For the last four weeks or so,
since its release on the Cuneiform label on January 21st, I have
kept returning to the eponymous debut CD by Thumbscrew,
a collective trio of Mary Halvorson, guitar, Michael Formanek, double bass, and
Tomas Fujiwara, drums. It’s a consistently great album, offering up music that
collides warmly responsive interplay with infectiously kiltered grooves. The
opening track, a Fujiwara head called “Cheap Knock Off,” alludes texturally–
you can listen for yourself and decide if this makes aural sense – to the early
John Scofield trio with Steve Swallow and Adam Nussbaum, or, given the
bell-like tone at times of Mary Halvorson’s guitar, even to the Jim Hall trio
of the mid 1970s with Terry Clarke and Don Thompson.
But – despite the title –
this is hardly derivative or imitative; it’s more of a music keenly aware of precedents
and precursors but pushing forward along the leading edge of its own present
tense. What emerges sonically in these
nine tracks is the trio’s shared practice of bending and unfolding time; they
co-create in each piece a motile amalgam of historicity and futurity, gesturing
(at least to my ears) at a rich set of musical antecedents from the jangling two-steps
of Son House to the poly-intervallic melodies of Henry Threadgill, while simultaneously
opening their improvised lines outward, palpably reaching, as Robert Browning
once put it, to exceed their grasp. Michael Formanek’s big tone and rhythmic
conception remind me of Johnny Dyani or Henri Texier: what’s remarkable is how
he – and how the whole trio – manage to synch up with such metrical acuity
(listen to those unisons) while driving so fiercely forward, right on top of
the beat, meeting it head on, ahead. This trio, tightly together, gives the
impression of an elastic looseness, a surge and release that’s a hallmark of
the best kind of collaborative improvising. For instance, the toe-tapping
shuffle of Fujiwara’s stick-and-brushwork on Formanek’s “Still . . . Doesn’t Swing” gives
way to a raucously dehiscent free improvisation, as if the trio had momentarily lost its
footing, only to reassert its cogency as melody at a slightly slowed tempo,
transformed and tugged apart and then refolded onto itself again through
Halvorson’s taffy-pull lines. Countable time comes unglued, seems to stretch
and then reasserts its urgencies. Thumbscrew offers a music that moves, and
that moves us along with them, listening: theirs is a remarkable and important record.
