The Retrographer, Issue 82 (September, 2 0 2 1)

October 03, 2021

Tim Carman Trio, Gabriel Bernini, Andy Shauf, The War On Drugs, Kacey Musgraves, Amber Mark, DEEP LEARNING, Lucinda Chua, meetka, Low, Pat Metheny, and more!

The Retrographer, Issue 82

Bulletins

Ten Songs for September, 2 0 2 1 | Listen to these songs on Spotify and YouTube

 “Scoochie”, Tim Carman Trio (Spotify / YouTube) – Tim used to tell me about Bob Gullotti, the man who taught him drums from when Tim was a teen until Gullotti’s death last year. With organist Ken Clark and guitarist Steve Fell, he sends up one final thanks from the drum throne. 

“You Got Me”, Gabriel Bernini (Spotify / YouTube) – The story goes that Al Kooper wanted to audition for Highway 61, but decided to try out on organ when he heard Mike Bloomfield warming up. Bernini (perhaps) apocryphally had his whole band switch instruments for this beautiful track, and it sounds set out on the bleachers of highway 61 itself.

“Green Glass”, Andy Shauf (Spotify / YouTube) – Shauf is a great storyteller; loves writing scenes, characters to return to, places that make you feel something. “Great American sitcom resumes, takes home the laugh; Everything feels better when I'm thumbing through the past.”

“I Don’t Live Here Anymore”, The War On Drugs and Lucius (Spotify / YouTube) – More highway music from Adam Granduciel, but now he’s later in the 1980s, deeper in his gated snares and twisting synths, arriving somewhere nearer to where Merchandise and the 1975 are headed.

“breadwinner” Kacey Musgraves (Spotify / YouTube) – This new album is no fun, but why the hell should divorce be? Instead, it offers some of the most cogently withering lyricism mauled matrimony has seen since “Idiot Wind”, peaking with this unsparing forewarning for future lovers.

“Foreign Things”, Amber Mark (Spotify / YouTube) – Let that bassline drop, that piano loop clang, those drums clatter. Mark sounds at peace among the swaggering instrumentation, laying deep in the cut and letting the ease wash over: “Feel like I could do this every night.”

“Song of Past & Present”, DEEP LEARNING (Spotify / YouTube) – Richard Pike finds movement in placidity, serenity in the slightest perturbations. Sounds pass like petals falling into water, glints of light on its surface, stones stretching and wobbling gently below.

“An Avalanche”, Lucinda Chua (Spotify / YouTube) – Delicate and careful, padding like a cat down a dark hallway, Chua seems to write movie music for movies that haven’t been made yet, music that apparates characters like spirits.

“New Me”, meetka (Spotify / YouTube) – An etude is a short, solo piece written to show off the skill of a player. It needn’t be complicated or challenging, per se, just demonstrate an execution of intent, an authentic demonstration of the soul of a piece, the soul inside the music that imprecision, unfamiliarity, or hesitancy might obscure. Just the feeling.

“The Price You Pay (It Must Be Wearing Off)”, Low (Spotify / YouTube) – Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker’s 7+ minute post-rock apocalyptic album closer is somehow both a terrifying display of maximalism, and a perfect distillation of the group’s minimalism. Who knows how they do it.

One Album for September, 2 0 2 1  

 “Bright Size Life”, Pat Metheny (ECM, 1976) (Spotify) 

Pat Metheny was born in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, a child of musicians in the heart of the midwest. As a teen, he acquired a Gibson ES-140 ¾ crawled deep inside it for the rest of his life. On the other side, he found wide open spaces, tones and colors at once familiar and new.  He remembers running the turntable back, again and again, to untangle Roy Hanes’s parts on We Three, or to work out the mysteries of Paul Bley’s Footloose. He reckoned he’d practice ten, twelve hours a day back then (he once claimed, perhaps facetiously, twenty), spreading whatever talent he had across the widest surface of hard work he could find. 

As a teen gigging around nearby Kansas City, Missouri, he wandered into the earshot of Bill Lee, a jazz musician himself and the dean of the University of Miami’s School of Music. Within a week of his first semester, he was offered an unusual transfer option: To become a professor of the very subject he came to the school to learn, electric guitar. He was 18 years old.

He wasn’t alone as a young faculty member at the school. One night at a show in town, Metheny heard a bassist so talented, "I almost went and got back on the bus and went back to Missouri, to tell you the truth. It was just shocking to hear somebody playing at that level, who was two or three years older than me.” That bassist, Jaco Pastorius, joined the University of Miami faculty the next year, at the age of 22, and became Metheny’s first contemporary collaborator to meet his ability.

Metheny’s skill had its own magnetism; a year after his ascendance at the University of Miami, jazz vibraphonist Gary Burton – one of Metheny’s idols – offered him a teaching assistantship at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. That led to a place in Burton’s band, and then a record contract of his own from ECM, the totem of modern jazz. In December, 1975 Burton flew Metheny to Germany to record his debut album, Bright Size Life.

Bright Size Life’s trio featured Metheny, Pastorius, and drummer Bob Moses, a brilliant, tasteful player who had already gigged with Burton, as well as Roland Kirk. Like so much of Metheny’s steep, wunderkind ascent, it arrived conceptually whole and perfectly prepared. This wasn’t an accident; In his year with Burton’s band, Metheny presented song after song to his bandleader, who harshly but pragmatically judged them, reminding the young guitarist that his first record might be his only one, and to make sure the music that got on it was the best he could produce. 

It wasn’t until he wrote the title track that he passed Burton’s muster. “Follow that thread, because that, I don’t know what that is,” Metheny remembers Burton saying. “Everything else you’ve brought in, I know what that is, but that one, that’s something else.” He had broken through his extreme pedagogy and found his own sound. “For me too, that tune crystallized something,” He reflected. “That idea that you have to play on the changes, play Coltrane stuff, play in all twelve keys – now that you can do that, don’t do that.”

By that, Burton meant something clear to jazz players, but not specific to jazz or even music, really. Players learn the classics not to use them, per se, but to know what’s been done, and where to go next. They learn the rules to break them.

What came out on Bright Size Life and its titular track stood confidently on its own. It was certainly jazz, and a forum for the practiced skill of its performers, but there was no didacticism there. It sounds like no jazz record – or maybe no record at all – before it, and yet like so much music that would follow.

From its opening fifth enclosures, “Bright Size Life” is moody, open, and blue like the wintry gloaming pictured on its cover. In only its first few moments, it establishes the character of its players indelibly: Metheny’s super-clean, precise lead; Pastorius’s groaning, lyrical bass figures; Moses’s swelling drum lines, seemingly matching his bandmates’ lines in dynamics and phrasing. Metheny and Pastorius are twin leads, telepathically switching from supporting one another to stepping out front. Metheny’s inspiration throughout was Gary Burton’s “Falling Grace”, which celebrated “individual movements – it could be the bass note, it could be the way a common tone cuts across more chords than usual” and modeled the mystery he’d tap into. 

“I may have been the only person that ever said, ‘That’s great… but’” Metheny explained of his loquacious bassist. “These chords are kind of unusual.” They had to be celebrated, not stepped on by the chatty exuberance of its performers. There is a clear, austere, and distinctly middle-America voice to this music. Metheny’s midwestern upbringing is denoted everywhere on the album, with titles like “Missouri Uncompromised”, “Midwestern Night’s Dream”, and “Omaha Celebration”. It was connoted too, its wide-open spaces seeming to arise from the very voicings he chose. This music has some untraced homology with the emo and math rock that would later emerge from the same region, in bands like American Football. These bands painted the emptiness of their homes in similar shapes, particularly what are called shell chords, and with their own super-clean lead guitar lines. “I love triads,” Metheny described of his own harmonic proclivities, a simple harmonic construction that would resonate in nearby musical movements to come. Musically, such choices were unusual for competitively flashy jazz artists, but the spareness of these voicings spoke to the capaciousness of its subject matter. “I like all the stuff, but I really like just hanging on D, and why not?” 

This dusky, moody tonality is featured throughout the album: The first minute of “Sirabhorn” stacks up in crystalline shapes before the band creeps in soft as snow behind it. “Unity Village”, a solo piece loosened of Metheny’s distinctive collaborators, whispers melodies over open fingerings that sound almost like Spanish guitar. The darkness of “Unquity Road” seems to mount endlessly, finding more and more ways to create tension, climbing without gaining altitude like an MC Escher.

Bright Size Life’s paramount stroke of genius wasn’t even completed until the night before recording finished. “Midwestern Night’s Dream” features a twelve-string guitar – uncommon for jazz – chiming harmonics, skittering ride cymbal, and, at close, a remote lead line rendered on the bass. For its first 75 seconds, it shimmers and beams like the first movement in a symphony dedicated to the sunrise, before it flattens into a caliginous landscape again. 

“As far as I was concerned, it was a disaster. We had played lots of gigs, and it didn’t sound anything like what I was hearing coming back from the speakers,” Metheny remembered. The album sold fewer than 900 copies, and Metheny might have thought that Burton’s warning – that your first might be your last, might be your only record – might have come true. But in the years that followed, its shadow grew. Artists who heard Bright Size Life hadn’t heard anything quite like it, and it left an imprint that built Metheny’s legend as one of jazz’s leading voices throughout the end of the 20th century. 

Metheny remembers a characteristically blunt question from a German jazz critic who asked, “Are you the last old guy, or the first new guy?” “The thing is,” he commented, “I think you know what he means, too. For me, there was no option other than trying to invent stuff.”

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