Yep, Jim McAuley’s new two-CD set is out, with a set of liner notes by yours truly. It’s a fantastic collection of duets with a variety of partners, including the late Leroy Jenkins, the Cline brothers (Alex & Nels), & Ken Filiano. Here’s the long version of my liner notes (I cut this in half for the disc, then used the offcuts for the press release…. waste not want not). You can hear a few samples here.
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I haven’t been able to find out much about Roy Dickinson, the author of The Ultimate Frog: An Unforgettable Story of a Strange Quest, a small book published in 1939, reprinting a story that first ran in Harper’s in 1924. It’s not so much a short story, really, as a parable about art, idealism and God, in which Old Man Sanders embarks on a quixotic quest to create a choir of four perfectly harmonious croakers, the moral being (to invert the usual maxim) that “the good is the enemy of the perfect” — that some brave souls won’t settle for the good-enough in art or in life. Sanders dies in the act of capturing the last frog, a little pickerel frog that “hit middle C as true as a good cellist”; the narrator, picking it up in hopes of completing the little choir, discovers that in the meantime the three others have hopped away, back into the swamp.
There’s surely gentle irony behind Jim McAuley’s titling this set of improvisations after such a book; after all, jazz is (as one commentator terms it) “the imperfect art,” tied to the expressive idiosyncrasies of the player’s individual personality — his “voice” — and subject to the happy or just plain unavoidable accidents of the moment. The elusiveness of McAuley’s music isn’t the sound of a Platonic ideal hopping away, but comes from a sense of a musical/human personality that keeps revealing more and more sides as you listen, with an intimacy, an emotional directness that sometimes actually puts you on the spot as a listener: freeform improv isn’t supposed to sound like this, is it? This openly expressive, this mutually implicating? (There are two or three tracks here whose drop-what-you’re-doing-now voodoo makes me think of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso”: “You must change your life.”) McAuley’s is not “private” music in the sense of being cryptic or abstract; he seems, instead, fascinated by the act of improvisation as a way of being-private-in-public, which offers a kind of welcoming ecstasy. And he’s fascinated by all those privacies (personal languages, life experiences, traditions) around him, which is why he’s a great duo partner, as can be heard in these four very different encounters with four strongly individual players.
The pieces here have been whittled down from a much larger body of material and carefully sequenced (there is a side of McAuley which hankers towards that froggy aesthetic absolute). It’s good to have a double-CD helping this time, because up to now there’s been far too little documentation of the guitarist’s artistry despite his long musical career. McAuley was born in Kansas in 1946; much to the dismay of his parents, his musical talent showed early, and as a teen he turned his attention to playing acoustic blues guitar. Classical guitar studies, folk guitar and jazz shortly entered the mix; in later years, he also took up kora, charango and oud (his music draws on many, many wells). In the late 1960s he was a member of a folk-rock group, Mouse; under contract to Capitol Records, the band moved to Los Angeles, only to fall apart before even recording their first album. Stranded, he spent a while as part of producer Don Costa’s stable of studio musicians–he’s present on albums by Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, and Eydie Gorme, among others–but the experience left him disenchanted, and it wasn’t long till he embarked for Europe (first Paris, then Ibiza) for an extended sojourn, concentrating on just “getting next to my guitar”. Returning to LA in the mid-1970s, he hooked up with the many fine players on the local avant-jazz scene — most crucially, the clarinettist John Carter, who was for a time his mentor. McAuley also connected with the post-Harry Partch microtonalists Erv Wilson, Ivor Darreg and Kraig Grady, an interest that much later bore fruit in the Acoustic Guitar Trio, a collaboration with Nels Cline and Rod Poole which explored just intonation, regular temperament and many other possible tunings (often simultaneously!). He kept a low profile, supporting himself with gigging and teaching, though there was one other false start towards a recording career in 1976, when he was signed to John Fahey’s Takoma Records, then dropped when the label was sold to Chrysalis. In the 1990s he led a series of disparate groups for Cline’s Alligator Lounge series — a constantly mutating project he dubbed “The Gongfarmers” (a gong farmer, if you really must know, is a medieval latrine cleaner). Despite this, McAuley’s only previous release under his own name, Gongfarmer 18 (Nine Winds), is actually a solo recording. His only other CD to date was the Acoustic Guitar Trio’s self-titled debut, released on Derek Bailey’s Incus label.
Aside from the leader himself, the musicians on these sessions probably need little in the way of introduction. McAuley originally met the late, great Leroy Jenkins (arguably the most important violinist to emerge from the 1960s jazz avant-garde) when the latter’s trio with Myra Melford and Joseph Jarman played LA in 2002. (Aside from these duet sessions, their encounter yielded an informative interview with Jenkins which was published in the poetry-and-jazz magazine Shuffle Boil.) Their performances are the closest thing on The Ultimate Frog to conventional free-improv duets — there’s no precomposed/prearranged material, they simply seized the moment and ran — but there’s certainly no cautious scrambling-around, either. On “Improvisation #12,” for instance, McAuley’s running-water stillness-in-motion prompts some of Jenkins’ most forthright, lyrical playing on the date, though there’s always an attacking edge — his articulation virtually jerks the line forward at times. It’s exhilarating and a little frightening to hear the players eventually push off into some very fraught territory indeed, through a series of countless incremental gestures and curving changes of direction.
The other three players here are key figures from the Los Angeles free jazz music scene, though Ken Filiano is now based in New York, and nowadays Nels Cline splits his schedule between avant-jazz gigs and his work as a member of Wilco. Many of these tracks involve some loose premeditation or agreed-upon exploration of a specific texture, approach or lick (including some great blues hooks); there are even a few dots-on-paper tunes. What’s most obvious is McAuley’s love of the sheer variety and depth of sound he and his partners can create — from the spellbound hush of “Bullfrogs and Fireflies” and “November Night” to the daft hullabaloo of “Froggie’s Magic Twanger,” featuring the Marxophone (a rattly zither-like gadget that used to be sold through the Sears catalogue — it’s hard to imagine producing any coherent “normal” music with it, but for improv it’s quite the thing!). The duos with Nels Cline are downright uncanny at times in the closeness of their phrasing and understanding, while the duos with bass and drums often have the contrapuntal richness of a trio (or quartet!) performance.
And then there’s the last track, a song with/for an absent partner, as the rain beats down outside. Listening to it, I can’t help coming back to the shining moment of near-transcendence in Roy Dickinson’s old story, when the frog choir is three-quarters complete:
Then we went back on the porch and listened. It sounded like real music. The philosophy of song and the woods was there. The deep note of the old bull, the higher one of the green frog, and the shrill tenor of the peeper blended in a melody like an old folk song. I began to think of the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn.’ It was the true harmony of the almost, the perfection of the nearly perfect. There was melody in the music, as of a world striving to be articulate at some point beyond the light of the morning star.
Keats’ poem says that “Heard melodies are sweet; but those / Unheard are sweeter.” Well, maybe… but I’m just thankful for the ones I’m hearing now, right here.
Nate Dorward, 15 August 2008
