Anna Webber – ‘simpletrio2000’

This music doesn’t hang around. “Slingshot”, the first track, opens with four deep and clean tenor chimes which are promptly diced up by the trio, and a whole world of complexity opens up. And then, as it progresses, a kind of harmonic sequence opens out, underpinned with the unmistakable wobble of beats chopped into fives. This is probably the closest to what some people call jazz that this album gets. “Idiom VII”, for example, goes even further into the detailed rhythmic dalliances hinted at in “Slingshot”, and yet it’s so well played that you want to understand what’s happening. It’s a fascinating process, like a single phrase played backwards and forwards across a tape head: rhythms stutter and rush, but with precision that generates a very specific excitement, a groove shot through with a healthy shot of puzzlement.

For me, music must be about detail. Listening to Coleman Hawkins, Stan Getz and Wayne Shorter in a single day, who couldn’t be struck by how their sounds are so precisely sculpted, with each player’s notes and rhythms emerging directly from that first impulse. So it is here: but in Webber’s case, I feel that the examination is of an almost microscopic level of detail. Rather than sitting on sequences, her pieces seem to creep out into the world in all directions, a series of crystalline formations that seem to multiply and divide. Familiar things come and go, there is no shortage of chords and riffs, but they are swept up in an altogether different system than that of traditional tonality. “Five Eateries (In New England)”, (with its reference to Charles Ives’ “Three Places”) travels through a bewitching range of textures and moods, as if reaching out to us…Mitchell’s lines dip and turn like white water rapids, Hollenbeck’s five sided groove slipping from rock grandeur to scalpel-led precision. Above all this, Anna Webber’s tenor is often warm and friendly, cello-ish, and yet there’s a feeling that clarity is her real objective, to articulate some kind of truth in sound. The sound of air, the clunking of pads and machinery, is all captured faithfully, part of the sound.

This truth can be unflinching in its intent: “g equals GM over r squared” is a solo for Matt Mitchell, a series of slow, ritualistic bass notes around which higher clusters appear, only to be cut off abruptly, almost unkindly…perhaps the process ran its course? “miiire” follows, another piece featuring irregular repetitions of single notes and strange and premature endings. There’s a kind of scientific consistency to the music, certain timbral and motivic ideas recur across pieces, as if the group is a kind of three-headed jeweller looking over gemstones, noting the unique and singular sparkle of each one whilst noting their structural similarities.

“8va” might just be what it says it is, an exploration of the way a saxophone raises a note by an octave. Like anything in art, if you care to look closely, there’s a whole world of contrasts and similarities to explore. (Listen to how Hollenbeck, for example, subtly cuts off his snare sound against the deep boom of his bass drum on “Ch9tter”, making that relationship the subject of his improvisation). 

Music can undoubtedly take on the big themes, politically and socially, but it can also investigate some of the minutiae of things that seem invisible to us because we cannot make the time to look and to listen. 

Make the time. There is a whole world of sound, full of feeling nestled in the cracks of this austere and beautiful music.

• Label: Intakt
• CD 430