Ra Kalam Bob Moses / Damon Smith Duo — Purecircle (Balance Point Acoustics)
Purecircle bpaltd15015 by Ra Kalam Bob Moses / Damon Smith duo
Respect your elders, but speak your mind. No single sentence is going to sum up Damon Smith’s career in improvised music, but that one captures one of its salient aspects. Beginning with Peter Kowald, who was one of the men who motivated Smith to be the bassist he has become (the other was Mike Watt), he has made it a point to work with musicians of earlier generations. But he doesn’t just back them up; he establishes ongoing, collegial relationships in which new music is made. Smith was born in 1972 and Ra Kalam Bob Moses in 1948, but they meet as equals on this splendid duo recording.
Purecircle is Smith’s third recording with Moses, whose drumming career stretches back to the 1960s, when a teenaged Bob performed with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Larry Coryell and Gary Burton. In subsequent decades, he’s played inside, outside, big band, solo, acoustic and electric jazz and purely percussive music. A longtime east-coaster (he recently relocated to Memphis), Moses turned out to live 15 minutes away from Smith’s home when the latter musician moved to the Boston area a few years ago. Neighborly jams in Moses’ home studio evolved into gigs and a couple records, Astral Plane Crash (with Vinny Golia, Henry Kaiser, and Weasel Walter) and Life’s Intense Mystery (with Burton Greene). Smith has since moved to St. Louis, but on a swing through Massachusetts in 2021 he dropped into Moses’ “Native Pulse” and they convened to make this record.
Purecircle comprises 14 tracks (believe your CD player, not the text on the cover, which contains some typos), eleven that the two men improvised together, and three brief ones that feature Smith overdubbing his double bass onto solos by Moses. From those one minute-long “Purecircle” interludes to the longest pieces, which last over nine minutes, each is a universe unto itself. One thing that Smith has taken from both Watt and Kowald is an understanding that the bass makes body music. When he tugs a low note, you feel it in your ribcage (kudos to engineer David J. Sullivan, whose name is misspelled on the sleeve, for a transparent and three-dimensional recording), and when he brings the bow down on the strings, they buzz like a berimbau. And Moses is a long-time student/teacher of the spiritual dimensions of drumming. Earth, meet cosmos. Each writhing note, shuddering groan, dancing beat pattern, or astutely sounded cymbal becomes part of a radiant, unified vibrational field.
And as a unit, these guys know what they are. They’re a rhythm section, albeit one that isn’t a slave to meters. Grooves are implied, pulses are felt, broken lines swing. They’re also a band, two guys united in common cause, acting as one. And they are instant composers, creators of forms worth perceiving past the moment in which they were created.
