Barre Phillips

Barre Phillips – Mountainscapes (1976/2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 37:48 minutes | 752 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM

Barre Phillips’s Mountainscapes brings together strongly contrasting elements, the furious high-energy playing of the Surman/Phillips/Martin trio juxtaposed with spacious impressionistic pieces originally created for Carolyn Carlson’s ballet dancers. The integration of acoustic instruments and electronics (with three of the musicians playing synthesizers) is beautifully balanced in the production. John Abercrombie dropped by the studio to jam on the last track, raising the energy level still higher. Recorded in March 1976, Mountainscapes was described by Melody Maker as “vast, awesome and glorious” and “a starting point for the shape of jazz to come.”

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Barre Phillips – Face à Face (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 33:50 minutes | 520 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM

The grandmaster of improvised bass and the electronics-playing son of Hungary’s great contemporary composer share a deep commitment to making new music in the moment, informed by their different lives and experiences.

With his subtle use of synthesizers and digital percussion, György Kurtág Jr shapes shifting spaces for Barre Phillips to negotiate, an acoustic labyrinth illuminated in detail in Manfred Eicher’s crystalline mix.

Recorded at Studios La Buissonne in the South of France, Face à Face is a consistently fascinating album.
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Barre Phillips – Music By… (1981/2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 41:19 minutes | 879 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM

Long before Twitter was a microblogging phenomenon, it was the name of the first cut on this out-of-print gem from Barre Phillips. Thankfully, there is nothing micro about it. Driven by train-like syncopation from drums and bass clarinet, this attention-grabbing burst of virtuosity introduces us to the bubbling acrobatics of daughter Claudia Phillips, a vocalist whose career as chanteuse found a niche in France in the 80s. Her sometimes-manic instincts are swept down the stream of Aina Kemanis, the voice of Journal Violone II. Together they form a magic triangle with John Surman’s own sinewy lines. With such exuberance and glottal depth as Claudia displays here, one can hardly keep one’s ears focused on anything but her brilliance. Her siren-like spindles prove to be a guiding force in the more freely improvised “Angleswaite” and, with Kemanis, trace fluid arcs in “Elvid Kursong” and drop like spores in “Pirthrite.” The latter is a bizarrely martial excursion that is at once march and requiem, made all the more so through the liquid alto of Herve Bourde. These facets contract into a single plane in “Longview.” Here, Claudia comes to life in a bubbling stutter, soon overtaken by Bourde’s tenor, left of center. “Entai” and “Double Treble” sound like an ice-skating bass and clarinet struggling for balance over a warping record, compressing the album into more rudimentary ciphers.
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Barre Phillips – For All It Is (1973/2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 40:18 minutes | 825 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM

This unusual meeting of minds pits bassists Barre Phillips (who also penned the proceedings), Palle Danielsson, Barry Guy, and J. F. Jenny-Clarke with percussionist Stu Martin in a tactile playoff with mixed results. It’s remarkable to think that four behemoths could sound so open, and so one shouldn’t be surprised to encounter a few tangles in “just 8.” For the most part, however, this introductory track maintains the clarity of separation that characterizes the album’s latter remainder. Either way, it’s a jaunty ride into an unprecedented sound-world. Martin anchors “whoop” with his engaging loops amid a menagerie of pizzicato signifiers. Along with “few too” it evokes a jack-in-the-box weeping for want of exposure. From that unrequited lament comes a bright promise, skewed by a hope that the world turns not even for itself. It’s a melancholic hope, to be sure, but hope nonetheless. Martin’s absence here makes the track an early standout: just the rocking of bows pressed into myriad shapes by insistent fingertips. “la palette” and “y en a” form another pair, taking a decidedly architectural approach to this most warped string quartet. Together, they form a cycle of destruction, pain, and healing.
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Barre Phillips – End To End (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 43:50 minutes | 668 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © ECM

Barre Phillips was the first musician to record an album of solo double bass, back in 1968, and he has always been an absolute master of the solo idiom.

In March 2017, Barre recorded what he says will be his last solo album, the final chapter of his “Journal Violone”: it is a beautiful and moving musical statement. All the qualities we associate with Barre’s playing are here in abundance ? questing adventurousness, melodic invention, textural richness, developmental logic, and deep soulfulness.

Over the years ECM has documented Barre Phillips in many musical contexts, including collaborations with John Surman, Terje Rypdal, Paul Bley, Evan Parker, Joe and Mat Maneri, Robin Williamson and more. But his first appearance on the label was the landmark recording ‘Music from Two Basses’ with Dave Holland in 1971. In 1983 there was the acclaimed solo recording ‘Call Me When You Get There’, including music for Robert Frank’s films.

Before Barre’s ‘Journal Violone’ there were no albums of solo bass improvising; now, they number in the hundreds. So End to End is also a timely reminder of how influential this endeavour has been, at an underground level.

End to End was recorded at Studios-La-Buissonne in the south of France, and produced by Manfred Eicher.
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Barre Phillips – Call Me When You Get There (1984/2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 40:11 minutes | 346 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM

I’ve said it before, but Barre Phillips is one of ECM’s brightest stars, though one would never know it by the solemnity of his genius. Glowing with a pale fire that can be drawn only in cosmic pigments, his sound-world on Call me when you get there throbs as if Michael Galasso and David Darling had fused into a collaborative quasar. The opening “Grants Pass” would seem to have been written in the margins of Steve Reich’s Different Trains, and works its gentle magic under the toenails of our foothold. Played on resonant multi-tracked instruments, this track stands as one of Phillips’s finest. Each shade of harmonic interplay forms a new glyph before our ears and eyes, proving once again just how cavernous the bass really is. This wistful trail leads us to the “Craggy Slope,” an uneven climb into heavily eroded terrain, occasionally punctuated by the fluid twang of the waters that wrought it into existence, and ending surprisingly in an almost baroque denouement. And on that edge we linger, dancing the slow-motion jig of “Amos Crowns Barn” before following the anonymous stirrings beyond “Pittmans Rock.” But when we jump, we land on “Highway 37,” caught in a stampede of tumbleweeds. Here, the bass sounds more like a ball of twine wound around a rubbery core, expanding into some looming paternal guitar, hunchbacked from old age. “Winslow Cavern” bubbles like the molten rock of a volcano before taking shape in the aptly titled “River Bend,” which plucks and scrapes its way through a serpentine journey. And as we take shelter in “The Cavern,” we discover that the only promise of life that awaits us outside its darkness is “Brewstertown 2,” a nightmarish backcountry town with an impending tornado etched into its background.
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