It could be Anthony Braxton’s 100 tubas, or Stockhausen’s four helicopters for that matter. The simple underlying logic seems to be: Why stop at one?
The appeal of adding more of the same instrument, or instrument family, is apparent in new releases from Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Henry Threadgill, trumpeter and Greenleaf Music label head Dave Douglas and in-demand drummer Tomas Fujiwara.
For Threadgill it’s guitars: His new release Listen Ship, out later this month, documents music that had its world premiere at the Bang on a Can Long Play Festival in May. It’s built around the six-string acoustics of Bill Frisell, Gregg Belisle-Chi and Miles Okazaki; the mandolin-like soprano guitar of Brandon Ross, and the bass guitars of Jerome Harris and longtime Zooid veteran Stomu Takeishi (not to mention the pianos of Maya Keren and Rahul Carlberg).
For Douglas it is the trumpet, and a recording that grew out of his long-running Festival of New Trumpet (FONT) Music: Alloy, a project with no fewer than three trumpets (Douglas, Dave Adewumi, Alexandra Ridout) plus rhythm (Patricia Brennan on vibes, Kate Pass on bass, longtime Douglas quintet member Rudy Royston on drums).
For Fujiwara on the new Dream Up, it is a Percussion Quartet, with Brennan’s vibes again playing a central role. The leader — frequent associate of Mary Halvorson, Tomeka Reid and other adventurers — plays conventional drumkit, while Tim Keiper and Kaoru Watanabe deploy a wide range of African and Japanese instruments including donso ngoni, kamale ngoni, calabash, temple blocks, timbale, djembe, castanets, balafon, o-jimedaiko, uchiwadaiko, shimedaiko and shinobue.
Henry Threadgill, Listen Ship (Pi Recordings)
Though Threadgill’s musical language stands apart, Listen Ship finds sonic parallels in recent acoustic guitar music such as John Zorn’s series on Tzadik, Joel Harrison’s Guitar Choir or Pat Metheny’s 2021 classical guitar album Road to the Sun.
It’s worth noting that for Threadgill, bringing in multiple players of the same instrument leads not to homogeneity, but to greater differentiation. “I don’t want you sounding like that guy next to you; that’s the European way,” he told me in a 2011 interview for this magazine. “I want to know when I go blind that I can tell those are my cows: cow number one and cow number two.”
There is nothing bovine in the sound of guitars one through six on Listen Ship: Instead we get a restrained and sensitive timbre and an overarching clarity of voices, with soprano and bass guitars cutting through the mix particularly well. Even with no drums, Threadgill’s work is doggedly rhythmic, with darting counterpoint and elusive clashing harmony generated by a theoretical system of the composer’s own devising.
The 16 tracks are lettered like the alphabet, but with no “K,” a combined “IJ” and nothing after “R.” The short piano intro at “A” makes the entrance of guitars at “B” all the more striking and compelling. “G,” “L” and the closing “R” are full ensemble with the pianos, “C” and “E” are piano duos, “P” features just one piano and soprano guitar, “D” is a substantial longer episode for all the guitars, “M” is a bass duo (the bassists are the star improvisers of the album).
These perpetual shifts in texture, interplay, dynamics and form are tantalizing in themselves. The music speaks with a clear purpose, whether or not one grasps the remoteness of Threadgill’s method.
Dave Douglas, Alloy (Greenleaf Music)
There is ample precedent for Dave Douglas working with additional brass. His Brass Ecstasy band debuted in 2009 with Spirit Moves. His 2017 release Little Giant Still Life featured the brass chamber-jazz quartet The Westerlies, while Dizzy Atmosphere (2020) featured Dave Adewumi on second trumpet.
Adewumi returns on Alloy, with the rising Canadian Alexandra Ridout completing what amounts to a small trumpet section — not quite a big-band section but functioning almost like one at times. Or an understated trumpet choir, or a troop detail playing fanfares, or whatever Douglas’s varied compositions for this group demand. One low-register harmonized passage on “The Antidote” has them sounding a bit like trombones. “Friendly Gargoyle” inserts a fleeting callback, probably unplanned, to “Manteca” (a high point of Dizzy Atmosphere), while the closing “Standing Watch” dips into a Brass Ecstasy vibe with its bluesy dissonance and slow 6/8 feel.
Instead of the piano and guitar of Dizzy Atmosphere, Patricia Brennan’s atmospheric and harmonically expansive vibraphone gives Alloy another texture, redolent of not only Bobby Hutcherson at his most angular and modern but also Milt Jackson at his swinging and versatile best with the MJQ. I’m thinking of certain moments on “Announcement: Vigilance” where bassist Kate Pass and drummer Rudy Royston function a bit like Percy Heath and Connie Kay to Brennan’s Bags. It’s a beautiful trio dynamic of its own, a tributary off the main river.
Tomas Fujiwara, Dream Up (Out Of Your Head Records)
Brennan’s vibraphone functions as pitched percussion on Dream Up. But it also supplies sustained melody and defined harmony in an otherwise non-pitched environment, with no bassist. In this setting she blends unpredictably with Tim Keiper mainly on blocks and hand drums and Kaoru Watanabe on taiko drums of various sizes. Keiper’s use of West African ngoni introduces a string component as well, harking back in a way to the guitars of the Threadgill release. Watanabe contributes a wind and breath element via the shinobue (side-blown wood flute), to great effect on the closing “You Don’t Have to Try.”
Fujiwara has dealt a fair amount with paired instrumentation, notably leading his band Triple Double. What he does on Dream Up sometimes recalls David Virelles’s work with multi-percussion; certainly there’s a shared interest there in Afro-Cuban drumming. His interest in taiko stems from his mixed Japanese background and trips to Osaka and Shimane in his youth.
The opening title track and the spacious “Komorebi” evoke a ceremonial or folkloric mood, while “Mobilize,” “Recollection of a Dance” and “Columns of Leaning Paint” delve more into rhythm and groove, with Fujiwara pointedly at the drumkit, anchoring the beat. “Blue Pickup” and “Ritual Pace” are proper percussion ensemble pieces, no vibraphone in the former, possibly well disguised in the latter. These are ambitious, polyrhythmic, sonically rich, freely mixing influences in pursuit of a sound that is, much like Threadgill and Douglas, both personal and unclassifiable. JT