Arthur Russell - Instrumentals

Pitchfork 84

Getting a handle on Arthur Russell’s discursive career would be tough, even if everything had been well documented. But in the decade following his death in 1992, Russell existed not so much as an artist with an in-print catalog than he did as a rumor—one with the highest class of reputation. The 21st century has seen a boom of Russell reissues, most of which have come from the Audika label’s partnership with the Russell estate.

In 2006, on the set First Thought Best Thought, Audika compiled a few of the cellist-composer’s noisier, long-form experiments, along with Tower of Meaning and Instrumentals. The latter was intended as a double-album set, though the label that first released Instrumentals in 1984 managed to lose its opening half (and to master the second half at the wrong speed). First Thought Best Thought corrected the speed issue, and restored the album’s opening portion, thanks to an archival tape discovery.

While First Thought Best Thought was a gift for anyone immersed in Russell studies, its sonics weren’t as clear as fans might have hoped. Audika took a separate pass at remastering Tower of Meaning, in 2016. And this year brings a new remaster of Instrumentals, available on both vinyl and lossless-digital formats. The album has never sounded better, nor has it ever seemed so much like an ideal point of entry into Russell’s pre-disco, magpie aesthetic.

The downtown composer conceived of his Instrumentals series as a “modular” piece, in which separate passages of notated melody could be played by an improvising ensemble, in any order. In performance, a relatively spare portion of preconceived material could flower into a full set. But only after the musicians mastered the riffs—a process that took some doing. In the liner notes for this new release, saxophonist Jon Gibson writes that one of the core challenges of this music was Russell’s desire for his band to “improvise with unfamiliar chord sequences placed upon asymmetrical … time lengths.”

During the 1975 sessions that form the first half of Instrumentals, you can hear Russell joyfully rummaging through his toy chest of influences. The indeterminate nature of each performance calls on the theories of John Cage, while the long-lined melodies and rhythms pull from Russell’s study of Indian classical traditions. The fact that the harmonies are full of poppy, countrified accents reveals the bandleader’s Americana affections.

Any mastering job needs some delicacy if it hopes to bring across all the formal aspects contained on these tapes. This new remaster of Instrumentals dials back on the drum-and guitar-heavy sound that swamped some of the lighter timbres on First Thought Best Thought. The subtlety of this edition allows each instrument in the group to sing out in a fresh way. On “Vol. 1, Track 1,” Gibson’s soprano sax has a lustrous, lilting sheen that’s well-matched by Russell’s electric cello lines. Instead of sounding plodding, due to its center-stage presence in the prior mix, the honky-tonk percussion on “Vol. 1, Track 3” now registers as lightly humorous. The competing tempos of “Vol. 1, Track 6” and the mix of woodwind drones and funk-guitar flourishes on “Vol. 1, Track 7” now pass by with a greater Zen bliss.

Performances from 1977-78 make up the second volume of Instrumentals (the half originally issued at the wrong speed in 1984). The pace of these performances is generally slower, the improvisation less animated in nature. And the comparative unison among players in Russell’s ensemble offers a look at the variety of the composer’s underlying melodic progressions. During the half-hour duration of “Pt. 2,” the starkness of some initial patterns leads to concluding vistas of greater sweetness. As on the freshly mastered abstract pieces “Sketch for ‘The Face of Helen’” and “Reach One,” a slight reduction of tape hiss brings real benefits. There’s still no such thing as a prototypical Arthur Russell album, but the range of textures on this new master of Instrumentals gets us closer than ever to his stated intention to fuse the avant-garde with, as Russell put it, “the bright sound and magical qualities of the bubblegum.”