Listening: Of Mist and Melting, Bill Connors
A taste of freedom. A touch of form.
The drum introduction by Jack DeJohnette provides a scintillating platform for Bill Connors to launch his guitar arpeggios from, which are soon followed by Gary Peacock’s bass and Jan Garbarek’s unmistakable tone on the alto or soprano saxophone. I’ll remind the reader that DeJohnette has said his drum set is tuned to be a “melodic” instrument. The effect he has when he plays using just his kick drum and cymbals is a light, misty shimmer of sound atop which other instruments can ride. He typically (on this album) throws in fills on the tom-toms or snare drum, which keep the driving rhythm going. His hi-hat work seems almost aleatory at times, it can be so unpredictable and syncopated. He’s playing with the traditional drummer’s grip at this early date (later in his career he will switch to matched grip due to tendinitis). His left hand’s deft dance atop the snare and tom-toms, while he maintains complex rhythms on his cymbals, must have been a special thing to behold when the album was released. It has been special for me to get to know the drumming of DeJohnette. On these early albums—including the one with Terje Rypdal and Miloslav Vitous, released the same year as Of Mist and Melting, and which I review here https://open.substack.com/pub/hanscox/p/listening-two-albums-by-guitarist—DeJohnette plays with a freedom, almost an abandon, that takes the listener through tumbles and churning as if going over a waterfall and being turned over and over by the hydraulics at the bottom.
Bill Connors surprised me the first time I heard this album. The unassuming tone and style of his nylon-string guitar was not something I had heard in jazz by that point in my listening. He plays harmonically and melodically, not doing jazz chord solos but moving between not only single-note lines and arpeggiated chords, but between the tone of a nylon-string guitar and the tone of a steel-string guitar. When he plucks the strings hard, snapping them against the frets, he gets an effect like that of a steel-string guitar. Other times, he can snap them more gently, and maintain the tone of a classical guitar. It is a thoughtful choice, and economical. Rather than having to multi-track his guitar parts, or swap out guitars, he has perfect control of his single instrument. Up until this writing, I had thought there were two guitars involved. I think most of his parts are improvised.
Jan Garbarek plays with a constant vibrato, in a sort of wail, almost a metallic wail, like the tone of Albert Ayler on his album Vibrations with trumpeter/cornetist Don Cherry. On the first two tracks, “Melting” and “Not Forgetting,” Garbarek plays with verve. On the third, “Face in the Water,” the energy slackens, and the ensemble gradually slows down, playing slower, sparer melodies, until the music disintegrates into silence. Though Bill Connors is credited with writing all the compositions on the album, Garbarek’s saxophones take center stage throughout the recording, with Connors having the stage at some times and Garbarek having it at many others. Garbarek’s instrument volume is higher than the rest, making his wail a piercing cry in the otherwise laid-back mix.
“Aubade,” the first track on the second side, features the neat trick Connors and Garbarek negotiate many times on Of Mist and Melting. Connors will play a lone note, and Garbarek with build volume on the same note, at the same time, melding the sounds of their instruments. It’s a sunny burst of aural light each time. DeJohnette accompanies them on cymbals, running a complex, aperiodic pattern that comes from both the right and left channels. No tom-toms, no snare, no kick drum, here. Connors plays a repeating chordal figure while Garbarek improvises over it. DeJohnette comes in on tumbling tom-toms, and Peacock is still not in the mix. Garbarek and Connors spend a little while improvising together, a call-and-response going on as if surreptitiously; that is, naturally, not like bad actors repeating memorized lines. The instruments calm and quiet, and Peacock has not joined. DeJohnette takes a solo. It is not wholly unremarkable, though it is unpretentious. It follows the theme of most of his work to that point on the album, with only slightly more variation than his previous playing, the rhythmic accompaniment of sizzling cymbals and tumbling tom-toms. Connors and Garbarek join after DeJohnette cues by returning to his cymbals only, and the track ends soon after.
“Cafe Vue” features Peacock from the first measure. While the track feels planned in that the rhythm is simple, compared to some previous tracks, the melodic improvisations of Garbarek, Connors, and Peacock, and the elaborate drum fills on tom-toms and snare by DeJohnette, give a free-jazz feel to parts of it; other parts are more structured, with Garbarek’s saxophone dominating and seeming to play a pre-written melody.
“Unending” is the final track. It begins with unaccompanied guitar. The style is semi-classical, a combination of fragments of chords and single-note lines between them. It is a down-tempo piece. The rest of the quartet joins a little over a minute in, or so. The playing is sparse, and Peacock complements the sparseness of the rest of the quartet by playing more prominently and elaborately. The entire album seems mostly improvised, here and there pre-written melodies appearing over pre-composed chord progressions, and most of the playing being improvisation that is centered on this underlying form. “Melting” seems structured to the point of having the typical melody-then-solos form of traditional jazz quartet performances. Unending gets more complicated, especially given that DeJohnette improvises as Connors and Garbarek improvise their way through a simple melody. His rolling and tumbling rises and subsides with their rising and subsidence.