Seven Deserts
Now approaching 70, Chris Brown and Scott Fields have done well in getting their music out during middle age, a phase of life where composers often fade into academia or the wilderness. (Some would say they are one in the same; at least, the former has healthcare benefits.) Subsequently, new recordings like Some Center and Seven Deserts take on additional weight. Both recordings extend established trajectories and add new elements to their respective vocabularies. Brown and Fields also continue to surround themselves with responsive collaborators.
Ordinarily, the merits of these recordings would prompt an earnest invocation of the well-worn bromide that they reward committed listening. Given the current situation, such commitment is a heavier lift for those who reflexively and understandably seek relief or escape in music. The listener is faced with a choice analogous to defaulting to comfort food or maintaining a disciplined diet. Some Center and Seven Deserts are supportive of the latter.
Respectively, Brown and Fields make knotty propositions like microtonality and modular structure easily digestible. There is an essence of locale at play with both composers – the Bay Area, where Brown has worked for decades, and Chicago, where Fields came of musical age. Brown does not simply employ Harry Partch’s 43-tone scale; like the iconic Californian, Brown brings a rarely heard brightness and spaciousness to microtonality, albeit one without hermetic ritual context. There is a passing resemblance to Anthony Braxton’s orchestra music of the 1980s in Fields’ negotiations between spontaneity and notated modules, but how the guitarist’s music breathes suggests more intensive rehearsal time than Braxton enjoyed back in the day.
Brown and Fields benefit from well-qualified collaborators. Brown is wise to stick with a trio for the Chromelodia Project, given how microtones are frequently snuffed by larger groups. Kyle Bruckmann’s piquant oboe timbres offset Theresa Wong’s burnished cello and the ring and jangle of Brown’s retuned MIDI keyboard. Wong is frequently captivating, playing detailed cello parts while fluidly singing the Emily Dickinson poems employed for the five-part title piece and the Jackson Mac Low texts used for the 11-section First Light. Brown’s software allows for two contiguous 43-tone scales to be heard simultaneously, giving the music iridescent colors and orchestral mass. The trio generates sufficient space-filling material without obscuring that these pieces are songs, a difficult tightrope walk.
Fields benefits from the familiarity of frequent collaborators like violinist Axel Lindner and saxophonist Matthias Schubert, the intuition of improvisers like saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and guitarist David Stackenäs, and the adaptability of contemporary music luminaries like flutist Helen Bledsoe. The composer also has a great asset in Stephen Dembski, who conducted Fields’ album-length 48 Motives and 96 Gestures. Field and his Ensemble maintain a robust, polished performance throughout this live recording, no small feat given the complexities of the hour-plus Seven Deserts. — Point of Departure
Samuel
Scott Fields’ music prompts questions, usually quickly: Where’s the line between the bold conceptions and the meticulous execution? Between the composer and the improviser? Between the jazz and what’s beyond category? Much to the guitarist’s credit, the answers are almost always elusive, as is the case with Samuel, Fields’ second collection of compositions drawn from the texts of Samuel Beckett. Given that, as measured in discographical time, the album comes on the heels of Beckett — the 2006 Clean Feed collection also featuring Fields’ quartet with tenor saxophonist Matthias Schubert, cellist Scott Roller and percussionist John Hollenbeck — spinning this more innocuously titled album without making the connection is not surprising. The music is sufficiently compelling to initially keep the booklet with Dan Warburton’s informative notes off to the side. The quartet has an incisive bead on the material; their ensembles are bristling; and their ability to sustain the finely calibrated development of the materials in three contrasting pieces of 20 to 25 minutes in duration reflects an exemplary, collectively honed discipline. Sure, knowing Fields painstakingly ascribed pitch and duration values to Beckett’s texts facilitates a fuller reception of the work; yet, it is not required to dig the jagged and jangling materials. It certainly explains the ensemble’s aversion to lustrous decay; in conveying the bluntness of expression fundamental to Beckett’s texts, their dampened attack and clipped phrases establishes a temperamental continuity that is as essential to the music as adherence to the scores and the parameters for improvisation. This tints materials that would otherwise be more easily compared to the graying generation of Midwestern structuralist composers (although Fields has lived in Cologne since 2003, Chicago is still discernable in his music). Still, the ensemble’s fastidiousness in articulating Fields’ compositions does not diminish the individualism of the players; on the contrary, these are among the more engaging performances to date by Fields himself and by Schubert and Hollenbeck, the more widely documented of his cohorts (the guitarist-like dexterity of Roller’s pizzicato always prompts a desire to hear more). This is another significant recording by Fields. — Point of Departure