Stephan Crump: Slow Water
Papillon Sounds

That Memphis-bred bassist Stephan Crump would one day craft a musical meditation on water seems in hindsight inevitable. After all, he grew up near the banks of the Mississippi, has lived by the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn for three decades, and even more importantly has grown ever more aware of the myriad ways by which the lives of humans and this life-force intertwine. While the planet's rivers long preceded our emergence, we've over time attempted to exercise control by walling them with levees, building dams to generate power, redirecting them into canals and aqueducts, and so on. Beyond imposing our will on the natural resource, we've also done considerable harm to it through pollution, groundwater depletion, and other destructive choices.

Despite that impact, water nevertheless finds a way to survive, which is one of the more critical ideas Crump took from Erica Gies' 2022 book Water Always Wins. A critical conclusion the science journalist reached is that if control were to be eased and water allowed to run its natural, slow course, a “fertile wonderland” (Crump's words) could result. It should surprise no one, then, that the sixty-seven-minute recording the bassist devised to give musical substance to these ideas would be generally slow, ruminative, and organically flowing. Crump was hardly lacking for experience in tackling such an ambitious theme, given his discography of fourteen album releases, involvement in film scoring, and musical interactions with forward-thinkers such as Mary Halvorson, Tyshawn Sorey, Ingrid Laubrock, and Vijay Iyer.

For Slow Water, recorded at Brooklyn's Big Orange Sheep in September 2023,Crump assembled a sextet featuring himself, vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, trombonist Jacob Garchik, trumpeter Kenny Warren, violist Joanna Mattrey, and violinist yuniya edi kwon. While such personnel possesses clear ties to jazz, stylistically the work is closer to through-composed chamber music, not classical formally speaking but reminiscent of it. In terms of structural design, it's interesting too, as Crump combined eight formally composed pieces with eight spontaneously created settings credited to all six members. Each of these eight is a conceptual prompt based on a water state designed to elicit a particular response from the players. Differences between the groupings aside, Crump created the work so that all sixteen parts would become a river-like system marked by directional shifts and changes in intensity.

As “Sound (Brackish)” inaugurates the work with a murky drone, the temptation to draw a parallel between this project and Gavin Bryars' The Sinking of the Titanic is strong. The tone established, the sextet proceeds to the first Crump-composed piece, “Bogged,” which sees trumpet and trombone melodies rising above a liquidy mélange of string plucks, vibraphone accents, and grounding bass. It's more animated than the opening, but the pace is still unhurried and the music amenable to change. Through-composed and prompt-generated tracks alternate, with the latter totaling twenty-one minutes. Different musicians are foregrounded in these improvs, Warren in one, Brennan in another, and so on.

One of the more memorable Crump-written pieces is “Eager,” which, with its see-sawing melodic flow and buoyant, almost whimsical feel, could be mistaken for a composition by Carla Bley. As happens throughout, Crump's bass provides a tasteful, rock-solid foundation for his partners, its presence all the more critical in the absence of a drummer. Another strong piece, “Euphotic” derives its thrust from his swinging pulse, which prods the others' expressions with an unwavering insistence, while, with Brennan delivering the tune's quirky, hiccupping theme, “Dusk Critters” is almost Monkish. Eschewing despair, Crump chose to conclude the work on a note of tentative optimism with “Bend,” the implicit message being that perhaps the situation, however dire it is, isn't without hope.

June 2024