By Michael Ullman
The message of the album on the triumph of AI is not convincing, but music, with its variety of sounds and tempos, its zigzaggy changes, written and improvised, is completely captivating.
Jon Irabagon, Servers (Irabbagast Records)
Describing his animated music and forward for Big Band on ServersThe saxophonist / composer Jon Irabagon says: “Beauty, humor, darkness and madness are part of it.” He refines his assertion by adding that he wants us to feel “beauty with the feeling of imminent misfortune”. Irabagon seems to be attached to the idea of misfortune. His latest recording, Survivalwas a solo ensemble played on the tiny saxophone sopranino. He recorded it in two bunkers of ammunition in the southern Dakota: among the songs he played in these shelters – precious by the rich paranoids – was a short song called “Doom Doom”. More fun, another selection was “how to eat a pine to survive”. (To be fair, the final number on Survival was “the sound of love of Duke Ellington”.)
As its title suggests, Irabagon’s latest recording finds him arguing with the idea of artificial intelligence. (A servers farm is a group of computers working together to provide services and storage: they could say, a kind of band.)
Its ambivalence is interesting. “Technology and I tend to be in contradiction with each other … I can’t even light my phone without something being. This recording was therefore a cathartic experience for me. In Irabagon, the five pieces on Servers Dramatizing the gradual takeover of human independence by AI nevertheless, in the past, Irabagon relied on techniques derived from its version of AI before starting to write, the saxophonist studied the recordings of His musicians and “extracts” them for sentences and key habits. He wrote for “nine specific musicians” after having “determined how to maximize the way they play naturally”. He took care to integrate their natural techniques and sentences into his compositions. His group consisted of his quartet – Pianist/Keyboardist Matt Mitchell, Bassist Chris Lightcap, and Drummer Dan Weiss – With the Addition of Violinist/Vocalist Mazz Swift, Trumpter Peter Evans, Guitarists Miles Okazaki and Wendy Eisenberg, Bassist Michael Formanek, and Percussionist and electronic musician Levy Lorenzo.
Despite their programmatic origins, the five tracks Servers are very colorful, animated, with constantly evolving textures and unique, electronic and acoustic sounds. The passages arranged of swing sometimes move in improvisations of extremely satisfactory groups and distant solos. The collection begins with the fourteen -minute “roommate”. (A roommate is a data center that rents to customers.) The first sounds we hear are from Levy Lorenzo playing Gongs imported from the Philippines. It is like the perfect set of wind, sweet and song caryals, and its locations serve as the foundation for the room. Then there is an explosion: above the electric bass, the group burst into its version of the melody; The contrast is exciting. Irabagon uses swing as an orchestral color: his group moves from four / four tapping from the toe to various types of right. On the “roommate”, the solos of the keyboard then the rhythmic section arrive, leaving the tempo. Later, about eight minutes, there is a kind of planned failure: the forward movement stops. Instead, we hear intriguing electronic sounds that lead to the repetition of original locations at acceleration speeds.
The “routers” are more fun. It begins with percussion in a strange rhythm which seems to jump in a decisive way and as suddenly as a bird on the grass. Irabagon prohibits short cracks and shy vibrations. It appears as a delicious game. “Singularities”, on the other hand, opens to a series of aggressive shards of about five seconds from the group. Halfway, the procedure begins to switch: under the Solo sax of Irabagon, the trumpet provides a distorted growing growing. “Graceful exit” opens onto the arc of the double bass in a solo which groans and slides via a series of ephemeral slides. Then, the track almost arrives at a complete stop while the group repeats a sentence at around 9 minutes, followed by electronics which are threatening and talkative.
The finish, “Spy”, includes passages of unclean creations and crowd noises. At this point, the AI has taken over. If I understand correctly, “the spy” reflects a moment when humanity is far from the natural world. As Wallace Stevens wrote it in his poem “less and less human, the wild spirit”: “It is the human who is the stranger, / the human who has no cousin in the moon . ” The track contains a vocal rendered morbid framed behind a changing background. At first, however, we hear a succession of strange electronic sounds or chitrike, outside the tempo. The message of Servers Is, in my ears, unconvincing, but music, with its variety of sounds and tempos, its zigzaggy changes, written and improvised, is completely captivating.
For over 30 years, Michael Ullman wrote a bimonthly jazz chronicle for Fanfare magazineFor which he also reviews classical music. He has emeritus status at TUFTS University, where for 45 years he taught in the English and Music departments, specializing in modernist writers and writing non-fiction in English, and the history of jazz and blues in music. He studied the classic clarinet. The author or co-author of two books on jazz, he wrote on jazz and classical music for the Atlantic monthly,, New Republic,, High fidelity,, Stereophilic,, Boston Phoenix,, Boston Globeand other sites. He plays badly on the piano.
