Orphic Machine (Bag Production Records)
Ben Goldberg
Released March 1, 2015
DownBeat Four-and-a-Half-Star Review
AllMusic Favorite Jazz Albums 2015
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/browse/MPREb_VoMRFzu1Hzg
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/7wHgtAakI6l6oj4X7nw8bn?si=N_HTiywNSi67gc7whXMwPA
About:
In 1978 I attended Brandeis University for one year as a freshman. It was my good fortune to get thrown into a dorm room with Tass Bey, a young man from Montreal who believed in the transformational power of literature to a degree beyond anybody I had previously encountered. Tass introduced me to pre-White Album Beatles and the writing of Leonard Cohen. Later he was to introduce me to some other things, but first he instructed me to enroll in a literature course entitled The Representation of Experience taught by a man called Allen Grossman. That course hit me very hard. We read old books – The Bible, Gilgamesh, Moby-Dick, etc., and Professor Grossman showed us into a world where reading, thought, meaning, action, and understanding came together. I wouldn’t say he taught us – it’s more like he embodied the business of knowing.
Years later, finding my way out of a dark period of life, I developed a sudden thirst for poetry. I got in touch with the poet Susan Stewart after I heard echoes of Allen Grossman in her work. Susan invited me to attend a 2006 gathering in honor of Professor Grossman’s retirement from Johns Hopkins where he read powerfully from his poems. I began studying a book of his called Summa Lyrica: A Primer of the Commonplaces in Speculative Poetics. The book is constructed as a set of interrelated aphorisms whose purpose is “to bring to mind ‘the poem,’ as an object of thought and as an instrument for thinking.”
Around this time I discovered an affinity for writing vocal music, when my group Tin Hat embarked on a project of songs using poems of E E Cummings as lyrics. I found I enjoyed the push-and-pull between words, melody, and harmony. (The Rain Is A Handsome Animal, with six of my songs, was released in August, 2012, on the New Amsterdam label.)
Chamber Music America commissioned a composition for large ensemble based upon Summa Lyrica. I had been reading the book for five years, and I intended to compose music based on its structure. But, as a poem cannot be restated in other words (for then it would be a different poem), the book would not allow me to summarize or map it. I got stuck in that useful way of getting stuck that suddenly opens up new possibility: the aphorisms in the book had been working on me, and I needed to let them work directly on the music, by using them as lyrics for songs. Something about the craziness of the idea – not a book of poems, but statements about poetry – writing about writing – really got me going. So I found myself writing songs with words like
“The function of poetry is to obtain for everybody one kind of success at the limits of the autonomy of the will.”
Orphic Machine, an evening-length work of ten movements, premiered in March 2012 at the Freight & Salvage Coffeehouse in Berkeley, and at the Blue Whale in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times, in a review, called Orphic Machine “knotted and occasionally spooky composition marked by dazzling interplay.” With a 2013 grant from the Shifting Foundation, I was able to record Orphic Machine in September 2013, for release in 2014.
Professor Grossman speaks of poetry as an instrument for the conservation of value across time. His work created work for me. Now I hope that you will find something of value in the act of listening.
Track Listing:
1. Reading (Ben Goldberg / Alan Grossman) 10:08
2. Line of Less Than Ten (Ben Goldberg / Alan Grossman) 06:13
3. Bongoloid Lens (Ben Goldberg / Alan Grossman) 03:11
4. Immortality (Ben Goldberg / Alan Grossman) 12:05
5. The Inferential Poem (Ben Goldberg / Alan Grossman) 03:52
6. How to Do Things with Tears (Ben Goldberg / Alan Grossman) 01:37
7. Care (Ben Goldberg / Alan Grossman) 13:22
8. The Present (Ben Goldberg / Alan Grossman) 06:38
9. What Was That (Ben Goldberg / Alan Grossman) 05:57
10. The Orphic Machine (Ben Goldberg / Alan Grossman) 12:44
Personnel:
Carla Kihlstedt: voice, violin
Ben Goldberg: clarinet, contra alto clarinet
Ron Miles: trumpet
Rob Sudduth: tenor saxophone
Myra Melford: piano
Nels Cline: guitar
Kenny Wollesen: vibraphone, orchestra bells, drums
Greg Cohen: bass
Ches Smith: drums
Recorded September, 2013, at Sear Sound, New York
Produced by David Breskin
Engineering and Mixing: Ron Saint Germain
Assistant Engineer: Eli Crews, Ted Tunhill
Mastering: Joe Gastwirt
Photography: Mimi Chakarova, Fredrik Nilsen Layout: Yuki Bowman
Review:
The poet Allen Grossman, a 1989 MacArthur Fellow who died last year, was an early mentor to clarinetist Ben Goldberg at Brandeis University. Goldberg has created a brilliant homage to Grossman with this sequence of musical settings of his teacher’s witty thoughts on poetics. The ensemble ranges from delicately voiced winds and acoustic piano to fuzzy electric guitar and vibes, but the focal point is Goldberg’s bandmate from Tin Hat, Carla Kihlstedt, who plays violin and sings with sly, understated clarity and an occasional Björk-like hitch in her voice. The result is a species of art song, but that term doesn’t capture this music’s wildly fetching mix of jazz, folk, soul, cabaret, blues and tango. The lyrics arrive in chunks of various lengths at the beginning, middle and end of instrumental passages. Goldberg’s melodies mimic the emotional content of the words in a manner that recalls the punning subtlety of Elizabethan song. On the meditation “Immortality,” the line “one kind of success” is repeated three times in three different stanzas, but sometimes goes up, sometimes down. Then, on the most sobering words of all—“death, death, death”—the melody unexpectedly soars. The work’s many attractive musical passages include deft voicings for clarinet and saxophone and a warmly swinging bass solo by Greg Cohen on “Reading”; a heaven-ascending vibes line by Kenny Wollesen on “Line Of Less Than Ten”; the ’20s cabaret vibe of clarinet and muted trumpet on “How To Do Things With Tears”; Goldberg’s clarinet blips popping up like stars in the night sky on “Bongoloid Lens”; the cyclical, African thrust of “Care”; the Monkish whimsy of “What Was That?”; and Goldberg’s growling contra-alto clarinet on “The Orphic Machine,” which spirals into a dark apocalypse.
Paul de Barros (DownBeat)
