Spending time with an album inspired by other artistic references feels akin to watching the bonus features of a movie – new points of view avail themselves for consideration, and additional rabbit holes of exploration appear. Art is delightful in that way; any existing artwork can become a new entry point for another. On Hemlocks, Peacocks (Jan. 10, Panoramic Recordings), scholar, composer, and drummer Will Mason – joined by Anna Webber on tenor sax, Daniel Fisher-Lochhead on alto sax, and deVon Russell Gray on keyboards – underscores this recursive process with a multi-movement meditation on remarkable beginnings and ends.
The album draws upon the Wallace Stevens poem “Domination of Black” and painter Joan Mitchell’s “Hemlock.” Regarded by the poet to be his best work, “Domination of Black” opens like something out of a Poe narrative: an unsettled darkness returns, repeats, and builds as the speaker’s uncertainty mixes perception and memory:
“At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.”
Mitchell’s lively painting, meanwhile, blends audacious deep green and blue streaks and cream with specks of red, as if she carved the hemlock from the canvas itself.
An entry in microtonal chamber-jazz, Hemlocks, Peacocks joins in the tradition of creative tuning systems (here inspired by La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano) and reaps similar benefits of fluidity and openness in its explorations. Though much of the harmonies and colors read as mellow and dark, the album feels wide awake throughout, and rewarding moments of accumulation await behind stretches of repeated figures and lines.
A theme of discernment runs through Mason’s intentional, intricate compositions; the task of close listening is foregrounded for the listener, who is directed toward the beating between saxophone microtones and wobbles of the keyboard. The opening track Hemlocks meets gentle trilling lines in the saxophones with diffuse textures in the keyboards and drums. There are moments for each member of the quartet to move in and out of view, the overall performance intentionally and thoughtfully restrained.
The Falling Leaves, Repeating Themselves features an interlocking, ouroborosian saxophone duet, giving way to the dusky harmonies of Twilight, where they flutter and respire gently and feebly, speaking simultaneously of the fire contained in the room and the fuzzy violet sky. The composition maintains a sense of agility despite the slowed tempo, suggestive of the way the eye works in the dark. Cavernous chord clusters here bring Debussy’s La Cathédrale Engloutie (The Sunken Cathedral), emerging from the water, to mind. More classic virtuosity and extremes of tempo and texture are found in Turned in the Fire and Planets, where an unambiguous trust amongst the ensemble shines through. Peacocks begins with an introspective march and fans out to a noisy peak before a drum solo ebbs away, closing out the album.
It’s the centrally-placed Hymn, whose harmonies draw from a sacred harp melody, which immediately intrigues in its contrast against the rest of the project. Gray and Mason’s mellow, almost pure duet rises like an offering – a nod to both the source material and chapel in Massachusetts where the project was recorded. Notably, the sans saxophone instrumentation and track title – whose reference lies outside the Stevens poem and Mitchell painting that frame the rest of the album – create negative space that lets the track function as a fourth wall break of sorts. It imparts a blessing, allowing the mind to pick up freer associations while listening. The departure from the taut intention of the project is delightful, lending other tracks thoughtful force as opposed to prescriptive symbolism.
While listening to this album and going about the tasks of living, I jotted “sometimes it feels as though what is connected is collapsed” in the margins of my notebook. Each subsequent listen of Hemlocks, Peacocks presents the task of distinguishing practice from mere repetition, perhaps forming it more in the shape of connection. As precarity continues to grow and haunt in and beyond the realm of art, making choices – compositionally, politically – remains its own craft to be sharpened.
I CARE IF YOU LISTEN is an editorially-independent program of the American Composers Forum, and is made possible thanks to generous donor and institutional support. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author and may not represent the views of ICIYL or ACF.
You can support the work of ICIYL with a tax-deductible gift to ACF. For more on ACF, visit composersforum.org.
