I recently bought Ballister’s self-released debut Bastard String (from 2011), an album that is relatively rare. After listening to it for the first time, I was amazed at how much Dave Rempis still sounded like Peter Brötzmann back then. And it’s even more astonishing how varied his playing has become over the years. This can be recognised very well on his new album Propulsion. The band presents Rempis on saxophones (as usual), vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz, who is known for his work with the aforementioned Peter Brötzmann, bassist Joshua Abrams (of Natural Information Society fame) and Rempis’s long-term musical partner Tyler Damon on drums.
From the very first not it’s remarkable how melodic and spiritual Propulsion is. This becomes particularly clear on “Egression“, the second track. Rempis begins with a minimalist solo, with Abrams lingering on a monotonous riff in the background (something he also likes to do with Natural Information Society), which remains dry as dust and thus forms a clear contrast to Rempis’s vibrato-laden sound and the extremely high registers the saxophonist uses here. In the second part, the rhythm section pushes Rempis up a mountain, from where his full sound then floods the land below in the most marvellous way. He sounds like Trane in his late phase, less gospel-like, more controlled instead, but just as passionate and heart-warming. The liner notes say that “this recording also catches the band at a moment of major emotional impact“, which might explain said emotionality. Propulsion also “documents the final concert of more than 900 that Rempis curated and produced as part of a weekly Thursday-night series of jazz and improvised music that stretched for more than twenty-one years from 2002-2023.“ This band therefore not only represents the four individual musicians, but is also representative of the state of the art of the Chicago scene. The music is not an “Ephemera“, as the third and final track is called, but a promise of what is yet to come. It’s the music of another America, not that of the neoliberal populists, but that of John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Joe McPhee. We will need it. Perhaps more than we realize.
You can buy and listen to Propulsion here:
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