Orphic Machine
BAG
Ben Goldberg
The high degree of difficulty on Orphic Machine, an enveloping new album by the clarinettist Ben Goldberg, has little to do with the formal intricacy or catalytic chemistry in his music.
The challenge comes from Goldberg’s inspiration for the album: Summa Lyrica: A Primer Of The Commonplaces In Speculative Poetics, a book-length essay by Allen Grossman.
An influential work of poetic theory ever since its publication more than 20 years ago, it’s hardly a natural candidate for a musical adaptation. But Goldberg, who had Grossman as an undergraduate professor in the late 70s, brings a light touch and a soulful ear. There’s little that rings emotionally heavy here, even though Grossman’s death last year at 82 imparts a whiff of elegy to this music.
Goldberg marshals some of the sharpest improvisers on the scene into a dynamic orchestra. Carla Kihlstedt, his fellow member of the style-blending chamber group Tin Hat, takes centre stage through most of Orphic Machine, singing verses excerpted from the original text.
That it works so bewitchingly is a testament to Kihlstedt’s coolheaded, unflashy singing, and to Goldberg’s graceful way with a melody. On Immortality, they even bring a sly sensuality to the first line of Grossman’s argument: “The function of poetry is to obtain for everybody one kind of success at the limits of the autonomy of the will.” (Yes, somehow it works.)
Besides Kihlstedt, who also plays violin, Orphic Machine features the trumpeter Ron Miles and the tenor saxophonist Rob Sudduth, blending or jostling by turns with Goldberg’s woodsy clarinet. The rhythm section consists of Nels Cline on electric guitar, Kenny Wollesen on vibraphone, Myra Melford on piano, Greg Cohen on bass and Ches Smith on drums.
On a piece like Care, the ensemble floats from one clear melodic premise to the next, never sounding overdetermined or strained.
The title track begins in rustling pianistic reverie, turns into a kind of soul dirge, shifts into oblique art song with classical counterpoint, and finally succumbs to a crushing accumulation of distorted guitar: all of it unpredictable, most of it thrilling.
More than anything, Goldberg seems to have taken at face value, with imaginative care, his former teacher’s note in the essay’s preface: “Above all,” he writes, “this is a text for use, intended like a poem to rise to thoughts about something else.”