Occasional Jazz Conjectures

[Liner Notes for VISITS by Triadė]

“Enough of clouds, waves, aquariums, water-sprites and nocturnal scents;
what we need is music of the earth,
everyday music…music one can live in like a house.”
Jean Cocteau

Long ago, different city, different century, the recordings on VISITS were first released. Back then, in the liner notes I noted that, “Revolution is always a choice of illusions. . .,” as relevant to the rigor of the 15th century Italian camerata and the writings of Huysman or A. A. Milne as to the defiance of Rev. Frank Wright, Fanon, or a De Kooning.

They were daring then, because they danced around any preconceived ideas of so-called avant-garde music, chamber jazz, or other revolutionary conceptions you might expect from a pianist-composer reared on the soundtrack of Pittsburgh’s Wiley Avenue, the plush existential doo-wop orbit of the Ravens, bebop and the Beats; who came of age at the intersection of Drexel and don’t- I- know-it in Chicago—an ineluctable, restless moment in the 1960s when Black art and poetry, music, and the collective revolution of the AACM created seismic and thermal disturbance in the comfort of jazz’s split-level, prefab dwelling.

But then again this might be just what you’d expect from a man who quotes Huxley, channels Maggie and Jiggs, Miro and the Bleys (Carla and Paul) and mixes up hints of tart, bitter truth with high-style Thurber-esque epiphany—all the while passing off a Slavic Ponderance in the Brief Face of Dixie.

“Surely,” said the poet George Oppen, “infiniteness is the most evident thing in the world.”

Carei Thomas is revolutionary and subversive because he deploys melody and nostalgia-free doses of antibromides with a utopian adherence to truth and beauty. None of that les sanglots longs des violins d’automne banality—if it ever does appear it’s because it’s part of a Swiftian high-five, a send-up of pompier and corpulent, self-important art with a curly-cued, capital A.

A man after my own heart, Thomas chases the curveball cubism and whiplash reflexes of bebop while maintaining a cinematic engagement with sonic narrative. He has both a deep abiding interest in poetry and form and a love of yawp, jitter, and maniacal wit (that essential tension between tearful joy, noise, and–somewhere in the fulcrum between tragedy and guffaw—equal cathartic parts Fats Waller, Hugo Ball and Ernie Kovacs).

In his life and art, Thomas has devoured sur place Cecil Taylor’s dictum (copied into a 1963 notebook of Clark Coolidge): “You are the recipient of all the cultural things around you that you wish to be–things like dance, theater, literature, the people you see, so you are a departure.”

12 years later I find myself face to face with a reverse Madeleine. Stage directions from Corneille: “The action takes place in the palace of the king.” Gone reflections. Flickers of things I’ve yet to see and hear. Vivid sounds. Henry Adams-like invisible forces of radiation and electric fields—a dynamo whirring like a symbol infinity.

It’s 11:52 pm and I’m hearing things that have a freshness—a new now not-beforeness:

“Any time there is a surface there is a surface and every time there is a suggestion there is a suggestion and every time there is silence there is silence and every time that is languid there is that there then and not oftener, not always, not particular, tender and changing and external and central and surrounded and singular and simple and the same and the surface and the circle and the shine and the succor and the white and the same and the better and the red and the same and the centre and the yellow and the tender and the better, and altogether.”—Gertrude Stein

In wildly fantastic, impressionistically lyrical moments (“Ghetto Pastorality” is a good example) Thomas’ “Brief Reality” embodies the same plane occupied by such late millennial fables as those of young Harold and the terra incognitae bursting forth from his purple crayon. When composer David Means noted “the elegance and interiority” of Thomas’ musical plane—he was surely thinking of the nooks, crannies, and conceptual corners of melody and monument that Triadė inhabits.

Call it conspicuous combustion, guileless alchemical abandon, or as Babs Gonzales named it, “expubidence”—but Thomas brings out a bold sense of gesture and magic realist tendency in his collaborators, from violinist Gary Schulte’s Fernando Suarez Paz-like swoops to Michelle Kinney’s earthy, contours on the cello.

Composed from a shifting series of vantage points, Triadė‘s music is best described by pianist Carei Thomas: “Brief Realities are ever changing series of purely invented music often spiced with cells or fragments of written material, used as a kind of skin or connective tissue. Within this tonal order, IMPROVISATION ignites the developmental process that creates the true composition and allows it to remain everchangingly fresh.” It’s a highly personal process that “Amends all irony while continuing to unwind . . .”

Music: Reciprocity, desire, and the dust of a fine rage.

Listen a while. And then some more. One might gain a glimpse or two into the nature of combustion and ignition, silence, radiance and history (for a Ravelian minute, I thought I that might have been a Berceuse sur le nom de Gabriel Fauré, but then I realized you were just happy to see me), bits of condensation and currents of surrender or maybe an expanse where you go to receive time. On VISITS, the quixotic swipes of ornament and de-chambered are both accessible and challenging, but most of all they are NOW:

“All experience rushes into this vortex. . .All the energized past, all the past that is living and worthy to live. ALL MOMENTUM …, instinct charging the PLACID, NON-ENERGIZED FUTURE. . . . All the past that is vital, all the past that is capable of living into the future, is present in the vortex, now.” —Ezra Pound

Once upon a time in 1995, I was reminded of an elliptical (albeit restoring) quality in this music that made me feel “more like I do now than when I came in.” It is about quiet revolution, purposeful moments that allow us breath and pause and deploy deep in us an impulse to:
“modulate
to distill
of waves
of electromagnetic
of inertia
of ionization
of polarization
of refraction
of tides
of reflection
of equilibrium
of symmetry
of friction
to stretch
to bounce
to erase
to spray
to systematize
to refer
to force
of mapping
of location
of context
of time
of carbonization
to continue”
—Richard Serra

( Tim DuRoche, Minneapolis, 1995; Portland, 2007)