The Ames Room – In Paris (s/r, 2023)

By Stuart Broomer

The Ames Room is a trio of alto saxophonist Jean-Luc Guionnet, bassist Clayton Thomas and drummer Will Guthrie. The first of their recordings that I heard was Bird Dies (on Clean Feed), a remarkable recording for any year but one that found its way to this site’s top ten of 2011. It’s nasty, brutish, not particularly short, and it sounds like music that might clean a drain, blow out a dam or crush a writer’s block. There’s a period review that includes the following, a tribute to the music’s savage economy:

This is among the most consistently intense performances I can recall hearing, consistent in the sense that a sauce might be, intense in the sense of a beating. The single track—yes, “Bird Dies”—is 46 minutes long and it begins with Guionnet chewing up and spitting out short phrases, varying them incrementally, repeating the same process with another phrase and doing it with the efficiency and timbre (and sometimes the pitch range) of a circular saw or woodchipper, while Clayton pumps out an insistent pulse and Guthrie creates an endless rebar knit-work of shifting and broken drum rhythms. The phrases and the rhythms change and sometimes the sound thins out—Guthrie goes down to a light rattle or moves around his kit or mounts a particularly violent barrage, Guionnet reduces the line to one or two squawks and actually stops playing for about forty seconds around the half-hour mark whether to regroup or highlight Clayton playing a scale in polyrythmic lockstep with Guthrie. However, the sense of a single extraordinary utterance remains, exhausting and also liberating, its time experienced both insistently and microscopically. (https://cleanfeed-records.com/tag/the-ames-room/)

There’s a certain confusion at the current source for this. I’m roughly 5,739 kilometers from home, can’t dig through the archive and the only other online source echoes this one. According to the source, I wrote the review, and it was published in The Wire, a periodical that I respect but for which I have never written. If I didn’t write this, my apologies to whomever did. It’s an accurate enough description for me to hope it was me.

'In Paris' is a live recording from “'Atelier Tampon Nomad', Chez France Vitet, Paris, France” on 13 December 2014. running 64 minutes, in four segments, functionally titled “On the One”, “On the Two”, “On the Three”, and “On the Four”. It begins with Guionnet blasting short, taut, dissonant phrases against Guthrie’s raw drum turmoil and Thomas’s near-inaudible (it might be my portable equipment) lower register beats. My first exposure to Guionnet’s highly varied music came with the quintet Hubbub, a beautiful cerebral ambient minimalism. The Ames Room similarly approaches ambient music, but it’s infernal, comparable to the early free jazz intensity of alto saxophonists Charles Tyler (with Albert Ayler), Marshall Allen and Danny Davis (with Sun Ra) and Roscoe Mitchell on the first version of “Nonaah” (1976). Contemporary practitioners who might be compared are alto saxophonist Chris Pitsiokis and guitarist Brandon Seabrook. Here, Ames Room provides a cleansing, even a scourging, reducing the elements of their performance to a radical, essential minimalism, not just as essence but necessary too.

In Paris is available here.

A third recording by The Ames Room, In St. Johan, is available here.