David Crowell: Polyrhythm Calling

Composer, saxophonist & guitarist David Crowell insists on developing an honest and original response to the musical examples that have moved and inspired him.  This work in progress demonstrates itself distinctly in his Empyrean Atlas project, an ensemble of three electric guitars (two, when he plays saxophone), with Andrew Smiley and Will Chapin (replacing the antecedent Ryan Ferreira), bass guitarist Greg Chudzik and Jason Nazary (trap drums). A listen to some of the music from his 2010 Innova recording (Spectrum — with the David Crowell Ensemble) reveals a strong regard for Steve Coleman’s achievements.  Crowell recorded here as saxophonist with guitar (Grey McMurray), bass viol (Mike Chiavaro) and Nazary‘s traps. The compositions hinge (as does so much of Coleman’s) around steady, repeating bass figures, both ambiguous and definite while suggestively rich with reinterpretive implication.

Coleman’s influence on younger generations of musicians is pretty significant, and the sonic resemblances so often heard derive from even more than the genuine depth of his musical conceptions. One could venture that he’s one of the few original, arguably avant-garde, musicians since bebop to have developed a transparently codified system of musical organization that can be followed (rather than only emulated) by other musicians.  His reinvented treatment of pitch and rhythm maps an accessible and contemporary alternative to retreading yet again the swinging 4/4 diatonic paradigm (however beautiful that can be) as a musical lingua franca without at all lowering the bar.

David Crowell’s own interest in complex and variable rhythm cycles participates in this shared evolution.   His saxophone playing is admirably fluid and adept and on this recording partakes of Coleman’s symmetrical movement considerations regarding interval and line.  At the same time Crowell’s constructions, his choice of ensemble melodies, radiate a distinctly personal cast.  Another striking quality is how Grey McMurray hovers and intersects the guitar role at key points of these cycles that hint at contrary, more gradual, concurrent pacings.

Extending his design investigations beyond his constructs for improvisers, Crowell’s explorations of longer blocks of monologically organized musical time have evolved toward liaisons with the contemporary chamber music scene, where he has since continued a parallel engagement with that musical context as well, managing to secure a number of commissions from chamber ensembles while also having participated as a saxophonist in the Philip Glass Ensemble since 2007.

A watershed shift toward what was to become Empyrean Atlas was precipitated upon his hearing Thomas Mapfumo’s music for the very first time in 2005 as part of BRIC’s Celebrate Brooklyn outdoor concert series. Thomas Mapfumo, also known as The Lion of Zimbabwe, grew from early professional emulation of R&B into a public spokesperson for the revolutionary impulse to repatriate whites-for-whites-only Rhodesia to indigenous sovereignty.  The music he calls Chimurenga (which in Shona means “struggle”) absorbed traditional Shona mbira music into the locution of electric guitars, bass and trap kit. His sung Shona language (to which, by the way, most colonial Anglophone settlers were tone deaf and couldn’t understand) advocacy of social justice has long galvanized Zimbabweans, and his eventual singing critiques of Robert Mugabe’s government has further earned him an exile from his native country since 2000.  I was also fortunate to be present during this same performance, where Mafumo and compatriots took Monk’s injunction to “lift the bandstand” into outright levitation — and this was an evidently well funded event as Mapfumo was joined on this occasion by several mbiras, a small wind section and a few exceptional dancers in addition to his customary guitar and drum collaborators, making it all the more arresting an experience. Shona music often combines concurrent 3 and 4 pulses in a way distinct among African configurations.  Melodies often hinge along the slower 3 axis, while the feet in particular, along with their sonic analogues, state the quicker 4 propulsion (which is, however almost nothing like swinging 4/4 with triplets, where the kinetic gravity breathes very differently).  The 4 feels like it’s accelerating from within the 3.  The time feels as if it’s compressing toward ecstatic suspension.  There’s absolutely nothing like it.

David Crowell thought so too.  He and I talked about the appeal of complexity and especially about polyrhythm.  One encounters a threshold at complexity that seems to defy comprehension while its internal coherence remains unmistakable. Sensibility stretches beyond oneself without excluding sense.  Polyrhythm induces a sort of alert delirium where the antigravitational gaps that poly necessarily opens up never regress into an oversimplified and centralized monontropy. Crowell takes these notions to heart.  He seeks a balance point in his constructions for Empyrean Atlas between the clearly declaimed identity of each instrument’s line and the composite impression exerted by the intersecting voices.  Green Arrow (leading off the group’s first recording) grows around saxophone lines whose consecutive phrases expand, contract and spiral as in his earlier work while the guitars cluster concurrent, blinking counterlines that weigh sophisticated girth to the music’s sound body.  His saxophone sound balances perfectly with the guitars, who often on this recording pop a propulsive kaleidoscope of subtly contrasting timbres.

Crowell stays with the guitar on Inner Circle, the group’s most recent recording, seeking to further collapse the figure/ground relationship so often posed between singer or wind with rhythm section.  Where the debut Empyrean Atlas CD emphasizes dry, percussive punch, Inner Circle invites more sustain and far more dewy, glistening surfaces.  My own personal taste inclines more toward that earlier sound, but Crowell has neither slowed his imagination nor relaxed his attention to detail while he evolves his sound ever further toward wherever it’s got to go; and in opting for a more subtly nuanced timbral palette of plucked electric strings, what might otherwise seem background qualities begin to push further toward the fore. Absence of a distinct lead line directs attention inward more toward a rhythm section alertness that stretches awareness toward the much wider temporal intervals envelop the intricacies of each moment’s shading.  Modulations from one sonic constellation to the next (which are superbly well timed, by the way) emerge as major ground shifts.  The sonic image evokes an inseparable whole that presents irreducible multiplicity.

Much of Empyrean Atlas’ sound, understandably and by design, transplants the Shona soniverse into contemporary Brooklynese.  Appropriate recognition and tribute it is; yet Crowell has never at all had in mind some North American cover version of Zimbabwean electric guitar music.  While the family resemblance is hard to miss, what he’s actually done instead is to absorb key aspects of that music into an already developing musical language of his own and in that way demonstrate respect for the integrity of African precedents by growing something of his own from within his own actual understandings. At the same time, Crowell’s incorporation of African constructive principles and sound spaces (via jazz, m-base and Zimbabwe) affirms the value of that cultural foundation beyond its local context and invention. Anything that can weather generations of aesthetic criticism, testing and revision has likely earned enough internal resilience to serve and inform needs and interests elsewhere, however different; which is to say if it does something for humans in one context, it will probably have something to offer other contexts as well.

Back when the Museum for African Art was still in Soho, I got to witness a duet performance with Q&A by the Congolese musicians Sam Mangwana and Papa Wemba during which they were asked why, as Africans, they’d adopted a Cuban form, rumba, as their own.  Replying with an unmistakably confident tone of high culture authority and self assurance, they acknowledged their wayward nephew thusly: “We find it creolized, but acceptable.” Imitating, borrowing and reconfiguring run apace with breathing and eating. Consider that, since recording became able to freeze-dry and redistribute musical sound every which way, musical information can wander wherever it might (and who knows what unfamiliar conch any musician might pick up off the sound beach?).  Still, not everything transfers all that digitally.  Amid the rampant potentials for unconsidered sonic homonyms, what’s between, before and after the sounds, such generative considerations as comprehension, understanding, imagination still have to be locally, even personally, grown, discovered and constructed.  This defines a threshold where the option of settling for out and out appropriation may instead become transformation (a relationship that some musicians sometimes call paying dues), where one has to go through real changes to find oneself (or maybe even a new self) in the process.

There have been musicians in China who studied and revered Beethoven (and even, if necessary, in some personally very costly secret, as during Mao Zedong’s “Cultural” Revolution).  Monet, Van Gogh and Frank Lloyd Wright have been among those open about their aesthetic indebtedness to Japan, as was Debussy to Java.  Roman alphabets.  Arabic numerals.  Tomatoes, maize, squash, cacau, papas, Haudenosuanee federalism and egalitarian challenges to the divine right of kings. Beisbol finds yet another home in the DR. The whole world still listens to Bob Marley. If something might prove itself to be “good” in any number of possible senses, wherever it may have come from, why shouldn’t a person be willing to learn from it  — and to be willing to change because of it?  Why not?

Albert Murray describes North American culture (to my ear aptly) as mulatto: equally Indian/Indigenous, African and European.  An aghast Eurosupremacist Carl Jung once reacted to the sight of Euroamericans a hundred years ago as “a strange picture: a European with Negro behavior and an Indian soul.”  However, creole Gumboamerica continues across a very long learning curve to struggle with a tilted earth self conception that imagines its best aspects as having descended almost completely from Europe — everything else being either entertainment, service or cheap labor.  Why else is it still necessary to emphasize that black lives matter versus everyone’s life matters?

Many contemporary poets, novelists, visual artists, filmmakers, intellectuals and scientists might find it just a little less complicated to hole themselves up in, say, punk rock, Euroclassical music, minimalism or other ivory avant gardes (along with their accompanying vocabularies of conceptual metaphors) and thus somehow manage “not to notice” the Africanicity of their own culture, much less elsewhere; but musicians can’t quite so easily avoid contending with Africa as a serious aesthetic force — although many still find a way (Elvis Presley invented rock and roll, right?). And, even though music in the United States has been deeply Africanized across the board for well over a century (and guys like Ives, Ruggles, Cowell and Cage regarded this as their most serious competition), it’s still a sound for sore ears to come across so explicit an embrace of continental African sound as Empyrean Atlas.  Aside from the hydraheaded impact of James Brown and what Ornette has done with Prime Time, very few Gumboamerican musical initiatives (I did once hear on the radio some LA group playing very Congolese but don’t know who they were) have taken on the possibilities of interlocking polyrhythmic guitars, despite their beauty, elegance and amazing musical potential. The guitar orchestra format promises a width of genreshifter potential as well.  It could, for some, pass on occasion as pretty guitar indie-rock, but without that flatfooted, reductive by default, temporally redundant, almost military monobeat that distinguishes so most rock music.  This same format could also walk into the “new music” theatre and present itself as a parallel offshoot to minimalism as “serious” composition. Fired up a bit by an audience of capable dancers, it could burn the house down.  Opened up with improvisation, it could traverse the thresholds unbounded by jazz.  And all of these at once — with conceivably all of these potential listening constituencies as well.

David Crowell’s curiosity, openness and experience avails all of these possibilities.  One should also note that that it’s not such an easy thing to play music like this.  It demands concentration and developing a way of listening holistically to an ensemble’s composite sound from the specific perspective of one’s own part, a practice that’s far more pervasive in Africa and Afro-Latino America than in the U.S.  Crowell has exercised the patience necessary to cultivate such a group within the centrifugal environs of New York City that has just arrived at the point where all of the material has been committed to memory.  No more paper.  A full potential shift from eye conception to ear conception.  Empyrean Atlas now poises at the crossroads of the two predominant modes of interpreting African musical models in the U.S.

The first is African American (and let’s not forget the Newyorican and other Latino contributions).  The second and much more recent interpretation arrives by way of Terry Riley, Steve Reich, David Borden and Philip Glass.  Riley played some jazz and has never completely abandoned that.  Reich dug Coltrane and studied drumming in Ghana.  Borden first studied composition with Jimmy Giuffre and Jaki Byard.  Glass hung outside the clubs in Chicago when he was still underage.  All have been creolized from the start.  Nevertheless, for all the crossover and common concern, the relation to polyrhythm and repetition importantly differs.  John Miller Chernoff has highlighted some aspects of this distinction through a comparative discussion of dance in his richly insightful African Rhythm and African Sensibility, where he notes that “Western dance is basically imitative and iconographic” with its primary function being to project an image, whereas African orientations dynamically converse with adjustable relations being posed among sounds.

While it’s true that any musical sound body assembles a sonic image, the function and interpretation of these gestures can significantly vary.  In conventional Eurological practices, this image culminates the final endpoint of compositional process.  The entire raison d’être of Eurological composition, preparation and performance is to present a specific, reliably replicable, determinate sonic image to listeners (and this even includes Cage’s determined indeterminacies).  However, in Afrological contexts, sonic image additionally communicates compositional information among compositional participants, thereby adopting these sonic constellations as the potential material of further invention.  Repetition and polyrhythm within pan-African aesthetics coordinate imbalances to impel open ended compositional movement and response, whether these be danced, sounded or “in your head.”

In contrast, Reich and Glass (both of whom’s musics have been signally important for Crowell) employ polyrhythm and repetition to construct highly evocative frozen soundscapes which may be projected with repeatable fidelity as one would a film.  I’ve always felt ambivalent about this musical orientation (David has also urged me to temper my misgivings just a bit and try to catch live what can’t be heard on recordings in a construct such as Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, where special clouds of overtones gather from the timbral intersections of all of the instruments).

As a devout rhythmicist, I find many of the patterning ideas fascinating (such as Glass’ twists and bends of sequential continuity in Einstein on the Beach) but the Eurological aspiration to sonic artifact, along with its withdrawal of rhythm from reciprocal interaction, leaves me unsettlingly cold. An unkind characterization of Reich’s music once occurred to me as “Debussy does Africa” except that Debussy is much too hip to merit such a characterization — regardless, a lot of the music celebrated as “minimalist” seems partially to identify its distance from African American alternatives by a politely debluesified sound palette that leans just a little too much toward ear candy for my own post-Monkified ear. Desocialized into “sonic objects,” the potencies of polyrhythm and repetition in minimalism feel defanged in zoologic domestication, interesting, truly, and still genuinely rich with psycho-perceptual affect, but meanwhile safely posed as illustrations rather than fully embraced as relational actors, consigned instead to a virtual reality that won’t notice that you’re there and isn’t about to change up on you the way a living organism would — this isn’t, however, to at all discount the high value of articulating intact coherent 4 hour musical thoughts either (nor are my disagreements with these composers for a whole a lot of reasons intended either as dis or to suggest that this music shouldn’t exist— or anything like that, in the way that the crown prince of the Frankfort School reacted so infamously to rhythm sections and Louis Armstrong).

Afrological repetition and polyrhythm differs from minimalism in that its intention is explicitly to provoke something else to happen (rather than to congeal a sonic monument) and to potentially let that something else in and develop new relationships.  Whatever patterning similarities can be observed between minimalist and pan-African repetition, they each mean very differently.  Where one structural orientation bends toward closed systems, the other waxes probabilistic. Afrological repetition anticipates potentially new, even yet to be imagined events, that invoke through contrast and mutual qualification relational harmonics.  Consider the use of the repeating riff in swing & blues music, the vamp in Coltrane’s My Favorite Things, Mal Waldron’s spontaneous repeating temporal tourniquets, mantuno. This also assumes a political distinction in compositional structure between the command orientation of monological organization and the intersubjectivity of multiple compositional agents in dialogical relationship.  This is customarily thought of as collective improvisation (which is, by the way, no less “structured” or “compositional”  than the Eurological example).  What it does abandon, however, is the commitment to a fixed sonic image so that it may incorporate and respond to change as structural components of musical composition.

There are unresolvable tensions between the perpetual lures of imagistic cohesion and the social relations of musicking (intraensemble information flow acts as a decisive component of any music’s compositional structure).  The Europeans once solved this by banishing improvisation (although, to my knowledge, improvisation had never been more than a solo prerogative — collective improvisation, i.e. dialogical composition, hasn’t been especially recalled). The transfer of musical information was linearized unidirectionally along a conduit from composer to performer. In traditional African practices, compositions are communal works of art passed on from musician to musician, each interface a particular beat constellation, “style,” dance or occasion that establish the means and parameters of compositional interaction.  These open systems tend to be very local (sometimes right down to a single village), very specifying and often very demanding and retain individual opportunity for “enriching one’s instrument with other voices” while abiding appropriate regard for the sound and moves of each other participant along with the global sonic image. Far northwest across the Black Atlantic, spirit, opportunity and imagination lifted Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet into radically flexible extensions of these principles; and while free improvisation relaxes concerns with sonic integration, the role of composer for improvisers proposes newly imagined interactive matrices that differently fulfill a similar function to traditional African organization.

For Crowell, such boundaries are continually permeable (as they actually are in practice) and likely not so important.  More and more musicians switch hit as a matter of course and draw from whatever along the spectrum best suits their shifting foci — as no single thing can possibly address everything anyway.  Given their own internal complexity, Crowell’s constructs for Empyrean Atlas are, at least for starters, thoroughly “composed” in the monological sense — but with the collaboration of these well seasoned musicians, the music’s terms may easily code switch into dialogical music, a condition that I, for one, find much more mysterious, interesting and alive as it involves actually living though some of the implications that a composition proposes. When a group of musicians adequately assimilates a compositional matrix, each becomes able to meaningfully compose within that context oneself, thereby enabling other things to happen, maybe even something completely new and unforeseen, without having to sacrifice the design integrity of the original conception.  Magic may not be able to be legislated into existence, but we can still prepare.

The kind of formally transformative improvisation plausible within Empyrean Atlas’ vocabulary is likely to behave more closely to African models than to the more sequential explications of African-American soloists. In a densely coordinated polyrhythm the smallest gesture, the absenting of a single beat can alter the balance of the entire sonic ecology.  Crowell and I talked about these sorts of subtle improvisational shifts already beginning to develop within ensemble performances and about how rhythmic constellations may be extended for quite a while before they shift, a very slow kind of improvisational development, but appropriate to the working material.  What also intrigues me are the potential conceptual discoveries, what differently situated kind of musical thinking might evolve in the process.  What if Empyrean Atlas, for example, were to continue this exploration of African “apart playing” but evolve an ensemble manner of developing a variable, open ended narrative analogous to that already accomplished by the jazz soloist?  I haven’t really heard that anywhere yet.  That would be a whole other level of cultural synthesis.  Somebody’s going to do it too.

There are worlds of implication in his description.  In a sense, he’s relating one way that concepts and patterns from one cultural constellation (Africa) become assimilated within the experience base of another (North America) and in that process meet from different angles more fundamentally linked as human — sensation, attention, gestalting, reconceptualizing — via the character of the common “material” itself. For example, most African musicians don’t organize that much of what they do around barline concepts or metronome references. Nevertheless the “common material” being explored — polyrhythm and the sculptural psychophysiologics of multiple perspectived time — is “objective” in the sense of its persistence and consistency beyond the variegating wobbles of personal and cultural predilections. And, after all, for all the migrating crossovers from Africa, Europe and Asia, the Americas are still their own things, and they’re going to do, unavoidably, their own indigenous things with it, as it likewise works that way in the complementary reverse.  Look at what Fela made of James Brown’s example.  JB reported that he couldn’t see much resemblance at all.  And just what does that Texas Nashville twanging pedal steel guitar mean in King Sunny Ade’s Juju music anyway? Probably something different than a good old boy might have had in mind, or maybe not so different… .

Cultural syntheses such as these are also sociocultural. Artists have to find a welcome to find support and further develop what they’re exploring.  Who’s going to listen — and why? What communities will be willing to adopt this music?  (and it may not always be one’s own) Or will this be a matter of inventing once again a new audience patchwork?  To a great extent the music itself is in charge of where it might travel, but even a music can’t really decide its own reception. Besides this, creative musics in particular unavoidably propose utopias, which is why they their “place” is always somewhere beyond where we have been.  Crowell, who is neither African nor African-American, hears and respects quite a bit of the African in his own sonic utopia, but how does this “Africa” currently “rate” in a socially contentious Gumboamerica?

For example, the public interface euphemistically presented as “new music” has never seemed to me to be truly about “new” music per se, but rather about a particular class of “new” for the most part.  I’m very happy to see that creative musicians such as Glass and Reich (who certainly do deserve it), for example,  have been able to move from taxi driving and leading their own groups in self organized loft contexts (with no money to speak of) to seeing their music featured now in some of the the most prestigious venues around the world, gaining the accumulating status that comes with that and, I presume, at least some reasonable compensation. But, have we seen the same level of regard and support over the same time period for Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Butch Morris or Henry Threadgill?  Is it that this music is not “new” enough?  Is it that their ideas are not considered to be on the same level of these other deserving artists?  Could it be because of the drum, that instrument banned in North America after the Stono rebellion, and drum concept itself? There are significant differences in skill sets and aesthetic conceptions that are at the same time strongly aware of (and in dialogue with) one another — and everybody (well, at least those doing the work) knows it.  One would think this would be the basis for a broad and stimulating long term public contemporary conversation in aesthetics, the ground of even further experiment and discovery, and it would seem that these intersections could regularly (rather than every so often) inhabit the same stages on the same nights with an equal degree of respect and notoriety.

What I really think is, despite the best of intentions and real efforts on the part of quite a few people, that there’s still a great discomfort among many with “blackness.”  I don’t mean at all that well meaning, liberal minded, melanin deprived people with caucasoid skulls actually object to the presence of — or friendship, marriage and collaboration with — persons with African features.  I think it’s an even deeper discomfort with African influenced world views and conceptions.  Somehow, Buddhists and India may be alright;  China might be okay;  Japan could be now almost (and still not quite) one of “us,” but Africa still rates number two — — or 3 or 4 … (fortunately, Africans themselves have their own independent perspectives on all this). The psycho-umbilical cord connecting Gumboamerica with Europe seems too precious to challenge, and Gumboamerican art still seems to need to justify itself first as part of a European history (while this is probably what least interests Europeans about Gumboamerican creativity), however redacted that particular fiction may pale in comparison with the promising richness of what’s really been going on.  There’s a learned, promoted, even educated self-delusion that Europe defines not an indispensable spoke on Gumboamerica’s roll, but its very hub.  This habituated colonialist divide turned aesthetic may on occasion trump even the artist, no matter how “white” that person’s ancestry may be: if one’s work emphatically honors and contributes in some way to a black aesthetic, one can likely expect somehow to stay back (it might still remain a better “career decision” to pursue “classical” composition — or even post-everything “free” music, versus being associated with all that goes with that “J” word).

Furthermore, regardless of the costs of that commitment, actual persons with darker complexions (and this is irrespective of their aesthetic attitudes and practice) continue to be accorded regard and support in far smaller proportions than their participation and contribution warrants (and neither is the aesthetic the whole story — the propagator of George the First’s 1988 race baiting Willie Horton ad was reputedly a capable blues guitarist). The maladies of the soul that Melville addressed via the white whale and Benito Cereno remain both contemporary and unhealed while the second American revolution is still in a process of recovering from 1877. Cultural democracy as dreamed of and talked about isn’t really here, not in practice, not completely, and not yet (and don’t give up on the notion either). The whole thing is (and has always been) a mess — not just in the U.S. — no Brasil, en Cuba y en México também.  The shadow of colonialism’s caste systems mixes up and messes up what might otherwise be more spontaneously natural sharings and borrowings.  Meanwhile, while one’s actually alive and breathing, one has to do what’s “natural” from the heart despite “reality” and make the very best of what’s possible (while always keeping a wary eye on those realities’ behaviors).

No single individual is personally responsible for these circumstances, but it’s hard for anyone to really avoid responsibility to them.  While an artist’s reach in relation to this is, for the most part, astonishingly limited (at least in terms of perceivable consequences), the notion of artist as antenna or lightening rod (or question mark or irritant …) isn’t so off base. Artists’ choices of where and how to pay attention — and what to do with that — really do matter if for no other reason than, in encountering any art, what one meets emanates from those choices (not to mention what they might put into motion). Complaint and critique contribute to dialogue, but nothing responds to circumstances (and to other work) as one’s own work does (as Charlie Parker once quipped in response to a master of ceremonies’ condescension — with an accompanying and appropriate look that could kill, “Music speaks louder than words.”).  Crowell focuses his integrity most upon what what he can shape most effectively, where his ear goes, where the sound goes, on how he develops a sonic community.  In tune with that, like Miles Davis or Steve Lacy, he’s openly generous in acknowledging his sources, and from this intersection he searches for something new, unique to his auditory & imaginative position.  David Crowell deserves a lot of respect for trusting his own path and for really doing something with it. His music, and its evolving musical language, is worth following and listening forward to.