Artist: Muhal Richard Abrams
Album: Celestial Birds
Genre: Avant-Garde Jazz
Label: Karlrecords
Released: 2020
Quality: FLAC (tracks)
Tracklist:
- The Bird Song (22:39)
- Conversations With the Three of Me (05:46)
- Think All, Focus One (05:36)
- Spihumonesty (07:55)
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In the era of major recession of the traditional record industry, keeping a label alive is in itself an act of virtuosity: but lavishing on the re-edition of rare works destined for a restricted niche is an indication of uncommon passion and intellectual nobility, ignoring the concrete economic risk arising at each step. With this modus operandi Thomas Herbst's Karlrecords has gained absolute prestige in the independent circuit, particularly with the 'Perihel' series curated by Reinhold Friedl, founder and artistic director of the zeitkratzer ensemble.
If the recent definitive reissues of Iannis Xenakis' electronic masterpieces – "La légende d'Eer" and "Persepolis" – could still reach a relatively more transversal audience, this compilation dedicated to the African American pioneer Muhal Richard Abrams (1930–2017) is equivalent to a bet as onerous as it is necessary to rebalance the official history of the American musical avant-garde.
It will surprise many, in fact, to discover that behind the name of Abrams lies the mentor who, with his Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), laid the foundations for the meeting and subsequent affirmation of various free jazz legends from the Sixties onwards: among them Anthony Braxton, Leroy Jenkins, George Lewis and the core members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago (Roscoe Mitchell and Lester Bowie), also appearing to various title in the pieces gathered in this collection. They were the disruptive "black" response to the aleatory movement Fluxus and to the post-serialist currents of the New York School: in this sense, therefore, M.R. Abrams' influence on the Chicago underground scene could reasonably be compared to that of John Cage in the fervent cultural humus of the Big Apple.
Nonetheless, Abrams has never found his place in the world: ignored by the elite of cultured music and concert halls, and consequently ousted from the centers for research in electronic music, his boundless musical vision also met the dissent from a certain jazz environment, guilty of a purism that contemplated only the acoustic sound in ideological opposition to the artifices practicable in the recording studio, to safeguard the human component – and the racial identity – inherent in its music.
A composer and multi-instrumentalist juggling with piano, clarinet and cello, in his wide discography Abrams has always had to keep in the background the experiments and hybridizations with electronics, an expression of the desire to go even further beyond the self-imposed boundaries of American jazz – however eclectic and foreign to schemes. The LP compilation "Celestial Birds" intends to give back full dignity to this forgotten side of its inventiveness, with a selection of four tracks recorded between 1968 and 1995 and included in as many albums signed in his own name.
The only extended track, the suite titled "The Bird Song" occupied the entire B-side of the debut album "Levels and Degrees of Light" (1968), demonstrating Abrams' ambition and early interest in collage and rearrangement in post-production. In a chapter of his essay "The Jazz Image: Seeing Music through Herman Leonard's Photography", K. Heather Pinson compared Abrams' free form piece with the "ornithological allusions" in the music of the second half of the twentieth century, from Charlie "Bird" Parker to Olivier Messiaen's monumental "Catalogue d’oiseaux", indeed some plausible references for an author who aspired to full recognition by the intelligentsia of that time.
In the first minutes, after an introduction of wrenching saxophone overtones, it's David Moore's poetic recitation that resonates in solitary, verses with free metrics and without a distinct logical thread that sound like a prophetic announcement from above – perhaps an imminent Apocalypse who will do justice to discrimination against the black community?
Immediately afterwards the instruments of a complete jazz band make their bold entrance: the aforementioned Braxton and Jenkins on alto sax and violin, Maurice McIntyre on tenor sax, Leonard Jones on double bass, Thurman Barker on drums and Abrams himself on piano and clarinet. Through the reverberations and the stereophonic diffusion provided by the composer their voices are no longer those of an ensemble in fervent dialogue, but spectral echoes evoked from the hidden recesses of a deep acousmatic dimension, a perspective space that alters the timbres and irreparably fades the edges, especially at the height of the chaos in continuous growth.
An actual birdsong blends and ultimately succumbs to the saturating clangs of percussion, to the high notes of the saxophones and to the screeching natural harmonics of the violin, which guides us to the other end of the tunnel with a series of dizzying and rapid scales going up and down the fret.
On the other side follow two pieces with the synthesizer, two different ways of giving vent to the multitudes stirring inside Abrams' creative mind. "Conversations With the Three of Me" (from The Hearinga Suite, 1989) opens with sharp piano chords, mindful of the late romanticism bordering on dissonance of Schoenberg's klavierstücke, but with an underlying gravity that today also refers us to the pained recitals of the long-forgotten maestro Julius Eastman. In the second half of the piece the abandonment of the piano in favor of the synth marks a reversal both in mood and language: inconsequential notes alternate like short blows of reeds in the wind, now no longer at the mercy of human ingenuity and therefore free to mean nothing.
The title track from the subsequent "Think All, Focus One" (1995) is even more schizoid in its overlapping of rhythmic levels and irregular phrasings with contrasting effects, with a mocking attitude that seems to trace Frank Zappa's last (and almost coeval) flairs with the Synclavier.
Concluding the collection is the title track from "Spihumonesty" (1980): a guttural synth drone (Abrams together with George Lewis) and the wavy motions of Yousef Yancey's theremin outline a disquiet space-ambient scenery that gets unstuck only after five minutes, when the liquid trajectories of an electric organ dissolve the dominant tension, nonetheless without concealing a deeply interrogative tone, in fact not resolving the composition and thus leaving the picture on hypothetical suspension points.
Although the framing of Muhal Richard Abrams' figure is a necessary premise to the listening experience, the pieces recontextualized in "Celestial Birds" are a significant testimony to the visionary intuitions that made him a guru for his entourage of talents, staunch defenders of an expressive freedom practiced intransigently, unaware of any direction other than forward.