Today (August 7, 2020) is another Bandcamp Friday whereby proceeds from all the purchases you make today through the musician’s marketplace site are going to the artist 100%.
I humbly offer a suggestion for a purchase: Freedom from Harrison Bankhead and Paul de Jong.
Paul de Jong is an apostate cellist who has applied his chosen instrument in ways it was probably never meant to be applied, primarily via the avant-pop, folktronica duo The Books. Harrison Bankhead has long been a fixture on Chicago’s improvised music scene and finally struck out on his own as a leader with Morning Sun Harvest Moon (2011) and Velvet Blue (2013) but had since been quiet on that front until now.
de Jong has more than a passing knowledge of electronics but he reminds us here that he needs nothing to be plugged in to sound bizarre, even alien. And Bankhead has more than a passing knowledge of free jazz — he was Fred Anderson’s bassist, for crissake — but that doesn’t mean he can’t go even further outside as he does here.
So this is a meeting of musicians on not quite either’s home turf, but de Jong’s EP with improvisational guitarist Spencer Friedman a few years prior gives us a taste of, ahem, Freedom, in that Freedom can likewise be described as “randomness, which blurs the distinction between playing notes and treating their instruments as found objects.”
This time, though, de Jong faces off against not a guitarist but through Bankhead an instrument that’s sort of the big brother of the cello, the double bass. It’s that interaction with that similar instrument that creates the sparks as they alternately try to sound like each other and not at all like each other.
The duo follows Michelle Obama’s advice on “Freedom”: while Bankhead goes low, de Jong goes high. First playing pizzicato, he then arcos a sweet melody that turns sorrowful and Bankhead is peppering the bottom with notes that accentuates de Jong’s adventurous narrative.
Percussive sounds abound on “Interaction of Variables” which, as best as I can tell, is coming from de Jong. Nonetheless, notes are still being played all while it sounds at times as if this is a trio with a drummer. Further blurring the lines are the liberal shifts by both from bow to no-bow and back, and even vocal scatting and creaky noises creep into this mashup of sonorities.
“Relative Survival” lurches from one deviceful idea to another, almost as if they were all separate snippets edited in together…but they’re not, which goes to show how deeply the two are in tune with each other.
As the double plucking begins on “Kinship,” it’s hard to tell which is which until de Jong arcos, providing a riff that Bankhead mulls overs, and then they swap roles and assume the same roles again, and so on; anything goes. That was obviously so much fun, they did it again, on “Kinship Reprise,” where de Jong strums his cello similar to a guitar at various points.
The two never quit maximizing the range of sounds that can come from two men with two, upright stringed instruments; Harrison (I believe) can be heard chanting along with bass figures on “Combinations.” On the very next track “Fieldwork,” de Jong is reaching up to nearly violin pitch range and then on “Freedom Again” picks the strings with the notes sharply clipped, like the sound of popcorn popping.
As cellists go, Paul de Jong’s got the gumption of the late Tom Cora, while Harrison Bankhead has the savvy of Charles Mingus. It’s all spontaneously on display with a cello/bass encounter to end all cello/bass encounters.
Freedom is available and waiting for your download at Bandcamp.
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