Sara Serpa: Encounters & Collisions (Biophilia Records)
Sara Serpa is a singer of a different order who loosely embodies a strand of “the tradition” in which the taking of risks is not only welcome but in some measure expected. This album is the most autobiographical she’s ever produced, and the relating of her experiences of arriving in the USA from her native Portugal puts flesh on the bones of a story among many migratory stories. Indeed stories as in what might be called spoken word interludes are integral to this set and in terms of track numbers make up exactly half of it. While they undoubtedly serve the interest of the bigger picture, they are arguably surplus to the requirements of this review.
The trio of saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, pianist Angelica Sanchez and cellist Erik Friedlander, together with Serpa’s sung lyrics and wordless excursions, conjure up a form of chamber music that’s arguably as distant from the customary understandings of what that means as it is from any album of the much recorded standards.
On Language the mood is one of a form of intimacy that falls a little outside the norms, at least in musical terms. Sanchez’s solo is understated and all the better for it, while it’s clear that all four participants are firm believers in the idea that less is more.
Given the album’s subject matter, a title such as Between Worlds is pretty obvious. the mood is one of intimacy that falls a little outside of the widely understood norms, at least in musical terms. Sanchez’s solo is understated and all the better for it, while it’s clear that all four participants are firm believers in the idea that less is more. Friedlander, with both fingers and bow, makes a telling contribution, not least in a duo passage with Serpa in which both voice and cello work for the common goal of leaving a lasting impression.
Viewed overall, I suspect (even in February and even though I sincerely hope to be proved wrong) that this might well turn out to be one of the less predictable new vocal releases of the year. Certainly the overall subject matter falls outside of the established orders, and the same goes for the music.
Sun Ra: Lights On A Satellite: Live At The Left Bank (Resonance Records HCD-2074)
Given the nature of his discography, rife as it is with releases on small, sometimes highly transitory labels of his own generation, the idea of a previously unreleased set of Sun Ra music might be a little incongruous, but that’s what we have here, captured in better fidelity than some of those releases referred to above, as it was at the Left Bank Jazz Society in Baltimore on 23 July 1978.
There’s historical depth sufficient to take in a quick run through of Horace Henderson’s Big John’s Special and Arthur Johnston and Sam Coslow’s Cocktails For Two, which in a duo consisting of Ra on piano and Marshall Allen on alto sax gets treated with a measure of irreverence falling short of Spike Jones’s.
Lights On A Satellite itself finds that other stalwart of Ra aggregations, John Gilmore, in almost rhapsodic mode. The band coalesce around him in a manner indicative of the amount of rehearsal time this incarnation of Ra’s band put in.
Danny Ray Thompson’s baritone sax gives some heft to We Travel The Spaceways, an effect which is (positively) offset by Ra utilizing a keyboard instrument the sound of which falls outside the customary reference points – organ, piano, electric piano, synthesizer, even clavinet – although at a push it might be one of the latter.
Offering both context and opinions, the accompanying, unusually obese booklet includes essays from the likes of Allen, Gary Bartz and John Fowler of the Left Bank Jazz Society. Would that all releases came with such diligence and attention to detail. The reading serves amongst other things to remind us (as if we needed it) that not only have the moments in time when such ensembles walked this earth passed, allowing of course for the fact that the centurion Marshall Allen is still at the helm of a version of this one, but also that their approach to jazz and the making of it has largely been eclipsed (not entirely positively) by academic application.
Savina Yannatou, Floros Floridis, Barry Guy, Ramón López: Kouarteto (Maya Recordings MCD 2402)
Of the four names making up this group bass player Guy has the deepest pedigree, but such is the nature of the free play to be found here that this doesn’t count for much. All four members, regardless of depth of experience, are more than capable of functioning in an environment in which little or nothing is predetermined, and the resulting music offers ample reward for those who wish to meet its demands.
On pieces such as Ydra 3 vocalist Yannatou gets as close to “leading” proceedings as anyone, although the overall impression is of a profoundly democratic quartet intent on dispersing the focus of attention four ways.
Even when a duo holds sway, as Yannatou and Floridis on bass clarinet do on Ydra 8, the dialogue is never dominated by one or the other, and the music flows in a manner defiant of convention while acutely aware of the passing moments in a way that arguably might escape musicians playing in a mode of improvised music closer to the contemporary jazz mainstream.
With that loosely in mind Ydra 6 (Greek Lullaby) coalesces around a traditional lullaby sung by Yannatou in the midst of a musical environment quite at odds with notions of any tradition stretching back before, say, World War Two. Does the result qualify as “world music”? I’ll leave that question for anyone who wants to bother with it. Suffice to say that the degree to which this piece – along with both Ydra 11 (Hebrew/Greek) and Ydra 13 (Albanian), both of which also crossover into titular realms – marks no significant shift in the overall programme is telling in itself.
The relatively animated Ydra 12 finds the volume going up and the music consequently relatively lacking in nuance. However, not even in this instance is rhetoric empty or otherwise emblematic of proceedings.
