Il y a 10 ans que le saxophoniste Damián Nisenson est arrivé à Montréal en provenance d’Argentine, où il laissait derrière lui ses comparses du trio Nikada: Fernando Kabusaki (guitare électrique) et Pablo Dawidowicz (batterie). Il les retrouve ici pour jouer ses compositions, qui mêlent jazz actuel, tensions rock et sensibilité folk. Les trois musiciens sont aguerris et inventifs; à noter: le solo de guitare qui déchire sur la piste 9 (les pièces n’ont pas de titre) et, un peu partout, l’efficacité économique du batteur. L’ajout du contrebassiste Jean-Félix Mailloux donne à l’ensemble un groove dont on ne voudrait pas se passer. Nisenson met dans son sax (alto ou ténor) une chaleur sombre qui plane sur l’ensemble avec grâce.

A concert experience — especially a first one — with Anthony Braxton’s Echo Echo Mirror House can be beyond perplexing. Each of the players onstage has, along with their usual axe, an iPod from which they intermittently play past Braxton recordings. Visually it can seem like a whole lot of sitting around, while auditorially it is more information than can be processed. The resulting dissonance is both harmonic and cognitive while toying with expectations about what musicians are supposed to be doing while on stage. Scratching DJs is one thing, but musicians playing mp3s with no seeming rhyme or reason? It’s a perplexing kettle of fish.

A recording of an Echo Echo Mirror House performance is, if nothing else, easier to mentally process than the concert experience, primarily by virtue of not having the distraction of looking at musicians without being able to associate their gestures to the sounds being received. Such is the case with the concert captured on Echo Echo Mirror House of a performance at the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville festival in Quebec. The album arguably should be titled “Septet (Victoriaville) 2011” in keeping with Braxton’s usual titling practice, and that epitaph is emblazoned on the back cover — miscommunication or a mistake in cover design may be to blame, but in any event Echo Echo Mirror House has the benefit of a better — or at least more traditional — mix than was in the room that night. On record, the live instruments are a bit louder than the iPod tracks, giving a foreground / background dispersal which makes it easier to focus on individual players, as jazz is supposed to want us to do.

Whether or not the mix is actually better, of course, is open to argument. The composer Raphael Mostel tells a story of running into John Cage at an early Bang on a Can festival. They encountered some friends outside after the dinner break who urged them to sit in the back, where the sound was better. “Imagine,” Cage is said to have responded, “a sound being better.” And indeed, Echo Echo Mirror House is best received as a Cagean listening experience — not in the overwrought-by-post-Cagean-and-quasi-scholars “listen to the wind, listen to the silence” sense, but to whatever extent we might establish guidelines and precedence for listening. There have been few listening experiences that compare to Echo Echo Mirror House, but one clear forebear is Cage’s HPSCHD, a massive piece of controlled cacophony available on a couple of recordings and on occasion staged live (a recent and remarkable rendition was realized by Issue Project Room at Manhattan’s Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in May). With multiple harpsichords being played live alongside recordings of harpsichords, computer generated sounds and video projections, HPSCHD (which received its premier at the University of Illinois in 1969) is an overwhelmingly immersive experience best received by simple absorption with intellectual questioning undertaken after the fact, if at all.

What is important about HPSCHD, and about Echo Echo Mirror House (both the project and the CD), is that it is not chaos, and in fact neither Cage nor Braxton often, if ever, descends into chaos. Both pieces work in layered, multi-linear structures, even if the levels of structure don’t always correspond with one another. But what the brain might receive as chaos is just a simple processing problem: there’s too much to take in. Little eddies of logic spin across the soundfield, overlapping and occasionally being overrun by the sound of one of the fine group of musicians [Taylor Ho Bynum (brass), Mary Halvorson (guitar), Jessica Pavone (voice, violin), Jay Rozen (tuba), Aaron Siegel (percussion), Carl Testa (contrabass, bass clarinet) and the leader on alto, soprano and sopranino saxophones], all of whom are allowed solos of sorts.

There’s some fun to be had in listening for individual voices arising from the Braxtonic bog, and it’s good game for the hardcore to try to pick out which Braxton records are being played underneath. But certainly this isn’t a record for everyone. Hell, it’s hard to say for sure if it’s a record for anyone! But it’s a fascinating, dizzying listen which should be experienced live or on record by anyone interested in 21st Century Gesamtkunstwerk totalism.

Whenever the controversy about what or who is or isn’t jazz is breached there’s likely no more polarizing figure than Anthony Braxton. Braxton has been so prolific in his writing and playing however that ample arguments can be mustered for both points of view. These recent CDs should add more verbiage to the discussion. Although both are well executed and absorbing, Braxton’s protean skills are such that a case can be made either way. […]

Echo Echo Mirror House on the other hand, recorded live in 2011 at the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, is played by a septet of Braxton associates, with the composer participating. Perhaps because the hour-plus Composition No 347 allows the players to add snatches of other Braxton pieces plus incorporate still other sounds sourced from iPods, the result is as convincingly jazzy as any advanced improvised music. […]

Encompassing vivid stylists like Taylor Ho Bynum, Mary Halvorson and Braxton himself, solo interjections are audible during Composition No 347, animating the already powerfully staccato creation. Upping the ante with found sounds emanating from the musicians’ iPods — include piano chamber music and near-operatic vocals — the effect is of several compositions being played simultaneously. So-called classical voicing and orchestration are prominently featured, but so are chugging band pulsations which reflect Basie a lot more than Beethoven. Plus, when it comes to the cornetist’s muted flutter tonguing, the guitarist’s tempo-transcending flanges and crunches and the saxophonist’s stuttering intensity, reference points are without doubt improvisations that derive from jazz — if they’re not jazz itself. Without question, the visceral excitement missing from the more formal Ensemble Montaigne CD is present here. Extravagantly and rousingly performed, by the penultimate sequence, the composition threatens to explode from unrelentless pressure following some frenzied contrabass clarinet lines from Carl Testa and Aaron Siegel’s glockenspiel hammering. Propitiously Braxton, Bynum and Halvorson combine with connective harmonies in the final minutes, effectively ending the piece.

With Echo Echo Mirror House vibrating with express-train-like tremolo power and Ensemble Montaigne making its points through precise tonal juxtaposition, Braxton’s musical powers are doubly confirmed. As to how you define these pieces that may be something best left to musicologists.

Wie hier beginnen? Zuerst einfach mal mit dem offensichtlichsten Reiz, der natürlichen Sopranstimme von Susanna Hood. Hood ist in Toronto die gefeierte Leiterin von Hum, einer interdisziplinären Truppe, die Körper und Klänge in Bewegung inszeniert. Als die ‘Irene Aebi’ von The Rent ist mir ihre jazzige, schlanke, gelegentlich mit Scatting und Melismen verzierte Kunstliedsangeskunst durch die Musique de Steve Lacy (Ambiances Magnétiques, 2010) nicht völlig neu. Im helldunklen Verbund mit dem Posaunisten Scott Thomson, ihrem Partner sowohl bei Hum als auch bei The Rent, singt sie hier dessen Vertonungen von Gedichten von P.K. Page (1916-2010). Patricia Kathleen Page, eine der großen poetischen Stimmen Kanadas, die sich Anfang der 1970^er auch schon gegen den Klimawandel erhob und nicht zuletzt gegen die Phrase vom Kampf der Kulturen. Gavin Bryars hat zwei ihrer Gedichte vertont (Three Canadian Songs) und 1999 mit ihr selbst ihren ökologisch warnenden Text ‘Unless the Eye Catch Fire…’ aufgeführt. Page stellt dem ‘permanent tourist’, der nur kommt, gierig schaut und wieder geht, ohne Verantwortung zu übernehmen, den Gärtner gegenüber, der sich kümmert. Aber nicht isolationistisch, auch nicht nur zweisam, sondern der Multitude verbunden und der Erde, auch wenn im Garten Rosen neben Stacheldraht wachsen (’The Metal and the Flower’). Hood betont das, wenn sie die schon eingangs gesungenen unsolipsistischen Zeilen As ten, as twenty, now, we break from single thought zuletzt noch einmal a capella anstimmt. Jeder ist eine Vielheit und Teil der Vielheit. Die Posaune folgt der Stimme als Double, als Echo, löst sich aber auch als Alter Ego, ebenso vollmundig, ebenso selbstbeherrscht. Pages weitere Helden sind der innere Ikarus in ‘This Heavy Craft’. Oder auch der Maulwurf: The mole is a specialist and truly / opens his own doors; digs as he needs them / his tubular alleyways; and all his hills / are mountains left behind him (’The Mole). Der Sternenhimmel ist korrekturgelesen und fehlerlos (’Stargazer’), auf der Erde sieht es anders aus. Mit der Option, to go mad… to be huge… the least molecule of an unlimited form… to burn and be burned. It is where you are not / that the fissure occurs / and the light crashes in (’Preparation’).

A new CD on the small Canadian Etrecords label of Michel F Côté. An album of songs based on the poems by Canadian poet P.K. Page, who died in 2010. Susanna Hood started her career as a dancer, and developed into an improviser both in dance and music. Thomson is a trombonist and composer working mainly in Montréal and Toronto. He studied with Roswell Rudd, Jean Derome, Eddie Prevost, a.o. He leads the quintet The Rent, interpreting works by Steve Lacy. In 2010 they released their debut for Ambiances Magnetiques. Between 2010 and 2012 Thomson composed a suite of 12 songs, inspired on poems by P.K.Page. He composed a version for his quintet The Rent, and one for Hood and himself as a duo of just voice and trombone. Thomson is working on a stage version of the suite for dancers and performers as well, because a lot of the poetry of Page is “danceable” Thomson states in an interview. Back to The Muted Note that contains 11 songs, sung by Hood with a jazzy feel, interrupted with fine solo sections by Thomson resulting in an intimate and charming evocation of Pages’s poetry.

Solo voce (Hood) e trombone (Thomson) per mettere in suono le poesie della scrittrice, poetessa e artista visuale inglese ma naturalizzata canadese Patricia Kathleen Page (1916-2010). Vocalizzi arty, virtuosismi, rapidi solo strumentali, interazioni un po’ telefonate. Conoscere la poetessa e l’inglese dovrebbe aiutare, altrimenti è dura.