Fields of Color features ten new compositions from Belgian tenor saxophonist Matthias Van den Brande, all inspired by the painter Mark Rothko. Van den Brande is joined by his regular trio members Tijs Klassen (double bass) and Wouter Kühne (drums), supplemented by Jean-Paul Estiévenart on trumpet.
Van den Brande is not the first jazz musician to be inspired by an abstract expressionist painter: Bill Frisell’s Richter 858 (2005) was written to accompany a series of paintings by Gerhard Richter. Nor is he the first composer inspired specifically by Rothko: American classical composer Morton Feldman wrote Rothko Chapel in 1971 after attending the opening of the chapel, which contains 14 large site-specific paintings that Rothko completed shortly before his suicide in 1970. But Fields of Color does offer something different from those two albums. It’s neither as abrasively avant-garde as Richter 858 nor as ethereal and minimalist as Rothko Chapel. Instead, it’s elegant Euro jazz in which the two horns are free to float over the rhythm section untethered by a chordal instrument.
Rothko often left his paintings untitled. “Silence is so accurate,” he said late in his career, expressing his belief that words could limit how viewers experienced his art. This linguistic abstraction gives Van den Brande even greater freedom to interpret the paintings. For example, the opening track “Lunar Landscapes” is inspired by Rothko’s last series of paintings, untitled but known for convenience as his “black on grays” and created in 1969, the year of the first lunar landing. Yet the tune isn’t austere or mysterious, but a rather cheerful mid-tempo number that starts with a soft tenor-sax riff soon joined by interweaving trumpet, building to a more energetic interplay between the full quartet, and ending with a return to the sax riff but supported by drums.
The group intelligently exploits all the permutations afforded by the four instruments. The aptly named “Multiforms” starts with a short drum solo before the whole band joins for a melody with a slightly Ornette-ish to hard-bop feel, then explores various combinations that include a sax/drums duet, and a bass solo backed by drums – a pairing neatly reversed on “Yellow Fields” which features a drum solo behind which the bassist simply repeats the first five notes of an ascending minor scale, to simple but dramatic effect. “Seagram Murals” gains extra colour from a riff played on a synthesiser (an EWI, perhaps) that’s counterpointed by both sax and trumpet. “Trickling Stardust” (the longest track, at 10:15) starts with a lovely descending motif on Harmon-muted trumpet backed by long notes played in unison by the saxophone and arco bass, before journeying across extended unmuted trumpet and saxophone solos, and ending with a soft landing of breathy sax and muted trumpet like the most nocturnal of Miles Davis ballads.
Providing further contrast are three very short interlude pieces (the longest is barely over a minute) that focus on texture and atmosphere: “Chapel I” (mournful long tones from saxophone and trumpet), “Chapel II” (heavily treated string atmospherics with bass punctuation) and “Aeolian Harp” (breathy saxophone harmonics with eerie atmospherics created by, presumably, a wind-blown harp implied by the title). These short tracks are the closest the music gets to the sonic equivalent of painterly abstraction.
One pleasure of the album is discovering lesser-known Rothko paintings. The final track “The Subway” was inspired by one of Rothko’s subway paintings made at the start of his career: a surprisingly representational painting of vertically elongated people, more akin to LS Lowry than the cloud-like rectangles floating on a colour field one normally associates with Rothko. The track starts with what sounds like a field recording of a subway train, before the whole quartet rattles along propulsively for an uplifting end to the album.
In his book The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art, Rothko stated: “For like any organic substance, art must always be in a state of flux, the tempo being slow or fast. But it must move.” And this most satisfying music certainly does that.
