David Rothenberg: Nightingale Cities
Gruenrekorder

On Nightingale Cities, clarinetist David Rothenberg expands on the duet approach of his earlier ‘interspecies' recordings by including others. To that end, he and like-minded musicians collaborated with nightingales in Berlin and Helsinki over a five-year period, the results documented in this double-CD release (a companion to the recording is Rothenberg's 2019 book Nightingales in Berlin). One of the best things about this unusual project is that it's not field recordings-based in the usual sense: a recording of that kind typically sees the artist collecting sounds from the environment and merging them with material, musical or otherwise, generated at a different place and time; in Rothenberg's case, interactions with nature, in this case nightingales, happen live and are recorded in real-time. (His music projects involving non-human species haven't centered on birds exclusively, by the way, but also have included ones with whales and bugs.)

Along with Hardanger fiddler Benedicte Maurseth, bassist Emil Buchholz, frame drummer Volker Lankow, oud player Wassim Mukdad, and violinist Sanna Salmenkallio, singers appear (Lembe Lokk, Cymin Samawatie, Ines Theileis) while Rothenberg (in addition to clarinets) and Korhan Erel are credited with iPad and Wouter Jaspers Field Kit. Complementing the two CDs (one documenting the Berlin recordings, the other Helsinki's) is a twenty-page booklet containing photos plus track listings accompanied by details about personnel, dates, and locations. Groupings of three, four, and five participants perform (nightingale included) on most of the Berlin tracks, whereas eight of the eleven Helsinki pieces are Rothenberg duets. That set also supplements the sounds of the Thrush nightingale with those of the sedge warbler, blackbird, reed warbler, and mosquito, and two album tracks present the nightingale unaccompanied.

A typical setting presents the leader on clarinet accompanied by two or three others and a nightingale interacting with all of them. The performances unfold in an unhurried, methodical manner, the humans receptive and responsive to the expressions arising from all concerned. The amazing to-and-fro that occurs between Lokk and the nightingale during “Dreaming Slow” should lay to rest any doubt that the bird's expressions are not in some way responses to the singer's. Much the same might be said of the title track, which sees the birds reacting to Samawatie's musings, Erel's eerie textures, and Rothenberg's explorations.

The sound design has the potential to expand limitlessly beyond acoustic borders when the iPad's involved. With the leader generating warbling synthesizer-like noises, “Alien Beauty,” for instance, is hardly like something one would imagine originating out of a Helsinki park. The ear otherwise perks up when the sweetly rustic sound of the Hardanger fiddle surfaces alongside the clarinet and nightingale during “She's Finally Here.” With frame drum prodding the music along, the ensemble becomes a folk-tinged septet for “At Midnight We All Waited,” and then takes on a bluesy Eastern character when oud and frame drum appear in “I Cannot Go Home.” One particularly amusing moment arises during “Exit Music” when at one in the morning the musicians are asked to leave a Berlin park and thereafter play no later than ten o'clock at night.

On disc two, Rothenberg's wail on the duet “Sharawaji Blues” sounds like he might have been imagining himself playing at a jazz club as opposed to a Helsinki park. In “No One Sings at Dawn Alone,” the Thrush nightingale turns particularly animated and talkative when paired with the leader's bass clarinet, after which Rothenberg comes close to matching the musical chirp of the Blyth's reed warblers during “Sisichak” when he plays a Bulgarian double whistle called the furulya. In terms of outliers, Nightingale Cities ends on a rather bizarre note when the insistent throb of Jay Nicholas's bass powers a grooving dance pulse through the nightingale-punctuated “NeoNachtigall.”

June 2019