Search - Susie Ibarra / Ikue Mori :: Susie Ibarra Trio: Songbird Suite

Modern, beautiful chamber-jazz.

Lord Chimp | Monkey World | 03/22/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"To the music lover, there is a strange delight in buying things with little or no information beforehand and discovering something great. I bought _Songbird Suite_ solely because it had an interesting instrumental lineup and it was on Tzadik. The cover art was also pretty neat (obviously I'm easily won over).My intuition has proved reliable. _Songbird Suite_ is nothing less than stunning, a very modern 'jazz' album that is downright beautiful in addition to being musically enlightened and innovative. While you wouldn't want to call this "lite," it is intimate and accessible. Susie Ibarra has become a big name in the New York avant/free-jazz scene, although this is mostly composed and drumming fireworks are mostly left out of play. Ibarra's trio is an unusual format, featuring herself on drums and an array of other percussions, Jennifer Choi on violin, and Craig Taborn on piano and electronics. Ikue Mori on laptop contributes to a few tracks as well.As far as labels go, this is in many ways closer to modern chamber music than jazz qua jazz. The music is very composed and the pieces at most establish contexts for improvisation rather than serving as runways for those free inclinations to take off. "Flower After Flower" is good example, which goes from a jazz-Messiaenic pastoral soundscape to an aggressively angular movement with sharp violin elisions and a starry shower of plinking sounds from Ikue Mori's electronics. "Songbird Suite" is a slow, mysterious flow of impressionism, using a mix of samples and acoustic instruments to create a surreal environment until its aggressive, rhythmically vigorous apogee. The first and last songs are the most jazzy sounding on the album, "Azul" and "Passing Clouds". The first has an infectious rhythm that is maintained all throughout, even in the torrid swirls of piano & violin dissonance that will take your breath away. The other is a beautiful piece with another addictive rhythm and memorable theme. Choi's violin has a classical, soaring vibrato quality and the piano playing is joyfully dissonant yet 'cool.'The three "Trance" pieces seem affiliated by their hynotic, tonally colorful moods if nothing else. "Trance no.1" is a colorful piece for percussion alone with subtle dynamics of timbre and rhythm. "Trance no.2" is a quiet percussion duet between Ibarra (acoustic) and Mori (electronic) that creates a really unique, otherworldly sound. "Trance no.3" is the best of the three, where a droning violin is surrounded with kinetic, atonal piano soloing, speckled with rapid-fire electronic bells n' whistles and pushed forward by heavy, militant percussive pulse.This gets highest accolades."

Unusual Instrumentation Yields Spectuacular Results

Jan P. Dennis | Monument, CO USA | 03/02/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"With this, I believe her third solo album, drummer and percussionist Susie Ibarra has produced a veritable jazz masterpiece.An unlikely combination--drums/percussion, violin, and piano--unites here to produce some of the most exciting and brilliant music available on the jazz scene today.Things definitely start out on the right foot with the spectacular Azul, a stunningly virtuostic piece based on a deceptively simple piano vamp and incorporating some highly charged violin playing. The tune bubbles along with a joi de vivre seldom encountered in such earthy yet sophisticated musical endeavors. The title cut, Songbird Suite, manages to evoke birdlike sensibilities without directly relying on avian materials. There's a deep mystery underlying these proceedings, a kind of musical essentiality that draws out pure emotional responses from the listener.Even on the purely pecussive pieces, namely, Trance #s 1, 2, and 3, Ms. Ibarra always manages to keep things interesting. Special note needs to be made of Passing Clouds, the last cut and one of the most satisfying jazz recordings ever made. Words cannot describe its sheer beauty. As with Azul, it's made up of relatively simple materials that manage to get transmuted into rarified jazz transcendence.Really, no matter who you are you will not want to miss out on this disc, sure to be one of the top releases of 2002."