Michel Doneda/Paul Rogers/Le Quan Ninh
Polwechsel
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Even among these less jazz-centric folks there are vastly different methodologies at work. Take, for instance, new records by the trio of reed player Michel Doneda, percussionist Le Quan Ninh (both French), and British-born, French-resident bassist Paul Rogers, and by the Austro-German quartet called Polwechsel. In both cases the music’s closest connection to jazz is its emphasis on timbre and texture, a tendency that can certainly be felt in the voicelike sonorities and vivid colors of, for instance, King Oliver’s Dixie Syncopators or any of Duke Ellington’s early bands. African-American music has always placed a premium on subtleties of timbre, often over and above innovative harmony or form. Think too of the blues, a three-chord form so stripped down that when it’s schematized or abstracted it feels ridiculously rudimentary. But of course the finesse of great blues and jazz performers flies in the face of formal reductionism; they sing and play with irreducible, ineffable inflection and nuance.
Doneda has had a longstanding connection with a folklore imaginaire, an approach to melding new and traditional music in unheard-of ways. (Other notable “imaginary folklorists” include singer Benat Achiary and hurdy-gurdy player Dominique Regef.) Doneda’s sound may remind you a bit of Roscoe Mitchell’s, with long, sometimes convoluted lines that are lent life through circular breathing. But his tone is drier and more puckered than Mitchell’s, his vibrato somewhat more pronounced and edgy. On Open Paper Tree the trio moves like a loris–slowly, gradually, making changes without abruption or sudden jerks. On “Arborescence Only” things do begin to shake, rattle, and roll, but long silences break up the flow. Though it keeps the organic crunch and chewiness of free jazz, it’s got an unmistakably different focus.
