By Taylor McDowell
I have to admit… I haven’t enjoyed an advent calendar since my youth. That
is, until Oùat released Trial of Future Animals this December.
Twenty-four tracks, released one-by-one between December 1 and December
24.. It was reason alone to celebrate this holiday season.
I recently had the fortune to review another fantastic piano trio, اسم
[ism] (consisting of Joel Grip, Pat Thomas and Antonin Gerbal). Bassist
Joel Grip anchors yet another fantastic trio in Oùat alongside Simon Sieger
(piano) and Michael Giener (drums). Trial of Future Animals is
Oùat’s third release - following their debut,
Elastic Bricks
(Umlaut, 2022) and
The Strange Adventures Of Jesper Klint
(Umlaut, 2022). Both are superb records and come highly
recommended. Elastic Bricksshowcased the group’s own compositions
- replete with strong penmanship and collective performance.
Strange Adventures
was a complete reimagining of the late Swedish pianist Per Henrik Wallin’s
1998 album Coyote. Utterly brilliant and enjoyable - plus it
really introduced me to the Swede’s music.
Whether navigating original (and often spontaneous) compositions or
interpretations of others’ works (“...perform[ing]
the music of Ellington, Hasaan Ibn Ali, Elmo Hope, Per Henrik Wallin and
Sun Ra…”), Oùat succeeds in reimaging/reframing the jazz tradition in a
way that is refreshingly modern. If you consider each member’s history,
then this comes as no surprise. Throughout Griener’s 40-plus year career,
he has weaved through a variety of jazz-adjacent projects (recently filling
the drummer’s chair in Berlin’s Die Enttäuschung). Multi-instrumentalist
Simon Sieger embraces a multiplicity of instrumental roles and styles,
playing tuba and trombone on a recent Art Ensemble of Chicago
recording
. As for Joel Grip, many readers might be familiar with his roles in اسم
[ism] and Ø£Øمد [ahmed] - the latter group expanding upon the music of jazz
bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik.
On Trial of Future Animals, the trio presents a collossal feast of
art. Twenty-four tracks - over 4 ½ hours of music - poetry/text by Sam
Langer accompanying most tracks, and individualized track artwork by Grip
himself. A genuine riches of a multimedia creation. If you listened to
Elastic Bricksand Strange Adventures, you get a sense of
what this group is capable of - but only an inkling of what they accomplish
on Trial. The playfulness is still there, as are the wickedly
fleet improvisations and arrangements (honestly, just listen to their
rendition of Wallin’s Vastgota Jazzen). But new faces emerge over
the course of Trial’s 24 tracks - recorded over a span of three
years. We hear new combinations of instruments, a couple of guest
muscicians, as well as new and disparate influences. As Joel described in
an email interview (spoiler alert - read the full interview following my
own ramblings), “Yeah, it's a trial of the future animals since we're
always testing who we are.”
It all begins with the clash of a gong. Bells and bass and - this is new -
singing! The Gong Song is an enchanting and eccentric tune (with,
I presume, Simon chanting “ding dong! it’s the gong song!”) that
concludes in rapturous joy. Space Boogie transitions between a
series of galloping and grooving ostinatos, with some superb soloing from
Simon. Invigorating! Red Horses and Cows doesn’t gallop as much as
it trots (literally). Michael lays down a convincingly equestrian cadence,
and as the piece grows into lockstep groove before traces of Charlie
Haden’s Song for Che emerges. Alice,a personal favorite
of mine, is a slow blues with a barrelhouse-style theme and a mid-section
where the three engage in a beautiful bluesy improvisation.
Elsewhere on The Long Dance we find Simon on organ playing theme
that repeats throughout before being nearly washed out by the drone of the
organ’s chords. Sudden and Här Kommer Greta, both composed
by Joel, could have fit well on Elastic Bricks (Grip also composed
most tracks on that record). Both pieces feel like short jazz vignettes
spiced together, yet the transitions within each song seem so seamless -
doubtless due to the incredible musicianship of each member.
Supreme
, Something with the Moon, Breach the Gap all uniquely feature
Simon on flute (a wood flute, from the sound of it); Joel even pulls out a
guimbri on Breach. These pieces have a distinct, quasi-meditative
feel. However, ever the tricksters, Oùat is quick to eschew the ritual and
leap right into a rowdy, swinging coda.
On Instable Mates, Oùat is joined by Rudi Mahall on clarinet for a
deconstructed rendition of Benny Golson’s Stablemates. Here,
Mahall/Grip alternate with Sieger/Griener playing the theme in pairs in a
way that makes the original tune almost unrecongnizable. The group sprawls
out on Oùat with Bex Burchand Praise Machine(at 26 and 43
minutes, respectively). The former improvisation includes guest
percussionist Bex Burch who contributes xylophone to the assortment of
percussive clinks, klonks and Simon’s gutteral chanting.
Praise Machine
is a beast of free jazz improvisation. It swings and throbs with energy -
showcasing the groups talents to string together exciting and mercurial
themes.
Imagine: it’s Christmas Eve. The 24th and final Oùat track has been
released. Hold the Boldmight be best enjoyed in one’s evening robe
with a cup of spiked eggnog. It’s a subdued swinging affair with Simon’s
raspy crooning to close out a lengthy and marvelous record.
Trial of Future Animals
succeeds on many levels: outstanding musicianship and camaraderie;
inventive composition and the reinvigoration of the jazz tune; and plenty
of humor. Broadly speaking, Oùat might be compared to other retrospective,
yet forward-facing jazz groups (that makes sense, right?). Think ICP,
Sven-Ake Johansson, or Sun Ra Arkestra, Gard Nilssen’s Acoustic Unity, etc.
Oùat dances with the spirits of jazz past, only their footwork is a bit
newer and unusual. They still find plenty of fodder in the standard song
format and jazz’s rhythmic inventions; anytime a group is willing to
approach these traditions from a fresh angle and a wild idea, I’m all ears.
Trial of Future Animalsis easily one of my highlights this year.
Trial of Future Animalsis available as a
digital download
, with a CD on the way (containing a selection of six tracks).
A selection of Joel’s art from Trial of Future Animals
Below is an unedited interview with the members of Oùat. The writer extends
his many thanks to Michael, Simon and Joel for time and thoughtful
responses.
TM:
First of all, what is in a name? Oùat (Once upon a time) - where did
that come from?
Simon:A band always has to have a name nowadays, because
people like symbols so much, and because incertitude is completely out of
fashion. Otherwise I think I'm more of a "no name" person. But then, you
just HAVE to choose a symbol that will summarize in a title what the band
is about. And what if the band is about asking questions? Can you call it
what? Is "what" a collectively shared symbol that leads everyone to make
the two major actions that a name is supposed to trigger : 1. "Oh man
"what" is such a cool name, I need to check out this band!" 2. "I can't
believe the way this name resonates with the essential act of questioning
as founded by Socrates, they must be interesting!" I think the answer is
no. Because "What" is too common and doesn't catch the eye. I mean, just
pay attention and you hear questions all day long that you don't even
bother answering ("What's up?" is my personal favorite). And "What" just
goes unnoticed these days, along with "how" and a few friends of his,
they're cancelled out of the culture of certitude that says "who" is right
and "what" is wrong. I wanted to save "what" so I disguised him into OÙAT.
Secret initials to Once Upon A Time, there were people whose lives were
only hanging by a question mark. People who saw and expressed questions
everywhere. Once Upon A Time, these questions are immortal, started like a
star starts, like a chord played by Ellington or Sun Ra, like a poetry by
Erri De Luca. These questions are started and they are forever always-never
answered. They live in the time of Once Upon A Time, the time of dreams
that come true, and they stay open, warm, and welcoming, patiently waiting
for the next person who will want to wear them like an old suit in modern
times. We want to wear old suits and make them speak the question of Once
Upon A Time, because Sun Ra and Ellington still got a lot to say that they
haven't said, and because we're ready to take the risk of being wrong.
TM:
In the time since Elastic Bricks, how would you say the group has
changed compositionally (if at all)? Are the group's musical emphases
the same as they always were ("..sets out to explore the idea of a jazz
standard song format of today.")?
Michael:For Elastic Bricks, we used predetermined material
that helped us develop a specific band sound. In addition to compositions by
Joel and Simon, we have used material by Duke Ellington, Hassan Ibn Ali, and
others in concerts. Working with the compositional approach of Per Henrik
Wallin has led to a freer approach to the written material and freed us from
the limitations of the traditional roles of our instruments in dealing with
song material. Certainly, wonderful compositions can still be written today
in the traditional AABA (and other) forms, but we feel that today's world
requires a different approach to playing songs, especially in the age of
manufactured aesthetics. The addition of voice and drums has led to a much
more direct engagement with lyrics and song forms that we are currently
exploring. As Archie Shepp said, "A song is not what it seems.”
TM:
Speaking of compositions - I couldn't help but notice the absence of
compositional credits for most tracks on Trial. Were they improvised
instead?
Michael:Wherever we played compositions, the composer was
mentioned. All the other tracks were improvised, except for the lyrics,
which were mostly written by Simon and Joel just before recording.
TM:
In "The Strange Adventures Of Jesper Klint" you focused on Per Henrik
Wallin's Coyote. What about Wallin's music - specifically that record -
spurred the interest to do this recording?
Joel: Good morning, Free Jazz enthusiasts, bloggers,
conversationalists, and bass players around the globe!
Thank you for raising this beautiful question about the Strange Adventures
of Jesper Klint.
What motivates us to play this music?
Where does this inspiration originate?
Well, perhaps I am the person to tackle this question.
Growing up in Stockholm, I had the pleasure of meeting, conversing with,
listening to, and exchanging ideas with Per Henrik Walin in person.
To me, his music revolves around questioning—not just societal norms and
other genres, as he was extremely critical.
He's not merely a great music critic, but also a literary critic,
philosopher, etc.
But he's also music. I mean, through his music, he interrogates who you
truly are. And I believe that's what truly fascinated me as a young jazz
music and improvisation enthusiast. He believed, or at least that's what I
gathered from him, that while working on sound, you're also working on your
own singualrity. Improvisation, essentially, is a means of self-expression
and being true to yourself. And I think that was his primary concern, and
what he felt was lacking in society's dialogue on individuality. Many talk
extensively about identity and authenticity, emphasizing their importance,
but ultimately, it's often just another form of selling something. Actually
working on sounds—that's working on your own sound, your own voice, and
asking yourself who you are by simply playing a note. A kind of condensed
sudden and vanishing imprint of you. Disappearing as soon as it appears. I
think this questioning inspired me to follow a lead away from Sweden. As if
I was lacking a certain friction to delve into this musical search in
Sweden. He made a notable record called, or perhaps known to me and a few
others, "A Farewell to Sweden," with another significant figure for me,
Sven-Ã…ke Johansson, in a duo bidding farewell to Sweden in their own way. A
symbolic recording to talk more about on another occasion, but mainly
straight forward and uncompromising thought added another layer of
introspection to his sound, which was incredibly inspiring. I had the
opportunity to meet and collaborate with him briefly, and then suddenly he
was gone; he passed away quite rapidly in 2005. So this music we're playing
is crucial in the way that it connects to my first very strong and intimate
discoveries within music. I always had this music in my head and listened
extensively to that record, "Coyote," but for the 15 years after Wallins'
death, I couldn't find anyone to play it with, until Simon and Michael came
along. It suddenly became evident that we had to do this, partly to
introduce other people to this master player, but also for ourselves, to
question our own sound, etc. His music is quite a journey and can be
genuinely beneficial in challenging your own creativity so that you
actually progress further. It's an adventure, and that's why I think we
retained that title, "The Strange Adventures of Jesper Klint," which is
actually the title of an adventurous book from the 1940s or 1950s. What
more is there to say?
In making that record also, I'd like to add that it's not solely, I would
say, an homage to Per Henrik Wallin. It's there, of course also, to
acknowledge, reintroduce him into jazz history, and so forth—to make people
hear his music because people outside of Sweden don't really know about
him, and even within Sweden, he's a relatively obscure figure. But it's
more an homage to ourselves, I believe. And I think this is what he wanted,
and what I felt from him when I met him: but who are you? So it's an homage
to celebrate our own sound and our own ability to, even in this
disintegrating postmodern world, find our own uniqueness in our own sounds
and embrace it. So we celebrate that, making music that we love, connected
to history, connected to where we are now, and connected to the future. Per
Henrik embodied that, but I think he struggled to communicate it because
ultimately, in the end, he didn't play much. I think improvisation and the
rich, diverse history of jazz have something to say about this, and we can
learn a lot from it in our efforts to progress not just forward and
sideways but also downwards, but ultimately, it's about moving and not
stagnating. And it's an homage to not stagnate.
TM:
A notable facet of "Trial for Future Animals" is the inclusion of Sam
Langer's text and Joel's track artwork. How would you say the recorded
music was intended to interact with these other works?
Joel: Good evening, free jazz bloggers and free jazz
enthusiasts worldwide. Welcome to the exploration of Oùat. Today, we're
going to delve into the question of the connection between music and other
forms of expression like writing and painting. How come in the Trial of
Future Animals, we choose to work with some texts and Joel Grip's
paintings? Well, I can probably offer a fairly foggy but also quite
personal answer to that. For me, music, theater, text, or drawing—springs
from the same well. It's all part of the gestural essence of life, I would
say. Making music, for me, stems from a bodily connected thought gesture.
Let's just say that sometimes, this thought, connected to the body, can be
expressed in the shift of a hand. Sometimes, I happen to hold the bass, and
it makes a sound. Sometimes, there happens to be a paper underneath my
hand, and it draws a line. Sometimes, my feet move on the dance floor, and
it's kind of the same origin of thought. So I don't see a reason why we
should not connect or why there's even a question about the
interconnectedness or lack thereof between words and music, etc. The words
are music, the gesture in painting is music, and at the same time, in the
music, there's movement, there are words. I find it intriguing. I also
think, like Lester Young, working on standards, the standard song
format—maybe we also have that question in this interview. Why are we still
working on the standard song format? I think we are because in the standard
song format, yeah, we have these texts, and in our songs, even though they
are 17 minutes long, they convey a sense—they include the sense of the
word, the sense of the gesture on paper, or the sense of a dance, in the
sense of communication, of embracing the world, basically. And let's see
here, ladies and gentlemen, I dropped my feather, but where are we? Where
is my thought, and what more can we say? Oh, yeah, we were talking about
Lester Young. Like he said, it's important to know the lyrics and
understand the sense of the melody in order to make a solo on it and to
develop the song. So for me, what he's basically saying is that the words
are melodies, and melodies are words, and we essentially converse with each
other. We connect with each other. Maybe this questions more why things are
so separated today. Why are there main visual artists who have no idea who
Charlie Parker is, or why are there main musical artists who have no idea
who Frank Walter is or any other significant visual artist? They don't
necessarily have to know their names, their birth dates, or their favorite
color, but it's about being aware and accepting that it all stems from the
same root. So yeah, I think this separation is really bothersome and
unhelpful—the fragmented approach to creativity, working on one instead of
the whole. But of course, playing the bass as a whole or playing the piano,
the drums, or writing a text, but including that listening—it's about
listening, embracing, and feeling the whole. And yeah, so we can learn from
Lester Young. Also, talking about Charlie Parker, he said when he came onto
the scene, he was like, "Who is this mother f*cker playing my sh*t and
playing their sh*t and playing his own sh*t?" Yeah, so I mean, we play
Parker's sh*t, we play Lester Young's sh*t, we play whoever's sh*t, and we
play our own sh*t. We embrace the light, we embrace the thought, the
written word, the gesture on paper which can turn into a word or sentence,
the idea of composition, the idea of interpretation, the idea of the
search, the idea of swing, the idea of friction and popular musics. Without
opposition or without differences, we don't have friction. And in the
standard format, I think you had all of these things. But thanks to the
Afro-American musicians taking this format and developing it, kind of
stealing it and turning it into their own sh*t to use Lester Young's words.
So what we are doing is turning all these things—the words, Sam listening
to us, and imagining a music in words, my images or someone else's images,
and our music—we turn it into our own sh*t. It's a way of digging. We're
digging into these different forms and formats, and by digging, we also
create our own piles and holes to fall into and jump off of. Yeah, it's a
trial of the future animals since we're always testing who we are. Since we
are animals, and since we can magically look into the future and look back
onto how we looked into the future, and this maybe it's a kind of handicap,
but we should work with that, our imagination, the handicapped imagination,
the handicap of being an imagination, to embrace that lovingly. Failing and
falling—that's what we are doing.
Oh, another thought adding to that is that basically, the
interconnectedness—not just the idea of it, but the fact that we are
connected to various things, ideas, and ways of doing—is actually the
groove. The groove can only exist when you accept this and partake in these
various elements. If it's me connecting to Simon or Michel or someone else,
or me connecting to the written word or a gesture on the dance floor, this
connection has to exist. It all exists. And this makes it groove, I think.
And that's, I believe, what Lester Young is also talking about. You have to
understand, or feel, the friction of doing to create a melody or expand on a
melody. You have to include and continuously reconnect, and you have the
groove. It's quite something else, and today, we miss a lot of that kind of
groove. We have isolated grooves, but ultimately, they're a bit like AI—they
groove for themselves in a very low bit artificial way. They don't move me.
But the fragmentation, the fragmentation of the post-world, the living in
the post-world, the idea of that—I think it's a bad idea. And reassembling
these scattered pieces makes it groove, but you have to accept many things,
accept that precision is not about being exact. It's about being open to
the play around limitations and knowing when to end. So the groove is about
taking risks, about embracing the unknown. So these texts and these
drawings, for me personally, are there for us to groove better.
TM:
I loved the incremental release of "Trial" - a musical advent calendar.
Whose idea was that? And I hear there might be a CD in the works - are
you still taking track suggestions for that?
Michael: As we wrote, Trial of Future Animals is an album
in transition.
We had recorded a lot of new material, which makes up the bulk of the
recordings, but the main idea was to release a new track for 24 days last
December.
So we went back to previously unreleased recordings that we liked too much
not to release.
It was also meant to be a statement about giving generously and in excess.
We just finished a proper CD with a selection of 6 tracks (from the 24)
that best represent our current way of making music.
The recordings have also been remixed, because with a daily release it had
to be done very quickly.
The CD is currently being manufactured and should be ready in the next few
weeks.
TM: Any upcoming tour dates for Oùat?
We play on May 7th in Marburg
https://www.jazzini.de/konzerte/termin/ouat
and on May 8th at the Jazzfest Eberswalde
https://mescal.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/jazz-24-karte_neu.pdf
And on October 11 in Budapest at OPUS/BMC
www.opusjazzclub.hu
And we are trying to book more concerts on the way to Budapest.
There are more concerts planned, but it's not concrete yet.
