Ken Vandermark — Momentum 4: Consequent Duos 2015>2019 (Audiographic)
Momentum 4: Consequent Duos 2015>2019 by Ken Vandermark
Momentum 4 is the latest in a series of projects that document saxophone and clarinet player Ken Vandermark’s renewed commitment to working in North America. The eagle-eyed will note that one of the musicians that Vandermark plays with on this set is English, but the encounter was recorded in Chicago, so it still qualifies as working in America. The premise of this 5-CD set is simple; Vandermark and one other musician improvised the music heard on each disc. Three were recorded in New York at The Stone during Vandermark’s residency there in 2018; the other two were recorded at Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio.
The music that flows from that premise is anything but simple. Each duet deals not just with the present moment, but also with the past that Vandermark shares with each musician, and what they have meant to him. Pianist Kris Davis, bassist William Parker, electronicist Ikue Mori, and percussionists Hamid Drake and Paul Lytton have either taught him things about how improvised music is done and what it means to play it, or opened the door onto new ways to advance his thinking and playing.
Each drummer holds a mirror up to Vandermark. Drake reflects his roots in fire music and funk, and enables him to project those roots in muscular and purposeful fashion. Lytton, on the other hand, challenges Vandermark to find ways to transcend what he knows. Usually when one says that one person plays rings around another, it’s a suggestion that one musician has way more technique. But Lytton really sounds like he’s flowing around the reedist’s solid statements, engaging closely enough to make you know the outlines of his ideas and then cascading past, making the music move without lapsing into recognizable genre or rhythm. Parker just jumps in, playing with the absolute commitment of a man who really believes that a group of musicians can open portals into the infinity of divine creation. This is the most overtly swinging set of the box, and also the most patient. Mori, on the other hand, brings content that bridges birdsong and sci-fi sound design. Once you get past the alien quality of what she plays (and you might not want to do that for quite a few listens, since her strange sounds are pretty marvelous), the freedom she accords to Vandermark is the most exciting thing about their duets. Davis is Vandermark’s newest partner on Momentum 4, and the only one to evolve from both being side-people in someone else’s band. They met in Eric Revis’ quartet, and their interactions often feel like two scholars comparing notes. You can hear an exacting review of the possibilities offered by densely articulated co-invention, patiently abstracted balladry, and shared explorations of their respective instrument’s outer limits.
Given Vandermark’s prodigious output — besides Momentum 4, he was on 11 other albums, three of them multi-disc sets, in 2019 — it’s fair for a listener to ask, which one should I get? None of the ones this writer heard were a waste of time, but this one draws top honors on account of the consistent strength of the accompanists. It’s not just a great place to hear Vandermark, but also to hear Davis, Mori, Drake, Lytton and Parker’s playing at peak.
Methods matter as much as outcomes in Ken Vandermark’s music. That means that when the Chicago-based improviser, composer, organizer and reeds player puts together a band, the way its members come to terms with the way the sounds go together is as much of a creative expression as the way they sound. Edition Redux is Vandermark’s current touring ensemble, the main place where he works out partially pre-planned forms over the long haul.
It is the descendent of a larger band that played just once in late 2022. While its performance showed promise, its membership was not available to devote the time necessary to develop the band’s fluency with Vandermark’s concept. So, he cut it down, switching out the established veterans (no hard feelings, they’ve continued to work with him elsewhere) and reducing the line-up to a quartet comprising three younger players — keyboardist Erez Dessel, drummer Lily Glick Finnegan and tuba/electronics player Beth MacDonald. They’ve toured with Vandermark both in Europe and the USA, and Broadcast Transformer is their second album.
The material that Vandermark has written for Edition Redux references a breadth of artistic impulses; the album’s list of dedicatees includes Scratch Acid, Nan Goldin and Herbie Nichols, among many others. Vandermark uses these lists to acknowledge people whose way of working has in some way inspired pause and reconsideration of how he works. These influences rarely manifest as an emulation of someone else’s sound, but in more of a problem-solving fashion. How long does a segment last? How does it connect to the next one? How disruptive or connective are the transitions? If this is starting to sound as much like film as music, it’s not accidental. Not only did Vandermark study film in college, he’s periodically commented upon it (among other non-musical artforms) in his social media posts.
Sequencing is a profound concern in Edition Redux’s music, and in this regard, Broadcast Transformer feels like a realization of the promise of its first CD, Better A Rook Than A Pawn. The album’s 14 pieces are combined in a modular fashion which leaves open the possibility that they can be shuffled and reordered. The quartet has been working this way for a while, and it shows in a couple ways. The jumps are more abrupt and the segues are more liquid, reflecting a mastery of the music’s transitions. And the places where segments abut also seem to make use of the musicians’ multiple strengths, which suggests that Vandermark’s been writing with them in mind. Dessel can switch instantaneously from funky comping with a clavinet-voiced synth to sharp-edged electronic slabs or a surging piano avalanche; he’s the sharp edge of the editor’s razor. Finnegan’s playing clearly articulates not only the shifting time feels, but the compositions’ contours throughout the contrasting sections. MacDonald’s tuba is a distinguishing sound print that can be a bulky, befogging presence or a strategically reinforcing agent of rhythm. Vandermark sounds like just himself, by turns burly, earthy, and emphatic, but also energized; one supposes that it’s a gas to be able to know that he can trust this posse of younger players to realize his ideas and bring their own strong selves.
If you’re ever at a loss about Ken Vandermark’s intentions, check for references to other art forms and consider the implications. In the case of this project, film is the medium that holds the clues, but his own history with groups of a certain size will clue you in to how ensemble organization proposes musical outcomes. An entr’acte is a piece of music or dance between two acts of a play; René’s Clair’s short film Entr’acte was an early piece of non-narrrative cinema placed betwixt two acts of a Dadaist ballet. And Soigne Ta Droite is both a piece of Gallic boxing advice not to drop your right fist and a movie that Jean-Luc Godard made in response to Jacques Tati’s Soigne Ta Gauche (“Keep Up Your Left”). We could spend some time unpacking the notions of one practitioner rejoining the work of a cherished predecessor, or the likely lifespan of an endeavor named after a planned interruption, but maybe it’s worth moving on to the music?
Entr’acte is one in a long line of little big bands that Vandermark has led since the 1990s. He often builds them out from an extent smaller ensemble, and the root band this time is Shelter (Vandermark on reeds, Nate Wooley on trumpet, Steve Heather on drums, and Jasper Stadhouders on electric bass and guitar). That band, like Entr’acte, will probably never play in either Vandermark’s or Wooley’s zip code, because it takes too much money and grief to get a group of European musicians into the USA nowadays. But Austria’s not so afraid of art, so the Artacts Festival hosted the convergence of Shelter plus six other musicians for a concert on March 11, 2018.
In order to clarify his compositional mission and the musicians’ roles Vandermark often divides either the bands or the music into easily managed sections. This time it’s the former; there’s a trio of horns (Vandermark, Wooley, saxophonist Mette Rasmussen), another of strings (Stadhouders, bassist Joe Williamson, guitarist Terrie Ex), and a third of percussion (Heather and Didi Kern on drums, Elisabeth Harnik on piano). The tenth player, turntablist and electronic musician dieb13, operates above or in between the three sections, which in turn stack layers of interdependent action one over another. In earlier times, Vandermark used large groups such as the Territory Band or the Brötzmann Tentet to challenge exactingly written music with passages of freedom and/or episodes of silence, and contrasted the approaches of his fellow Chicagoans with those of European revolutionary veterans and new radicals. Nowadays the stylistic ingredients are different and the national juxtapositions more complicated, but the idea of mixing personalities and pre-existing aesthetic information to get the combustion right remains. So does the Passages of Vandermark, Harnik or Rasmussen waxing raw and intricate over tidal waves of drums and basses turn into episodes of punchy riffing derived from the sounds of 1970s Lagos or Addis Ababa. Ex gores the music from the side like an elephant with strong tusks and a stronger grudge against the poachers in yonder truck, dieb13 keeps trying to land flying saucers in busy traffic, and Wooley converts you to a church with no name with the purity of a few long tones. The whole thing ends with a full-band exclamation point that cues you to get out of your chair and give up a few whoops. If you clap again because it’s by no means assured that the band will play again, clap a third time because Vandermark will probably put together another one with an equally but differently cool line-up that will build upon this one’s lessons.
The title is an imperative; Ken Vandermark’s always looking ways to advance the work. Marker, his electric band of recent years, includes four Chicago-based musicians (Andrew Clinkman and Steve Marquette, electric guitars; Phil Sudderberg, drums; Macie Stewart, keyboard and violin) who are all a good couple of decades younger than the veteran multi-reedist. The process of learning Marker’s first book of tunes, which are documented on the disc Wired For Sound, drew them into a creative vortex that mixed up rule-based improvisation, the juxtaposition of compositions, and sonic references to late editions of Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band, Funkadelic and Vandermark’s own vast back catalog.
Once you pass through the storm, you’re changed. Having mastered Vandermark’s book of methodologies, the combo sets to pulling them apart and recombining them. A strong performance of each tune isn’t enough to get an idea of what’s going on here, since part of the process involves the collective making decisions on the fly about how the tunes fit together. So New Industries includes two discs, one studio and one recorded at Milwaukee’s Sugar Maple. Each track contains two to four compositions, and each of those compositions contains multiple options. The music is a bit like a card game, one that can be redirected every time a player lays down a card. The dealer wrote the rules, and he is also a player, but he is less interested in making everyone else around the table play his way than he in seeing how they’ll get him to change up his own game. Instrumentation, attack and sequence can vary from hand to hand. In the studio, “La Chambre #1” is first articulated with delicacy by Vandermark’s clarinet and Stewart’s violin; in concert, the full band drags the tune through the mud of low-end keyboard distortion before ending where the studio version began.
This is tricky stuff to negotiate, which may explain why the music often feels so tense. The guitars chop and scrape, the tenor sax points and hollers like a traffic cop managing a key intersection on the way to the stadium on the day of the homecoming game, and Stewart flips the lights on and off with her switches between jittery electric piano interjections, humid organ drones, and delicate violin figures. Special credit goes to Sudderberg for devising grooves that not only hold it all together, but also keep it flowing. The band’s input ensures that Vandermark’s works are constantly renewed — mission accomplished.
