Bill Orcutt Quartet – featuring Orcutt alongside three equally formidable musicians – Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendoza and Shane Parish recorded a Tiny Desk Concert for NPR…one of the best I’ve seen in a long time.
Bill Orcutt seems to be everywhere in my Soundworld at the moment. Most recently, we reviewed his solo album, Jump on It, in which Glenn Kimpton noted how it was ‘calm and even quiet in places’. It’s a beautiful album and a dramatic contrast to his heavier concoctions that audiences may well have witnessed on the opening night of Chicago’s recent Frequency Festival, facilitated by the number-one free jazz and creative percussionist, Chris Corsano.
While Orcutt can craft beauty, as he has done on the above-mentioned album, he also wields his instrument like an alchemist. He’s an explorer, and you never quite know where he’s going to take you, but you know the journey ain’t going to be boring.
One of his latest projects has really caught my attention and sent me off in some beautiful exploratory directions – Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet featuring three other players who command equal respect among their peers in the world of contemporary and improv music. Two of them have featured in these pages. While Wendy Eisenberg can pull weight in the power-trio setting of Editrix – “Editrix is an important band and we definitely live up to your expectations in terms of hotness, kindness and innovation” – it was 2021’s gentler and wonderfully rewarding Bent Ring that caught my ear most recently, a track from which slipped into Lost in Transmission No. 94 alongside another quartet member, Shane Parish and his recent single Walk Back Words, from his first full-length album of ‘songs with words’.
Prior to this, we reviewed Parish’s 2022 Liverpool album. Described by Thomas Blake in his review as “in the simplest terms, an album of guitar instrumentals based on sea shanties, it is also a meditation on the nature of artistic exploration, on how both music and preconceptions can alter over time.” He also notes, “As the lead guitarist in prog experimentalists Ahleuchatistas he is well-versed in the art of making weird and wonderful sounds while hooked up to an amp. On Liverpool, he makes good use of his pedigree, tuning in to the exciting and sometimes discomforting area between melody and abstraction.”
Brooklyn-based guitarist Ava Mendoza, maybe best known as a member of Unnatural Ways, is well-known for her deeply expressive playing techniques and has played with some of the best on the scene. Her work on William Parker’s Mayan Space Station was formidable as she led the trio of Parker (bass) and Gerald Cleaver (drums) on an incredible improv free-for-all. She’s also a formidable soloist (check out 2021’s New Spells).
Creating music for a quartet is no easy task; it’s complex, and the execution of those pieces is no less harrowing. Orcutt has written and improvised on four-stringed guitars for four decades, and last year he released Music for Four Guitars – each part played by himself and stitched together using Logic audio software. Shane Parish drew the short straw at transcribing Orcutt’s album, so I guess he must know Orcutt’s playing pretty damn well by now.
I’ll say no more and let the music do the talking as it’s one of the best Tiny Desk Concerts I’ve seen…the reflexes in action here are quite unreal. Four musicians at the frontier of creativity and having fun while they’re there.
If you want to see them live, they are playing at EFG London Jazz Festival at Kings Place, London on 15th November (tickets).
SET LIST
- Or from behind
- In the rain
- At a distance
- In profile
- Or head on