Michaël Attias: Quartet Music Vol. I: LuMiSong / Quartet Music Vol. II: Kardamon Fall
Out Of Your Head Records

This latest release from alto saxophonist Michaël Attias catches the eye not only for arresting visual images by TJ Huff and a reverse-flip front-and-back cover design but for packaging two separately issued Quartet Music volumes into one. The shorter set of the two, LuMiSong, first appeared earlier this year and now joins the later-recorded Kardamon Fall in this sprawling document of Attias's music. He's an audacious forward-thinker who's worked with Anthony Braxton and Paul Motian and whose intricate compositions sometimes call to mind ones by fellow boundary-pushers Tim Berne and Julius Hemphill. Performed by two slightly different quartets, the dozen pieces, all but one by Attias, are anything but straight-ahead blowing exercises or riffs on standards. On the contrary, a clear portrait of this questing artist coalesces upon exposure to the material.

While Kardamon Fall is the fresher set, it makes sense to start with LuMiSong, which couples the leader and keyboardist Santiago Leibson with bassist Matt Pavolka and drummer Mark Ferber (cellist Christopher Hoffman also guests on one of the four tracks). Attias developed the material with his colleagues during the lockdown days of the pandemic before laying it down at East Side Sound in June 2021, keyboard overdubs added four months later. The compositions are often long-form and episodic, with Attias himself using words like collage and mosaic to character these adventures in sound.

Testifying to the complexity to which he gravitates, “#63 (Settled)” grew out of his consultations with the Yi-King, which determined the tune's rhythmic, metric, and harmonic materials through the superimposition of two tigrams—none of which the listener necessarily needs to know but is interesting nonetheless for revealing the composer's sensibility. Working with a twenty-one-bar form (three times seven bars of four), the piece lopes into position with an hypnotic theme a springboard for wiry interplay and Leibson's electric piano adding to the trippy vibe. The music broils, burbles, and percolates as the leader rides his partners' turbulent wave before giving way to the cheeky “Mister Softee is a Front,” the theme the ice cream truck blasts through the neighbourhood mangled and mutated by the quartet as it works its way through a punchy rendering replete with an unaccompanied solo by Pavolka and an equally memorable one by Leibson on piano. By contrast, “NME” opens glacially with ghostly bits of piano and bass shadowed by alien synthesizer warblings. Gradually things heat up when an aggressively delivered theme—Attias doubling his alto—emerges alongside Rhodes noodling and a progressively harder-edged attack. The spectacle of the leader simulating two sparring alto soloists makes for gripping listening, as does the swinging solo turn by Leibson. Attias derived intervals for “Hexway Liner” from a trichord Anton Webern used in one of his pieces, the gesture again saying much about Attias's compositional approach (his comment that “early and late exposures to Devo, Threadgill, and Stefan Wolpe are in the DNA of this piece” is telling too). This so-called “cruise-ship to Hades” is a combustible creature that with Hoffman aboard calls to mind the work Berne and Hank Roberts have done together.

With Leibson again aboard but with bassist Sean Conly and drummer Tom Rainey newly added, Kardamon Fall was captured at Oktaven Studio in Mount Vernon, New York in September 2022. Lasting approximately an hour, the volume's twice the length of LuMiSong and naturally offers a fuller account of Attias and his music. The ballad-styled title track eases the album in gradually, with the saxophonist musing ruminatively alongside a stream of brushed drums, piano sprinkles, and pensive bass pulses. A biting intro by Conly sets the stage for the serpentine groove of “Trinité,” its labyrinthine form emblematic of the leader's style. Conly and Rainey show they're as adept at executing Attias's charts as their LuMiSong counterparts and adapting to the music's controlled chaos and hammering ostinatos as they arise. Conly's and Attias's wavelengths are so attuned, the bassist's freewheeling “Bobulated” could be mistaken for one by the leader. By the time “Mind Fondue” and “The Angel Fold” roll out their intricate post-bop designs, the listener will likewise have grown accustomed to the quartet's mercurial attack. As eruptive as Kardamon Fall sometimes is, there are pretty moments too, the sultry ballad “Avrils” a prime example of the gentler sound the quartet's capable of delivering and a splendid showcase for the leader's prowess as a soloist.

December 2024