By João Esteves da Silva
Released just one week apart back in April, these were arguably my two
favorite albums of 2024 with some (remote) connection to the jazz
category (alongside maybe Matt Mitchell’s solo piano album
Illimitable). They are also interestingly related, beyond the fact that
composer-singer Sofia Jernberg is present in both of them – as a main
protagonist in Musho, a duo with composer-pianist Alexander
Hawkins, and as part of a larger, intricate tapestry in composer-bassist
Nick Dunston’s COLLA VOCE. Both are, as I take it, groundbreaking
statements, featuring among the most significant albums to have been
released lately. In particular, both radically question the role of the
voice in twenty-first century music. If I were to classify them
somehow, I’d say something like “avant-garde world music” wouldn’t fit
Musho
too badly and, despite its versatility, I wouldn’t mind placing
COLLA VOCE
in the contemporary classical shelf. But, in fairness, both works are really
sui generis.
Alexander Hawkins & Sofia Jernberg – Musho (Intakt, 2024) *****
When faced with Musho’s cover, one must be struck by the fact that
the singer’s name comes below the pianist’s, for the convention
tells us that it should be the other way around, even in cases where the
latter happens to be the main composer. This subtle subversion is itself
telling: Musho shouldn’t be taken as different in kind from
Hawkins’s other duo collaborations with notable women musician-composers
such as Tomeka Reid, Angelika Niescier or Nicole Mitchell. There’s a more
substantial view implicit here: even when performing songs (with words),
the voice is simply another instrument (with its own unique
features, of course), on a par with the cello, the saxophone, or the flute;
and the singer is simply another musician, here on a par with the
pianist. The conventional singer/accompanist hierarchy is thus shattered,
and so both singer and pianist are emancipated: they are still free
to stick to more or less conventional roles, if they so wish, but can also
embrace all the remaining possibilities their instruments offer; and,
crucially, they present themselves to audiences as equals: a
genuine duo of musician-composers.
The singer qua musicianconception (and its
voice qua instrument
counterpart) has been prominent in creative music for some time now, but
few have made as powerful and persuasive a case for it as Jernberg. She is
the ultimate anti-singer, in a sense that goes even beyond the
emancipation of her instrument: while breaking new ground at the musical
(or sonic) level, she rejects all sorts of extra-musical diversions that
often intrude the ways in which artists (especially women singers) are
publicly perceived (and judged), namely uses of her image for marketing
purposes or stage performance antics. This is not just as an artistic
statement but a political one, radically at odds with the kind of liberal
(pseudo-)feminism that preaches “women’s empowerment” without seriously
questioning the very power dynamics that foster the oppression of women in
the first place. And she does all this while being one of the most
formidable singers around, with a gorgeous (and instantly recognizable)
timbre and mind-blowing technical resources, which she deploys with a rare
intelligence and taste.
Together with Hawkins, another true musical polymath, Jernberg has created
a sound world that is both genreless and timeless, and as interesting as it
is moving: a song cycle comprising material from various traditions
(Ethiopian, Swedish, Armenian, English), but arranged and performed in such
a way so as to form a single cohesive aesthetic, both breathtakingly
beautiful and new. And, despite such cohesiveness, one is still able to
trace what is peculiar to each of these traditions, i.e., we get a form of
universality that does not overwhelm locality. (Here, too, one is bound to
think of salient political analogies.)
Musho is a definite highlight of Hawkins’ already rich
discography. And it is the perfect entry point into Jernberg’s art.
Nick Dunston – COLLA VOCE (Out Of Your Head, 2024) *****
An “Afro-Surrealist Anti-Opera”. That’s how Dunston describes
COLLA VOCE
, a kaleidoscopic work for string quartet, vocal quartet and chamber jazz
ensemble, plus post-processing. The album, which is the work
itself, was produced by Weston Olencki. Shortly after its release, Tyshawn
Sorey won the Pulitzer Prize for Music with
Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith)
, a work he then described as an “anti-concerto”. Now, is some kind of
artistic (and, in a way, political) movement taking shape here? Possibly.
One in which Black musician-composers, following on the great AACM
tradition, confront the traditional media of (generally White) Western
classical music and, instead of either submitting to their conventions or
altogether rejecting them, subvert them in creatively adventurous ways,
testing their very limits.
In the case of Sorey, we have a concerto for saxophone and orchestra which
subverts the usual virtuoso role ascribed to the soloist: it’s an
introspective, slowly unfolding work, and so an anti-virtuoso one;
and, despite preserving the soloist-orchestra distinction to some extent,
at times even an anti-soloist work, too, namely when the saxophone
is withdrawn from its concerto-style prominence, blending into the
orchestral texture instead.
The notion of an anti-operais perhaps less straightforward, but I’d
say the aformentioned notion of an anti-singer may shed some light
onto it: just as Hawkins and Jernberg overcome the singer/accompanist
hierarchy, so does Dunston overcome the vocal/instrumental one on a larger
scale. In fact, all four singers – Cansu Tanrikulu, Isabel Crespo Pardo,
Friede Merze, and Jernberg herself – taking part in this anti-opera are
themselves anti-singers of some kind. And this is to say that the roles
ascribed to the JACK Quartet and the Berlin-based chamber jazz ensemble –
comprising, alongside Dunston, violinist/violist Maria Reich, cellist Anil
Eraslan, guitarist Tal Yahalom and drummer Moritz Baumgärtner – also go
beyond what would have been commonly expected from them in an opera
setting. At times the strings appear to scream, qua human voices, and there
are occasions where the voices can be heard emitting string-like sounds,
these being just two among many instances of unconventional stuff going on
here.
Overall, Dunston, whose own double bass playing must also be lauded,
achieves a remarkable balance between notation, spontaneous composition and
post-production, making it hard to tell where one ends and the others
begin. In particular, his string writing – formidably tackled by the
formidable JACK players – is exceptional, totally devoid of cliché,
somewhere in between the Wandelweiser aesthetic and harsh noise. He is a
master at managing contrasts, and at reconciling (apparent) chaos with
organization. One also gets subtle hints of modern NY jazz here and there,
as well as more exotic or even hardcore sonorities. But despite all its
sonic variety, COLLA VOCE is, ultimately, surprisingly cogent,
although our very notion of cogency may well have been redefined by it.
While Musho is straightforwardly identifiable as a song cycle, no
matter how subversive, one is bound to wonder whether COLLA VOCE
is still recognizable as an opera at all. It’s a kind of duck-rabbit (to
use Wittgenstein’s image), wavering between opera and something else – and
that may be, at least partly, where its surrealism lies.