Will Mason Ensemble - Beams of the Huge Night
The Free Jazz Collective 90
By Eric McDowell
Will Mason’s ambitious debut album is the product of equal parts isolation and collaboration. According to his website the 26-year-old drummer/composer, a doctoral candidate at Columbia, holed up for two months in a remote Maine cabin without water or electricity to write Beams of the Huge Night. But before it could be recorded, the music—which is demandingly detailed, complex, and muscular—had to be hammered out in live trials with the help of the rest of Mason’s ensemble: Stuart Breczinski on oboe, Daniel Fischer-Lochhead on alto sax, Nina Moffitt on vocals, Travis Reuter and Andrew Smiley on guitars, and Dan Stein on upright bass. Finally, a month of mixing followed the three-day studio session. The result of this extended process, from pencil-and-paper composition to post-production fine-tuning, is an impressively balanced first statement from a bold new voice—full of confidence, free of ego.
The album opens with “Finn,” a sixteen-minute tour-de-force that showcases many of the contrasts to come over the album’s six tracks: quiet meditations against math-rock grooves, intricately braided horn and guitar lines against crystalline vocal syllables, chaotic group improvisations against studio manipulation. Forced as these dichotomies may be, they help suggest the breadth of Mason’s compositional abilities and at the same time the focus of his conceptual vision, as each individual element is angled toward evoking the sense of “awe and unease” Mason cites as central to the experience of nature he wants to represent onthe project.
While “Finn” takes its time gathering energy, the shorter follow-up “Door 6” kicks off with a crunchy odd-meter workout that feels lifted straight off of last year’s Zevious album—until Moffitt enters with melancholy phrases that would indeed be aptly described as “beams” cast against “the huge night.” The well-placed next track, “Door 7,” takes the rhythmic rigor down to a more subdued place with Mason on brushes, though in the final few moments the feel shifts to a snaggy Afro-Cuban groove overlaid with insistent staccato horn and vocal patterns.
The album’s second half features two pieces dedicated to small Maine towns Dixfield and Strong. The former is another extended, hydra-headed beast—fifteen minutes of ambient exploration, airtight off-kilter drumming, saxophone blowing, and trance-inducing drone, all topped with ending worthy of Steve Reich (think New York Counterpoint). But if my insufficient descriptions have you wondering whether Mason isn’t simply tossing unrelated fragments together and calling it composition, take the special opportunity to read his essay about the latter Maine piece, which offers rare detailed insights into both his inspiration and his complex writing process. This generosity—and I mean not only his dedication to teaching and paying knowledge forward, but also the way he’s stuffed Beams of the Huge Night full to overflowing with ideas and delights—is a sign, I hope, that Will Mason has a lot more to give us.
Listen here:
Beams of the Huge Night by Will Mason Ensemble
Watch here:
Fri May 27 00:00:00 GMT 2016
Avant Music News 0
Posted on December 8, 2015 Updated on December 8, 2015
Will Mason’s ensemble is a seven-piece outfit, featuring Stuart Breczinski on oboe, Daniel Fisher-Lochhead on alto sax, Nina Moffitt on voice, Travis Reuter and Andrew Smiley sharing guitar duties, Dan Stein on bass, and Mason himself on drums. Mason writes that he “composed these pieces while isolated in northern Maine and they deal with the mixture of awe and unease that comes from feeling truly alone in the woods.”
Mason’s influences include Kris Davis, John Zorn, Dan Weiss, and John Luther Adams. Perhaps most obvious of these is Dan Weiss, especially when comparing Beams of the Huge Night to Weiss’s excellent Fourteen from last year. Both Mason and Weiss are drummer / composers who excel at big-band pieces of remarkable complexity. Also, both Beams of the Huge Night and Fourteen feature mostly-wordless female vocals providing a haunting atmosphere. Beyond these similarities, Mason forges his own path.
The 16-minute opening track, Finn, kicks things off with a slow improv section, followed by an aggressive theme in which the guitars, oboe, and sax provide layered, falling cascades. This builds into a controlled blow-out, an introspective yet angular interlude, then back to spiraling motifs over heavy guitar picking.
Mason provides dexterous drumming, equally at ease in free-form and riffing contexts. There is something of a heavy-metal feel to the compositions, in the sense that the group will play all out over recurring rhythms, though any repetition is subtle due to the constantly shifting tectonics of Mason’s writing.
Case in point, the second track, Door 6, features a single-string guitar riff, over which the vocalist and instrumentalists float in and out. Bass and drums accent the rhythms, and the track slowly morphs into a much more assertive piece, with urgent blasts of sax, oboe, and vocals over well-placed chording. Door 7 follows, a more restrained offering featuring undistorted guitar improv over drumming, before breaking out into a full-group staccato exploration.
Another long piece, Dixfield, ME, is characterized by irregular sax lines over bass and drums, eventually accompanied by equally disjointed guitar lines. The remaining members jump into with an occasional crescendo. By the half-way mark, the entire group is going full force, then they suddenly digress into a quieter approach. This, in turn, builds into a brash, single-note punctuated melody.
At only 26, Mason, who is currently pursuing a doctorate in music at Columbia University, has a long career ahead of him. If Beams of the Huge Night is any example of what he can do, we have a lot to look forward to in coming years. A solid album of the year candidate.
http://newamrecords.com/mason-beams-of-the-huge-night/
Fri May 27 00:00:00 GMT 2016