Broken Shadows • Broken Shadows
 azz vinylists know the boutique Newvelle Records label, with its
periodic subscription series of six LPs released one per month. The label often features
special projects and one-off combinations; Newvelle’s 2019 fourth batch includes an
album by the working quartet Broken Shadows, which had toured in 2018, at the time of this
May recording. The band would merit attention for its personnel or repertoire alone. The
quartet unites longtime pairs: saxophonists Tim Berne and Chris Speed played umpteen gigs
in Tim’s quartet Bloodcount; bassist Reid Anderson and drummer Dave King anchor the
Bad Plus. Beyond that, Speed and King play in each other’s bands, and Berne toured
with an extended Bad Plus, playing Ornette Coleman music.
Which is also Broken Shadows’ mission. Six of ten tunes on their LP (180-gram clear vinyl, flat as western Kansas) are by Ornette. "Walls-Bridges" is by his tenor saxophonist ally Dewey Redman, also from Fort Worth, and there’s a signature composition by their longtime associate, bassist Charlie Haden. Two pieces come from the next great composing altoist to follow Coleman out of Fort Worth, Julius Hemphill, Berne’s early mentor. Jazz repertoire is always in a state of flux. In recent decades, the stampede toward Thelonious Monk compositions showed that improvisers are craving more advanced material. As dense and complex as Monk’s music can be, it had some of the country funk of a gap-toothed stuck-key roadhouse piano. In that light, one might have expected -- might still expect -- a similar vogue for Ornette Coleman compositions. He too wrote (very different) catchy tunes that lend themselves to improvised development on the composer’s own terms, and in which you can hear rural articulations going back to 19th-century field hollers. Ornette’s lines sing. And as with Monk, to really play the material, you’ve got to get a little of that dirt into your own sound, as Broken Shadows does. It’s not that the players imitate their counterparts in Ornette’s bands -- not usually, anyway. Reid Anderson’s strummed intros to the Latin love song "Una Muy Bonita" and Haden’s "Song for Che," and his plush pizzicato melody statement on the latter, tell us all we need to know about how deeply he has investigated Haden. The whole band plays with that exuberant Ornetty bumpkin jauntiness, exposing the lighter, lift-ier side of King’s drumming. Dancing on ride cymbal, cantering on the rims or hi-hat, commenting on the solos, he gets that happy Billy Higgins bounce, notably on "Bonita." On "C.O.D." drums play the melody and get an early solo, launched with an evocation of Edward Blackwell’s quasi-bata tonal tom-toms with Ornette. The warm recorded sound, good balance and rich bass tone effectively/unshowily evoke the original LPs in a good way. Coleman liked pairing up with another horn, using an alto/tenor frontline when Dewey Redman came aboard from 1968 to 1972: "Toy Dance," "C.O.D.," "Broken Shadows" and "Civilization Day" come from that under-scrutinized period. The saxophonists here have their own sounds, but parallel those counterparts: Berne’s alto, like Ornette’s, is bright and biting, and he can nail the exclamatory high-note yips and yawps. Speed’s tenor timbre, like Redman’s, is coarser, grainier, more prone to split tones, hoarser in a field-holler way. Like the bassist, they let the improvising unspool in its own time, guided by the logic of a melody more than the length of its phrases. As Haden knew, and Anderson shows, just suggesting harmonic motion -- heading toward or away from home -- can be enough to spur the horns ahead. The players respect the material; "Broken Shadows" is so plaintively beautiful, it’s enough for one saxophone to play it straight while the other embellishes; on the third chorus, bowed bass joins the chorale. Where the horns improvise together, they can tie tight knots, but more often volley in open counterpoint. Where they solo back to back, the second soloist may not just pick up where the first solo leaves off, but actually extend its musical development. That’s teamwork. The program is bookended by Hemphill’s 1980 "Body" (from Flat Out Jump Suite) and his immortal "Dogon A.D." from 1972, one of the prime texts of ’70s jazz, with its limping 11/8 beat and grinding blues-cello bassline. (Anderson transfers Abdul Wadud’s cello parts to bass.) There is still more funk in Julius’s sound, and the band gets down in the ditch and keeps digging. Nothing drags on; most tracks run three or four minutes, with "Dogon" the marathoner at almost seven, but there hypnotic atmosphere is part of the point. Broken Shadows sound so good playing this stuff, with joy and respect, you hope other musicians looking for durable material will take the hint. As usual with Newvelle, the gatefold sleeve is sturdy and
thick, this series adorned with reproductions of abstract, almost tactile paintings by
Hery Paz. An insert sheet contains one installment of a six-part tale by Tim Sultan, about
a fictitious jazzman who left behind a string of much-sought-after limited-edition albums.
That is maybe a little too on the nose. Postscript: In 2021, Intakt reissued Broken Shadows on CD, adding Ornette Coleman's "Street Woman" and "Comme il Faut," with new notes by Branford Marsalis. |
