Latter Day Synchronisms

[Henry Musikar]

http://tinyurl.com/mild-violence 
Another work included on that disc, which probably goes furthest in
juxtaposing seemingly unrelated musical elements, is American Dreamscape,
also composed in 2005. Scored for a standard jazz quartet-alto saxophone,
piano, bass, and drums-plus Ricks's signature electronics, it is one of the
composer's more secular creations, though not exactly: It was inspired by a
passage in Thomas Pynchon's otherworldly Gravity's Rainbow. In the novel a
drugged character in a hospital imagines himself in the bathroom at the
Roseland Ballroom hearing strains of the popular standard "Cherokee"
downstairs on the dance floor. At the same time, in a different place, bebop
legend Charlie "Bird" Parker improvises on the chord changes of the same
song and has an out-of-body experience.

Fueled by Pynchon's descriptions, Ricks creates a vivid audio collage that
opens with a noisy crowd at a club in the middle of a set-a pianist
reminiscent of Bud Powell plays a run, but it sounds somehow not quite right
because it has been microtonally altered. This quickly shifts into an
electronically-generated timbral kaleidoscope before landing into a truly
weird sonic space that is somehow equal parts post-bop jazz and so-called
Uptown music. Eventually acoustic multiphonics and similar sounding
electronic responses blur to the point where it is difficult to identify the
source of any specific utterance with certainty. While the sonic translation
of this literary passage sounds more like Eric Dolphy than Bird, Dolphy's
explorations beyond hard bop orthodoxies into free jazz melodic directions
might very well be the sound of Parker having an out-of-body experience.
Ricks explains, "I thought of Charlie Parker waking up in the after life, or
pushing through past some sort of threshold into a very surreal world. The
other thing is there are little short snippets of recorded alto sax where I
purposely add in some record scratch, but the lines are funky and atonal. My
idea was to try to create an unreal situation where somehow I had excavated
these old recordings, but when you listen to them they are completely new or
out of this world."
http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=5911 

Henry Mu