KEN VANDERMARK — Strade d'Acqua / Roads of Water (review)

KEN VANDERMARK — Strade d'Acqua / Roads of Water album cover Album · 2011 · Jazz Related Soundtracks Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
Ricochet
Knowing him so fervent and prodigal (probably more than any among us), I find Vandermark to be surprisingly tempered on this album. None of the other new releases (the new Resonance tenure, Reed Trio) would showcase something strikingly offbeat - and since this was recorded back in 2008, there's even more bitter music it stands apart from (the volumes with Nilssen-Love, Lean Left, Sonore etc.) - but Strade d'Acqua, his very first OST, is indeed of a different vibe and eloquence, in mild, rustic or (in comes the obvious pun) sticking to the script ways.

The Predella Group features Jeb Bishop, Tim Daisy or Fred Lonberg-Holm, to name but the familiar faces from Vandermark's entourage. The jazz is - I must be using this word for the third time already - surprisingly traditional, almost composition-based, not quite under old free-form beliefs, but more about essences, with drops of sounds and sequences. Group coordination has here a totally different meaning: voices that are doubled, parallelisms, one instrument taking on another, strings of dialogues.

There is an often cardinal ambiance, developing much later: tribal tinges with fine, crawling dissonances ("Further") or straightforward experimental sounds and noises ("Signals"); clean harmonics and brass moaning on a single brake drum beat ("Sieve of the Soul"); superimposing light, mysterious tones, dozingly hummed by the bass, grainly fretted at the chimes, pensively whistled at the clarinet ("Austral Cartography").
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