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Through the cracks
Instrumental (and other) music that defies genre
BY JON GARELICK
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Brave Old World

Jenny Scheinman

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Arguments about what is or isn’t jazz are almost as old as the music itself, yet every year, it seems, there’s more and more exceptional music that just doesn’t fit anywhere. Here are three recent albums that all have a passing resemblance to jazz but mostly are just doing their own thing.

Dus Gezang fin Geto LodzH/Song of the Lodz Ghetto (Winter & Winter) starts with the klezmer tradition and soon becomes something new. The quartet Brave Old World fashioned it from a musical history of that particular Polish Nazi ghetto (part of the second largest city in Poland, the ghetto at its height contained 164,000 souls) in the songs collected by scholar Gila Flam. It begins with a little folk song sung by one of the ghetto’s survivors, Ya’akov Rotenberg, in a low-fi recording made in 1985. He’s singing "Rumkovski Khayim" — a sardonic "tribute" to Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, head of Lódz’s Jewish council, infamous for his nefarious negotiations with the Nazis. "Yidelekh zenen gebentsht mit Khayim," Rotenberg sings. "Jews are blessed with Khayim (life)." "Khayim," is also, of course, the Yiddish transliteration of Rumkowski’s middle name. And in the third line, "hakhayim" — "house of life" — is the Yiddish euphemism for cemetery. In the song’s lyrics, as Brave Old World keyboardist and composer Alan Bern tells me over the phone, "every line is a triple-entendre."

As Rotenberg’s recording fades, a scratchy fiddle picks up the tune, playing it through a couple of times before a piano enters with a second minor-key strain that’s graced with rich, dulcimer-like ornaments. The piano modulates into another theme, this one augmented with deep bass notes and florid runs. Segue with the piano still rumbling into a clarinet dance figure, a fiddle’s rhythmic accompaniment, accordion, and finally a modern singer delivering the light-hearted wedding-dance tune "A gants fayn mazltov" ("A really fine mazltov").

Song of the Lodz Ghetto weaves various reprises of these three tunes ("Rumkovski Khayim," the overture, and that thick, rumbling "Berlin 1990") with other dances, laments, party songs, even a bit of the march section from Beethoven’s "An die Freude|Ode to Joy," ending with that old recording of Ya’akov Rotenberg. The texts and improvisations on Song of the Lodz Ghetto balance folk simplicity and modern sophistication, past and present. And despite those florid rushes in Berns’s opening piano improvisation, the arrangements are balanced too, everyone (Bern, Kurt Bjorling, Stuart Brotman, vocalist Michael Alpert) doubling variously on piano, strings, accordion, clarinets, percussion, even a bit of pizzicato jazz bass.

The cycle was originally presented as a performance piece, and Brave Old World have been refining it for 15 years. It would be wonderful to see it performed as cabaret theater. The beautifully designed cardboard CD case offers the texts in English, German, Yiddish, and Hebrew. As you flip from the Yiddish text to the English translation, Song of the Lodz Ghetto becomes enriched as an important piece of Holocaust literature.

The plunger-muted cornet of Taylor Ho Bynum is immediately recognizable to fans who’ve heard him playing around Boston for the past several years with the Fully Celebrated Orchestra, Aardvark, and other ensembles, as well as with his former Wesleyan instructor Anthony Braxton. With his infinitely expressive range of tone colors — slurs, whinnies, growls, and bright open horn — and daunting technique, Bynum is our Bubber Miley.

But now, as the Pythons would say, he’s given us something completely different, Other Stories: Three Suites (482 Music), with his SpiderMonkey Strings ensemble. On this his CD debut as a leader, Bynum combines one of his working bands of cornet, guitar, tuba, and drums with a string-quartet format he originally used as part of a score for Leigh Dana Jackson’s short film "The First Three Lives of Stuart Hornsley." That film music is heard here in a 5:50 suite bookended by the four-part Supo Eno (26:04) and the three-part SpiderMonkey Stories (24:19).

Bynum’s combining of idioms is compelling at every turn. His distinctive vocal-like cornet enters on the first track with dissonant strings and is a key voice throughout. But these aren’t just extended concerti for cornet. Bynum lays out for extended passages. There are plenty of those spiky, post-Schoenberg dissonances in the strings, but Bynum passes easily from the tonally unhinged to tonally and rhythmically grounded lyric melodic themes, with solos all around, including some very jazzy phrasing from vibist Jay Hoggard and veteran jazz tuba man Joseph Daley. The string players also improvise their own occasional adagios and pas des deux as well as agitated, skittering solo statements. And Part Four of Supo Eno begins with a rising little melodic figure that I could swear came out of Beethoven or Schubert, though Bynum says he was thinking of Charles Ives.

The most accessible section is the Hornsley suite, with its lyrical pizzicato-string accompaniments to a cornet melody. But as in most jazz, rhythm is king, and SpiderMonkey Stories ends with string statements over chunky rock rhythms played by tuba and Ornette-style rhythm guitar (Pete Fitzpatrick), all harmonically askew and biting.

Violinist Jenny Scheinman is part of guitarist Bill Frisell’s cohort, and if she’s unclassifiable, it’s in a Bill Frisell sort of way. Her 12 Songs includes folk-like tunes set adrift on spacy explorations, usually with an intimate, chamber-jazz feel. In fact, with the little 3/4 ditty "Satellite," which starts out as a dance between fiddle and piano, you could make that chamber the front parlor, like something out of Ken Burns’s Civil War.

But that’s just one way in which 12 Songs sets up expectations and dashes them. It’s mostly acoustic except for Frisell’s electric guitar, which is heard frequently. The first time I listened to 12 Songs, I thought it sounded too much like a Frisell album, not that that’s a bad thing, just not its own thing. But with each listen, the album became harder to hold onto. The clip-clop beat and languorous minor-key melody of the opening "The Frog Threw His Head Back and Laughed" is Frisell enough, but it’s set apart by Scheinman’s sweet-toned solo. "Song of the Open Road" starts off like "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze" before going somewhere else entirely. "Moe Hawk" is a fetching two-beat march with cornet and accordion and a touch of Weill in the syncopated melody. Ron Miles’s cornet solo is a highlight — slurs, flutters, and half-valved effects, and various stepwise left turns, feints, and jabs held together with sure melodic logic. Scheinman follows with long-toned bowed double stops, nice and thick, before thinning out to silvery runs and staccato punctuations.

Playing, songwriting, and arranging all set 12 Songs apart. From the spacier middle tracks ("The Bouy [sic] Song" and "She Couldn’t Believe It Was True") Scheinman moves to the Latin dance "Suza" and a lovely calypso duo for violin and the melodica-accordion hybrid called the claviola, buoyant and piping. The final, loping country waltz deserves lyrics. There’s no "swing" in 12 Songs, but jazz fans will probably want to call it their own.


Issue Date: December 16 - 22, 2005
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