A Wondrous Trumpet-Piano Paean to Nature
A pair of avant-gardists play duets to calm and startle you
If you’re looking for 35 minutes of riveting calm, this is the album for you. And if “riveting calm” strikes you as oxymoronic, well, the album fits that in several ways. It consists of duets between trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and pianist Amina Claudine Myers, both 82 years old but as youthful in spirit as anyone around. They’re veterans of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), known for its avant-garde jazz artists, but Myers has long been active in gospel, chamber-orchestra, and Broadway circles, while, in recent years, Smith has composed and improvised music inspired by landmarks of natural beauty (check out his albums America’s Natural Parks and The Great Lakes Suites) and the intricately minimalist art of Nasreen Mohamedi (A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke). He also put out a boxed set of 12 string quartets.
Central Park’s Mosaics of Reservoir, Lake, Paths and Gardens (yes, that is the album’s title) is a gorgeous work—consisting of seven pieces, six composed by Smith, one (for solo piano) by Myers--that really do evoke the ethereal calm and underlying turbulence of New York’s Central Park. Both elements are vital. Smith holds lots of wavering whole notes on his trumpet, but his choices of notes strike just the right blend of harmony and dissonance. Myers evokes ripples on the piano, almost like a harp, but the ripples border on rapids, there’s nothing New Age about them.
Don’t be put off by their avant-garde backgrounds. There’s adventure in this music, but there’s also melody and mood; it’s accessible at every level that you want to probe, and there’s plenty of layers here, more than there seem to be at first listen.
Not only that, it sounds fantastic. You wouldn’t know it unless you looked at the record’s inner label very closely, but the LP—on a 180-gram slab of clear vinyl—was mastered at 45rpm. (The cover says nothing about the speed. I can imagine many buyers lowering the needle as the disc spins at 33-1/3, hearing slow subsonic rumbles and wondering “WTF?”)
It was recorded at Sear Sound, one of New York’s finest studios.
Producer Sun Chung, who once worked at ECM and more recently launched Red Hook Records (you can purchase the record directly from the website) told me that the trumpet was miked by an RCA 44 and an RCA 88, the piano covered by a pair of Schoeps CMC6s blended with an AKG C24. The tracks were taken down on high-res digital, then mixed on an Avalon analog board. There is some reverb on the trumpet, some natural, some supplied by a Bricasti processor. (It doesn’t sound pasted on.)
The CD (which I heard first) also sounds very good, but the vinyl is eye-popping. It’s like listening to a different recording, with much wider dynamics (and much finer dynamic contrasts), plummier ovetones, an airier ambience, a bigger (more lifesize) piano, a more golden and upfront trumpet.
