TWiS Throughline: Valve Proposition

Three contemporary trumpeters go deep

Dear Fellow Listeners,

The old Listening Post feature of This Week in Sound has been renamed Throughline to better represent the underlying concept. The concept is an annotated three-item music playlist/mixtape, each entry centered on a different theme, that theme being the “through line” between the varied tracks.

What constitutes a through line? It might be instrumentation (as in this issue), or technique, or cultural heritage, or record label, or scene, or medium, or mode of consumption, or collaborative connection, or generational influence, or something else entirely. The tracks may be new or old, live or studio, original or reworked, official or unofficial. Usually there will be at least one recent (or otherwise timely) track in order to keep the loose associations tethered to our current moment. This week they’re all new.

If the This Week in Sound newsletter is about the role of sound in culture and everyday life, then the Throughline issues, by highlighting the shared context of various tracks, surface such concepts through clusters of mutual association. (Similarly, by connecting the dots within a given issue’s selections, I’m aiming to connect the dots between Throughline and the sound studies material that constitutes This Week in Sound.)

The plan is for these Throughlines issues to go to paid This Week in Sound subscribers as a thank-you, but as I haven’t sent out one of these recommended listening sets in a while, this issue goes out to the full subscriber list. There are currently well over 5,000 This Week in Sound subscribers, which is awesome. I can’t promise the Throughlines annotations will always be as lengthy, meaty, and link-filled as this week’s, but the themes and sets will always reflect consideration.

The first of these new Throughline entries is titled “Valve Proposition” — yeah, a brass-themed play on the idea of “value proposition,” which was on my mind as I’ve been adjusting my overall approach to my newsletter in this age of newsletter overload (and, not unrelated: machine-induced slop). This issue situates side-by-side the work of three very different exploratory trumpet players. Below are videos of two live performances, plus one album track. Thanks for listening and reading. As always, your feedback, recommendations, and support are appreciated.

▰ 1: FOUR-TIFIED: Max Kraft Takes a Chair

If you read my long-running blog, Disquiet.com, then you may have seen a mention of this video earlier this week, when I listed it in the On Repeat section, where most Sundays I mention some music I’m especially fond of at the moment, and that I don’t want to risk waiting to write about. This footage is of a quartet featuring the extraordinary Norwegian electric guitarist Eivind Aarset. Like a lot of his listeners, I first encountered Aarset’s heavily processed playing as a result of his partnership in the band led by trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær. If I understand correctly, the quartet here — Aarset, Jan Bang (live sampling, electronics), Ingar Zach (percussion), and Max Kraft (trumpet) — is essentially the After the Wildfire Quartet, with Kraft in the place of the great Arve Henriksen. This is fantastic music, with subtle rhythms and sublime, restrained playing by both Aarset and Kraft. This video is the first I’ve heard Kraft, and it’s rewarding to listen to this back to back with some of After the Wildfire’s work. After the Wildfire is its own complicated and rich subject, having arisen from a collaboration between Bang and Henriksen (along with Dzijan Emin, who conducted the Fames Institute Orchestra from North Macedonia). Given that this edition of Throughlines is the first in the new series, I couldn’t have hoped for a better example of a through line than this video (recorded at the Gărâna JazzFest in Romania back in July), since this is a new(ish?) quartet born from a preceding sequence of projects. And who knows where it will go, and when those various phases may circle back around.

▰ 2: BUILDING BRIDGES: Ambrose Akinmusire at an Exhibition

There’s a great concept in art, and in literature, among other fields, of works being “in conversation” with each other. Hang two paintings on a gallery wall, and let them converse in the mind of whoever happens upon them. Read two books at the same time, and notice as ideas, characters, settings, and literary devices find connection. A more immediate and direct take on that idea, Bridges is the name a program from Jazz at Lincoln Center that puts musicians in conversation with parts of the collection at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. (The concept itself is not unusual. Gagosian Gallery, for example, had a great video series of musicians responding to art in situ, among them Kim Gordon and Bill Nace’s Body/Head, John Zorn and Bill Laswell, and Jason Moran. Modest Mussorgsky was, of course, ahead of the pack.) As of this writing, there have been four Bridges videos. This one features the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire playing solo amid the fragile, colorful silk panels of artist Marie Bannerot McInerney’s “Trace Me Back.” It’s a unique pleasure to hear him on his own, taking his time, working at the sort of pace that going temporarily solo makes possible, a pace that correlates with the McInerney piece’s hovering quality. He’s also been experimenting with electronics of late, as on his recent collaborative album with guitarist Mary Halvorson, Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings. Here the echoing space and the slow pace do a facsimile of processing. There will be six entries in Bridges. They’re hosted on the jazz institution’s YouTube channel. Akinmusire’s was the third. The fourth featured Halvorson and drummer Tomas Fujiwara (artist: Edward Steichen). The first two were Elena Pinderhughes (artist: Lenore Tawney) and Joel Ross (artist: Julie Mehretu).

▰ 3: QUARK STAR: Sarah Belle Reid Goes App

Sarah Belle Reid is a prolific musician and gregarious educator who often uses her synthesizers to process her horns and her voice. “Ritual” is a haunting, electrified piece for trumpet and processing from her recent album, Manifold, which is, as with the quartet with Kraft up above, mid-step between one phase of her work to another. What began as a touring opportunity for live processed horns became a location-specific quadraphonic experience, and will soon become an app (name: Quark) to provide immersive listening to the vast majority of us who don’t, you know, have quad setups at home — a weathered copy of the old Who album doesn’t count. (Learn more at the Manifold release’s album page on Bandcamp.) Of the three trumpeters heard in this issue of Throughline, Reid does the most to loosen traditional modes of playing. Sounds gets warped and splattered and twisted, and yet the horn is always there.