“I wanted the sound of people figuring it out, dealing with something in the moment, grasping and reaching and trying. The sound of people trying.” That’s how the clarinetist describes what he was going for with his second release from his current group, Ben Goldberg School, Vol 2: Hard Science.
A lot of musicians try to mix predetermined music with improvised music, but Goldberg found a novel way of achieving that. He wrote a slew of songs structured for solo clarinet – 20 in all – and then as the tape rolled, he introduced them to his Ben Goldberg School ensemble for the first time (excepting a few tricky passages that required minimal rehearsal). The remaining five players were left to react in real time, assuring that the fifteen performances heard on Vol 2 reflected their honest, fresh reactions. If that’s school, then you might call this record a pop quiz.
The Ben Goldberg School has now been around a while, some ten years or so, but the line-up has been remarkably stable; Nate Brenner on electric bass has replaced David Ewell on an acoustic one. Otherwise, it’s still Kasey Knudsen on alto sax, Jeff Cressman on trombone, Rob Reich on accordion and Hamir Atwal on drums. As you might surmise from this configuration, this band is built to klezmer although truthfully, they are built for just about anything. For these recordings, they had to be.
You can hear the band follow Goldberg on “Song 1”, but they are just slightly behind him, and each chord that’s introduce is drawn out, they quickly make it flower fully. When Goldberg plays his figures on songs like that one and “Song 15,” “Song 5,” “Song 20” or “Song 2” the rest of the group plays just a half step behind creating this “Row Row Row Your Boat” effect, and when he takes breaks between the figures, so does everyone else, lagging a bit in the pause and creating this interesting distribution of instruments.
The rhythm section kicks off a tango in “Song 11,” which indicates the guys got a sneak peek of the song beforehand, but as Goldberg makes twists and turns, the rest of the band is left to rely on their wits again and their response is rippling with fine interplay. Brenner and Reich kick off “Song 12,” as Cressman and Knudsen quickly figure out where Goldberg is going with his cascading pattern. A mid-tempo Brenner/Atwal funk formation underpins “Song 19,” where Goldberg is left largely to handle the front end on his own, but the leanness feels right for this.
On “Song 6,” Goldberg is closely shadowed by Knudsen’s alto sax, who almost – but not quite – sounds like Goldberg’s echo. That would be intriguing enough, but as the song turns to another pattern, the remaining four members delicately make their way in. A jungle groove emerges and a party briefly breaks out before returning the quietness of the beginning.
Prewar jazz sets the stage for “Song 3” but that turns out to be the first in a series of two vignettes used interchangeably, and the second and third pattern (which is the second one stretched out) are connected by Atwal’s tom-heavy beat. The swing of “Song 22” is so crisp, it’s impossible to tell that the band hadn’t known the arrangement ahead of time. Alternately for “Song 7,” the backing musicians use Goldberg’s phrases as cues to build upon his composition.
Keeping musicians on their toes always brings out the best jazz. That’s what Ben Goldberg sought out to accomplish with Vol 2: Hard Science and he got just the results he was looking for.
Vol 2: Hard Science will go on sale August 5, 2022 from BAG Productions. Pre-order/order yours from Bandcamp.
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