Matthew Herbert's last proper full-length, 2001's exceptional Bodily Functions, mixed squishy vocal house music with acoustic jazz instrumentals. The occasionally jarring transitions between the house tracks and the jazz bits bothered some people, but I thought they worked despite the vastly different production. In addition to just sounding good mashed up against each other, I enjoyed listening for threads that ran through the tracks in an attempt to understand Herbert's base-level preoccupations regardless of genre. Herbert is a house producer but also a fine pianist, having studied since he was a kid, and he has a serious affection for elegance.
Oh yeah, and Bodily Functions was built in part from sampled sounds of the human body. Mustn't forget that, with Herbert, there is always a concept. That his records still sound great even if you don't know what's happening or why (the Radio Boy release The Mechanics of Deconstruction might be the exception here) is a testament to his vast talent. Your average music listener isn't going to log on to magicandaccident.com to read a 3,000-word screed on Herbert's methods. They want something that sounds good when they're cleaning the apartment. And Herbert is careful to deliver on that level-- at least with music he expects you to pay money for. The overlapping layers of concept and commentary are an additional benefit, something to pry apart and analyze after the music has stopped.
Herbert's latest project ups the stakes in every imaginable way. Goodbye Swingtime (which has yet to find U.S. distribution) finds him broadening the aspects of his music that already set him apart from the electronic music community. Where on Bodily Functions he wrote music for a small jazz combo, the Matthew Herbert Big Band is a unit with four trumpets, four trombones, and four saxes, along with Herbert's piano, bass and drums. The Big Band developed out of an invitation to assemble a group for performance at the Montreaux Jazz Festival. Ultimately, Herbert wrote the tunes, worked with arranger Pete Wraight to realize the harmonic structure, recorded the band live, and then mixed and manipulated the results on computer.
Of course, the "big band in a digital mood" idea isn't enough, and Herbert has his theoretical preoccupations. He indicates in his notes that "The conceptual back bone of the album is political literature." Books by Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and others are rustled, tapped and otherwise made to sound without benefit of the actual words within. Sounds of a printing press, Herbert's own inkjet printer, and a rally against the war with Iraq make appearances elsewhere. Herbert also invited listeners to send him recordings of their local telephone books being dropped to the floor, in an attempt to build a collective howl from the noise made by literally millions of individual names (I wonder if I'm in there somewhere?). A heavily layered concept, even by Herbert's standards.
Truthfully, though I've read some of his suggested reading and have an interest in Herbert's politics, I haven't been able to integrate his concept into my reception of the music on this record. And it doesn't really matter. What I hear on Goodbye Swingtime is a well-written, creatively arranged big band album that becomes breathtaking when the acoustic elements break down and reassemble themselves, which doesn't happen quite enough for my liking. Far more interesting than the subliminal far-left rhetoric are the subtle and surprising manipulations Herbert manages to integrate into the sound of the band.
With Herbert it's all of a piece; every gesture is politicized but the music itself never preaches. The listener decides which content to absorb, and I'm most impressed by how the song "Fiction" slowly transforms \xBE of the way through from a punchy, brassy pop arrangement worthy Doc Severinson into funk a la The Dirty Dozen Brass Band and then finally into a short section of completely cut and programmed beats that retain the same rhythmic thrust. The way all this goes down in approximately 90 seconds is astounding.
Picking up the ball, "The Three W's" uses a looped section of the aforementioned printing press' metallic grind as a perfect percussion motif, like this is what Gil Evans would be doing now if he'd held on a little longer. The drama in "The Battle", which feels like several separate but related tunes warring for thematic dominance, is heightened further when the meticulously voiced harmonies dissolve from something arranged to something played by a lone man with his hand on a mouse.
Not all the interesting breaks involve digital manipulations. "Chromoshop" pauses halfway through for Herbert to insert a few bars of solo piano dripping with the lyricism of Vince Guaraldi. But for all of Herbert's production and editing brilliance, sometimes the vocal end of things on Goodbye Swingtime is a bit less successful. "The Three W's" and the slinky "The Simple Mind" both feature his frequent collaborator Dani Siciliano in her usual torch song mode, which I can't get enough of. I'm less enamored with Super_Collider's Jamie Lidell, though, with his heavily mannered, faux-Al Jarreau yelps. Both "Everything's Changed" and "The Many and the Few" are less than they could be because of his presence.
A few dull moments aside, Goodbye Swingtime is a highly original and engaging record that's also one of the last things one would expect for a producer who made his name with house music. It has a way of confounding expectations even after multiple listens because of its unusual production approach. The way Herbert combines the sound of a big band with his studied deconstruction, the invisible mental border we draw between a record as document of a live event and a record as a product of studio technology is unusually and unpredictably porous. Herbert always has a way of making confusion an attribute.
