Last night at the
Western Front, Ches Smith’s trio (with
him on drum kit and vibraphone, Mat Maneri on electrified
viola, and Craig Taborn on piano)
offered two sets of provocative, engrossing and powerful music drawn from The Bell, their recent
album issued by ECM. Each set consisted of extended suites of Smith’s
compositions; his writing practice sounds to me typically to involve a logic of
serial disjunction, assembling each piece from layered rhythmic and melodic
cells—emerging in the recording as fractal loops, insistent frittered ostinato,
reminiscent at times of Steve Reich’s music for percussion—conjoined in
distinct, contrasting sections. In performance, those assemblages—close to coruscating,
unfixed fragments of wordless art songs—link up, often with turn-on-a-dime jump
cuts, to produce a compelling admixture of meditative resonance and hard-driving,
impactful disturbance. The music feels both openly improvisational and
exactingly through-composed, as it moves from the intimate lyricism of chamber-jazz
to—I’m not exaggerating—bone-shaking heavy-metal thrash. The first set emerged
as a single suite, gradually ramping, like “I Think” and “Wacken Open Air” do
on the recording, toward a propulsive, drum-driven wall of sound; the recording
itself is quieter, with the drums mixed down a little, while in performance
Ches Smith will build a thunderous and gleeful abandon. (I don’t know which
compositions were played in which set, although I think they began with “The
Bell”; they may have played extended version of the album tracks in order,
since the second set—which featured two more compact suites instead of
one—closed with “For Days,” the final cut on the recording.) Craig Taborn’s
lines concentrated principally on repeated motifs, either locked chords or looped
shards of melody, but he also provided an insistence, a fierceness, that
introduced a provocative and—if this is the right word—actively contemplative
energy into the potential stasis or fixity in such unwavering recurrence to
push the sound forward. Gilles
Deleuze names a philosophical version of this practice, simply, the
imagination: “The role of the imagination, or the mind which contemplates in
its multiple and fragmented states, is to draw something new from repetition,
to draw difference from it. . . .
Between a repetition which never ceases to unravel itself and a repetition
which was deployed and conserved for us in the space of repetition, there was
difference, . . . the imaginary. Difference inhabits repetition” (Difference and Repetition 76). Mat
Maneri’s contributions on viola either established electronically-enhanced bass
drones, or, more frequently, negotiated the interstices of upper-register tonality,
pulling at the spaces between notes, microtonally fraying and re-stitching
phrases. All told, it was a truly powerful gig, the trio collectively laying
down a spate of compelling trajectories through variegated tensions and
multiplicities: overlapping lines that attend on, that sound, I’d say, the
“barely intervallic” collisions and differences inherent in present-tense
collaboration, to grant an audience moments of shared, unsettled, and
imaginatively rich listening.
Book
Gilles Deleuze.
Difference and Repetition. 1968.
Trans.
Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP,
1994.
Print.
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