It’s impossible to sift through the most compelling experimental music, progressive and/or improvised jazz of the last decade or so and not encounter Chad Taylor. This is a drummer and percussionist who’s associated with such cutting edge endeavors and artists such as the Chicago Underground projects, Marc Ribot, Eric Revis, Jaimie Branch, Stereolab, Digital Primitives, Yo La Tengo, Matana Roberts, Fred Anderson…the list goes on and on. Chad Taylor the Solo Artist has been around a while, too, but it wasn’t until he signed up with eyes & ears Records that the record-listening public got to hear the very core of his virtuosity through his debut release Myths and Morals earlier this year.
When a drummer makes a solo album with no one else playing, the conventional wisdom is that this setup is very restrictive. After all, the drums isn’t designed to be a tonal instrument and who wants to hear an hour of drum soloing? But that’s not how Taylor approached this; he saw this as an opportunity to show all the possibilities for a fresh approach to music making that can come from percussion alone. Myths and Morals is a collection of music defined by timbres, not genres.
Taylor is a believer in doing more with less so even though he could be loud and fast, that’s not what this album is about. He makes his toms whisper on “The Fall of Babel” before launching them into a groove where he resists the temptation to clutter it up with drum tricks. The African rhythm he rolls out on “Abtu and Anet” relies more on the cymbals he manipulates to simulate the sound of some exotic percussive instrument. On “Carnation,” Taylor turns his cymbals into eerie chimes. And “Phoenix” is largely about modulating tempos.
It’s not just a drum show: Taylor does some really nifty things with a mbira, an African instrument of a wooden board with metal tines attached to it long used by the Shona people in what is now Zimbabwe. He’s used this instrument in his Underground projects, but Myths and Morals is his first opportunity to hear him dig deep into an instrument he’s spent the last twenty years mastering.
Taylor takes this primitive instrument in “Arcadia” and applies a delay pedal to it, creating some truly out-of-this-world sounds. On “Gum Tree” he’s sticking with the higher pitched tines, creating a completely different sonority, that of rain patter. The nine-minute “Island of the Blessed” is his furthest mbira exploration, and the delay effect gets even crazier. With the eroded loop on infinite echo, Taylor sits down behind his drum kit and proceeds to put down percussive parameters around it. It’s a lot like the Chicago Underground Duo minus Rob Mazurek – which after all equals Chad Taylor.
Chad Taylor takes this occasion of his first solo album to show you stuff you won’t hear on all the numerous, critically acclaimed projects he became involved with, but Myths and Morals makes it pretty clear why he’s constantly in demand for these projects.
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