Kelly Rossum - Line Liner Notes

The concept of line is often mistakenly correlated with the idea of linear thinking, a direction forward along a path connecting points and advancing to certain resolution, in the most direct way possible, a slice of mathematics. Line is of course a lot more than that. The late-‘40s work of Jackson Pollock, consisting of layered drizzles of house paint on unprimed canvas in a rhythmic web of overlapping arcs and sidesteps, is in fact an all-over, non-directional field of lines. Lines in this case take the form of color, and of physicality. Frank Stella’s geometric paintings of the early ‘60s present serial bands of color in the unwavering path of the artist’s brush; the spaces between appear as pinstripes, but in fact these lines are an absence demarcating the path of the artist’s action. In narrow space, they define. So this concept of line denotes presence and absence, space and gravity, the fragmentary and the whole even as a path is carved out.

The music of trumpeter Kelly Rossum takes these contradictions of line fully into account. Rossum has been a resident of Minneapolis since 1996, and Line is his third recording as a leader (in addition to his direction of the Exit 50 big band). Here, he has brought together a cooperative quintet made up of members of the Twin Cities’ burgeoning improvised music community, who delicately hedge the lines between inside and outside playing. Chris Thomson (tenor and soprano saxophones) and vanguard siblings Chris Bates and J.T. Bates (bass and percussion, respectively), along with Houston-based tenorman Woody Witt, join Rossum on twelve compositions (eleven by the leader and one, “Soft,” by Thomson) that fill out one’s craw and map out its poles. All of Line’s pieces were recorded live in real-time, as one would experience it, upwards, outwards, forward and backwards.

Central to the focus of this record are six brief fragments, each entitled “Line” and each featuring a different member of the ensemble. “Line” can be interpreted as number of ways; in the first, as a jaunty postbop number where Rossum’s terse chromatics and meaty, rounded phrases collide with jagged shards (a la Don Cherry) over a rhythmic push-pull between the two Bateses. A sparser second variant mostly features Witt’s gritty, gutbucket flurries (he has that Texas tenor sound, as reedman Prince Lasha would put it, “coming up through the ground and out through the bell”), its theme even more tersely stated here than in the first. On the eighth track, “Line” is given a complete take, Rossum worrying a few nervous fragments at the outset and then building upon them with smeared bravura (a Miles-ian hallmark of construction), as well as containing Witt’s most colorful and fully-realized solo of the date, filing the points with enough action to forget about a road map.

Alternates of thick, direct strokes and glassy sketches make up “La Vita a Roma,” a massive call-and-recall minor theme propelled via tenors and bass, Bates’s percussion mapping areas around the horns with both physicality and openness. J.T. Bates is one of those exceedingly rare percussionists who has come to the realization that less is more, and pares himself down with presence – he can be felt just as much when he’s barely there as when he’s building massive, hurtling architecture. Though he admits a Tony Oxley influence, a clean and organic handle on repeated drum-and-bass rim shots underlies “Sitting on the dock looking at stars,” an oddly-titled piece considering its initial image, as Rossum, Witt, and Thomson (on soprano) draw a measured dissonance with through-composed swaths in a sonic drawing of constellations.

“Sand Dunes” is a dangerously forthright minefield girded by surging vamps, its solos and spiraling collective improvisations dancing and colliding with the rhythm section, recalling the weighty large-ensemble writing that pervades “La Vita a Roma.” Witt digs his heels in deep as Rossum’s vocal inflections and tense multiphonics jab at his sides until the leader is given an empty canvas on which to draw a burnished lineage from bill Dixon to Lee Morgan to Toshinori Kondo, fractured strokes against a steamrolling path – the commingling of two very different lines. Rossum incorporates the sardonic “wahs” of Lester Bowie throughout “Seduction,” the most on-the-surface conventional piece on the record, but with a healthy dose of grit and irony underneath its slinky tango. Thomson’s “Soft” is the reedman’s single composition on the session, though he makes his presence felt very strongly throughout with a keening-yet-cool lyricism, somewhere between John Tchicai and Warne Marsh (see “Line III”). Surely, Thomson’s off-centre introspection comes through here, with a delicate melody that is gradually wrung for all its worth by prodding tenor and trumpet and the rhythm section’s continual ebb and advance.

“Draw a straight line and follow it” (in the words of La Monte Young) might be the dictum for “Places of the Mindful,” where concentrated and slowly-drawn bass harmonics and percussive rustle drone and carve themselves out, trumpet, soprano and tenor adding their breathy, guttural contributions to one of the most taut pieces of the date. For being as free and possibly “unfettered” as it is, “Places of the Mindful” is also extraordinarily delineated – at once allover and narrow, exuding the hyper-awareness of place that mindfulness entails.

Line is not a mere directional indicator or divisional tactic; it is a marker of points between which many things can occur, points appearing repeatedly with open actions and experiences between them. Kelly Rossum, Chris Thomson, Woody Witt, Chris Bates and J.T. Bates have gone far beyond the canvas in applying Line.



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