Jyaku Sound is the music label of Joseph Jarman’s Brooklyn Buddhist Association; the six players on Chris Chalfant’s Love and Light are all members or associates of the Association. The packaging of the CD is, by jazz standards, suspiciously wholesome. On the cover the sandal-shod leader floats etherially among the clouds of a handsome sunset; inside, a strip of words – “LIGHT ENERGY MOTION” and so forth – is looped into the shape of an infinity symbol. The music itself is pretty beatific but (fortunately) hardly as anodyne as the CD design leads one to anticipate. It’s not exactly ground-breaking in its mix of free jazz and exoticism (it could easily pass for an Impulse! disc of the late 1960s), but at its best the music has a combination of serenity and unearthly dissonance that is quite effective. “African Harp,” the 15-minute opener, is rather good once it gets past Chalfant’s drifting wordless vocals. Like most of the music on the disc, it’s a swirling, shimmering tapestry of sound rather than a string of highlighted solos. The suite “Love and Light” takes up 32 minutes of the album, and unfortunately it’s the least satisfactory track, burdened with trite lyrics (“Love is here and love is there, love is here for all to share . . .”) and a truly diabolical instrument (melodian?) which sounds like the simultaneous squeezing of two broken accordions tuned a quarter-tone apart. Frequently, too, the pitching of Chalfant’s voice and the winds is enough to make one’s ears ache. Memo to Ms Chalfant: chording away on a tempered instrument like a piano while someone’s singing or playing flat – er, in a non-tempered manner – is just asking for trouble.

The other disc here, Bill Cole’s Seasoning the Greens, is a better bet all round. Like Love and Light, this is jazz that draws on a variety of world musics for inspiration. But here the mix of Western and non-Western instruments and systems of temperament is piquant rather than jarring, and only occasionally do things get too cluttered (I did find the combo of pennywhistle and – is it nagaswaram? – on “South Indian Marriage Rhythm” rather hard to take . . . ). Cole is especially interested in exploring the distinctive musical rhythms of other cultures: the central section of this continuous hourlong performance finds the musicians improvising in succession over rhythmic patterns from India, Colombia and Ghana. The musicians sidestep the jazz convention that dictates a round of neatly framed solos, instead elaborating continuously developing textures of lively, collectivist improvising. To my ear, the presiding spirit on this disc isn’t Coltrane or Sanders but Charles Mingus: certainly the latter’s influence is unmistakeable in the whoop and holler of the final track, a rolling 6/8 blues that brings the cultural odyssey of the piece back home.

Cole switches between a variety of instruments on the disc: the Chinese sona, the Korean hojok, the Northern Indian shenai and the Southern Indian nagaswaram. It would take a listener more closely acquainted with these instruments than I am to figure out exactly what he’s playing where, because these are actually all variations on the same basic instrument (a type of oboe). None of them has what you’d call an appealing sound: the Encyclopedia Britannica neutrally terms the sound of the nagaswaram “strong and penetrating” and notes (deadpan) that, like the bagpipes, it “is usually played outdoors.” I’m probably not the only listener whose musical tolerance is tested by an hour of skirling conical double-reed oboes. But despite such considerations, the disc is worth persisting with, as there’s some very fine music on here – above all, the magical and haunting “The Triple Towers of Kyongbokkang.”

Nate Dorward

Cadence, February 2003