saxophone solos here (on "Lake Michigan," "Lake Superior," "Lake Huron" and "Lake St. Clair") convey space, daring and nervous tension, with spiky notes and splintered phrases that develop into flowing lines. Then, on flute ("Lake Ontario") and bass flute ("Lake Erie"), he presents different styles: longer tones that also include cliffhanger intervals, spaces are filled. His sound is highly inflected, his vibrato is wide and slow. While there´s a center of calm in Smith, even in his occasional fast passages, there´s a sense of danger in Threadgill, even in his long-tone vibrato: Look out, he´s gonna get ya.

Against the free movements of the two horns, there is the busier activity of the bassist and drummer. Lindberg is closely attuned to the trumpeter. Sometimes, the bass line is as independent as the horn´s, at other times, as in the duet segments during "Lake Huron" and "Lake Erie," the bowed bass balances and sometimes imitates Smith´s phrases, they converse - his interplay is marvelous. He can also offer virtuoso lines that recall Charles Mingus, as in his fluttery opening to "Lake Ontario" and in his solos. Lindberg´s choices, for example, of notes, rhythm, momentum, to bow or to pluck, are invariably just right. Of course, such highly refined empathy is necessary in this music.

"Jack DeJohnette and I have never, ever struggled to play music together. I´ve always felt inspired when he´s playing the drums. The main reason is, I don´t have to figure out how to use my sound or worry what the count is or the nature of the activity he´s using - is it swing, is it this or is it that? What he does is he picks up the essence of each person´s creative energy putting that into the mix, as opposed to having a form that fits everyone in the ensemble, and the whole piece or the whole segment." DeJohnette´s feeling for textures is especially important in The Great Lakes Suites. Seldom do his textures become dense. He almost never impose patterns on the music, until the minute of funk that concludes the final piece, "Lake St. Clair."

So subtlety, sensitivity, virtuosity, balance, freedom of motion comprise The Great Lakes Suites by Wadada Leo Smith´s Great Lakes Quartet. Right now is a wonderfully fertile period in his career, as if Smith is feeling a second wind in the new millennium. What a joy that he´s so active and his work is now so well documented with productions such as this.
Chicago, May 9, 2014
John Litweiler

muzycy:
Wadada Leo Smith: trumpet
Henry Threadgill: alto saxophone, flute and bass flute
John Lindberg: double bass
Jack DeJohnette: drums

utwory:
CD 1:
1. Lake Michigan
2. Lake Ontario
3. Lake Superior
TT 41:46

CD 2:
1. Lake Huron
2. Lake Erie
3. Lake St. Clair
TT 48:35

wydano: 2014-12
more info: www.tumrecords.com