Guitarist Scott Fields, born in Chicago 68 years ago this month and longtime resident of Germany, has been building his music for decades, starting with early exposure to Chicago’s AACM and the special influence of Don Moye and Joseph Jarman of the Art Ensemble. Since the mid ‘90s, he has been developing large-scale compositions involving modular forms to expand and integrate written and improvised elements. Seven Deserts is such a work, a seven-part piece that’s 65-minutes long, derives from a 50-page score and includes an improvising conductor (long-time associate Stephen Dembski) primarily responsible for pulse and density, and a 20-piece orchestra. The latter is as central to the achievement as Fields’ thoughtful management of form, texture and individual input.
The musicians include members of Cologne-based new music ensembles devoted to diverse areas of contemporary practice, with sections of strings, flutes, percussion and brass and a host of individuals distinguished in improvised music, among them bassists Pascal Niggenkemper and Christian Weber, electric guitarists David Stackenäs and Fields himself and individual reed players Frank Gratkowski and saxophonists Ingrid Laubrock and Matthias Schubert. Seven Deserts is a work that continuously alternates and combines distinctive solo voices with a contrapuntal interplay at once distinguished by its wedding of complexity and clarity. No matter how many parts are going on, there’s a sense of individual lines, from the flute that inaugurates the initial segment to the dense, rapid lines of “Desert 6”. Every musician has a highly developed sense of timbre, whether the smooth, even tone of Helen Bledsoe’s flute, varied vocalic chirp and wail of Laubrock’s soprano or Udo Moll’s brash, burred trumpet. The ensembles can develop strange, wandering polyphony with eliding pitches or form tight-knit coils, roam further afield or suddenly halt. The album has been assembled from studio and live performances of the work for the optimum version possible, but the sonic quality is seamless.
As well as invoking a tradition that includes Anthony Braxton, Barry Guy, Roscoe Mitchell and George Lewis, Seven Deserts joins a collection of recent works—Christopher Fox’ Topophony, Laubrock’s Contemporary Chaos Practices, Nate Wooley’s ongoing Seven Storey Mountain—in blurring boundaries between and expanding the possible syntheses of large-scale composition and improvisation, increasingly presented as complementary rather than contrary processes.
Stuart Broomer — New York City Jazz Record
