I recently bought Ballister’s self-released debut Bastard String (from
2011), an album that is relatively rare. After listening to it for the
first time, I was amazed at how much Dave Rempis still sounded like Peter
Brötzmann back then. And it’s even more astonishing how varied his playing
has become over the years. This can be recognised very well on his new
album Propulsion. The band presents Rempis on saxophones (as usual),
vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz, who is known for his work with the
aforementioned Peter Brötzmann, bassist Joshua Abrams (of Natural
Information Society fame) and Rempis’s long-term musical partner Tyler
Damon on drums.
From the very first not it’s remarkable how melodic and spiritual
Propulsion is. This becomes particularly clear on “Egression“, the second
track. Rempis begins with a minimalist solo, with Abrams lingering on a
monotonous riff in the background (something he also likes to do with
Natural Information Society), which remains dry as dust and thus forms a
clear contrast to Rempis’s vibrato-laden sound and the extremely high
registers the saxophonist uses here. In the second part, the rhythm section
pushes Rempis up a mountain, from where his full sound then floods the land
below in the most marvellous way. He sounds like Trane in his late phase,
less gospel-like, more controlled instead, but just as passionate and
heart-warming. The liner notes say that “this recording also catches the
band at a moment of major emotional impact“, which might explain said
emotionality. Propulsion also “documents the final concert of more than 900
that Rempis curated and produced as part of a weekly Thursday-night series
of jazz and improvised music that stretched for more than twenty-one years
from 2002-2023.“ This band therefore not only represents the four
individual musicians, but is also representative of the state of the art of
the Chicago scene. The music is not an “Ephemera“, as the third and final
track is called, but a promise of what is yet to come. It’s the music of
another America, not that of the neoliberal populists, but that of John
Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Joe McPhee. We will need it. Perhaps more than we
realize.
You can buy and listen to Propulsion here: