.. Sing House .. Amygdala

Jason Kao Hwang’s compositional writing is as interesting as the improvisations he sets into motion —   no small thing as the two are as dissimilar as they are interdependent.  One, nearly by definition, waves unchartable, unwritable, alchemical, in defiance of measure, is discovered from the inside out, is highly vibrational & combustible.  The other carves fuel, resistance, compression, strategic interference, dispersal, ensemble codes, recycled revision, gravity & give.

Both lean toward respective entropies.  Purely free improvisation counts so much on miracles & serendipity that it too easily defaults into stereotyped textures, sounds & narratives (& there are musicians who consistently transcend this brink, but it’s not nearly so simple as the word “free” implies).  Precomposed music, as the Euroclassical tradition has demonstrated (& even imposed & demanded) a fracturing of musical activity around a stable artifact that’s compliantly reenacted as a “composition,” thereby attaining a controlled species of sonic imagistic coherence, but at the high cost of music as nature morte.

In collective improvisation, each participant acts as a composer, each deciding a music that’s cumulatively negotiated, a compositional structure at wide variance from the monological notion of composer as supreme commander & architect.  The counterposition of composer for improvisers (a composer for dialogical composers) formulates a hybrid, mutant transformation of that role.  In this context a “composition” is not the endpoint of compositional activity, but a transitional crux, a reference gesture, a starting point for yet more compositional invention.

A good amount of composing for improvisers, however, does no more than cut & paste nature morte with spontaneous invention in discrete blocks, with the twain in a cursory, one night stand, distant nodding acquaintance from across the room.  Here’s the tune, the head, the lick, the riff, the chart, the vamp & over there is the soloing & ensemble interaction, leaving plenty of room for ego to fill in the dead zones with buzz & energy & show.

However, the great composers for improvisers have done much more than turn out such sonic “things.”  Papa Ellington famously composed for and around specific individuals rather than instruments.  It may be apocryphal, but a story once came my way that Duke didn’t compose for a particular musician until he’d seen how he played poker.  Reliable or not, the story at least accurately targets the probabilistic terrain that composing for improvisers navigates.  Mingus further upped the game as both composer and bassist provocateur, aptly threatening the boundaries of “composed” & “improvised” into fluid reciprocity.  Monk, Ornette, Cecil T, Threadgill, Wadada & Butch Morris are among those who’ve developed specific languages & circumstances that reinflect the momentum of improvisational imagination into something more than individualistic habit.

Hwang is also that kind of composer, a constructer of torsion meadows for improvisation, where the reference episodes & underpinnings are shaped by their experience of ensemble reaction while they punctuate & launch those responses, a both/and positive feedback relationship where each makes the other stronger & sound more strongly.  It’s a powerful, subtle & not all so obvious a skill.

Hwang is also of a transitional generation where many non-African-American musicians tested & reevaluated their relations with black music.  For many of these creative, non-standard musicians, black music, for any number of reasons, simply came to offer a supply of additional styles to draw upon amid a pastiche smorgasbord eclecticism, an disposition that helped identify a large part of NY’s “downtown scene” with its sometimes easy blur into those more “colorless,” but somewhat better funded suburbs called “new music.”  A much smaller number, Hwang among them, have been willing to accept the aesthetic demands of African-American precedent as their own, acknowledging that they’re dealing with something larger & deeper than style, but with a body of artistic procedures & attitudes that’s equal in validity to anything Eurasia or Euroamerica have generated.   That the defining “white” dream of second class status still imposed on actual African-Americans continues to extend also to African inspired aesthetics makes this a somewhat brave & risky choice, especially when the aspiration is not to appropriate, but to contribute with one’s own originality as a peer, along the way attempting to put into practice a social dream that has yet to come into full existence.

On February 6, Roulette hosted an evening featuring two of Jason Kao Hwang’s initiatives, his Sing House in quintet formation and the premier of his chamber trio, Amygdala.  Sing House is a well fermented, deeply seasoned project built with the collaboration of Trombonist Steve Swell, pianist Chris Forbes, Ken Filiano playing bass viol and the trap percussion of Andrew Drury.  Amygdala situates Hwang’s violin and viola amid the gayageum of the Korean musician Rami Seo and Michael Wimberly’s hybrid djembe/trap kit.

I just recently learned that Hwang had been a film student once upon a time before becoming overwhelmed by music he was hearing and adopting violin.  It can be overly facile to unthinkingly assume crossovers between any two regions of a person’s concentration, but I’d long been attracted to a clarity of definition not so different from visual announcement that has distinguished Hwang’s music as long as I’ve been aware of it.  Each sonic event in his music arrives, and speaks, absorbs and engages as an image.  Each image-moment induces a suspension, an awe-jaw-dropped interval of aesthetic arrest through which one might slip enchanted despite oneself.  This is mysterious because these shifts are so plain, obvious, unapologetic, simple, direct … and still absolutely surprising, but with surprise very different from the trickster humor of Monk, for example, who continually sets listeners up for off rhymes and devastating punch lines.

Listening to the opening performance of No Such Thing,  or the consequent (and very different) Dreamwalk, I think about driving west from from the North American Sierra Nevadas into San Francisco, where it’s as if the western half of the continent has been sliced & diced into that narrower tectonic squeeze called California, first outdramatizing a lot of the Rockies, then laying out some splays of the Great Plains with a few quick nods at the Iberian Alentejo and Andalucia, and eventually fogging into greener Pacific West Coast microclimates so close to the precipice of land, all within just a few 60 to 70 miles to the hour.  There’s a logic to landscape that may calculate geological sense, but,  to the traveller, is not linked spot to spot by any conversationally predictable logic.  This sort of inexplicable is-ness is likely part of the wonder that landscape especially invites through motion.  There’s something confounding about it, with its mind so different than human.  We know it makes sense, and we have to accept this, mystification and all, because the palpable reality yields so unnegotiably (Well, that is, unless one just happens to be a Robert Smithson, the Army Corps of Engineers or a real estate developer …).

Hwang’s music also persuades through this so well because of an internal tensile strength of sound, not only the condensed, sedimentary laser of Hwang’s own violin tone, but his ensemble lines and his success in evoking the same from his ensemble’s improvisation.  One gets the sense that Hwang relates with sound as an actual living substance rather than as an illustratory embellishment for more abstract ideas.

4. How there is no Such Thing

No Such Thing opened the concert with a very brief, well coordinated, ensemble flurry that quickly melts into a variegated solo expansion of that sound by Steve Swell, surrounded with reflective rolling counterlines from the rest of the group, most evidently from Hwang and Forbes. Within two minutes, solo drums have assumed the floor. After half a minute, the drums conclude, and a continuation of the opening ensemble figures ensues — angular chromatic, with body language that steps, reaches and climbs — folding by the 3 minute point into a bass generated vamp fulcrum below blues shouts from the violin, under which Swell swings and punches forward in something closer to his blues persona  (and his blue sound statements are often very telling).

Hwang reenters (with accompaniment), plying thematic material eventually trombone doubled with a medium tempo swinging 4/4 emerging from the rhythm section that falls into a 12 bar blues where Hwang’s improvisation configures a front line.  By the middle of the second chorus Forbes is interjecting high speed propulsive lines and and the violin goes there too, all doubled time and flash textured. The surfaces gradually cut themselves and thin, the violin hovering quietly amid the upper register. A capella piano meanders and comprehends melodically for a while, and then the band splashes back into the blues tempo and format.  A couple of choruses and the intensity ups and outs again bleeding from there into washes of sound.

5. Clarity to the Cut

One possible signal of some conceivably “good art” might be an ability to explain itself just through the example of being what it is.  I remember once spending part of an afternoon with Richard Serra’s torque sculptures in Bilbao, Spain. Vivid and clear as a bell.  When I segued to Serra recorded speaking about the work, what I’d recognized turned out to correspond almost exactly with what he said he was after— this in pretty sharp contrast to the work of another very eminent sculptor also then being exhibited at that Guggenheim, whose relatively anticlimactic objects easily paled before the conceptual width of his far more effusive postmodernese apologies.

And while his music sounds nothing at all like Varèse, I suddenly recognized a dispositional affinity that’s been there all along.  The words Sing House spell out with more precision what Hwang is thinking about than I’d barely, hardly even woken up to.  The music actually sings itself from room to room, each unfolding a distinct landscape, all housed within an architecture amenable to such diversity.  Here is an instance of musical construction doing something that neither architecture nor landscape can literally do themselves, yet it’s able to house and actualize some of their dreams.

Each of Hwang’s 4 Sing House accomplices in fact displays quick propensity for shape shifting.  There’s a lot in this band of what’s been called inside-outside playing. as was earlier demonstrated, for example, by Rashid Ali’s 70s quintet with Marvin Blackman, Charles Eubanks and Jimmy Vass, or Mingus’ 70s quintets with Don Pullen and George Adams.  Often the music may sound completely “out” or “free” on the surface while there’s a lot of attention being maintained toward common ensemble reference matrices (or what some musicians often way too glibly term “structure”).  Sing House is not, however, bound by these precedents. The references called “form” bend and transform with much greater plasticity and with its own unique sort of “group mind.”

Jason and I conversed a little about his approach and process.  With Sing House, he chose to eschew conventional theme solosolosolo theme etc. jazz formats in order to further organize musical events as more of a journey.  A particular alternative example that had impressed him was some music by Toru Takemitsu, who’d coordinated some music in the manner of a garden, with attention toward which sounds might be round, long, thorned, etc.

He also recalled some of his previous experience with his EDGE project, a Filiano-Drury quartet with trumpeter Taylor Ho Byrnum, where he would often find himself totally revising what he’d written a number times, finding in the process that he’d actually written too much material, the mass of which tended to overly lean on the players, but was also, finally, however interesting in itself,  more than what was really necessary.

By the emergence of Sing House, he’d resolved to write less and less in order to shape a piece, aiming to distill written lines to only what’s essential, to a condition from where nothing more can be reduced.  He initiates melodic sketches, sometimes on the basis of unusual interval combinations, and then trial and error reworks them by ear over and over until they reveal such an irreducible identity.  The character of each consequent or previous sonic event develops through a sort of critical call and response, already knowing the propensities of his players and hearing their voices in his head as he proceeds.  While well aware of traditional Western conventions regarding theme and reiteration, etc., he opts for avoiding such tendencies they’ve become so familiar and obvious as to have become intellectually cute. The geological irregularity in Hwang’s construction is therefore quite deliberate with elements of both assemblage and subtractive sculpture in his procedure, the subtractive being one decisive agent in the music’s aura of transverbal mystery, where the pruning clarifies the phenomenological presence of what one hears, while the echoes of what’s been removed never fully disclose themselves.

The amygdala is a crucial part of the brain that organizes in terms of emotion in contradistinction with the abstraction capacities of the neocortex or the reflex mechanisms of the brain stem.  Often the amygdala processes and reacts to a circumstance before the more deliberative areas of the brain even get a chance to hear about it.  Conversely, those “purely rational” brain activities rely on these emotional channels to establish value, priority and focus, thus tying the amygdala not only to impulse feeling, but also to deep memory, learning and decision making.  Musical experience, more often than not, bypasses immediate frontal parsing, landing first in the belly of Amygdalaland before taking off toward concurrent conceptuabilities.  Touching base via the amygdala switchboard veers very close what what artists mean when they talk about getting what they do to go “straight to the nervous system.”

7. Living the Afro-Eurasian Eclipse

I first heard of Hwang’s Amygdala project as what seemed to be a sort of nascent proto-Pan-East-Asian ensemble that was to include at least shakuhachi and gayageum, but when I heard a provisional version live at Andrea Wolper’s Why Not Experiment series in the West Village, there was instead a duo of Hwang with Rami Seo.  Seo’s instrument, the gayageum, is a Korean zither, that, for those unfamiliar with its name, most closely resembles the Japanese koto.  Besides some wonderful playing, what most stood out was how Hwang imparted an orchestral sensibility and scale to this smallest possible of ensembles through the often unison melodies and interludes which framed the music’s dialogical interactions.

Hwang has already initiated at least one other project that includes Asian musicians and instrumentation, Burning Bridge, where Sun Li plays pipa and Wang Guowei plays erhu.  Both are from China.  When filtered through stereotype, the visage of a Chinese American guy experimenting with Asian music could get glibly attributed to some imagined atavistic essentialism or naturally hardwired affinity, or could be interpreted as roots-worn-on-the-sleeve or as some direct, inherited participation in a tradition that would thereby signal a generic “authenticity.”

Overly convenient presumptions such as these remind me of stories I’ve heard about visual artists who’d been unable to break through the gateways of the gallery-museum complex until they explicitly “went ethnic” and were then granted a niche as if to confirm that their work (and what goes with all that) primarily merits a hyphenated status that’s not been asked of, say, Donald Judd or Jasper Johns.

“World Music,” similarly, names one of the fences (and, ironically, niche marketing gateways) erected to publicly distinguish music that’s neither Euroclassical nor Afroamerican derived, that, while not exactly sidestepping the hierarchies posed between “high” and “low” music (or people), at least gets some distance away from the nearly ubiquitous music of those, um, “scary” American black persons for just a moment.

Hyphens in the arts, and especially in music, nevertheless almost always imply some version of second class status, just as the categorizer “fusion” singles out a process that’s happening all the time as instead something exceptional.  The hyphen that can still be noticed in many library catalogues, bookstores, music marketing venues and academic concentrations (“ethno”-musicology, for example) is an imperial inheritance habitually meant to distinguish the activities of “real” human beings from the “not quites.”  The U.S. (and not just India, Algeria or Cuba) is still, in the estimate, for example, of artist and art historian Robert Storr, a postcolonial country, and by this I’m pretty confident he means the actual people and culture, not the military-industrial-mediapropaganda behemoth that so loudly claims to represent “us.” One persisting toxic legacy of this colonial history surfaces as the applied American fantasy of “race,” which, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has clarified, “is the child of racism, not the father.”  The hyphen that haunts hybrid and original musical initiatives is often a collateral extension of this imperial shadow.

In the case of Hwang’s family, his parents were university scholars who, at the turn of the 1949 revolution, had found themselves unexpectedly unable to return to China, afterwards settling with some difficulties outside Chicago amid the prevailing conventions of ‘50s Northern segregation in a nominally “whites only” neighborhood.  Theirs was a double isolation in that his parents spoke a dialect mutually unintelligible with the Cantonese spoken by the majority of Chinese resident, for example, in the environs of Chicago’s Chinatown.  In accordance with fashion, Hwang and his parents were each singled out in different ways for sore treatment well beyond what anybody would imagine asking for and certainly enough to eclipse any comfortable options for taking one’s sense of identity for granted.  Such experiences for Hwang only intensified imperatives toward conscious self awareness and self definition.

While the caste aspirations of “race” proffer pernicious, sadomasochistic fiction in place of earned identity, the lived actuality of close quarter participation anywhere along the bands of cultural spectra and accumulated personal histories nevertheless breathes real and inalienable.  Hwang recognizes and accepts the distinct cooking and influence of ethnic transmission as part of one’s own personal landscape and not, in itself, as a site of struggle, affirming that each person, in constructing an identity, makes choices  that become embodied as what one thinks and what one does. While aware that there are people who’ve responded to this challenge by feeling most comfortable when “being” someone else, Hwang adopts the contrary tack wherein “the world is right when you are what you are.”

In considering music a site of active imagination within which “we imagine who we are,” Hwang has chosen to engage and make relationship with his total sound history, a history  indissolubly  populated with sounds of his parents’ voices in conversation, with laughter and body language, with components of a stylistic way of being so pervasive that he was able to recognize it even at the distance of street rhythms and gestures he once witnessed during a visit to Korea, all of which asserting itself with his not understanding a word being spoken.  This exposure doesn’t in the least constitute any closed definitions of Hwang’s vision or possibility, but offers an access he wishes to include.

Hwang’s own musical conception and identity had already matured by the time he began incorporating Chinese and other east Asian instruments and musicians into his ensembles.  He felt especially attracted to their sound qualities, to the resemblances of their timbres and registers with those of Chinese speech.  These were not adopted as signifiers, and he wasn’t importing along with them east Asian organizational and theoretical concepts, but he was inviting alliances, as he would with any musician, along more horizontal, reciprocal and egalitarian axes of unique sound and individual personality,

As for snap assumptions, Hwang’s observed that the category of multiculturalism can often furnish an convenient, if facile, rubric for organizing musical events, and expectations that he might therefore, as a matter of course, deliver something exotically Chinese or Asian derives more out of audience curiosity than from any sort of ill will.  That said, he’s also noticed that any rising tides to be derived from multiculturalism don’t seem to have done that much to lift the political cachet of “Asian” music in such a way that would draw more audiences to his own music; and while expanding one’s audience is almost always an interest, it’s also beside the point of his music, which is deliberately exploratory, inquiry generated and discovery oriented, in contrast with nostalgic or tourist trophied.

8. Amygdala

To a great extent, Hwang’s compositional strategies with Amygdala, not so unsurprisingly, resemble his approaches already so successful with Sing House.  As a chamber trio, the best treat and distinction is that Hwang plays a lot more violin and viola, and more prominently, than the broader distribution of soloists favors with the quintet. Relative to Sing House, Amygdala was decidedly in a younger phase of development.  but the relative looseness of Amygdala emphasized equally valuable but different qualities than those availed with Sing House. There’s a classic New Orleans feel of heterophony going on here with instruments playing almost the same line, but not the same way, with each player contributing a personal and specific instrument based spin on the proceedings. Hwang takes advantage of close differences, of those commonalities in range, timbre and envelope shared by viola/violin and gayageum and plucks and slides tones almost as if part of the gayageum’s string set.

Seo plays very percussively as the occasion invites, sometimes referencing Afro-American funk sounds through double stops, tritones and intimations of I-IV dominant 7th vamps.  Wimberly funks in from another angle, dropping encircling offbeats to relocate Seo’s phrasing in a delicate to balance interchange.

Hwang navigates the homynyms of East Asian pentatonic with blues tonality, staying finally closer to the blues shout in his inflection.  When he begins microtonal sliding in this context I start to hear an acoustic, violined parallel with electric Hendrix traversing Machine Gun and so many other settings.

Instead of trying to police a fusion music here, Hwang’s approach is more person centered than style driven.  Each of these differently experienced musicians transports a number of musical dialects to the situation, and he allows them to converse, and in those relationships another something congeals.

9. SomeCoda

This is music that crossroads the long considered thought and incremental evolution with the contagious flash of the unexpected.  Jason Kao Hwang’s work spans the distances and finds yet unconsidered life amid even an extraordinized ordinary.

Jason Kao Hwang website