10 Tracks I Can’t Do Without: Keyboard/Synth Recordings

Pianist Liam Noble has a new improvising project with synthesizers…working with dancer Maya Takeda (link to video below) which he describes as “work in progress”. For this article in UKJN’s “10 Tracks…” series he dives into the world of synths. As he writes: “The musicians I have chosen here all seem to me to be curious about the sound, to be actively going into it in the way Sonny Rollins does with the tenor, or Bill Evans bringing out a melody line just brighter than the chords below…”

It’s hard to believe now, given their current omnipotence, but synthesisers used to get a bad press. One of my first loves in music, after Beethoven and Scott Joplin, was “Queen”. Perhaps due to the intricacy and richness of Brian May’s guitar, albums would often proclaim “No Synthesisers!” on the back of the sleeve. Well, they later went back on that of course, but it stuck with me, as an aspiring twelve year old pianist. Synths were essentially a short cut for one handed pianists. And I, of course, went back on that…but there’s a fear, as there is with A.I, that what you gain in convenience you make up for in a kind of flatness of character. And like AI, some of them aim to please through what has already happened, guzzling on the past achievements of others. Many of the factory sounds on keyboards now allude to a particular period, often a particular song, with YouTube an endless source of instruction videos on how to emulate Gary Numan’s lead sound on “Cars” or the tacky bells of a DX7 electric piano.

In some ways electronics proposes a diametrically opposed approach to that of jazz: a potentially endless array of sounds, all of which are in some way already made, contrasts with the idea of “finding your own sound”. I have fond memories of seeing both Pat Thomas and Steve Beresford with tables full of small sound making devices, some of which would be used once before being summarily discarded, others forming more of a central role. They both seemed to me to be finding a personal route through the detritus of a sonic life and making it beautiful. Because often, the first thing to do is to build your instrument, to design the parameters around which you create tension and release. Of course, you can simply play the thing, and musicians like Chick Corea and Jan Hammer did that very successfully…but I’ve decided to leave them out here, because the keys are still the important thing. Special mention goes to Keith Jarrett, who has the rare distinction of being dismissive of what I like most about him: his role in Miles Davis’s bands, the vox organ and the distorted Rhodes in fluctuating layers of grunge. The musicians I have chosen here all seem to me to be curious about the sound, to be actively going into it in the way Sonny Rollins does with the tenor, or Bill Evans bringing out a melody line just brighter than the chords below. It’s the detail that’s interesting, the willingness to enter into a dialogue with technology where you accept its limitations and are open to its infinities. And how you stop it all simply spinning out of control.

1. Herbie Hancock: “Chameleon” from “Headhunters”

It seems an obvious choice, and it’s my first simply because of how unpianistic Herbie’s synth sounds here, sitting over a starkly funky vamp. In that space, Hancock sounds vaguely like he’s trying out all the knobs and buttons as he goes, and there’s a wonderful and slightly comical sense throughout that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Evoking the multiphonics of Pharoah Sanders, a panicked flock of electric geese and a broken laser gun in equal measure, it feels like he could go on forever, cranking phrases into the cracks between pitches and squeezing the tail end of phrases into duck farts. It’s this wayward exploration that makes the slick jazz expertise of the following Rhodes solo (itself a thing of rare beauty) feel such a relief.

2. Joe Zawinul: “In a Silent Way” from “8:30”: Weather Report

I tried for a long time to understand how two people could wrestle this kind of beauty out of the air. Wayne Shorter’s acerbic soprano is perfectly cloaked in orchestral colour here, Zawinul matching his every move instinctively, the intro winding beautifully into the theme, here with all the chords that Miles made him remove for his own album of the same name. The whole thing is so short, but there’s a world of heartache in its brevity. My introduction both to Wayne Shorter, and to this tune started with this album, and so I have a bespoke level of disdain reserved for anyone who tells me that later Weather Report “isn’t as good as the early stuff”. Music to put on in the aftermath of a failed relationship, or at least it was when I was a teenager. (I had plenty of opportunities to experience that particular reverie).

3. Joe Zawinul: “Zeebop” from “di.a.lects”

Zawinul’s music from the eighties all has this sense of a mythical land about it, a kind of undiscovered folk music. He claims that African music was not a direct influence on him, but it’s hard not to hear this a kind of digitised The way he chose to articulate the complex patterns and the big band sonorities through the medium of electronics is never better illustrated than here, where a furious cymbal beat drives everything headlong. He somehow finds warmth in the cold edged sounds, giant chords that sound like a blend of horns and steel pans, bass and drums locked in manic interplay, and around this Zawinul spins an inexhaustible collection of riffs and melodies. This is music that is unapologetically happy, dazzlingly bright, ferocious and brilliantly constructed. He would later expand this sound in his “Syndicate”, a band whose virtuosity caused musicians to gawp at in disbelief. But for me there’s something special about the synthetic quality of this record. Zawinul’s world is his and his alone.

4. Wayne Horvitz: “Dinner At Eight” from “This New Generation”.

Something strange started to happen to me in the late eighties: I started to listen to music that wasn’t what most people would think of as jazz. Wayne Horvitz, a well-known member of the so-called “Downtown Scene” in New York was, along with Bill Frisell, John Zorn, Tim Berne and others, stepping away from the constraints of fusion and the post-Marsalis landscape to craft a series of albums drawing on a wider palette of music. I can’t put my finger on what I like about this record, except that it just seems to sit in a place all its own. Above the drum machine polyrhythms, a reverb soaked line evokes something from a William Burroughs fever dream in Tangiers: and then suddenly it fades away, a mood that has no beginning and no end. FM synth sounds can seem cold to some people (especially given the current fad for a return to analogue) but they never have to me…I was raised in that digital waved world, with Duran Duran and Madonna alongside Ellington and Monk.

5. Wayne Horvitz: “The Front” from “Miracle Mile”

Horvitz is one of my favourite composers in all of music and, like his wife Robin Holcomb (another favourite), he effortlessly cuts across melodic and harmonic territories to produce a kind of angular Americana. Here, the sample of a young child’s voice, mixed in with God knows what, forms the backdrop of an elegantly constructed tune that could be a folk song if it weren’t so strange. The chords move against both, producing a wrenching dissonance that is rescued by the sheer ingenuity of the logic that underpins it. There’s an arpeggiator in the mix too, which in its ability to run up and down the notes of a chord automatically is surely the ultimate underminer of jazz-based virtuosity. This music manages to be both clever and sonically outlandish, with a truly lyrical melody thrown in. Then there’s the Elliot Sharp guitar solo, which sounds like it must have been very loud but is here mixed in to the texture in such a way that it feels like a fly buzzing through a room full of sculptures. And a proper ending! Take note jazz people.

6. Paul Bley: “Gentle Man” from “Synth Thesis”

My introduction to Paul Bley was haphazard in terms of the proper chronology, governed by what I found in record shops. This was one if the first albums I listened to, and it’s something of an exception. Having eschewed synthesisers in the seventies after his experience with Annette Peacock, someone must have convinced him to try one out in 1994. I don’t think he ever went back a third time. Against the richness of his piano chords, this synth sounds almost rude in its lack of nuance. But something happens. True to cantankerous form, he refuses to budge, and we are forced to accept this sound that he’s ended up with, which is like an airy flute, a mellow lead and a milk bottle hit with a chopstick all rolled into one. To me it always sounds like he just got the first preset he found and went with it. But between these two sounds, the Rolls Royce of the piano and the Fisher Price of the keyboard, there’s a strange Monk-ish magic that starts to emerge despite the digital chill in the air.

7. Paul Bley and Annette Peacock: “Touching” from “Improvisie”

Another one off, a recording that sounds like nothing else. This is partly due to the incredibly dynamic sound of Annette Peacock’s voice, here at her expressionistic peak. She also wrote tunes for Bley, and this one, once it arrives, is like a love song in a haunted house, heart wrenching and slightly terrifying. Her unflinching emotion is matched by incredible projection and power. Han Bennik on drums is a brilliant character too, able to both blend and cut with the Radiophonic-esque sounds. In places the music steers closer to Varèse’s “Poème Eléctronique” than jazz, in others there’s a clear song-based inspiration. With the sheer range of sounds and overlapping instrumentation, it’s not always easy to know who’s doing what here, but like Horvitz, it seems they are inventing a whole way of feeling music as they go.

8. Richard Teitlebaum: “Blues” from “Homage To Charles Parker”

A bluesy phrase, a held note, a simple, harmonium-like chord…OK, yes, it’s a blues, but not that kind. George Lewis’s piece seems to take different elements of the form and character of the blues, the chords becoming a series of drones as Douglas Ewart’s bass clarinet darts in and out. These elements are slowly rotated like a gemstone in a jeweller’s hand. There’s a feeling, later, that the idea of repeated chords is becoming important. If that sounds a little dry, well, possibly it is…. certainly the studio sound is lacking air somehow, but that only serves to enhance the slow and patient unfolding of whatever architecture is holding this strange performance together. In places it reminds me of early minimalist pieces like Steve Reich’s “Four Organs”, where textures overlap at a snail’s pace. Gradually more and more of the group start to improvise, but at around twelve minutes Teitelbaum’s sustain starts to draw everyone in and we end up back where we were. Richard Teitelbaum’s contribution here is sparing and succinct, always blending with his surroundings. You hear him listening, and that in itself feels like a kind of texture…it’s the blues under a microscope, where things get so big you almost lose your sense of their shape.

9 Thomas Lehn: “Synths: Live In Barcelona”

I must admit I’m new to Lehn’s music, and this is something I recently discovered. When I listen to this, and watch it too, it has a quality of someone taking apart and reassembling some strange giant mechanism, or perhaps inspecting a large animal that may or not be alive. He prods it, sometimes patiently pursuing some imaginary train of thought, other times seemingly taken aback by the creature’s snarling response. (This latter scenario is becoming familiar to me, a feeling of both momentary terror and amusing glee). There is a sense that the performer is not in control always, nor should they be, but that they are guided by what “comes up” in the machine. Because space has such a large role to play here, there’s a surprising amount of light and shade, sounds that seem at times to be on the verge of total collapse, at others hovering on the edge of silence. Throughout, his demeanour veers between the virtuosic leaps of an athlete and the calm stasis of a predator whose prey is in its sights.

10 Matthew Bourne: “Somewhere I Have Never Travelled (For Coral Evans)” from “Moogmemory”

The first time I heard this, I remember marvelling at the sheer magnificence at the instrument’s sound, and Bourne makes you hear it by sticking simply to held notes and chords and the pulsing of the instrument’s arpeggiator, an endless sequence of gently throbbing colour that could be the underscore to a movie but is far better without visual distractions. There’s so much potential for sound shaping in synthesisers, so it’s refreshing to just hear an instrument do one of the things it does best. The balance between simplicity and surprise is beautifully handled, and every time the chord changes there’s somehow something new to hear in that sound. It’s almost like a homage to the instrument itself…as the chords die away, tiny variations suddenly become meaningful. I can imagine turning the power on, laying my hands on the keys and, hearing that warm heartbeat, thinking “yeah, that’s all I need” …