Recent CDs, Part 4: Cryptogramophone

In its ninth year, the little Cryptogramophone label is attracting increasing attention for recordings on the forward edge of music, with good sound and imaginative packaging. Myra Melford and Nels Cline have new CDs on the label, both likely to attract listeners who accept that jazz values can exist apart from standard song forms and harmony, and without being tied to a steady 4/4 pulse.

Myra Melford

In The Image of Your Body, Melford continues her fascination with music of India. A fearless piano improviser and a composer of meticulous precision, she introduces her new five-piece band, Be Bread. She called her last five-piece band, which had nearly the same instrumentation, The Tent. The mystique of band-naming aside, Melford's music uses the evocative capabilities of electronics and amplification to summon up the exotic atmospheres of the subcontinent and hint at the spiritual mysteries there. She employs the Indian instrument the harmonium, as she did in her previous album, The Tent, to impart a kind of folk simplicity as one layer in the complexity of "Equal Grace," "Be Bread," "If You've Not Been Fed" and the title track.

The iconoclastic trumpeter Cuong Vu is on board again. Guitarist-banjoist-vocalist Brandon Ross, bassist and electronicsician (it's a new word) Stomu Takeishi and drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee are recent arrivals in Melford's world, which is wide. For all of the unfettered--not to say unhinged--expressionism in the improvisation throughout a piece called "Fear Slips Behind," Melford wraps up the track in the last twenty-six seconds with a lapidary bit of ensemble writing that might have come from Andrew Hill or Sam Rivers in the 1960s. There are too few extended passages of her piano playing, though one of them begins the long performance called "Yellow Are the Crowds of Flowers." Then the piano melds into Ross's keening guitar, and we seem headed into a stretch of ECM-ish floating. Before long, however, the band is generating gale-force mutual improvisation that lasts until Melford calms things down at the keyboard and the sun comes out just as it is setting. Did I mention that this is evocative music?

Cuong Vu's own CD, It's Mostly Residual, includes his Melford bandmate Stomu Takeishi and the always gripping guitarist Bill Frisell. It is well worth hearing.

Nels Cline

Cline, a guitarist not shy about using electronic enhancement, is one of a small stable of Cryptogramophone semi-regulars. For twenty-five years he has worked in jazz fusion, jazz rock and free jazz, and made occasional forays into folk (with Ramblin' Jack Elliot) and country (with Willie Nelson). Cline's New Monastery: A View Into the Music of Andrew Hill, draws on all of those genres with the exception, perhaps, of country. I say "perhaps," because in the tidal wave of electronics and percussion that engulfs the listener in the final three minutes of "Compulsion" there could be hidden away some little allusion to C&W. That seems unlikely but, then, I've heard it only five or six times.

At the other end of the decibel scale, a delicate rubato duet between Cline's guitar and Ben Goldberg's clarinet on "McNeil Island" contains suggestions that swing may be about to break out. Sure enough, shortly before the three-minute mark, Scott Amendola's cymbals and Devin Hoff's bass begin sliding into the mix. Now, they are Cline's customary band, The Nels Cline Singers, which has no vocalist, plus Goldberg. Soon cornetist Bobby Bradford is aboard, as slippery around tonal centers as he was in the late fifties and early sixties when Bradford, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy and John Carter were enfants terribles of the Los Angeles avant garde.

They meld into "Pumpkin," one of Hill's beyond-boppish themes. It may not be your grandmother's kind of swing, but now they're swinging. On other tracks, Andrea Parkins joins on accordian. Yes, accordian. At times the cumulative sound is so dense that the ears can barely penetrate it. At others, the music is gentle, open and lyrical almost in the Viennese sense or it tends toward the kind of atmospheres generated by Miles Davis of the post-Bitches Brew period. Lack of dynamic range is not a problem here. In addition to Bradford, Goldberg and Parkins, Cline brings in his twin brother Alex on a couple of tracks to ramp up the percussion.

After decades in low profile following his success in the 1960s, Hill has begun attracting renewed attention as a pianist and composer. Cline's treatment of his music may be part of the beginning of Hill's rediscovery by a new generation of musicians and listeners. His approach is not to recreate Hill, but to use his compositions as launching pads for his own ideas, which have depth and complexity.

Next time, short reviews of a few other Cryptogramophone releases, among others.