The Free Jazz Collective
90
By Nick Ostrum
This may just be my own limited perspective, but experimental vocalists seem to be a thing now in a way they have not been for some time. Yes, singers such as Maggie Nicols, Maja S.K. Ratkje, Phil Minton, Thomas Buckner, Yamantaka Eye, Jaap Blonk, Mike Patton, Anne Rhodes and others have been floating around improvisational circles for decades. However, many others, who hitherto were under the radar, have finally been getting some recognition and slowly winning me over as of late. Add the Schweizerin Vera Baumann to that list.
MingBauSet consists of Bauman, guitarist Florestan Berset - like Baumann, part of the Luzerne scene - and drummer Gerry Hemingway. Hemingway is the only member of the trio I had encountered before. This setting, however, seems to push him to new spaces. Hemingway is attentive and responsive, but focused on sound, space and timbre rather than in his rhythmic escapades in Day & Taxi. For his part, Berset complements him well, leaning on abstract cascades of color and scratchy atmospherics. At many points, one could mistake Berset’s lapping waves as emanating from a mixing board or computer program, or even Hemingway’s percussive array, rather than an electric guitar.
What really stood out to me and my own newfound appreciation for the human voice, however, is Baumann. She is surprisingly soulful at points, singing lines that remind me of Leena Conquest’s poetic chants. At other times, she is utterly indecipherable, in a fashion similar to Saadet Türköz with slightly less abandon, or maybe just more grounding in some new music/concert-hall tradition. At times, the layerings sound like some avant-rock music replete with cosmic soundscaping and absent the traditional verse/chorus/verse structure or, really, any traditional metered or chordal structure associate with rock music. Instead, Yakut’s Gallop is about interweaving sounds, hypnotic extended motifs over which Baumann’s infectious chants prance. For his part, Hemingway really gets space to extend, here, and alternately embrace and shed his instrument’s rhythmic past. Listening through Hemingway, this is a completely different experience from Taxi & Day. Actually, listening through almost any lens, one could say the same. However, much like Run, the Darkness Will Come!, Yakut’s Gallop is well worth a close listen, and another, and another…
Yakut’s Gallop is available on CD or as a download: Yakut's Gallop by MingBauSet (Gerry Hemingway / Vera Bauman / Florestan Berset)
Sun Apr 17 04:00:00 GMT 2022