Sadly, many will hear Chris Corsano & Bill Orcutt’s latest LP, Made Out of Sound, as “not-jazz,” though it would be more aptly described as “not-not-jazz.” In a better world, it would warrant above-the-fold reviews in Downbeat, or an appearance on David Sanborn’s late-night show (if someone would only give it back to him). More likely, we can hope for a haiku review on Byron Coley’s Twitter timeline to sufficiently connect the various improvised terrains trodden by this long-time duo — but if you’ve been able to listen past the overmodulated icepick fidelity of Harry Pussy, it should surprise you not an iota that Orcutt’s style is rooted as much in the fractal melodies of Trane and Taylor as it is in Delta syrup or Tin Pan Alley glitz.
As for Corsano, well, it may seem daft to call this particular record “jazz” (because duh, it has a drummer), but to me Corsano is beyond jazz, almost beyond music, his ambidextrous, octopoid technique grappling many stylistic levers and spraying a torrent of light from every direction. Corsano’s ferocity has elevated many “mere” improv records to transcendence, but here he’s crafted his polyrhythms within more narrative channels, bringing to mind his “mannered” playing in the lamented Flower- Corsano duo. It’s not “groove” playing precisely, but it follows many grooves simultaneously, much like Orcutt’s own melodic musings — which is why they’re so naturally lock-in-key here.
Which maybe makes it all the more surprising that Made Out of Sound was in fact recorded in different rooms on different coasts at different times, and stitched together by Orcutt on his desktop. Corsano recorded the drums in Ithaca, NY, and (as Orcutt states), “I didn’t edit them at all. I overdubbed two guitar tracks, panned left/right. I’d listen to the drums a couple times, pick a tuning, then improvise a part, thinking of the first track as backing and the second as the ‘lead’, though those are pretty fluid terms. I was watching the waveforms as I was recording, so I could see when a crescendo was coming or when to bring it down.”
Fluidity ties the tracks together. With a little more groove and a little less around-the-beat maneuvering, one could almost hear the boiling harmonic layers as Miles-oid in “Man Carrying Thing,” but with new-found Sharrockian modalities, Corsano accentuating the tumbling nature of the falling notes. The Sharrock vein continues with “How to Cook a Wolf,” its Blind Willie-esque melodic simplicity and repetition extrapolated 360-style in a repetitive descending riff that falls into Cippolina-isms (by way of Verlaine) until the end crashes upon the shore.
Much like Orcutt’s last solo album, Odds Against Tomorrow, there’s a gentler, almost pastoral flow to some tracks (“Some Tennessee Jar,” “A Port in Air,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking”) that calls to mind the mixolydian swamplands of Lonnie Liston Smith — but unlike Odds, other tracks (“The Thing Itself”) smash that same lyricism into overdriven, multi-dimensional melodic clumps that push several vector envelopes at once in an Interstellar Space vein.
With the help of Corsano, Orcutt has managed to slither even further out of the noise/improv pigeonhole lazy listeners/writers keep trying to shove him into. Looking at the back cover of Made Out of Sound, we should not see Orcutt hurling a guitar into the air with post-punk bravado, Corsano toiling behind him in the engine room — we should witness an instrument levitating from his hands, rising on invisible major-key tendrils of melody, fired by percussion, spiraling into an invisible event horizon. — TOM CARTER
Harry Pussy’s “Superstar” included in the Wire’s best of 2020.
PAL-062 Bill Orcutt LP
“REASONS I AM GREAT”
Limited edition LP of a live peformance from 2015.
“The sounds here represent an apex for this particular portion of Bill Orcutt’s journey. I would probably mark the beginning of this era as 2012’s “Star Spangled Banner” single, where Bill’s vocalizing, and avant blues harmonics begin to parallel certain aspects of Loren Connors’ work. Orcutt’s playing along these lines was interrupted by sessions & live shows with Chris Corsano and Bill Nace, as well as electric guitar excursions that all displayed rather different profiles.
But there was a definite sense that with at least some of his live solo shows, Bill was intent turning the Great American Songbook into a massive commentary on avant garde techniques. A lot of musicians have tried this in little spurts over the years, taking extremely familiar musical themes and using them as crowbars to break into the minds of squares who would otherwise deny them entry, but this never seemed to be Orcutt’s motive. It always felt more
like he was doing something sculptural, like Ed Keinholz or George Herms – taking objects so banal they existed almost entirely on a subconscious level, and using those as the building material for a whole new language of guitar gesticulation. There were places where this overlapped sonically with some of Connors’ work (which was natural enough since Loren was using Mark Rothko’s palette-of- limitation as a way to re-contextualize the blues as art music), but these were transitory episodes.
In a way, Bill’s playing of this period is conceptually closer to that of John Fahey, whose desire to syncretize the high art of 20th Century compositional music and the low art of American Traditional forms remains largely misunderstood, because Fahey appeared so un-serious about it. But Bill’s way of reintroducing technique into a style of playing he had begun by using textures almost exclusively, is very apparent here. By woodshedding these tunes diligently, he has succeeded in reducing their guts to a series of tone fields he can recreate in any sequence. Then he can splice them together to create new subliminal musical texts in much the same way Burroughs and Gysin’s cut-ups used known words and phrases to create entirely new and original images streams. The more you listen to this one, the deeper it gets.
I am inclined to like everything Bill does, because I think even the projects he treats as virtual toss-offs have a lot of content if you take the time to parse them out. Reasons I Am Great is as far from a toss-off as anything he’s done. And you really better check it out.”
–Byron Coley
Limited edition 15 Song 7" EP of studio recordings from 1993.
“Somewhere between the first and second Harry Pussy singles, Adris and I worked up a set’s worth of 30-second ‘songs.’ I doubt we ever played the whole thing live, but we did record it over a couple of nights at Rat’s studio around the corner from our Michigan Ave apartment on Miami Beach. Our occasional bandmate, Ian Steinberg, a teenage accordionist whose mom dropped him off for the session, showed up on the second night to contribute vocals and fuzz accordion on several tracks. Of all the songs recorded, only 'HP Superstar’ was ever released, on 1995’s 'What Was Music?’ compilation, though 'No Hey’, 'Youth Problem’ and 'Prelude’ appeared in other versions elsewhere. Live renditions of some of this set are also captured on the 'Live in Chapel Hill, 1993’ single.”
San Francisco based musician Bill Orcutt presents “The Idea of Every One,” an hour-long exploration of the source material behind his Editions Mego LP “The History of Every One.” Inspired by the “contrapuntal” CBC radio programs of Glenn Gould and the multilayered superimpositions of Godard’s “Histoire(s) du cinéma,” it’s a dense and harrowing ride through the history of American popular music.
