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When is an improvisation more than an improvisation? When a spontaneous collaboration gels into something that’s more the sum of its parts. Pianist Zack Clarke and cellist Chris Irvine have been improvising together for more than a decade. Their new album Stereotaxi is certainly unpredictable, with plenty of unexpected juxtapositions, subtle musical jokes, and “wrong” notes. But each of these 14 improvised duets, many of them no longer than a typical pop song, has a discernible semantics. Each has a color palette, and each creates and sustains a mood. Most of the time the two musicians match modes. Most of the tracks reckon with jazz, and I don’t mean free jazz – and they’re not self-indulgent.
Stereotaxi
There’s quite a bit to unpack on this album. The tracks range from the frenetic (“Gliding Through,” “Volcanic Conniption”) to the pastoral (“Rise to the Highest”) and melancholy (“Fragments of Sunrise”). Part of the especially jazzy “Sit Still” suggests a ballad, while in the appropriately named “Sorrow Song” Clarke’s gliding touch on the piano recalls Bill Evans‘ artfulness.
“6 Miniatures” crams a rainbow of cello techniques into just over three minutes, which cruise by like a miniature “Carnival of the Animals.” Clarke and Irvine repeat this exercise in the more subdued “4 Short Pieces,” where the cello keens sadly over arpeggios out of the Romantic tradition. In “Rise to the Highest” Clarke improvises accompaniment that suggests Chopin and perhaps Fauré under Irvine’s emotionally charged melodies.
The cellist reaches outside the standard playbook of techniques in several tracks, like “Volcanic Conniption,” the slithery “Confrontation,” and, with subtle harmonics, the song-like, shimmery, and gripping “Walking in Water.”
Unformed Forms
Clarke and Irvine improvise with a remarkable synchronicity. A quintessential example is “Dancing with Fumes,” one of the albums’ most affecting numbers – I was going to say “tunes,” meaning “songs,” that’s how together and formed-sounding the track is. Despite unorthodox intervals it reads like a lost jazz standard. Another example is the slow march “Stride Me to the Moon,” which, far from featuring stride piano, transfixes with gentle chordal development.
The longest track is the last. In “Dreams of Weight” Clarke hews mostly to traditional jazz harmonies while Irvine roams from traditional to 12-tone territory and back.
Stereotaxi from Zack Clarke and Chris Irvine is an unusually solidified improvisational album that starts in jazz, progresses through multiple other traditions, and emerges as something new and quite exhilarating. It’s out now on New Focus Recordings.
