The regulars on our website know that I am a fan of Dave Rempis and all his projects. But that doesn’t mean I’m uncritical. However, the Chicago-based saxophonist always manages to surprise me - be it with an unforeseen band line-up or with unusual sounds and textures. On Gnash, it’s more the latter. Rempis and Tashi Dorji, the man on the guitar in this duo, are two thirds of the fantastic trio Kuzu and have come together on this album for an intense jam session informed by free jazz, psychedelia and modern minimalism. The links between the city’s jazz community and post-rock, folk, electronic music and the avant-garde can easily be traced in their work.
The piece that got me on Gnash is “Orphic Hymn“, on which Dorji put his love for folk music and his Bhutanese background to the fore, combining it with blues and psychedelic rock influences. For almost five minutes, he dreams himself into his own musical universe before Rempis enters with an oriental-sounding riff. Dorji, however, sticks to his chosen path and spreads out further pads, giving the music a trance-like quality. It brings back memories of the 1960s, when AMM were on tour with Pink Floyd or when Miles Davis jammed with rock musicians. Anything seems possible in this duo too, boundaries become blurred, especially when both turn the intensity screw in the middle of the piece and Dorji then introduces barrel organ-like sounds. Here, the duo’s music is close to neo-psychedelia bands such as Spacemen 3 or crossover projects like Spring Heel Jack.
Rempis and Dorji have started playing together since 2017 “when they first came together as a duo on the extensive solo tour that Rempis undertook across the US that spring. Performing together in Dorji’s hometown of Asheville, the two spurred one another on with back-to-back solo sets that ratcheted up the fire, before coming together in a shared union of volcanic proportions“, as the liner notes say. The basis of the recordings here was Rempis’s month-long residency at Chicago’s legendary Hungry Brain club and a follow-up gig at Milwaukee’s Sugar Maple club. Rempis and Dorji took advantage of the sold-out atmosphere and channeled the audience’s energy and enthusiasm to bring out the best in them.
“Ask for the Impossible“, the longest piece on the album, is an example of this. Everything about this piece is communication, both musicians bring everything they can to the table: Hard, choppy duels, brutal intensity, hard-hitting breaks in the playing style; tender, almost ballad-like musical embraces, spiritual outbursts, the grand gesture combined with the will for ultimate silence.
What finally needs to be mentioned is the fact that this album features Dave Rempis on soprano saxophone for the first time, an instrument left to him by his friend and mentor Mars Williams when he passed away in November 2023 after years of battling cancer. This is another innovation that promises excitement for future recordings.
Dave Rempis and Tashi Dorji show on this album that musical pigeonholes do not exist for them, they create something new with their available material. It is a pleasure to listen to them.
Gnash is available on CD and as a download.
You can listen to it and order it here:
1 comments:
A fabulous recording!!
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