Fantastic Merlins

Innova 670

Look Around: Establishing Shot

The movies and jazz—two shiny pieces of modernity that once shocked the masses. Two art-forms masquerading as entertainment. Both, once upon a time, offered up the idea (perhaps for the first time in this country’s history) that pleasure was indeed a worthwhile quest. One is like the other. Jean-Luc Godard once said, "The cinema is not the station, the cinema is the train.”  They’re both, to further paraphrase le Réalisateur, “interested in the train, and not the station, for [they are] no longer waiting.” From their dubious fin-de-siècle birth-pangs onward, jazz and cinema have refused to simply play it pretty for the pretty people, instead soaking up resistant energy from war, social upheaval, sex and power, bankrupt values, and the seductive velocity of the 20th century—all with intoxicating daring and a hustler’s cool.

Let’s get lost. They’re playing our song. Was the face. I want to flip. In the misty night. Flip for real. She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket. No names, no addresses. Just companions for the evening. . . Establishing shot. Action:

From the brooding to hopeful, funny, poignant and shocking to outlandish, fantastical, and heartbreakingly tragic, music and film ravish our sensibilities with subversive quietude, vice-torqued textures, subtle melodic insurrection. We like music that is cinematic, we relish a film with jazz-like pacing.  Complex narrative wrapped around the curves of simple beauty. This is the neighborhood of the Fantastic Merlins.

Musically they are the spiritual kin of bass sorcerer François Rabbath, Albert Ayler’s vibrational, gospel-tinged sonorities, Frisell’s spacious, meteorological impulses, Sonny Rollins’ hopscotch antics, an occasional taut Feldmanesque mise-en-scène , Morricone’s redolent lozenges of mood and memory, and 1980s shoot-from-the-hip, NYC-downtown avant-gardisms that ricochet between angular swing and curveball poetics. While not outwardly a JAZZ group (in the verse-chorus-bridge-solo-solo-solo sense), the Fantastic Merlins’ approach to rhythm and space is firmly rooted in a freewheeling jazz sensibility—and  then again,  there’s that patient, narrative quality that is, yes, deeply cinematic.

The Fantastic Merlins are Nathan Hanson, tenor saxophone; Jacqueline Ferrier-Ultan, cello; Brian Roessler, bass; Federico Ughi, drums. What’s been called their gift for the psychedelic is really more of an alchemical interplay. Like the bass-piano-clarinet dynamics of Jimmy Giuffre’s Freefall, the group executes a sensual game of freeze-tag between figure and ground. At moments angular and aggressive, but rarely ever austere, the music’s textural elements breathe exceptional warmth into elliptical spaces. Bass, cello, saxophone intertwine for a honey-rich choral effect, splinter with steely “abkratzen,” and epitomize chamber music (both in the sense of containment and a subversive sense of surface attraction). It’s the soundtrack of a strange and beautiful love affair.

David Hockney, in an exchange with fellow painter Larry Rivers, once said he would rather his work be thought of as beautiful, because, “interesting was on its way there, but beautiful could knock you out.”

Look Around by Ughi is a gorgeously evocative, open lament—it gives a brooding, filmlike sense of foreshadowing that betrays the composer’s affinity for Paul Bley. While there’s an ether-inhaled atmospheria to things, Roessler’s use of bow (haunting flautando and calorie-rich bottom of the François Rabbath, Mark Dresser variety) suggests a more Central Europa-Mediterranean-Sephardic grounding, keeping things from entering into the Scando-austerity of an ECM record. The undercurrent, steeped in sadness and a yearning for hope, pulses with thrums of war, loss, and the slow-motion shock of disbelief.

Hanson’s I was behind the couch all the time jumpstarts the session with ominous to-be Ornette to-bop and propeller-arm-swinging forward momentum. Full of encroaching consequences, creeping suspense and ultimate horror (but in the most baroque, yeah-like-that-could-happen, Roger Corman sense), the piece curtails itself with delicious entropic distractions, hide-and-seek rhythmic centers, and an almost shave-and-a-haircut denouement. With A Very Small Animal we’re met by stillness, then slowly evolving thickets of movement. There’s a riot going on. But this rebellion eschews the noisy and offensive, embracing instead a quieter unrest—think of the sonic equivalent of Barnett Newman's audaciously bold line.

Outside of cinematic moodscapes, tunes like It Would Seem are where the group excels—creating a terrifically angular, intercutting of push-me/pull-you, Monkish figures, abrupt right-angles (as jarring as an exit off the New Jersey turnpike), and, what might best be described as, a fugal falling-up-and-down-the stairs. It’s delightfully bumptious. Unlike John Zorn’s unscheduled lane-change approach to “aural movies,” the Fantastic Merlins collectively traffic less in cut-n-paste, “file card,”synaptic chaos. Here, swirly shimmering pools of eddying string-n-sax swoops and circular echoes of melody collide with attenuated, treble-shrill skronking and boom-chakka-lakka-thump. The result is like a Steve McQueen car-chase in the middle of a good foreign film—unexpected  yet somehow familiar in its excitement and adrenal thrill. Suspenseful, but electric with paint-peeling splendor.

Letting Go is just that. Like some of Bill Frisell’s chamber work, this has a gorgeous moebius-strip current of steel, metal, wood, and curved space. Part passacaglia, part gone reflection (one of those tiny imagist poems of experience that connect us to threads of the past, the knowable), the piece has a Satie-like simplicity, with an implied ache. I’m reminded of AACM pianist Carei Thomas’s inspired see-sawing of the fulcrum between beauty’s dark and lighter recesses and remember that poet George Oppen once said, “If one steps into nothing, the fact is tremendous.”

Roessler’s Dance Partner revels in what can best be described as a nagging, playful, I’ll-tell-the-waiter-he’s-wanted-on-the-telephone-change-partners-again mashup between “Lulu’s Back in Town” and Piero Umiliani’s ultra-infectious “Mah-Na Mah-Na.” And I’m all the better as a result. Runoff Water is a piece of poetry. Swelling with condensation, it’s insistent, like Wislawa Szymborska’s Water, patiently “Gnawing at stone” that coaxes one toward “pronouncing all the vowels at once.”  Hints of an ancient-to-the-future update of 16th century Emo prince,  John Dowland, semper dolens ( “Flow my teares” is another form of run-off, isn’t it?). Music of this gravity (to misinterpret Andrei Tarkovsky’s definition of cinema) is where we go to "receive time." 

Lenny is a “hit single.” The slashing rhythm of the strings goads, teases a kinetic, dancerly vamp and the result is all-out, angular, funkified no-wave exhuberance. Fierce, hip, and obstinate, with an albeit melancholic hue,  I can’t help but feel that Hanson was channeling the rapid-fire, Benzedrine-fueled free association of at least one Lenny, the late lamented Mr. Bruce. Ughi’s Line, a vivid piece of wrenching, pastoral beauty and slowly evolving gesture, is one of the most richly satisfying entries on the session. The elegiac sea-to-shining-sea momentum and narrative quality is worthy of classic Morricone.

Beautiful urgency, Ornette circular-madness (think Science Fiction-era), pulsing, tense, and full of menacing joy—Bright and Wide gives way to full-bore sax and skittering drum volleys. . .near-psychedelia, expansive, with a distinct avoidance of gravity. From a lurching dodge and parry between cello-bass-saxophone, an insistent trance-fueled, test-kitchen wedding of timbres, we’re met with one last glorious interrupted skraaanck. Fin.

Jean Cocteau once said, “The public does not like dangerous profundities; it prefers surfaces.” The values of jazz and improvised music are typically an affront to the polite surface of life. Call it a left-handed form of human endeavor, but The Fantastic Merlins’ subversive aesthetics are a threat to The Man. They embrace a daring velocity, a dissonant wail, a noir-ish sense of sensuality, intimacy, and risk, they embody freedom and possess, dare I say, a democratic appeal . . .all of which act as a powder-keg, dismantling silence and decency, as poet Ed Dorn once said,  "like whips of sex in the Sousa-filled night."  It hardly gets more cinematic than that.

—Tim DuRoche, Portland, OR

(Tim DuRoche is a Portland, OR-based jazz drummer/conceptual artist and writer active in improvised music from ragtime to no time. He writes regularly about jazz, dance, and other arts and culture-related issues for a number of publications.)