What is captivating on this record as the way in which the quartet are equally adept at creating perfectly imperfect sounds and manipulating these in ways that their bandmates are rewarded and celebrated.
Irritable Mystic: IMR003
Jason Stein: bass clarinet; Marilyn Crispell: piano; Damon Smith: double bass; Adam Shead: drums
Recorded June 19th 2023 by Nick Broste at Palisade Studios
In the CD cover there is a note to say that ‘this entire studio session is recorded in the order it was played’. The titles of the pieces are drawn from the poem of Nathaniel Mackey (Adumbrating the band we’d be) in the CD case. The poem is a surreal tale of travelling musicians playing in a frightening town, but this provides the sense, matter, and mattering of the pieces. It also provides the odd hyphen in the album’s title (A spi- / raling horn grew out of my backbone, up- / wards in back of my head and above it,…).
On the opening track, ‘a song paid by singing’, Stein’s bass clarinet enters cautiously over drum and bass that slink around in nervous circles, before it starts to gain confidence and to confide in the piano. A couple of minutes in and the clarinet’s caution disappears and it brashly calls out various lines of melody (‘talking big’ the poem has it). Beneath this, bass and drums increase in tempo and vigour, with the piano gradually stirring a storm that is unleashed across the final third of the piece to exhilarating effect.
Of course, any recording featuring Crispell is a must-listen and she doesn’t disappoint on this album: the cascades of notes and sheets of chords, the discordances and shimmering clarity of her notes are all present. Stein’s clarinet drives the music with an intelligent precision that compels the other musicians to dig deep. Smtih and Shead create an exuberant post-bop crash and bang rhythmic support to the playing. What is captivating on this record as the way in which the quartet are equally adept at creating perfectly imperfect sounds and manipulating these in ways that their bandmates are rewarded and celebrated; in short, the key to improvisation has to lie in the respect that each musician has in their bandmates and the ways in which this allows the music to be set free into new and unexpected places. The recording is an object lesson in what this means and how it can be made to happen.
