“Living Portrait of Scott Fields” by Andre Ferrella recording dénouement
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About me. Me me me me!
Born in Chicago but based since 1976 in Madison, Wisconsin, Fields is presently nurturing his own creative renaissance, following a prolonged absence from the arena. He is a musician of considerable conceptual sophistication. He is also judicious in his choice of collaborators, inviting along musicians who will galvanize any concept into active life. — Julian Cowley, The Wire
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Guitarist/composer Scott Fields is a genuine musical adventurer, as likely to explore complex systems of motivic structure as free improvisation. The question that follows, though, is “When?” For Fields is the kind of player whose simultaneous sureness and abstraction can easily blur the lines of method. — Stuart Broomer, Signal to Noise
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Few guitarists have taken up the challenge of free improvisation, at least relative to saxophonists or drummers. And because there have been correspondingly few masters in the field, emerging artists tend to veer toward one of only two canonical styles: the jagged, brittle abstraction of Derek Bailey or the equally fervid (but relatively linear) postromantic lyricism of Joe Morris. But Scott Fields has managed to find a different path, and a rewarding one at that. He borrows evenhandedly from both Bailey and Morris, but offers fewer notes and less volume than either, opening up a fair amount of space and giving his music a particularly midwestern contour—prairie landscapes instead of canyons. The guitarist also offers an answer to the essential question of jazz since the 90s: how to balance composition and improvisation. Unlike a typical head-then-solos jazz tune, his music doesn’t counterpose these two forces; instead it often seems to employ both simultaneously, weaving together theme and variation so seamlessly you can’t always tell the difference. — Neil Tesser, Chicago Reader
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In general, Fields’ music is unique but surprisingly accessible, often featuring long-lined solos. Fields improvises very well, sometimes displaying classical and flamenco influences. — Harvey Pekar, Jazziz
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There’s a definitely classical feel to his sound, but it’s tempered with a prickly improvisational edge. Fields is equally talented at composing, crafting long skeins of dense melodic interplay through which solo passages emanate with ease. — Peter Margasak, Chicago Reader
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Fields’ guitar playing covers a broad stylistic palette. Some of his compositions and improvisations are unusually spacious, allowing time for each note to resonate and breathe; some of the compositions explode into jagged sonic shards that shower the listener, not allowing time to fully comprehend or absorb the sonic onslaught. Fields’ phrasing is more suggestive of the piano work of Cecil Taylor than it is of the work of any mainstream jazz guitarist. At times, Fields takes broad swipes at his guitar, creating dense clusters of sound splintering out of the dark sonic nest. His dynamics are broad and carefully controlled. There are also clear strains of rock-based sensibilities that creep into some of the improvisations. Fields has a highly developed approach to composition that blurs the distinction between composition and improvisation in much the same way as Myra Melford did during her performance at Duke University last week. In all cases, the forms of the compositions are integrally linked to the form of the improvisations and the interplay between the players. The basic pattern is for the selections to begin with a simple melody and evolve into improvisations of intense interplay and ferocious energy. Yet, even in its most seemingly uninhibited moments, the trio retained a high level of discipline and coherence.— Stan Dick, Spectator Magazine
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Unless an unpredictable upheaval happens (for example in terms of guitarists, it is necessary to be able to remember our “conversations” about James Emery, Masujaa, Spencer Barefield, Joe Morris, Bruce Eisenbeil…), Scott Fields is destined for a dazzling future where he lives, on the borders of the lands of jazz—or its installation. There (in Madison, Wisconsin), on the 13th, 14th and 17th of October, 1996, he brought together two ensembles that he knows better than anyone else. With the first, Fields played a perpetual game, his instrument clearly linking with either the piano or with the bass, depending on whether he wished to give to the variation a slippery character or an impenetrable one. There is also in his phrasing a mastery of a gliding flight which ignores caution or vertigo, as well as an emphasis on tiny boisterous contractions, six cords without fragments, but in balance across which Marilyn Crispell continues to exert the power of slackening, especially during the dispersion of Anthony Braxton’s quartet. In addition, Fields draws out his guitar and broadens it, giving the impression of tranquilly sinking himself into the eye of the cyclone; the body worn-out from the storm prevails over outer dangers and themes. — Alexandre Pierrepont, Improjazz
Music for the radio program This American Life
Diese CD erschien zwar schon im vergangenen Herbst. Da mir “This American Life” damals abhanden kam, sie hier im AMM-Forum aber unbedingt besprochen werden sollte, denn sie ist wirklich erstaunlich, im folgenden nun ein kleiner Text darüber. Der in Köln lebende US-Gitarrist ist kein Unbekannter in der Improviser-Scene, nahm Scott Fields doch beispielsweise mit den Protagonisten Hamid Drake, Gerry Hemingway, Joseph Jarman, Myra Melford, Otomo Yoshihide oder Matt Turner Musik auf. Sein neues Album, ca. Fields 32 Produktion, liefert die Musik des in Chicago gesendeten Radioprogramms “This American Life.” Allerdings kein schlichter Hintergrund-Klangteppich ist hier zu hören, sondern der ebenbürtige Partner neben David Sedaris, dem Autor und Sprecher der Story (ist auf der CD nicht dabei!). In den fünf von Fields komponierten Stücken gönnen sich der Gitarrist und seine drei Kollegen Sebastian Gramss (Kontrabass), João Lobo (Perkussion) und Scott Roller (Cello) alle Zeit und gelegentlich auch Ruhe der Welt. Ohne jemals in abgehobener Coolness zu erstarren, spielen sie absolut klar und intensiv ihr sensibles Free-Jazz-Ding. Konsequent und voller Emotion!!�(Viel Vergnügen bei der Entdeckung wünscht — Olaf Maikopf, All My Jazz
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The bassist here, Sebastian Gramss, featured on Das Mollsche Gesetz’s Catalogue Of Improvisation, which I reviewed in The Wire 303. DMG’s improvisations follow two rules: no piece should last more than 60 seconds, and each should be followed by a pause of the same duration as the music. In contrast, Scott Fields allows the musicians to stretch out, and all five tracks last around a quarter-hour. With a line-up like this (electric guitar, cello, bass, drums), the label “chamber jazz” always hovers menacingly, but it is not particularly helpful as shorthand. Fields and co produce thoughtful music, but not unduly cerebral, dry or cautious — the improvisations are adventurous, constantly engaging and often passionate. The last Fields album I heard, Dénouement (Clean Feed) took more than a decade to get a proper release. Fortunately, this very impressive session has taken only a year to escape. Incidentally, This American Life is a Chicago Public Radio show that its producers describe as “movies for the radio,” and if this CD is anything to go by, it must be addictive listening. — Barry Witherden, The Wire
Drawings
There’s an enhanced CD among the recent releases by Ernesto Rodrigues’ Creative Sources called Drawings. The “enhancement” consists in a 55-minute MP4 video — Der Raum, by Arno Oehri — which shows the working processes between Scott Fields and German visual artist Thomas Hornung, who lives in Basel and spends about one hour every evening by making spur-of-the-moment drawings on A4 paper sheets, “typically in black but occasionally in colored chalk,” as per the guitarist’s words. The three collaborators first met in 2004 during a residency in the Swiss Alps, yet only after a while the American decided to dig out something from those sketches, converting them in a multi-page graphic score whose constitution is better explained by the composer himself in the liner notes. Fields, one of the most interesting phrase scramblers in contemporary jazz also in more “regular” outings (check his efforts on Clean Feed), asks the listeners to play the 98 audio tracks of the disc in shuffle mode — the same method applied to Hornung’s 171 pictures, previously selected, when he performs this work live. This modus operandi is not really crucial for the ultimate result, as the severely fragmentary conciseness of the solos causes the whole to sound exactly as a haphazard reproduction of the initial program even when the record is played straight; I seriously doubt that a remote chance of memorizing this album exists. What needs to be noted is how brilliantly this man manages to conjure up a growing quantity of uncommon timbres, chordal surges, skeletal counterpoints and unclassifiable pitches from his axe (manipulated conventionally or through various kinds of implementations), elevating the music to a degree of consequentiality on a par with its pictographic complement. — Massimo Ricci, Temporary Fault
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German artist Thomas Hornung has the habit of making many quick drawings, most of which he discards, and some he archives. Guitarist Scott Fields made this CD to accompany these drawings and to mimick their creation. The CD consists of 98 tracks, ranging from 8 seconds to 1 minute. In this short period, there’s hardly anything to tell, and that’s what it sounds like: short snippets of sound, with no apparent sense. Unless this makes sense to you: “Eventually I decided to convert some (as it turned out 171) of his drawings into a multi-page graphic score. To do that I made a matrix of pitch rows and numbers that represent playing techniques. Then I reversed Thomas’s drawings so that what was black became transparent. Finally I laid each drawing over the matrix and used what was visible as an element in an extended, modular composition.” It is pretty painful that you need to explain all this, and much more, in two pages on the liner notes. In my humble opinion, music is about music, not about some intellectual and cerebral creation. Click on the cover above to see how much notes remain after the “color reversion.” The point of this approach totally eludes me. There are about five trillion other ways to organise notes based on external circumstances, most of which are possibly more valuable than the approach taken here. I have no problem that other art forms can generate inspiration for musical evocations, quite to the contrary, but not through such a mechanistic intellectual process. What Fields does, is just to create randomness. There is no link whatsoever between the drawings and his music. And none of the 98 pieces actually has anything to tell. They’re just a few sounds on one or several strings. Less interesting than a bee buzzing around your head. The good news is that “I had 254 takes, 171 of which I kept (…), a month later I culled the 171 acceptable takes down to 99, one for each track possible on the CD.” We were saved from listening to a triple CD. — Stefan Gijssels, Free Jazz Blogspot
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Der Chicagoer Gitarrist Scott Fields, in Köln lebend und mit diversen musikalischen Formationen wie z.B. dem James Choice Orchestra im experimentellen Improvisationsbereich arbeitend, hat mit Drawings eine Solo-CD veröffentlicht. Er spielte im Loft in Köln Miniaturen mit einer Gibson-E-Gitarre ein. Die 99 Kompositionen, keine länger als eine Minute, wirken wie Improvisationen, in denen Free-Jazz-Einsprengsel aufleben, einsame, schwermütige Bluesriffs angeschlagen werden, für Momente Heavy-Metal-Gitarrenattacken losbrechen, sich atmosphärisch-dröhnende Soundflächen einstellen, Garagenrocksound-Versatzsücke sich Raum verschaffen, Geräusch- und Tonexperimente eingebaut sind. In den kurzen Stücke nimmt sich Fields die Freiheit von Extemen, sich einerseits ruhig in eine sanfte Melodie einzufühlen und andererseits einem fahrig-heftig-harten Gestus von Rhythmus nachgehend. Wobei eine zutiefst lebendige, in sich stimmige Dynamik entsteht. Auf dem Cover von Drawings sind die wei�en Linien einer Grafik auf schwarzem Grund abgebildet. Die kurzen Tracks der CD haben auch den Charakter von freier, ungegenständlicher Zeichnung. An abstrakten Expressionismus erinnernd. Und im speziellen geht es um den in Basel lebenden deutschen Künstler Thomas Hornung, der Inspiration für die Kompositionen war. Er verbringt so manchen Abend in seinem kleinen Wohnatelier am Zeichentisch. Minutenzeichnungen herstellend mit Kreiden auf schwarzem DIN-A4-Papier. Dabei Wein trinkend, Musik hörend. Cellostücke von Dvorak etwa. Blätter von Hornung waren Vorlagen für Scott Fields Partitur. (Translated by the site’s webmaster, email him with complaints.) The Chicago guitarist Scott Fields, who lives in Cologne and works in the areas of experimental music and improvisation with such groups as the James Choice Orchestra, has just had a solo CD called Drawings released. At The Loft, in Cologne, he recorded miniatures on a Gibson electric guitar. The 99 compositions, none longer than one minute, are improvisatory. Free-jazz moments emerge, lonely, gloomy blue riffs are struck, with moments of heavy-metal guitar breakaway attacks. Also incorporated are atmospheric, earthshaking sound fields, garage-rock sound fragments, space, noise, and tone experiments. In the short pieces Fields explores the freedom of extremes. One quiet, with a sensitive gentle melody, followed by a hard, violent rhythmic gesture. Lively deeply coherent dynamics arise. The graphic on the Drawings cover is white lines on black. The short tracks on the CD have the character of free, abstract expressionism. The inspiration for the compositions was German artist Thomas Hornung, who lives in Basel. He spends many evenings in his small home studio at the drawing table. He manufacturing drawings in black chalk on A4 paper, each taking just minutes, while drinking wine and listening to music, most often Dvorak cello pieces. Hornung’s sheets were templates for Scott Fields’ score. — Tina Karolina Stauner, Textem
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What’s your framework? Every creative musician, even the freest, operates within one. Consider Scott Fields, for example. There’s a lot of spontaneity in the Chicago-born, German-based guitarist’s music, but it arises from carefully selected structures. In the case of Drawings, he has both internalized and responded to another artist’s process in order to stoke his own. Each of its 99 brief performances is an immediate response to an image by Swiss artist Thomas Hornung. The album’s sleeve notes portray Hornung, who is apparently so obscure that he is virtually Google-proof, as a man of rigid habits. He spends each day following the same schedule, lives in two identically furnished rooms, and each night he spends an hour dashing off images on one piece of A4 paper every minute or so, with time out for cigarette breaks. Fields, in turn, took a sheaf of Hornung’s drawings (which are reproduced on the tray card) and tried to play for as long as Hornung had drawn; the denser the inking, the longer he played. But nothing lasts too long, and the whole CD runs just 46:20. This brevity may be a formal triumph, but it makes for frustrating listening. There’s a fair bit of variety, from Nels Cline-like shredding to swelling feedback to elegantly plucked shapes to music box-like chimes. But none of it develops. Of course, these tracks weren’t supposed to, but the result is still a choppy and unsatisfying listen. Ironically the soundtrack to an accompanying video by Arno Oehri, which shows Hornung and Fields at work, is more engaging. It is comprised of raw material from the sessions, drastically slowed down and pitched so low that it doesn’t sound like guitar anymore. Since the video has no other sounds, one has plenty of time to savor Fields’ slow-mo gestures, and plenty of motivation; the video’s 55 minutes is way too long to watch Fields play divorced from anything you hear. — Bill Meyer, Dusted
Scharfefelder
Gleich zwei neue CDs des seit fünf Jahren in Köln lebenden Chicagoer Gitarristen Scott Fields erscheinen dieser Tage auf dem interessanten Lissabonner Improviser-Label Clean Feed. Fields kennt man von seinen Arbeiten mit Joseph Jarman, Hamid Drake, Mat Maneri, Marilyn Crispell, Michael Formanek, oder Jeff Parker, alle veröffentlicht auf Kleinstlabels wie Black Saint, Delmark, und Music and Arts. Scharfefelder — sorry, diesen Titel, zusammengesetzt aus den übersetzten Nachnamen der zwei Gitarristen Sharp und Fields, finde ich nicht so richtig lustig. Doch vielleicht ist diese strikte Eins-zu-eins-Übersetzung ja auch absolut ernst gemeint, denn musikalisch geht es in dieser «neuen Kammermusik» meist kratzbürstig zu. Da wird lustvoll so einiges zitiert, erinnert (in den packendsten Momenten) an Larry Coryell’s Spiel bei «Spaces», kurze Akkorde lassen auch an mittelalterliche Lautenmusik denken. Ausgiebige leidenschaftliche Improvisationsgefechte ausschließlich auf akustischen Gitarren, wilde Ausgelassenheit, zarte Sinnlichkeit, abrupte Brüche — wahrscheinlich ist das alles provokativ gemeint, soll den Hörer herausfordern. Aber ob sich, außer auf Improvisation versessene Gitarristen und Hardcorefans der beiden Saitenderwische, noch jemand für deren introvertierten Streifzug durch die Scharfefelder interessiert? Nach fast siebzig Minuten gebe ich mich geschlagen — ganz ehrlich, mir ist dieses orgiastische «Geschrammel» zu anstrengend. (Translated by the site’s webmaster, email him with complaints.) Two new CDs from Chicago guitarist Scott Fields, who for the last five years has lived in Cologne, appear on the Lisbon label Clean Feed, which specializes in interesting improvisers. Fields is known from his work with Joseph Jarman, Hamid Drake, Mat Maneri, Marilyn Crispell, Michael Formanek, and Jeff Parker, all published on such small labels as Black Saint, Delmark, and Music and Arts. Sorry, I do not find the title Scharfefelder, the German translation of the surnames Sharp and Fields, the two guitarists, really funny. But perhaps this strict one-to-one translation is also absolutely serious, because this “new chamber music” is mostly provocative. There are many enjoyable sections that recall (in the most absorbing moments) Larry Coryell’s playing on “Spaces” and sudden chords that bring to mind medieval lute music. Extensive passionate improvisation exchanges, played exclusively on acoustic guitar, wild exuberance, delicate sensuality, abrupt breaks — probably this is meant to be provocative and is intended to challenge the listener. But, except for improvisation-obsessed guitarists and hardcore fans of the two whirling-dervish string-players, would someone find the introverted journey through Scharfefelder interesting? After nearly seventy minutes of this orgy of “crazy strumming” I began to feel the effort. — 4 stars (out of 5) Olaf Maikopf, Jazzthetik (Continues with review of Bitter Love Songs.)
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De to gitaristene Elliott Sharp og Scott Fields har også satt preg på amerikansk musikk de siste 30 årene, både som komponister og utøvere. På Scharfefelder møtes de til naken, akustisk dyst og duett, i grenselandet komponert/improvisert. Musikken er intim, men også stålstrengskarp og eksplosiv. Stilkomponenter fra frijazz, blues og minimalisme tilkjennegir seg i de forskjellige uttrykkene som presenteres. Scharfefelder byr på fortettet nerve og reflektert spill. — 5 stars (out of 5) Arild R. Andersen, Oslopuls
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Elliott Sharp in allen Gassen: hin und wieder lässt sich der Gitarrist auf Zwiegespräche mit Kollegen ein Scharfefelder zieht sich mit einem Dutzend Stücke in die Länge. Das ausufernde Techtelmechtel aus wilder Ausgelassenheit, zarter Sinnlichkeit und abrupten Brüchen ermüdet auf die Dauer und ist wohl nur für Gitarren-Freaks geeignet. Scharfefelder bezeichnen kein musikalisches Neuland und sind insgesamt akustischer Kunst verpflichtet. Sie sind die direkte Übersetzung der beiden Protagonisten Namen Sharp und Fields. Der 1959 geborene Chicagoer Gitarrist Scott Fields mit Wohnsitz Köln hat mit vielen innovativen Vertretern des aktuellen Jazz gearbeitet. (Translated by the site’s webmaster, email him with complaints.) Elliott Sharp walks many roads. Now and then the guitarist collaborates with colleagues. Scharfefelder is long, with a dozen pieces. The recording�s rampant flirtations with wild exuberance, delicate sensuality, and abrupt breaks, which tire the listener in the long run, is probably only for guitar freaks. Scharfefelder breaks no musical new ground and is a display of the art of the acoustic. The title is direct translation of the two protagonists names, Sharp and Fields. The Chicago-born (1959) guitarist Scott Fields lives in Cologne and has worked with many innovative representatives of contemporary Jazz. — Reiner Kobe, Jazz Podium
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Listen to Scott Fields’ opinion: “(…) collaborations between bald guitarists are, by their nature, irresistibly charming (…)”. Not a truer word. And the hairless virtuosity we’re given handfuls of in “Scharfefelder” is enough to make me stop thinking about those hyperglycemic crises I experienced decades ago, when the depleted puppy who’s writing these words thought of “Friday Night in San Francisco” as a good starting place to take the instrument a little more seriously. As Goofy would have it, gawrsh. This acoustic duet, recorded at Sharp’s zOaR studio halfway through August 2007, shows that one can still play full chords and let them resonate without being ashamed; and if those shapes proliferate until becoming three or four hundreds — and even badly dissonant, for Christ’s sake — strange halos of peculiar harmonics might invade your terrain and persuade you that flamenco is born again, in a bionic variety (“Doubleviz”) excluding predetermined progressions. Need slanted lines? There are things here which could convince that Sharp and Fields’ fingers are somehow disjointed (“Freefall”); they catch the exact spot where resonant note and wood-ish thud meet, transforming their artistic personae in human bradawls smiling at the listener while punching holes in the residual convictions about that erstwhile tool for serenades and beach hooking. If Ralph Towner and John Abercrombie ever get to hear this, they might be willing to drown in the Sargasso Sea (just kidding, huh? I like some of that stuff, too). Shaven craniums reflecting the open-mouthed admiration of a fellow instrumentalist still willing to learn, impartiality be damned. Not an easy record, in any case: give it the fullest attention and don’t try to use it as background, either you’re a guitarist or not. — Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes
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“Scharfefelder”: Ausschließlich zwei akustische Gitarren: left channel Elliott Sharp, right channel Scott Fields. Und freie Improvisation. Das Faszinierende der Aufnahmen: Sie führen in ihrem unruhig Experimentellen zu so konzentriert klarem spirituellen Raum, wie man es eigentlich von reiner Folkmusik gewohnt ist, die schon Musikgeschichte ist. Es entsteht ein Gefühl von Essenzialität. Das sich auf das ganze mögliche Spektrum von Free Jazz, Improvisation, Blues und Folk bezieht, mit dem souverän gespielt wird, um zu Destilliertem zu gelangen. Zu einer Art Purismus von Traditionellem und Avantgardistischem. Man könnte zwar von der Fingerfertigkeit der beiden Gitarristen mit analysierenden Worten sprechen. Unvermutete Breaks, sperrige Akkorde, verquere Melodieläufe, nervölse Tonfolgen, extremen Wechsel von Sanftheit und Härte benennen. Doch mit Eloquenz könnte man vor allem der Grundstimmung, die sich beim Hören einstellt, nicht leicht nahekommen. Vielmehr passen dazu innere, landschaftsartige Bilder, sich synästhesieartig einstellend. Jamais-vu- und Déjà-vu-Fragmente ineinander geblendet. “… Improvised duos are like a good conversation. Double guitars are a special case: reflections, counterpoints, figure and ground (…”, kommentiert Elliott Sharp in den Liner Notes. Scott Fields hingegen fügt hinzu: “…Although this material is flexible, it can be misunderstood …” Eher umgekehrt wirkt das bei den Songtiteln: Sharp benennt mit großem Assoziationsspielraum: “Branedrane” etwa lässt an D-Branen denken, die man sich als dynamische Objekte in einer höherdimensionalen Raumzeit vorstellt. Die unendlich ausgedehnt sein, aber auch ein endliches und sogar verschwindendes Volumen haben können. Das reißt auch gedanklich Raum auf. Wie auch einer der weiteren Sharp-Titel: “Freefall”. Fields Songnames hingegen klingen einfach verspielt und greifbar: “Between Octopus And Squid”, “Fresh Red Flea” oder “Big, Brutal, Cold Raindrops”. Die beiden Akteure sind sonst auch in diversen Band-Projekten zu finden: Sharp, der Multi-Instrumentalist, der als Komponist auch für Ensembles arbeitet, in Downtown New York City. Und Fields, der Chicagoer, in Köln lebend, in diverse musikalische Gruppierungen involviert. (Translated by the site’s webmaster, email him with complaints.) Scharfefelder: Just two acoustic guitars: left channel Elliott Sharp, Scott Fields right channel. And free improvisation. What’s fascinating about the recording: the almost restless experimental approach leads to a clear, concentrated and spiritual atmosphere, that we recognize from pure folk music (which surely by now is part of music history). It creates a feeling that gets to the essence of music within a wide range from free jazz, improvised music, blues, and folk. The two play with all these styles sophisticatedly to finally arrive at a distilled version between tradition and avant-garde. We could analyze both guitarists’ dexterity, talk about unexpected breaks, bulky chords, “verquere” melodies, nervous tones, extreme changes from softness and hardness. But with such eloquence that it puts you into a special mood you can’t catch just by listening. Rather, it evokes images and inner landscapes that blend as jamais-vu and déjà-vu fragments in your mind. “…Improvised duos are like a good conversation. Double guitars are a special case: reflections, counter points, figure and ground…,” commented Elliott Sharp in the liner notes. Scott Fields, however, adds: “…although this material is flexible, it can be misunderstood….” Rather the reverse effect is in the song titles: Sharp names one song “Branedrane,” which makes you think of D-Branes that are dynamic objects in an imaginary higher dimension of space and time. This could be extended to infinity, as well as a very limited, tiny volume, close to nothing. Titles like this open up your mind, like another Sharp title: “Free Fall.” Fields’ song names, however, sound more playful and easily accessible: “Between Octopus and Squid,” “Fresh Red Flea,” or “Big, Brutal, Cold Raindrops.” Both musicians can be found in various other band projects: Sharp works in the New York City downtown scene as a multi-instrumentalist and composer for many ensembles. Fields, of Chicago, lives in Cologne and is involved with various musical groups. — Tina Karolina Stauner, Textem
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Guitar duos present many possibilities for intrepid musicians. Such pairings can be opportunities for boundary-pushing sonic explorations. Scharfefelder, a collaboration between guitarists Elliott Sharp and Scott Fields, is a frenetic set of duets performed on acoustic guitars. This is a challenging listen, with dissonant passages a common occurrence, but still obvious that both musicians are masters of the instrument. Tracks such as “Branendrane” and “Put your pennies in my Portuguese cork hat” showcase the iconoclastic�and quite different from each other�playing of both guitarists. Sharp and Fields both contributed to the compositional structures here, with each piece more of a loose set of parameters for improvisation than tunes in any conventional sense. — Karen Hogg, All About Jazz
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Two of Clean Feed’s best loved guitarists meet up “Scharfefelder” for a knotty, flinty series of performances based on compositional sketches the pair cooked up in advance. These kinds of exchanges can be quite compelling, particularly with two players so eager to achieve distance from everything even remotely associated with typical guitar duos. They do so without sacrificing their zeal for the basic characteristics of the instrument. For one thing, there’s lovely and quite dense counterpoint all over the place, notes replicating like pixels among the push-pull rhythms, string scrabble, and chiming harmonics of “Branedrane.” But the mood isn’t always antic or jittery. The music is disorienting but also quite reflective, even poignant on “Big, Brutal, Cold Raindrops.” Things billow out, or disperse like a droplet of soap in oily water, on “Minerali.” And they draw out long, looping lines that spool downward as tempo slackens on “Shuffle Through the Restaurateur Gauntlet.” Taken a track or two at a time, this stuff is bracing, though as an album my impression was that it went on for too long. As a whole, something about this music didn’t connect with me, and I consistently found it more impressive than enjoyable. Many listeners will dig this, as on some basic level it’s enough that two good guitarists play well together. — Jason Bivins, Cadence Magazine
Bitter Love Songs
Mordant wit and caustic self-deprecation have always been reliable elements in Scott Fields’ creative expression. From the pithy brickbats of semi-fictional critic Hugh Jarrid to the admirable, if puzzling, practice of publishing pans right alongside praises on his website, the guitarist has never shied away presenting the whole package of his persona, prickly pear portions and all. Even by Fields’ archly candid standards this new Clean Feed outing stands out. His liners read as a suite-like screed, pillorying a succession of unnamed assailants to his temper and patience. He saves the strongest recriminations for last, directing black roses and dead rat vitriol at those who have wronged him in love. Track titles wryly embellish on the conceit, my personal favorite being “Your parents must be ecstatic now.” Despite the dour and potentially distracting emotional context, the set stays sharply on point throughout, though it’s hard to tell exactly how much of the acrimony is genuine and how much is amplified for show. The music curiously recalls the early Nineties work of Joe Morris in its preference for pared down frills-free interplay. Jagged single note runs race regularly atop undulating bass and drums rhythms. Think Flip and Spike, and more specifically “Itan” and “Mombaccus,” and your close to the aural mark. Fields’ tone is often a bit rounder and cleaner than JoMo’s and that may be a function of the recording, but there’s a comparable frequency of densely knotted note clusters, spit out at staccato intervals. Bassist Sebastian Gramss and drummer João Lobo traffic in comparable agitation and irascibility, shading in the cracks around Fields’ chattery plectrum pings while still keeping the pieces intentionally off-kilter. It’s a dynamic intended to ape the disquieting feeling just prior to when one’s heart goes under the knife of betrayal and scorn. The pieces follow similar schemas until “I was good enough for you until your friends butted in” when the seething clouds break a bit into more spacious variation of melancholy. This is easily Fields most jazz-oriented album in many moons and a welcome fang-fringed spin on familiar forms. — Derek Taylor, Bagatellen
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The Freetet is ostensibly Cologne-based guitarist Scott Fields’ “traditional blowing vehicle,” and Bitter Love Songs is his first in the guitar-bass-drums format since Mamet (Delmark, 2001), with bassist Michael Formanek and drummer Michael Zerang. On Bitter Love Songs, he’s joined by German bassist Sebastian Gramss and Portuguese drummer João Lobo. What makes this date a semi-departure for Fields is that, in the last six years, most of his work has been for chamber ensembles with unique instrumentation; improvised but with challenging notation. These include Beckett (Clean Feed, 2006) and We Were the Phliks (Rogue Art, 2007). “Yea Sure, We Can Still Be Friends, Whatever” opens Bitter Love Songs, an evermore scumbled improvisation on a simple-but-effective bluesy theme, from fleet mid-range choruses to muted smears interspersed with referential flecks. Gramss and Lobo make a solid post-bop pair, yet seamlessly enter into frantic collective interplay as Fields’ runs become blurred. More pointillist is “Go Ahead, Take the Furniture, At Least You Helped Pick It Out,” occupying similar structural territory to Fields’ more delicate chamber pieces, while still sallying forth with a pliant groove. What might separate this group from “traditional” theme-solos-theme orientation is that, for the most part, the leader is the only soloist (Gramss is spotlighted on “I Was Good Enough for You…”). Nevertheless, the Freetet’s approach is certainly unified—as Fields’ playing becomes more fragmentary and texturally diverse, Gramss and Lobo up the ante. Indeed, the bassist is frequently the first to follow Fields in speedy plucked lines, as mutual shading soon approaches a locking of horns. “My Love is Love, Your Love is Hate” (winner of the shortest-title contest on this disc) finds the writing becoming progressively more seasick in a hellishly knotty melodic/rhythmic collision, Lobo’s suspended time gradually filling in momentum alongside the strings’ ornate picking, digs and scrapes. Sub-tonal jabs behind the bridge approach British guitarist Ray Russell’s territory, before the trio brings the tune into a muddy thrum. One must be prepared for relentlessness with this disc—even the brief calm of a dusky Grant Green-ish melody on “Your Parents Must Be Just Ecstatic Now” is quickly overtaken by a storm of fuzz and piercing shards. When Fields and guitarist Jeff Parker convened a double-trio for Denouement (Geode, 1997, reissued on Clean Feed), the level of interplay from the “paired Freetets” astounded this writer. On Bitter Love Songs, multiplying the equation is unnecessary, as there’s so much music available here. — Clifford Allen, All About Jazz
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With his guitar trio, the Scott Fields Freetet, the guitarist wants to get even for all the problems caused to him by people he trusted and especially the one he loved. The titles of the tracks leave nothing to the imagination : “Yeah, Sure, We Can Still Be Friends, Whatever,” “Go Ahead, Take The Furniture, At Least You Helped Pick It Out,” “My Love Is Love, Your Love Is Hate,” etc, etc. And with that knowledge in mind, you would expect some raw, frustrated, angry or even violent music, or at best some sad blues-drenched wailing. What you get is nothing of the sort, though. You get abstract and free music, nervous and agitated, often sounding like Joe Morris, all in the mid-tempo range, with the exception of the fifth track, “I Was Good Enough For You Until Your Friends Butted In’” which is a little slower and closer to a blues in form and feeling. Sebastian Gramss on bass and João Lobo on drums play well and supportive, because Fields is not always easy to follow. Despite many good ideas, the emotional disconnect between theme and form is too big a gap to bridge for me. This soft-toned, gentle, open yet nervous music is the opposite of the destructive anger you would expect. Fields would have done better by presenting is music “as is,” leaving more to the listener’s imagination, rather than pointing the direction with words. Now, it’s just a nice album which will certainly be of interest to modern guitar-players. 3 stars — Stefan Gijssels, Free Jazz Blogspot
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The depths to which Scott Fields will sink are seemingly infinite. On his newest debacle, Bitter Love Songs, on the Spanish label Clean Feed Records, he hires a surrogate to perform in his place. Although Fields is listed as the album’s composer and guitarist, clearly he has hired a far-superior plectrum pounder to play his parts. This reviewer’s best guess? Joe Morris. Having suffered through countless (and beatless) Fields solos I know well his plinky-plunky “Ah so, mister, you have ticky for washy, no ticky no washy” acoustic guitar “stylings” and his many mangled missteps on the electrified alternative; the licks on this disc just taste different. Although I deplore his dishonesty, failing to even assign his sub a nom de axe ala Bird’s Charlie Chan, I applaud his absence. With Fields reduced to scratching out a few simple, nay simplistic, songs, his able replacement (clearly Morris) and rhythm-section reliables João Lobo and Sebastian Gramss rehydrate, resuscitate, and jazzitate these mediocre melodies. Fields’ sole remaining task was to pen whiney liner notes and assign ridiculous “bitter” titles to his “compositions.” Couldn’t Morris have tackled titles too? Fields is bitter? He should be…toward whomever sold him his first guitar. — Hugh Jarrid, Swingin’ Thing Magazine
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Guitarist, sort of Chicago’s answer to Derek Bailey, although I wouldn’t swear on that, since for me one of the main things they have in common is that I’ve never made much sense out of either. This is a trio, recorded in Germany, with Sebastian Gramss on double bass and João Lobo on drums. Title isn’t obviously reflected in the music, but it sure is in the song titles: “Yea, sure, we can still be friends, whatever;” “Go ahead, take the furniture, at least you helped pick it out;” “My love is love, your love is hate;” “Your parents must be just ecstatic now;” “I was good enough for you until your friends butted in;” “You used to say I love you but so what now.” Liner notes hit even harder. Not sure where the music comes from — sublimated anger? — but it seems uncommonly focused, for once. I’ve played this record a lot on the road the last month, and it’s never let me down. The avant-guitarist has a tendency elsewhere to diddle in abstractions, but he plays with remarkable logic here — bitterness must focus the mind. The Freetet adds bass and drums, bulking up the sound and punctuating the emotions. (A-) — Village Voice critic Tom Hull, tomhull.com
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(Continued from double review with Scharfefelder.) Ganz anders dagegen die Wirkung der Bitter Love Songs. Ebenfalls in weiten Zügen Improvisationsmusik, fesselt sie von Beginn an. Fields widmet sich durchgängig der freien Jazz-Form, wie sie Ornette Coleman mit seinen einstigen Gitarristen James «Blood» Ulmer oder Bern Nix etabliert. Dessen Harmolodic-System stand wohl Pate bei den sechs Stücken voller organisierter Unordnung. Fields zieht seine steil an- und absteigenden Flugbahnen ganz in dieser Tradition der «Umdeutung des Vorgefundenen» über lineare Intervallreihen. Seine zwei technisch hervorragenden Kollegen Sebastian Gramss und der Portugiese João Lobo begleiten den Gitarristen dabei mit feinsinnigen Überlappungen, führen lebhafte Kommunikationen. Diese Musik ist free, hat gleichzeitig aber auch eine fesselnde Melodiehaftigkeit und starke Blues-Verwurzelung — ungemein aufregend. (Translated by the site’s webmaster, email him with complaints.) Quite different, on the other hand, is the effect of Bitter Love Songs. Also in the broad discipline of improvisational music, it captivates from the start. Fields is consistently dedicated to free-form jazz, as established by Ornette Coleman with his former guitarists James Blood Ulmer and Bern Nix. Its Harmolodic system was probably the model for these six pieces of organized disorder. Fields moves through steep and descending flight paths through linear interval series in this tradition of “reinterpretation of the method.” His two technically excellent colleagues Sebastian Gramss and the Portuguese João Lobo accompany the guitarist, overlapping with subtle, lively communications. This music is free, but also fascinatingly melodic, with strong blues roots — incredibly exciting. — 4 stars (out of 5) Olaf Maikopf, Jazzthetik
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El amor ha sido desde siempre una fuente de inspiración para todas las artes, incluida la música. Por su parte, la ruptura del amor ha servido también como fuente de inspiración artística, aunque no es demasiado habitual que sea el protagonista íntegro de una grabación. Esto es lo que sucede con Bitter Love Songs del guitarrista Scott Fields. Un disco que contiene seis composiciones amargas, desapacibles, con estructuras broncas, retorcidas y desasosegantes, que logran transmitir ese abanico de sensaciones asociadas tanto a la ruptura amorosa como a la desolación, soledad y rencor posteriores. La ausencia de sus correspondientes letras es suplida magníficamente por las texturas de la guitarra de Fields, especialmente en los once minutos de “Yea, sure, we can still be friends, whatever,” que el guitarrista convierte en una suerte de fuerte discusión de antiguos enamorados. Por su parte “You used to say I love you but so what now” se transforma es un tema seco y nervioso, al igual que le sucede a “My love is love, your love is hate,” mientras que “I was enough for you until your friends butted in” es una pieza desolada y llena de espacios, con un leve deje country. Obviamente, el proyecto no llegaría a ninguna parte sin la maestría de Fields y de sus acompañantes, el contrabajita Sebastian Gramss y el batería João Lobo. Ambos se encargan de tejer la red sobre la que el guitarrista formaliza sus sentimientos. Música desoladora, como (parte de) la vida misma. — Pachi Tapiz, Ritmos del Mundo
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Another improviser who tours as frequently as [Evan] Parker is guitarist Scott Fields. Chicago-born, Fields moved to Köln, Germany a few years back. On the witty Bitter Love Songs (Clean Feed CF102CD), he leads a trio completed by a Portuguese rhythm section: bassist Sebastian Gramss and drummer João Lobo. Fields’ compositions, which match liquid guitar runs, slinky bass lines and on-the-beat drumming, are still at variance with their sardonic titles. For instance “My Love is Love, Your Love is Hate,” features a spinning staccato theme from Fields that is stretched with slurred fingering until it seems that it will rupture, but doesn’t. Working in double counterpoint, the massed strings join to produce a barrage of notes, with Fields sounding as if he’s playing microtonally and Gramss slapping a backbeat. Meanwhile Lobo’s flams precede an intermezzo for ringing guitar licks. Note clusters are lobbed between the players on “You Used to Say I Love You but So What Now.” But the strategy is different. Fields’ contrapuntal chording skirts C&W picking, while Gramss resonates handfuls of low-pitched timbres. Eventually as the bassist settles on legato pacing, Fields wraps up with echoing, blues-based licks. Gramss’ bass work owes its suppleness to sonic extensions from older bass specialists such as New York’s Mark Helias, who has recorded in Toronto. His Open Loose band includes drummer Tom Rainey and tenor saxophonist Tony Malaby. — Ken Waxman, Jazzword
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“Sì, certo. Possiamo rimanere amici in ogni caso”; “Ti andavo bene finchè i tuoi amici non si sono impicciati”; “Il mio amore è amore, il tuo amore è odio”. Parte dai titoli, ma anche dalle impietose e stringatissime note di copertina la tremenda autoironia di questo disco, in cui Fields sembra voler riflettere con cadenze tragicomiche sull’amarezza e sul fatalismo degli incontri sbagliati della vita. Come quello con un musicista che “sembra apprezzare la tua musica ma poi, appena trova un ingaggio migliore, se ne va dal tuo gruppo”. Il fil rouge di una drammatica e nuda concretezza sembra proseguire con perfetta continuità in una musica suonata da una chitarra elettrica privata di ogni orpello effettistico, da un contrabbasso e da una batteria. Quindi un trio non certo insolito nel jazz moderno, ma abbastanza raro da incontrare nella discografia free. Un tratto originale accentuato da un’improvvisazione incasellata tra temi molto spigolosi ma rigorosi e da un’improvvisazione continua alle cui spalle lavora un bassista capace di porsi in linea quasi telepatica con gli altri due e la percussività del giovanissimo portoghese Lobo. Il primo è il quarantaduenne Gramss, anche lui come Fields vive a Colonia e ha collaborato tra gli altri con Fred Frith, Rudi Mahall e Tom Cora. Lobo si è già ascoltato in Italia con musicisti decisamente lontani da qui: Enrico Rava, Giovanni Guidi e Mauro Negri. In questo disco si rivela in grado di conferire propriet� espressiva anche quando si toccano vertici di radicalismo improvvisativo. Apparentemente è lui il regista di tempi spezzati e multiformi che sostengono una sorta di insistenza armonica in cui un’immensa gamma di soluzioni passa attraverso arpeggi chitarristici, linee atonali velocissime o un’informalità grattuggiata. 4 stelle — Gigi Sabelli, All About Jazz, Italy
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While the sardonic album title alludes to a session fraught with rancorous despair, guitarist Scott Fields’ Bitter Love Songs is, perhaps ironically, one of his most accessible efforts. Born in Chicago, but now based in Cologne, Germany, Fields recorded this date in his new home town with German bassist Sebastian Gramss and Portuguese drummer João Lobo. An iconoclast who favors unusual instrumental combinations, this is his first guitar trio recording since Mamet (Delmark, 2001), with bassist Michael Formanek and drummer Michael Zerang. In the scathing liner notes Fields explains that the unsettled themes, fitful rhythms and grating dissonances elicited by the trio are intended to invoke the nerve-wracking nausea that accompanies the impending dissolution of romance. While all of these traits are present, they are often fairly subtle; in contrast to his exotic conceptual projects, this loose trio session is actually somewhat conventional. With Fields as the principle soloist, Gramss and Lobo follow the guitarist’s lead, providing stirring rhythmic accompaniment that vacillates in tempo from casual to frantic. The majority of the tunes saunter at a buoyant mid-tempo clip with periods of intermittent turbulence. Occasionally reaching a fevered pitch, but never boiling over, the trio generates a more agreeable mood than one would expect from such song titles as “My Love Is Love, Your Love Is Hate” and “Your Parents Must Be Just Ecstatic Now.” Only “I Was Good Enough for You Until Your Friends Butted In” breaks form with a languorous abstract blues. A proponent of structured improvisation based on tone row manipulation, Fields conveys his enigmatic statements with focused intensity. He fires rapid salvoes of knotty linear cadences at regular staccato intervals from his clean-toned hollow body. At his most feverish, he conjures blistering chromatic note clusters as he scuttles across his fretboard. Together, Gramss’ elastic walking bass patterns, Lobo’s shuffling trap set ruminations and Fields’ thorny commentary coil into a kaleidoscopic mosaic of expressionistic interplay. Despite the derisive title, Bitter Love Songs is a compelling example of modern jazz guitar improvisation supported by an empathetic rhythm section. For aficionados of unfettered guitar traditions, this is essential listening. — Troy Collins, All About Jazz
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Everything in this CD — from the extremely sour liner notes, to the cruelly sneering track titles, to the leader’s “chip-on-a-shoulder” photo in the inlay card of my promo copy — reports of someone who is about to explode following a series of unlucky existential affairs. What better method to channel a potentially destructive fury into a handful of composition for guitar trio, and making them appear delivered from jazz stereotypes as well? That�s what happens in Bitter Love Songs, the latest news coming from Scott Fields, whose clean-but-not-too-much tone characterizes a fine brand of dissonant, almost irritating at times, angular tunes where he’s sustained by Sebastian Gramss on double bass and João Lobo on drums. Hammering down phrases that appear as acrid as one’s mood after a rollicking from the office’s chief, Fields sounds similar to a man obsessed, totally unmindful of the establishment of a harmonic permanence. Ostinato-based figurations and chords full of minor seconds and augmented fifths are served like hamburgers at McDonald’s, one after another in deadpan pessimism, until every honeymoon picture on the wall gets ripped off the frame. The calmer settings are tackled with a sort of extreme aloofness, all the more enhanced by a rhythm section that doesn’t want to know what “regularity of pace” means. The guitarist declares to have kept the words of these bitter songs to himself, but there’s no question that his music stings worse than a lawyer’s bill. If John Scofield (note the curious assonance) decided to go harmolodic, maybe he could ask here for a few lessons. — Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes
Beckett
Although guitarist Scott Fields is the composer for each of the five lengthy compositions on Beckett, the music sounds very much like episodic free improvisations. The guitar-tenor-cello-percussion quartet has an unusual sound. The use of wit in places, along with occasional melodic passages, serves as a contrast to some rather noisy sound explorations. The musicians listen closely to each other although quite often they follow completely independent paths. The final results will certainly keep listeners guessing for just when one is ready to sum it all up as a freeform screamfest, the mood shifts and the band plays a spacey ballad. Listeners who are open to rockish sounds and avant-garde ideas will find this music of strong interest. 3½ stars — Scott Yanow, All Music Guide
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Beckett follows in the conceptual footsteps of Mamet (Delmark, 2001), guitarist Scott Fields’ previous project inspired by an author. Tracking the thematic similarities between Beckett’s writing and Fields’ compositions is a tenuous prospect, like any project that yields inspiration from a divergent art form. Nonetheless, the album provides a challenging and rewarding listen on its own, with or without knowledge of its genesis. From aleatoric excursions to blistering, jittery free-bop, Fields has an ear for adventurous, unconventional sounds. Christening his work “post-free jazz,” Fields’ complex, multi-part compositions reveal themselves gradually, providing ample room for solo expression and unified thematic development. Packed with intricate counterpoint and tight group interplay, these labyrinthine works blur the line between the composed and the improvised with kaleidoscopic, pre-written passages and dense, free-wheeling improvisations. Joining him for the first time are three new collaborators. Ubiquitous percussionist John Hollenbeck is a fountainhead of unique textures and unconventional rhythms, his pneumatic inventions contribute an array of percussive wonder to the session. Tenor saxophonist Matthias Schubert blends fervent angularity with a flighty, mercurial zeal, especially during his spasmodic tirade on the agitated “What Where.” Cellist Scott Roller employs a diverse approach, blending a sober, singing tone with a scathing bow attack. His lyrical turn on the pensive introspection of “Come and Go” is as delicately melodious as his assertive assault on “What Where” is jarring. The leader shines in this spartan context, his bright tone accenting a razor sharp fusillade of notes one minute, genteel chords the next (sometimes together), as on the zany swing of “Rockaby.” Although conceptual allusions to literature might suggest haughty pretension, Beckett is actually Fields’ most varied and swinging record in years. Even at their most abstract, these are engaging compositions, bolstered by zealous group interaction, rich harmonic ingenuity and stunning dynamic range. Like the work of its dedicatee, one listen to this album won’t do it justice. — Troy Collins, All About Jazz
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The guitarist Scott Fields provides a tribute to Samuel Beckett with a dense and challenging bit of chamber jazz or maybe modern classical/free music that he describes as “post-free jazz” and “exploratory music.” His concept of tightly packed compositions with noisy breaches of the oft times violent surface tempts the outer reaches of sound. Perfectly matched by the overtly quirky drummer, John Hollenbeck, these odd structures ask many musical questions, and sometimes provide answers. — Mark Corroto, All About Jazz
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Think of music you associate with Samuel Beckett and you probably think something spare, lean, minimal, Morton Feldman being the most obvious point of reference. There was, after all, their (anti-?)operatic collaboration Neither, and two of the composer’s three last completed works were Beckett-related (Words and Music, and For Samuel Beckett). But despite several striking similarities — compare Feldman’s fondness for gently permutating cells and the internal repetitions and sonic play of Beckett’s late prose — there are appreciable differences, notably the size and scale of their final works. While Feldman stretched out in the last decade of his life, almost as if he’d foreseen the arrival of the 80-minute compact disc that would become the ideal medium for the spacious, thinly-painted canvases of his late compositions, Beckett’s works became ever more condensed, distilled. (You could, though, argue that the ultimate distillation of his work was 1969’s tiny playlet, Breath, which, devoid of both actors and dialogue, lasts just 35 seconds, but there’s still some debate among Beckett scholars as to whether this was evidence of the author’s wry sense of humour, written as it was for Kenneth Tynan’s bawdy review Oh Calcutta!). Whatever, when you think Beckett you don’t automatically think of elegant and intricately crafted modern chamber jazz, but that’s precisely what guitarist Scott Fields offers us here on this magnificent quartet outing with John Hollenbeck (percussion), Scott Roller (cello) and Matthias Schubert (tenor saxophone). There’s little direct correlation that I can find between the album’s five tracks and the Beckett works they take their titles from — Breath, Play, Come And Go, What Where and Rockaby (all plays as it turns out) — but dig a bit deeper and the similarities begin to appear. One of the reasons Beckett’s oeuvre has consistently fascinated musicians is its sheer musicality: a constant sense of play between micro and macro form, a concern for motive, idea, development, coupled with a wicked ear and subtle sense of humour. And that’s exactly what Fields is working with here. Sometimes the pieces are as ferociously determined as the monologue that propels The Unnamable to its unforgettable conclusion ("I can’t go on, I’ll go on"), sometimes they appear to slump into the ditch at the side of the road like Watt. Sometimes they’re as wild and effusive as Lucky’s celebrated stream-of-consciousness speech in Waiting for Godot, sometimes they’re as still as Still. Fields’ accompanying text, not surprisingly a little Beckettian itself, seems to be apologetic in tone (“All that improvisation. Anti-Beckett, if anything. I have a lot to answer for. Pray for me”) but there’s nothing to say sorry for. Beckett was apparently fond of Franz Schubert; I’d like to think he might dig Matthias too. The playing of all four musicians throughout is exemplary, the scores cunningly crafted and intriguing to the point of being frustrating (and if that isn’t Beckettian I don’t know what is) and the recording superb. What more could you ask for? A sequel, perhaps. — Dan Warburton, Paris Transatlantic Magazine
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Beckett was recorded by a strong quartet consisting of Scott Fields (electric guitar), John Hollenbeck (percussion), Scott Roller (cello) and Matthias Schubert (tenor sax). The leader uses “post-free jazz” and “exploratory music” as definitions to help us poor reviewers writing about his vision, in this case setting Samuel Beckett’s short plays in terms of sonic rendition. The CD contains five tracks of what one could call “radical comprovisation,” a no-genre-all-genres series of structural possibilities for instruments to dialogue calmly or look for litigation. On a first approach we could think about entities like Curlew or Doctor Nerve; sometimes things get a little more complicated, though. Fields privileges a clean timbre on his axe, which is fundamental to maintain absolute clarity in his pretty entangled lines. Roller excavates imaginative figurations while remaining an ideal partner for dissonant unisons and ever-evolving, intertwining dissertations with Schubert’s non-conservative vocabulary. Hollenbeck is a bright-minded participant to a collectively sensitive interplay that never ceases to amaze, alternating basic patterns, uncontrollable rolls and sheer bedlam with self-controlled gestural balance and almost exhilarating musicianship. Everything in this disc tends to the instantaneous generation of attitude-permeated linear and textural counterpoint, whose results add spice and intelligence to a music which is only apparently difficult to penetrate, revealing instead many layers and secrets that will make adventurous listeners seriously happy. An advertisement for well-regulated iconoclastic playing, Beckett is one of those releases carrying the same weight of a powerful political statement. Listen and learn, then decide if you still need the velvet touch of deadly boring “jazz.” — Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes
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Cologne-based expatriate American guitarist Scott Fields frames this memorable quartet session as a tribute to existential Irish writer Samuel Beckett (1906-1989). Unlike Beckett’s almost static works featuring lonely humans trying to articulate the unexpressive however, Fields’ compositions manage to be both stirring and affecting. Although the longer tracks incorporate Beckett-like extended pauses, elsewhere all-encompassing, multi-voiced counterpoint recalls not the Irish dramatist’s bare-bones style, but the overlapping dialogue of film makers such as Robert Altman. American playwright David Mamet received a similar homage from Fields in 2000 and the subsequent years have fortified the guitarist’s playing and writing…or is it acting and directing? Dramatis personae in this work include a cast of experienced actors…er, players. German tenor saxophonist Matthias Schubert exposes timbres ranging from pumping atonal slurs to echoing, chesty vibrations; versatile American percussionist John Hollenbeck busily propels the splintered beat with his regular kit, while using water-glass-like pings, pealing chimes, and what sounds like rubber-balls bouncing on snare tops for added scene-setting. Yank expat cellist Scott Roller, of the legit Helios String Quartet, adds cross-swiped col legno jabs as effortlessly as vamping walking bass lines. While the staccato “Play” projects quadruple counterpoint from all concerned — demonstrating call-and-call rather than call-and-response — the nearly 30-minute agitato “What Where” is Fields’ chef d’oeuvre. With his knob-twisting distortion and slurred fingering on show, the guitarist elaborates the accelerating explosive theme on top of solid rhythms propelled both by Hollenbeck’s unaffected smacks, slaps and pops and near-identical stop-and-start voicing of scrapes, whistles, stops and vibrations from cello and saxophone. Thematically conclusive throughout, Beckett transcends its derivation to become CD that is certainly more polyphonic — and often more theatrical — than Beckett’s writing. — Ken Waxman, Coda Magazine
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Beckett features the Scott Fields Ensemble in a tribute to the work of playwright Samuel Beckett (1906-1989). Running helter-skelter and varied with much emotion, the quartet members interact as characters in a play, letting their conversations come and go without restraint. Tenor saxophone, cello, drums and percussion and the leader’s fiery guitar make each composition sparkle with animation. They prefer short, choppy statements that move back and forth from one artist to the next. Whereas most Free Jazz ensembles fit the pieces together in such a way that they’re able to deliver their music simultaneously, Like the script for a play, each artist here becomes a character in the composer’s arena. They juggle their musical lines with such seamless delight that it all seems quite natural. However, the music runs detached and choppy for the most part. While much of the program flits back and forth, there’s considerable space between the lines. Fields’ comfortable guitar remains capable of expressing a wide range of emotion, from quiet inhibition to rage. Cellist Scott Roller fulfills the role of melody-maker as well as providing the underlying rhythmic pulse. John Hollenbeck colors with swirling activity, while saxophonist Matthias Schubert contributes considerable thematic material. Beckett was a minimalist who allowed his work to grow increasingly cryptic. What a perfect match for Scott Fields, who points his latest improvised project in the same direction with much success. — Jim Santella, Cadence Magazine
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Let it not be said that Scott Fields cannot learn from his betters. As it was pointed out by this very critic, although certainly by other like-minded arts analysts as well, his 2002 Delmark recording Mamet failed in its stated goal of alleviating the chore of reading or watching dramatic works. For reasons one hopes were simply incompetence rather than malice or deeply buried self-destructive urges, Fields omitted much of the meat and instead proffered creamed spinach. Perhaps here I must remind the forgetful reader that the Chicago string-bender offered an alleged time-saver which was to permit the harried customer to listen to instrumental condensations of literary masterworks rather than struggle with the written word or sit through interminable video realizations, not to mention live presentations, by far the most time-guzzling method for the consumption of a playwright’s reflections. Although these aural Cliff Notes were an admirable goal, the pick-pusher shot himself in our foot by not only severely abridging the texts of five David Mamet plays, but also by keeping the exact placement of the cuts to himself and perhaps his A&R man. All educational value was abandoned because the listener, no matter how attentive, was provided no hint of where acts or scenes or even speeches began or ended. The uproar, led by your correspondent, was deafening. In this mismanaged mea culpa, Fields sets every word in five Samuel Beckett plays. Before providing his purportedly improved play-stitutes, he lifts his middle finger off the fretboard of his customized jazz guitar and extends it to you, the listener. Rather than get right to work explicating Beckett’s notoriously convoluted wordplay, Fields tenders the playwrite’s infamous “Breath,” an entirely wordless!! work. Very funny Fields. Ha ha. For the remaining four plays the so-called composer provides a rhythm and pitch for every uttered word. Alas, the result in no more useful than that of Mamet. Rather than exposing the words, Fields camouflages them with audible fog. He muddies the musical waters with incomprehensible extra sounds and notes. Worse yet, at times he layers lines, rendering the meaning of Beckett’s dialog distressingly distant. Even with text in hand, this listener found lines exceeding hard to hound dog. Sniffing out meaning became more work than it was worth. Perhaps if this were Fields’ first folly, hope could be held that illuminating his errors would lead someday to a more functional educational aid. But this political season has already exposed the pitfalls found in platefuls of false hope. Thanks but no thanks Fields. I would rather peruse Ron Paul’s proposals than fish for meaning in this bait-and-switch swamp of words rendered irrelevant. — Hugh Jarrid, Swingin’ Thing Magazine
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Both of these releases have prose as their muse and include drummer John Hollenbeck as a sideman. This is not surprising as Hollenbeck is a meticulous musician who has a proclivity for precision and a propensity for delicate phrasing. Electric guitarist Scott Fields fronts a quartet that employs free improvisation to depict more the form and feel than the storyline of five plays by Samuel Beckett while German bassist Henning Sieverts and his quintet cleverly construct a program of palindromic playfulness with 14 cuts based upon both literary and musical symmetry. Beckett is best known as a minimalist who highlighted the conundrum of humanity’s despair in conjunction with the will to go on; Fields however has given him a surprisingly upbeat interpretation. Cellist Scott Roller and saxophonist Matthias Schubert are the two additional performers who round out this interesting quartet and they fit very well into what alternates between engaging dialogue and freeform soliloquy. Hollenbeck propels more with staccato jabs than by laying down a discernible rhythm track to set the overall prosody, setting the stage for creative interpretations. “Breath” maintains the original brevity of the stage-work but restages birth-cry to whimper while riffing off of the “birth-life-death” theme. The extended compositions pick up on bits and pieces of the originals: a pause, a single structure, the gestalt to develop a lively musical discussion of the dramatic material. — Elliott Simon, All About Jazz
We Were the Phliks
This album does not reveal its secrets easily. The proceedings start slowly and sparsely enough, but, very quickly, we are thrust headlong into a densely packed quartet of intense contrapuntal improvisations, full of long blisteringly fast lines. The occasional rhythms prevail, but they are quickly usurped by further post-post-Bop interregistral runs. The results are initially exhausting, and on first listen, Thomas Lehn and Xu Fengxia provide the only relief in the form of varied texture. Lehn’s synthwork has always been a pleasure to hear, endlessly inventive and compatible with almost anything. Xu Fengxia is new to me, but her work here is brilliant, exhibiting the best timbral traits of European improv peppered with what I can only describe as touches of pan-ethnicity. Sudden shifts in volume, pitch, and duration make her contributions forceful but beautiful. Only the final track presents some welcome moments of repose, and, I might add, some of the most intricate and gorgeous group improv on the disc. Long drones swell, shimmer and fade, guitar gliding in softly to obscure itself in saxophone shadows. When the lines return, they are slow, almost languid, the players seemingly more willing to accommodate space. As interesting and engaging as these pieces ultimately can be, Fields’ playing strikes me as too similar throughout. Perhaps it’s just a sound I don’t like, or with which I need more acquaintance, but almost constant runs executed in a very homogeneous timbral spectrum don’t help matters. The fourth piece in particular holds incredible promise, for all members of the ensemble, and I hope that this group will continue exploring in that direction. — Marc Medwin, Cadence Magazine
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Guitarist Scott Fields points out in the liner notes to his latest record We Were The Philks: “It is my habit to set myself some rules for each project I compose. Otherwise the world is just too big for me. For my contributions to The Phliks book I made myself a rule that every tune would include traditional notation, graphical notation, and improvisation. In the Phliks pieces I would blur the distinction between notated and improvised material.” When one listens to the 70-minute work, a distinct sense of confusion comes about. What is composed and what is improvised? Then again, when the music is this solid, does it really matter? Fields has assembled a stellar cast for the project. His ensemble includes Thomas Lehn on analogue synth, Matthias Schubert on tenor sax and Xu Fengxia on guzheng. Fields’ music sparkles with an unspoken intensity. While his guitar hums with electric sparkles, put together with Xu Fengxia’s distinct hollow guzheng, it is a killer. Add to this Schubert’s intensely satisfying tenor gale blows and Lehn’s other-worldly synth slabs and you’ve got yourself a tight band kicking up a storm. As the sounds alternate between more serene passages and those that simply rock, the music moves in a natural, nearly cyclical way. If there is one factor that sticks out of the mix, it’s got to be Thomas Lehn and his squeaky synth. In applying simple pressure tactics, he often times convinces the other players to follow along into alien territories he favours to tread. Wildly satisfying record from beginning to end. — Tom Sekowski, Gaz-Eta
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Scott Fields posits a somewhat idiosyncratic attitude toward musical partnerships. He takes his time and isn’t averse to what at first may seem like incongruous collaborations. This new Rogue Art release corroborates that characterization with what might be first in terms of instrumentation. On paper, the combination of electric guitar, tenor saxophone, analog synth and guzheng might seem an oil and water proposition, but Fields balances notation with improvisation over four long pieces and ably proves its viability. Each piece appears to be named after friends and patrons of the four. The disc title refers indirectly to a phenomena often cited by Fields where bands in which he is involved commonly coalesce under his umbrella ensemble rubric. The shift in this case came not from a domineering sense of self-importance, but a gradual realization of Fields as focal point for the group. Thomas Lehn frequently acts as agent provocateur, his synth set-up the most mutable in terms of accessing taxonomically unfamiliar sounds. At times he swirls and eddies around the fringes, inserting gurgles and blips amidst the others’ more circumscribed interplay. In other spots, as on the opening of “Brad and Laura Winter” he surges into pole position, sounding a bit like Sun Ra behind a phalanx of buttons and keys and building a pump-organ-meets-calliope chorus in concert with Fengxia that in a weird way recalls the darker carny side of Tom Waits. Mattias Schubert is similarly liberal in his palette on sax, moving from cottony breath sounds to skirling cries and even relatively straight melodic statements. As the strings contingent Fields and Fengxia make for a consistently catalytic pairing, the latter moving from fragments of Chinese melodies to spates of kitchen-utensils-on-iron-grate dissonance while Fields plays everything from faux classical patterns to hook-toothed blues arpeggios. Lulls do occur, but rarely for very long and each of pieces achieves a pleasingly organic tractability. Variety is the spice and the four pack plenty in. A word too to Fields clipped cadence liners which are as clever, whimsical and self-deprecating as ever and an apposite appendix to the music. — Derek Taylor, Bagatellen
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Utilizing the textures available from one instrument which assumed its modern form sometime between the 10th and the 15th century and another 20th century invention considered antique because it’s merely analogue, guitarist Scott Fields has created an almost 70½-minute CD that’s as audacious as it is rewarding. Naturally being improvised music, We Were The Phliks also depends on the interpretive skills of the four players as much as the graphical or conventional notation Fields uses for these four long pieces. A mixture of experiences and cultures, the players are Fields, the Chicago-born guitarist who has lived in Köln, Germany for the past few years; two German-born Köln residents: tenor saxophonist Matthias Schubert and analogue synthesizer player Thomas Lehn; plus Xu Fengxia, a native of Shanghai, who now lives in Hövelhof and plays the guzheng, a large Chinese zither whose most familiar shape was established by the 15th century. All the players are open to new experiences however. Fields, whose collaborators have ranged from fellow guitarist Jeff Parker to oboist Kyle Bruckmann, and Schubert, who is part of a co-op trio with tubaist Carl-Ludwig Hübsch and trombonist Wolter Wierbos, manipulate traditional jazz instruments to this end. Lehn, whose extended wires and in-put plugs characterize his axe of choice as a pre-1980s model, often plays with fellow sound explorers like saxophonist John Butcher. As well, despite her instrument’s antiquity, Xu has recorded with Free players such as percussionist Roger Turner. Operating in non-traditional territory, the sounds created here don’t replicate expected timbres anyhow. Xu’s guzheng vibrations sometimes resemble those of a double bass or a banjo; Schubert is as likely to output wispy flutters and tongue slaps as honks and legato runs; and Lehn’s synthesizer does double duty as an electronic keyboard and to trigger otherworldly oscillations and drones. While Fields does comp, his licks would never be confused with those of Barney Kessel. At points in fact, settling on a fashion in which to simultaneously interact with Schubert’s altissimo squeaks, Xu’s triple-stopping banjo-like peals and Lehn’s disconnected electronic pulses, the guitarist tries out crunchy, downward string trebles that balance between Bluegrass runs and Hawaiian echoes. When the sonic diffusion among the four doesn’t evolve in rondo-like fashion, it does so in dual counterpoint. For instance the pleasantness of Xu’s chromatic plinks and plunks is contrasted with Fields’ staccato reverb; or Lehn’s vibrating electronic drones are texturally contrasted with Schubert’s trilling smears. Elsewhere, distortions from the two electrified instruments create cumulative, polyphonic crackles and sputters. In still other spots, the saxophone’s twittering phrasing turns tenderly legato, while the guzheng’s zither-like qualities disappear into lute-like glissandi. Each player’s techniques and ruses protrude with structured logic during the more than 24½ minutes of “Assi Glöde.” Stuttering barks triggered from the synthesizer, plus distorted chording and stop-time rasgueado from the guitar escalate to contrapuntally contrast with Schubert’s irregularly paced growls and Xu’s chromatic plectrum plucks. Midway through, while the guzheng player’s abrasively flat picks, the reedist’s fluttering vibrations and split tones are shadowed by overlaid, distorted guitar runs. Soon with the combined pulsations making up a continuous electro-acoustic background, single reed puffs move to the foreground. Eventually, a new passage of motor-driven oscillations from Lehn encourages Fields to abandon single-stroke licks to create a throbbing crescendo of sprawling multiphonics. That is quickly amplified by Schubert’s reed snorts and spetrofluctuation. With the climax attained, a few final saxophone breaths and echoing guitar fills confirm the piece’s conclusion. On earlier CDs, Fields has celebrated such accomplished literary figures as American playwright David Mamet and Irish dramatist Samuel Becket. Featuring this unique mixture of almost ancient, near-modern and contemporary textures, the oddly titled CD’s literary precedent could be a time-shifting science fiction novel that intersects concepts of past, present and future. Overall, We Were The Phliks is definitely a good read…that is listen. — Ken Waxman, Jazzword
Song Songs Song
Guitarists Jeff Parker and Scott Fields’ Song Songs Song (Delmark) is about as experimental as it gets on a domestic label. The duo utilizes feedback, distortion, samples, snippets, loops, wah-wah and many other things on a program of material that doesn’t follow any discernible pattern. Sometimes it is uncanny, other times rather incomprehensible, but it is always challenging and intriguing. “The Fields of Cologne” and “LK 92” are the two shortest pieces and come closest to containing conventional devices as a set (or at least recognizable) melody, middle section and conclusion. Otherwise, the pair blurs and obliterates notions about soloists and accompanists, switches places at unexpected times, fades in and out of pieces, varies the volume in unusual sequences and offers a work that can be enthralling, confusing and annoying, sometimes all at once. — Ron Wynn, Nashville City Paper
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This strange electric guitar duo recording is perhaps one the oddest and most un-jazz-like of the vast Delmark catalogue, which mostly deals with jazz and blues dates from the fifties onwards. Chicago-based Jeff Parker does have some jazz credentials, playing with the Chicago Underground and Fred Anderson, yet he can’t really be pegged as most of the current Chicago underground continues to pursue diversity and unpredictability. Wisconsin based Scott Field is also a great improviser, as well as a unique composer, his more than a dozen releases also embrace diverse approaches and an ever-changing cast of players to work with. Each of the six pieces here also cover a variety of approaches. Jeff’s “LK” is a calm, haunting and even jazz-like in its rather melodic guitar tone, it is a sort of ballad that is quietly deconstructed as it evolves. “Untitled, 1968” sounds like it could be Fred Frith and Henry Kaiser (maybe a Dead space jam?), with all those volume pedal swirls, free yet focused noise sections, but never going too far out. By “Untitled, 2004,” they start to go further out, faster, freer and more intense, but never losing sight of each other as they work together, trading ideas and licks, suspending time as they weave lines together into one sound/blend. “Untitled, 2001” has both Jeff and Scott playing with that warm, relaxed jazz guitar tone, Les Paul meets Joe Pass? Actually, they move through a variety of approaches quickly, casting off one idea after another. “Untitled, 1955” is a long work that again shows a quite a bit of unorthodox techniques, twisted harmonies, intricate noise-work, both subtle and intense abstractions, q and a sections, quickly tapped harmonics, alien textures and some nice quiet and spooky moments. Jeff Parker and Scott Fields work quite well together, combining forces and blending their sound into one story-like journey. In a blindfold test, most folks would have little clue who they really are listening to. — Downtown Music Gallery
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Quite possibly one of the most adventurous records yet to emerge from the highly respected jazz and blues label, Delmark, Song Songs Song pushes the limits of what can easily be considered traditional jazz improvisation. Jazz guitarists Jeff Parker and Scott Fields play with and against each other in a studio session that will certainly be remembered for its risk taking elements. Guitarist Jeff Parker, known for his work with numerous projects including Tortoise, Isotope 217, The Chicago Underground pairs up with Scott Fields, a free jazz guitarist and composer who has hovered around the avant garde jazz scene since the late 1960’s. These two play a sequence of pieces that run from the melodic to the downright dissonant. Book ended by Parker’s more delicate pastoral pieces, the bulk of the record finds the two guitarists in stop and go pointillistic free debate. Volume pedal swells, scraped strings and distorted chromatic runs all fly by as the guitarists play an endless game of cat and mouse. Melodic fragments emerge from the pieces, but are just a quickly discarded to explore more textural territory. Call and response improvisation is the conceptual backbone of this session. One can almost visualize the two sitting side by side copying runs from one another, then abstracting them, before turning them inside out and playing them back again. Not an easy listen for those with pre-conceived notions of what jazz improvisation should sound like, Song Songs Song is a brave release on Delmark’s part and makes for perfect blindfold test material. Play this one for your guitar geek friends and see if they can guess even one of the players. — Troy Collins, Junk Media
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On any recording that pairs players of like instruments, the primary duty to the listener is to serve as a device in which the ability of each musician can be judged, a forum for finding who plays best, who wins and who loses, who is the better man. How else can real, relevant ranks be established? But Windy City label Delmark this time blows a foul new sound in stereo guitars and as such presents what its crew of producers and A&R men must have thought a practical joke of blustery subtlety. Well this critic is not amused. Where the packaging should be informative, it is just as lazy as a summer wind. The label’s high command commits a Nuremberg’s worth of crimes against all CD consumers. First of all they leave the curious reader blowin’ in the wind, unable to tell one track from another, since these windburnt bureaucrats didn’t even see fit to include titles for the inner four “songs” on this song-parched Frisbee of acrylic and laser dimples. The next disappointment is the substitute for comprehensible liners notes with a monsoon of unrelated and meaningless words. But what turns this wayward wind of inconsideration into a presidentially declared disaster area of thoughtlessness is Delmark’s decision to jettison identification of which “musician” is playing on which channel. Judgments as to historical context, racial tendencies, and plain old chopsmanship are rendered near impossible without clear delineation of roles and responsibilities. Instead of paying a competent typographer to set a simple sentence of x = right channel, y = left channel, the label’s leaders leave little leads as to which guitar slinger is slinging where (subliminal, no doubt, since these louts heap scant care on the very lifeblood of their business: CD-buying individuals). Careful inspection of the packaging revels several clues, however. First of all, there is the cover photograph, which shows Jeff Parker on the left and Scott Fields on the right (perhaps also reflecting their political leanings). Turning the jewel box a single rotation reveals a second, smaller photograph on the CD’s rump. Again Parker is on the left and Fields is on the right. Returning to the front cover, Parker’s name is on the left and Fields’ is on the right, defying all alphabetical convention. On the rear, Parker’s name is again left and Fields’ right. This pattern, in fact, recurs wherever the names appear side by side. It is clear that this wind cries Parker left channel, Fields right. With that knowledge established firmly in mind, Delmark’s smokescreen clears on the epic battle between Parker’s solid jazz credentials (think Charles “The Yardbird” Parker or Maceo Parker more so than William Parker or, least of all, Evan Parker) and Fields’ wet-behind-the-ears eagerness but inability to please patina. Now the listener can see who is where. Parker grooves; Fields ruts. Parker swings; Fields dangles. Parker burns; Fields flickers like a candle in the wind. Nothing would please me more than to say Parker prevails. But in the end Fields’ demons destroy whatever musical content once lurked in channel left, leaving these Song Songs Song, Wrong Wrongs Wrong. — Hugh Jarrid, Swingin’ Thing Magazine
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Blistering, ferocious, harsh, abrasive, confrontational—quite often, the adjectives that are typically used to describe death metal, grindcore and metalcore have also been used to describe the more militant side of free jazz. Charles Gayle and post-1965 John Coltrane—two examples of avant-garde jazz taken to a brutal extreme—are not for the faint of heart any more than Slayer or Cannibal Corpse. In fact, some of Coltrane’s most devoted fans have a hard time comprehending his post-1965 work. But the AACM has, on numerous occasions, demonstrated that not all avant-garde jazz favors a take-no-prisoners aesthetic, and Song Songs Song easily represents that kinder, gentler school of outside playing. This 2004 date, which finds Jeff Parker and Scott Fields joining forces for a two-guitar duet, is not about in-your-face confrontation; instead, the guitarists favor a pensive, reflective approach to outside playing. Song Songs Song is far from a straightahead bop album; the performances are as abstract and cerebral as they are spacy and eerie. But they aren’t harsh or militant by any means; nor are they dense. While extreme density can give Gayle and post-1965 Coltrane—or, for that matter, Slayer’s death metal—a claustrophobic quality, Parker and Fields thrive on the use of space. Instead of trying to cram as many notes as possible into a solo, they choose their notes in a more careful, deliberate fashion. That isn’t to say that the two guitarists don’t improvise; improvisation and spontaneity are a major part of what they do on Song Songs Song. But it’s a thoughtful spontaneity—a thoughtful way of exploring the abstract and the intellectual. Admirers of the AACM school of outside expression will find a lot to like about the dialogue that Parker and Fields enjoy on Song Songs Song. 3½ stars — Alex Henderson, All Music Guide
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Parker and Fields’ freeform soundscapes are by turns disturbing and disarming. Fretting and bowing their instruments and blending samples with extraneous sounds, the dialog between their electric guitars moves from elation to hallucinatory. — Vintage Guitar Magazine
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Song Songs Song finds Fields and Parker claiming quite a bit of common ground with Parker’s trademark fluidity blending nicely with Fields’ clean abstraction. Parker’s “LK 92,” the album’s opener, exhibits the only real groove on the record with an ominous chord progression from Fields providing a fertile landscape through which Parker negotiates his limber strolls. When Fields joins the jaunty ramble, the guitarists’ interplay tantalizes with gorgeous, interwoven lines and hurried passages that are more Jim Hall than Derek Bailey. They leave this relatively accessible real estate behind with the four Fields-conceived “Untitled” pieces (the composition listings actually read as medium descriptions for visual works of art as in “Untitled, 2004, Dried Blood On Gauze, Elastic Strip With Adhesive Backing”). These selections are markedly unstable objects with extended periods of reflective calm interrupted by agitated, tussling chatter from the six-stringed interlocutors; volume knobs are played with, pedals are engaged, and a bit of dirt is thrown on the canvas at times. Despite all the labor involved and some inspired moments, the tracks tend to meander aimlessly, never really marshalling a truly compelling reason to stick with the hike for its duration. “The Fields of Cologne,” another Parker composition, finishes the record, thus fulfilling the simple logic of the album’s title. Much freer than “LK 92,” the introspective piece practically begs for the sinewy cornet of Rob Mazurek (Parker’s colleague from the Chicago Underground assemblies) to slip into the conversation. It is evident after listening to these two very different recordings [Song Songs Song and christangelfox] that Fields succeeds most profoundly when he casts his conceptual net far and wide. — Kevin Lian-Anderson, One Final Note
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Guitarist and composer Scott Fields dislikes easy categorization. He’s created nonsensical terms for his music to prevent critics from pigeonholing him. He defined The Scott Fields Ensemble “as consisting of everyone who has performed or recorded with the group at any time. Although not all members are present at any given performance or recording, they are there in spirit when not corporeal.” His liner notes for this duo release with guitarist Jeff Parker are equally ornery, stealing potential critics’ rhetorical thunder. The six slippery improvisations live up to his rhetoric; all of them actively defy musical limitations. Superficially, the pieces suggest an array of approaches: minimalism, free improv, Morton Feldman’s austere structures, blues, rich jazz. Parker and Fields, however, go beyond any one approach, edging toward Cage’s definition of sound: pitch, duration, timbre and loudness. The duo works in a larger narrative arc with ample use of repetition, silence, subtle variation and texture. Fields’ half-serious titles express something of the duo’s intentions. Each one sounds like the name of a painting, and describes their collage approach to structure. On “Untitled, 1968, Bing Cherry Juice, KY Jelly, Ketchup on Vellum,” Parker and Fields glue together a series of spiky feedback bursts, tangled runs, volume-knob fade-ins and fade-outs and percussive strums. “Untitled, 2004, Dried Blood on Gauze, Elastic Strip with Adhesive Backing” begins like a musical still life as single notes, chords, plucks and scribbles briefly flicker. Isolated moments take center stage before the duo plunge each into a thicket of feedback and metallic ringing. The artists continually lead the listener in different directions. On “Untitled, 2001, Soot on Slate,” the two guitarists excavate the melodic content, and focus on single tones, chords, or progressions. They examine their finds from every angle until they transform it completely. The pair wanders a labyrinth, not searching for its center or exit, but exploring each corner, route and dead-end. Parker and Fields shadow each other throughout so closely that separating them becomes fruitless. Both use a sharp attack and quick decay, quiet dynamics, stunted phrasing, and very few, if any, effects. Their guitars on “Untitled, 1955, Crayon on Kellogg’s Corn Flakes Box” stand naked. They clip phrases with rapid volume changes, chime delicate harmonics, grate the strings with their picks. The cumulative effect is at times powerful, at others dismayingly restless. Two Parker pieces nicely bookend the album. The bubbling rhythmic lines of the album opener “LK 92,” reminiscent of Ali Farka Toure’s buoyant guitar work, act as a palate cleanser, while “The Fields of Cologne” serves as an after-dinner cappuccino. These pieces’ more overt melodies lighten the album’s unceasing investigation. — Matthew Wuethrich, Dusted
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Chicago Guitarist Jeff Parker’s ascent has been as smooth and deft as his playing. He works ably in multiple contexts, not only in Tortoise and the various Chicago Underground line-ups but also as a sideman, backing Fred Anderson and other Chicago notables. His duo partner on this disc, guitarist Scott Fields, is somewhat less known, but that says nothing about the quality of his work. There’s a clear division of labour, and an obvious aesthetic divergence, on Song Songs Song. Four of the disc’s six tracks are credited to Fields, and titled like works of visual art — “Untitled, 2001, Soot On Slate”; “Untitled, 1955, Crayon On Kellogg’s Corn Flakes Box”; “Untitled, 1968, Bing Cherry Juice, KY Jelly, Ketchup On Vellum”; “Untitled, 2004, Dried Blood On Gauze, Elastic Strip With Adhesive Backing”. These are more abstract, and difficult, that the opening “LK 92” and closing “The Fields Of Cologne”, both composed by Parker. This is not to suggest that Parker is uneasy in noise/improv territory. Though he may jazz things up more frequently than his partner, he’s fearless through the disc’s 63 minutes. Indeed, his lyricism seizes the day at more than one point, making Fields’s more obstreperous gestures feel like stunts. This is particularly true during “Untitled, 1968 …”, which occasionally sounds like Parker and Fields have been replaced by Joe Morris and Orthrelm’s Mick Barr. Still, this CD isn’t a mismatch, rather a fascinating conversation between two equally talented, but philosophically distinct compatriots. — Phil Freeman, The Wire
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Guitarist Jeff Parker teams with an electric-guitar-equipped Fields for a series of duets on Song Songs Song (Delmark), and, not surprisingly, the results are just as free as Christangelfox — and just as boring. The album opens and closes with pieces by Parker; sandwiched in between are four “Untitled” pieces by Fields where the pair contrast dirty and clean tones (“Untitled, 1968”), share a wealth of dissonant harmonies (“Untitled, 2004”) and spend many minutes trading complicated phrases reminiscent of Parker’s work in the math-rock group Tortoise. The incessant exploration produces not a single memorable moment. Why doesn’t Jeff Parker ditch arty pretension and spend more time honing the group sound of a record like “The Relatives”? — Russell Carlson, Jazz Times
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Although we are told that first impressions are usually correct (the “go with your gut” approach), the liner notes for this release nearly derailed my enjoyment of the music. The notes, such as they are, were written by Fields and consist of a stream-of-consciousness collection of words and phrases in a postmodern style full of in-jokes and self-references, but also a lot of information if you stay with them (including a somewhat snide reference to Kali Fasteau, who does not even know Fields). Some of them are funny, even witty, and Fields actually makes a mistake (“Hendrix’s flat nines” [the Foxy Lady chord] is really a sharp nine), but one phrase is repeated quite a few times: “pitch and timbre over time.” Boiled down, then, that phrase is exactly what this music is about. Fields gives some more hints, bolding and capitalizing the words melody, harmony, orchestration, rhythm, morphology, taxonomy, and osmosis, which are sprinkled through the notes. The title of the album Song Songs Song probably refers to the fact that tracks 1 and 6 are credited to Parker and tracks 2 through 5 to Fields. After a few close listens, one can easily hear motives or phrases, if not melody, that are presented, passed back and forth and developed, textures that thicken and thin, sound types that range from harmonics to severe distortion, slowly played sections next to ones with speedy runs, free rhythm juxtaposed against straight time. Neither player can be called a traditional guitar player on this release, but Parker (left channel) is definitely the more lyrical and sentimental—“LK 92” has a very strong and (dare I say) pretty melody with a poignant secondary answering phrase; and “The Fields of Cologne” has an atmospheric “Frenchness” about it that draws one in, plus it has a definite quote from a jazz standard. Fields is much more in your face (note the song titles), and gets more “out there” sounds from his guitar, which come from the world of electronics and stomp boxes, sometimes scraping and pulling the strings (a picture shows him using a violin bow on his strings), sometimes using the volume knob to swell whatever distortion or feedback he is getting at the moment, and hence comes across as more experimental (despite the fact that there are obvious motivic figures), but always in control. There is a certain messiness about the fast playing, but that might also be purposeful. I also have no idea how the players communicated their intentions to each other; how much was written out or how much was musical or visual cues. The tunes many times just trickle out, so unless you listen intently, where one track ends and another begins might be missed. In sum, after a rough start, this album grew on me, and might be a winner for those who like to hear instruments pushed to the extreme, but within audible frameworks. — Budd Kopman, All About Jazz
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On Song Songs Song Parker and guitarist Scott Fields engage in a freeform, improvised route amid track titles that would make Captain Beefheart proud. The duo partakes in scratching and clawing via lightly amplified electric guitar lines and contrasting sound-shaping maneuvers. On the opening “LK 92,” perhaps the most accessible piece of the bunch, Parker and Fields render a laidback jazz-blues motif topped off with an affecting melody and random shifts in pitch. Although the guitarists occasionally crank it up and with just enough amplification to generate some bite, the majority of the set is structured upon irregular ebbs and flows. The duo uses space as a means for maintaining an element of surprise while also employing volume control techniques and assimilating a wide-ranging latitude of viewpoints. The 17-minute improvisation “Untitled, 1955, Crayon On Kellogg’s Corn Flakes Box,” is part minimalism and dissonance, embellished with clanging harmonics and odd phrasings. The picture painted here is that of two shrewd operators establishing a few guidelines, yet not knowing or caring where they’ll end up. 3 stars (out of 5) — Glenn Astarita, DownBeat
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Jeff Parker and Scott Fields are two of Chicago’s finest guitarists. They’ve each had diverse histories and while their musical paths have crossed before (on the sextet recording Denoument), this is the first time they’ve played together as a duo on disc. Parker has a pedigree playing in some of Chicago’s more unusual ensembles: Isotope 217, Chicago Underground Duo, and Tortoise. Fields strikes me as a more restless individual, working primarily with various musicians (i.e. Marilyn Crispell, Francois Houle, Hamid Drake, and many others) but never settling in with one group. But Parker and Fields, although very distinctive players, almost mesh as one on this set of surprisingly low-key duets. Both can be highly abstract players when the mood strikes them but, here, they sound like two guitarists firmly rooted in the Jazz guitar tradition. The opening section of “Untitled 2001, Soot on Slate” sounds like something Jim Hall might have attempted back in the early 1960s (when he was playing on recordings like Gunter Schuller’s Jazz Abstractions). Although four of the tracks are based on themes, this one is an improvisation. Oddly enough, it has a compositional feel to it. The two circle lazily around each other with melodic lines and dissonant yet gentle accompanying chords. The whole thing holds together nicely. The opening and closing tracks on the disc (Parker’s “LK” and “The Fields Of Cologne”) are also in the gentle, quieter vein. And “Fields Of Cologne” has a truly beguiling melody. But there’s a lot of variety in this program. “Untitled, 2004, Dried Blood On Gauze…” contains some furious scrabbling and some of the most intense music of the set. Yet, even at their most frenetic, Parker and Fields are listening players and never seem to get in each other’s way. Although both players are noted for their use of effects boxes, preparing their instruments, etc., the majority of this disc refrains from that approach. Probably the most effects-laden track is “Untitled 1968, Bing Cherry Juice…” (love these titles) and it has some of the finest playing of the set. Although it must also be said that this track contained some rambling passages that made it go on far too long. But this disc is, for the most part, surprisingly free from endless noodling that sometimes plague the duet format. Song Songs Song finds two of today’s most forward thinking guitarists (who also just happen to be from Chicago) engaging in fruitful dialog. — Robert Iannapollo, Cadence Magazine
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That said, The Relatives is generally more conventional-sounding than the flights of fancy on Song Songs Song, Parker’s collaboration with experimental guitarist Scott Fields. The CD starts off innocently enough. The Parker-penned “LK 92” pits a low-register, loping, minimal groove against swinging jazz-inflected melodies; the language wouldn’t be out of place on a Metheny or Frisell release. By the album’s second track, the Fields composition “Untitled, 1968, Bing Cherry Juice, KY Jelly, Ketchup on Vellum,” we are off to the races! The piece is a thirteen and a half minute assemblage of various avant-garde trademarks — feedback, atonal soloing, pointillist textures — brought together with a degree of whimsy and improvisatory character. Parker and Fields have a certain chemistry; they manage to find order within the chaos and the various diverse juxtapositions work, delightfully. Even more cohesive is “Untitled, 2004, Dried Blood on gauze, Elastic Strip,” which has a considerably appealing misterioso character; if Webern wrote for two electric guitars, this might be the result! — Christian Carey, Signal to Noise
christangelfox
Three musicians gather to make music. Each plays an instrument and percussion that comes in a set of four. Their percussion comprises scrap metal, stone, and wood, all of which float on foam slabs. They begin and then go on for the next hour playing the composition of Scott Fields. The music on christangelfox is influenced by Asian cultures, but as Fields notes in the liner notes, that intention is not formal. But it does give a pith and air to the process, whether it be in the loop and swell of the cello from Matt Turner or the cry and plea that emanates from the clarinet of Guillermo Gregorio. And Fields lets his guitar lilt on a classical progression or lets the notes thrill to a flamenco rhythm to lend a different dimension. There is plenty of interaction and conversation. The devolution takes some nice turns and twists, even if much of it is essayed in an equable atmosphere. But it is in this environ that they thrive and give vent to their imaginations. There are moments, though, when they ruffle the calm, and while it is just a passing thought, it does bring in a likeable ruffle. One of them comes around the 26th minute, when the metal and the wood percussion gets into an animated discussion while Gregorio curls, twists and blows breathy notes. In tandem they create one of the more breathtaking moments on the record. Despite its length, and given that this is one continuous performance, it holds interest. — Jerry D’Souza, All About Jazz
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Fields likes to devise purposely meaningless catchphrases for his music — his latest is “transparent music.” I guess I’ll rise to the bait: that seems to me a pretty good description of his admirably lucid hour-long chamber-trio piece christangelfox. The band consists of Fields (on nylon-string guitar), clarinettist Guillermo Gregorio and cellist Matt Turner, all three of whom also make use of a “percussion array”: four pieces of scrap metal donated by a sculptor friend, four pieces of stone, four pieces of wood. Despite the disc’s striking title, the music is not especially devotional: this is the sound of calm thought rather than prayer. It’s a rapt nocturne — languid and whimsical, full of soft hoots, wistful cries, and flintstone-spark showers of plinks and clanks. Boundaries become blurred: improvisation and composition are virtually impossible to tell apart, and the piece’s even, unhesitating inner pulse overrides the usual distinctions between free time and meter. You hear this pulse most clearly in an eight-minute episode at the piece’s centre that sounds like an anxious, sped-up version of Messiaen’s “Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus.” (Maybe there’s something to the disc’s devotional title after all….) The homemade percussion becomes more sporadic from this point on, and as the mood becomes darker and intenser one almost misses its cheerful, irritating jangle. In the end the piece doesn’t so much resolve as come to rest, the piece’s now-familiar themes restated softly and less surely, the musicians spinning them out finer and finer until at last they break. At times christangelfox recalls Gavin Bryars (“Allegrasco,” especially) or Morton Feldman, or some of the AACM’s gentler excursions, but basically this is completely sui generis. “Transparent music”? Maybe you could call it mood music — though what mood, I couldn’t possibly say. You’ll just have to listen and find out. — Nate Dorward, Cadence Magazine
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Scott Fields has toiled in relative obscurity since the late 60s—languishing, like the Freakwater song goes, in the Midwest like some old romantic fool—but his burgeoning body of work (he didn’t start actively recording and releasing his own material until the early 1990s) has collected a significant coterie of critical admirers. The guitarist is noted for the craft and care he demonstrates when choosing his collaborators, and I don’t think one can quarrel with the conscripts he dragooned for the two efforts in question here. Song Songs Song is a duo session with fellow fretman Jeff Parker, while christangelfox is a trio date with reedist Guillermo Gregorio and cellist Matt Turner. By my lights, christangelfox’s minimalist excursion constitutes the stronger work; its measured approach and subtle instrumentation—each player textures the unfolding drama with startlingly effective percussive accents coaxed from pieces of wood, metal, and stone, “all floating freely on open-cell foam slabs” according to Fields’ own liner notes—evokes a mystical space that is unsettling one moment and curiously uplifting the next. Never one to be boxed in conceptually, Fields has referenced the deep musical history of myriad Asian cultures (particularly in his use of the unorthodox percussion arrangement) to construct an hour-long solemn meditation grounded in a single scale. Together, the musicians spin a paradoxical fabric that is intensely ascetic even while it unspools its complex narrative thread. One particularly arresting passage occurs at the midway point when Fields introduces a delicate ostinato guitar figure that heightens the tension while Turner and Gregorio awaken to the call and respond with searching expressions. It is a testament to Fields’ remarkable facility for blending composition with free improvisation in a seamless fashion. — Kevin Lian-Anderson, One Final Note
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All three players on guitarist Scott Fields’ Christangelfox are credited as percussionists, clinking and tinkling various instruments that aren’t listed in the notes but are probably akin to anything shiny on the shelves at any Williams-Sonoma. As the clattering, nonenchanting and ceaseless din of the rhythmless percussion hangs in the background, Fields noodles in minor modes on a nylon-string guitar, Guillermo Gregorio drones eerily or chirps curtly on clarinet and the usually excellent cellist Matt Turner bows wilted lines in accompaniment, sounding utterly uninspired. It’s an hour-long stab at creating a stark, abstract landscape that fails because the musicians hardly sound engaged and rely too heavily on the tiresome free-jazz gambit of answering one non-sequitur squawk with another. Christangelfox ends up a waste of time for all concerned. — Russell Carlson, Jazz Times
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There are some musicians who stand out from the crowd, and guitarist Scott Fields certainly qualifies. Not that his music is overtly provocative or extreme, but there is an unquestionable singularity to his vision, one more readily identifiable as contemporary music rather than jazz or free-form improv. A case in point is this single, flowing, fifty-nine minute piece performed by him, on acoustic guitar, Matt Turner on cello and Guillermo Gregorio, playing only straight b-flat clarinet. More than that, all musicians play percussion, striking what seem to be metal plates or tubing in ways reminiscent of Balinese gamelan ensembles (which the leader himself alludes to in his insightful notes). In doing so, one may well be reminded of John Cage’s translation of Far Eastern musics into the contemporary classical vernacular; there’s an underlying reflective, meditative quality to the work, which is spiked by the clattering percussion passages. While the bulk of the performance is improvised, written passage surface throughout, like signposts along the way of a mysterious journey in time, space and tone color. Accordingly these are never bright and bold, but subdued and dark, yet no less intense, like the deep ultramarine hue that adorns the cover. — Marc Chénard, Coda
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Fields adopts an unplugged approach, playing nylon-string classical guitar; it is fascinating to hear him, stripped of amplification, effects, and feedback, improvising strictly in the pitch-rhythm domain. One part Stockhausen post-modern chamber music and one part ethnomusicological exploration, Christangelfox is a haunting, sonically beguiling work. — Christian Carey, Signal to Noise
15=15 Plunderplunderphonics
On a dark day last year I had the displeasure to review two recordings that featured guitarist Scott Fields as leader or co-leader. Those leaden releases, which I called “boring” and “just as boring,” not to mention “a compete waste of time,” could not have prepared me for Fields’ brilliant new two-CD set 15=15 Plunderplunderphonics. With restraint I would never expect from Fields, this well executed set is a two-hour-long romp that is almost as kickass as a real, live Batmobile. It could make a Massachusetts liberal whistle Dixie. On 15=15 Plunderplunderphonics Fields chose tunes rife with melody, tunes which are perfect lines for this exercise in harmonizing with like timbres. Each track is enjoyable. Though his pen still drips ink left over from his days as a pretentious New Music-head in the 90s, Fields’ mind-bending melodies are just the sort of complement needed to create an album that never bores and begs for repeated spins. 15=15 Plunderplunderphonics is rich with references to other works and other cultures. You can hear hints of literally hundreds of familiar riffs. The ensemble’s nutso version of “Michelle” is maybe one of the best Beatles-gone-jazz treatments yet. Later Fields showcases an impeccable sense of time and lets pretty, curly-cue licks blossom in a medley that combines Jerome Kern’s “Yesterdays” with Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday.” And not content to hop on the klezmer bandwagon, Fields directs the album into deeper, darker, less trustworthy corners of the Jewish folk tradition. The tunes on 15=15 Plunderplunderphonics yearn and cry “Oye Vey,” imparting a feeling of spiritual insatiability that sounds and feels very, very Jewish, almost sneakily so. As a guitarist, Fields flexes his virtuoso chops on 15=15 Plunderplunderphonics, revealing a middle ground between the bop lines of Joe Pass and Django Reinhardt’s Euro-flavored gypsy voodoo. His skills will send young guitarists to the woodshed and cause older ones to consider hanging up the ax forever—Fields is that frustratingly great. The way he can daisy chain quirkily voiced chords and ascend toward ecstasy only to climb back down on a simple, quarter-note run never gets old, even though he does it over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Guitarheads especially will drool over this one, as he catches up to strike a slightly muted chord as if to say “gotcha,daddy-o” and then sets off again to hunt down his next shivering victim. I’ll be damned if he isn’t hiding a third hand inside one of his suit sleeves. An extended solo during “Tea for Two” that serves as a summary of his style, with dazzling triplet waterfalls, chunk-a-chunk chord vamps and arpeggiations that suggest an extra few fingers on his right hand and perhaps a few more on that hidden third-hand. The sixth string on the Gibson Scott Fields Signature SF-336 that Fields plays during this set never booms, just as the highs notes never sound too bright. The guitar’s glowing tone—the Gibson SF-336 guitar is the oh-so-rare archtop that guitaraholics dream of just seeing, let alone playing—comes in a tightly contained space that complements Fields’ control. That sustaining, clear-as-rural air SF-336—it’s a shame there aren’t more of those out there to wax records with—will sooth the souls of the hopelessly guitarded, but it should ring gorgeous to anyone’s ears. Working up a sweat to 15=15 Plunderplunderphonics would be a troublous task. Although the ensemble does offer a decent share of lively grooves, the record exists as more of an introspective love album, lilting and hopeful in spots, agonizingly woeful in others. Rather, playing the role of an urban griot, Fields tries to hip us to the history of jazz. 15=15 Plunderplunderphonics is a storyteller’s work. Yet, the music burns, even if as an ember rather than a blast furnace. If they can capture this kind of energy in the studio, then I’m sure they can produce it before an audience, which means that a night when the Scott Fields Ensemble’s name is on the marquee would be a night well spent. — Russell Carlson, Jazz Times
From the Diary of Dog Drexel
Four pieces of Scott Fields with addition of a fifth piece assembled by Gregory Taylor using soloist improvisations of the members of band, a zigzagging job this, lost between sour and sweet melodies; child of so many outlines, as well as enormous bursts of fire from the trumpet of Greg Kelley. The breaths of the Nperign school become diluted in a series of melodic contortions that are in fact fascinating, creating solutions certainly not new but surely captivating as few have been. Composition and improvisation keep pace with each other, making swells along the way on evolutions—sometimes very much Coleman-like—of Guillermo Gregorio on alto sax and on clarinet, and in a caustic vein that animates and guides the actions of the good Kelley on the trumpet. In truth there is very little in the way of real ostinati, nervetheless, the first track flows a little strangely, lunar, between pursuing winds and percussion that has a ceramic quality; the discourse changes remarkably in the case of Pissed with its structure perennially in the balance between hysteria and moments of apparent calm where the tension is really palpable before falling headfirst into an abyss of dissonance, sort of ecstatic in form; a kind of ritual emigration guided by the contortions of the winds. The following track, Bummed, churns up new phantoms of the house of Kelley, replacing the roughness that more usually characterizes them with a form much more harmonious and round where each instrumentalist seems concentrated in the desire to create a crafty meditative viewpoint. This is a work that lives on the impulses of the musicians but also on their ability to hold back those impulses in favour of writing that’s sometimes delicate and escaping to where wide spaces can contribute to the creatiion of an evocative and oniriche atmosphere without however ever diminishing a good dose of uncovered nervousness. Agitated reveals itself to be the central nucleus of the work with its structure run through, improbably, by the winds and the percussion and stretched strings, and again pauses and divisions in which discords are revealed to exist in order then to be abandoned, in a vision that, as much as it owes to the past seems also to be projected towards the future, but without the slightest pretention. The piece concludes with Medicated that contrasts with the rest but perhaps precisely in virtue of its difference it seems to be perfectly assigned to close this work in the appropriate manner. Cold without doubt, but necessary to restabilize, after the smoothness of the previous movements, the sacred germ of doubt. The final that loses itself in silence leaves us in possession of a work of remarkable beauty to add to the list of things received. 3½ stars — Marco Carcasi, Kathodik
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For this recording, composer Scott Fields assembled a core group from the cream of Chicago’s improvising scene (with the importation of trumpet ringer Greg Kelley from Boston) to have them investigate his scores that seek to blur the line between written and improvised music. Generally, those lines aren’t too tough to discern, his composed music sounding something akin to the post-serial style employed by, for example, Anthony Braxton in similarly defined works. Unfortunately, there is also a like dryness and whiff of academic orientation in this writing as well; one gets the vague impression of having heard these motifs on many an occasion over the last 30 or so years. The improvisational sections also carry something of an oil and water quality. On the one hand, some of the musicians bring a jazz-like conception that often seems at odds with the tenor of the pieces while, on the other, someone like Kelley, one of the finest and most imaginative players on the free improv scene, sounds constrained by the format, unnecessarily corralled into a relatively narrow area. The group sound itself is usually quite appealing given the range of instrumentation involved, and percussionist Carrie Biolo stands out for her strong contributions, but the lack of expansiveness in the scoring leaves one feeling stifled after the first four pieces. The final track, Medicated (this dog evidently was having a pretty bad day), is another bowl of tapioca entirely. Here, Gregory Taylor has taken taped samples of each musician improvising on his or her own and assembled a rich, fascinating work that goes a long way toward salvaging the whole affair, a gust of cool, crisp air entering a musty room. — Brian Olewnick, All Music Guide
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Musique concrète, as an archaic variety of New Music, caught noises with a butterfly net and pierced them. In a poetical travesty of this procedure, composer Scott Fields and his ensemble switch themselves on and off like a tape, let noise, silence, explosion, implosion, color-thunderstorm and pale nothing succeed one another hard and fast — or weave concrete things into one another, images which come up, overlap, discolor, change. Everything is hand-made and mouth-blown, everyone is a juggler, amply gifted to wake up illusions and re-extinguish them. Shadow-voice behind the clarinet becomes hectic breath, becomes railroad, uncanny in approaching, as in effacing its own decipherment. It is a dream wherein the unbiased eye sees symbols, signals, signs all in off-shades, restlessly moved, pulled by invisible strings. Pictographs arise like suns: glassy swimming desert-flowers of vibraphone and crotales, cheeky siren-glissandi with which the oboe — unappreciated princess of jazz-instruments — plays the trumpet… A winter-cold epilogue though — as if logic was not allowed to remain without a punch line — throws a net over the sounds after all: electronic mirage constructs the decay of color and outline. Fogs are lifting, threatening, clearing up — and Scott Fields’ thrashing guitar sound emerges; echo of rage, naked king in the heath. — seven boxes (highest rating) Michael Herrschel, Neue Musikzeitung
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“The best plan for listening to this music is to treat it as a whole rather than worry about what came from where,” writes Chicago-born guitarist Scott Fields of this five-movement suite (if you’re interested in the title, check out the scrambled eggs on Fields’ website, www.scottfields.com) featuring Fields himself, Carrie Biolo on pitched and unpitched percussion, Guillermo Gregorio on alto sax and clarinet, Kyle Bruckmann on oboe and English horn and Greg Kelley on trumpet. The first four movements (“Conflicted”, “Pissed”, “Bummed” and “Agitated”) also require a conductor (Stephen Dembski), whereas the finale (“Medicated”) was constructed by Greg Taylor using Max/MSP software to work on solo improvisations by the ensemble members. Rossbin regulars expecting another helping of austere, spare improvisation (the label has released excellent and highly acclaimed work by Annette Krebs, Andrea Neumann, Toshi Nakamura, not to mention Greg Kelley’s second solo album) are in for a surprise; in both instrumentation and structure, this has more in common with Varése and Birtwistle than it does with Taku Sugimoto. Fields intentionally blurs the distinction between composed and improvised material in accordance with the fine AACM tradition he grew up with, with the result that “FTDODD” joins the 4CD Rastascan box set of Anthony Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music and Masashi Harada’s 1999 “Condanction Ensemble” as another great example of top-notch improvisors bringing their skills to bear on material of a more composed / structured nature. Bruckmann and Gregorio have plenty of opportunities to showcase their outstanding multiphonics, and those familiar with the extraordinary sonorities Kelley can summon from his trumpet on his solo recordings will be duly impressed by his mastery of Fields’ arching melodic lines. After the swirling, snarling tour de force of “Pissed”, “Bummed” is a wondrous, strange, bassless landscape inhabited by muffled plunks from Biolo’s xylophone and Fields’ nylon-string guitar and plaintive wails from the wind instruments. “Agitated”, despite its title, is a decidedly fresh flowing tangle of delicately scored melodic lines, before Fields stands aside in the final movement to allow Greg Taylor to extract tissue samples of solo material and subject them to cold laboratory scrutiny with his Max/MSP software. The resulting music is, like the entire album, intriguing and impressive, if a little frosty and detached. Of course, hardcore improv snobs will dismiss it as too composed and aficionados of the likes of Ferneyhough and Finnissy will probably find it too loose, but that’s the risk you run if you want to set up shop in this particular no man’s land. However, as this album demonstrates time and again, far from being barren wasteland between two frontier checkpoints, the territory in question is bursting with miraculous new life forms. — Dan Warburton, Paris Transatlantic Magazine and Signal to Noise
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Bow wow. Woof woof. Give this critic a melody. Yip yip. Arf arf. This old man wishes Scott Fields had stayed home. On this recording “composer” and “guitarist” Fields again lifts his leg on you, the listener. Fields and his littermates —brass jockey Greg Kelley, oboemann Kyle Bruckmann, squeaky-toy specialist Carry Biolo, computer programmer Gregory Taylor, and Italian woodwind-wielder Guillermo Gregorio—have broken loose from their leashes, in spite of the presence of alleged conductor Stephen Dembski. One would think—nay, pray—that choo-choo chief Dembski could teach these new dogs a few old tricks, but throughout it is clear that these pups are barely paper trained. If only Fields had provided proper positive reinforcement, a tasty treat here and there to reward the musician and ultimately the CD-purchasing public. But where there should be swing, these mongrels rock ‘n’ roll over and play dead. Where there should be harmony, there is a cacophony of howls and whimpers. Luscious tone is hiding in the basement, replaced with distressed scratching and panting. Grrrrrrrrrrr. My recommendation? Do not buy this little doggie in the window. And if one is left on your doorstep, take it to the pound to have it “put to sleep” as indeed will be the fate of anyone who adopts this homely mongrel. — Hugh Jarrid, Swingin’ Thing Magazine
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“My name would be ‘Dog Drexel,’” confides guitarist Scott Fields in his online biography, explaining the title. From the Diary of Dog Drexel comprises four compositions called “Conflicted,” “Pissed,” “Bummed,” and “Agitated.” You might justifiably conclude that Fields has concocted a grungy soundtrack to an imagined life of sleaze. But you’d be wrong, though it’s certainly fraught with tension and brittle attitude. Evolved from the system of generating non-tonal scales Fields has worked with since entering the orbit of composer Stephen Dembski, this harmonically ambivalent music often evokes unease. Dembski conducts a quintet featuring Fields on electric and nylon-stringed acoustic guitar, Greg Kelley on trumpet, Guillermo Gregorio on alto sax and clarinet, Kyle Bruckmann on oboe and English horn and Carrie Biolo on vibraphone, marimba, crotales, and unpitched percussion. There’s a cut-glass feel to the ensemble: multifaceted, hard-edged, and refractive. Luminous with the shimmer of vibes, they can sour when the reeds clash, defiant when the trumpet asserts itself, or angry and threatening when Fields’s guitar growls and lashes out. A fifth track, “Medicated,” is credited to all five players plus Gregory Taylor who processed materials from their improvising. Its meltdown of definition into more fundamental ambivalence, volatile temperaments, and even the remnants of Fields’s spiteful soloing, dosed and deliquescing into computer-generated numbness, make for a fitting conclusion. — Julian Cowley, The Wire
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Scott Fields is yet another musician interested in melting the boundaries between so-called jazz and so-called classical music. He’s usually identified with the free music side of things through recorded and other sessions with the likes of bassist Michael Formanek, percussionist Michael Zerang, clarinetist Fran�ois Houle and drummer Hamid Drake. Yet the Madison, Wis.-based guitarist also has advanced a method by which chamber ensembles like the one on this carefully designed CD can develop extended improvisations. Seemingly a close cousin to Butch Morris’s theory of conduction, Field’s process is built on a tonal system that Stephen Dembski, a University of Wisconsin-Madison music professor, who conducts the quintet here, developed. The American Manual Alphabet and traditional conducting gestures are used by the conductor to select from melodic fragments. Then, as musicians switch between motives, the basic materials for their improvisations — primarily 48 non-linear scales upon which the motives and gestures are built, plus the underlying feel — also change. What results, at least on this CD, is five examples of abstruse, unconventional chamber music. Truthfully though, the outcome doesn’t sound that dissimilar from other small group, classically oriented pieces for strings, horns and percussion developed by improvisers who haven’t advanced specially designated theories. Additionally, although all the disc’s acrimonious-sounding song titles are Fields’s — who admits that “my porn name would be ‘Dog Drexel,’” as are the first four compositions, this is still overall, ensemble work. Naming his band in homage to the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the guitarist’s playing partners get the space within which to forge their own lines. Interestingly not one has much hard-core jazz background. Clarinet and alto saxophonist Guillermo Gregorio’s history of experimentation stretches from his beginnings in Buenos Aires to his present residency in Chicago. Right now he works with similar committed players like cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and Carrie Biolo, who is also on this disc. Percussionist Biolo who has recorded the formal music of Cornelius Cardew and Anthony Braxton has also toured with eccentric guitarist Eugene Chadbourne. Another associate of Lonberg-Holm and Zerang, not to mention Gregorio, oboist and hornist Kyle Bruckmann describes himself as a freelance classical musician. Conservatory-trained trumpeter Greg Kelley sometimes plays free jazz with veterans like saxophonist Paul Flaherty and Braxton, but spends most of his time exploring the outer limits of textures created by his horn. He has released two notable solo CDs and often performs with other Boston-centred sonic explorers like saxophonist Bhob Rainey. Kelley’s extended technique gets a suitable showcase on “Conflicted,” its polyrhythmic texture expanded to a longer form than on the other tracks. Advancing to triple tonguing from primary tones that morph between those of a baroque piccolo trumpet and breathy intervals, the initial theme is advanced by unison clarinet and vibes. As well, Bruckmann’s English horn articulates the instrument’s standard tone, but much tarter and sharper than classical types would expect. Eventually Gregorio’s alto saxophone and Fields’s nylon-string guitar alternate long lines until a harmonic blend of most of the instruments nearly create liturgical organ chords. Staccato pitch sliding arising from horn trills, trumpet blasts and harsh electric guitar fills soon turns repetitive mirroring the title, as feedback-laden licks presage a whining horn vamp gradually dissolving into silence. “Pissed,” the shortest — at less than 8½ minutes — track is also the only other piece to truly reflect its appellation. It’s noisy, with smeared splutter from the trumpeter contrasting with woodwinds’ multiphonics and some metallic tone slivers from the vibes. Then discordant electric guitar notes join with the oboe to goose the theme into a higher pitch. At this point, Kelley seems to be fully inhabiting his horn, blaring as he comes up with balloon inflation sounds that mix with unpitched percussion hocketing and rococo horn lines. Although longer, “Bummed” and “Agitated” may revolve around a shifting tonal centre and highlight conflicting musical patterns, but by this points the smears and multiphonics have been expected, like the sound of a pooch whose bark is worse than his bite. As a matter of fact, the edgy wooden-sounding percussion, legato oboe tones and resonant Hawaiian guitar allusion on the former and quieter vibes and nylon-string plucks on the later seem to suggest unified forward motion rather than polyrhythmic exploration. The adjective “pleasant” even comes to mind. It’s almost as if what you though was a ferocious junkyard hound has been revealed as a fluffy lap dog. Metallic as all get out, “Medicated” — poor puppy Drexel — while notable on its own seems to be in variance with the other tracks. Software-constructed from Ensemble solo improvisations by Gregory Taylor, the result is wiggles, whooshes, whistles and multi-tonal echoes that can probably be linked to reed blasts, tingling bells and outer- space rockabilly guitar licks. Including what appears to be tapes running backwards creating voices like David Seville’s Chipmunks, the piece builds up to electronic drones and ends with a reverberating vibe note. Taken together the entire project is satisfying, though not outstanding. If the pseudo-electronica had been dispensed with and more emphasis put on toughening up the initial polyrhythmic invention, things would have been more striking. Right now, though, it can satisfy many — especially those following the saga of Fields’s ever-changing Ensemble — and suggest new interest in what else the guitarist can create as a composer. — Ken Waxman, Jazz Weekly and Jazz Word
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Over the years, Fields has been a kind of one-man avant-garde, doing a variety of original work in Madison, Wisconsin, and this album continues his mission with the usual humane understatement. A goal of the first four movements of this five-movement piece is to blur the distinction between written and improvised music. During those movements, at least one written part and one improvised part is steadily played by two of the album’s five musicians — Fields on guitar, Carrie Biolo on vibes, marimba and unpitched percussion, Guillermo Gregorio on alto sax and clarinet, and Greg Kelley on trumpet — while the remaining three either improvise or play written music, constantly shifting the balance between the two. The fifth movement, composed by Gregory Taylor, uses Cycling 74’s Max/MSP software to blend and processes the solo work of each ensemble member. Overall, the results are pleasingly low-keyed, with all sorts of unusual colors and textures being produced. There’s a lot of contrapuntal work here, but the musicians stay out of each other’s way, making their work easy to follow. But that doesn’t make it shallow. B PLUS — Harvey Pekar, Urban Dialect
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Recorded in a strange, hollow ambience, this is a spirited if ill-tempered sequence of group pieces, with a coda where the ensemble members each played solos which were then doctored by Gregory Taylor’s software into a droning, rattling track that sounds somewhat like old musique concrète. Unfathomable. Three stars (of four). — Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, seventh edition
96 Gestures
Composer-guitarist Scott Fields forgoes his usual small group work for a triumph of scale. On 96 Gestures, conductor Stephen Dembski and a dozen A-list free-jazz musicians — including Joseph Jarman (alto sax), Myra Melford (piano), François Houle (clarinet), and Rob Mazurek (cornet) — work from and elaborate upon Fields’ modular compositions. Three radically different performances pirouette as effortlessly as a Calder mobile in a gentle breeze. — Wired
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“96 Gestures” is based on a huge score of 96 motifs or “gestures” that musicians play and improvise on, as per a conductor’s cues. By controlling the durations of the phrase length, the conductor could “create contrasts of cohesiveness of pulsation in the tradition of Steve Reich,” writes annotator Stephen Dembski, a professor of music at UW-Madison, who conducted the work. But the effect is far more unfettered and unpredictable than Reich’s chattering, modular-sounding music. “96 Gestures” grows, from oddly shifting and beguiling rhythmic interactions, into some fairly woolly collective improvs, but it never sounds chaotic. That’s due to the score’s undergridding, Dembski’s guidance and to the extraordinary skill and invention of these fine musicians. Besides guitarist Fields, the ensemble includes saxophonist-flutist Joseph Jarman, pianist Myra Melford, clarinetist François Houle, cornetist Rob Mazurek, oboist-English hornist Robbie Lynn Hunsinger, cellist Matt Turner, bassists Hans Sturm and Jason Roebke, and percussionists Damon Short and Dylan Van Der Schyff. The result, even through three 60-minute-plus takes, is eminently listenable new music. Charming, quirky dance-like duets and trios mushroom into larger collectives. You won’t forget a plaintive passage of long tones for trumpet, saxophone, bowed basses and drums, about 19 minutes into the opening performance. Each take is quite different, like a landscape constantly mutating into new forms and colors. — Kevin Lynch, The Capital Times
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Fields has said that his use of the word ‘Ensemble’ pays homage to The Art Ensemble of his native Chicago, rather than being a means to identify a particular group of musicians. The personnel lined up behind the name has varied wildly. Van der Schyff recurs on 96 Gestures but as part of a 12-piece group steered by conductor Stephen Dembski. Among the other members are alto saxophonist Joseph Jarman, pianist Myra Melford, clarinetist François Houle and Rob Mazurek on cornet. The composition is a structure of cued modules giving leads that encourage improvisation. Outcome can vary considerably as these three realizations, each more than an hour long, demonstrate well. Common to all three is a sense of fluency, lightness and mobility, multiple events and constant activity without unwanted snarls or messy collisions. Ostensibly very different to This That, and on a label subsidiary to CRI, which has for many years championed contemporary compositions, 96 Gestures nonetheless shares points of contact in its questioning repetitions and variations, its (more formal) permutatory maneuvers and the sense that no concluding gesture can ever be more than provisional. Fields’s choice of collaborators has been one of his strengths. Here it ensures sensitive playing and accurate reading that align the piece with substantial work by the likes of Butch Morris, Anthony Braxton, and John Zorn seeking ways to sustain and extend creative relationships between composed forms and alert improvising. — Julian Cowley, The Wire
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On 96 Gestures West-coast composer and guitarist Scott Fields resurfaces with another of his much ballyhooed “modular compositions” for improvising chamber ensemble. This one meanders over an eyelid-drooping three hours and eighteen minutes. A test of endurance for even the most seasoned critic, I must admit that mid-way through the third disc I started to doze off and at one point actually drove off the road. Fields—or his gullible label CRI—attempts to justify this dangerous length through the suspicion-raising claim that each of the three discs represents a complete, unique performance of this so-called “composition.” Common sense, or simple human decency, dictates that the composer, or conductor, or label A-and-R man, make some attempt to condense this test of one reviewer’s patience. The best parts of each of the three discs should have been combined into a single roof-raising jam session. The best way would have been to take each of the 12 musicians’ solos and arrange them back-to-back. Myra Melford, for example, has several stirring solos, but they’re too short and too far apart. They should have been melded into one long ivory tickling so we could really check out this chick’s chops. Likewise, François Houle’s licorice stick licking should be sliced into one long, black blow, even though that would expose the Frenchman’s c’est la vie intonation. And Chi-Town Undergrounder Rob Mazurek’s gen-X excursions on Harmon-muted trumpet could have been a bitchin’ brew over the goosestepping ostinados of “Herr Contrabassman” Hans Sturm. Of course, running all of these solos together would have left scant room for any of the leader’s own fret work, but really that is just as well. — Hugh Jarrid, Swingin’ Thing Magazine
this that
Scott Fields is an electric guitarist who can go for the jugular while shouldering same fairly hefty conceptual baggage. His squally eruptions on This That suggest an intelligent and ironic man giving vent to seething anger and frustration. But this trio recording in the sympathetic company of cellist Peggy Lee and drummer Dylan van der Schyff is by no means all spleen. Much of the album has a probing feel, quietly teasing apart modest phrases and motifs that are firmly established at the start then continuously revised and elaborated. The three players circle around the core material kneading and tugging until it has stretched into a piece that can be called “This is This,” “That is This,” or “That is That.” The reversible titles accurately reflect music that seems conclusive but is primed to unravel in order to begin again. Despite the assertive tone, nothing is ever definitively stated because it can always be said otherwise, as in all successful improvising. — Julian Cowley, The Wire
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Guitarist Scott Fields grew up in the Hyde Park area of Chicago’s Southside, the very turf that birthed the AACM, and his Ensemble—a floating collective that over the years has included such luminaries as cornetist Rob Mazurek, percussionist Michael Zerang and guitarist Jeff Parker—is named in tribute to The Art Ensemble Of Chicago. This That is a heavy trio session, pairing Fields with cellist Peggy Lee and drummer Dylan Van Der Schyff, and it’s even better than Mamet, his extraordinary tribute to the plays of David Mamet that surfaced earlier this year. Whereas that was a subtle, conversational work, This That finds Fields tossing off manic proto-Metal flurries that land somewhere between the early motorpsycho extremities of guitarist Makoto Kawabata’s work with Musica Transonic and the heavy melodic strong work of free jazz guitarist Tisziji Muñoz. Cello and drums provide a skewered counterpoint, pirouetting around the margins as Fields channels straight through the heart. — David Keenan, The Wire
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What is Scott Fields’s fallacious mind ever possessed him to misuse, nay abuse, one of jazz’s greatest torch singers? Why tarnish her legacy with no greater goal than to nail a “big name” to his star-starved shingle? Regardless of how addled Peggy Lee has become, how advanced her Alzheimer’s disease, how confused and helpless she is in her current condition, there is no excuse for exploiting her fantasies as a jazz violoncellist. Whatever her promise must have been as a schoolgirl cellist in the early days of the horseless carriage, it is just too late, far too late, to rekindle those long lost evenings spent caressing catgut and rosin. All of that said, it is remarkable how well Ms. Lee manages the aforementioned violin, extra-value-meal size. Her intonation is as sharp as a coffin nail. The tremors in her hand shake loose a delicious vibrato. Her tone is as rich and well-aged as the grand dame herself. Her staccato strings snap like “Fever.” But still the essence of Ms. Lee has wafted away, diluted by too many cheap whiskeys and bummed cigarettes. Where is the swing? Where are the walking bass lines? (Do her high heels and satiny slit dresses make it impossible to lay down a respectable cello walk?) Where are the clever quotes from her many hits and the jazz standards with which she became so familiar in a million venues from faceless dives with beer-soaked stages to the very Tonight Show with Johnny Carson? Fields rubs in her dementia by naming all of the “compositions” on This That some combination of “This” and “That.” “This is That.” “This is This.” “This isn’t That.” My God man! Isn’t it enough to humiliate this once-proud Jazz Artist (don’t you wish that you could say the same of yourself?) without demonstrating that she longer can distinguish this from that? The shame! Dylan van der Schyff (drums) also “contributes” to this travesty. — Hugh Jarrid, Swingin’ Thing Magazine
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For guitarist Scott Fields, an ensemble is more about a strategy for organizing improvisations than it is about putting together specific long-term groups. Past ensembles have consisted of anywhere from three to a dozen players with a revolving cast. For this incarnation, Fields pairs up with Vancouver stalwarts, Peggy Lee and Dylan can der Schyff. These two have been working together in a variety of contexts for a decade now (in addition to being married) and have developed near-telepathic abilities. They are well versed in approaching improvisation with a total disregard for stylistic lines. Free improvisation nudges up against Jazz heads while being crossed with rock torrents; prickly abstraction and simple melodies intersect. They provide strong partners for Fields, who has developed a like-minded approach in creating compositional forms for spontaneous interaction. The session starts out with quiet, measured counterpoint as Lees dark arco spins lines against Fields’ slashing smears and van der Schyff’s pointillistic punctuations. But quickly, things build to a fierce energy Raucous guitar runs spill out like searing horn lines while cello and drums stir up churning waves that crash along with an infectious momentum. Then, suddenly, the storm breaks to an open free section with the three spinning arcing lines that careen off of each other. And that is just the first piece! But what could be sheer mayhem or noodling in lesser hands holds together. The three build dynamic improvisations with acutely attuned senses of structure. Fields’ compositional forms provide the framework for the pieces, but it is clear that Lee and van der Schyff are full coconspirators. Angular thematic threads appear and then get pulled, prodded, and toyed with, disappearing into collective flurries only to reemerge again in a slightly morphed guise. Rather than defy expected musical roles, the trio ignores them altogether. Lines are just as likely to be sparked from tuned drum lines as they are from the guitar; Lee may jump up to the upper ranges of the cello while Fields dives down to resounding bass notes only to flip moments later. By the time the three reach the final piece, which builds with a stately tension and then resolves with a achingly beautiful arco cello melody, a sense of completion is achieved. Those looking for a representative release to dive into Scott Fields’ music needn’t bother. Each release reveals a new wrinkle to his expansive musical view, and this, in no small part due to his ensemble members, is one of the strongest yet. —Michael Rosenstein, Cadence Magazine
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First of all, This That is an unlikely release for the San Diego-based avant-garde label Accretions, because Scott Fields has no ties with the “Trummerflora Collective.” That being said, label director Marcos Fernandes took a wise decision to release this very strong CD. For this studio recording, the Scott Fields Ensemble was a trio, cellist Peggy Lee and drummer Dylan van der Schyff (both from Vancouver, Canada) following the guitarist in a series of structured improvisations. This match-up proves to be particularly successful. Lee and Schyff know each other by heart, their chemistry has reached a commanding level. Moreover, Fields’ loose compositions and penned-down segments are stylistically closely related to the projects they were involved with during the 1990s, from Talking Pictures to François Houle and Tony Wilson’s groups. So This That ends up sounding like a cousin of the Vancouver avant-garde jazz scene. Some of these tracks follow specific contrasts, textures, or structures, while others have written heads. But the compositional work usually remains seamless (except for the obvious tutti lines). Fields is in very good shape. His dislocated melodies find a sympathetic soul in Lee’s lyrical cello playing in “That Isn’t This.” In “This Isn’t That” he throws in an impressive solo. This That may not have a star-studded line-up like Five Frozen Eggs (with Marilyn Crispell and Hamid Drake), but it sure delivers the goods — and if you have never heard the free improv unit of Lee and Schyff, this is your chance. Strongly recommended. — François Couture, All Music Guide
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Interactive empathy marks the intricate trio session of Scott Fields and his association with cellist Peggy Lee and drummer/husband Dylan van der Schyff. Electrified blurs of blue light pass before one’s eyes as Fields ignites the soundstage with his rapid-fire style of execution. This would appear to pose quite a challenge for most musicians, but Lee and van der Schyff immediately jump into the furor and produce explosive fury of their own. While Fields is burning the countryside with his scorched earth policy, Lee furiously bows her cello and van der Schyff adds incendiary stimulus to fan the flames. Then just as quickly, the trio slows things down with sensitive, near melodic phrasing and quiet tones. Fields delicately plucks the strings in single-note rotation and van der Schyff uses soft, brushed tones for accent while Lee establishes lines more closely associated with a bassist. The contrast in the trio’s temperament, which alternates with regularity, is stimulating. Fields shows that he is able to handle both sides of this Jekyll/Hyde coin masterfully by pouring out waves of electric colors ranging from calming green to disruptive red. His lyrical statements are built on delicately improvised lines that lull one into a sense of false security before he again explodes and fully uproots the quietude. Lee is highly motivated on this date, using the bow aggressively to tame the instrument through a series of wildly pronounced skirmishes. Her buildup of tension and ultimate release is exceptionally well executed. The touch of van der Schyff is ever changing as he responds to these varying mood swings. He moves adeptly from pastel yellows to dark browns to match the existing mood of the group. What is most evident with this trio, however, is its skill at listening. The three act/react to each other and intertwine creative landscapes onto an ever-changing topography to forge a kaleidoscope of varying tones and textures. Fields wrote all eight selections, but the line between previously and instantly composed is blurred. The musicians launch as a unit from the short themes and jointly reinvent their orbit. This That is challenging music with multiple rewards emanating from its group dynamic. It requires close concentration to appreciate all the subtle nuances, but with a disciplined attitude, full appreciation can be realized. — Frank Rubolino, One Final Note
Mamet
Cloistered in Wisconsin, guitarist Scott Fields devises new ways of structuring improvisation. In a string of unjustly overlooked CDs, he’s experimented with groups of varying configurations. This incarnation of Fields’ ensemble is a good introduction to his music, in part because it showcases his thoughtful, probing guitar solos in a trio setting. Inspired by playwright David Mamet, this project uses the atmospheres, dramatic interactions and texts from five plays to guide the soloists. Fields goes so far as to incorporate Mamet’s dialogue into his instrumental scores, and to assign dramatic roles to each musician. The strategy demands, and obtains, expressive, “vocal” performances from bassist Michael Formanek and drummer Michael Zerang. On “The Woods,” listen to the give-and-take between Fields’ guitar and Formanek’s bass, which voice the female and male “leads,” respectively. Fields’ guitar solos pass through a pleading blues twang to sputtering anger, culminating in howls of anguish. Without in-depth knowledge of the plays or the scores, it’s impossible to assess how closely the trio captures the meaning or rhythms of Mamet’s dialogue. The performances are so good that it shouldn’t matter. four stars! — Jon Andrews, Downbeat
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Best Album of 2002 Playwrite David Mamet’s works inspire the music here — hence the presence of tunes called “American Buffalo” and “Oleanna.” But Fields’ precise motivation is less important than the work itself. With bassist Michael Formanek and drummer Michael Zerang, this gifted guitarist constructs open-ended, freeform soundscapes filled with noises that are alternatively weird, discomfiting, and stimulating. — Michael Roberts, Jazziz
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On Mamet guitarist Scott Fields takes poignant moments from five David Mamet plays and sets them to music, making full use of the playwright’s penchant for exaggerated linguistic rhythm to fire the structure and dynamics of these songs. The concept will likely be too cerebral for some (isn’t playing good music hard enough?), but the results work as avant-garde jazz. With help from drummer Michel Zerang and bassist Michael Formanek, the trio broods, bristles, cries and pries, replicating the drama of Mamet’s dialogue-driven scenes. Fields’s guitar takes the part of the woman and Formanek the man, leaving Zerang to provide the rhythmic undertow. Undoubtedly one of the most adventurous albums to come out from the Delmark camp, Mamet pushes jazz to a place many jazz musicians don’t dare to go. — Tad Hendrickson, CMJ New Music Report
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His solo technique is somewhat like the David Mamet plays that Fields uses as his inspiration for the CD’s titles: Mamet’s characters often converse in brief, elliptical dialogues that circle back on each other like Abbott and Costello doing heavy drama. Unlike Mamet’s writing, though, there is little humor or true tension in Fields’ music, which tends toward completely free improvisation, with little or no contrapuntalism among the players. Tracks like “Edmond” and “American Buffalo” come and go like an off-Broadway play, leaving little impression in the process. “The Woods” begins with almost two minutes of silence before the faintest sounds gurgle to the surface, and then it’s all timbral effects for the next seven, The song continues for another 10, and actually picks up some steam for a few minutes, but “The Woods,” like Mamet, is a potentially funny joke with a big buildup and a so-so punch line. — Christopher Porter, Jazz Times
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On the surface, this is probably the most conventional instrumentation that Fields has used for one of his ensembles. But like a director casting a play, he has carefully chosen his co-conspirators. Formanek is a fantastically inventive bass player. He is on equal footing throughout; flexibly adjusting his playing and interaction to the flow of the piece. At times he is the aggressive lead voice, at others a dynamic sparring partner for Fields. His resonating plucked lines and booming arco fill out what might otherwise be a spare setting. Zerang is a colorist, setting the timbres and textures for the dialog of bass and guitar. This in no way suggests that he is relegated to a supporting role. Instead, he fills out the ensemble with his limber, pointillistic percussion; moving from pinpoint attack to pummeling cascades to propel the improvisations. Fields has a quirky sound, shaping his lines with clean intonation and angular intervalic jumps, at times filled out with a subtle use of real-time sampling to layer multiple lines. The three players use the compositional framework as a motivic framework for elastic interaction full of finely detailed interplay. Quiet, intensely abstract lyricism can lead to thorny, clashing thunder. If one is familiar with the way that Mamet constructs his dialogs and uses tension and release in the development of his plays, it is possible to discern those influences. Though it provides an intriguing layer, it is hardly essential to hearing what is going on here. Instead, Fields has used the sources to create compositional frameworks for open-form improvisation. Even without the knowledge of the underlying basis for the pieces, this trio music is a compelling example of probing group interchange. — Michael Rosenstein, Cadence Magazine
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Despite the potentially clunky concept — the compositions inspired by the plays of David Mamet — Chicagoan guitarist Scott Fields, here flanked by bassist Michael Formanek and drummer Michael Zerang, confounds expectations with a really listenable and inventive approach to group explorations. His score alternates bursts of Mamet dialogue with sections of directed improvisation. The group intone their lines like actors, mumbling phrases and snapping back in argument. Mamet’s writing is very aware of rhythms in speech patterns — most evident in the cyclical despair of American Buffalo. Fittingly enough, that play fuels one of the trio’s most swinging takes, moving into protorock territory that at points sounds like TNT-period Tortoise. The Woods starts quietly, subtly droning and chattering with a section “meant to evoke dusk near a pond in a Midwest forest with its crickets and loons and raccoons and wind rustling through the trees….” Tension builds and spills into violence, the group slamming straight into a wall of dead feedback, while a despairing undercurrent breaks and submerges the players. — David Keenan, The Wire
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Arguably the Anthony Braxton of the guitar, Scott Fields is among avant-garde jazz’s unsung innovators. The guitarist, now based in Madison, WI, was part of the Chicago avant-garde jazz scene during the 60s and ’70s and, much like Larry Young brought modal post-bop to the organ, Fields’ guitar playing was influenced by the pioneering work of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). An improviser as important as Fields should have a huge catalog but, regrettably, the electric guitarist has only recorded sporadically over the years. Recorded in 2000 and released in 2001, Mamet finds him putting his spin on the works of playwright David Mamet. Although there are no words or lyrics, Fields was thinking of Mamet’s plays when he composed instrumentals like “Oleanna,” “The Woods,” and “American Buffalo.” But one doesn’t have to be an expert on Mamet’s work to appreciate this excellent release. And, for that matter, being a lover of Mamet’s plays doesn’t guarantee that you will love Fields’ Mamet CD (which employs Michael Formanek on acoustic bass and Michael Zerang on drums). Ultimately, the thing that will determine whether or not you find Mamet meaningful is how much you appreciate and comprehend outside improvisation. If you’re an admirer of fearless AACM explorers like Anthony Braxton, Lester Bowie, and Roscoe Mitchell, you owe it to yourself to hear Mamet — a CD that is enthusiastically recommended to anyone with a taste for AACM-style avant-garde jazz. — Alex Henderson, All Music Guide
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Today’s hustle-bustle, no-time-for-mama world is a far too busy a place for serious reading. Realizing that there are many, and, let’s be frank here, possibly an infinite number of, great literary works whose pages I will never have the time, however desired, to peruse, it was with eager hope that I laid Scott Fields’ disc “Mamet” und mien plattenspieler. You see, Fields advertises his CD as a kind of “play on disc,” through which he hopes allow busy literati to speed listen to great word works. In this case he has condensed five of the great Chicago playwright David Mamet’s dramatic masterpieces to their instrumental essence. His scheme was to remove the words themselves, distilling the plays to raw emotion and scenario-atic movement, replacing English dialog with the universal language of music. But with each passing guitar bar, with each incomprehensible thumping contrabass contribution, with each percussive phrase, my disappointment grew. As much as I tried to grasp Mamet’s meaning, the meandering musical misrepresentation of this giant of the American stage and movie house left my eyes glazed and my mind muddled. One cannot grasp even the barest of scene changes, or the movement from one act to the next, let alone the meaning of master Mamet’s universal utterances. Reading the script of “American Buffalo” while listening the identically titled track on Fields’ fraud was little help. In a final act of desperation, I viewed the video version of “Oleanna” (starring the multi-faceted William Macy, who although not in the fine form he displayed as “The Shoveler” in Mystery Men, gives a stirring performance) while listening to Fields’ version. Not only was the musical condensation out of sync with the video, which we know was the correct interpretation since it was directed by David Mamet himself, but it drowned out the dialog. My advice? If you want to bone up on these plays, rent the videos. Fields may have brazenly branded his “plays on disc” M-A-M-E-T, but a more appropriate spelling would have been F-A-I-L-U-R-E. — Hugh Jarrid, Swingin’ Thing Magazine
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Self proclaimed programmatic music, MAMET is a series of interlocking compositions “guided by” five of the plays written by American playwright David Mamet. Mamet, the wordsmith, is notorious for the care he puts into the cadences of his dialogue and Madison, Wisc.-based guitarist Scott Fields has tried to reflect both the words and the structure of the plays in his tunes. How well does he succeed? Quite well in a musical sense, since the improvisations created by the guitarist and his helpmates — Chicago drummer Michael Zerang and New York bassist Michael Formanek — could certainly stand on their own. But whether each properly reflects the dramatic work it’s supposed to represent is more of a moot point. Keeping in mind that the guitar here represents Mamet’s female characters and the bass his male ones helps prolong the idea. An almost 22 minute tour-de-force — and the longest track on the disc — “The Woods” goes the farthest towards reifying Fields’ thesis. Depicting a two-character play that simmers with an undercurrent of suppressed violence which finally explodes in the final scene, the sounds move from nearly inaudible at the beginning to arena rock level at the end. Beginning with hushed bass notes, percussion clicks and the odd guitar lick, a cowbell suggests the rural setting. Following the original melancholy theme, all bowed bass and cymbal runs, a bass drum wash and cymbal swish introduces the guitar, which becomes louder as the seconds tick by. This lyrical guitar section is supposed to reflect the female character’s hope that her relationship will last, but a deep, dark, masculine bass solo seems to foreshadow its doom. Finally, after harsh guitar notes which are offered up like dagger thrusts, a furious physical fight is depicted. Fields concentrates his repeated held notes on staccato screeches and the savagery of Jimi Hendrix-style feedback. All three musicians operate at magnified fortissimo for a while until the melancholy theme returns at the conclusion. One of Mamet’s most famous works, “Oleanna”, about the transformation of a power relationship between a female student and a male professor, thrives in this setting as well. With Zerang’s percussion keeping things moving in the background, over the course of the tune Field’s guitar lines gradually gain in the strength and intensity as Formanek’s bass moves from a strong bowed part to short, deep, plucked notes which almost slow to stasis. Reflecting sameness in tempo and atmosphere, the other tracks are less satisfactory, but that perhaps may be a function of Mamet’s themes rather than Fields’ conceptions. Still, trying to relate Zerang’s percussion to playing cards being dealt or money jingling on “Prairie Du Chien” may be too much of a stretch — especially for those who haven’t seen the play. Held to a different standard than the usual guitar, bass and drums work out, Fields has to be commended for his imagination as well as for what he has produced. Convincingly, for the greatest part of the discs, the musicians have used their skills to put remarkable improvised flesh on the programmatic compositional bones. Exploring an unusual musical byway, Fields has created a disc that can be thought about as well as heard. — Ken Waxman, Jazz Word
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Mamet is another one which shrieks “concept.” This time, a musical pendant to the eponymous playwright’s work. Slow, dense and effortful, it’s hardly an enlightening or even very involving listen. 2½ stars (of four). — Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, seventh edition
Dénouement
An austere chamber-like atmosphere informs most of the numbers, augmented by the metallic amplification of the guitars and the muted contrasts between percussion and strings. Together the six move over an angular landscape of fractured melodic fragments, skittering harmonics and lopingly morose themes pausing along the way to sculpt a strong succession of enigmatic improvisations. Those who value music that challenges and incites rumination will find a great deal to decipher in the riddles of Field’s sound collages. — Derek Taylor, All About Jazz
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Each performer preserves a distinct identity as the music unfolds. The lines frequently converge as a phrase or harmonic configuration is picked up and echoed in the course of another current, but those nodes never arrest the forward motion, or blur the internal contours of the music. It’s a long album, arguable, after the first few listens, a little too long given its evenness, But it is also insidious, spiked with subtle temptations to play it again. — Julian Cowley, The Wire
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The music is marked by its dynamic sensitivity and unforced flow. The forms are elastic enough for the musicians’ characteristic voices to emerge, but there is far less polarity than empathy between them. While Fields generates some atonal lyricism, almost an extension of Jim Hall, and Parker can insinuate blues connotations into the most abstruse discussion, what stands out is their affinity, the ease of their give-and-take. — Stuart Broomer, Signal to Noise
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The listener is placed in the midst of a complex of layered dialogues, in which the two guitarists seem most apparent but in which underlying threads of bass and percussion gradually rise to prominence. The levels of clarity and transparency are surprising for a group of this instrumentation, and the ultimate feeling is both abstract and contemplative. — Stuart Broomer, Coda
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Working in a different ensemble altogether, Fields’ playing turns into a different animal altogether. Double trio that he put together sometime around mid 90’s, provides the leader ample opportunity to stretch out as a composer and improviser. Competing with him on guitar is Jeff Parker, while the rhythm section is made up of Jason Roebke and Hans Sturm on bass and Michael Zerang and Hamid Drake on percussion. Best thing is each player has its own channel to play into, thus giving perfect chance to hear point-counterpoint between what the other partner is doing at the same time. Fields here sounds more relaxed. In fact, his playing is akin to his better Music & Arts records from mid 90s. A little on the angular side, but still romping up a healthy dose of all over the map picking. At times bluesy, while other times completely free, it’s difficult to imagine all of these pieces were actually composed. Much of the guitarist’s work sounds somewhat similar to what James Blood Ulmer used to do in the mid 70s. Roebke and Sturm complement each other quite well, shifting between pure arco and some nasty finger picking action, while both percussionists keep a firm beat on the proceedings. Each takes a turn at soloing, while Drake is master of keeping his distinct personality on the record. Originally released in limited quantities on Fields’ own Geode imprint, the record is finally seeing a much deserved reissue. Glowing with a warm heart and ideas to spare, it’s safe to put Dénouement as re-issue of the year so far. — Tom Sekowski, Gaz-Eta
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Chicago-based guitarist Scott Fields most successful projects, such as Mamet (Delmark, 2001), and Beckett (Clean Feed, 2007), offer a novel merger of structured improvisation inspired by literary sources, this album included. Recorded in 1997 and previously available only on Fields’ own tiny Geode label, this session sat dormant for ten years before this Clean Feed reissue. Dénouement features a unique double ensemble; two electric guitar trios playing in tandem, but rarely in unison. In 1997, Fields’ working trio consisted of bassist Hans Sturm and drummer Hamid Drake. Fellow Midwesterners, bassist Jason Roebke and drummer Michael Zerang pilot the second trio with guitarist Jeff Parker. Five years before his solo debut, Like-Coping (Delmark, 2003), Parker demonstrates the lyrical finesse and adventurous risk-taking that has brought him acclaim as part of the new Chicago scene. Using multiple pitch sets and compound rhythmic figures to create an off-kilter sensibility, Fields creates a complex mosaic of contrapuntal lines and cross-rhythms. Modulating dynamics with nuance and relaxed pacing, the ensemble meanders from austere chamber-esque duets exploring pointillist dialogue to dense collective passages that unfurl knotty tendrils of abstruse commentary fueled by angular, interlocking rhythms. To his credit, these layered compositions feel unforced, belying their structural intricacy. Intertwining with graceful subtlety, the two trios navigate similar paths without drifting in cacophonous discourse. Drake and Zerang’s elastic rhythms skirt between skittering harmonic accents and fulminating energy, while Roebke and Sturm occasionally alternate techniques, bowing fractured double stops and sonorous arco glisses or plucking metered pizzicato. Fields and Parker offer a kaleidoscopic array of scintillating tonal colors and subtle electronic textures. Less EFX dependent than many electric guitarists, they rely on sensitivity of touch and phrasing for their sound, rather than twiddling knobs on stomp boxes. Employing a variety of approaches, from pensive, linear patterns to blistering fretwork exuding jittery bursts of atonality, they complement and contrast each other with remarkable restraint and a seething undercurrent of roiling energy. Fields’ darkly humorous song titles allude to the uncertain resolutions of morose, convoluted narratives, much like his own compositions. Intricate, but not overly esoteric, Dénouement is a welcome reissue and a high water mark in Fields’ varied discography. — Troy Collins, All About Jazz
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This may very well be the year that puts Chicago guitarist Scott Fields firmly on the improvisational map. His Clean Feed Records debut, Beckett, occupies a tense poise between measured and somewhat theatre-inspired movement and free immediacy. Joining him on the tightrope walk are percussionist John Hollenbeck, tenorman Matthias Schubert and cellist Scott Roller. On the heels of Beckett is the reissue of Dénouement, a double-trio recording initially waxed in 1997 for Fields’ tiny, now-defunct Geode label. He’s joined by guitarist Jeff Parker (here in a pre-Thrill Jockey guise), bassists Jason Roebke and Hans Sturm, and drummers Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang (who appeared with bassist Michael Formanek on Fields’ excellent Delmark disc Mamet). Fields characterizes the music as “the bastard child of King Sunny Adé and Ornette Coleman” and he might not be incorrect in that assertion. Luckily not recorded in mono, each trio is audible in separate yet interweaving channels, Fields, Sturm and Drake on the right and Parker, Roebke and Zerang on the left. From the opening plinks and strums of “Her Children,” plaintive and nearly detuned, Parker and Fields underpin, addend and fragment their own dialogue, a delicate conversation in language about to collapse on itself. Pulled out from dissipation by a seemingly abrupt arrival at martial swing, the twin rhythm sections offer a steadily oppositional groove, basses and guitars walking in contrasts and a unison of throaty grasps, linked mostly by absence. After all, one reason for using two bassists or drummers in opposing rhythms is that the contrast will, rather than stagnate create a third and less deterministic pulse, stemming from “both” and “neither.” Like musical forebears the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, these lengthy improvisations (albeit with brief written signposts) should be taken as a whole, with individual areas popping out and grabbing one’s senses — dueling arco-ponticello basses catch the ear mightily, percussion hanging overhead in implied fits of near-waltz as Fields and Parker skitter from the front porch to somewhere way, way underground. A charged, fuzzy rock phrase is worried in damning repetition, Sharrock-like overtones brought out as basses, toms and a second guitar both goad and placate. It’s the simultaneity of sounds, phrases and rhythms and their conflicted outcomes — or, rather, the space between these things — that makes Fields’ ensembles work. Luckily for us, this early example of his music is available again. — Clifford Allen, Paris Transatlantic Magazine
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This session, featuring two trios of guitar, bass and drums, was cut in December 1997. Chicago based guitarist Scott Fields hawked the recording around for two years, and the labels that bit either backed out or went broke. In desperation he pressed some copies and issued them through his own short-lived label, called Geode. It would have been easy for the members of the twin trios to get locked into some kind of contest, but Fields chose colleagues aware and willing enough to co-operate rather than compete, and the two winds of the ensemble dovetail superbly into an integrated unit. Fields’s co-guitarist is Jeff Parker, the bassists are Jason Roebke and Hans Sturm, the drummers Michael Zerang and Hamid Drake: it would be hard to distinguish them in a blindfold test, as the players echo, interweave (and listen to) each other with considerable subtlety. For the session, Fields devised related but dissimilar pitch sets for the two trios, and specified time signatures equal in length but divided differently. If this suggests the music is dry, it isn’t though it is often contemplative and a little opaque. Those, and there seem to be many, who hated Jeff Parker’s sometime gig in Tortoise and the 2005 Fields/Parker collaboration Song Songs Song (Delmark) are perhaps unlikely to connect with Dénouement, but for my ten cents it’s inventive and consistently engaging. — Barry Witherden, The Wire
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Scott Fields’ compositional world is forbidding at best, almost impenetrable at worst. Billed as a double trio and actually recorded ten years ago, Dénouement lends itself more easily to immediate comprehension because of the stereo placement of the six players. Additionally, or maybe as a result, the textures are somewhat thinner, or more accessible,than on more recent releases. The opening guitar duo breathes with refreshing transparency, and when the other instruments enter, it is as if each, aware of his doppelganger, is extra careful not to tread on any toes. The compositions themselves, structures rather than always strictly notated, also allow for more space and silence; simply listen to Nothing had been Wrong to spot the aesthetic. A beautiful bass glissando opens a meditative full group exploration, Kline and Parker’s guitar styles of a piece, even combining with high arco playing from the bassists to eerie effect. The album swings and lopes with downright pleasantness, not that any of the sure-fire improvisational prowess of other efforts is sacrificed — far from it! All complement each other quite nicely in what might be described as a harmolodic journey through structured improvisation. — Marc Medwin, Cadence Magazine
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Guitarist and composer Fields assembled a double trio to interpret the complex nuances of his half-written, half-improvised scores, giving the players circumstantial instructions in order for the compositions to sound like “puzzle pieces,” the six instrumentalists effectively intertwining rhythms and phraseologies yet resulting as a coherent, and ultimately delightful whole. No wonder that this stuff remained unpublished for years, while — to quote the author — “label owners fell in and out of love with the music”: this is fairly difficult material, which in its presumed calmness offers many and one points of observation for a series of crosscurrents mixing modern jazz and quasi-chamber apparitions, spiced by mostly clean-toned if pretty dissonant guitars (Fields and Jeff Parker — yes, Tortoise‘s), elegantly austere, beautifully sustaining basses (Jason Roebke, Hans Sturm), swinging-but-also-pensive drumming (Hamid Drake, Michael Zerang). Divided into seven tracks, whose names are a joy to read — take a look at the full title of “…His late wife…” to have an idea — the 72 minutes of Dénouement do not carry excessive weight at any moment, being instead gifted with considerable musicianship which transports the ensemble towards those heights where the rarefied air of clever interplay is present and easily breathable. Minimal in a way, communicative at various levels, these arrangements show Fields‘ lucid vision and ability to remain within the realms of circuitousness while avoiding those sterile dialectic supplements that uncork the bottles of vintage listlessness typical of dead-end jazz. This is a commendable album to savour delicately, repeatedly, consciously. — Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes
Hornets Collage
Overall, Hornets Collage is lyrical, enduring, spacious yet subtly captivating as the Trio pursue layered themes and sweet-tempered choruses while the music breathes life and conjures up vivid imagery proportionate to an impressionist painter of landscapes or dreams…. Hornets Collage is an authentic synthesis of interminable patterns as the musicians keenly and vividly conceptualize the notions of nature, hard at work. Recommended! * * * * — Glenn Astarita, All About Jazz
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The affinity isn’t about particulars, but rather the quiet intimacy, economy and evanescent lyricism (both composed and improvised) of this remarkable group. Fields’ classical guitar playing is just that, richly sonorous, bell-like and subtly nuanced, and the three-way playing here is a continuous weave of thoughtful linear threads. — Stuart Broomer, Coda
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Like all cds on the nuscope label, this one is extremely well recorded, so one can rapt attention to the smallest or quietest detail. From ultra sparse sections to busy portions, there is an absorbing thread that holds this all together. “When She Speaks…” recalls that quirky Giuffre type of excursion with tight little flashes of notes that quickly erupt. Five of these pieces are collective improvs and each is an adventure unto itself, open ended, boisterous and mysterious, yet somehow connected through deep listening and reacting. The majority of these pieces are (well) written and involve a variety of strategies and textures. Concentrated, thoughtful and provocative sounds to ponder. — Bruce Lee Gallanter, Downtown Music Gallery
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A chamber music delicacy in the improvisations cloaks an underlying incisiveness, which in turn cleaves cleanly through airs of pretension. Roebke’s supple bass is the rhythmic fulcrum for the group. His crisply plucked lines ripple outward and surround the music in gentle waves of aqueous support. Field’s choice to employ only acoustic strings is essential to the group’s sonic palette. Even without the aid of amplification, he devises a startling display of guitar techniques, everything from jangling string-bending discord to dulcet lyricism. — Derek Taylor, Cadence Magazine
Five Frozen Eggs
Context is the operative for success regarding Scott Fields’ musical vision. While capable guitarists are a dime a dozen, only a handful compose and improvise in a challenging setting with the consistency of Fields. By surrounding himself with players of the highest caliber, Fields’ group suggests a finely tuned, living entity. This quartet serves as an important reminder of what creative improvised music has to offer. In this case, a nimble musical vehicle with all-wheel drive. — Jon Morgan, Cadence Magazine
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Five Frozen Eggs — the sleeve-notes explain the title — strikes something of a balance among the various styles Fields is investigating, loosening the chamberish qualities of some of the pieces without surrendering the rather formal, almost courtly kind of free organization he seems to be interested in. His own playing here eschews much in the way of effects and there is a sense of contrapuntalism among the four musicians which makes this record perhaps the best place to sample Fields’s music — energetic, occasionally volatile, but fundamentally about form and its effect on content— Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, sixth edition
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Five Frozen Eggs merges the tensile throttle of Disaster and charged largeness of 48 Motives. — Andrew Bartlett, Eugene Weekly
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Fields wrote all of the compositions on this stimulating CD and plays them on guitar with pianist Marilyn Crispell, bassist Hans Sturm, and percussionist Hamid Drake. Despite often performing quietly, they take plenty of risks. Fields employs harmonic and rhythmic/metric concepts derived from composer Stephen Dembski, which he’s modified for use in an improvising context. Often his group’s playing, though not conventionally melodic, is lyrical. Much of the disc features thoughtful, pointillistic collective improvisation. Crispell’s the most aggressive player here and performs impressively. Her work ranges from pensive to jarringly percussive, but is always well thought out, inventive, and clearly articulated. Fields plays economically, concentrating on adding color to the ensemble. Sturm and Drake make valuable contributions, listening closely to what’s going on and responding with intelligence and creativity. — Harvey Pekar, Jazziz
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The compositions of the American guitarist, Scott Fields, move between Jazz and New Music. The songs working as outline sketches, reflecting feelings, serve as a starting point for the numerous, free improvisations of the participating musicians. Powerful, swinging or grooving collective improvisations are as possible as entertaining lyric moments or ironic comedy. Notable here is the aloof, alluding style of pianist Marilyn Crispell. Hamid Drake, known for his earlier work with Peter Brotzman, plays a powerful but nuance filled percussion. In the combination of their soliloquies, the musicians of the Scott Fields Ensemble produce a cohesive, satisfying, and unique sound. Five Frozen Eggs is an energetic but varied and versatile recording, filled with all sorts of surprises. — Thomas Forkert, Jazz Podium
48 Motives
48 Motives is a profound extension of Fields’ hornless quintet CD Fugu (Geode) where he amply displayed his use of different contemporary post-free jazz and post-classical music. Fields excels in creating slowly sculpted swerves, hairpin turns, and even magnificently powerful door blowing exertions. And on Motives, Stephen Dembski brilliantly guided the octet version of Fields’ ensemble for an adventurous sound event that awaits you. — Andrew Bartlett, Midwest Jazz Magazine
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Entitled 48 Motives, his piece consists of melodic fragments composed using a harmonic system that is intended to provide a listenable application of the serial twelve tone techniques used by classical composer Arnold Schoenberg. Highly listenable it is, as the figures played by cellist Matt Turner and ex-Art Ensemble of Chicago member Joseph Jarman are both emotive and melodic. Though the chaotic polyrhythms caused by the active participation of each of the members at times seem random there are plenty of stabilizing musical figures that sustain the music without relying on familiar patterns. — Jeffrey Herrmann, yourflesh
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Whether or not a group later than a quartet can collectively improvise in an artful manner is an open question, even thirty-odd years after the recording of those two landmark albums [Free Jazz and Ascension], but if it is to happen, it seems certain that an imposed structure is necessary to avoid the pitfalls of utter cacophony. Fields’ ensemble does that, for the most part, and while in this particular performance the effect is not wholly successful, this talented composer has given more than a hint of how it may eventually come about. — Chris Kelsey, Cadence Magazine
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Double quartet, 48 eight-bar themes, each with its rhythmic counterpart, and a conductor to order and cue the themes at his discretion: those are the components of this recording. Fields counts on the interaction of these motives to generate interest. It happens at times, but the overall effect is that of minimalism: texture begging for development. — Bill Bennett, Jazz Times
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Scott Fields is nothing if not an academic composer, but he’s a visionary one. 48 Motives is a scored composition that is based on 48 eight-bar melodic fragments. These are built on a tonal system designed by Stephen Dembski of the interaction of two 12-pitch tone rows that are used to construct nontonal scales. It has been simplified and notated for improvisers exclusively. 48 Motives is written for four or more treble instruments in combination with two rhythm units, with at least a bass player and percussionist in each. Then, for the treble instruments, Fields composed 12 motives constructed on 12 closely related scales that were not related to the other three scale sets. Then he divvied them up among the other groups so that each had 12 of their own and four from the other three instruments. Finally he composed a rhythm element, giving 24 to one and 24 to another. Then a conductor uses the American Manual Alphabet as well as traditional conducting gestures to select motives, instrumentation, dynamics, tempo, and more. As musicians move back and forth between motives, the basic stock for their improvs changes. Now, this is all heady stuff, is it not? And all of it would be useless were it not for its compelling possibilities and the way those possibilities are explored by the instrumentalists at work here. And what a group of musicians he assembled. For the recorded premier he used pianist Marilyn Crispell, cellist Matt Turner, and his bandmates — John Padden and Geoff Brady — for a rhythm section, among others. Stephen Dembski conducted. There are so many things going on at once in this music, all of them so instinctually related and timbrally exotic, it’s difficult to nail down any one thing except for the dynamic range that follows a circular trajectory of empathy and force, led by Crispell. This music is magic, wonder, and mystery all rolled into one, and beguilingly accessible. Let’s face it, folks, Fields is a genius. — Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
Sonotropism
The feel here is of an exquisite piece of chamber-jazz just sufficiently dirtied to keep it lively. Crispell, who’s done so much of this kind of playing with Anthony Braxton, is perfect for the job, and Ochs is equally capable.— Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, sixth edition
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There are undoubtedly some terrific moments, but the whole project is too self-consciously eclectic and “downtown” to allow the players to lose themselves in the music for sustained periods. In music, as in life, nirvana requires forgetting oneself. Here, both the writing and the playing seem at certain times to fall into the refrain “Remember Me!…Me! and at others to reverberate loudly with a “What should I be doing now?” vibe. — Walter Horn, Cadence Magazine
Disaster at Sea
The Madison-based Scott Fields Ensemble doesn’t waste a moment on its sinewy debut for Berkeley’s Music & Arts. Picking up where the late Sonny Sharrock left off, Fields threatens to wear out his plectrum five minutes into “Sputter,” the furiously free second movement of “Disaster at Sea,” an intricately developed long-form work that evokes the tensions of its aqueous theme with unexpected irony. From then on, the guitarist/composer alternates between aggression and reflection, building a tonal architecture that’s consistently interesting and often quite stunning. — Tom Laskin, Isthmus
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All together, the CD is a rattling affair. Fields attacks his guitar as Cecil Taylor or Borah Bergman attack the piano. He takes massive swipes across it, covering a scatter of notes that get clustered so tightly together that the impact of each piece takes multiple listens to blossom. Fast and loud, the trio slams its way through Fields’ highly developed approach to the guitar and composition. — Andrew Bartlett, Midwest Jazz
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Almost frightening in its execution, this is a trio that creates music of overwhelming density… Even in their freest moments, the group has a high level of discipline and conference. For the most part, the improvisations appear democratic, with the lead equally shared between Turner and Fields. Davis meticulously accents and shadows the assertions of the duo; his shimmering cymbals echo their distortion while the din of his snares and toms enhance the color of the dialogue. Whether it be the slurred, raucous guitar, or the ominous resonating cello, their improvisations are full of textural fervor, resulting in a sound as jarring and explosive as the calamity that influenced it. — Jon Morgan, Cadence Magazine
Fugu
Compositions, all written by Fields, are structured but very expansive, and rely on the empathy and dexterity of the group members. The relative sameness of the instrumental timbres could have been a liability, but Fields’ writing actually seems to exploit similarities, encouraging the listener to enjoy and compare the nuances of each instrument’s sound…. There’s a wonderful suppleness and understated energy to this ensemble, achieved through a combination of musicianship, intelligence and uncommonly strong mutual sympathies. — Bill Tilland, Option Magazine
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I do not want to spoil the sense of discovery that the listener should get from Fugu. This is quiet, yet dynamic music that compels and invites you to listen. When you do, the results are very impressive. Give yourself time to move into this group’s creations. — Richard B. Kamins, Cadence Magazine
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Guitarist and composer Scott Fields has assembled his long-running ensemble for another foray into his strangely beautiful tonally organic universe. If Oregon had begun without horns, playing all Western instruments and moving through vanguard transpositions of serialism and post-Coltrane vanguardism, they might have sounded something like this. Fields writes delicately balanced pieces for strings and percussion that bridge the gap between jazz, new music, and free improvisation because they are simultaneously all of them and none of them at once. His sense of balance and harmony are impeccable as he shoves tiny angular figures against percussive accents (“The Plagiarist”), or opens the tone field with long, drawn out spaces draped with minimal finery (“Poem for Joseph”]). This is not to say the band doesn’t swing, because they do, just not in a linear way. Their reliance on each other to move a difficult harmonic sequence through to its fruition and into the field of “playing,” as on the title track, creates in them a sense of driven tension, one that is equal pars abandon and nuance. This is an elegant, graceful, and very forward thinking approach to jazz. Highly recommended. — Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
Running with Scissors
When he does solo, Fields is inventive and accomplished and his instrument enjoys a wonderful sense of depth in the recording. Most of all, the compositions fit the group—Fields is a thoughtful and probing composer, again often bring to mind the late Eric Dolphy in his choice of wide intervals and corduroy rhythms. — Carl Baugher, Cadence Magazine
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Fields’ music will appeal to those who feel—as this critic does—that Eric Dolphy’s ‘Out to Lunch’ was one of the seminal recordings of the ‘60s. That disc also sounds like a textbook for Fields and his quintet. Running with Scissors made me want to stick a microscope to my ear to catch all the nuances played by Fields and his group. — Steve Goldstein, Midwest Jazz Magazine
Chronotomy
The contrasts within this group amount almost to conflicts. Mazzola’s gesturally grand piano seems at odds with violinist Mat Maneri’s microtonal subtleties. Drummer Geisser’s extrovert flourishes seem oddly paired with electric guitarist Fields’s undemonstrative finesse. Strange forms of accord do emerge repeatedly amid the tensions and apparent imbalances. The European pair take compositional credits for these four pieces, recorded in New York in 2002, but it’s the greater restraint and more oblique contribution from the Americans that really enlivens the music. There’s persistent danger of encrusted stolidity and overblown rhetoric in Geisser and Mazzola’s playing; Maneri and Fields provide some of the necessary corrective through their light touch and lateral thinking. Interest arises through that faultline of uneasy collaboration, but arguably it’s outweighed by the cumulative effect of excessive cymbal thrash and opulent pianism. — Julian Cowley, The Wire
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The quartet on Chronotomy takes the music to a different space. The long-standing duo of Swiss improvisers Geisser and Mazzola team up with a fine pair of improvising string players. The duo has recorded for a bevy of labels since the 1990s, and have met up previously with guitarist Fields on 1999’s Maze, and with both Maneri and Fields for 2000’s Cadence recording Heliopolis. Of the four tracks on this release, only “Decode” is under 11 minutes long (it is also the most sustained exploration of lyrical content and stillness). But these four players not only avoid the monotony that some long form improvisations fall into, they play with a convincing collective voice as well, and only the 27-minute title track tries the patience at all. The mood rangers from intense fire-breathing energy to cool repose, from arch chamber minimalism to overblown expression. Frequent comparisons of Mazzola to Cecil Taylor miss the boat; while he plays with density and propulsion, his chord patterns and use of dynamics are distinct, forming a sonic lattice with Geisser’s detailed percussion. And with partners as gifted as Fields and Maneri—both of whom combine a vast range of textural devices with a winning affinity for knotty polytonality—the music brims with intelligence and vigor, regardless of the modality of the moment. All parts are generally equal, and each player leaves his colleagues a considerable amount of elbow room, including regular breakdowns into duos and trios. But it’s hard not to conclude that the most exciting passages are those where Mazzola, Fields, and Maneri are locked together in delicious counter-point, or those where Maneri’s slurred microtones wend their way through Mazzola’s shards or Fields’ dense note clusters, as on “Elevate,” though do hold out for the tasty atmospherics from Fields and Maneri during a crashing piano/drums duo at the end of “Chronotomy.” Coasting along on lightning quick reactions and serious, consistent flow, this is a fine recording. — Jason Bivins, Cadence Magazine
Heliopolis
European and American improvisers enjoy a rich tradition of cross-pollination. The bridging of the geographic gap posed by the Atlantic Ocean is a daily occurrence as musicians from both sides regularly convene on either shore. Mazzola and Geisser, two Swiss citizens who make frequent forays to the States to play with their American counterparts, are regularly members of this ongoing collaborative exodus. Both men are classically trained and highly versed in the art of free improvisation. Maneri and Fields are similarly adept in this arena and on the basis of their reputations were conscripted by the co-leaders to take part in what is ostensibly a team effort. A minimum of premeditated referents and four pairs of open ears are the principle elements in the interchange of extemporaneous ideas. Fields receives the shortest straw in the audio draw, his muffled arpeggiations sometimes buried in the balance of instruments. Maneri’s scythe-like bow adds sharp harmonic twists against Mazzola’s stuttering clusters and Geisser’s traps work frequently as an accentuating agent to the ensemble sound. The opening “Omniverse” starts in piecemeal fashion as the players examine and discard various elements both individually and en mass. Solos are collective rather than discrete and rare are the instances when a player is heard in isolation. “Chronos” ticks onward like a clock being wound, rising in dissonance and volume on a wave of Fields’ amplified feedback. Maneri shapes nebulous lines above a terrain of busily propulsive drums and worried pianistics and the piece seems to dart in a dozen directions at once. It’s these shorter opening pieces that fare better than the longer, more involved errands that follow them. “Zodiac” and the title track bend perilously close to excess over the course of their respective time spans and, while each harbors numerous passages of spirited exchange, the overall effect is of a culinary dish left too long in the oven. The latter opens quietly and after a period of adjustment the quartet settles into a protracted and cooperative investigation of muted tones and textures. “Heliopolis” is louder and more frenetic, filled with bursts of energy and galvanic release. Closing with the curiously titled “Xoltl,” the four dive once more into the communal hot spring of heated improvisation and chart a myriad of currents. In the final count this meeting of European and American constituents sizes up as a somewhat flawed enterprise and begs the question, what would these four have come up with had they afforded themselves more time for familiarity and preparation? Still, much of the music on hand is undeniably exciting and points to the efficacy of free collective improvisation as a means of facilitating and even mandating on-the-spot agreement and conceptual malleability. By every indication Mazzola and Geisser’s sallies to American soil are frequent. Future collaborations will no doubt illustrate further the firm stock they take in testing their wits with other States-born improvisers. — Derek Taylor, One Final Note
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Those of you who managed to wade as far through the last issue’s reviews section as the “G” page deserve congratulations and may recall mention made there of this quartet’s Maze CD [Quixotic]. Heliopolis is recommendable for similar reasons: literate, polished and composed (as in played with composure) post-Cecil sax-less quartet free jazz, with tinges of chamber and classical. Mat Maneri replaces Matt Turner on violin, but the group’s balance is unaffected — most of the hot improv action centres around Mazzola and Geisser, with Scott Fields adding noodly guitar trills, and Maneri sliding in slices of angular violin. Benjamin Watson’s liner notes predictably tend to the florid, but he’s right on the money when he describes this group as “equitably balanced as a classical string quartet” — this is intelligent, analytical music, imbued with an intoxicating sense of collective freedom. — Nick Cain, Opprobrium
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Drummer Heinz Geisser and pianist Guerino Mazzola represent yet another stream of jazz from Cadence/CIMP. Whether the j-word is appropriate to chamberish, post-serial, microtonal improvisation I’m not so sure, though there is a post-Tristano/Giuffre/Bley school which has always had a presence. Thoughtful violinist Mat Maneri and guitarist Scott Fields (who is not unlike Joe Morris) round out the quartet. The music follows the increasingly familiar pattern of long surging and pointillistic improvised lines played simultaneously by the members of the group within a very narrow dynamic range. Heliopolis is, however, one of the better examples of this often arid style, ranking alongside Joe Maneri’s superb Dahabenzapple (hatART). Mazzola clearly enjoys firing off lightning fast right-hand runs and elbowed clusters after Cecil, Fields adds to Morris’ lexicon with unruly distortion pedalwork, Geisser is as thrillingly unpredictable as Randy Peterson, and Mat Maneri impeccably observes the family tradition. This music’s austerely narrow focus won’t be to everybody’s taste, though it is certainly a more convincing fusion of classical music and improvisation than any of the “New Silence” projects I’ve heard, and a high watermark for the microtonal school of improvisation. — Fred Grand, Rubberneck
Maze
Eye-opening free improvised music. Contemporary free music recorded by two Swiss teamed with an American guitar and cello team. Clearly, the pianist has been influenced by Cecil Taylor, but generally, the interesting music performed on this CD is extremely individualistic in terms of both rhythm and interplay. I felt unlimited possibilities with this type of music. — Tokyo Swing Journal
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Like the title says, an extension of the Swiss duo of Geisser (percussion) and Mazzola (piano), a coupling which has previously been expanded into a trio with the addition of saxophonists Rob Brown (Orbit [Music & Arts]) and Matthias Rissi (Fuego [Creative Works]). The two have also cut a fine duo for Cadence (Toni’s Delight), and Geisser is a member of the Collective 4tet (three kinda okay CDs on LeoLab). For Maze they’re joined by two Americans: guitarist Scott Fields — who has recorded four CDs of comprovised jazz featuring the likes of Marilyn Crispell and Hamid Drake — and violinist Matt Turner, whose recent solo disc on Meniscus impressed; he’s also played in Bay Area group Debris, recorded a few albums with bass player Jeff Song, released a solo piano album, and played on Fields’s 48 Motives [Cadence], Disaster At Sea and Sonotropism [both Music & Arts]. This is a refreshingly saxophone-less quartet, reminiscent of Cecil Taylor’s smaller un-saxed groups, with marked classical and chamber influences, whose unusual formation and chosen area of activity gives rise to some literate and articulate free jazz. Mazzola’s piano anchors the group, sparking changes in direction and momentum swells, as he and Geisser flit about each other, and Turner and Fields inject melodic counterpoints and arch scratchings. The playing is precise and accurate and the improvisational dynamic intelligent and poised, the group switching smoothly from bewildering whirls of activity to exploratory duos and trios. Fine stuff from unheralded musicians, released on what surely must be a Cadence subsidiary label — identikit artwork, no label address, and 73-minute running time are all giveaway clues. — Nick Cain, Opprobrium
Meet the Critics
Ideally a piece of arts criticism can stand alone as a work of literature. Articles by masters such as David Denby (film) or Calvin Trillin (food) are engaging even to the reader who has no intention of consuming the product under review. For those who do choose to watch, read, eat, look at, or listen to the subject of a review, the criticism should deepen the experience of watching, reading, eating or whatever. It is a sacred duty to be a critic in any field, including my particular interest: music. Not only can a critic affect the professional course of a musician’s life, the critic may actually affect how people listen to music. When I was a graduate student I conducted, for my Masters thesis, an experiment that tested how reading various types of music criticism — judgmental, historical, analytical, and allegorical — affected how subjects listened to a piece of 20th-centrury classical music. What I found was that the amount of musical training subjects had affected the way they listened more than the types of reviews they read. Subjects with a minimum of about four years of music education, such as violin lessons, tended to listen more analytically. I should mention, however, that I conducted only a single experiment and had I continued in this line of research I would have refined my method, which may have produced different results. What I find interesting, and distressing, is that potential importance of the critics’ role has no apparent relationship to their abilities. Consider how the music critic Derek Taylor entered the profession. “I got into music reviewing primarily through Jon Morgan (ex-music critic and Meniscus honcho),” Taylor has written. “I was familiar with his work in Cadence and had this mental impression of him based solely on his writing: fifty-something, post-grad educated, erudite, balding, glasses… basically Walter Horn ;-) Anyway Jon ends up crashing at my place one weekend while covering a Scott Fields recording session in Madison and I’m greeted by this twenty-something guy who basically looks, talks and acts like a lot of my friends in college. In other words, he wasn’t that far removed from me. The disparity between my preconceptions and reality got me thinking: man, if he can do this writing thing, why can’t I? A call to Cadence later and I was on their masthead.” To paraphrase Taylor’s epiphany, “If this slacker who has no music training and isn’t much of a writer can be a professional critic, why can’t I?” And Derek was right. He has written for One Final Note and Cadence and he now manages the blog Bagatellen, in which the primary topics are avant-jazz and improvised music. Derek has many good qualities. He’s such a sweet man that he has a hard time accepting that bile exists in others and he has organized concerts for no reward other than feeding his love of avant-jazz. But it appears as though he has virtually no ability to analyze music (he says he for a time attempted to play contrabass) and he uses such flowery prose that at times his reviews read like parodies. The reason that Taylor and the many colleagues of his who share his traits are able to find their way into print is purely economic. Cadence, for example, reviews every jazz-related recording that is submitted to it. Supporting such a democratic attitude requires a lot of critics. Yet at one time, I am told, the only compensation that Cadence reviewers received was the recording they were reviewing. “You can keep the CD.” The latest news is that reviewers earn credits that they can use to buy recordings from the Cadence catalog. It’s hard to feed a family on that. At this point, while I pick at scabs, I should mention that these hobbyist critics and perhaps even many of the pros do this work for the love of the music. The guys (really, all guys) listen to staggering quantities of recordings. They write for near to nothing and then in their off hours blog and comment on blogs about the same stuff. God love them for that. The bigger publications pay better, of course, and their critics are more polished. But too often avant-jazz critics are stumped as to what to say. They rely on two depressingly common strategies. The first is simple affect. “I liked this. I didn’t like that.” They function as a Consumer Reports for music. What could be less interesting. The other is to offer blow-by-blow descriptions of the music in allegorical language. “Lowe then enters like sparks careening from a welder’s torch. Reacting with alarm, Drake parries with snare-drum thunderclaps and floor-tom canon blasts. Soon…” and so on and on and on. It might be useful for readers to understand something about the critics of the reviews I have collected above. As a free bonus, I have added a few who have not written about my work, as far as I know. But be warned, this is a work-in-progress and as such includes many gaps and some placeholders. Why am I qualified to review critics? I studied the topic of criticism as part of my graduate research. I have been reviewed and interviewed often enough to be exposed to some critics’ strengths and weaknesses (don’t get me started on Ludwig van Trikt). And, in the spirit of Derek Taylor, “if he can do this writing thing, why can’t I?”

name	publications	personal association	reviews of my stuff	preferences and prejudices	reviewership (0-5 upturned noses)	musicianship (0-5 upturned noses)
Russell Carlson	JazzTimes (associate editor), Harp (associate editor)	none	Song Songs Song, christangelfox, 15=15	Stylistically he stopped listening in 1955. Especially fond of pre-bop guitar virtuosos. He really really really hates my music.	Loads his copy with so many cringe-inducing archaic hipster clichés that it is impossible to take his analysis seriously. 1.5 upturned noses.	Appears to be a guitarist, but that’s all I know. Evaluation Pending.
John Corbett	DownBeat	Have met many times and my trio was one of the first groups he booked into his Empty Bottle series. He is polite and intelligent and knowledgeable about many genres of music. No fan of mine, however.	none	An academic who, I think, studied early free-jazz musicians for his doctoral work, has a love of outsider musicians and, surprising to me, faux outsiders as well.	Well informed but his prose is remarkably old-school for someone so smitten with the avant-garde. 3.5 upturned noses.	Enthusiastic, but unskilled guitarist 1.5 upturned noses
Julian Cowley	The Wire	One or two emails.	this that, 96 Gestures, Dénouement	Seems to prefer avant-jazz.	Well-read, good writer. 4 upturned noses.	unknown
Stefan Gijssels	Free Jazz Blogspot	Two emails. He gave Bitter Love Songs a lukewarm review because the music wasn’t as angry as the CD’s title suggested. English is his second language (more likely fourth) and he doesn’t understand that bitterness and anger are different emotions. I emailed him a note to this effect, but he stood his ground.	Bitter Love Songs	He has written “The three great musicians of the last century all three came to their peak in the 60s: John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix. In the totality of human musical history, you can forget about the rest of twentieth century composers, but not those three.”
Walter Horn	Cadence	Submitted one of his projects to my now-deceased label Geode.	48 Motives	avant-garde	Mean spirited and sometimes misinformed. 2 upturned noses.	Judging from the one recording of his that I have heard, incompetent musician. 1.5 upturned noses.
Hugh Jarrid	Swingin’ Thing Magazine	Years ago we had a run-in. Back then — when I was a young musician in Chicago and he was a mediocre drummer who had to pay real players out of his own pocket just to get a sideman gig — he claimed that I stole his girlfriend. I only borrowed her for a few days, but I guess he figures he owes me one anyway.	Song Songs Song, From the Diary of Dog Drexel, 96 Gestures, this that, Mamet, Beckett, Bitter Love Songs	Prefers music that isn’t mine.	Error filled, flacid, over-alliterated copy. Zero upturned noses.	Unspeakable drummer. Couldn’t count to four if you spotted him one, two, and three. Zero upturned noses.
Chris Kelsey	JazzTimes	none	48 Motives	Focuses on technical ability of musicians.		Fine saxophonist. 4 upturned noses.
Budd Kopman	All About Jazz	We had a weird exchange. In his review of Song Songs Song he busted me for an error in my liner notes (I meant sharp 9 but wrote flat 9), but then erroneously said that a person I quoted (snidely, he says) “does not even know Fields.” She does and I told him, but he left the error posted.	Song Songs Song	unknown	Reviewed CD in a vacuum, without listened to anything else of mine. Wrote primarily about the liner notes. 1.5 upturned noses.	Appears to be a guitarist, but that’s all I know. Evaluation Pending.
Jon Morgan	Signal-to-Noise, Cadence	Came to my house to interview me. Spent hours scratching his arms (lice? DTs?) and asking me whether I liked one or another favorite obscure record. Told Signal-to-Noise that he would write a profile of me and asked for a stack of my CDs they had in a queue to be reviewed. Did the same with Coda, but never wrote for either and both publications then couldn’t review the CDs because he wouldn’t return them. I will someday punch him on his upturned nose.	Avant-garde		Ultimate slacker amateur. Would give him 1 upturned nose, but I’ll throw in an extra for the nice label he used to run. 2 upturned noses.	unknown
Harvey Pekar	Jazziz	One of the first national critics to review my music. We have spoken on the phone several times and met once.	Running with Scissors, Fugu, From the Diary of Dog Drexel, profile for Jazziz	Best known as writer of the American Splendor comic books and as the subject of the movie of the same name, he is a long time jazz critic and collector. No apparent bias.	For his pure, unsullied Harvey-ness 5 upturned noses.	Not a musician. N/A
Alexandre Pierrepont	Improjazz	Pleasant email correspondence.	Avant-jazz		Writes in a flowery, poetic style with great enthusiasm. 4 upturned noses.	unknown
Derek Taylor	One Final Note, Candence. Runs the blog www.bagatellen.com	We lived in Madison, Wisconsin at the same time for a few years and worked together in a non-profit jazz support organization.	Dénouement, Hornets Collage, Bitter Love Songs, We Were The Phliks	Fond of downtown improvisers.	Too nice to be a critic. Well-listened but inadequate analysis. Flabby writing. 2.5 upturned noses.	Says he was once a mediocre bassist. Taking his word, 1 upturned nose.
Dan Warburton	Paris Transatlantic Magazine, The Wire, Signal to Noise	One or two emails.	From the Diary of Dog Drexel, Becket		Ludicrously qualified, skilled writer, honest. 5 upturned noses.	Fine violinist, composer, and improviser. 5 upturned noses.
Kevin Whitehead	Fresh Air	We have met in passing a few times and he was civil, but he seems to harbor deep anger about something.	none	New jazz that swings, especially from Europeans. Has written at length about the Dutch avant-scene.	Well informed, well-written, with hints of snottyness. 3.5 upturned noses.	Average guitarist 2 upturned noses.

Interview taken December 1998 for a Jazziz feature by Harvey Pekar

Question: When did you start playing?

Answer: When I was a teenager, in the Hyde Park neighborhood in Chicago, on the south side. I played in blues bands and rock bands and when I graduated from high school I moved in with a rock band on the north side. That lasted about a year, then I moved back to Hyde Park.

Hyde Park and other parts of the south side was also where the whole AACM scene was going on, and I heard a lot of those guys even when I was 15 or 16 years old and I started to try to imitate their style. Around this time I also had a chance to hang around Joseph Jarman, who was friends with the mother of the drummer I was playing with. Joseph and I didn’t ever play together, and I didn’t take lessons from him or anything, but I did get to hear him a lot, since he played every chance he got. I think that year he played with both the MC5 proto-punk group out of Detroit and John Cage. I remember him throwing the I Ching to make compositions. He also was very encouraging to me, and probably everyone else he talked to.

After the rock band fell apart, I pretty much stopped playing rock or blues and I formed a free-jazz power trio with an organist named Stan White and a percussionist named Richard Vertel. This group was very influenced by the AACM players, especially the art ensemble, but also by the trio that Tony Williams, Larry Young and John McLaughlin had, Lifetime I think. The whole AACM multi-instrumentalist approach also affected me and in addition to guitar, I started to play tenor and soprano saxophone, flute, clarinet, various other stringed instruments, and percussion instruments. At one point Richard and I found a pair of beat up Ludwig timpani. I bought the 23-inch and he bought the 25-inch one. So I was hauling this pawn-shop full of instruments to all of our gigs.

This trio played completely free. We didn’t use charts or any type of composition. We didn’t talk about what we were going to play or what we had played, other than to say it was a good or bad night. We were playing at jazz and rock rooms. We opened for Doug Ewert’s band one week and a couple of weeks later played at a rock festival that included groups like REO Speedwagon. We were also incredibly loud. In fact, when we opened for Doug, he insisted that we play second because he want his audience to retain their hearing for his set.

When I started with this trio, I really didn’t have any fundamental reading or notation skills. As a naïve teenager I had thought that the AACM people were just blowing, but I found out that most of those guys were very polished. Most of them — like Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell — had come out of the hard-bop scene and had been in various military bands. They were also producing pretty elaborate compositions. So I realized that I had to develop some basis for what I wanted to do that extended past playing by ear. I started to work through Paul Hindemith’s Elementary Training for Musicians with a vibes player named Dave Kelly and I also started to study classical guitar with a woman named Sherry Conway.

Around this time the trio — it was called Life Rhythms — decided that just playing free was turning into a dead end for us. Some nights we just weren’t into it or couldn’t get started, and without compositions to work from, we would sometimes not play anything we liked. So we decided to start composing our ideas. But when we did that, we found that we were going in opposite directions. The organist wanted to play “space rock,” like groups like Pink Floyd at the time and The Soft Machine. I was more interested in the AACM sort of thing. So Stan found a different guitarist, a real rock guy, and they took made up space names, like Karellen Zor and Jacxillion. A year or so later, Stan died in his sleep at the age of 26 and the vibes player Dave Kelly formed a sort of fusion group with Vertel, a bass player, and a pianist. I played a couple of gigs with them and they asked me to join them, but I wasn’t much interested in that style and didn’t think I was very good at it anyway, so I declined.

For the next couple of years I continued to study and play freelance gigs some. I also attended tons of AACM performances. The Art Ensemble was back from Paris by then, and Henry Threadgil had just formed his trio with Fred Hopkins and Steve McCall. That was before it was called Air, it was still the Henry Threadgil Trio. I also saw a performance of the AACM big band (I don’t remember what it was called exactly). The final piece knocked me out. Jarman and Mitchell were playing bass saxophone, Threadgil (I think) was playing bass clarinet. Doug Ewart was playing bass clarinet. George Lewis was on trombone. I think Don Moye and Steve McCall were in the group, as well as Fred Hopkins and others. It was a long bass line that grew and grew. I also would see various AACM ensembles in very intimate settings, like University of Chicago classrooms and small coffeehouses. Obviously, those performances influenced the way I think musically more than anything else.

I got burned out on Chicago, however. I was a frequent crime victim and my health was bad and I was performing less and less. Then I got married and moved to a small town outside of Madison, Wisconsin.

When was that?

I was 23, so it was 1975 or 76. I tried to form a group there, but I couldn’t find musicians who had any idea what I was talking about and I don’t know if there was anyplace to play anyway. I did continue to study classical guitar, this time with George Lindquist, who is a music professor at the Milwaukee Conservatory and the University of Wisconsin at Parkside. I also enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a music major, where I studied theory and composition. Unfortunately, the UW didn’t have a guitar department yet, so I wasn’t allowed to take many music courses; I graduated with degrees in journalism and economics. But for the next 15 years or so, I really didn’t perform. I played a wedding service now and then, and for a year had a rock parody band, which I really didn’t feel good about, but I really wasn’t doing much musically.

When did you start performing again?

In 1990. My father had died the year before, and for some reason that shook me up to start performing. I formed a quintet called the Silt Loam Ensemble with another guitarist, Carl Michel, who I’d been studying with. We played around Wisconsin for a year, Then he left town, and we changed drummers, and I substituted a trombonist for Carl, then a vibes player for the saxophonist, until I was the only original member left. So I changed the name to the Scott Fields Ensemble, which is composed of myself and various combinations of the people I play with on a regular basis.

When did you start on this Dembski stuff?

About four years ago. I was working for the University of Wisconsin part-time as a writer — I was writing mostly about science, but they also gave me most of the arts and music stuff — and I was assigned to write and article about Stephen Dembski, the graduate composition professor. When I interviewed him, he explained how he had developed a post-serial, pseudo-tonal pitch-organization system. He went through the progression of tonal systems that have been used in Western classical music, ending up with 12-tone stuff, serialism. He studied with Milton Babbitt, who sort of took serialism as far as it could go, so Dembski was looking for something else.

It occurred to me that the progression of tonal organization in classical music also happened in jazz on a much more compressed scale. So if melody and mode were the main thing in Renaissance music, modulation was a Baroque thing, extending chords was a classical and Romantic thing, altered modes was a post-Romantic trend, 12-tone was at the beginning of the twentieth-century and pure sound maybe came after that, the same evolution can be seen in jazz. So Dixieland is melody based, then jazz becomes more chord based with the Swing era, very change-, and altered-and-extended-change based with bop. Some of the post-boppers, like Lenny Tristano, were doing 12-tone stuff (for that matter, Freedom Jazz Dance is based on a 12-pitch tone row). And the free jazzers were certainly influenced by post-tonal stuff and pure sound. So I thought maybe the Dembski system would work for improvisation, maybe that was a good next step for me.

Why did you want another system at all?

Although my groups haven’t been playing absolutely free — I’m pretty much obsessed with composition and structure — a lot of the improvised sections were free tonally. Sometimes that is the best way to go, but sometimes I was looking for more tonal coherence, something to tie the improvisations together in terms of pitch, rather than just structure or orchestration or playing techniques. I had used all of the stock tonal systems, modal stuff and altered scales, and stock tonality, and 12-tone systems, but sometimes using those various systems in one set felt too cobbled together, really post-modern. I wanted some other pitch organization system that didn’t refer back to earlier music.

How does the Dembski system work?

It uses the interaction of two irregular 12-tone pitch sets to create scales. Normal tonal scales are built off of the only two regularly spaced 12-tone rows you can make from 12 pitches, the cycle of fifths and the chromatic circle. If you take any 7 consecutive notes from the cycle of fifths and put them in the order of the chromatic circle�in other words, arrange them chromatically�they will form either a major scale or a mode of a major scale. And of course, chords are built from these scales.

What Dembski does is make two non-regular tone rows, then treat one like the cycle of fifths and the other like the chromatic circle to make scales, and from those chords. That way the scales and chords aren’t tonal, but they do form a closely related set of scales and chords that work together like tonal scales and chords do.

So you use the system the way Dembski does?

In some ways but not others. I simplify it greatly and added aids for improvisation. In Steve’s system, each pair of 12-pitch tone rows creates more than 1,000 scales. That works for his classical stuff, but is too much for improvisation. For each pair, I make just 12 scales. It took me a while to figure out how to get people to improvise within this system. Originally, I provided the scales and for the chords I provided traditional chord symbols, like seven, flat five, flat nine and so on. But I found that the improvisers would see those symbols and immediately use the major scales and modes associated with them. So instead I started providing between one and three extra staves for each improvised section. One staff is always there, that provides the scale for that moment. If there are chord changes (based on Dembski chords), I provide a second staff that shows the first four notes (like a seventh chord) of the chord for that moment. And if I want a particular rhythmic feel — a kick — I put that on the third staff.

The heads, of course, always have Dembski scales, chords, and a feel, but since they’re not improvised, I show just the written part.

Do all of your recordings use this system?

All of the CDs do. The first CD, Running with Scissors, is transitional. The compositions represent a progression from tonal music to Steve’s system. The first two pieces — Exogamy and 1/3 Dutch — are tonal. An Ounce of Sense is based on whole-tone scales. I Want to be a Millionaire but I Don’t have a Tuxedo is serial (sometimes called 12-tone or atonal). The next two pieces — Pieces of Piggy and Mulch — are based on “limited sets,” a form of 12-tone music that uses tone rows a chunk at a time. The last six tunes on the album are based on Steve’s system. For these compositions, I used traditional jazz forms — such as rhythm changes, the blues, modal jazz, and the Wayne Shorter piece Footprints — as a basis for those.

The next CD, Fugu, is all Dembski stuff, and it doesn’t use traditional forms at all, although it is quite structured. The one after that, 48 Motives, is an extended conducted improvisation. It consists of 48 melodic themes with accompanying parts for bass and kit drums. Each of the four melody instruments has 24 themes, 12 written for the instrument and four from each of the other three. That means any part can be doubled, as the conductor chooses. Because the conductor selects themes, their order, combinations, instrumentation, layers, dynamics, and tempi, the performances of the piece are really different from one another. Each theme also includes a related pitch set upon which the musicians base their improvisations. That means the conductor also influences the performance by selecting the tonal material available to the improvisers.

For the recorded version of 48 Motives, Steve Dembski was the conductor. We did three takes, which are really different from each other. We released the second take and might release the third as well, since I have had some interest from labels for it and I think it’s good.

The CD after that, Disaster at Sea, is also based on Dembski’s system, which I’m using it for everything right now, but the tonal coherence is a little harder to hear. It’s a trio of myself, Matt Turner on cello and Vincent Davis on drums. I wanted to exploit the similarities of the sounds between cello and overdriven guitar. So it’s pretty thrashy and since I play hardly any chords, the tonal organization is difficult to detect, especially on the first piece, in which the tonal structure just sort of peeks out from a wall off noise. We also play a Joseph Jarman composition, Old Time South Street Dance.

Joseph Jarman is on 48 Motives. How did you link up with him? What’s the connection?

He was the one individual I remembered best from the AACM scene, and the one I was most influenced by. In fact, the reason my groups are all called the Scott Fields Ensemble is an homage to the Art Ensemble of Chicago. So once I felt as though I were ready to play some again, I wanted to reconnect with him. Roscoe Mitchell lives here in Madison, so I got Joseph’s number in Brooklyn from Roscoe and I called Joseph and asked him to come to Madison to perform with me and three other players here. He had only the vaguest idea of who I was, but enough so that he agreed. The performance was OK — he was great, but I was nervous and have played better. Later that year, I asked if he would record a large-ensemble piece I was writing. That’s 48 Motives, which was released on Cadence Jazz Records in July 1996. While he was here for that, he and Marilyn Crispell, who’s also on 48 Motives, performed a duo concert (my trio with Matt and Vincent opened), which I had recorded and produced as a Music and Arts CD, which just came out.

Do you have anything else new?

Yes. I recorded two other projects in October. One is a quartet with Marilyn Crispell, Hamid Drake on drums, and Hans Sturm on bass. It’s called Five Frozen Eggs and comes out on Music and Arts in April. That’s all my compositions using the Dembski system. The other project is actual Dembski stuff. He wrote an extended composition called Sonotropism that Marilyn, Larry Ochs, and Matt Turner, and I recorded in the studio and in performance. I haven’t mixed that yet. I’m also planning a couple more recordings for late spring, one for classical guitar, hand drums and bass and the other for quintet. I’m also working on a 48-Motives-like piece called 48 Cycles. It’s intended for 10 or more players, but I don’t know when I’ll be able to record that many people.

Are you playing out much?

Matt and I and Donald Robinson are touring the West Coast in March and Matt and I should be in Europe later in spring. Other than that, I’m playing primarily in the mid-West.





October 2001 interview with Ludwig van Trikt for the September 2002 issue of Cadence magazine

Question: Your playing seems to avoid the usual modernistic guitar sound points (i.e. influences) that have characterized jazz guitar playing for the last 20 years. Please comment?

Answer: That’s probably because I don’t really come out of the jazz tradition. I started as a rock and blues player and as such the people I listened to most were B.B. King (I wore out at least one copy of “Live at the Regal”), Albert King, and Jimi Hendrix. My formal study, however, is primarily as a classical guitarist and my favorite player, and so chief influence, was Julian Bream. I have listened to jazz guitarists too, but I don’t think that they deeply affected my approach as much as rock and classical guitarists and jazz musicians who played other instruments. I paid much more attention to Miles Davis, and Coltrane, and Eric Dolphy, and people from the AACM movement in Chicago — Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell, and Henry Threadgil especially — than to any jazz guitarists.

Do you then consider yourself a “jazz musician” or a “new music” artist?

Either, I suppose. If I had to decide, I would go with “new music” just because there is a lot less baggage associated with that term. I like the fact that the term new music is so poorly defined. When the term jazz is applied to a person they can be confronted with all sorts of infantile qualifiers, such as “can he blow over changes” or “does he know all the standards in all keys” or “does he swing.” Of course any good musician can learn to do any of these things — and I have actually played straight-ahead gigs playing standards, running changes, and swinging, although that’s not where I’ve invested the bulk of my creative energy so frankly that sort of playing is a chore for me and I don't do it any more — but it’s dopey to attempt to create a sort of Wyntonesque musical gauntlet that people have to endure to be allowed entry into the exclusive club called jazz. Anyway, when people ask me what you’ve just asked I typically say “my recordings usually end up in the avant-jazz or new music bins.” Based on what you’ve heard, what bin would you put me in?

I consider your music to combine so many elements; but primarily I view you as a jazz avant gardist.

That’s the usual classification and I have no objection to as an abstract concept. That is, the idea of exploring new ideas that usually include improvisation and that show some jazz influence. Conversely, the term “jazz avant-garde” has come to represent a particular post-bop style (think Albert Ayler, late Coltrane, and currently David S. Ware) that isn’t one of my strongest sources, although I do like that sort of thing well enough.

You mention in your website that some musicians have attempted to teach you in vain? Please give examples and explain. By the way never in my experiences with artist have I seen a musician view his work with such naked candor.

Partially the line you refer to is my attempt to make it appear as though I’ve actually studied music without either bragging on the people I’ve studied with or trying to make it appear as though I’m completely well rounded. Either way, I can be a difficult student, since I question everything. But really, that line is just a lame attempt to deflate my musical credentials rather than anything to be thought about too deeply. I learned a lot from those people who spent their time teaching me. Their efforts weren't wasted entirely.

Why and when did you pick up the guitar?

Because I wanted to be a Beatle, specifically John Lennon. For at least a year I made do with a broom, which I strummed and sang along to the rustling sound it made. But broom wasn’t versatile enough for me. So either I saved up 50 bucks or my mother gave it to me, I can’t remember, and when I was 12 I got a cheap guitar and I immediately wrote a song called “Why” (it went something like “Why why why why why why why why”) that used the first three chords I learned.

What particulars of the A.A.C.M. came to influence your own approach to music?

To start with, the idea of spontaneous composition. When I was 19 I formed a very loud free jazz trio called “Life Rhythms” with a drummer named Richard Vertel and an organist named Stan White. We didn’t use any predetermined compositions or structures at all. The music had pulse but no time and sensed tonal focal points but no conventional pitch organization. Instead the emphasis was on form, texture, energy, and color. For me at least, that idea came out of the AACM concerts I attended. We also eventually started to compose music within similar principles, as AACM musicians did, although it turned out that our ideas were so different that the group disbanded, or at least that contributed to the split.

Another influence was the idea of being a multi-instrumentalist. I remember attending Art Ensemble gigs and, in particular, an AACM big band concert at the Arie Crown Theater, in which the stage was smothered with instruments that almost everyone seemed to switch among freely. So I started playing things other than just guitar. By the time Life Rhythms dissolved I was hauling all sorts of stuff onto stage. I was playing tenor and soprano saxophone, flute, clarinet, alto clarinet, sitar, mandolin, timpani (the drummer and I bought a pair of used Ludwig kettle drums), and all other sorts of percussion. Over the next few years I gave up everything except guitar, however.

The way that hearing all of those early AACM gigs most affected me, however, was just in planting the idea of creating new work rather than repeating what had already been done. Not that I wasn’t already thinking that way, since I was a compulsively creative kid if not especially gifted. But the rock groups I knew wrote their own material and the AACM people with almost no exceptions all of the AACM people were writing material and consciously exploring new ideas. (The only exception I can think of is the first time I saw the Henry Threadgil Trio, later to become “Air,” they were playing Scott Joplin tunes.) Because I was more driven to make things than in specifically being a musician, I found this focus very attractive. As a result I have never played in a cover band and jazz groups I have led have rarely played covers. For awhile one of my groups played one Monk tune, and I’ve recorded one Joseph Jarman piece, out of affection for him as much as for any other reason, but other than that I’ve always focused on creating new music rather than reworking existing compositions.

Besides the A.A.C.M -most of your other influences seem to be in the “new music” realm. You describe Negel Tufnel as the greatest influence on your work. Why so?

Nigel Tufnel is the character played by Christopher Guest in the mock-rock band “Spinal Tap.” In other words he is not a real person. I liked the movie.

In looking at your concert schedule- it appears that you are doing the same type of guerilla performances that Ken Vandermark has taken on? You even have shows scheduled for Nashville,Tenn. and Saint Petersburg, Florida?

Yes that’s right assuming that by “guerilla” you — and I guess Ken, although I haven’t personally heard him use the term — mean that some of the presenting organizations are small and underfunded and some of the venues aren’t fancy theaters. New music, even when performed by very well-known personalities, and I’m not one, survives because of a network of ad hoc presenters who most often are volunteers who work for no other reason than the love of this sort of music. But that doesn’t really have anything to do with the size of the community. Some of the gigs in Chicago, for example, have much more of a grass-roots feel about them than say the gigs in Chapel Hill, North Carolina or Athens, Georgia. The people in Nashville who will be presenting the trio tour you’re referring to — with Vinny Golia and Toshi Makihara — have presented me before. Their venue is a nice art gallery called Ruby Green.

Actually, just about my favorite places to play are galleries, assuming that they have enough chairs for the audience and can hold a reasonably sized audience. I usually like the acoustics, and I like to see the art. I appreciate also that the situation feels less formal that a theater, in that the audience is more approachable and the lighting is less severe. For me the feel is also much better than a bar, which by far is my least favorite setting, what with the drunks and noise and smoke and all. On this tour I think we’re not playing any bars, at least I hope not. In Madison I have a relationship with a small gallery — the Wendy Cooper Gallery — in which last year and into this year I presented a series of duets with myself and people from other countries and in which I occasionally present people passing through on tour as a favor. There’s no funding, but there is a small volunteer group involved. So I guess I work both ends of the “guerilla” movement. And again, that’s not uncommon. Many working musicians I know also casually present to help out other musicians.

What is the bottom line on running your own label- Geode. In dollar and cents figures what kind of money are you making or lossing on being a largely self produced /self managed (are you?) artist?

Of my last 10 CDs as a leader, only one is on Geode. That is dénouement. A deal I thought I had with a different label to release dénouement fell through and out of consideration to the other musicians who had invested their time in the project, I decided to put it out on Geode rather than restart the negotiation process with another label. But Geode is largely dormant. It’s a label I’ll use if I have a project that I love but other good labels don’t. If a friend were in a similar situation, I suppose I would release their project on Geode as well. But I sure wouldn’t encourage that. Some years ago I was fired up about having my own active label. I was shocked to find that real time and energy was required to make the thing work. That’s time I’d rather spend composing and practicing.

I still then would like to know your perception of the money that a artist like yourself makes on an average recording in dollar and cents terms?

As with most creative artists, for me each deal is different. Sometimes the label arranges in advance to foot the costs and fees associated with a recording. Sometimes a recording is supported by some sort of public or private funding agency. And infrequently I’ll record on spec without any other support and then come to an agreement with a label after the project is finished. In all cases, I’ve never been a position where the label attempted to influence the music at all (well, actually in one case I wanted to have a hidden track of Marilyn Crispell singing a jazz standard and the label said “no hidden tracks”) and I’ve also always been able to in some way influence the other aspects of the packaging and notes and so on. And all of the labels I’ve recorded for have kept their word on agreements we’ve had, which is nothing to sneeze at.

How did you learn to craft your large ensemble work. Are you thus far satisfied with what you have documented?

You mean the two modular compositions, 48 Motives and 96 Gestures, I assume. First of all, writing for the individual instruments in the modular pieces is no different than writing for them in smaller ensembles. That’s because the modular pieces are orchestrated spontaneously. Maybe I should explain what these modular pieces are so that might make a little sense. The essence of the method is that the composition is constructed of a set of modules whose interrelationships vary predictably from very strong to weak. In performance (including recorded performance) an improvising conductor working in the moment selects and layers modules in any order. The conductor uses the American Manual Alphabet, which is a set of hand positions, as well as traditional conducting gestures to select modules, instrumentation, dynamics, tempi, and other musical attributes. The conductor also can direct the instrumentalists to improvise on the modules’ themes, pitch material, and rhythmic structures. The result is a composition that in performance is always radically different and yet is always the same.

The first of these modular pieces — 48 Motives — is the most simple in structure. The composition, which is for at least eight instrumentalists and an improvising conductor, consists of 96 modules that are all the same number of beats and all in 4/4. The interrelationships in the second modular piece — 96 Gestures — are considerably richer. It’s for at least 12 instrumentalists and conductor. Unlike Motives, 96 Gestures (which is built of 144 modules) allows for formal counterpoint, contrasts in time signatures, and variations in the number of beats, which lets the conductor to create the sorts of phase relationships found in music by Steve Reich, Phillip Glass, and other minimalists. I’m also working on a third, larger modular piece that will include all of the richness of 96 Gestures and will add additional orchestration possibilities. The performances on both projects were extraordinary and I was of course pleased by that. There’s really nothing like having fine musicians take your music to heart and make something of it. I was a bit disappointed in the release of 48 Motives in one respect. It was released as a single CD. To fully appreciate these modular pieces it’s necessary to hear several versions. We recorded three versions of between an hour and 70 minutes. But when I looked for a label to release the project found several that would release a single take but none that would release all three or even two as a single set. I had hoped to release the other takes eventually, but the master tapes suffered damage in a flood and I’m not sure if they can be repaired. Perhaps.

96 Gestures, on the other hand, was released as a triple-CD set. It came out just a month or two ago and I couldn’t be happier about the way it turned out. Well, except for the packaging. I lost that fight. But I very much like the recordings. Ideally many versions of the pieces, with many different musicians and many different conductors, would be performed and recorded. That’s another thing I’m working on.

Some of the Cadence recordings have a flat sound but 48 Motives especially captured the ensembles richness.

You wouldn’t expect the Cadence releases to have any sort of consistent sound since, as far as I know, they all come in over the transom. I mean they’re all produced by the leaders or someone they find to produce in a wide variety of studios and then submitted to Cadence for release. Could it be Cadence’s other series, the C.I.M.P. CDs, that you’re thinking about? Those almost all use the same technique: DAT, two mics, start playing. I admire their goal, which as I understand it is to duplicate the live listening experience, but the outcome sometimes mystifies me. If two microphones equaled two ears and not using reverberation and not riding levels equaled how a brain processes information, maybe I’d be convinced. But I don’t think that is how electro-acoustics works.

Anyway, I’m glad you like the way 48 Motives sounds. Like most of my projects, it was recorded at Smart Studios in Madison. Smart is owned by two of the members of the pop band Garbage. It has great facilities and they give artsy-fartsies like me a great break. The head engineer there, Mark Haines, has been especially helpful. The only drawback there is that the room itself is too small for anything larger than a quintet. Motives was an octet and as a result the mix was a bit of a nightmare. It was also recorded analog, multi-track to two-inch tape. That’s how I prefer to record, since the sound is so much warmer than digital formats. For example, Hornets Collage was recorded there to two-inch and then the tape hiss was removed electronically in mastering. Fugu, Disaster at Sea, and the improvised tracks on Sonotropism were all two-inch at Smart. So was dénouement, which was recorded at Airwave in Chicago and mixed at Smart. I wish I could always record analog, but the tape is so expensive. Recently I had six reels of tape, like $1200 worth, fail and the company that made it — Quantegy — wouldn’t even respond to a letter, let alone make good. So I’m recording to various digital formats nowadays. But I’m not happy about it. If you compare the long cut on Sonotropism, which was recorded live in concert to A-DAT, to the three improvised pieces, which are on two-inch in the studio, you can hear how much more real the analog sounds.

Matt Turner really holds things together melodically on 48 Motives. Please comment?

Matt was great on 48 Motives,. He was great on Sonotropism, Fugu, 96 Gestures, and Disaster at Sea too. In fact, I can’t remember any time that he has been less than fantastic, although to the casual listener maybe sometimes it’s hard to tell. He never uses any sorts of showy tricks and typically he’ll completely subjugate his own personal goals to that of the project. Clearly he’s one of my favorites, not just on my stuff but on his solo projects as well. I’ve always loved playing with him because he just makes everything better than it would have been had I been left to my own devices. He also humors me on my ideas and frequently fixes errors I’ve made without every mentioning it. But you asked about Motives. That piece, like most of my compositions, was written to take advantage of certain players. Matt, and Marilyn Crispell, and Hans Sturm, in particular, are virtuosi, and I wrote parts that really pushed them. They made the most of it.

How does Dembski’s tonal system approach differ from Cecil Taylor’s and Butch Morris?

You need to understand is that Steve Dembski’s system is much more intricate when he uses it in his own classical music than on my pieces. I’ve simplified it considerably for improvisation. But it appears to some extent on all of my CDs. You can really hear it on Fugu, 48 Motives, and 96 Gestures. On the others it is less apparent. It would be a bit much to explain it all here, but I’ll give you a rough idea. Assume that traditional Western tonal systems are based on the interaction of the circle of fifths and the chromatic circle. Dembski’s pseudo-tonal system treats one 12-pitch tone row as though it’s the circle of fifths and one as though it’s the chromatic circle. The result is that the tonal and harmonic foundation of the music has a cohesiveness, but it isn’t traditionally tonal. But all that said, I work with just the crudest version of this system. Just enough to get improvisers started, when I can talk them into it. That’s not always easy. There is a growing resistance to using any notated music and instead just playing completely free. I got that out of my system 30 years ago, and although I do occasionally play completely free, I’m becoming increasing resistant to those sort of gigs. Some aspect of composition is necessary for me to find any satisfaction in this stuff. So I guess I’m part of the growing backlash against completely free improvisation.

As to how Steve’s system compares to those of Taylor and Morris, to be frank I didn’t know that either of those men, neither of whom I’ve even met, used any particular tonal system. Interestingly, Steve when he was an undergraduate at Antioch College played in a student big band that Cecil Taylor led. Steve says that Taylor used to write out pitch sets for the group to follow. But I don’t know if a system was involved. Perhaps you’re thinking of some similarity in the methods of conducting spontaneously for these three. I think Taylor has one, although again I don’t know the details. But Morris’s “conduction” method is well known and some of his techniques have carried over into the method that I developed, which Steve uses when he conducts my large-ensemble pieces. But for my pieces, the primary focus is using the American Manual Alphabet to cue and combine modules. During the performance some parts of Morris’s system do creep in, however, such as who to listen to and how the improvisations can develop and so on. And of course, since my pieces use Steve’s tonal system, he really understands how to manipulate the tonal relationships in the modules.