Renee Rosnes's "Galapagos Suite"
Kim Kleinman, Contributing Writer
In addition to jazz, literature was part of the precocious teenaged and precociously beer fueled conversations Fritz and I had with other friends. Lest you think we were, besides the beer, little saints, don’t worry, there was predictable sophomoric humor and the requisite angst of adolescence. We lived vicariously through the books we read and the words great writers spun for us. I was interested in novels, but Fritz also had an ear for poetry—and not just the great lyrics that went with the anthems of the late 1960s-early 1970s.
He appropriately feels the loss of the great poet farmer Wendell Berry who died this week and so I was not surprised to receive this text:
“…the news of Wendell Berry’s passing hits me hard. He was a significant influence on my thinking from college on, beginning with The Unsettling of America, which came out the year I graduated.
“My daughter, with whom I shared thoughts on this, suggested I dedicate this weekend’s shows to him. I’m going to do that.
“What ecology-themed jazz records exist?”
Of course, I kibitzed and am proud to have had my suggestion of “Skylark” as Saturday’s Song of the Week accepted and Renee Rosnes’s Written in the Rocks considered as a finalist for Friday’s featured album. Friday we’ll hear Maria Schneider’s wonderfully apt “Data Lords: The Natural World” in the 10 p.m. hour. But Rosnes is on tap for Saturday, so we get to hear them both.
The overwhelming bulk of my suggested album is given over to the seven tunes of her “Galapagos Suite” which are inspired by her interest in natural history, Charles Darwin, and their point of intersection, the Galápagos Islands. Her tunes include “The KT Boundary” (for the point in the fossil record 66 million years ago when the asteroid hit that killed most dinosaurs, but not birds!) and “Cambrian Explosion” (for the rapid evolution of life forms 538 million years ago. See Stephen Jay Gould’s “Wonderful Life” for a lucid popular discussion.).
I’m a historian of biology, so I share Rosnes’s fascination and admire her effort to capture in our highly evolved art form what Darwin himself knew, that “there is grandeur in this view of life.”
For this voyage she has a particularly sensitive crew of improvisers. There’s Steve Wilson on reeds—flute and soprano sax as much as his lyric alto saxophone. Always a fluid melodicist, he brings those skills to this broader palette of horns to help tell Rosnes’s story. Steve Nelson’s vibraphone work has a crisp clarity and openness that conveys the distances of evolutionary time and space. Bill Stewart’s sharp cymbal work echoes the decay in Nelson’s mallet work while he gently pushes the rhythm of solos and whole tunes in multiple directions. The album is called Written on the Rocks and it rests on the rock that is Peter Washington’s bass, indispensable and essential, quietly astounding in how he too, like Stewart, moves the music.
Rosnes is, like her bandmates, an eloquent voice on her instrument. But, as her work in Artemis shows, she is a gifted arranger and particularly adept as a leader where she is generous with a conception that draws out her bandmates’ contributions in the service of the music. Here that conception is to tell in seven episodes the evocative story how life has unfolded. There is drama but it is in the accumulation of countless small details that Rosnes and her band reveal this story.