Translated material
Alice, vibraphone!
Patton's credo in all projects is a combination of incompatible styles, mixing everything with everything. This soundtrack (for a short Australian film) is not very hostile towards the listener. Moderately hostile, so to speak. Unlike the group, let's say Fantomas. Although it’s useless to compare with his other albums, because it’s pointless to compare anything with Patton’s albums. About artists like him, idle critics and authors of homemade reviews in the music lovers LJ community usually say that “his style is impossible to describe” or, as an option, that “it is impossible to count the number of musical styles that he ...” In general, It's clear. The trick is that you don’t need to count anything, because it’s not about the styles or their quantity at all. Patton's okroshka is a style: mixing everything with everything, the alien with one's own, the close with the alien (postmodernism, excuse the unfashionable word). Strange meanings arise at the joints and seams. There is such a mishmash of styles, these same junctions and seams that musical information turns into noise. This, oddly enough, greatly clears the brain and refreshes perception.
The album is masterfully produced. It’s completely unclear which is whose: yours or the sample. The shiver down the spine comes precisely from musical ideas, and not from their incompatibility. I won't tell you what it's made of. But it won’t be boring: the road is winding and skids at turns. The title track is like Ennio Morricone meets John Zorn. The songs A Perfect Twist (really like a twist) and A Dream of Roses are more or less similar to complete works - supposedly old pop jazz on a worn out gramophone record.
This album is only the third solo in the discography of the super-prolific Patton. And the first one released on his own Ipecac label. This is also the first soundtrack by Patton, who, by the way, is going to direct a movie himself.
Igor Butman. "Funny Stories" (Sony/BMG). An idle reviewer sits and scratches the back of his head with a pencil, thinking: who should be paired with Mike Patton in the review column? And he understands that anything can be paired with Mikepatton’s mishmash, even a box set of vinyl records with speeches by Leonid Ilyich. Or maybe Igor Butman with melodies from Soviet cartoons, but more on that later. There is no dissonance: Butman is eclectic, Paton is damn eclectic, so why waste time.
No, of course, Igor Butman is not a “mate” for anyone. And our best jazzman, the only one from the jazz environment “celebrity” and jazz culture manager (remember the festival “Parliament Jazz” or “Le Club”, where there were historical concerts - Joe Zawinul, Jimmy Smith shortly before his death...) Now, how It turned out that Butman is also a champion of the domestic record business. His latest album, “Funny Stories,” has currently sold, according to statistics from the Russian branch of the Sony/BMG label, about twelve thousand copies. To use stock exchange slang, “a psychological threshold has been crossed.” Because the circulation of any other legal jazz albums - be it by our musicians, or even by Western Grammy-winning stars - is usually an order of magnitude (that is, exactly an order of magnitude - ten times) less.
But the dog is with them, with the numbers. From an artistic point of view, this album is, generally speaking, unreal. Music from Soviet-era cartoons and the film “Guest from the Future,” played with real elastic swing by great people. The lineup of Butman's collaborators reads like a Who's Who in Jazz book: Chick Corea, Randy Brecker, John Patitucci, Jack DeJohnette. I deliberately do not list the instruments these gentlemen play. Firstly, everyone knows this, and secondly, if it’s not known, then it’s time to find out, and Butman’s album is a good reason. The only musician who may not be very well known in our country is vibraphonist Stefon Harris. Harris is a man of the 90s, a representative of the so-called post-bop, already a very famous party virtuoso. Butman wanted to call Gary Burton, but the maestro could not and advised his student Stiffon Harris. In general, an amazing composition - both ours and not ours, both old and young...
“Pinocchio” and the melodies of “The Bremen Town Musicians”, “The Bear’s Lullaby” from “Umka” and other motifs well known to all, probably, generations of Russians - in “disguised” form it is no worse. Just cool acoustic jazz, with feeling and mood. It’s funny to listen to soloists for whom these are not melodies familiar from childhood, but rather Russian composed music. Actually, we can say that they play it inventively, with soul, but without any reflection.
One of those who was well acquainted with the material on offer was Randy Brecker. Randy Brekker performed “Beautiful Far Away” with Butman at Moscow concerts, and, in my opinion, this is the only track that didn’t work out very well: it was too drawn out and too sad. In the film, as all people of my generation remember, the theme has two versions: lyrical with vocals and cheerful instrumental. Vesely accompanies, for example, Alisa Selezneva, who is running away from pirates and jumping over a fence. Listening to Brekker's solo, Alisa and the schoolchildren from Ostozhenka would never have believed that this very “far away” could be beautiful... But it is so, minor quibbles, invented in the absence of major quibbles.
I have heard the opinion that Butman is speculating on our heritage. This is strange (not to say offensive). When John Coltrane recorded My Favorite Things, a tune from the musical "The Sound of Music", in an oriental key, no one said that he was speculating on the most American art - the musical. Although, maybe someone said exactly that. History has forgotten their names, but somehow remembers the name of John Coltrane.