Jon Irabagon’s “Server Farm”

By Michael Ullman

The album’s message about the triumph of A.I. is unconvincing, but the music, with its variety of sounds and tempos, its zigzaggy shifts, written and improvised, is totally engrossing.

Jon Irabagon, Server Farm (Irabbagast Records)

Describing his lively, forward-looking music for big band on Server Farm, saxophonist/composer Jon Irabagon asserts: “Beauty, humor, darkness, and insanity are all part of it.” He refines his claim by adding that he wants us to experience “beauty with the sense of impending doom.” Irabagon seems attached to the idea of doom. His last recording, Survivalism, was a solo set played on the tiny sopranino saxophone. He recorded it in two munitions bunkers in South Dakota: among the tunes he performed in these shelters — treasured by the paranoid rich — was a short piece called “Doom Doom”. More amusingly, another selection was “How to Eat a Pine Tree to Survive”. (To be fair, the final number on Survivalism was “Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love”.)

As its title suggests, Irabagon’s latest recording finds him wrangling with the idea of artificial intelligence. (A server farm is a group of computers that work together to provide services and storage: they form, one might say, a kind of band.)

His ambivalence is interesting. “Technology and I tend to be at odds with one another… I can’t even turn on my phone without something going wrong. So this recording was a cathartic experience for me.” To Irabagon, the five pieces on Server Farm dramatize the gradual takeover of human independence by A.I. Nonetheless, in the past Irabagon has drawn on techniques derived from his version of A.I. Before he started writing, the saxophonist studied the recordings of his musicians and “mined” them for key phrases and habits. He wrote for “nine specific musicians” after “figuring out how to maximize the way they naturally play.” He was careful to integrate their natural techniques and phrases 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, trumpeter 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 on Server Farm are vividly colorful, lively, with ever-shifting textures and unique sounds, electronic as well as acoustic. Arranged passages of swing sometimes move into wildly satisfying group improvisations and far-ranging solos. The collection begins with the fourteen-minute “Colocation”. (A colocation is a data center that rents to customers.) The first sounds we hear are of Levy Lorenzo playing gongs imported from the Philippines. It’s like the perfect set of wind chimes, gentle and songful, and its pitches serve as the bedrock of the piece. Then there’s an explosion: over the electric bass, the band bursts in with its version of the melody; the contrast is thrilling. Irabagon uses swing as an orchestral color: his band moves from a toe-tapping four/four to various kinds of free-ranging. On “Colocation”, the keyboard solos and then the rhythm section arrives, moving out of tempo. Later, around eight minutes, there’s a kind of planned breakdown: the forward motion stops. Instead, we hear intriguing electronic sounds that lead to the repetition of original pitches at accelerating speeds.

“Routers” is more playful. It begins with percussion in an odd rhythm that seems to hop as decisively and as abruptly as a bird on the grass. Irabagon interjects short squeaks and the vibes shy comments. It comes across as a delightful game. “Singularities”, on the other hand, opens with a series of aggressive bursts of five seconds or so from the band. Halfway through, the proceedings begin to rock: under Irabagon’s solo sax, the trumpet supplies an obbligato of distorted grumbling. “Graceful Exit” opens with the bowing of the double bass in a solo that both groans and slides via a series of fleeting glissandi. Then the track comes almost to a complete stop as the band repeats a phrase at around 9 minutes, followed by passages of electronics that are threatening and chatty.

The finale, “Spy,” includes passages of odd creepings and crowd noises. At this point, A.I. has taken over. As I understand it, “Spy” reflects a time when humanity is estranged from the natural world. As Wallace Stevens wrote in his poem “Less and Less Human, Savage Spirit”: “It is the human that is the alien, / The human that has no cousin in the moon.” The track contains a morbidly rendered vocal framed behind a shifting background. At first, though, we hear a succession of eerie or chittering electronic sounds, out of tempo. The message of Server Farm is, to my ears, unconvincing, but the music, with its variety of sounds and tempos, its zigzaggy shifts, written and improvised, is totally engrossing.

 from https://artsfuse.org