LINER NOTES
Every significant cultural production represents a complex intersection of storylines, a tangle of lineages. These crossing paths may start out relatively independent of one another, at least until they meet, at which point they become inextricably intertwined. In Buddhism, this is explained in the principles of dependent origination, which suggests that nothing comes from out of nowhere, and interdependency, which further insists on the relatedness of all things, their ultimate ontological reciprocity. Things are in a constant state of becoming, transforming, mutating, hybridizing. Existing lines meet; new possibilities are made manifest.
Maybe this is a heavy way to start the liner notes for such a lovely, ambitious, unpresumptuous CD as Brooklyn Lines . . . Chicago Spaces. Listening to KLANG, however, I am immediately taken with the way that various paths meet in the group’s approach, not just the two geographical locations of the title, but a whole host of stylistic and strategic storylines.
Two of those lines commence with Ornette Coleman in the late 1950s; Coleman’s approach, it should be said, did not originate independently, but extends another set of intersecting lines, from bebop and jump blues and nursery rhymes and birdsong. Let’s look at the lineages that emanate from Ornette. The first spools out via the John Carter groups; Carter took the freebop idea, expanded and elaborated on it, his clarinet solos presenting a whole new way of considering the instrument, and his complex, multi-part compositions hinting at fresh potential structures for improvisation. Out of Carter, we can locate part of the 1990s Chicago sound, the part primarily associated with Ken Vandermark, whose work picked up on some of those potential structures and instrumental approaches and further extended them.
Unfurl that line a little further, remaining in the Windy City, and you find James Falzone, a s....... więcej |