Peggy Lee: Echo Painting
Songlines

The only name that appears on Echo Painting's front cover is Peggy Lee's, but it's no collection of solo cello performances; in fact, it's arguably the Vancouver-based artist's most group-oriented recording to date. It's not her only large-scale outfit—The Peggy Lee Band and Film in Music are both octets (she also co-leads the trio Waxwing with saxophonist Jon Bentley and guitarist Tony Wilson)—but at ten members it is the largest. The tenet began as a one-off, with the material for the ten musicians originating as a suite-styled commission by Coastal Jazz and Blues that eventually premiered at the 2016 Vancouver International Jazz Festival, but its tenure has continued beyond that live presentation.

Lee's idea for the project was to augment players with whom she's worked for a long time with new voices; in that regard, Echo Painting sees Bentley, drummer Dylan van der Schyff, and trumpeter Brad Turner augmented by Pugs & Crows guitarist Cole Schmidt, pedal steel guitarist Bradshaw Pack, and violinist Meredith Bates; fleshing out the band are tenor saxist John Paton, trombonist Roderick Murray, and bassist James Meger, while Robin Holcomb guests on an affectionate rendition of The Band's “The Unfaithful Servant.” The inclusion of violin and pedal steel makes for a harmonically resplendent sound, and Lee's material is never better than when the players' unison playing fills the air. (Interestingly, Pack's addition mirrors a similar move made by Mary Halvorson when she added Susan Alcorn to her octet for 2016's Away With You.)

Echo Painting is very much an ensemble work, with the emphasis on group playing and Lee's writing and arranging; soloing is present but less plentiful than one might expect. Lee gives herself a few well-chosen spots (at the beginning of “Snappy,” for example) and weaves solos for her players into the thirteen tracks, but the musicians' energies are primarily channeled into executing Lee's charts. Representative of the approach is “A Strange Visit,” which largely eschews soloing for a thrumming, full-band attack.

Lee has cited Carla Bley and Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra as an inspiration, and certainly tracks like “The Hidden Piece” and “End Piece” indicate connections can be made between the tenet and the LMO, even if the instrumentation involved isn't quite the same. Like Bley, Lee arranges her material to maximize the multiphonic potential of the music and accentuate the individual personalities of the band members. Lyrical passages are present, but so too are aggressive moments that reveal the tenet's raw side (e.g., check out the scalding freak-out Schmidt unleashes in “Snappy” or the furious string flurries that dominate “Foreground,” a brief improv featuring Bates, Lee, Schmidt, and Meger).

She effectively exploits the contrasts between the various sections throughout. During “Out On a Limb,” for example, the rich timbres of the horns and reeds are offset by the string instruments, whose syncopated pluck powers the material with muscular drive. The cymbals-rich playing of van der Schyff adds greatly to the ensemble's splendour on the opening “Incantation”; accentuating that aforementioned Bley-Haden connection further, his cymbal splashes and snare strikes during the central tenor sax-drums episode are reminiscent of Paul Motian's in the LMO. Nowhere are the ensemble's harmonic voicings better showcased than during “Hymn” and “Nice Collection,” the latter of which Lee also distinguishes with a beautifully soaring theme. Though she first conceived of Robbie Robertson's “The Unfaithful Servant” as an instrumental, she ultimately decided it would be bettered with Holcomb contributing a vocal. And a nice coda it is, even if the singing separates it from the other pieces.

June 2018