RedGreenBlue: The End and the Beginning
Astral Spirits

Split into two prosaically titled halves “The Beginning” and “The End,” the debut release from RedGreenBlue requires a small degree of adjustment in expectation for the material to be properly appreciated. While it's not inaccurate to see the recording as extending out of the spiritual jazz tradition, that's perhaps too small a lens through which to view it. Yes, associations with Alice Coltrane, Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, and others do arise, but The End and the Beginning has as much to do with experimental ambient and La Monte Young-inspired minimalism as it does jazz. In one sense, each half of the recording gravitates towards one of the poles when the first side features Paul Giallorenzo (synthesizer, pump organ, electronics), Charlie Kirchen (bass), and Ryan Packard (drums, electronics) only and the second adds Ben LaMar Gay (cornet and electronics). Were one to limit one's focus to “The Beginning,” names such as Terry Riley, Don Cherry, Rob Mazurek, and Paul Schütze also could be added to the DNA pool.

Captured at The Hungry Brain in Chicago on July 1st, 2018, the material naturally lends itself to an LP format when it splits into two twenty-minute-plus explorations. It wasn't the first time the musicians gathered: a four-week residency at Burlington, another Chicago venue, transpired in spring 2017 and the material on the release was developed during the first half of 2018. Its tone is inward-looking, though a gradual expansion of the sonic terrain does occur when the music grows progressively more muscular and dynamic.

With Kirchen repeating a simple five-note figure against a softly clangorous drone, “The Beginning” begins drowsily with the three working hard to instill entrancement. After pump organ chords imbue the material with a suitably psychedelic aura, acoustic bass lines become more elaborate and the drumming more aggressive to facilitate the music's blossoming. Real-time interactions between the trio prove suitably engrossing as they advance into a dialogue that grows ever more unbounded. As the first half enters its final quarter, the music percolates like a combustible mass, as if each participant's straining to cast aside any and all restraints. “The End” opens with a burst of bass-thrusting energy, and when the horn enters it's hard not to think of Miles circa In a Silent Way, especially when the feverish pulse is locked-in and LaMar Gay serves up a peck-peck-peck or two; Giallorenzo's organ smears similarly add a Milesian vibe in calling to mind On the Corner and He Loved Him Madly. Soon enough, however, the four leave such connections behind as they penetrate further into their own dizzying realm. Things take a surprisingly restful turn halfway through before the storm returns for a late-inning surge, but, truth be told, one part of me would have preferred sustained heat for the full twenty-three minutes.

No matter: all four of these experienced adventurers comfortably inhabit the abstract space the music offers to them, with the assurance of their actions confirming the words Peter Margasak used in The Chicago Reader to describe Packard's trio ZRL, that its members “operate so authoritatively in disparate settings that it's difficult to describe them in terms of genre—they're interested in exploration, wherever it may take them.” Said description as aptly applies to the sounds collectively birthed by RedGreenBlue on this outing.

June 2022