It's been a while since I've written about releases from the Pi Recordings label. 2021 was an especially fruitful year for Pi as it marked its 20th anniversary and released albums by Henry Threadgill (the first artist released on the label back in '01), Snark Horse and Steve Coleman. The Snark Horse release was a six-disc set by the duo of keyboardist Matt Mitchell and drummer Katie Gentile, along with many friends. That, and the other two artists' work were pretty intriguing efforts that involved some head-scratching and deep listening, the qualities I've come to expect from the label. The following albums are much more recent though they both came out a few months ago. Now it's time to put down some thoughts about the sounds on the discs.
Miles Okazaki
Thisness
(Pi Recordings) www.pirecordings.com or milesokazaki.bandcamp.com/album/thisness
Miles Okazaki's last few albums for Pi (including this one) have incorporated the myth of the trickster, a scalawag from literature who thrives on disrupting the norm and breaking taboos. Like many bands, the title of their first album, Trickster, has become synonymous with Okazaki's quartet with Matt Mitchell (piano, Fender Rhodes, Prophet-6), Anthony Tidd (electric bass) and Sean Rickman (drums).
As a side note, a different kind of trickster might have been afoot in the production of Thisness. When the disc was placed in my laptop player, all titles appeared in Chinese symbols. When translated through an online system, they all read "How to be a great office worker," or "How to become an excellent office worker." The question becomes, Is the trickster toying with us, or does Okazaki's music improve inter-office skills?
It should be also be noted that the guitarist came up with actual titles of the four tracks after they had been recorded, all of them coming from successive lines in a poem by Sun Ra, "The Far Off Place." The music was composed in a manner that evoked the Exquisite Corpse game that was invented by surrealists, in which one artist made a drawing and folded the paper downward so only a little bit could be seen and would give the next artist only a vague cue on how to proceed. Each artist did the same thing, leading to a work that combined several disjointed but entertaining illustrations coming together.
The writing and the sound of the band make Thisness quite the surreal performance to drop in on. Tidd's fretless bass takes the sound back to '80s electric jazz, all slippery and tight. It's not smooth but it feels like it could be, as it blends with Okazaki's clean guitar lines, played on a Gibson ES-150 "Charlie Christian" model. Rickman often plays his kit like he's trying to stem the tide, sounding skittery while Tidd is getting funky ("I'll build a world").
Like an exquisite corpse image, things change in the middle of each song, sometimes gradually, sometimes radically. What was loose and flowing at first suddenly gives way to a 4/4 groove, though Okazaki keeps things choppy before grooving in his own way ("In some far off place"). Rickman sets up a beat in some hard-to-pin-down cluster that seems to total seven in the track "years in space" and the band makes it swing with authority. When that foundation eventually morphs, so too does Okazaki who sounds like he's switched to acoustic guitar.
Despite that fact that a lot happens in all four of these tracks, the music never sounds complex for complexity's sake. Even when Mitchell snakes in on a keyboard countermelody or sounds emanate from Okazaki's "robots" which are programmed to join the improvisation, the music has an organic feeling to it. When the final track, "and wait for you," folds up with barely a climax, it feels like a conversation that could have continued on, in great detail.
David Virelles
Nuna
(Pi Recordings) see above or davidvirelles.bandcamp.com/album/nuna
David Virelles compiled a list of 35 pianists in the liner of Nuna that inspired him to create the 16 tracks. The roster starts with Johann Sebastian Bach and ends with Geri Allen, including Ethopian pianist Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, Alice Coltrane and Vladimir Horowitz to name just a few. It's a fascinating list equaled only by the range of the music that Virelles plays on the album, largely unaccompanied. Actually the music exceeds the intrigue of the list, to be honest.
The Cuban-American pianist doesn't single out any of his predecessors for a direct tribute, realizing that would oversimplify things. There are elements in many of the pieces that come from them, a flourish here, a percussive attack there, a low chord resonating thanks to the damper pedal. The overall effect of the music sounds both infectious and challenging, where the source becomes secondary to where Virelles takes the music.
"Spacetime" starts out not at the piano but with the marímbula, a wooden box with metal keys which is often used in Cuban changüí music. It kicks things off boldly, while emphasizing the percussive quality of the instrument Virelles typically plays. Among the 14 originals, two tracks come from composers in Santiago de Cuba. While the bright melody of "Cuando Canta El Cornetín" sounds like it might be an interpretation, it also has the feeling of a Bach invention. "Germania" has a similar feeling. Percussionist Julio Barreto joins Virelles on three tracks, adding more nuances to a set already full of them. His entrance in "Ignacio Villa" - halfway into the piece - works as a clever move to elevate the music further.
None of the pieces on Nuna sound like spontaneous works. They all come off like compositions, some with room for improvisations but all of them well-formed. Few last more than five minutes, making the album like a vast program of what the modern pianist can do with a fertile imagination.
For that reason, Villa should be required listening for all college freshman piano students. They don't need to learn how to play it or play "spot the influence." Instead, they should get to know it. Live in it. Ponder how Virelles came up this music. Then use their version of that process to develop their own voices.
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