Ephemera (indie)
Linsey Wellman
“I’ve heard some players that can play much more creatively with the standard set of saxophone techniques, but I guess that’s just not the way I’m wired,” Ottawa saxophonist Linsey Wellman recently wrote me.
Wellman’s wiring, however, is such that it gives rise to his stark new solo alto saxophone CD Ephemera, which sets aside more conventional musical and jazz-world concerns about developing melody, dealing with groove and time and exploring harmony to offer instead a sound experience that is by turns minimal or serial, reserved or dense to the point of breathlessness.
The 45-minute disc consists of nine unnamed tracks — Wellman must have wanted to avoid any programmatic associations. So, the music is presented uncompromisingly, and the listener must grapple with inferring Wellman’s meaning or creating his or her own.
The first few tracks focus clearly on a few saxophone techniques and small musical units — such as long tones, multiphonics and oscillations between major and minor intervals, sometimes with the application of a gravelly timbre. As the disc progresses, Wellman’s music become more slippery, and then more insistent. The fifth track is an impressive feat of arpeggios that seems both baroque and ambient. The sixth track is a modal incantation that would bring John Coltrane more to mind if Elvin Jones were playing mallets at his kit and Jimmy Garrison were droning. The disc’s seventh track finds Wellman playing persistently with a six-note phrase. During the seventh track, it seemed to me that Wellman was repeating some of his materials and strategies — the track involves toying with triplets and then arpeggiation. With the final track, after some plaintive atonal playing, Wellman ultimately returns to the multiphonics that ushered in the disc, giving the recording a pleasing full-circle arc.
Above all, Wellman’s disc strikes me as a showcase for his dedication to exploring what he is capable of doing with the horn, showcasing facility for the instrument and for extended techniques that will fascinate listeners whose ears are already attuned to his esthetic — in other words, who are wired as Wellman is.
Linsey Wellman launches his disc Ephemera tonight (Nov. 18) at Club SAW (67 Nicholas St.) at 8 p.m. (Doors open at 7 p.m.) Admission is $15.
