The three guys in Brooklyn’s Dawn of Midi play a grand piano, an upright contrabass, and a drum kit-- the same instrumentation used in traditional jazz piano trios. But it’s tricky to say where Dawn of Midi's new album Dysnomia fits within the jazz pantheon, if it even fits in there at all. Unlike their minimalist free jazz debut First, Dawn of Midi meticulously scripted and scored Dysnomia. For 46 continuous minutes, the trio inverts free jazz into bound jazz, torturing their instruments by playing as few notes as humanly possible. They write barely-there melodies that chase their own tails. They establish mercurial rhythms that are confusingly simple -- three humans dovetailing instrumental loops into thousands of subtly different permutations. It sounds close to an acoustic Beak> session playing a Steve Reich composition, though even closer to something totally unprecedented.
There’s been plenty of jazz groups that tried to reach out to the rock kids in recent years-- The Bad Plus and Brad Mehldau (both trios, incidentally) have shown up on the radar with covers of indie rock songs, though the covers feel more like like a bait and switch operations to get a wayward rockist into their more straight-ahead jazz charts. Unlike those groups, Dawn of Midi aren’t interested in coddling the uninitiated into the world of trading fours and Dmaj11 chords. On Dysnomia, they more interested in, or rather wholly focused on, rhythm. It's a new bridge out of traditional jazz to the rest of the world, and it's built with obsessive precision.
The pilgrimage begins with Aakaash Israni suggesting a tempo with two-note bass line. Then Amino Belyamani counters with one or two notes played with one hand while the other mutes the strings inside the body of the piano, making the piano melodies on Dysnomia sound more often like a thwack on a cymbal stand or some Eastern banjo. The polyrhythms of the bass and piano lap each other until Qasim Naqvi connects all the pulses on on the kit and, for a sustained moment, trio is in sync. And when they coalesce like this it’s so rewarding in that kind of pseudo-spiritual way, like when the tempo of the windshield wipers match up with the music in your car. But they all soon disengage and the three scatter off into new orbits at new speeds and prepare to align again.
This rubric that Dawn of Midi uses-- the lost and found, the tension and release-- has its closest cousins the digital world of Orbital, DJ Shadow, or Aphex Twin. The very real instruments on Dysnomia start to transform into breakbeats, ambient textures, a house hi-hat on “Nix”, all with gradual builds with a few “drops” here and there. With a sleek mix by Rusty Santos, who engineered Animal Collective’s Sung Tongs and mixed Owen Pallett’s Heartland, it also shares more with these avant indie albums that used looped acoustic instruments to create free-form dance music-- the "j-word" has little to do with it.
The ultimate irony of Dysnomia is that by playing with musical restraint, they discover whole new avenues of sound that's focused on rhythm, dismantling jazz with the tools that built it. And while it may be closest in spirit to ambient electronica or American minimalism, it retains the tenor of a human, organic quest for something spiritual and transformative. Who knew a grand piano, a contrabass, and a drum kit could actually get people nodding their heads the same way a DJ could? Dawn of Midi’s first triumph isn’t just a sleeker Can, or a more narcotic Battles, or a catnip for Radiohead fans who enjoy arguing whether or not “Pyramid Song” is in 4/4. It’s not just a piano trio that’s subverting the tenets of jazz, either. It’s a missing link for two camps that have been diametrically opposed for years, speaking different musical languages and mostly failing to communicate. Guess no one ever thought to try to get the kids dancing.
