ECM debut for Michael Formanek, whose formidable bass has propelled groups from the Mingus Big Band to Tim Berne’s Bloodcount and has backed artists as diverse as Chet Baker and Elvis Costello. A bandleader and composer in his own right, he is heard here with some highly-talented colleagues in an outgoing programme of his own pieces, whose unorthodox constructions set up strong solos and fiery group interaction.
The Rub And Spare Change
Michael Formanek, Tim Berne, Craig Taborn, Gerald Cleaver
- 1Twenty Three Neo
08:32 - 2The Rub And Spare Change
09:24 - 3Inside The Box
05:59 - 4Jack's Last Call
07:27 - 5Tonal Suite
17:10 - 6Too Big To Fail
09:17
What begins as a kind of modal hymn with “Twenty Three Neo” – complete with pianist Craig Taborn’s mildly incessant five-note phrase, bassist (leader Michael Formanek’s quiet and supportive arco playing shadowed by alto saxophonist Tim Berne’s light, lyrical tone and drummer Gerald Cleaver’s soft percussive flurries – serves as an understated, dramatic backdrop to all that follows. […] Indeed, “The Rub and Spare change” works on you incrementally, to the point where you forget where you started and only know of what you’re hearing at the moment.
John Ephland, Downbeat
“The Rub and Spare change” ist ein Kleinod der Postavantgarde, dem jedoch auch jedes Understatement fremd ist. Eine gelungene Kombination aus Power und Poesie, die an die ganz großen Momente der Parkslope-Szene in den neunziger Jahren erinnert.
Wolf Kampmann, Jazzthetik
Formanek’s highly-rhythmical works set the stage fort hese progressive-jazz icons to expand and explore a variety of unhurried frameworks. With budding fabrics of sound and meticulously crafted themebuilding exercises, Formanek’s scope of compositions engender snappy grooves and capacious movements. These factors allow saxophonist Tim Berne and pianist Craig Taborn to carefully pick their spots and reformulate primary motifs into buoyant crescendos. […] Not overpowering, frenetic, or a modern jazz blowout, the biassist focuses more on evoking moods and using space, time and cadence as an underlying component. It’s a wide-ranging set, speamlessly merging a higher art-form with an equally high entertainment factor. Formanek digs deep and the end results are unequivocally fruitful.
Glenn Astarita, Jazzreview.com
Michael Formanek ist ein Komponist von beachtlichem Format, dessen Stücke manchmal suitenartigen Charakter haben und auf gleichermaßen eigenwillige wie unterhaltsame Weise zwischen Post-Bop und Post-Free-Jazz changieren – und manchmal scheint es, als blinzle Monk irgendwo zwischen den Noten hervor.
Kultur
This is a super-smart and genuinely modern brand of jazz whose unique structures and heady atmospheres derive resonance from the composer and ensemble’s miraculously spare touch, which masks some formidable playing chops – a barely contained explosiveness is never too far away.
John Payne, LA Weekly
Bassist Michael Formanek’s latest album is a masterful work of postmodern jazz noir. […] “Too Big to Fail”, the last song on the album, serves as an excellent conclusion to “The Rub and Spare Change”. Formanek and company employ all of the musical tools they utilized on the previous tracks: droning keyboard that lulls the listener into a fugue state; staccato saxophone that pierces the song, leaving only scraps of sound; and a jumble of percussion and bass that forces out new rhythms. “The Rub and Spare Change” is an achievement brimming with energy, with creativity, and with a ferocious playfulness lacking in a lot of new jazz.
Michael Kabran, Popmatters
“The Rub and Spare Change” is the remarkable ECM debut of Michael Formanek, creative improvising bassist, resourceful jazz composer, and bandleader able to bring forth inspired performances from his cohorts. The album features a new band which nonetheless draws upon years of shared experiences. When Formanek assembled his quartet for a set at New York City club The Stone in August 2008, the forceful spirit of the performance convinced him that this was an ensemble that needed to be documented on disc. The quartet was duly recorded in June 2009 in Hampton, New Jersey, and the music then mixed with Manfred Eicher at New York’s Avatar Studios, spirit very much intact.
Michael Formanek has played with altoist Tim Berne on many occasions over the last two decades. They first joined forces in the bassist’s project Wide Open Spaces in 1991, and shortly thereafter collaborated in Berne’s Bloodcount band. In and out of each other’s ensembles since then, they’ve also played and recorded as a duo. Formanek has furthermore toured and recorded with projects led, co-led or featuring pianist Craig Taborn and drummer Gerald Cleaver, and they, in turn, have a long history of mutual collaboration. Cleaver has also played often with Berne, and Taborn has been a member of Berne’s Hard Cell group. (When last heard from on ECM, Berne and Taborn were both members of a David Torn group.)
If the interweaving of individual histories is complex, so is some of the material that Formanek pitches to his musicians. But there is a unanimity and shared sense of purpose in the ways in which they approach the compositions, while Formanek’s writing lucidly combines and contrasts drive, earthiness, propulsive grooves and tight-wound rhythms with a rapid turnover of conceptual ideas. Of the musicians’ self-evident compatibility, he notes, “It definitely helps that there is a lot of history in the different combinations. It means you start out with a strong awareness of everyone’s capabilities, and the trust factor inside the band is very high. I write music for the strengths of the individual players, including material I know they will sound great on, but I also try to direct them to new spaces. Then again, Tim, Craig and Gerald are players who actively seek out challenges and, quite apart from whatever I bring to the table, they will also always want to make a recording experience an event for themselves”.
The compositions trigger highly-focused responses from the players. “Oftentimes, I’ll set up a slow ground pulse and subdivide it a lot of different ways rhythmically, perhaps emphasizing the bottom part of the groove a little more as a piece develops. I was trying to set up situations that would bring out the qualities I especially enjoy when this group of musicians plays together. Sometimes, also, I want to get the structures out of the way when necessary, so as not to stifle the process.” Composition and guided group improvising are complementary work methods here.
The first part of the opening “23 Neo”, is “based off a 23-beat ostinato pattern played mostly by piano and drums. “Simple and harmonically ambiguous,” in Formanek’s estimate. “Its four pitches gave me an idea for a simple scale to use against that, as an experiment with a limitation of pitches to use in the melodies. Tim and I play fragmented melody.” Texturally sparse, the improvisation evolves into “Neo”, a second ostinato piece.
“The Rub and Spare Change” similarly links two compositions. Part one, “The Rub” alludes to teenage years in San Francisco, with memories of listening to Tower of Power and playing with other exponents of Oakland funk. “I don’t play that music any more, but part of its feel has stayed with me. I wanted to get some of that peppery groove in there but also a different kind of tension with the use of harmonic ‘rubs’.” “Spare Change”, by contrast, is very open, with melodic signposts to set up some provisional structural rallying points along the way
“Inside the Box” develops from a four-bar pattern, 4-4-4 and 3 beats, with emphasis on its rhythmic rather than harmonic underpinnings. “Sometimes I’ll set up rhythmic structures which can be really free but maintain a focus for the improvisation and bring out more of the rhythmic fabric of a piece.“
The epic Tonal Suite (17 minutes long) is a combination of three pieces, starting with an initial melody whose relentless eighth note “almost non-tonal line” moves against intersecting grooves that converge and diverge. Chromatic twists and turns distinguish the piece’s songlike middle-section, while the closing section explores abstractions of funk in 5/4 and 7/4.
“Jack’s Last Call” references the final words of a friend who passed away suddenly last April, before Formanek could respond to a last answering machine message. “As a composition it’s very simple, a theme of just a few notes. For me, it is primarily an emotional statement, about a subject very much on my mind when we made the recording.”
“Too Big To Fail”, with its topical title from the era of the Wall Street crisis, sets up a larger than life duet for Berne and Taborn in its early moments, both of them really going for broke.
These are a few of the things happening in the action-packed course of Michael Formanek’s ECM debut. The emphasis on rhythmic drive and melodic invention may sometimes bring the furious creativity of vintage Mingus to mind, and it seems fitting that Formanek’s resumé has included a period with the Mingus Big Band. Then again, he has played in so many contexts – starting with a precocious gig with Tony Williams Lifetime when only 18. Along the way he has worked and gigged with a great range of old masters from Lee Konitz to Joe Maneri via Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard and Stan Getz, as well as virtually the whole roll call of contemporary NYC progressive players.
In the 1990s, amongst other recordings, he released a string of leader dates for Enja and a solo bass disc for Berne’s Screwgun label. However “The Rub and Spare Change” is the first album to be issued under Formanek’s name since 1998. In the first decade of our present century he has been busy at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore where he directs the Peabody Jazz Orchestra. In 2007 the orchestra premiered Formanek’s composition “The Open Book”. Other current activities include work with Tim Berne’s Bloodcount band, reunited after a ten-year hiatus.
Michael Formanek has played with altoist Tim Berne on many occasions over the last two decades. They first joined forces in the bassist’s project Wide Open Spaces in 1991, and shortly thereafter collaborated in Berne’s Bloodcount band. In and out of each other’s ensembles since then, they’ve also played and recorded as a duo. Formanek has furthermore toured and recorded with projects led, co-led or featuring pianist Craig Taborn and drummer Gerald Cleaver, and they, in turn, have a long history of mutual collaboration. Cleaver has also played often with Berne, and Taborn has been a member of Berne’s Hard Cell group. (When last heard from on ECM, Berne and Taborn were both members of a David Torn group.)
If the interweaving of individual histories is complex, so is some of the material that Formanek pitches to his musicians. But there is a unanimity and shared sense of purpose in the ways in which they approach the compositions, while Formanek’s writing lucidly combines and contrasts drive, earthiness, propulsive grooves and tight-wound rhythms with a rapid turnover of conceptual ideas. Of the musicians’ self-evident compatibility, he notes, “It definitely helps that there is a lot of history in the different combinations. It means you start out with a strong awareness of everyone’s capabilities, and the trust factor inside the band is very high. I write music for the strengths of the individual players, including material I know they will sound great on, but I also try to direct them to new spaces. Then again, Tim, Craig and Gerald are players who actively seek out challenges and, quite apart from whatever I bring to the table, they will also always want to make a recording experience an event for themselves”.
The compositions trigger highly-focused responses from the players. “Oftentimes, I’ll set up a slow ground pulse and subdivide it a lot of different ways rhythmically, perhaps emphasizing the bottom part of the groove a little more as a piece develops. I was trying to set up situations that would bring out the qualities I especially enjoy when this group of musicians plays together. Sometimes, also, I want to get the structures out of the way when necessary, so as not to stifle the process.” Composition and guided group improvising are complementary work methods here.
The first part of the opening “23 Neo”, is “based off a 23-beat ostinato pattern played mostly by piano and drums. “Simple and harmonically ambiguous,” in Formanek’s estimate. “Its four pitches gave me an idea for a simple scale to use against that, as an experiment with a limitation of pitches to use in the melodies. Tim and I play fragmented melody.” Texturally sparse, the improvisation evolves into “Neo”, a second ostinato piece.
“The Rub and Spare Change” similarly links two compositions. Part one, “The Rub” alludes to teenage years in San Francisco, with memories of listening to Tower of Power and playing with other exponents of Oakland funk. “I don’t play that music any more, but part of its feel has stayed with me. I wanted to get some of that peppery groove in there but also a different kind of tension with the use of harmonic ‘rubs’.” “Spare Change”, by contrast, is very open, with melodic signposts to set up some provisional structural rallying points along the way
“Inside the Box” develops from a four-bar pattern, 4-4-4 and 3 beats, with emphasis on its rhythmic rather than harmonic underpinnings. “Sometimes I’ll set up rhythmic structures which can be really free but maintain a focus for the improvisation and bring out more of the rhythmic fabric of a piece.“
The epic Tonal Suite (17 minutes long) is a combination of three pieces, starting with an initial melody whose relentless eighth note “almost non-tonal line” moves against intersecting grooves that converge and diverge. Chromatic twists and turns distinguish the piece’s songlike middle-section, while the closing section explores abstractions of funk in 5/4 and 7/4.
“Jack’s Last Call” references the final words of a friend who passed away suddenly last April, before Formanek could respond to a last answering machine message. “As a composition it’s very simple, a theme of just a few notes. For me, it is primarily an emotional statement, about a subject very much on my mind when we made the recording.”
“Too Big To Fail”, with its topical title from the era of the Wall Street crisis, sets up a larger than life duet for Berne and Taborn in its early moments, both of them really going for broke.
These are a few of the things happening in the action-packed course of Michael Formanek’s ECM debut. The emphasis on rhythmic drive and melodic invention may sometimes bring the furious creativity of vintage Mingus to mind, and it seems fitting that Formanek’s resumé has included a period with the Mingus Big Band. Then again, he has played in so many contexts – starting with a precocious gig with Tony Williams Lifetime when only 18. Along the way he has worked and gigged with a great range of old masters from Lee Konitz to Joe Maneri via Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard and Stan Getz, as well as virtually the whole roll call of contemporary NYC progressive players.
In the 1990s, amongst other recordings, he released a string of leader dates for Enja and a solo bass disc for Berne’s Screwgun label. However “The Rub and Spare Change” is the first album to be issued under Formanek’s name since 1998. In the first decade of our present century he has been busy at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore where he directs the Peabody Jazz Orchestra. In 2007 the orchestra premiered Formanek’s composition “The Open Book”. Other current activities include work with Tim Berne’s Bloodcount band, reunited after a ten-year hiatus.
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