From the looks of albums that make it into Pitchfork's review archive, you'd think jazz was an obscure music available only to strange elitists, if occasionally interesting to normal folk. "Jazz is dead as a popular art form," was the comprise I agreed to, wincing all the while, in a recent exchange with a conscientious objector. I'm not sure I totally agree with that statement, but it was the only way to make my point of jazz's continued relevance without conceding that it is, at best, an interesting sideshow to the popular, rocky main attractions.
Yet, jazz is vibrant, as long as you're willing to flip past the Billboard top 40 jazz records and delve into the 'marginal' sides of truly new music. The biggest problem I see with jazz is not in its unfamiliarity to most rock listeners, or even with the art's own hardliner traditionalists (paging Mr. Marsalis, Mr. Marsalis, please pick up a white courtesy phone)-- the greatest hurdle for jazz is that it's seen as antiquated, eccentric dinner party music; something to take a few samples of so it can make your record collection look nice, and prove that you "gave it a chance."
That's a shame, because a lot's happened to jazz since Kind of Blue and A Love Supreme. In the case of Otomo Yoshihide, you might even be hard-pressed to call it 'jazz' at all. Where the crusty old regime might lead you to believe that swing beats and long, wanky sax solos were required, this incredible Japanese experimentalist forgoes the traditional for the extreme, post modern and ironic. In many ways, Otomo is similar to American John Zorn, though rather than flighty sax skronks and hardcore backdrops, he favors the turntable, the guitar, and the raw, romantic impressionism of free jazz. Of the literally hundreds of releases he's been involved with, the most famous was his legendary avant-rock collective Ground Zero (sort of a more colorful, Japanese version of Zorn's Naked City). His New Jazz Ensemble, which plays here, features many of the same musicians, but makes a jazz noise where GZ rocked.
Dreams is Yoshihide's second record with his jazz band, though the first was billed as the New Jazz Quintet. The first record saw Yoshihide struggling to strike a balance between modern electronic improvisation and traditional hard bop. This one is altogether different, most notably due to the presence of female vocals, provided by Phew and Togawa Jun. Phew is no stranger to fans of experimental Japanese music, and her earthy voice turns many tunes that would be straight-ahead jazz ballads into introspective tone poems. Jun, meanwhile, doesn't quite possess Phew's command of atmosphere, but adds a less weighty compliment to the music nonetheless.
Tunes like "Yume" and "Good Morning" are gentle ballads, and help make a case for 90s extremists like Yoshihide being more than just noisemongers. On the latter, trumpet, sax and guitar accompany Phew's vocal, often leaping into boisterous, atonal solo figures, though never overpowering her frontline melody. "Yume" begins with a childlike trumpet introduction, keeping an omnipresent sine wave in the background, and ushering in the flute, guitar and saxophone. Phew again delivers a well-worn vocal here, but instead of being a vulnerable ballad, the song reaches near-epic heights of post-rock torch song. Her more aggressive side can be heard on "Hahen Fukei" and the amazing "Teinin Pushiganga", but her voice seems tailored for the calm before the storm.
The centerpiece of the record is a mammoth, 16-minute version of Jim O'Rourke's "Eureka", featuring Jun and Phew. The song begins as a bawdy funeral march, but quickly returns to the familiar ballad strains of the earlier tunes. However, about five minutes in, the sound of waves crashing on a beach take over, and soon the sine wave returns. When the vocals re-enter, free percussion and bass, and double-tracked saxophones playing the melody join them. The ensemble crescendos to a fiery climax that sounds completely in the tradition of post-Ascension free jazz. Yoshihide's band, following the hallowed jazz model of reinterpretation, has taken music seemingly outside their realm and played it like it could never have belonged to anyone else. It's this kind of creative ambition (and the ability to pull the music off) that should inspire non-believers to take a closer look at new jazz. It's as good as it ever was.
