Tension and release

While writing about Nik Bärtsch recently, I mentioned his practice of giving all his compositions the same title — each is called “Modul”, with a distinguishing number attached, thereby establishing no preconceptions in the listener’s mind. In that respect Darcy James Argue, the Canadian-born, New York-based composer, could hardly be more different. In the past, the pieces on his albums with his big band, Secret Society, have variously directed our attention towards an imagined dystopian Brooklyn, a philosopher of ancient Greece and a distinctly realistic dystopian deep state. His latest, a 2CD set called Dynamic Maximum Tension, consists of pieces inspired by specific individuals, ideas and events, bearing dedications clearly signposting their themes, and reflecting those origins in their sound and structures.

This can be almost literal in something like “Codebreaker”, dedicated to Alan Turing, in which the staccato brass phrases evoke the chatter of an Enigma decoding machine, opening up for a lovely soft-toned alto saxophone solo by Rob Wilkerson. Or it can be implied, as in “Tensile Curves”, a multipart work dedicated to Duke Ellington, with seven individual soloists and lasting 35 minutes, which in past times would have been a respectable length for a single long-playing album. It was inspired by the unorthodox extended structure of Ellington’s “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue”; there is nothing particularly Ducal about the sound, but he would surely have appreciated the grace with which the piece, having opened with shrill brass fanfares against Jon Wiken’s galloping drums, creates a kaleidoscope of moods before it winds down through a passage featuring Sara Caswell’s hardanger d’amore (a modern Norwegian fiddle with 10 strings, five of them sympathetic), Adam Birnbaum’s sombre piano chords and a Mingus-like passage of collective polyphony, with Sam Sadigursky’s clarinet closing a darkly glowing coda.

More unexpected is “Last Waltz for Levon”, a tribute to Levon Helm — the only member of the Band, of course, who was not Canadian — which summons as much backwoods spirit as a 20-piece band can, with the trombonist Mike Fahle as its featured soloist (over mellow writing for clarinets) and incorporating sidelong quotes from “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”, introduced by Mike Clohesy’s bass guitar. Cécile McLorin Salvant pops up to do a turn on “Mae West: Advice”, singing a jolly lyric based on a sort-of-Dadist poem by Paisley Reckdal: Ban tobacco: do bacon abed, be delectable, collectible, a decent debacle. Décolleté don’t conceal; acne, do...

The title of the opening track, “Dymaxion”, is the short form of Dynamic Maximum Tension, the principle on which the engineer-architect Buckminster Fuller, the dedicatee, created his structures, including the geodesic dome before which Argue is standing in the picture above. You can sense in the writing the measured use of tension to ensure that an unreinforced structure retains its shape, while Carl Maraghi’s gorgeous baritone saxophone improvisation reminds us that Fuller worked with people and nature as well as geometric formulae in mind. At times such as this, Argue’s confident manipulation of his resources makes me think that finally someone has taken the theory behind Bob Graettinger’s controversial modernistic Third Steam pieces of the early ’50s (such as City of Glass, written for Stan Kenton) and turned it into actual music.

But out of this densely packed sequence of 11 compositions and 110 minutes of music, “Your Enemies Are Asleep” is the piece that will stay with me longest. Here Argue metabolises his debt to Gil Evans quite brilliantly in the opening passage: a slow, well-spaced string bass figure to set an ominous mood, spare woodwind voicings, a half-concealed bass clarinet beneath lightly sketched brass. Then the bass figure is augmented, the brass becomes a choir, and Ingrid Jensen — another Canadian — enters for a solo which, for the subtlety of its entry and the enthralling development of its trajectory over an increasingly dense and emphatic orchestration, reminds me of nothing less than the way Evans turned “The Barbara Song” into a concerto for Wayne Shorter 60 years ago. Jensen’s improvisation is a masterpiece in its own right: flaring, squeezing, dodging, soaring and fluttering around the contours of the writing. The closing passage is another example of Argue’s gift for ending a piece on a quietly dramatic note of reflection.

Oh yes, and Martin Johnson’s sleeve essay informs us that “Your Enemies Are Asleep” is dedicated to Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion, its title taken from a 19th century Ukrainian poem set to music by Vasyl Ovchynnikov, a bandura player who disappeared during the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. The notes beyond the notes add another layer of resonance to this outstanding album of completely modern music whose precision — whether of conception or execution — never excludes the human component.

* Dynamic Maximum Tension by Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society is released on the Nonesuch label: https://darcyjamesargue.bandcamp.com/album/dynamic-maximum-tension. The photograph of Argue is by Lindsay Beyerstein.