#eremite records

Graves had spent his early years studying African drumming, tablas and playing timbales in Latin jazz bands and that sense of time, extended from African and Caribbean ceremonial music and ritual imbue these sessions. Hugh Glover talks about this and the time he spent with Graves, whom he refers to as Prof, in the extensive interview included with the LP set conducted by Jake Meginsky. “We were listening to the music of the peoples of the interior forest of the Congo… First, the Prof’s mood sets up a tribal-like atmosphere. It’s Congo-like — possession states. The rhythms, I think they immediately stimulated the need to dance… The next thing one must know and be aware of is that Milford Graves, he is not a time-keeping drummer like most jazz drummers. Prof represents the epitome of traditional hand drumming. I’m talking about ceremonial music and ritualistic sounds most familiar with divination.” 

Hugh Glover only recorded a few times so the January duo session with him and Graves is a particular find. The first of the four improvisations starts out with the percussionist’s churning thunder, leading to the entry of the tenor player’s hoarse, braying cries. The two had known each other for a decade at that point and Glover had been part of a European tour of Graves’ quartet along with Joe Rigby and Arthur Williams. That symbiosis is immediately evident. There’s a fluid sense of polyphony and elastic polyrhythms at play as the two bound along with ebullient intensity. The music is charged with open, spontaneous interchange and while the intensity level is high, they never overpower each other. Graves’ percussion work is revelatory here, spilling across his kit with a limber, propulsive dynamism. One can hear the legacy of African and Latin American rhythms exploded out with the drummer’s lithe control of tuned skin and slashing cymbals, with masterful control of dynamics and timbre. The inclusion of a short, 2-minute recording from the session reveals their careful attention to detail as the two sound-check the room and their balance and then charge into a compact give-and-take. Their concluding 7-minute improvisation is a particular highlight as they ebb and flow with synchronous fervor. 

The inclusion of a three-minute drum solo, recorded in February, is a brilliant addition to the set, particularly since Graves didn’t release any solo recordings until his two discs on Tzadik that came out in the late 1990s. On this 1976 recording, Graves distills his unified, multi-limbed attack into a roiling tempest of energy. Each thundering salvo, each cymbal crash, each resounding wallop of the bass drum is meted out with focus and intention. Glover remarks that listening to the solo recording he was struck by “the melody, and the melody of the tones that he gets, the way he rocks from one melody pitch to another. It has always been a mystery to me how Cuban drummers in Bata were able to modulate the rhythm and the meter. Well, it takes more than one player to do it Cuban style. Prof shows you can do it as one player.” 

The three March improvisations with Graves, Glover, and Arthur Doyle provide a notable link in the trajectory toward the session recorded a few weeks later that would be released as Bäbi. Glover reminisces about the March session here, noting “When we played, though, Doyle and I, we weren’t thinking of BÄBI [a name Graves used for his conceptual approach to improvisation]. We were thinking of… well I know I was thing of, and I’m pretty sure he was thinking, how do we keep up with Prof!” While that may have been going through their minds, that uncertainty never reveals itself in their playing. Graves begins the 12-minute improvisation that opens the set with tuned cascades of rim shots and toms and the two quickly join in, with Doyle’s raspy tenor crying out against the shifting percussion. The modulating rhythms and meters of Graves’ solo are the foundation of the buzzing whorls that develop in three-way, spontaneous orchestration which never flags for a moment. The shorter second piece kicks off with an extended section of chattering drums, making way for the two partners to interject barking, ecstatic exclamations that mount with intensity as Graves hurtles in with clanging cowbell. The final piece is the most abstracted, with Doyle’s high-pitched flute skirling against the chafed yawp of Glover’s klaxon and Graves’ coursing flow. Here, improvisation and ritual are melded together with pelting focus. 

Glover concludes his interview reminiscing  that “It was like Prof was saying, there is no ensemble, there is no musical configuration that I can’t play with as long as I’m allowed to play what I want to play. In other words, his confidence factor was like, I know I have the essence of where any group wants to go. If they allow me to do my thing, I’ll take them there.” The sessions released on Children of the Forest are a fitting testament to that belief and provide a welcome addition to the documentation of the lineage of Graves’ musical legacy. Here's to hoping that Black Editions continues to mine the Prof’s archives. 

1) Joshua Abrams makes music about time and patience—music that, as he put it, “offers the possibility of slowing down.” With his group Natural Information Society, he crafts simple loops, primarily with a three-string African lute called the guimbri. A plethora of sonic elements—including guitar, harmonium, autoharp, and all kinds of percussion—gather around him like moss crawling up a wall. The result is a sound that moves forward while simultaneously seeming to freeze time.

The restraint of Abrams’ work matches his long-arc career, which he began in Philadelphia as an early member of the Roots. Moving to Chicago, he formed Thrill Jockey group Town & Country and became ensconced in the city’s jazz and indie scenes. Many of the people he met there, including Cairo Gang’s Emmett Kelly and Tortoise’s Jeff Parker, have performed in Natural Information Society, a rotating collective that recently solidified into a working unit.

You can hear the effect of that consistency on Simultonality, the fourth Natural Information Society album in seven years (alongside an excellent collaboration with Bitchin Bajas). The group moves together like a carbon-based machine, loose enough to allow for surprises but always focused on one goal. Over tracks that often last eight minutes or more, their focus takes on a Zen quality, as Abrams’ loops become so entrancing they seem to create their own private dimension in space-time.

Much of that time-expanding effect derives from Abrams’ unique choice of instrument. With its rubbery, resonant tone, the guimbri traditionally has been used for healing and trance ceremonies, which can sometimes last for upwards of eight hours. And so Abrams’ simple figures can continually hold attention across long stretches because his tone is so rich and multi-layered. Throughout Simultonality, his playing forms the foundation of each song, offering his bandmates a core around which they can circle, fly, digress, and connect.

As a result, the music on Simultonality coaxes you to quiet your mind and focus your attention, but it doesn’t necessarily move slowly. The majority of the songs here surge forward at an energetic clip, with some even sounding nervously excited. On opener “Maroon Dune,” Abrams’ pounding two-note cycle spawns guitar strums and drum rolls that intensify the song even though the pace doesn’t quicken. A shuffling rhythm instantly propels the 12-minute “Sideways Fall,” powering the group through thick sonic terrain (a perfect analogue to the rolling train tracks in the tune’s accompanying video.)

Abrams and his group don’t spend all of Simultonality in high gear. One track, “St. Cloud,” consists primarily of gentle bells and chimes, the musical equivalent of a trickling waterfall. And on closer “2182½,” Natural Information Society swerve into straight-up jazz, supporting the contemplative sax strains of Ari Brown as if they were a mid-period John Coltrane ensemble. It’s a nice glimpse of the diversity this group is capable of, infusing traditional structures with meditative qualities. But overall, Simultonality advances Abrams and Natural Information Society’s signature sound, one that gets even more unique the further it grows and expands.

2) Dusted, and particularly this writer, stands corrected. The last time we dealt with Joshua Abrams and the Natural Information Society was in a review of Anemometer, the group’s summit with the Bitchin Bajas. That review suggested that the Bajas brought the krautrock influence while Abrams was responsible for the Gnawa and world jazz references, but we were too binary for our own good. On Simultonality’s “Sideways Fall,” which takes up half of side two, drummers Mikel Avery and Frank Rosaly lean into Jaki Liebezeit’s beat pattern for Can’s “Vitamin C.”  

The aforementioned tune connects the dots between Can, James Brown and Moroccan trance grooves, and that’s by no means the whole story.  While Abrams and his group may confine themselves to natural information, that doesn’t mean that they can’t cast a wide net. The cascade of resonating electric strings and staccato harmonium that opens “Opiuchus” is like a neon-lit refraction of Steve Reich’s “Music For Eighteen Musicians,” and the swinging, cross-hatched rhythm workout that follows combines electric and acoustic sonorities like a banner woven from sky and earth. “Maroon Dune” uses another Can-derived rhythm as the foundation for another celestial-terrestrial dance; while most of the band keeps loose reign on a bucking beat, bellows-driven and electric keyboards glide overhead, evincing the paradoxically slow appearance of fast-moving clouds. Musical and elemental forces converge harmoniously without losing their essence. It’s a soul-warming response to the agents of fracture at work in America and other places.  

On all of these pieces, Abrams plays a Moroccan bass lute known as a guimbri, which infuses the music with a ceremonial vibe.  But he sets it aside on two others. He plays harp and messes with the tape speed on “St. Cloud,” a brighter-toned study of motion within motion. And he switches to double bass for the slow-burning closer “2128 ½.” The titular number refers to a now-empty patch of South Indiana Avenue that was once occupied by Fred Anderson’s Velvet Lounge. The Velvet’s jam sessions and out of town bookings provided essential schooling for both musicians and audiences, and Abrams played there many times. The piece starts out free and agitated, courting chaos, but then segues into a walking bass line over which Ben Boye lays down a carpet of cosmic electric piano chords and saxophonist Ari Brown blows a blues that blends the yearning of early 1960s John Coltrane with the sandpapery grit that Pharoah Sanders brought to Alice Coltrane’s music a decade later.  

One might get the idea from all these historical references that Abrams is just another guy who wants to show what he knows. But that misses the point that all of these antecedents used rhythm and tone to heal, enthuse, and mesmerize. This music was fashioned with similar intentions in mind, and it uses the recognizability of past intentions to help put its point across.

3) If Joshua Abrams’s Natural Information Society is in the business of creating “sonic environments,” then 2015’s Magnetoception was a place for wandering. Gently paced, its considerable variety distributed deliberately across four LP sides, the music guided with a light hand. This meant that before exploring every corner, there was a chance you might get lost—in thought, perhaps, or in the task of getting up again to flip the record over. NIS’s latest, by contrast, is a tighter, denser space. Lasting only 42 minutes, Simultonality has an energy that would be hard to sustain for much longer and a momentum that ushers the listener along with no chance for straying.

Given the niche that Abrams has dug out for NIS in the avant-jazz scene, it’s not surprising that at the root of Simultonality’s propulsive character lies rhythm, in particular the hypnotizing ostinati that ground Abrams’s simple, sturdy compositions. Though these looping patterns tend to be anchored by Abrams himself—mostly on guimbri, but also on harp and acoustic bass—it doesn’t hurt that pretty much everyone in the band plays some kind of rhythm instrument—some of them doubled: Emmett Kelly on electric guitar, Lisa Alvarado and Ben Boye on a variety of keyboards (plus Boye’s autoharp), and Michael Avery and Frank Rosaly on drums and percussion.

As the album’s title suggests, it’s the band’s collective focus that accounts for the full unstoppable force of the music. Opener “Maroon Dune” sets off on a bounding 5/4 two-step. Over Abrams’s punchy guimbri line, the rest of the band weave variations on the ostinato—all except Alvarado and Boye, whose broad chordal overlays sigh like exhalations in strange but compelling contrast to the perpetually unresolved odd meter. In other places all voices align, as in the Reich-like pulsating introduction of follow-up “Ophiuchus,” which eventually opens out into an affectingly wistful 6/8 groove. At the center of the album sits—or rather, dances—“Sideways Fall,” an epic twelve-minute jam whose quarter note percussive backbone has already earned numerous comparisons to Can’s “Vitamin C.” Here the band’s voices double and echo each other—not only Avery and Rosaly, but also Kelly, Boye, and Alvarado, who pass around complementary phrases with the circularity of a snake eating its own tail.

Whereas the first three tracks are all about groove, the final two move into new territory. With its web-like harp ostinato and dewdrop embellishments, “St. Cloud” lets in a bit of fresh air, welcome after the close, sweaty dance marathon that precedes it. But the real departure is “2128 ½,” named after the address (on Chicago’s South Indiana Avenue) that once hosted Fred Anderson’s beloved Velvet Lounge. Being a tribute, the tune is weighted with smoky, forlorn nostalgia, from the classic (and uncharacteristic, for NIS) free jazz introduction to the walking bass line (equally uncharacteristic) Abrams descends into at about the three-minute mark. Though the band works with what feels like a single consciousness throughout the album, the closer guest-stars veteran Chicago saxophonist Ari Brown. His playing is exactly what’s needed—broad and musical, dynamic and yet somehow static at the same time, evoking a lost past. It’s an unexpected but brilliant ending to one of NIS’s best albums yet.

4) Born in Philadelphia but now based in Chicago Joshua Abrams is a multi-instrumentalist and composer who specialises on the three stringed North African bass lute or guimbri, a ceremonial instrument of the Gnawa people of Saharan Africa.

Originally a double bass player Abrams first made his name on the jazz and experimental music scene in Chicago where he played with drummer Hamid Drake and saxophonist Matana Roberts among others.

For several years Abrams has led Natural Information Society, a floating group of musicians who combine the sounds of North Africa with elements of jazz, the minimalism of Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Philip Glass and vintage krautrock. It’s an exotic mix that has been documented over the course of four previous albums, “Natural Information” (2010), “Represencing” (2012) and “Automaginary” and “Magnetoception” (both 2015). “Automaginary” represented a collaboration with fellow Chicago band “Bitchin’ Bajas.

Drake has been a regular member of NIS but is absent from “Simultonality”. Nevertheless many of the musicians who have been part of the project since its inception do appear. For “Simultonality” Natural Information Society line up as follows;

Joshua Abrams – guimbri, bass, small harp, bells

Lisa Alvarado – harmonium, Leslie, percussion

Ben Boye – chromatic electric autoharp, piano, Wurlitzer

Ari Brown – tenor saxophone

Emmett Kelly – electric guitar

Mikel Avery – drums, percussion

Frank Rosaly – drums, percussion, resonator bells

With NIS Abrams has always preferred to work with two drummers and on this recording Avery can be heard in the left stereo channel and Rosaly in the right. Their percussive sounds are augmented by the metallic shaker sound of the rattle attached to Abrams’ guimbri.

“Simultonality” isn’t a jazz album per se despite Abrams’ roots in that scene. The leader has declared the album as being about “pure motion” and it’s different again to the music of its immediate predecessor “Magnetoception”, an album that I haven’t heard but which has been described as “beautifully spacious and unhurried”.  Abrams himself merely says “the last album was slow” and leaves it at that.

Given its roots in Gnawa ceremonial music and with the amount of percussive hardware in evidence it comes as no surprise to find that the music on “Simultonality” is highly rhythmic. It’s also dense and intense and tightly knit with opener “Maroon Dune” featuring Alvarado’s harmonium swirling around the interlocking rhythmic patterns generated by Abrams, Avery and Rosaly. “Simultonality” consists of only five pieces, some of them being of considerable length. In Gnawa culture the guimbri has been used to provide the pulse in trance ceremonies and Abrams’ relentless, implacable groove performs that function here as the other instruments coalesce around it.

“Ophiucus” introduces a more obvious minimalist influence which gives the music a spacier feel that ties in with the acknowledged krautrock influences. Kelly’s guitar fulfils a more prominent role among the layered keyboards and the insistent rhythms. It’s denser and more multi-faceted than the opener and there’s the sense that the members of NIS are operating like a single sonic organism to work towards a common musical goal, a process that the press release compares with bees in a hive. There are no soloists as such, but everybody is deeply involved.

Following the intensity of the first two pieces the gentle “St. Cloud” represents an oasis of calm with its atmospheric kalimba like sounds augmented by the quiet rustling of bells and the subtle use of keyboard textures.

The hypnotic grooves are back with a vengeance on the twelve minute “Sideways Fall” which opens side two of the vinyl version of the album. Here the rhythm is adapted from Can drummer Jaki Liebezeit’s break in that band’s tune “Vitamin C” with Avery and Rosaly dividing the beat into separate parts at Abram’s request.  Meanwhile Hamid Drake claims that the rhythm was first popularised by Jabo Starks and Clyde Stubblefield of James Brown’s band the J.B.s. In any event it’s an absorbing journey with its compulsive grooves, deeply layered textures and snatches of swirling, minimalist inspired melody. It’s the most hypnotic piece on the album, the relentless grooves evoking memories of not only Liebezeit and Neu’s Klaus Dinger but also the rhythms of contemporary electronic dance music.

The closing “21281/2 South Indiana” finds Abrams switching back to double bass and the music adopting more of a jazz feel with a freely structured introduction. The introduction of Brown’s tenor sax steers the music even more firmly in a jazz direction with the saxophonist contributing the only genuine ‘solo’ of the album. The music is reminiscent of the ‘spiritual jazz’ of John and Alice Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders.

The song title harks back to Abrams’ time as house bassist at Fred Anderson’s Chicago venue the Velvet Lounge on South Indiana Avenue. Anderson would often play the music of Alice Coltrane between sets and at the end of the evening and this performance represents a homage to those times. Interestingly Abrams regards the music of NIS as something of a spiritual journey and cites the bassist and composer William Parker as a significant inspiration for the project.

“Simultonality” continues to find Abrams creating an increasingly individual music that binds disparate musical elements together in pursuit of a common purpose. The closing track is likely to represent a highlight for jazz listeners. Elsewhere those of that persuasion, like myself, may find the music a little bit too repetitive and lacking in the harmonic invention and stylistic and dynamic variety of the best contemporary jazz.

The side-long tracks, averaging over 20 minutes each, are named only for the dates on which they were recorded and thus lack any point of reference beyond the music itself, which occupies a space somewhere between jazz and ambient similar to that explored by Parker with and alongside groups such as the Natural Information Society and tracing back to his time with Tortoise. The sound has a live feel but no audience noise. Apparently entirely improvisational, the music is nevertheless purposeful, evolving without reliance on crescendos or quick shifts in tempo or instrumentation. 

A colleague at Dusted described this recording as “a groover not a smoover,” which gets to the heart of the matter: all four players remain committed to the collective project rather than relying on one another to support their soloing. To be sure, there are some fine solos, such as the elliptical guitar figure beginning around 2:45 on “2019-07-08 II,” the sax at around 11:00 on “2019-07-08 I,” and the back-to-back guitar and sax workouts in the first half of “2019-05-19” that develop organically with the support of the rhythm section. These and other moments, including the stately opening of “2019-05-19” after what sounds like glitchy organ and the emergence of a guitar (?) line that sounds like a Bitchin’ Bajas synth in synch with the drums around 13:00 on “2019-07-08 II” help shape the listening experience into a kind of journey.

Simultaneously soothing, playful, and thought-provoking, Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy is an outstanding recording with the potential to appeal even to those for whom Parker’s work with Tortoise or in other settings hasn’t resonated. The liner notes rightly compare the set to such landmark live recordings as Lee Morgan’s Live at the Lighthouse in which a band, rather than running through well-known pieces, uses the setting to make a fresh statement.