Iancu Dumitrescu — Ansamblul Hyperion Conducerea Muzicală: Iancu Dumitrescu (Corbett Vs. Dempsey)
It’s one thing for a musician to have come to adulthood in the 1960s, and another thing to say that they did so in communist Rumania. Forced to form in a time and place of proscription, Iancu Dumitrescu learned not only to aim high, but to carve and string his own bow. Faced with a state-controlled system that took a dim view of many current trends and enforced its perspectives by reviewing every score performed by existing ensembles, he started his own band.
In 1976 Dumitrescu formed the Hyperion Ensemble, which would remain his most frequent means of hearing his ideas realized for decades to come. Four years after it first convened, the ensemble checked into a Bucharest radio station to make its first album for Electrecord, which at the time was the nation’s sole record label. While Dumitrescu was billed as conductor, only one of the session’s four pieces was his; the other three were by Romanian composers who had been practicing longer. The program includes compositions by Octavian Nemescu and Corneliu Cezar that combine chamber musicians and electronics, as well as one by Ștefan Niculescu that called upon its players to improvise.
Dumitrescu plays a bit of piano on Niculescu’s "Sincronie," reinforcing a resonant percussive core from which woodwinds and strings branch out to form an airy structure embedded with tiny, turning phrases. Corneliu Cezar’s “Rota” combines bucking brass with in-your-face electronics that combine representations of natural phenomena with unbridled blippery. If someone chopped it up into little pieces and told you that the parts came from Can’s ethnographic forgery series, you’d have a hard time proving them wrong. Nemescu's "Combinatii In Cercuri" contains both the session’s oldest and newest music. It lays a sparse, eventful exchange between strings and woodwinds over whirring electronics, which at certain points seem to swallow the acoustic sounds whole. Taken together, they show that Dumitrescu was part of a community that was aware of advances occurring elsewhere in Europe, but did not feel obligated to pay direct homage to them.
But what makes this disc, which is finally enjoying its first CD edition as well as its first US release, more than a footnote is Dumitrescu’s debut, "Movemur et Sumus." While it is mostly performed by once cello and one contrabass, with the composer adding a middle section of bowed, metallic percussion, it never feels reduced. Each stroke of a bow across strings unleashes a spectrum of sounds that seem to simultaneously radiate and absorb light. This synaesthetic effect isn’t an end in itself, but a vehicle for transcendence. The release of this music in the USA at a moment when the country seems to be rushing headlong into the same kind of dull, domineering idiocracy that Dumitrescu had to endure seems sadly apposite; may it serve as a beacon for artists trying to figure out how to be true in false times.
Steve Lehman & Orchestre National De Jazz — Ex Machina (Pi)
When you think big, there’s no substitute for resources. Alto saxophonist and composer Steve Lehman’s ideas are typically broad and deep, but Ex Machina is especially massive. The project combines big band jazz, spectral composition, and interactive electronics. Any one of these elements takes study and skill to master, and while Lehman has the instrumental chops and integrative intellect grasp the parts, it takes a lot of time in a well-stocked kitchen to assemble them all into something that isn’t just a lumpy influence stew. requires a lot of time in a well-stocked kitchen.
In order to pull off this project, Lehman collaborated with the Orchestre National de Jazz, a big band funded by the French government. He also involved IRCAM (the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Musics) to incorporate electronics that respond to the live musicians in real time. After years of composing and workshopping, Lehman and his long-time American collaborators, trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson and vibraphonist Chris Dingham, joined the orchestra for eight concerts, and then settled into the studio for four days at the beginning of 2023.
The time and resources have not gone to waste. This music feels not only sui generis — the only records it really sounds like are Lehman’s earlier octet recordings — but lived-in. The exchanges between dopplering horn sections and single soloists, and the meshing between orchestrated frequencies and precisely mutating rhythms, is spot-on.
But enough about how impressive it is; what is it? Essentially, it’s a transfer of Lehman’s spectral jazz concept, in which an understanding of frequency relationships yields access to alien sounds and an engagement with rhythm concepts spanning the ages of bebop and hip-hop makes the whole thing swing, to a post-Gil Evans orchestral environment. It has plenty of big brass punch, crips rhythms, and abrupt shifts in velocity and tone, all of which create fertile opportunities for adroit soloists to assert both structure-oriented and emotion-evoking responses. Ex Machina is everything it set out to be. And if you’re looking for a recording that’ll give you new things to hear every time you play it, it is without peers.
