from Peter Zummo to ML Buch
"minimalism plus a whole lot more"
real quick: gigs this month
July 9 - a Josh Cole Quartet + strings w/ Aline Homzy, Lina Allemano, Nick Storring, John Oswald, Blake Howard, and me @ Tranzac
July 10 - Brodie West ‘Donna Lee’ Quartet w/ Brodie, Reg Schwager, Nick Fraser, me @ Tranzac
July 19 - Sandro Perri & friends @ Tranzac
After the recent gigs with Peter Zummo this last month Sandro Perri in a text exchange said this to me…
i have often wondered… how many times have any one of us written 8 perfect bars and then fucked them up by trying to turn them into “something”
There are a couple tunes of Peter’s where I think he’s written the perfect 4, 6 or 8 bars, and when you’ve written the perfect 8 bars, you don’t really need to write much else. Way Better Than I Expected and Actual Serpentine are blissful pieces of melody that feel incredible to sit in.
We didn’t play Peter’s “hit” Song IV on this tour - in his words “I’m not interested in doing that anymore” - that piece I think is a perfect composition, when you look at the chart, and I’m lucky enough to have a photo copy of the original - it seems so simple, a collection of perfect 2-4 bar ideas that all work together. But to Sandro’s point, he didn’t f!@# it up by trying to turn it into “something”. With the wrong musicians, would the piece work as well? Probably wouldn’t be quite as magical, it certainly helps that Peter had a daily relationship collaborating with Arthur Russell and Bill Ruyle. When Peter says “minimalism plus a whole lot more” I think its fair to say collaborating regularly with the right musicians is a big part of that “whole lot more” - musicians fluent in improvisation, pop, rock, disco, punk and minimalism as a start, musicians open to committing to Peter’s vision.
Like all great composers, Peter has some specifics about his music that make it work. No chord symbols, only specific voicings, he actually said to me “I don’t like it when people write chords in my charts”, Michael Davidson and I quickly took out our erasers after we heard that. Lets be honest, chord symbols are a deeply jazz idea/practice and Peter’s music is not jazz, he will be the first to tell you that. And as much as it would be easy to say that all the melodic fragments he writes can work with the other parts of the composition at any time, he is quite specific about how things should line up and how to connect the different fragments of his compositions. As a composer his music is both totally open and deeply specific. Its an incredible balance that seems so easy to achieve when you live in his music, but we all know, its an incredibly difficult balance to find as a composer.
I went and saw ML Buch play in Toronto last week, another composer/artist that to my ears sounds steeped in rock, folk and minimalism with some very specific ideas about how her music works. Dare I say her music is reflective of some of the ideas Arthur Russell developed in his music. There are some perfect songs that consist of some simple refrains that get to that same emotional level Arthur did for me. Working It Out is one for sure, there are a bunch more. It was also maybe one of the most beautiful and perfect nights of singing I’ve ever heard.
I don’t think I’d call it minimalism but as a bass player and fan of experimental pop/songwriting - how good is Ruth Goller? I love it. One night I played her new record for Peter, and Peter was like “Oh this is Ruth, yes she’s a friend”, they share a mutual friend in Bex Burch. To my ears its reflective of Arthur in a different way - maybe more so the solo singing with an idiosyncratic solo instrument vibe World of Echo established than the approach to minimal repetitive composition - either way its great, so so great.