75 Dollar Bill and Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society yield plenty from the leanest of materials
75 Dollar Bill (Rick Brown and Che Chen), photo: Alex Phillipe Cohen
One of the most aggravating, dispiriting things in music journalism these days is how rigidly most publications cleave to release dates when considering coverage of albums. I can’t count how many times pitches have been rejected because the record will have been out for a month or two by the time the piece would run. It’s a situation I find ridiculous on numerous accounts, because it lays bare that such writing is inextricably linked to the business affairs of publications, and serving potential advertisers. An interesting piece of writing on a record doesn’t go stale if there’s something substantive, informative, or revealing about the piece, even if the record has been covered widely elsewhere. I get the problem with bland, empty-headed blurbs on music that’s garnering press coverage all over the place—and with the state of music journalism these days, where posting a track and regurgitating a press release passes for serious content, that’s a real thing—but outside of pop music such ubiquity almost never occurs. When publications direct coverage according to the release schedule of record labels, it’s pretty clear whom they’re serving.
As the year winds down there has been lots of excellent music that I haven’t written about elsewhere, so I plan to do so here in the coming months, including some things that you’ve no doubt read about elsewhere. Hopefully my thoughts will bring something new to the discussion. The latest albums by 75 Dollar Bill and Joshua Abrams’ Natural Information Society have been favorites that I’ve returned all of 2019 and they share many affinities, whether ingeniously transplanting disparate African traditions into a distinctly American sensibility (although both groups have developed those translations so rigorously, the provenance is less prevalent than ever) or deploying a deeply trance-inducing repetition and often single-chord structure. Both efforts stand as new high watermarks for each ensemble.
The Mauritanian roots of 75 Dollar Bill were made clear from day one in Che Chen’s lacerating guitar playing—years ago he studied under Mauritanian guitarist Jheich Ould Chighaly, a key member of the band led by singer Noura Mint Seymali (he’s also her husband)—and fundamental concepts remain in how his spider-webbed riffing accrues monumental power, raunchiness, and projection as it cycles on and on. The recent I Was Real (Thin Wrist) finds a number of guests joining Chen and percussionist Rick Brown, who continues to produce mind-bending depth from the punk rock plywood cajon-like box that doubles as his drum stool and a series of homemade mallets. The duo’s machinations obviously throb at the heart of all the music here, but the shifting arrangements throughout the album add new colors and timbres, expanding the pair’s sonic blueprint in all kinds of ways. The epic title track, for example, seems to roll into eternity, patiently pulsing with a tangy striated drone (somewhere between Tony Conrad and a tamboura) played by guest electric violist Karen Waltuch complementing the twill of thumping low-end tones laid down by Andrew Lafkas (double bass) and Sue Garner (electric bass); Chen calmly embroiders a spare riff, plucking out endless little variations that stab and seethe before retracting into meditative cool. On “WZN#3 (Verso)” is a cool act of subtraction, as most of the recorded tracks were later stripped away. Chen puts his guitar down altogether, opting for amplified violin and filling one channel with the returning Waltuch takes the other creating a three-way dialogue of slashing lines, drones, and skree with baritone saxophonist Cheryl Kingan—somehow hybridizing Celtic fiddle music and Tuareg jams.
The entire album uses shifting personnel and arrangements to add variety and dynamics, whether it’s the seamless transitions between the twitchy quarter-tone guitars, bass, and percussion in “New New,” the post-industrial drone of “Worm,” and the needling hoe-down of “Like Laundry,” or the way “There’s No Such Thing as a King Bee,” with the clattery hi-hat of Carey Balch adding a stuttering white noise to the heavily flanged microtonal smudges of Chen and Brown’s nuanced rumbling. The piece I find most irresistible is the ferocious “Tetuzi Akiyama,” named for the chameleonic Japanese guitar experimentalist—you can listen to it below—which taps into one particular side of his personality with a choogling guitar girded by a massive, cranky baritone sax line, to say nothing of a ceiling-piercing ascent with probing single-string choking and sax bleats that wobble like a turntable with a cat dancing upon it. While nothing I’ve ever heard on record can match the frenzy they churn out live, they’re getting closer, and plus, I Was Real does things they don’t do on stage.
On Mandatory Reality (Eremite) Abrams and crew bring a purely acoustic setting to the leader’s exploratory themes, and while his guimbri remains at the core of the music—reflecting his deep engagement with Morocco’s Gnawa tradition—the most obvious aesthetic overlay is classic minimalism. Naturally, Gnawan music is minimalist in its own distinctive way, but Abrams has beautifully merged durational investigation and microscopic shifts to the group sound, which is warmer and lusher than any of the outfit’s previous work. The music unfolds at molasses-speed and that leisurely pace is essential to how each extended piece works, with changes occurring so slowly that it’s hard to identify the transformations—this brand of minimalism helps the listener end up in a much different place from where they started without necessarily gleaning how they got there.
Natural Information Society (Mikel Patrick Avery, Lisa Alvarado, Joshua Abrams, Jason Stein), photo: Ike Day
As Alan Licht’s perceptive liner note essay points out, the glistening yet brittle lines of guimbri and Ben Boye’s autoharp on the opening track “In Memory’s Prism,” which is embedded below, recall some of Don Cherry’s cycling melodies. It feels like an ostinato, but Abrams gradually alters the patterns he plays. One of the dominant sounds throughout the album are shimmering horns played by cornetist Ben LaMar Gay, bass clarinetist Jason Stein, and alto saxophonist Nick Mazzarella, which float atop the imperturbable groove like stratus clouds. Gauzy layers of sound formed by billowing long tones feel like a single, soft-edged object, but as the piece unfurls the horns add variety in the length of each utterance and the way individual members pull apart and coalesce, constantly altering timbre, density, and motion. According to the notes the second track “Finite” is the actual source for “Memory’s Prism,” but they sound plenty different. It opens with a lovely guimbri solo, with the buzz of metal rings that traditionally hang from the instrument, before shifting into a loping groove built piece by piece: Hamid Drake’s percolating tabla, Mikel Patrick Avery’s seductively clopping African tam-tam drum, Boye’s sparse piano embroidery (which, at times, reminds of me of Chris Abrahams’ most reductive work in the Necks), Lisa Alvarado’s swelling harmonium figures, and then the airily interwoven, hocket-ish horns (beautifully spread across the stereo field). Here the differentiation of horn and piano lines is more explicit and interactive—yet from a less microscopic perspective they form a single, exquisite pattern—and a ruminative Mazzarella eventually channels the spirit of John Coltrane in a rare stretch of extended soloing. At the halfway mark of this forty minute epic Abrams abruptly reduces the length of his line, which gives the piece a different, more jagged flow—like riding the rapids rather than drifting across placid waters—providing Gay and Stein a different landscape for their superb solos.
On “Shadow Conductor” pulsing eighth notes generate a pointillistic vibe, each terse utterance collectively forming a chattery mosaic that hovers around a wobbly tonal center. The density and volume is in steady flux, constructing a thrilling strain of uncertainty and suspense that refuses to resolve. The album concludes with “Agree,” a spacious jam of massed wooden flutes interacting in guttural long tones, fluttering high pitch sallies, sibilant vibrato, bright melodic fragments, rollercoaster glides, and throaty trills. The short piece serves up a kind of ecstatic coda to the long-form meditations that precede it. It’s a stellar progression for Abrams, and one that fully dispenses with any fears that embracing such a specific instrumental foundation could lead to a creative dead end. In fact, he’s vibrantly demonstrated just the opposite, and it seems as though there are infinite possibilities for what comes next.
Today’s playlist:
Witold Lutosławski/Polish Radio National Symphony Orchestra, Concerto for Orchestra/Jeux Vénitiens/Livre pour Orchestre/Mi-Parti (EMI Classics)
Tyshawn Sorey, Pillars (Firehouse 12)
Norma Waterson & Eliza Carthy, Anchor (Topic)
Jesper Zeuthen/Jacob Anderskov/Anders Vestergaard, Out of the Spectacle (ILK)
Mabel Kwan, Georg Friedrich Haas: Three Homages (New Focus)
