Four years after drummer and composer Scott Amendola first premiered his orchestral piece for a live audience in a Oakland, California theater, the rest of the world finally gets to hear it. And, it was worth all the effort Amendola expended to bring it to this point.
Fade To Orange (now available digitally, vinyl and CD on sale June 2, 2015) is at once arid and dramatic, alternately delicate and abrasive, a seventeen-minute opus of a dedication to his wife Ari. It’s also a confirmation that the favored drummer of guitar giants like Nels Cline and Charlie Hunter has a talent that extends much further than merely the master of a deep groove or even as a leader of quality progressive jazz combos.
Not many jazz musicians — even some rather good ones — can sit down and write out a symphony, complete with intertwining parts for strings, horns and a three-piece, electric jazz-rock band. Yes, an electric jazz-rock band: Amendola incorporated his Nels Cline Singers compadres Trevor Dunn (bass) and Cline himself on electric guitar into this very large band. This was no afterthought. “The idea was really the Singers meet the Symphony,” reveals Amendola. “I wanted Trevor’s electric bass for that big contrast with the orchestra, and I conceived of the piece as a concerto for guitar.”
And then there are the horns. Amendola hand picked the wind guys, starting with clarinet extraordinaire Ben Goldberg (also a composer to be reckoned with) and other Bay Area notables such as Santana’s Jeff Cressman (trombone), ROVA flautist Steve Adams, Heidi Trefethen (french horn) and Rich Armstrong (trumpet). William Winant served as a key utility component undertaking all manners of percussion, including glockenspiel, timpani and marimba. The string section, which called for violins, violas, cellos and bass, were duties handled via the Magik*Magik Orchestra conducted by Cheche Alara.
Like any good long-form composition, “Fade To Orange” takes the listener on a journey, evolving but laden with jarring twists and turns. Amendola’s patter is the first thing you’ll hear but it soon intensifies and mutates (thanks to what appears to be discreet tape manipulation) into a sonic swirl and Dunn’s simple pulse ushers in the entry of everyone else. A gathering storm involving the strings and Cline stops just short of an outburst, clearing the way for the first statements from the winds, posing questions answered by Cline’s sensitive jazz lines and his signature use of vibrato. The strings move up to the forefront again, repeating a note over and over like a collective strumming of a guitar, during which time Dunn slips in some improv before signaling the start of another movement, the one where the Nels Cline Singers collectively take the reins and groove on a four-chord vamp. This is where Cline cuts loose with electronically-enhanced rage but the cool thing this time is that the string section rises up to join the fray. When it all comes crashing down at around the twelve-minute mark, the final movement surfaces from the wreckage, a minor key strings motif accompanied by Winant’s marimbas, and Cline almost imperceptibly weaves himself this hushed sonic tapestry.
Quietly dissipating into silence, the whole performance ends in a very quick seventeen minutes and twelve seconds.
But that’s not long enough to fill out an album, only one side of a vinyl, so Amendola had an idea: fill up the second side with shorter remixes of the same performance, enlisting four distinct personalities to each take their turn at re-imagining the song into their own image.
Mocean Worker aka Adam Dorn fashions a mid-tempo groove out of the final section’s pattern, adding a gurgling Steely Dan-style Wurlitzer and pulling out Cline’s wailing guitar parts to bring a caustic counterpoint to the smooth groove. Deerhoof guitarist John Dieterich teams with Drake Hardin to turn in the most unhinged interpretation of the original performance, putting Cline’s guitar through a blender and cutting up other parts into unrecognizable bits, save for Amendola’s thunderous rolls from around the middle of the song. That final motif does take shape, only to deconstruct again.
Yuka Honda hones in on a strings-led pattern from earlier in the song and pushes Winant’s marimba up front before piecing together a bellowing drum solo from Amendola’s parts. The last half of her remix centers on the final movement with relatively minor alterations. Beautiful Bells aka Justin Peake is a drummer and composer himself, and his ethereal treatment of FTO might be the most imaginative one of the bunch. He creatively devises a new rhythm from Amendola’s drums by strategically fixing a loop’s beginning and end points.
Oftentimes the mixture of chamber music with contemporary forms end up sounding like hearing two songs in parallel with each other. The major triumph of Fade To Orange is that so many divergent parts were thrown in with the orchestra and came out together as a fully unified whole. You immerse yourself into the emotion, sentiment and flow of it and not be concerned about not the style categories it might fall into because it transcends that.
Scott Amendola was right, this just couldn’t be a special, one-night-only performance. Fortunately, it won’t be now.
Order the digital files, vinyl or CD of Fade To Orange here.
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