High Alps of Sound

Earshot Jazz December 1998 Peter Monaghan Glam rockers could do it with gaudy spandex tights and spangly hair. Young Country crooners seem to need only a stetson and shrinkfitted bluejeans. In jazz and variants of it, alas, commanding your audience's attention is of a taller order. A few informative comments about the music can help. Shuffles about between numbers, wondering what to play next, surely does not. In quest of suspending the everyday, Tucker Martine and his band Mount Analog have contrived their own solution. It depends on using sound, alone. Mount Analog's shows are shifting, interwoven, cannily paced collages of tunes (jazz-based or not), soundwashes, and fragments derived from rarely reconciled musical domains. In the course of a 45-minute set, the music shifts and wafts in an unbroken stream. Freely improvised passages leaven more obviously structured stretches of melody, and vice-versa. Martine's bandmates, Jon Hyde, Bruce Wirth, and Steve Moore - all three mutli-intsrumentalists - move among batteries of acoustic and electronic string, horn, and percussive instruments, at one moment easing into a languid, countrified ditty, then gearing up to a more "jazz-like" passage. But then Wirth, on violin, may play a Bach fragment, and bandmembers will work to incorporate it (certainly not as prescribed in the conservatories) onto Mount Analog's compelling kaleidoscope of sound, musical noise, and often diffracted melody. Clinching this unusual musical practice is Martine, a quiet presence almost hidden at the back of the stage. There, seated at an array of electronic recording-studio equipment. He electronically and processes his bandmates' sound, then feeds the results back into the on-stage mix. Or, he may trigger digitally stored field recordings, so that suddenly the voices of children, the squeal of an engine, or the clapping of hands will drift out - and will confound standard expectations of live musical performance. The result suggests a dreamscape, a warped aural cinema where melody and noise intermingle. Clinching the approach is that Martine does not deploy his electronic equipment as a DJ might - by say, locking the band into grooves or programming repetitive looped segments. Rather he "plays" his samplers and processors, converting studio sound-engineering equipment into an expansive musical instrument. At most times the sonic elements of Mount Analog's music are plainly not what one might associate with jazz: There are no discernible solos of saxophones, piano, drums...But the whole approach adopts the improvisatory spirit and hybrid texture of jazz. The movement of a piece will at times resemble a slowed, distended ballad, even if constructed of filtered and unfamiliar sounds, or of the jangling of a guitar, the tapping of a typewriter, the milling of Moroccan villagers, a Texas truckstop jukebox heard across a railyard, the clang and thrum of a factory, the hum of a highway, carnival clamor heard from a stormy rainwater drain, shortwave radio distortion rhapsodizing symphonically, engagement of the cogs that drive the music of the spheres... Such were the elements of Mount Analog's inaugural, self-titled CD release of last year. At times, they registered concurrently with some blisteringly beautiful melodies for percussion, violin, guitar, and other more recognizable instrumentation. Mount Analog was, to be sure, an impressively assured debut. Martine says the project was to take shape when, some time earlier, his growing familiarity with the technology of recording alerted him to new ways of making and manipulating sound. As he says: "Anything is possible, I stared to realize." Martine had been working as a studio engineer and producer since coming to Seattle from Nashville, via Boulder, Colo., in 1993. In 1995, Wayne Horvitz, the Seattle-based keyboards and composing wiz, and catalyst of many local musicians' projects, invited Martine to become a member of his acoustic/electronic chamber-jazz quintet, 4+1 Ensemble - as a performer. He had been impressed by Martine's skills in the studio. "Wayne really points out how my perception of the studio isn't that different from playing an instrument," says Martine. "Basically what he said to me was, 'I want you to do what we do when we mix a record, only live.' That was really important to me, and in some ways it encouraged me to start Mount Analog, because I realized that I had this whole other instrument at my disposal." That also led to a spectacular collaboration with 4+1 member Julian Priester, who invited Martine to take part in his own recording session with progressive saxophone veteran Sam Rivers. Martine recalls: "Julian and Sam were cooking up an idea about making a record and had been brainstorming about how to add another element - something other than the two of them, and not a drummer." Priester recommended to Rivers that they use Martine. In 4+1, Horvitz integrates electronic concepts into compositions from the outset, and Martine improvises from there. Rivers and Priester, it turned out, were happy to set Martine loose, to see what he could come up with. The result was the extraordinary Hints on Lights and Shadow (Postcards) and concert appearances, including a memorable performance at the 1996 Earshot Jazz Festival. There, Rivers clearly savored the novel approach. He seemed at times, entranced as he listened to his own sampled and processed solos, and he intermittently augmented them with fresh ideas. Martine says Rivers has said little to him about the approach, which has been a very rare use of electrified sounds for Rivers: "He doesn't say much about it at all. He just loves to dive in and go. As soon as he trusts you musically - that you know when to stay out of the way and when to step forward - it's all listening and playing after that." But one sensed, witnessing the collaboration, that a potentially powerful step forward was occurring in the nature of jazz performance. Certainly, Light and Shadow was far from the first recording to feature electronic sampling. For example, Wayne Horvitz, himself, used similar techniques in the late-1980's recordings with Butch Morris. But, with more recent advances, the utility of recording technology as an improvisational tool seems to have come of age. It's as if Edgard Varese's prescient view of music, 60 years ago, has finally been fully incorporated into musical practice. (For a truly state-of-the-art and full-frontal example of where things have headed, try British free-jazz saxophone master Even Parker and electronics collaborators on the stunning Live at Les Instant Chavires, Leo Records, 1998). Martine's collaboration with Rivers and Priester continues in occasional festival appearances. Mount Analog is now the primary musical vehicle for Martine's ideas. But it is far from the only place you are likely to hear him, or notice his influence. He has come to be held in high regard both as a performer and a studio engineer and producer. He has recorded, engineered or produced recordings for Bill Frisell, Wayne Horvitz and a host of musicians in genres as varied as rock, free-improv, and country. Among his fast-lengthening list of credits: -both of Wayne Horvitz's Zony Mash recordings, as well as the latest of his Pigpen CD's; -Bill Frisell's soundtrack for a documentary American Hollow, set for release at this year's Sundance Film Festival, and for Gary Larson's TV special Far Side, part 2; -the piece Frisell provided for Gus Sant's Psycho remake, as well as a project this month with drum legend Jim Keltner; -violinist Eyvind Kang's highly idiosyncratic CD from last year, Theater of Mineral NADEs (Tzadik), on which Martine also played drums; -a bluegrass recording by Frisell collaborator and banjo player Danny Barnes. Last January, Martine went back to Nashville to produce and lend "adventurous elements" to the alternative country band, Farmer Not So John, whose singer, guitarist, songwriter Mack Linebaugh is an old friend and bandmate. Often working from his home-located Flora Ave Studio, Martine also has contributed music, processing, or engineering to recent or upcoming releases by Zony Mash/4+1 guitarist Tim Young, guitar and vocals innovator Sue Ann Harkey, the inimitable Climax Golden Twins, former Golden Palominos singer Lori Carson, and Chris Eckman of the Walkabouts. He produced, and played drums and treatments on an upcoming release from Hughscore, the band led by bass legend Hugh Hopper, formerly of Soft Machine, that also includes Seattle-based keyboardist/vocalist Elaine DiFalco and bassist Fred Chalenor. Last month, Martine produced an upcoming album by two New York-based Seattleites: drummer Andrew Drury and saxophonist Briggan Krauss. And he is composing a commissioned, 70-minute piece for choreographer Jeff Bickford and his company, Zen Fred Movement. "Finally", says quiet-spoken, self-effacing Martine, "people are saying, 'I've heard what you do, I like it, would you help me bring an element of that to my recording?'" The Mount Analog CD was largely a solo affair for Martine, although he called on several friends, including violinist Eyvind Kang and guitarist Tim Young. Also on board were two members of the current Mount Analog lineup. One, Bruce Wirth is a violinist who also plays mandolin, banjo, and harmonium. Jon Hyde, originally from Alaska, plays pedal-steel guitar, electric bass, and occasional keyboards. He and Martine met when Martine recorded a rock band Hyde was in, Rock Paper Scissors. Completing the current line-up is trombonist Steve Moore, the band's most jazz-rooted player. He increases the multi-instrumentality of the already versatile lineup Says Martine: "The trick with Mount Analog is giving people room to do what they do well, without it being just a novelty." Moore enthusiastically buys Martine's concept: "It's all about creating an environment that is open and fosters creativity. As a jazz musician, I've never felt I have as much in common as I do with Tucker and the other guys in Mount Analog. Yet we have very little actual 'musical/style traits' in common. Accommodating that variety is made easier by Martine's indifference to genre boundaries, and by his adoption of unhurried pacing and exploratory passages of soundscape that permit the band to shift from one gear or style - really, combination of styles - to another without pausing or breaking their shows' aural spell. Martine says: "I tend to emphasize more ambient textures because I think that, given what everyone else is bringing, that compliments it well. I'm just trying to find that tiny line where none of it's contrived but everyone has all the room to be themselves. I really like to think it's not fusiony at all but there are traces of American roots music, and jazz, and other things." The band's name came from the title of a 1952 novel by French writer, Rene Daumal, whose subtitle suggests its singular nature: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing. "It's not so much that that book changed my life," explains Martine. Rather he wanted to reflect the nature of the soundscapes he creates. Both on the album and at the live shows, the sense of the name emerges in the music's marriage of arcane sonotities, novel geographies, an evocation of quest, and a humanness that prevails over the shock of technological currency. Martine appears, in fact, far from a devotee of dazzling new technology. It's only worth using "as long as there's a musical idea there to support it," he asserts. "When I start to have a problem with electronics or technology is when all that is interesting is the fact that someone is manipulating things." One joy of the current lineup of Mount Analog , he says, is that he gets to renew his "first-love" in music: playing good-old acoustic drums. He says: "Playing drums was my first love, and I still love it. That was my primary involvement with music from when I was 12." It was not until he came to Seattle at he beginning of 1993 that he started to create electronic music. For butoh dance, as it happened. And with no drums. "People seemed to like it," he says. So he continued. He realizes now, he says, that he was drawing on a variety of experiences. He had, for instance, been a radio DJ while in Boulder, airing arcane music appropriate to his late-night slot. He had also taken a course at the Naropa Institute in creative recording with guitarist Steve Tibbetts, whose own recordings, swirling and mesmeric, appear a likely influence on Martine. "What I get real excited about," he says, "is that Mount Analog seems like a culmination of all my interests which at a distance seem unrelated and disparate." When he began to develop his approach to electronics, "I was just basically trying to find a way to create the sounds I heard in my head without saying, 'Well, I'm going to call a guitarist.'" Explaining how to create music such as his, Martine says, in effect, "No big deal." He uses, he says, "pretty basic stuff - it's tools that anybody could walk into the music store and get for a couple hundred dollars." That means gadgets such as a "digital looping device" that permits him to record passages of his bandmates' playing, then feed them through filters, back into the live mix. As they reemerge, they often are not recognizable as the original passage, though they retain musical forms. Similarly, Martine can modulate sounds by, for instance, bending the pitches of the originals. Often, that;s a matter of "manipulating sounds to even I would forget what they were." A new Mount Analog recording is in preparation.