If you took a look at the musicians who call themselves Oceans Roar 1000 Drums, you’d note the saxophone-double bass-drums line-up, and think you were set for some jazz. If you know your American songbook well enough, you’d recognize that they copped their name from a Johnny Mercer lyric that’s been sung by Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Bob Dylan (on Triplicate, of course), and settle in for some sounds that swing. Armed with those expectations, you would likely find their music very perplexing.
But if you accept that name as a reference to a process and not a cultural moment, it makes more sense. Mercer’s words, which appear in the song “Day In, Day Out,” extol the transformation that passion can work upon a regular day:
“Come rain, come shine,
I meet you and to me the day is fine
Then I kiss your lips and the pounding becomes
The oceans roar, a thousand drums."
When the senses are heightened, nothing’s the same. And this music is all about the heightening of the senses. Its roots in improvisation run deep but span genres. Drummer Todd Capp is a New Yorker who got his start playing with members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in the 1960s, and wound his way from loft jazz to new wave to this trio with two younger man who currently live in Berlin. Andrew Lafkas came up with Milo Fine and studied with Bill Dixon before moving to Europe. And Bryan Eubanks is a soprano saxophonist and electronic musician who has recorded and toured with Jason Kahn, Toshimaru Nakamura and Stéphane Rives. He is married to composer and violist Catherine Lamb, and an instrument system he developed, the secondary rainbow synthesizer, has appeared on several of her records; she is not a member of Oceans Roar 1000 Drums, but she plays that synth on this one.
The secondary rainbow synthesizer collects environmental sounds, either from within or just outside of the room where music is being played. It filters them and then feeds them into the music in a way that feels more than implied but not quite present. The synth takes its time to be felt on this recording, which spans two sides of a nicely pressed LP or 35 continuous minutes of a digital file. Capp opens the proceedings with a light, multi-colored drizzle of percussive sound that wouldn’t be out of place in an Art Ensemble of Chicago tune. The percussion is scored by Eubanks’ harsh, near-metallic horn tones. Lafkas’ bass is in there somewhere, plucked so gently that its tones might seem to be hiding behind Capp’s shaken bells, inviting you to point your ears in its direction. But then the percussion seems to melt and morph while the hands that played it apply brushes to drums, suggesting the sounds if not the forms of that jazz trio we were talking about a paragraph back at the same time that the real time rules of jazz fade away. And then the bass’ harmonics seem to surface like a breaching whale, and the saxophone draws acrid clouds of feedback out of an amplifier, further attuning the listener’s ears to contrasting actions and textures.
When Sinatra sang that “Day In, Day Out,” you could imagine him sailing his hat across the room as he rushed toward his lover’s arms; it’s the anticipation of consummation shared with the listener that makes the seconds while the song passes seem extraordinary. Nothing so impetuous happens here, but as the secondary rainbow synth turns some sounds to a blurry mirage and the trio adds new ones with a mix of gentle care and strategic cruelty, the audience is invited to listen ever more closely and ponder what’s happening. That act of listening is what heightens the music’s experience as vividly, if less loudly, as Sinatra’s excitement at the coming score. The ESP label famously printed the legend, “the artists alone decide what you hear on their ESP-Disk,” upon their LPs; if this trio were to a propose a slogan, it might be, “the listeners along must decide how to finish what they hear on this disc.”
