The Vandermark 5 - AlchemiaRecorded over five days, from March 15th – 19th 2004 in the club of the same name in Cracow, Poland, Alchemia documents the entirety of the Vandermark 5's residency in that fair city, and provides much more than a snapshot of one of the hardest working groups in contemporary jazz at the height of its powers.
In addition to 21 Vandermark originals, including three new pieces, "Camera", "That Was Now" and "Pieces Of The Past", the programme featured no fewer than 10 Rahsaan Roland Kirk compositions, two pieces by Sonny Rollins ("The Bridge" and Part Two of "The Freedom Suite") and works by Don Cherry ("There Is The Bomb"), Archie Shepp ("Wherever June Bugs Go") and, to celebrate his 75th birthday, Cecil Taylor ("Conquistador, Part 2"). As well as Ken Vandermark (reeds), the band includes Dave Rempis (saxophones), Jeb Bishop (trombone), Kent Kessler (bass) and Tim Daisy (drums), in other words the V5 line-up as it has been since 2001 (Bishop has since left the group, apparently to be replaced by Fred Lonberg-Holm on cello).
In a recent review for PT, Stephen Griffith, a KV fan if ever there was one, wondered "whether the world really needs a 12-disc Vandermark 5 live set.." Were that to be rephrased as: "Is there a market for a 12-disc Vandermark 5 live set?" the answer would be a resounding yes, since producer Marek Winiarski recently confirmed he'd already shifted over 250 boxes in the States alone – out of an edition of 1000, which is no mean undertaking for a small, fledgling label. If one counts these 12 discs as just one element of the V5 discography and includes compilations, the group has released 14 albums over the past nine years, making it one of the best-documented outfits in jazz today. Following the development of the V5 on disc from 1997's "Single Piece Flow" to last year's "Elements of Style" is a fascinating exercise, and, if album sales and critical acclaim are anything to go by, one that many jazz fans (Mr Griffith included) have undertaken with great relish. As such, Alchemia is something that any self-respecting Vandermark fan can't really afford to be without, even if the idea of shelling out something in the region of $100 ($90 I believe if you order it direct from Not Two's Website at nottwo.com) might not appeal at first.
OK, OK, so much for the Not Two promo publicity spin. Stephen Griffith's musing raises another important question: could this be the beginning of a trend? It's not inconceivable that similar small labels could follow suit and release for public consumption equally huge box sets documenting literally hundreds of concerts, especially if they adopt the cheaper CDR format. These days (to quote Morrissey, stop me if you've heard this one before) anyone with an Mbox or portable DAT recorder and a laptop with some editing and mastering software can print and release a superb quality live recording with attractive packaging and liners to boot for next to nothing. A casual glance at the hundreds of discs reviewed at this site over the past few years will reveal many of them to be just that (though not all are CDRs, of course). But allow me if you will to quote from Ned Rothenberg's interview with Sasha Burov: "I have thousands of tapes of gigs, good gigs, that I don't need to release. I have a very different attitude towards making CDs from some of my friends, people like Evan [Parker], or Elliott [Sharp]. Their attitude is albums come out, people know them for a little while, and then it's over. Like they were magazines. Not like each one is perfect, it's just so people know what you're doing. Nowadays everything can be recorded in so much higher quality – this isn't like Charlie Parker recorded by Dean Benedetti in the bathroom – and everybody has a digital tape recorder. We're drowning in material, and drowning in musicians, and everything is being packaged, repackaged. How many times are you going to put out Kind of Blue?"
Is the "record-as-document" idea the way to go? It seems fair to assume that if today's technology had been around in the 1950s and 1960s we'd now have literally thousands of hours more Miles, Monk, Coltrane, Dolphy (the list goes on..) to listen to, which is great if you're a diehard fan, but even the most assiduous collector still only has 24 hours in a day. I was asked why so few of the records I selected for my totally self-indulgent Top 40 a couple of years ago date from the past five years, and the simple answer to that is that I haven't had the time – and, if things carry on the way they are now, probably never will have – to listen to new albums more than a handful of times before the next new disc gets popped into the machine. I've had great fun listening to Alchemia, and can proudly report I've given each of the 12 discs my undivided attention at least three times – but is that really enough?
The advantage of a huge set like this is that one can at least approach it in different ways. It's enlightening to chart the progress of the new Vandermark compositions over the five evenings – "Camera" appears no fewer than five times, "That Was Now" four times and "Pieces Of The Past" twice – listen to how the band gradually warm to the material, gaining assurance with each successive performance. Adopting another tack, you could extract a whole album or double album of V5 covers, those famous "free jazz classics", one of which could be entirely given over to the Rahsaan Roland Kirk material (for those who didn't net the "Free Kings" bonus CD with the first 1500 copies of "Elements of Style"). And we haven't even mentioned the last two discs of the set, which document a couple of lively jam sessions held by the V5 with locals Marcin and Bartlomiej Oles sitting in. Very few people will have the time to play the whole set back to back, but if you do you'll appreciate the difference between the first and last days, and how the group responds to ever more enthusiastic crowds as the week progresses.
There's much to recommend Alchemia: the recordings are uniformly excellent (though had I been mixing them I might have been tempted to add just a smidgeon of reverb..), the liner notes, apart from a few typos, informative (well, the Vandermark interview at least – 'fraid my Polish isn't up to tackling Maciej Karlowski's essay), and the music, needless to say, superbly played. I am, however, reminded of a remark made by Vandermark's former Flying Luttenbachers boss Weasel Walter on a "Bagatellen" thread discussing this very box ("bless his funny little Midwestern work ethic.."): Alchemia is, like it or not, another example of contemporary culture's information overload, perfect perhaps for people who pay to have 200 channels of Cable TV and only ever watch two of them, or who download zillions of megabytes of music and video only to have them languish unheard and unwatched in hard drives. I sincerely hope that anyone who invests in this document can find more time to spend with it than I have (so far): but I do have a sneaking suspicion that it won't be long before another equally enormous box set comes along to claim everybody's attention.
Dan Warburton (Paris Atlantic Magazine)
Data wstawienia: 2005-07-03
