Lana Trio — Live In Japan
Admittedly, I have trouble deciphering any meaning or emotion from this recording. It is an actively anti-musical form of free jazz, an indecisive call and response in which various arrhythmic and atonal sounds erupt and collide, never cohering or truly dissipating. The musicians are seemingly against the creation of momentum, or any form of truly decisive playing. Though I am sure the musicians are listening closely to each other, I am skeptical of any real relationship between what the 3 members of the trio are doing. The album flows in a manner which is meandering and anticlimactic.
The dry, familiar sounds of the chosen instruments, typical to traditional jazz, do little to separate this album from countless recordings from the 60's and 70's. The only real melody instrument present is the piano, the trombonist (Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø) mostly content to create disjointed and separated grunts. He freely utilizes the ability of the trombone to bend and detune pitches, and create sounds between the notes in the 12 tone system.
The pianist Kjetil Jerve possesses a greater sense of direction than the other two members, often dwelling on a pleasant or evocative couple of chords or momentarily sketching vaguely scalar dramatic melodic ideas. Any enjoyment I get from this recording comes from his playing. Yet, he is certainly still prone to abruptly changing the subject, seeming to lack attention span. Often, no memory of the previous moment is evident; the result is an intensely fragmented form of music.
4 minutes of the first track are devoted to a near-silent passage in which the trombonist issues an undulating watery gurgle, while other players wait silently. This texture is quite pleasant, and I find the ambient minimalism of this section preferable to the indecisive atonal soup of most of the album.
The first piece "Candyism" does not develop into something coordinated enough to engage my mind until its last final few minutes. Repeated efforts to focus on this sound seemed futile. The final section does have a pained, cathartic intensity, the energy level suddenly climbing to the point where urgency and emotional desperation are apparent. If only the rest of the track had been completely omitted, I find myself thinking.
The 17 minute second piece "Meanwhile, Somewhere" is extremely sparse. It is a Feldman-esque study in the effects of single sustained pitches allowed to dissipate completely before another is sounded, arranged in discernable melodic order. The sound does create a certain slowing of the air, but also feels something like an uncomfortably stagnant, sickly mire. I wonder what point there could be to dwelling in this space.
I feel that a sense of momentum is essential to an improvised recording such as this, with 3 very lengthy tracks averaging at 20 minutes. This album could be said to possess anti-momentum, bubbling up indescively into half-hearted activity, gradually sinking back down into stagnation. If it is a kind of ambient music, it is eerie, uneasy and devoid in warmth or soul, lacking the visionary powers of dark ambient, drone and explicitly ritual music. It is ambiguity that never seems to clarify. Perhaps free jazz fanatics will find some profundity in this recording; for me, it provides nothing I am looking for. It is neither joyful, nor fierce, nor truly aggressive, it is something closer to a mild, restless forboding.