CATALOGUE
RETURN
Interview with Tony Malaby
|
Tony Malaby
Apparitions
SGL SA1545-2; Hybrid SACD (2+5 channel) only
Release date: October 14, 2003 (U.S.)
Tony Malaby, tenor & soprano saxophone; Tom Rainey, drums;
Michael Sarin, drums & percussion; Drew Gress, acoustic bass
New York saxophonist Tony Malaby's Mexican-American background and experience
playing both inside and outside bring a subtly different flavor to his second
record as leader. Apparitions is even more open and exploratory than his debut, Sabino(which made the NY Times' and Philadelphia City Paper's top ten jazz lists for 2000). The process began a couple of years ago when he performed several times with two drummers and loved it: "It's just the most comfortable couch, or like taking a warm bath, just being surrounded by that sound and falling into it." He soon knew who the band was going be; having played together a lot in various other combinations, they already had a shared
vocabulary to build on. They worked with Tony's structural concepts more
than with written-out compositions: "I decided to try to create platforms
for my favorite 'zones' that we'd developed or would hit on. So for example,
a multi-layered zone where the four of us are each playing in our own pulse
or dimension in time, or a very transparent zone where it's cymbals/mallets/brushes
and I'm playing flute-like and Drew's playing arco. And the question is: how am I
going to get this into a composition, how am I going to structure it?"
Throughout Apparitions, freedom and form are dual aspects of the music's
evolution. Cutting-edge jazz typically blurs the distinction between
composition and improvisation, but seldom are the results so intuitive
yet coherent — sinuous group elaborations of uncanny dexterity, the
often dense textures retaining a striking clarity. The whole record
feels like one extended suite exploring forms and moods on some knife-edge
between passion and abstraction. "A big part of the aesthetic is that the
composition is hidden, and the improv is equally hidden... Tom, Mike and
Drew are masters at creating this effect, because they can absorb the
material very quickly and are then able to abstract it and deconstruct
it, they create another layer over the written material, even as they
perform it... On 'Talpa' and 'Jersey Merge' there's a structure that
we're blowing off of, chord changes — 'Jersey Merge' is based on the
harmonic structure of 'Bye Bye Blackbird' — and I knew that I'd get a
different type of music from the rest of the record if I incorporated
a couple of tunes with form and structure. The way they mask that there
is a form there is brilliant, it creates a seamlessness that never
constricts me as an improviser."
Timbral innovation is another area of investigation,
"trying to create the illusion that I'm not playing
saxophone, that I'm playing marimba or other percussion-like
instruments... trying to make the ensemble sound bigger than it
really is." Evoking cultural and natural space is also an
important consideration: "I use a lot of imagery or
visualization, and at the time of making Apparitions I
was dealing a lot with my heritage, so a lot of imagery of
adobe, weavings, chilis, cilantro, spices, the ancient
pyramids of Mexico... these were on my mind. And there's
a primitiveness in the music — 'Tula' at times sounds like
I'm blowing into a conch shell... Something I've always
carried with me from the southwest, moving to New York,
is a sense of space. It's very easy for me to create
density and energy but I'm working on spacing that out,
pacing myself, and thinking of 'arcs' differently, I
don't want things to always start soft, crescendo to
a peak, and come down at the end."
Originally from Tuscon, Tony Malaby has been permanently based in New
York since 1995 and has been a member of many notable jazz groups
including Paul Motian's Electric Bebop Band, Marty Ehrlich's
Traveler's Tales, the Mark Dresser Quartet, Fred Hersch's quintet
and Walt Whitman project, Tim Berne's Quicksand, Mark Helias' Open
Loose, and bands led by Bobby Previte, Tom Varner, Michael Formanek,
and Kenny Wheeler. For more biographical information: www.tonymalaby.com,
www.drewgress.com,
www.screwgunrecords.com (Rainey), www.allmusic.com (Sarin).
Audiophile note: Apparitions is the 9th Songlines hybrid SACD, and the 7th to
be mixed multi-channel, but the first to be both recorded and mixed in Direct
Stream Digital. For those with multi-channel playback, the spatial qualities
of the music are very significantly enhanced, while SACD provides greater
transparency and timbral realism than CD playback. (Please note that the
credits are incorrect regarding the stereo mix, which was done live to
two-track by Joe Marciano.)
|
* The Mestizo Suite:
Picacho
Humo
Mambo Chueco
*
Talpa
* Voladores
* Fast Tip
* Apparitions
* Dos Caminos
* Jersey Merge
* Tula
|