#simultonality

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One might get the idea from all these historical references that Abrams is just another guy who wants to show what he knows.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.