Cory Smythe: Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
Pyroclastic Records

Anyone thinking pianist Cory Smythe might deliver a straight-up version of “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” on his new album would only need to look to his two earlier Pyroclastic releases to be otherwise enlightened. The first, 2018's Circulate Susanna, examined the cruelty and violence within a minstrel song like “Oh, Susanna”; four years later, Accelerate Every Voice explored race, class, and privilege via probing studies of Andrew Hill's Lift Every Voice (Blue Note, 1970) and the inspiration for it, James Weldon Johnson's Black national anthem, “Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing.” Familiarity with those projects had to suggest Smythe's next American song-based project would approach its subject matter as thoughtfully.

Countless recordings have been made of “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” with everyone from Sarah Vaughan and Charlie Parker to The Platters, Sarah Vaughn, and Bryan Ferry taking turns. Rest assured, however, that no one has interpreted Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach's 1933 show tune as audaciously as Smythe. Adding to the album's arresting character, the pianist presents it as two halves, the first featuring performances by an all-star cast of forward-thinkers—Smythe plus vocalist Sofia Jernberg, violinist Joshua Modney, cellist Tomeka Reid, trumpeter Peter Evans, trombonist Zekkereya El-magharbel, acoustic bassist Stephan Crump, drummer/percussionist Jessie Cox, and saxophonists Ryan Muncy (alto), Ingrid Laubrock (tenor), and David Leon (alto and baritone plus clarinet)—and the second a seven-part set of solo piano excursions. As distinct as the sections are, their respective re-imaginings of the haunting tune bind the halves thematically.

Just as those earlier albums' source material provided bold springboards for the pianist, the wistful ballad does the same when Smythe exchanges the romantic heartbreak of the song for musings on climate emergency and ecological disaster. By his own poetic description, the four ensemble pieces, originally commissioned by Norway's Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, developed into “an object lesson in the transmutation of weather and grief into sound, its titular metaphor for desire, delusion, and disaster spilling out in shapely ringlets of billowing melody.” It shouldn't surprise that the song proper is merely elliptically referenced, if at all, in the eleven treatments on the release.

The musicians on the group settings bring jazz credentials to the project, but none of the pieces comes remotely close to qualifying as jazz, at least as conventionally defined. They're abstract explorations in sound design and compositional form that stretch, creak, lurch, and ooze in a manner more suggestive of writhing biological life-forms. Fragments of individual expressions congeal into performances of alien, chromatic character. Two “Liquiform” parts alternate with two “Combustion” pieces, the first pair liquidy and amoeba-like and the second understandably more violent in its many instrument collisions. As the group performances advance, one's reminded more of an adventurous classical figure like Alfred Schnittke than any composer associated with jazz. Even so, the material's connection to the song directly emerges in “Combustion 2” when Jernberg sings the lyrics against a woozy backdrop that plays like some diseased mutation of a standard arrangement for the tune.

The seven solo piano improvisations dissect the song at a micro-level, but they're not in fact pure acoustic performances. By augmenting the piano using two MIDI keyboards and a breath controller, Smythe dramatically expands on the instrument's sonorities. Swaths of metallic sound and string noises flesh out the sound field, the result a dense interweave of transducer speaker resonances and microtonal sprinklings, stutterings, and eruptions that again suggest little more than a tangential tie to the original. Words like pointillistic and expressionistic come to mind as Smythe advances through his explorations, each one coiling into the air like cigarette smoke.

February 2023