Dave Soldier's Zajal

My latest Vinyl Anachronist music review is now live at Part-Time Audiophile. You can read it here.

Vince Bell's Ojo

I tend to get a whiplash, pun intended, when one of my jazz contacts sends me something that isn't quite jazz. Vince Bell's Ojo is a perfect example of this, although I should have expected this much from Mulatta Records, Dave Soldier's label. Soldier's music, as well as his projects with others, tends to be out there, on the fringes, mining completely new sounds and ideas that can be either hypnotic or incredibly challenging. This new album from singer-songwriter-guitarist Bell isn't quite either--but this intriguing mix of spoken word poetry and folk/Americana music makes you tap the brakes. What is this music? What is Bell talking about?

Bell has a strong and gruff voice, not too different from men like Leonard Cohen and Robbie Robertson, but he can shift effortlessly into singing in a more conventional way if necessary. In fact, he has a very pleasing way of singing, passionate and heartfelt, that reminds me of New Zealand's Dave Dobbyns. It's his storytelling that's the draw here, which puts him into the same wry and twisted world of Tom Waits, a world full of extraordinary tension among ordinary people. Soldier, who produces the album, describes Ojo as “A cowboy walks into a bar with a rabbi, a minister, and the band from the first Star Wars movie, and this is what happened."

As eclectic and strange as this all sounds, it really isn't. Bell's tales are hauntingly clever, but told in an avuncular way that recalls that old man in your town who's been sitting on the same step, telling the same stories about the way things used to be and they way they ought to be. You're comfortable and familiar with the idea of having this man in your everyday life, but occasionally he says something that sticks with you more than you'd like. In a way he's a slightly more urbane version of Utah Phillips, to make yet another comparison, except that Bell is diving more deeply into folklore and philosophy--such as his pondering of the meaning music has in our lives.

Musically this is a rich and varied album, populated by Pedro Cortes' flamenco guitar, Robert Dick's flute, David Mansfield's banjo and dobro, Renaud-Gabriel Pion's clarinet and piano, Rob Schwimmer's continuum, Ratzo B. Harris' bass and Dave Soldier's violin, as well as vocal contributions from Laura Cantrell. There's also a heavy complement of swirling, jangling percussion from Patrick Derivaz, Valerie Dee Naranjo and Satoshi Takaeshi, which elevates the folk and Americana into something more global. I feel like that's Soldier's touch since his recordings always highlight the mystical sound of percussion instruments and their ability to stand guard at the gate of the cosmos. But it's Bell's weathered growl of a voice that keeps Ojo earthbound and essential.

Dave Soldier's The Eighth Hour of Amduat on CD

I honestly think I should know more about Dave Soldier than I do. He's a very interesting person, and he's involved in plenty of mystical and cerebral projects that connect the aesthetic dots between music, art and history. (His real name isn't even Dave Soldier.) When I reviewed the latest Sonus Inenarrabilis' CD a few months ago, I was just a bit confused by the way this album was packaged especially in terms of who did what, and whose music they were playing. That's Dave Soldier's fault, I think. Shortly afterward, I found a half dozen of my friends in the audio industry discussing Soldier on Facebook in a way that led me to believe they knew him and he was a good buddy of theirs.

Now I have this new Dave Soldier project on deck, The Eighth Hour of Amduat, and the ambiguity continues. A perfunctory listen reveals very little since it's a somewhat eclectic and disjointed collection of noises and sounds, punctuated by passages of truly beautiful music, all recorded in a careful, loving manner. Looking at the busy cover of the CD undoes some of the mystery--Marshall Allen plays Sun Ra, Sahoko Sato Timpone plays The Mistress of the Boat and there's credit for an orchestra and choir. But then, at the bottom, it says "Rita Lucarelli, Egyptologist."

Take my advice and dig around a little bit before throwing this into your CD transport and hitting the play button. In a nutshell, this is what Dave Soldier has done: he's taken the oldest known musical score, "The Eighth Hour of the Book of the Amduat" from 1425 B.C., and he's turned it into an opera that fuses jazz, classical and electronic music. As a whole, this opera jumps around from lush orchestral scores to free jazz freakouts to extended periods of random sound effects and noise and overall it can be a bit frustrating. It's when you focus on the individual components of the opera that you find the hidden jewels. For instance, Marshall Allen's contributions on saxophone and something called an EVI (electronic valve instrument) are intriguing especially when you consider that he's now 93 years old. The choir is fascinatingly unhinged because it's mostly improvisation, a novel concept.

After listening to this album a handful of times, I can be honest and say that reviewing it is quite tough because there are so many layers here and I might not peel them off for a number of years. This is difficult music, but there are so many fascinating touches that I think there's more to discover.

One thing, however--the sound quality is excellent.

Sonus Inenarrabilis/Nine Live Plays the Music of John Clark on CD

It was a tad difficult to wrap my head around this CD--not music-wise, of course, but title-wise. Is Sonus Inenarrabilis the name of the group, or is Nine Live? Who is the guy holding the French horn on the cover? Is that John Clark? Is it okay to name your record label Mulatta in the PC age? It even took a bit to make sense of "Nine Live"--is there supposed to be an s at the end? Oh wait, maybe that's the name of the ensemble, nine people playing live. Ah. It's starting to become clear. The name of the album is, indeed Sonus Inenarrabilis, performed by a jazz nonet and featuring music written by the horn player on the cover, John Clark.

I hate to seem like I'm fussy about all this. It's just that in judging this CD by its cover (and title), I made some assumptions such as this is a very small label with very limited production budget putting out the kind of CD Nine Lives sells at the back of the club after a gig. I'm not biased against such releases--everyone has to start somewhere, and I've been guilty more than once of buying someone's CD after a live show. It's just that my expectations are usually somewhat low in these instances--the production values are probably minimalist at best considering studio time can be quite expensive, especially when nine musicians are involved.

After a perfunctory first listen, I realized just how wrong I was. Have you ever seen a hi-fi component that comes in a rather plain black box that turns out to be a great performer, and the manufacturer then comments that "we put all the good stuff on the inside, where it counts"? On Sonus Inenarrabilis, all the good stuff is definitely on the inside. First, the choice of instrumentation is fairly novel for a jazz nonet--clarinet, violin, horn, 7-string electric bass, cello, viola, drums, bassoon and keyboards, all held together by conductor Thomas Carlo Bo. That allows Nine Lives to slide around in the space between genres, moving surreptitiously through jazz, blues, fusion and funk as a well-tuned small orchestra--imagine a Lalo Schifrin score from the mid '70s and you'll understand the vibe. In other words, this is not a recording of a horn player sitting in a chair, playing old Scarlatti pieces.

That's not to say this music is odd or exotic in the same ways as Black Paintings, which I reviewed last week. It's not hard to imagine this music as the soundtrack from a '70s movie, a pretty good one at that, with a slightly dated sound that's completely on purpose. (This idea popped in my mind because I watched The French Connection the other night and I've always had very mixed feelings about the harsh, atonal jazz score until now--I love it.) I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the clean, compact delivery of John Clark's compositions is totally intentional, evoking that same sense of perhaps a B-movie score that outclasses the B-movie it's in.

The kicker is this: the sound quality of this modest little CD is absolutely superb. There's a forward and immediate presentation here that excels at separating each performance so that you can follow individual performers with ease without losing sight of the whole. Dan Cooper, who co-founded the ensemble with John Clark, provides such a solid foundation with his 7-string bass guitar--it's always there, offering full, warm and rich support of his fellow performers. Drummer Cesare Papetti, on the other end of the frequency range, offers plenty of delicate shimmering highs with his splendid cymbal and hi-hat work. Everyone else in between is on the money--these are mostly NYC session performers who are the epitome of professionalism.

As far as Mulatta Records is concerned, it has a hell of a pedigree. Dave Soldier, who produced this album and is responsible for getting these nine performers in the studio at once, co-founded the label in 2000 with Nigerian record producer Ayo Osinibi. Soldier has had a very interesting career as a composer and performer on his own. Even the motto of Mulatta is "purveyors of the unique and bizarre," which seems at odds with the very low-profile cover. But Sonus Inenarrabilis makes much more sense when you just place the CD in your player and forget about the rest.