Different drummers
The Boss's long-lost 'loops album,' and the heartbeat of the Something Else! fest
My newest piece in Slate is a review-essay about the new Bruce Springsteen set Tracks II: The Lost Albums—seven (!) previously unheard full-length records (or simulacra thereof). They include the long-rumoured, mid-1990s “electro-pop” record based on drum loops influenced by West Coast hip-hop and UK trip-hop. Nearly as revelatory is a mid-2010s orchestral-pop record reminscent of Frank Sinatra’s 1970 concept album Watertown and of Burt Bacharach. How do these sounds revise our image of the Boss?
Stepping back, I also ask how to think more generally about the growing mass of vault-opening projects from aging 1960s and 1970s rock stars, especially for more casual fans—and about the social and political significance of archives.
Meanwhile I’m on podcast panels this week on the Slate Culture Gabfest discussing the death of Brian Wilson, and on CBC’s Commotion in a whirlwind conversation about Neil Young, Benson Boone, and Sabrina Carpenter’s controversial album cover, as well as the death of Steven Leckie of first-wave Toronto punk band the Viletones.
Finally, coming up Friday on Slate, I’ll review the new HAIM album, I Quit.
But enough of that! Let’s get out to some shows.
Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!
Make no parley—stop for no expostulation,
Mind not the timid—mind not the weeper or prayer,
Mind not the old man beseeching the young man,
Let not the child’s voice be heard, nor the mother’s entreaties,
Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses,
So strong you thump O terrible drums—so loud you bugles blow.
— Walt Whitman, 1861
Whitman wrote that poem as the drums of the Civil War came to shatter the everyday air of American life. It came to mind this week for obvious reasons, as the world’s equilibrium was rocked by the thump and boom of Israeli bombs in Iran, along with Iran’s counterstrikes.
But I also think about non-martial kinds of beats, like the joyful pulse of the dance floor, the chaotic mass rhythms of street festivals or protest marches, and the unpredictable neural-path-switching patterns invented by drummers and percussionists in jazz and improvisational music.
This weekend (Thurs-Sun) marks the 11th year of Something Else! in Hamilton, Ont., a creative-music festival that in its adventurous selection of artists can often match the quality of likeminded larger festivals of its kind anywhere, like Big Ears in Tennessee or Vision Fest in NYC, just at a much more compact scale.
Unfortunately where it’s never been able to match the bigger fests is in profile and publicity. Even in its hometown, too few arts lovers are aware of the riches of the festival, and as artistic director Cem Zafir told me recently, it’s been an ongoing struggle to get Toronto jazz and new-music fans (and media) to pay any attention and make the short hop over. That might partly be because it’s followed a liberal policy allowing the artists to do other shows in the area around the same time, rather than adopting a “radius clause” as some festivals do. Again this year, several of the artists coming to Hamilton will play Toronto shows on their off days. Which is nice for Toronto, but rough on Something Else.
Meanwhile the organizers in Hamilton are only Zafir and a couple of others, and as we all know there’s an acute shortage of extant media even to approach that cover small and far-out cuture.
As a result, the festival might need to revamp after this year in order to survive—either to scale down, or perhaps convert into a more conventional jazz festival with an avant-garde side-wing. Something (else) would be lost either way.
As I head to Hamilton this weekend, it occurs to me many of the shows I’m looking forward to the most feature drummers and percussionists I’ve long admired. So I thought I’d highlight four of those by way of preview. Passes to everything are only a hundred bucks; you can get them here. (And there are also free events Saturday and Sunday afternoons.)
Susie Ibarra
New York-based Filipinx-American percussionist and “sound sculptor” Susie Ibarra is the poster artist for this year’s Something Else! I’ve been following her work since the 1990s, when I often saw her playing in Victoriaville, Guelph, and New York with the likes of John Zorn, William Parker, Dave Douglas, Matthew Shipp, and many other avant-jazz heavies. She always played with an exacting precision while closely and instantaneously responding to her collaborators. More recently Ibarra’s interests have turned to ecological and cross-cultural sound explorations, under the influence of the late composer and sonic philosopher Pauline Oliveros as well as her own island-culture heritage. For instance, one of her ongoing projects is Water Rhythms: Listening to Climate Change, created in collaboration with glaciologist and geographer Michele Koppes at UBC.
Ibarra will be playing a solo set on Saturday afternoon at 4 pm, including pieces from her upcoming album Forest Birds. Toronto’s Cluttertones chamber ensemble (Rob Clutton, bass; Lina Allemano, trumpet; Ryan Driver, voice and keys; Tim Posgate, banjo/guitar) will follow, playing some Ibarra compositions among others. And then at 6 pm, Ibarra will lead an environmental “sound walk” at nearby natural retreat Cootes’ Paradise. On Sunday at 6 pm, Ibarra will reappear playing with Toronto’s Filipinx “gong punks” Pantayo, on a bill also featuring Chik White with Naomi McCarroll-Butler, and the electro-acoustic group Callisto.
Here’s an extended video of Ibarra in solo action, playing “Ritwal” for Suoni Per Il Popolo in Montreal, 2021.
Gerry Hemingway
A veteran of the jazz vanguard since the 1970s, the New England-born, Switzerland-based, Guggenheim-winning drummer and composer Gerry Hemingway’s name is linked with giants like Anthony Braxton (with whom he played for nearly a dozen years), Anthony Davis, Wadada Leo Smith, Reggie Workman, and more, as well as his own ensembles. Hemingway strikes the difficult balance of being an assertive and provocative drummer while always offering space for his playing partners, whether many or few. At Canadian gigs I’ve most often seen him in his more intimate, long-running duo with pianist Marilyn Crispell, with whom he seems to share a kind of compositional telepathy.
On Thursday night at Something Else! we’ll get to see him in two different modes. First, in another piano-drums duo with Japanese (but Dublin-based) keyboardist Izumi Kimura; they’ve just released their second album together, How the Dust Falls. Then he will be part of the international five-piece “supergroup” led by the great Québécois clarinetist-composer François Houle, The Secret Lives of Colour. Focusing on more abstract sounds and microtextures, the group also features the exquisite French bassist Joëlle Léandre, American pianist Myra Melford, and B.C. guitarist and oud player Gordon Grdina (who like Houle is responsible for some of the best jazz-ish records to come out of this country in the past couple of decades).
Frank Rosaly
I became familiar with Frank Rosaly as a ubiquitous presence on the free-jazz scene in Chicago in the 2000s (where he’d relocated after growing up in Arizona). He was behind the kit, sometimes with jerryrigged electronic additions, with dozens of ensembles, including Josh Abrams’ Natural Information Society; with composer-performers like Jeff Parker, Nicole Mitchell, and Matana Roberts; in the Rempis Percussion Quartet; and as a soloist. Really, name anyone active around Chicago in those years and Rosaly probably kept time with them, or redistributed it, you might say. But in the mid-2010s he relocated to Amsterdam, where he married Bolivian-born singer/performer/visual artist Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti.
In the past couple of years they’ve also joined forces as co-composers and leaders of a project called MESTIZX, rooted in Rosaly’s Puerto Rican and Ferragutti’s Bolivian and Brazilian backgrounds. They put out an album on International Anthem/Nonesuch last year that the Guardian accurately described as “infectiously kinetic compositions that reference jazz, cumbia, bomba and much more.” On Saturday night at Something Else! they’ll be joined by South African-born, Amsterdam-based musician James McClure on trumpet and synths, Chicago keyboardist Ben Boye, and another Chicago MVP, Nate McBride, on bass. The Canadian ensemble Johnston/Bates/Fraser is opening, joined by a Chicago guest of their own, the acclaimed saxophonist Jon Irabagon.
Here’s a glimpse of MESTIZX in action in Berlin a year ago. Thanks to the folks at TONE in Toronto, they’re also playing Friday in the main hall of the Tranzac, with locals Mas Aya and Artu.
Farida Amadou
I’m bending the rules a bit here, as Belgian-Nigerian musician Farida Amadou is a bass player, not a drummer. But bass is considered a rhythm instrument of course, and it’s especially percussive the way Amadou hits, taps, literally flogs, and generally beats the hell out of it, drawing on her punk-rock roots as much as any free-jazz practices. Her set in Toronto two years ago opening for Zoh Amba was one of the most mesmerizing, unforgettable performances I’ve seen this decade. The level of concentration and physical relationship to the instrument really has to be witnessed to be understood.
This weekend in Hamilton, Amadou will play a solo set on Friday night ahead of the effervescently modular music of Anna Webber’s Simple Trio out of New York, and then returns at 1 pm on Saturday for the free show at the Hamilton Library along with a couple of Toronto-based ensembles. Later that same day, she’ll come in to the Collective Arts venue in Toronto to play a duo set with the excellent Karen Ng (who slayed at the recent Weather Station concert at the Great Hall).
They share that bill with Nova Scotia sound and performance artist Chik White, who’ll be playing with saxophonist Naomi McCarroll-Butler. That duo is also playing Something Else!’s Sunday night show, as well as the free Sunday afternoon event in Hamilton, during which Amadou will also accompany the Earth, Wind & Choir vocal ensemble, and Brodie West’s excellent Ethio-jazz-influenced ensemble Eucalyptus will round things out.