Jeffrey Brooks: The Passion
Cantaloupe Music / Innova Recordings

Of the three world premiere recordings of works by Minneapolis-based Jeffrey Brooks presented on The Passion, it's naturally the title work that by default will be regarded as the central one. Yet as legitimate a claim as it makes to that status, it's the middle piece, Capriccio on the Departure of a Beloved Brother, that resonates as powerfully for me. The reason's simple: Brooks wrote the piece as a tribute to his close friend, British composer Steve Martland, who died in 2013 of a heart attack at fifty-eight and whose music I loved, so much so that his participation in 1994's Louis Andriessen-curated Meltdown inspired me to make the trip overseas (Martland was a former student of the Dutch composer's). Seeing Martland's band perform live stays with me as an experience and memory I cherish. Fortunately, recordings such as Crossing the Border (Factory, 1992), Horses of Instruction (Black Box, 2001), and Martland (NMC, 2015) remain available for those discovering his music anew.

Confronted with the tragic loss, Brooks turned for solace to J. S. Bach's own Capriccio on the Departure of a Beloved Brother, a crackly vinyl recording of which introduces the Brooks work as an allusion to loss before quickly morphing into material that could pass for something by Martland himself. It's important to note that Brooks isn't aping his late friend here; it's more the case that their styles align, with both sharing a passion for arrangements featuring electric and acoustic instruments and high-energy, oft-complex material that's challenging for players and enthralling for listeners. For this eleven-minute treatment, David Bloom conducts performers from two new music outfits, Bang On A Can All-Stars and the New York-based Contemporaneous, the seventeen musicians constituting a mini-orchestra. Forty seconds into the piece, guitar feedback and drums supplant the Bach intro, after which intricate figures by electric guitar, funk bass, drums, harpsichord, woodwinds, and strings lock into aggressive counterpoint, the high volume and intensity level of the performance emblematic of Martland's own predilections. Brooks captures his friend's love for rock music in a raw guitar riff that surfaces nine minutes in and in the heavy drum beat that helps guide the piece home.

Preceding the Martland tribute on this first recording devoted solely to Brooks' music is After the Treewatcher, which Brooks wrote as a reimagining of sorts of Michael Gordon's The Treewatcher (he first met Bang on a Can co-founders Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe as a Yale music student in the mid-‘80s before returning to Minnesota and taking up residence in Minneapolis). Gordon's work made such an impression on Brooks when he heard it at its 1980 premiere, he felt compelled to revisit it thirty-two years later to create his own version. Performed by an amplified eleven-member unit, the work shares with the Martland one a metronomic feel, though it's even more pronounced in After the Treewatcher. Cyclical patterns by guitarist Taylor Levine and five string players generate a potent trance-inducing effect as the layers weave into a dense polyrhythmic concoction, the design growing increasingly hypnotic as it advances urgently along its eight-minute route. It's not static, however; three minutes along, a mesmerizing solo spotlight featuring pianist Vicky Chow emerges, after which the ensemble's driving pulse reasserts itself, the piece eventually culminating in a nod to Gordon's original with Lang striking a hotel bell.

The ensemble expands dramatically for the title work, with three voices (Molly Netter, Lucy Dhegrae, Philippa Thompson) added to twenty-two instrumentalists, three of the latter credited with sleigh bells. Though the subject matter has to do with the trials endured by ordinary people (the terminally ill, victims of mental illness, etc.), the tone isn't downbeat, Brooks choosing instead to emphasize endurance and perseverance. Like the Martland piece, The Passion is a deeply personal work for the composer, with the text in its third movement taken from a pamphlet his cancer-afflicted sister, Claudia Brooks Lindberg, made while dying that includes life instructions for her children. Musically, the piece is again robust, the rhythms sometimes jagged and the arrangement an expressive, high-amplitude blend of electric guitar, bass, strings, woodwinds, percussion, piano, and brass. The musicians move fluidly through the three parts, and with so much stimulating activity in play the piece seems shorter than twenty-one minutes. When the vocal-less opening movement ends, the meditative second murmurs softly, its spoken text (which includes Biblical passages in addition to words relating to those aforementioned sufferers) recited in overlapping formation in three languages. At the fifteen-minute mark, the music regains the energy of its introductory section, the vocalists now intoning his sister's words with, well, passion and the texts a mix of the mundane (“Get your teeth checked and cleaned twice a year”) and the heartbreaking (“You are loved / You are wanted / You are special”). Though two of the recording's works grew out of pain and loss, the overriding tone of the music is more celebratory than resigned, and one imagines Brooks' sister and Martland wouldn't have wanted it any other way. However unendurable it sometimes feels, life does, after all, go on.

July 2019