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Protest Heaven (180g)
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180-gram vinyl only release. Includes free MP3 download.
One afternoon, a teenaged Jason Ajemian was laying carpet at a country music recording studio in the Blue Ridge Mountains. "I saw an upright bass on top of a vocal booth, so I asked the engineer if I could string it up and borrow it." And so he did. There weren't a lot of jazz musicians around his native Virginia, Ajemian explains, so he got into what was at hand. "I did my first playing with my father's old friends: they did folk songs, hillbilly stuff, mountain music. He grew up in an Irish family. His three brothers were all musicians. Whenever I was around them, there was a lot of music happening."
Like Charlie Haden a half-century before him, Ajemian absorbed one batch of American forms - country and bluegrass - on the way to embracing another - jazz and improvised music. The formidable and much-loved New York tenor saxophone player Tony Malaby was the catalyst for the young bassist's transition, mentoring and befriending Ajemian during his first days as a student at Arizona State University. That formative relationship comes full circle on Protest Heaven. This vinyl-only release captures music made on a single evening at the Chicago art gallery Heaven. The performance was the climax of an ongoing series of shows featuring a group assembled from some of the best-known musicians on the city's post-1990s scene: Chicago Underground Duo, Trio, etc., stalwarts Rob Mazurek (trumpet), Chad Taylor (drums) and Jeff Parker (guitar). And the out-of-towner, Mr. Malaby - one of New York City's most valuable players for the last 15 years.
The band is called Daydream Full Lifestyles. The outfit grew out of intense musical relationships that had been evolving for years. Ajemian's history with Taylor and Mazurek began before he arrived in the Midwest in 2000. "I was a huge fan," he says. “I'm really good friends with all of them." Soon enough, he was playing with the pair in the trio, and in Mazurek's Mandarin Movie & Exploding Star Orchestra, and also gigging weekly with Parker.
Ajemian continues: "In 2005 Tony talked to me about putting some music together. Tony was really into the UG guys, as well, and those guys into Tony," The bassist didn't expect his bandmates to insist it be his music. "Oh great," he recalls thinking, laughing. "I'm a little younger and these guys are pretty well-established. And I'm trying to figure out how to get enough work (on my own name) to keep it afloat."
If Ajemian had any insecurities about the validity of the concept, or the power of the improvised sounds that the musicians make, they don't show on these eight tracks, selected and edited from a live recording that ran over an hour. The music's open flow, spontaneous dynamic and intimate spirals of thought and passion are the very core of what improvisation is all about. And when the players are of this caliber, inspired moments abound as a product of collective process and individual spark.
There's a method here. The songs, with impressionistic titles like "Animal, Big Tree & River Steam," and "No Dark," come together as what Ajemian calls "breath process music." He explains: "Instead of music composed to a time signature or external clock, this is timed to each performer's internal clock. Everyone plays along to their own breath patterns. It's a chance operation. You compose music so it can fit into any overlapping of people’s breath patterns."
Ajemian has been doing this a lot. "Getting with these guys was my first attempt to take it to jazz spectrum. There's this quality that at any moment someone can think about his breath more than they think about where he is in the music, and move the music that way. At any moment, we can teleport where someone focuses on his breath and go inside instead of outside."
"I'm not putting out a jazz record that sounds like the next jazz record," Ajemian says. "Some things I do are heavily improvised, some are conceptual big band music. My thing is more about concepts. How is this thing gonna sound? It sounds like this but you arrange it a little more like that. The beautiful thing about it is we’re all improvisers, so we know how to get into things. It causes this constant catalyst of motion."
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ARTISTS
Tony Malaby (tenor sax); Rob Mazurek (cornet); Jeff Parker (guitar); Chad Taylor (drums); Jason Ajemian (bass) |
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