Spooky Actions
Featuring:
Bruce Arnold—Processed Guitar,
John Gunther—Woodwinds,
Peter Herbert—Bass,
Tony Moreno—Drums,
When Anton Webern was composing his Five Canons on Latin
Texts, he probably wasn't thinking very much about American improvised
music. Yet formal harmonic structure is the original essential European
contribution to the character of jazz. And while much of the mainstream
of jazz repertoire is still mired in the harmonic concepts of Tin Pan
Alley, Spooky Actions, a New York based jazz quartet, have found
inspiration in the discipline and muted palette of
twelve tone music.
In their debut CD "Spooky Actions, Music of Anton Webern" (MSK 117) the
quartet plays through note for note transcriptions of the Five Canons
op. 16, as well as the Five Movements for String Quartet, op 5. They
then improvise over the pieces. Rather than taking extended solos, the
ensemble uses a sensitive and informed interaction to create original
music based closely on the spirit
and form of the written work.
It is astonishing to discover how suited the sonorities of the jazz
quartet
of drums, saxophone (and flute), electric guitar and bass are for
12-tone
music. Indeed, the ears of listeners accustomed to these sounds will
find
that they are a kind of Rosetta stone; the pristine, compressed
structures
of Webern's music take on new clarity and attractiveness, making for
extremely accessible listening.
The band's name comes from the phrase "spooky actions at a distance."
This was how Albert Einstein described the phenomenon of two seemingly
unconnected, disparate objects that nonetheless exert a powerful
influence on one another. Spooky Actions, the band, certainly
personifies this concept, showing how vivid improvisations can be
derived from music that is often thought of as "etched in stone."
Here are two audio selections from the CD, provided as MP3 files:
1. Five Movements
for String Quartet, op 5 1st movement
2. Five Movements
for String Quartet, op 5 1st movement Improvisation
Please visit Spooky Actions at their new website SpookyActions.com
"Arranged by guitarist Bruce Arnold, these ten compositions (and nine improvisations derived from them) present an intriguing and very original "jazz" take on the music of serialist composer Anton Webern. It may not swing, but it does mean something--and Arnold's inventive, processed guitar tones propel this Downtown New York improv meets European classical into the interest zone."
—Guitar Player Magazine December 2003
"Whether you'll like Spooky Actions' Music of Webern depends greatly on whether you like Webern, so let's start there. Even before he converted to the serialism of his teacher Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern had taken eagerly to atonal composition. Webern wrote compressed pieces in which single notes stand out from thin textures and achieve great intensity, helped by an exacting approach to timbre. Webern never supplies an obvious logic to connect those single notes; listeners feel the gaps and build their own bridges. Listening to Webern is something like reading surrealist poetry: suggestive, enigmatic and often fascinating.
Spooky Actions - John Gunther on flute, saxophone and clarinet; Bruce Arnold on "processed guitar"; Peter Herbert on bass; and Tony Moreno on drums - has transcribed Webern's early-period five movements for string quartet and five canons and supplied its own improvisations on these brief pieces for Music of Webern. But these men aren't trying to make this most abstract of composers into a swingin' jazz cat; they address Webern's music on its own terms and shed new light on its strange beauty.
In the transcriptions, Gunther and Arnold both play their sustained, quiet notes with the concentration and ardor that Webern demands, while Herbert and Moreno occasionally perk up the texture with rhythms alien to Webern, but they're just as comfortable providing subtle but devastating accents. All four players make their timbres work with Webern while preserving their distinctiveness, for renditions that sound both fresh and idiomatic. The improvisations are just as compressed and arresting as the transcriptions; it takes close attention to hear when they pile in more notes or hit the rhythm harder than ol' Anton would have, but that only makes the differences more affecting.
Webern will probably always be an acquired taste, but Spooky Actions has given jazz fans a great way to enter his world."
—Andrew Lindemann Malone Jazz Times April 2004
Spooky Actions—$8.99
Item#: msk-117
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