For years, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has made music in which little seems to happen, at least through conscious effort. Instead, he simply fills the frame with the ephemeral—wind, sunlight, church bells, wandering spirits—and nudges it every now and then, to keep the elements in play. His earliest solo work, back when he was still playing in San Francisco post-rockers Tarentel, channeled guitar feedback into bodies of liquid, silvery and in constant flux. Then, for a while, his guiding hand became more apparent. With 2010’s Love Is a Stream, hints of recognizable forms began emerging from the rose-tinted fog, and by 2015’s A Year With 13 Moons, his Mexican Summer debut, those shapes had sharpened into a kind of dream-pop deja vu: short, breezy pieces for guitar and drum machine evoking Fennesz and the Durutti Column. But eventually, as though he’d come as close to actual song craft as he wished, he began easing back into abstraction. By 2019’s sublime Tracing Back the Radiance, he seemed less like a musician or composer than a landscape artist who, in the manner of James Turrell, makes the vicissitudes of the sky itself his primary raw materials.
Gift Songs is Cantu-Ledesma’s first major release under his own name since Tracing Back the Radiance, and it feels like an extension of the 2019 album. There, the artist—credited with just vibraphone and effects—largely disappeared into an ensemble including Mary Lattimore on harp, Chuck Johnson on pedal steel, and Bing & Ruth’s David Moore on piano. He is an equally elusive presence here, unconcerned with solos or spotlights. “For me, it’s interesting just to try to create the conditions for people to work together and get music kind of rolling and then pull out things that I think are interesting,” he has said. “And in the moment, try to sculpt a bit.”
Working out of a converted barn in upstate New York, where he’s been based for several years, he recruited a new set of players for Gift Songs: Omer Shemesh on piano, Booker Stardrum on drums, and Clarice Jensen on cello. Cantu-Ledesma plays guitar, pump organ, Hammond B3, percussion, and modular synthesizer, but the palette this time is almost entirely acoustic; it would be easy to believe that there was no electricity involved beyond the current required to power the mics and roll the tape. They went into the studio with little idea of what was to come out, Cantu-Ledesma has said, which makes the cohesiveness of Gift Songs that much more remarkable. Each of the album’s three major parts—the side-long opener “The Milky Sea,” the three-part “Gift Song” suite, and the 10-minute drone piece that blossoms out of the latter—feels fully considered, both as a standalone and a part of the whole. In this way, Gift Songs might be an exercise in perspective: one idea, or object, viewed from three different angles.
“The Milky Sea” is the lushest piece on the album. Shemesh’s piano takes the nominal lead, tracing rubato runs whose open-ended tones are faintly reminiscent of Ethio-jazz; Stardrum’s percussion slowly rises up from below, keeping steady, unobtrusive time on ride cymbal and toms. An unbroken layer of white noise hangs like a fine mist clinging to a field. Jensen and Cantu-Ledesma are somewhere in there, blurrily filling in the missing notes of Shemesh’s scale. In mood and tone, it recalls Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders’ Promises, but unlike that composition, there is no center here. Shemesh’s piano is both foreground and background, lead and supporting actor; Stardrums’ drums are so subtle that it took me a long time to even register their presence. There’s something almost Rothko-like about the way the song’s dusky wash of tone pulls you in.
What sets “The Milky Sea” apart from merely decorative strains of ambient jazz is its abiding sense of mystery. Shemesh’s playing, which braids together two chords, has a way of burying the implicit root note—a structural complexity you might not clock without sitting down and blocking it out on the piano, but you can feel it in the song’s ebb and flow. Stardrum’s unchanging rhythm, which amounts to a handful of taps on the drums at best, at first seems uncomplicated and carefully restrained. But if you zero in on it, you may eventually realize that he’s counting in five, not four—a subtle but crucial detail that helps explain how a piece of music this relaxed can leave you feeling so untethered.
If “The Milky Sea” were a painting, it would cover an entire gallery wall. The “Gift Song” triptych, on the other hand, has the unfussy intimacy of a set of pen-and-ink drawings. The first pieces Cantu-Ledesma and Shemesh recorded, they are duets for pump organ and piano, watery sketches for the later mural. Despite, or perhaps because of, their small scale, they invite you to lean close and take in tiny details—the almost inaudible, rapid-fire pulsations of certain chords on the organ; the occasional creak of the piano bench or clack of an organ stop; the way organ and piano, neither quite in tune with the other, join in gently rumpled, genially uneven temperament.
The album’s title is a reference to Shaker gift drawings—artworks made by members of the millenarian religious sect, mostly in the 19th century, translating mystical experiences into intricately patterned designs with the bold geometry and bright colors of embroidery or quilt squares. Their creators were called “instruments” instead of “artists,” presumably because they saw themselves as but tools in the hand of God. It’s a good metaphor for Cantu-Ledesma and his collaborators; whatever role he may have ultimately played in shaping these final forms, there’s a powerful sense that the players are simply conduits for the music. When he’s not making music, Cantu-Ledesma is a Zen priest, and it’s easy to detect the influence of his faith on Gift Songs; the individual ego is completely subsumed within the whole.
That holistic quality is particularly true of the rapturous closing track, “River That Flows Two Ways.” A drone piece for Hammond B3 and pump organs, it’s both the simplest piece on the album and the most complex: a rippling field of tone that seems to extend outward in all directions. Three notes sketch the outline of a chord at the song’s beginning, and a fourth joins in some 90 seconds later; beyond a handful of changed notes halfway through its 10-minute run, there are no discernible musical events. Nothing happens, but those overlapping chords are enough to hold you rapt, opening up to reveal wave upon shimmering wave of vibrational patterns. It reminds me of the old adage that you can never step in the same river twice: The fundamental harmony may never change, yet it is in perpetual flux, with no two moments quite like any other. The beauty of the piece—and of Gift Songs as a whole—is that it never tells you what or how to feel. It flows through you, and you through it.
