Gary Thomas: Code Violations
Gary Thomas remembers the last time he played with Miles Davis's band, in August of '87: "Miles asked me if I'd consider playing some funk licks, and I told him no, that's not the way I play.'* The conservation was amicable, but Thomas was insistent.So why does a guy who'd walk away from a high-profile sideman gig with Miles make a record with two synthesizer players, and guest shots by the funky Dennis Chambers?
"You won't hear any funk licks on this record," Gary Thomas says. "I like the way some funk stuff sounds, and when I played with Miles I developed some appreciation for synthesizers. But I'm not into blowing pentatonic scales and big loud blues-scale things over funk grooves. I just want to play what I play —you shouldn't be limited to a few notes or ideas.
"This isn't a groove record. We take a standard jazz
approach: everyone in the rhythm section is free to do what he wants when it comes to the solos. The shifting beats they play don't happen in a funk groove. That's one reason I like playing so much with Anthony Cox, who's my favorite bass player. All the rhythmic and harmonic variations he plays make this music so much different."
On Code Violations, Thomas is no less committed to hot tenor blowing than in Jack DeJohnette's or Michele Rosewoman's bands, or on his own fierce debut — Seventh
Quadrant.
Does Thomas's free approach put him in a perilous position —too out for the funky cats and vice versa, and too electric for conservatives? Is that what he means by "Code Violations?" "Right —everything I put on there goes against the grain of what most people were expecting." All of the players are from the Baltimore-Washington area. Drummer Steve Williams has worked with Shirley Horn's trio. Seventh Quadrant's usual bassist Geoff Harper joins Anthony Cox on double basses for "Maxthink" and "Absolute Images," and replaces Cox on "Zylog," where he shows off an original and mobile tuba-like conception.
Drummer Dennis Chambers, a friend of Gary's since high school, often works with this band when he isn't on the road with John Scofield. He subs for Williams on "Sybase," and he and Gary wing the duet "Traf," which underscores the premium Thomas puts on improvisation. (As do the duets for flute and guitar, improvised from melodic kernels, where Bollenback's jaunty like Django.)
If the duo "Traf" sounds like a trio, it's because of the ghost afterimage the tenor produces as it's tracked by a MIDI synthesizer. (Thomas keeps the volume way down, which is the general rule for synths on this album.) "Instead of having the synthesizer play parallel notes," Thomas explains, "I assigned a different harmony note to each note I play on the saxophone; I set it up the way I prefer to hear notes run together. It's mixed low. I wasn't gonna put the synthesizer up front —I mean, I still play the saxophone, I'm not gonna replace it. You can take the limitations of tracking technology and turn them into advantages: if you bend a note on the sax, the synth note doesn't bend, so you get some dissonance. Some notes are harder to process, so you get a longer delay —I like that. Split tones drive it crazy; if you hit three or four notes, it tries for them all, and sounds like something striking each note.l"
On "Sybase" and "Pads," Cox's acoustic bass signal is likewise beefed up: a harmonizer doubles its line, the barest microtone sharp. Cox's woody tone and attack sing through clearly, but the organ-pedal-sized bass sound calls attention to how tuneful his variations can be. It's the first time I've heard electronics applied to a bass where the circuits don't destroy out the instrument's virtues.
I asked Gary about the flute, which he plays on the duets with Paul Bollenback, and on "Absolute Images." Did he worry his other axe would seem out of place here? Nah. "I play the flute, so I figured I'd use it." He played flute for the same reason he plays ferocious tenor: It was the natural thing to do.
Kevin Whitehead August 1988
NEW MAPS OF HELL
by Biba Kopf
To immerse yourself in the roar of Hell is to strip yourself of all your usual psychic defences. In your newly raw, sensitized state, you can once again live life fully, all senses alert to the experience of new noise, new smells, new sensations, at least for the duration of the trip.
But if Anytown, anywhere in the world at some point appears dismayingly familiar if only from postcards or that once-in-a-lifetime holiday consumer guide, such appearances are deceptive in the extreme, and you are of greatest danger to yourself just when you think you've got the hang of things. At which point you lose control of the city and it begins to take control of you. This is no longer the systematic derangement of the senses attractively practised and preached by Arthur Rimbaud from the Horn of Africa; it's more the destructive erosion of the self documented in Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky, where the hidden courtyards of the city's casbahs prove even more hostile to its heroine than the desert winds.
So this is the point of departure of Paul Schütze's New Maps of Hell: the point of separation where the strange begins to pull away from the familiar. His Hell might be applicable to Anytown, but it draws its power from specific detailing that locates it more precisely in one of the burgeoning new interzones of the Pacific Rim. His choice of location reflects not only the fact that heâs an Australian with a deep interest in the musics, specifically percussion, of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. It also attests to the economic and cultural realities of the region.
Originally released in 1992, New Maps of Hell coincided with the West's late recognition of this economic and cultural shift to the Pacific. The pictures accompanying the excited business reports were all computer graphics, skyscrapers and tropical palms. Unsurprisingly, these glowing reports carried no real sense of what it's like to be in such a city, where new money and air-conditioned shopping malls have been grafted on to densely populated streets, and every available slope is the site for a precariously clinging shanty town. For its part, Schütze's music sets you down close to its beating heart. Deploying his percussion-heavy ensemble, including trombone, bass, guitar and keyboards, he creates a dense, thrilling frenzy of sound the equal of Miles Davis's Agharta (recorded live and initially only released in Japan, the state that typifies both the vitality and cultural peculiarities of the new Pacific). The disc begins exotically enough with a dawn call to prayer rising above the mist rolling in from the sea. The piece's one clear voice solemnly intones, " did not say this. I am not here." That's the last clear human statement you'll hear for its duration. Elsewhere a taped Japanese voice, then someone speaking a less familiar language and finally an utterly alien utterance are the coordinates plotting the music's shifts into the dark unknown. And suddenly you can no longer find your way back to the central marketplace where dispersed and desperate peoples forlornly gather to glean the information that might lead them to the open sea. Inevitably, the music loses itself in dirt-ridden back alleys. The darker the alleys, the more menacing the ambiences. Here, silence threatens more than it reassures. And all the time your future is haunted by the single terrifying sound, heard on "Topology of a Phantom City", of chopper blades disappearing into the dusk, conjuring the newsreel image of the last helicopter leaving Vietnam before the fall of Saigon.
The percussion traces the pulses from the centre to the various outlying suburbs where the cityâs ethnic mixes are most apparent. It's not Schütze's intention to homogenise these disparate ethnic musical elements, but to "compose" them into a modern Balkanised city. Immerse yourself in it and soon the sense of heat and filth trapped in the arcs of sound drawn by the trombone and keyboards starts to Balkanise you. By the disc's end, all your certainties have been thoroughly pulled apart.
Biba Kopf, The Hidden Reverse, 1995
