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The music of composer Marc Mellits caught my attention back in 2018 with its adventurous mixture of minimalism and rhythmic complexity. “If there’s a nagging voice in the back of your head telling you serious music shouldn’t also be fun,” I wrote, “tell it to shut up and listen to Marc Mellits’s works on Smoke.”
Bass clarinet and marimba were prominent on that album. Now bass clarinetist Jeff Anderle has recorded a new set of Mellits’s propulsive music. On the six intense movements of Tight Sweater, Anderle is joined by Haruka Fujii on marimba and Kate Campbell on piano. On the equally rhythmic eight movements of Titan, Anderle teams with the Friction Quartet.
Throughout, Mellits continues to mold his unique short-attention-span minimalism that combines seriousness of purpose with a spirit of play. Along with the continual rhythmic gaming, part of the fun is picking out individual instruments to focus on in turn as you listen.
Tight Sweater
The uptempo movements, and that’s most of them, have a definite minimalist flavor, but within the repetitive phrasing lurks continuous change, harmonic but also rhythmic. You can lock attention on a steady beat, such as the rapid seven-counts of the first two movements of Tight Sweater, amusingly titled “Exposed Zipper” and “Trans Fatty Acid’s Rain.” But as these brief pieces play out, runs emerge that adhere to the rhythm while breaking, or seem to, the bounds of time signature.
Anderle finds the soulful side of the bass clarinet in pieces like the pastoral “Mara’s Lullaby.” The piano provides swelling harmonic accompaniment while the marimba murmurs gauzy atmospherics.
Just as you’ve caught on to the two alternating time signatures in “Pickle Trousers,” the mischeivous Mellits trips you up with odd-time measures. And the watery, polyrhythmic “Evil Yellow Penguin” mixes common time with unpredictable beats.
The final movement returns to the three-plus-four time of “Exposed Zipper,” but then blows it up. The listening brain wants so hard to make sense out of it, but after a while it feels safer to just surrender to the temporariness of it all. Mellits even creates the illusion of an accelerando in the closing minute by shrinking the length of the measures.
Titan
On Titan Anderle works with violinists Otis Harriel and Kevin Rogers, violist Mitso Floor, and cellist Doug Machiz. The first movement builds a cartoonish theme into a vaguely menacing development that’s over before you know it. In the second, staccato punctuation marks from the bass clarinet pound with airy force and duet with arco strings – except where the two switch places in a pastoral middle section that’s all the more effective for its tininess.
This suite too has slow movements with pretty melodies. “Harada” runs barely more than two minutes, yet manages to find a surprising ending. The swaying chords of “Liquid Methane Rain” make way for an evocative melody from the bass clarinet, played in an upper register with something of the muted timbre of a French horn.
The tense, dynamically active “Hyperion Chorioid” harks back to the pioneering work of Laurie Anderson, full of dark emotion, but diving in and getting out – like the majority of the pieces in this collection – in less than three minutes. “Dispersed Retina” plays with the ambiguity of 3/4 vs. 6/8 time, the latter winning out in a rare pizzicato sequence. Bars in different time signatures alternate in the sunny “Velvet Kickbox Hydroxy,” though the three-plus-four that we heard in Tight Sweater plays an important part again.
A minute-long final piece called “Phoebe & Janus” serves as a prickly coda to this well-nigh irresistible collection, with Anderle overblowing to create a percussive effect, as if to say: I am the master of this instrument. And a bass clarinet guru he certainly is.
Warp & Weft from Jeff Anderle and composer Marc Mellits is out now on New Focus Recordings and available at Bandcamp.
