Featured Artist: Michael Bates

CD Title: Outside Sources

Year: 2003

Record Label: Pommerac Records

Style: Free Jazz / Avante Garde

Musicians: Michael Bates (bass), Qunisin Nachoff (tenor saxophone and clarinet), Mark Timmermans (drums and percussion).

Review: One of the continuing issues with writing and talking about jazz, conventional, mainstream, “free” ( that is, however it is pigeonholed), in contrast to classical, composed works is that these musics are so different that they cannot be broached in the same breath. That “jazz” is purely a performance art and does not have anything to do with any other music that is written down prevails as a winning argument.

OUTSIDE SOURCES, a recent release on Pommerac Records, offers the music of bassist, Michael Bates. Bates is a student of the world. He draws his ideas from his experience and puts them to a beautiful use. In his trio are reed player, Quinsin Nachoff, and drummer, Mark Timmermans.

The recording does not necessarily rely on the bass as the main instrument. In fact, although Bates solos on it as a matter of intervening with personalized integrity into the whole of a piece, the clarinetist/saxophonist seems to travel over a majority of the music as if to establish a plane of resonance over a skin of tautness, dryness, and the hushed demeanor which the bass and the drums create. The drums and bass are in a space that supports the reeds as springs would support a mattress. The separation sometimes dissolves for the purpose of agglomerating the pitch substance of all the instruments, but more often than not, drives the music in a definite direction.

The pieces themselves make evident a tight sense of boundary and tunefulness which is not uninviting but which plays to the listener’s adaptations to structure in and out of what can be described as unbounded. The music alludes to this openness several times, particularly when Nachoff presses split tones and double notes.

The truth is, and perhaps, this is simply my truth, music becomes the music it is depending upon the stance of the composers/improvisors/players and how that stance is presented to the listener. The package of the music and where it is inserted into the listener’s perception is a mastery required in and of itself. Yet, that aside, when the music and the listener get together, if the blend makes sense, then a joyous time is had by all, thus, equalizing all sources that enrich playing and listening, sources that come from the inner spirit as well as the ones living on the outside.

Record Label Website: http://www.cadencebuilding.com

Artist's Website: http://www.outsidesources.org

Listen or Buy: http://www.outsidesources.org

Reviewed by: Lyn Horton

Click here for printer-friendly version of review.

Send this page to a friend.