Image via Yousef Hilmy
Will Schube still can’t believe Larry David got Salman Rushdie to say ‘fatwa sex’ on Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Heady, honkin’, wildin’ free jazz first seems like a foreign language, in which the code is cracked when you finally understand. And Dave Harrington, Patrick Shiroshi, and Max Jaffe’s new trio album, Speak, Moment, may initially scan as unapproachable, but beneath the improvisatory structure is a mighty, infectious, and inviting heartbeat. As Shiroshi tells me, “I just want people who hear our music to feel something.”
The trio linked in a patchwork manner. Psych-leaning improv maestro Dave Harrington and Max Jaffe can trace their roots to their shared time in the NYC underground. Once both artists were firmly relocated in LA, Abrams connected Harrington with another friend of his, Shiroshi. The duo immediately hit it off too.
Shiroshi appears everywhere you look, whether at the tragically defunct ETA Highland Park (where this trio often played together) or on tour with reincarnated rock gods The Armed. He’s also a member of the most excellent chamber-folk-jazz group Fuubutsushi. Harrington, who fans of this site should know, broke through as one-half of Darkside but has become a jazz hero for a new generation in more recent years, between his solo releases and live shows. He has also single-handedly revived the Online Ceramics secondhand market in LA with his Dead-celebrating jam band Taper’s Choice (real heads—real Heads?—know).
Jaffe suggested the trio hit the studio, and aside from a few general touchstones and ideas, the group decided to record some ideas and see what came of them. The result is Speak, Moment, an otherworldly blend of these three players’ voices into an urgent, pulsing, shifting organism.
“It can go any number of ways, but this is just one of those lucky cosmic things that worked out,” says Harrington about the project. “Sometimes people show up and they have a really concise thing that they do, and then it’s about interacting with that. Some people show up and bring a little more malleability.” Harrington credits the success of this project to each player’s balance.
“This worked because the three of us hold those two things in equal measure,” Harrington adds. “We operate in a lot of different musical worlds, and so we’re used to being a little chameleonic, but we all have very strong identities as improvisers.”
This record is both a collection of songs and a rare token that should be cherished. It’s a live capturing of three generationally talented musicians performing together for the first time, speaking a language immediately felt but impossible to translate. This shit happened in the 60s, when all-timers would link up for a day and drop a record. But as it turns out, Harrington, Shiroshi, and Jaffe are part of a history that is rich, vital, and still innovative. We should count ourselves lucky. It is, to put it bluntly and a bit obviously, what makes music so f*cking cool.
To help decode the roots of Speak, Moment, we asked each member in the group to share three albums that either reflect the spirit of the LP or serve as a jumping off point — whether you’re a free jazz connoisseur or hide in the other room when the honks come calling.
I don’t have to give a rundown of the album. It’s hard to describe. I remember when I saw them play, they would do things where they would swing and they’d play tunes, and they would just be totally at ease with the fact that there was no bass player there keeping the pulse. It was this kind of shared responsibility that created a kind of drifting, floating groove that is very unique. Motian would do things like just play the ride cymbal every now and then in time, but not keeping time, just kind of trusting that time was going to be there every time his hand went back to the cymbal.
He would lift his hand up and take a beat and then just smash the kick drum. It was never aggressive, it was never avant-garde per se, but it had a looseness and freedom that lived inside this beautiful music. If nothing else, I listen to this record and I think about it in this context of comfort with space. It’s almost a reminder because I use a lot of electronics and I can easily become a wall of drones or noise or harmonic goo if I’m not careful. This record is a reminder to me that in that context, with this instrumentation, that space created can be the greatest gift.
All three of them have again, like the last trio, huge, interesting, fascinating musical lineages. I don’t know the origin story of how they became a band. It’s super hard to describe the music, and I love that they call themselves Death Ambient because it really speaks to something in the music. It’s kind of ambient music, but all the songs are three or four minutes long. It’s not a Music For Airports situation.
This is just such a touchstone record for me. The thing I love most that they do on the record is create a very abstract, very electronic — especially because of Ikue Mori — electroacoustic ambient music. There are all of these acoustic elements that are at the center of the music, and they play this free — what I assume to be, and could only be — free improvisation, that also has these really beautiful melodic moments to it.
It goes in and out of these thematic things or these bits of melody and harmonic consonance, and then into this void. Fred Frith will play paintbrush on guitar and Ikue will bring in static crackle living organism stuff. Hideki is playing a bunch of different instruments on it. There’s banjo in there somewhere. There’s this real freedom of texture in the record that I think about a lot.
There are some records that I don’t listen to all the time, I’ll listen to every now and then, but they remain in my memory as an influence. This is one of those things. The way that that record lives in my mind is strong. I’m often influenced by some combination of the last time I listened to it, but maybe sometimes my own memory and internalization of it.
He’s a British free improviser, and he played in a lot of different circles and crossed over with ECM people. He lived in the European Peter Brötzmann free jazz world. At the end of his life he was in New York a lot, or maybe he moved there and was playing at Tonic and made some records that were produced by John Zorn.
This is one of them. This record is kind of a stand in for Derek Bailey as an idea and icon. This happens to be one that I listen to a lot. Bailey had a concept called nonidiomatic improvisation. It essentially meant trying to play freely in the moment without reference to genre. Depending on who he’s playing with, sometimes they kind of sound like free jazz, sometimes they kind of sound like new music, sometimes they sound like noise rock. He made a record with The Ruins that was on Zorn’s label. The nonidiomatic improvisation concept is something I think about probably every time I play a show. Whenever I go somewhere and I’m improvising, Bailey will pass through my mind at some point, and he’ll remind me that what I really need to be doing is listening as hard as I can and responding. That can be anything.
It’s an exercise or a concept that stays with me because I love genre. Part of the fun that I have when I’m doing free improvising gigs is I’ll just pitch a big softball down the middle that feels like a samba or a lounge jazz tune, or I’ll just start playing what can only be Krautrock and see where it takes us. Because I enjoy that so much, Bailey is a reminder to me to then get out of that and be like, I can play any note. I can play any rhythm. I can play no rhythm. I need to detach myself from any point of reference. If I just really listen to what’s happening near me, how can I respond without trying to contextualize it?
I was hot on the Bailey tip when I went into the studio, and Robbie, who was the engineer, is one of the only other people I know who’s read this obscure Derek Bailey biography. I walked into the session and I started popping off about Derek Bailey because I was really excited about having finished this book. I thought maybe that Max or Patrick would be into it. Robbie turned around to me and was like, ‘Oh yeah, I loved that.’ I thought it was a good sign.
This album is three tracks long, and each composition is so fleshed out even though it’s improvised, too. There’s something aspirational and inspirational about that. The way that they’re using production—I don’t think they’re using any electronics in the performance. The way that they use the whole process of mixing and editing and the production on the record is really unique and it gives it a very specific flavor. When I first heard Tony Buck’s drumming, it was a long time ago and I was still new to New York. His whole approach actually was very revelatory for me as far as exposing how else you can play drums.
Brötzmann is a giant of sound, but when he was at home he would only play Coleman Hawkins or melodic players. That’s crazy! The last solo record that he put out had no real honking—I think it was his last solo record. He was just doing covers of standards. I thought that was a beautiful arc to his story. I’m glad he put that out before he passed away, rest in peace. Ayler’s tone on Swing Low is just, ‘Man, you f*ckking feel it!’ At the end of the day, whether live or on record, I just want people who hear our music to feel something.