As the title suggests, Pig Inside The Gentleman is an
album fundamentally based in stark contrasts. Much like the baroque and grunge
technique of quickly shifting from loud to soft, soft to loud (which is called
either terraced dynamics or sforzando (sƒz) depending on how pretentious you’d
like to be), the album uses surprising shifts in tone, mood, and complexity to
keep the listener’s focus nailed down to the music. If you don’t, you’ll likely
be unable to recognize any given song on the album from one minute to the next;
the Contemporary Noise Quintet work under the assumption that you’re paying
close attention to what they’re doing.
While Pig Inside The Gentleman does use the classical
technique of sƒz in many of its songs, the real tool of contrast for the
Contemporary Noise Quintet is, as suggested by their name, chaos. While the
opening track, “Million Faces” provides the purest example of chaotic noise in
a mid-song, two-minute long aside, almost all of the other songs on the album
use either frenetic percussion or free-flowing solos to suggest that any given
song could repeat that kind of breakdown.
By proving their willingness to abandon structure in “Million Faces”,
the Quintet are able to make a noisy piece like “P.I.G.” all the more
interesting, simply because the listener is kept wondering how long the song’s
ramshackle structure will survive.
This isn’t a new idea, of course. The idea of thinly
restrained chaos as music goes back to at least 1959’s landmark album, The
Shape Of Jazz To Come, which took the bebop structure to the logical
extreme by essentially eliminating chords. Both Coleman’s free jazz innovation
and the older bebop style used a brief melodic statement (a head melody) as a
preface to extended, rambling solos that encouraged collective improvisation.
It was all part of a growing trend of exploring and pushing the limits of
Western pop music, and grew popular for its enabling of wild imaginations. The
two genres, along with others in that vein, such as avant-garde jazz, wiped the
canvas clean, following in the footsteps of artists like Picasso or Dali in
trying to break from tradition.
Those efforts arguably worked too well; jazz disappeared
from the mainstream, being replaced with vocal jazz, rockabilly, Britpop, and
the first whispers of rock-and-roll. Free jazz demands monumental patience from
listeners who aren’t themselves musicians, as they are forced to listen to
music that isn’t trying to get anywhere or even be particularly melodic. More
modern genres like shoegaze and drone are similar in their blatant challenge to
their audience’s sense of aesthetic; drone musicians like Sunn O))), who sound
more like living refrigerators than real musicians, are ready-made punchlines
for jokes about hipster taste. To put it less prosaically, the late-50s
essentially saw jazz disappear up its own ass.
The Quintet don’t go quite that far; piano is often the most
prominent instrument in each song, generally providing a melodic grounding for
the other instruments. Nor does it
really resemble bebop, as key melodic phrases are often repeated throughout the
song rather than simply being a beginning/end-point. “Millions Faces” comes the
closest to the bebop structure on the album, resolving on the same melodic
phrase from the beginning, but uses an
intro-chorus-verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus (AABABCA) that’s closer to rock
than free jazz. Even the chaotic, noisy bridge has some manner of order; horn
riffs provide punctuation to the crowded sentences, giving the section an air
of comprehensibility.
That tendency to ground chaos in some semblance of order is
what makes the album generally listenable even to jazz plebeians. That isn’t
meant as an insult; my favorite type of jazz is closer to blue and modal than
the deliberately difficult noises of Bitches Brew and the like. It takes
a great deal of effort on my part to discern the structure to most of the songs
on Pig, and the only reason I would ever really do it is in order to
describe it.
The sound, or texture, of the album is what’s truly
important. As you may expect from an album I enjoy so much, the Quintet do not
play happy music. This is dense, atmospheric music that would be perfect for a
film noir soundtrack if it didn’t call so much attention to itself. Soundtracks
need to compliment a film in order to work properly, but this album simply
calls too much attention to itself to ever exist comfortably in the background.
That generally dark texture of Pig owes a great deal
to the percussion work. Jazz drummers are often held as the pinnacle of the
drummer musical hierarchy, primarily because they often have to navigate tempo
and time signature changes within a single song, as well as contribute the
occasional solo. In the Quintet’s case, the drummer seems to exist within a
completely different temporal world; while the melodic instruments in “Million
Faces” are languid, the drummer is frantic, making even the staccato melodies
of the song seem urgent.
Those melodies are generally established and played on the
piano, further distancing Pig from free jazz’s no-chord rules. On
several songs the piano almost serves as additional percussion, providing a
melodic grounding to the drifting solos of the two horn players or, on the
lovely “Sophie”, the two violinists. It’s often the piano that keeps these
songs in adherence to some kind of formal structure; without it the album would
be much closer to Ornette Coleman’s style.
Unlike the classical styles of bebop or avant-garde jazz, Pig
doesn’t require the listener to know the rules and conventions it’s breaking. Compared
to the populism of 50s swing, free jazz can seem almost like a bizarre inside
joke, a punch-line enjoyable only to the parts of the audience who heard the
setup somewhere else, or are clever enough to guess it. The Contemporary Noise
Quintet are considerate enough to teach their attentive listeners the rules
before they break them.
That consideration of the listener is what allows the album
to be listenable and even, dare I say it, fun. The genre-straining
improvisations of post-50s jazz was enjoyable for the musicians and those hip
enough to understand they were on the cutting edge, but to others it was
something they simply didn’t understand. That doesn’t mean free jazz is bad,
but I would say that Coleman and latter-day Coltrane require a different
approach than Sinatra or Ellington. To my mind, it’s more impressive to bend
the rules than it is to simply break them.
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