Saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock has established herself as an adventurous, innovative, and expressive musician and a compelling improviser. However, on her ambitious recent release, Purposing the Air, it’s not her saxophone that is heard, but her composer’s pen, which takes as its subject the poetry of Erica Hunt, specifically “Mood Librarian—a poem in koan,” from Jump the Clock. Together, the pens of Laubrock and Hunt create an evocative atmosphere as challenging as it is inviting.
Ingrid Laubrock
Purposing the Air (Pyroclastic Records)
A review
Ingrid Laubrock’s double-disc release, Purposing the Air, includes 60 miniature compositions (ranging from 30 or 40 seconds up to just over three minutes) matched to Erica Hunt’s miniature texts from her poem “Mood Librarian—a poem in koan.” According to Merriam-Webster, a koan is “a paradox to be meditated upon that is used to train Zen Buddhist monks to abandon ultimate dependence on reason and to force them into gaining sudden intuitive enlightenment.” Kind of like poetry, which uses words to bypass them on the way to a deeper comprehension.
The compositions, musical vignettes a deux, are evenly divided among four duos: vocalist Fay Victor and cellist Mariel Roberts, vocalist Sara Serpa and pianist Matt Mitchell, vocalist Theo Bleckmann and guitarist Ben Monder, and mezzo-soprano Rachel Calloway and violinist Ari Streisfeld, aka the contemporary classical music ensemble Duo Cortona.
The structure of the compositions varies according to the duo. So for Bleckmann and Monder, for example, who come from a jazz/new music background and have been playing together for years, Laubrock has provided harmonic sketches and left it to the duo to fill them in, with Monder working primarily with an electric instrument but also an acoustic one. (Writing for Monder’s orchestral electric guitar and gear would be . . . um, hard to notate.) Similarly, Laubrock leaves plenty of room for the Victor/Roberts and Serpa/Mitchell duos, whose members are stellar improvisers. For the classical duo, on the other hand, the pieces are essentially through composed.
The poetry itself can be cryptic, playful, suggestive, evocative, dreamy, etc.—a smorgasbord of mood and thought—and Laubrock and her musicians create a tailored sonic nimbus for each in which the text is suspended and elaborated. A few favorites include the giddy and exasperated track 50, Koan 26—“after ‘ecstasy’/laundry”—with Calloway’s imposing vocal and Streisfeld’s excited and then deflated line. Track 2, Koan 13—“catch the ball and now/I throw it”—with Victor’s assertive playfulness and Roberts’ cartwheeling cello. Track 39, Koan 40, with Bleckmann and Monder setting the sun ablaze—“all this light does/put time in the shade”—a Ligeti-ish track that deserves a movie. Track 16, Koan 5—“gaze comes from the top down/squares the body”—with Serpa and Mitchell elaborating a deranged nursery rhyme.
Provocative, evocative, challenging, and entertaining, Purposing the Air presents the vivid work of two inventive composers—one of words and one of notes—in collaboration with eight ready-for-anything musicians in an ear-opening adventure.
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