Music Review: Pauline Oliveros/Roscoe Mitchell/John Tilbury/Wadada Leo Smith - "Nessuno"

Track Listing:

1. Part I......................30:51
2. Part II.....................39.45
3. Part III (Encore).....5:25

Personnel:

• Pauline Oliveros: Roland V accordion
• Roscoe Mitchell: alto saxophone, soprano saxophone, flute
• John Tilbury: piano
• Wadada Leo Smith: trumpet

Jazz, at the end of the day, comes down to rhythm. From Dixieland marches to avant-garde throwdowns, the common denominator remains the propulsive rhythm of of the bass and drums. Much is made of the dizzying harmonies and spontaneous melodies, but beneath the chord charts lies the same swinging beat that unites the blues to funk and hip hop.

Imagine, however, a jazz performance without a rhythm section. No bass or drums to keep the beat and even the piano mulls for a time between each laconic strike. All pretense of dance and shuffle fades away, leaving behind pure brooding mood. At that point, would such a performance even be considered jazz?

It's hard to say, but Nessuno makes a compelling case regardless. Uniting for a one-off performance at the Angelica Festival in Italy in 2011, the supergroup brings to the table all the strengths of their respective backgrounds to create a unique work of art.

Much of the music's unusual character can be attributed to the late accordionist Pauline Oliveros. Oliveros didn't come out of jazz, but rather the classical and tape music scenes of the west coast. In the 1960s, she co-founded the San Francisco Tape Music Center alongside other such luminaries as Morton Subotnick and Terry Riley. For several years before her passing in late 2016, she had expanded her reach into the realm of world music and jazz. Over her career she has perfected a live set-up for her accordion, an instrument which, under her command, transforms into a powerful soundscape generator.

There's no lack of jazz pedigree on this record, however. At the same time Oliveros was revolutionizing classical and electronic music in the sixties, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and reed-player Roscoe Mitchell were charting new territories in jazz. After Ornette Coleman freed up the medium in 1959 with The Shape of Jazz to Come, young players all across the country and the world were eager to stake a claim in the New Thing and embark into new realms of sonic possibility. Smith and Mitchell, among many others, took part in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the legendary free jazz collective. Mitchell himself is a member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, a musical group now approaching its fiftieth year of existence. Smith has been having a renaissance for the past few years, first becoming a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2013, then being named Best New Music by Pitchfork last year for his collaboration with pianist Vijay Ayer on the album A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke.

Such improbable collaborations between wildly different artists often (quite rightly) draw suspicion and disdain, but here such a fear would be unfounded. Although improvising almost everything on the expansive tracks, all four musicians seemed to share a similar vision going into the live performance: a brooding soundscape recalling a haunted house in which inanimate objects fly around and smash into each other on their own accord. Tilbury's careful piano playing builds the spare framework through which the spectral horns sail. Oliveros' ruminates and stews with her digitally modified accordion, droning like a busted organ forgotten in a church basement. Now and then one of the horn players will embark on a rousing solo, but for the most part the players are content to blend into the eerie atmosphere.

As to whether it's jazz, each listener can make that call for themselves. For my part, jazz has always had a willingness to do away with received pieties and seek out the daring and new. If that defines jazz, then Nessuno succeeds admirably.