Alvin Fielder / Frode Gjerstad / Damon Smith — The Shape Finds Its Own Space (FMR Records, 2016) ***½

By Rick Joines

The Shape Finds Its Own Space is a set featuring Norwegian Frode Gjerstad on clarinet and alto saxophone and Americans Alvin Fielder on drums and Damon Smith on double bass recorded at the No Idea Festival in Austin, Texas, on February 25, 2016. The album’s title, and the title of the three-part 38-minute improvisation—“angles, curves, edges, & mass”—comes from an artist’s statement by Ellsworth Kelly:

I have worked to free shape from its ground, and then to work the shape so that it has a definite relationship to the space around it; so that it has a clarity and a measure within itself of its parts (angles, curves, edges, and mass); and so that, with color and tonality, the shape finds its own space and always demands its freedom and separateness.

Ellsworth Kelly is an apt muse for an improvising, free jazz musician. He sought to escape representation and the conventions of easel painting on a rectangular canvas, yet his abstractions always abstract from real objects: windows, frames, and the wall around them, the tombstone curves of Tour de France kilometer markers, the way light bounces off rippling water. “The form of my painting is the content,” Ellsworth proclaimed.

Can free jazz musicians transpose this visual artist’s goals into their medium? Kelly’s method of composition was to avoid composition: chance eliminated the need to decide where things go. Likewise, Gjerstad, Fielder, and Smith play without knowing how things will unfold. They work their instruments and shape their music, revealing its plasticity, but music also resists and makes its own demands. It has limits both the body and imagination must respect. Fielder modulates in and out of rhythm, riding a cymbal and at times positively swinging as Smith walks growling, fat-fingered bass lines. Smith’s strings whisper into hazes of harmonics and dive in glassy shrieks. Both flirt with mixtures of pure improvisation and conventional musical beauty, unlike Gjerstad who opts for the unrestrained. I am not a fan of his frightened-wounded-nearly-dying-animal-spinning-on-a-rusty-turnstile-whose-tea-kettle-is-at-the-boil style, but he’s been at it for decades, and others find it enthralling. Like the abstract artist, these improvising musicians wander out to the edge of the real and the imaginable and wobble there on the precipice where the aesthetic ends and its opposite begins.

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