Way Out East

The music on “Way Out East”, performed by the Gravitas Quartet of Wayne Horvitz, piano, Peggy Lee, cello, Ron Miles, cornet, and Sara Schoenbeck, bassoon, can be considered jazz-inspired chamber music or contemporary classical-inspired jazz. If you’re coming from a classical music background, you’ll notice the Gravitas Quartet’s chamber music character, especially in their use of the orchestral instruments cello and bassoon. If your ear is attuned to jazz improvisation, the trumpet and piano solos will draw you more in that direction. As a listener with one foot in the classical camp and the other in jazz, I find myself hearing the music from both perspectives at once.  (...)
Cellist Peggy Lee, a composer and bandleader of small and large ensembles in Vancouver, BC, paints with a wide palette of tones. Her improvisations draw on a background of contemporary art music, and like Ron Miles, she has a deep affection for the Western American influences that flow through Wayne Horvitz’ writing. Effortlessly switching between bowed and plucked lines, Lee covers the supportive role of a bassist when she is not soloing. Bassoonist Sara Schoenbeck has been performing with Horvitz on many projects over the years. Schoenbeck’s supple, plaintive lines in the duet piece “Our Brief Duet” maps the ground the two musicians would explore years later, in the superb recording for Songlines, “Cell Walk”.
In the longest piece on the album, “Berlin 1914”, Horvitz’ skillful writing and arrangement, Sara Schoenbeck’s seamless blend of her bassoon with Peggy Lee’s cello, Lee’s dark-hued solo bowed passages, and Ron Miles’ emotion-laden closing solo encapsulate the mutuality and individuality of these four gifted musicians.

Keyboardist and composer Wayne Horvitz's new improvising chamber group, the Gravitas Quartet, makes its Songlines debut with Way Out East.

In a set that's reminiscent of his previous rhythm section-less unit, the Four plus One Ensemble, Horvitz and company premiere an accessible set of evocative chamber jazz that's both austere and experimental, unified by Horvitz's lyrical writing.

Horvitz once dabbled in an array of old school electronic effects and vintage keyboards, from Hammond organ to DX-7, but he limits himself here to piano with only the occasional foray on synthesizer. This stripped-down ensemble sound highlights his gradual drift towards a more melodic and populist sensibility in ways his more amplified projects like Pigpen or Zony Mash obscured it with their focus on groove and density.In the confines of this spare acoustic setting, his delicate and nuanced piano playing is given center stage. Only on the assertive "Reveille" does he really plug in, summoning watery, gamelan-influenced arpeggios and crashing, metallic synth shards over the clarion calls and staccato interjections of the ensemble.

Bassoonist Sara Schoenbeck and cellist Peggy Lee contribute lithe lines and fragile phrases alongside occasionally terse passages. Schoenbeck's playing veers from tranquil rumination to agitated, multiphonic fanfare. Lee fluctuates between cinematic lushness and sinuous audacity. Alternating between refined support roles and featured solo interludes, these two players span the entire history of their respective instruments.

As a regular sideman of guitarist Bill Frisell, trumpeter Ron Miles' familiar brassy refrains are instantly identifiable. The singular stylist's inventive contributions to this record are among its many riches, including emotionally vulnerable and adventurously exploratory solos on the beautifully haunting title track and the epic album centerpiece, "Berlin 1914." Like Frisell's rhythm section-less album Quartet, this album traffics in dusky pastoral Americana, albeit with a more wintry sheen.

The Gravitas Quartet occupies a conceptual no man's land somewhere between nostalgia and the future, where pensive, minor-key piano excursions are joined by stately cello, regal bassoon, ghostly trumpet and burbling electronics. Way Out East perfectly assimilates Horvitz's bittersweet melodies and sci-fi futurism into a synchronous sound world all his own.

[...]In a chamber jazz setting like on Way Out East, he’s given plenty of room to express those sentiments.  With Lee’s cello and Schoenbeck’s bassoon adding lovely moodiness to Horvitz’s compositional template, the quartet glides through a series of thoughtful expressions and delicate sentiments.

Some tracks, like “Ladies and Gentleman” and “A remembrance…” bubble with avant-garde bassoon gurgles, pensive trumpet sighs, sharp cello lines, and twittering piano notes.  Others, like “Way Out East” and “Berlin 1914” have a slow meander as serene as a walk in the park and as a warm as a fireplace on a winter afternoon.  But most, like album-opener “LB” include both of those approaches, and effect an intoxicating contrast of beauty and scar, of fresh pure snow and  sharp glistening ice.