The immense popularity of the music from O Brother, Where Art Thou? brought forth a torrent of interest in traditional roots music. Whether it be bluegrass, old time, blues, gospel or ragtime, there is no finer practitioner of this idiom on the mandolin than Mike Compton of the Nashville Bluegrass Band. Widely acclaimed for his contributions to the O Brother soundtrack and tour, he teamed up with David Long, a young gifted mandolinist and vocalist, in 2003. It seems only fitting that these mando-masters of traditional American music found their way to David Grisman's studio to record, STOMP, the first ever release from Mike Compton and David Long.
With tunes like Bill Monroe's "Evening Prayer Blues," "Ashland Breakdown," "Old Mountaineer" and "Tanyards" one hears the soulful essence of Monroe's musical wisdom channeled through this gifted duo and taken even a step or two further.
Original compositions by Mike Compton are highlighted throughout on the hypnotic "Big Indian Blues," the exciting down-home blues mandola solo "Stomp" and the octave banjo mandolin solo piece "Black's Run." David Long's composing talent and strong solo techniques are showcased on the moving "January Nightmare," while on "Centipede Hop," both tell the humorous story behind this lively and melodic collaboration.
Whether newly composed by either Compton or Long, or taken from traditional archives, STOMP is a moving musical odyssey through the deep South circa the 1930s and 40s, delighting the listener with a variety of vocals and instrumentals in blues, ragtime, minstrel, gospel and old time genres
Charlie Mariano, who is now eighty-two, has always been a pioneer of beauty in jazz. Where other jazz musicians cause opposites to collide, working with syncopation and dissonance, he has always searched for the greatest possible harmony, and did so even though, at Charlie Parker’s side, he was partly responsible for one of the greatest cultural clashes of the twentieth century. But Mariano was one of the very few who knew hot to transform the subversive energy of bebop into a spiritual urgency. When he was no longer able to strike gold in jazz alone, he sought and found new inspiration in Indian music. For Mariano, music functioned like a funnel with which he concentrated the maximum amount of positive tension into the smallest point possible. Any attempt to put his spirituality into words is bound to fail, because his sounds are scarcely tangible. An entire century culminates in Mariano’s playing. He demands an entire ear, an entire listener.
What this old, wise man of the saxophone is now offering up to our ears, together with the Beirach on piano and the Hübner brothers on violin and bass, is the quintessence of all his musical expeditions of past decades. Naturally a seasoned expert like Mariano knows that he cannot answer all the fundamental questions of life himself. And hence the composition of this quartet is no coincidence. Beauty results not from the typical session acquaintances that can be so fatal in jazz: recording three takes each of eight pieces on two afternoons, only to go their own ways thereafter and then join up again a year and a half later for a joint tour. No, the Beauty quartet is part of a musical family tree that spans more than two generations. Richie Beirach is strongly marked by his teacher Charlie Mariano. He has manifested his view of profound beauty in sound in the bands of John Abercrombie and Dave Liebman, among others. Beirach was in turn mentor to the Swiss musician Gregor Hübner, who lives in New York, and in a trio with George Mraz they enjoyed success with unconventional arrangements of compositions by Béla Bartók and Federico Mompou. Marino, Beirach, and Hübner were already working as a trio before they brought Hübner’s brother Veit on board for additional grounding. That this constellation works at all lies not least in the contrasting timbres of saxophone and violin, which never get in each other’s way, or even produce interference.
No matter whether the quartet is performance jazz standards or originals of its own composition, it produces a fundamental tone of cosmic harmony that causes us to forget the corset of profane genres and categories. Perhaps this music is jazz, because it is instrumental, and improvisation runs through all the pieces as an essential constant. But the shared inspiration promises a great deal more. Cultural set pieces, states of mind, and experiences from Europe, America, and Asia are here woven together in an unprogrammatic way that transcends epochs, so that the place of origin of a given attitude or idiom no longer matters at all. Rather, each individual note evokes a silent, undistorted desire for the next one. The music just happens, without regard to the expectations or habits of potential listeners. If this music can be called jazz at all it is because Mariano, Beirach, and the two Hübners return after an odyssey of more than a century to the origins of innocence that were probably inherent to it only in legend.
Three generations, with completely different experiences behind them, put together their three-dimensional image of beauty to create a mosaic that is so complex, homogeneous, dense, and yet transparent that it precludes even another word about it or any attempt to describe it. Anyone who has ears may listen. . . Perhaps it is out there after all, the beauty independent of the human sense, which comes as close to the divine as the pyramids, the music of Monteverdi and Bach, and the altarpieces of Jan van Eyck once did.
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