It is endlessly fascinating to me how the world of jazz, which over one hundred years ago was very often the music that broke new ground, pushed back boundaries, and generally carried the pioneering spirit of musical creativity, has re-emerged as the leading force in these realms again in 2025. For some decades, particularly after the seventies when the role of jazz became sidelined by the audio advancements in the rock and pop world, this was maybe no longer the case, but with rock and pop, to my ears, increasingly defaulting to generic forms it is once more the jazz world where the interesting and challenging sounds can be found, which brings me to Revision, the debut studio album from esteemed poet and theorist Fred Moten and improvising bassist Brandon Lopez. The 62-year-old Moten is a Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Riverside. He has had a large number of poetry collections published and is a MacArthur Fellowship winner for his “new conceptual spaces to accommodate emerging forms of Black aesthetics, cultural production, and social life.” Brandon Lopez, meanwhile, is a New York-based double bassist, an instructor of improvisation and double bass at the New School for Jazz and celebrated for his improvisational work, which is very much in evidence throughout Revision as he unlocks new sonic territories while his instrument simultaneously leaves room for Moten to weave a magical dialogue.
The pair both have the aura of master’s here, as they release on record for the first time, having previously issued two titles on the Reading Group label as a trio with Gerald Cleaver. My initial sense of the work collected is that the first impressions may, in themselves, be a hurdle. In isolation, the idea of a whole album of just poetry and prose backed by improvised double bass might seem to immediately present the listener with a challenge, but then add to that the titles of each selection giving nothing away at all, the first three tracks are simply known as #14, #5 and #3 and the remaining eight titles are all similarly non-chronologically minimal. But I found that the lack of valid preconceptions, not to mention any content details that really give the listener something to get hold of, absolutely tune your focus on the words. Moten has, as you would expect given his decorations, a fluid and vivid way with language that can summon moods and images aplenty alongside the more obvious and extreme trigger points of humour and anger. Fairly quickly, you notice how your instinctive senses latch onto this without any obvious audio reference points. Suddenly, what initially felt like a challenging listen has scooped you up and carried you into a relatively easy and rewarding journey.
Massive kudos must go to Lopez for enabling this with his receptive playing. There are many instances of the instrument sounding nothing like a recognisable double bass at all, its function being to create sonics and dissonant textures, building a natural setting for Moten’s words. On the thirteen-minute second track, there are long sections in which he plays the instrument as a piece of percussion, hitting what I assume to be different frame contours to get altered tones of rhythmic slap. Fred responds to this too, jumping headlong into a section of complimentary wordless scatting to match the tempo Lopez has briefly locked into. The piece ends with frantic plucking of the strings, occasionally returning to the frame bashing and once in a while falling into a more authentic bass line flourish but more often than not, excavating one of those fabled ‘notes between the notes’ and juggling them in the air a while. #7 features scraping bowed sound exploring parallel textures to those heard on outsider pioneer works like ‘Metal Machine Music’ fifty years ago. Add to this the vocal delivery of Moten, he dances around these pieces, not merely reciting, there is rhythm, pace and drama in the delivery. Musicality essentially in how some lines steer close to being semi-sung, and other influences seep through, such as the deliberate and effecting quote of ‘I Put A Spell On You’ during #10. But it comes back every time to this unique hybrid of voice and double bass, intertwined impossibly as one in a recital that lives, breathes, evolves, explores, changes and expresses as one in an impossibly unrepetitive hour of sonic splendour. ‘Revision,’ as a piece of work, feels like it has arrived at the place it was meant to get to with some conviction.
Revision (April 11th, 2025) Tao Forms
Bandcamp: https://nevernotagravedigger.bandcamp.com/album/revision