See
full Jazz Times Review
AllAboutJazz.com
(4-star album
review of "Transparent Horizons")
The intro emerges
as heavy bowed bass—buzzy, ominous, sustained. Suddenly there's a thunderstorm,
rock drumming, electric guitar, and tenor saxophone. A synthesizer (seldom-used
here) wails, but less than the guitar and saxophone, then makes bell sounds
and more while the bass goes thudding and bells like a stag before things
devolve into the slower, quieter space of the original mood.
Thus develops Stich
Wynston's "Outward Bound." "I Think This Party's Over" seems a faintly
sardonic title for the second track's doomy storm noises, bleating tenor,
and integration of textures in which it's hard to say who does what as
the group surges into movement, booming backgrounds to the tenor, burgeoning
guitar, and bass together in the underlying storm. Is this "party" the
whole modern world?
This music favors
intros. Jim Vivian's massive, buzz-edged, echoey bass, punctuated by Wynston,
opens Young's "Existential Departures." Drums supply rhythmic patterns
below a three-man bass cembalom imitation. A quasi-oriental theme, thundercrack
drumming, bowed bass, and amplified guitar and gentler tenor slow into
meditative interplay. The bass swells above, gigantic. Undramatic this
ain't. The three melody instruments harmonize and play ominous lines, cut
and tempered at times by crack-of-doom drumming. Superficially more playful,
with a darting guitar/saxophone/bass prelude, "Surf Aces" becomes a tour-de-force
upper register tenor saxophone feature. Passionate stuff.
"Spiral Nebula,"
with pedalled, echoing solo piano, is a firmly struck etude, three-plus
minutes of European concert music. "Evanescence" opens with the three front
line instruments together, intense yet again. Behind the subsequent guitar/bass
duet, Wynston helps the bassist sound doomier before the tenor/bass duet
lightens things a little. Wynston belabours his drum kit, like the voice
of fate. Bass and drums stalk the closing guitar/tenor unison.
It's all exciting...
darkness with spirit. "Caboose" is a complex work for solo percussion,
preceded by a band intro. What is Wynston hitting, scratching, and playing
drumrolls on (or maybe inside)? Solo percussion with tone colour? Yes!
The ensemble ending is like the twanging of a vast string.
Guitar, bass and
drums open "Automatic Entry," with a bow applied to the strings of the
upright bass. And when guitarist Jeff Young decamps, the bass goes way,
way down, rising undefeated to support a tenor excursion, with Wynston
the tragedian's drums. The guitarist picks up on the tenorist's feeling
for beauty in desolation, creating organ chords unaccompanied before the
bass comes back from below into a mighty conclusion.
"Intergalactic Spheres"
features a minotaur yowling, a sustained pedal note, and a chiming music
box figure repeated and re-repeated as the saxophone rises into high weaving.
"New One" hints at Bach before turning into a religious-sounding ballad
a shade like Lovano/Motian/Frisell, but supercharged with gargantuan bass.
The guitarist's more hymnal section suggests mainstream jazz credentials
before a passage in tenor unison, in fugal business with bowed bass.
[...] The CD insert's
yellow spine means that this set belongs in TCB's "contemporary series."
It's music for black days, sustaining undefeated spirit: there's no discouragement
here.
Robert Calder
AllAboutJazz.com
Dec 2005 |
AllAboutJazz.com
(4-star album
review of "Transparent Horizons")
Toronto musician
Stich Wynston takes drumming about as far from its timekeeping role as
it can possibly go on Transparent Horizons, his first CD since his 1999
eponymous debut on Buzz Records. Wynston and his group Modern Surfaces
(saxophonist Mike Murley, guitarist Geoff Young, and bassist Jim Vivian)
maintain almost the same lineup as the previous album—only guest pianist
Paul Bley is missing. Here they dispense with a pianist, with the exception
of "Spiral Nebula, where Stich himself plays a Debussy-esque solo piano
étude, and "Intergalactic Spheres, where the group plays around
a looped piano arpeggio that provides the recording's only rigid time.
Wynston is obviously
influenced by Jack DeJohnette and Paul Motian; he's got DeJohnette's muscularity
and Motian's painterly approach. Like fellow Toronto drummer Barry Romberg—who
produced the CD—he uses rolling fills and explosive accents to adorn musical
space, not to provide metronomic time. Wynston and Young share the compositional
credits (four and six tracks each, respectively), and their pieces are
of a similar intuitive, impressionistic hue. I've sung the praises of Young
many times, and his distinctive, spidery lines have never been more appropriate
than in this ensemble. Vivian (who plays in Young's own trio) contributes
ruminative lines and rich, resonant arco statements, and Murley's tenor
and curved soprano add an otherworldly, keening presence.
Because this is otherworldly,
even cosmic music. It is not, however, a New Age kind of cosmos; it's too
unsettling. Young's long "Automatic Entry may be the sparsest tune here,
with Young's almost spaghetti-western, twanging guitar cagily stating the
theme against Wynston's no-time fills before Vivian (on arco bass) and
Murley (on curved soprano) play meditative, glacial solos; meanwhile, Wynston's
drums and hand percussion fill in space, like a painter putting blue here
and magenta there. The players seem to be toying with Monk's "'Round Midnight
in the theme and solos.
Individual accompanied
solos aren't common here, though; there's really nothing that qualifies
as comping in the traditional sense. Instead, we get the simultaneous four-way
interplay of, say, "Existential Departures, where all the musicians are
in a sense soloing at the same time—a sort of space polyphony. This actually
requires an acute awareness of what the other musicians are doing; this
is a listening band. This peculiar polyphony is also utterly unclaustrophobic:
the fifth member of the group on this album is silence.
The overall impression
is often a contradictory one of past and future intersecting. Wynston plays
a fascinating, visceral solo on kit and what sounds like sheet metal on
"Caboose (although the song's bookended with a tenor/guitar/rattling-popcorn-drums
theme, the solo's in essence the tune) that is both deeply modern and oddly
atavistic—like Yanomamo Indians armed with Blackberries and samplers.
The disc ends with
Young's gorgeous "New One, an absolutely lovely, melodic (and comparatively
conventional) Spanish-tinged number that gently lowers the listener back
to terra firma after sixty minutes in an eerie and occasionally frightening
deep space. It's not a journey for the timid—but it's one very much worth
taking.
Paul Olsen
AllAboutJazz.com
June 2005 |
ZEITGEIST
(album review of "Transparent Horizons")
One time Shuffle
Demon, drummer Stich Wynston has got together with long time cohorts Mike
Murley, Geoff Young and Jim Vivian for a daring and challenging set of
modern jazz.
Avante garde to the
max, this is not a record for the casual passer by, replete as it is with
complex time changes, atonal soloing and possibly illegal rhythm patterns.
Although Stich is
the bandmaster he doesn't let his Jack DeJohnette influenced percussion
get in the way of the other performers. [...] the saxophone work of Mike
Murley is, at times, otherworldy. A description that is highly appropriate
considering the highlights include “Existential Departure”, “Spiral Nebula”
and my particular favourite “Intergalactic Spheres”.
Sometimes moody,
always challenging, sometimes magnificent, this is a superb album of instrumentals
which gives you something new with every listen.
by Zeitgeist
Edinburgh, UK.
June 2005 |
JAZZ
NOW (album
review of "Transparent Horizons")
Modern Surfaces comes
to us with a certain amount of pedigree, as their guitarist is Geoff Young
of Barry Romberg's very notable over - there - somewhere jam band, Random
Access (reviewed by yours truly in the June 2005 Jazz Now and favorably,
I might add).
Recorded and produced
in Ontario (by Romberg), we begin "Outward Bound" with a lengthy bowed
largo intro from Jim Vivian that draws us into a sound world parallel to,
say, later Roscoe Mitchell's, and once Wynston kicks in with no small authority
Young and saxophonist Mike Murley enter as well.
I like the spacing
of the instruments here [...] It's a sort of rotating shattered Y arrangement:
Wynston occupies, amoebalike, the center of the tone field, Vivian bubbles
and cooks beneath him in the mix, and the two melodic instruments splutter
(Murley) and float (Young) around them.
Murley tests his
tenor's capabilities sparingly with scraped pedal points of a kind, while
Young prefers to let bowedlike chords drift across the improvising. Very
strange. In but not in. Out but not out.
There was some sort
of presagement to this on Random Access 3 (see the June issue): one track,
"Serenity Now," (Is Romberg a Seinfeld fan? No, I asked that one before)
had Young radiating clouds of notes from the center of the piece, fitting
willy-nilly through barlike clicks of synthesized marimba.
It was a bit like
we've heard British guitarist Brian Godding do in his band Mirage [...]
or with the Mike Westbrook Orchestra. Again, very strange. To quote Danny
DeVito in Taxi, "But memorable!"
Young's "I Think
This Party's Over" is a strangled Eliot Sharp-like blues that opens and
closes with a distant if approaching gale of industrial noise. Murley and
Wynston flurry at the edges of this massive tube train of sound, Vivan
slipping in-under with slow-picked, dreamy figures, and Wynston's double
downbeat sort-of coalesces the actual tune. But only sort of. It's a nervous
sort of detente that the musicians here have worked out, and the not -
exactly - nailed - down air of the music makes it singular.
Anyone who reads
too many of my reviews (you'll decide how many or few that is) usually
notes that I moan comically how bassists are usually undermiked. Not so
here, and Vivian's dark, Schnittke-like tone does the continuum many good
turns. One such is his atmospheric picking during the slow antibossa section
of "Surf Aces," under Young's neutral-drive Jazz-club phrases and Murley's
relatively peaceful alto. Love that head melody, kind of Monk - meets -
Laurindo - Almeida.
I also go for this
group's sense of time. "Existential Departures" runs over eleven minutes,
and here it's Vivian and Wynston's turn to hover at the edges; Murley and
Young (on acoustic guitar) do long, twinned, serpentine phrases à
la Terje Rypdal's 1980s ECM releases (especially Descendre). Beautifully
odd. Again, in but not in, out but not out. Not clinically so, either,
not like, say, Schoenberg's Verklarte Nacht.
The closing ditty
"New One" also has a tentative air, thanks to Wynston's commenting melodically
as much as anyone else on the wintry central chorale trotted out by the
remainder of the band.
[...] there's
lots more good stuff up ahead, like Young and Murley holding "Evanescence"
together while Wynston and Vivian wig out around them; or Wynston's hail
of dropped baseballs detonating all around and through "Caboose"; or the
piano ostinato that gives one something to hang onto for dear life as Young's
ballooning sustained synclavier notes strain to contain multitudes.
Here it's Vivian,
Murley, and Wynston who overlap, converse, and talk past one another in
a hunt for common ground of the sort you'd see in a Joe McElroy novel.
Missed connections, indeed. But memorable.
It's all really good,
really weird stuff that shows the quartet form isn't dead just yet. Care
must always be taken in the finding or re-exploring of new or familiar
ground, but this CD shows that the ragged space between in and out also
has a few more secrets to cough up.
Ken Egbert
Jazz Now Interactive
Vol 15 No. 5
September 2005 |
"Of course, the Shuffle Demons would be
nothing without the rippling and funkily beautiful groove laid down by
Stich Wynston – who is to the Demons what Zigaboo Modeliste is to The Funky
Meters of New Orleans. Playing deep in the pocket Mr Wynston allows the
soloists go to the moon and back as he – unwavering – is always there to
welcome them back to the house of funk."
Raul Da Gama (see
original article)
That Canadian Magazine
November 2020 |
"You hear that edge in Richard Underhill's
urgent alto solos, in the three-part horn lines that could cut you off
at the knees if you came too close, and in the restless propulsion of Stich
Wynston behind the drums."
John Shand
The Sydney Morning
Herald (see
original article)
July 2020 |
"One can not ignore just how crucial bassists
Downes and Vivian, along with drummer Wynston are to the success of the
music here. Wynston is an especially exciting drummer playing with explosiveness
at times."
Ron Weinstock
In A Blue Mood (see
original article)
February 2020 |
"Stich Wynton's "Fukushima," dedicated
to the Japanese quake victims, is a raucous scream at what would seem to
be a nature indifferent to man and his suffering. It is a heart wrenching
piece. His "Strollin'" makes for a swinging contrast."
Jack Goodstein
Blogcritics.org
(see
original article)
September 2012 |
"Dear Stich,
Thanks for sending along your CD. I really enjoyed it.
Great playing and great writing. I think you've ingeniously woven
Paul Bley's playing into your own ensemble. Great to hear it.
Good luck"
Dave Douglas, world
renowned trumpeter/composer
Fax to Stich's home
June 1999 |
"Dear Stich,
Great and creative music!! My compliments!!"
Dave Liebman, legendary
saxophonist
Fax to Stich's home
July 1999 |
"Dear Stich,
I thoroughly enjoyed this CD. The musicianship is wonderful!"
Keith Tippett, renowned
British Avant-Garde jazz pianist
Fax to Stich's home
May 1999 |
"Dear Stich,
Thanks for your call yesterday. I've now had a chance to listen to
the album and think it sounds excellent!"
John Surman, ECM
recording artist
Fax to Stich's home
July 1999 |
"Toronto drummer
Stich Wynston brings together Canadian avant-garde figurehead Paul Bley's
piano, Geoff Young's guitar and Mike Murley's sax for a 14-tune exploration
of where 21st-century mainstream might end up. The compositions,
all by band members, seek new form and content, often succeeding in enigmatic,
wry, extravagant and imaginative ways. Bley sets the mood with dashes
into stylistic corners, sax and guitar wander in unison with chattering
drum commentary and labyrinthine puzzles are solved by clear expositions
on such tunes as Young's "Kolbo" and "Merrmonator". Murley has never
played so far out and Wynston, responsible for eight works (including "Environments
1",which includes birdsong) is an equal partner in these fascinating excursions.
"Catharsis" is an airy Bley solo meditation, "Hamentosh McFarfel" offers
an essay in stern guitar-drum dissonance, soprano and piano rebellion and
then more horror. Young's "Unaware Of The Sound She Was Making" is
percussive and turbulent, symbolizing this intelligent foray by four inquiring
minds."
Geoff Chapman, jazz
journalist
Toronto Star, Canada
August 1999 |
"Drummer Stich Wynston
and the two other Toronto musicians of Modern Surfaces, tenor saxophonist
Mike Murley and guitarist Geoff Young, are touring in Europe at the moment.
Good for them: Their free-ish, probing approach to contemporary jazz,
abetted here by the legendary Canadian pianist Paul Bley, will find a receptive
audience there long before it attracts one at home. Wynston's restless
drumming has everyone playing nicely out of character; Murley and
Young haven't been this edgy or raucously expressive in years, and Bley
sounds fresh mixing it up with his younger compatriots."
Mark Miller
The Globe And Mail,
Canada
Thursday, November
18, 1999 |
Featuring special guest Paul Bley on four tunes (two are original piano
solos: "Ravenna" and "Portal"), Canadian drummer Wynston's trio features
him with the versatile guitar of Geoff Young and saxophone player Mike
Murley. Best known for his own mainstream projects -- and ongoing
stints with the West coast fusion band Metalwood, and Toronto's long-running
Time Warp -- it's good to hear Murley stretched in fresh directions here,
from the spacey poignance of "The More Things Change The More They Stay
the Same", and his rhapsodic cadenza in "Feeschler," to the freer dynamic
and fierce fusion of "Hamentosh McFarfel."
Wynston is a dramatic drummer in the tradition of Jack Dejohnette.
His atmospheric minimalism is showcased in "Self Sacrifice," a dramatic
drum solo, while his delicate touch animates two solo piano performances
("Catharsis"/"Looking Glass") that confirm the parallels with Dejohnette.
David Lewis
Review from
SamTheRecordMan.com
web site
Thursday, November
18, 1999 |
Drummer Stich Wynston made his name in the '80s anchoring a constantly
changing group of former Toronto street musicians called the Shuffle Demons,
who managed to cross over into rock club success with a zany stage show,
costumes and a handful of catchy songs. During Wynston's nine-year
tenure, The Demons were as rhythmically based as their name suggests, so
the drummer's re-emergence as a composer of skittery pieces filled with
free improvisation is somewhat surprising. Also surprising is that
one of his bandmates is fellow ex-Demon Mike Murley. The saxophonist
is more commonly found these days playing like he's been studying the recording
of Sonny Rollins meets Coleman Hawkins, and it's a joy to hear him exploring
the outer range of his horn again.
[...] Bley's ability to manipulate time, create drama from silence
and execute sudden changes of direction informs the band improvisations
and his spirit infuses the writing of Wynston and guitarist Geoff Young
as well. Wynston even contributes his own solo piano piece, the pretty
"Looking Glass," which has all the earmarks, if not quite the intuitive
touch, of Bley.
The trio performances are marked by frequent unison passages of sax and
guitar and a constantly shifting underlay of percussion. Like Bley,
Young has a well-tuned sense of dynamics, dropping jagged, jarring accents
into his composition "Mermonator" and unleashing some raucous bursts of
noise behind Murley's skronking horn on Wynston's whimsical "Hamentosh
McFarfel."
Wynston, who used to be the comic in The Demons' act (his rap song "Get
Out Of My House, Roach" was a Demons standard) keeps a straight face during
most of the proceedings. He only slips into his old persona to resurrect
an early piece of existentialist doggerel called "What Do You Want?" that
closes the recording on a flat note.
James Hale
Down Beat magazine,
USA
February, 2000 |
"Sparse, free, and a little surreal, this album is a mirror leaning against
the darker corners of our existence. It will scare you into submission,
then point out the thin sliver of light it's been concealing.
Local pioneers Stich Wynston, Mike Murley, and Geoff Young get in bed with
famed New York pianist Paul Bley - but this is no star-powered pillow fight,
it plays like a fruitful collaboration of equals. From lilting, quirky
conversational ensemble pieces to haunting solo pianoscapes from Bley,
the CD is as diverse as avant-garde jazz records get.
Capped off with a pants-peeingly wacked out remake of Stich's classic Shuffle
Demons spoken word rant "What Do You Want", this album is worth having
for that track alone. If you're into out, buy it and file it somewhere
between Sun Ra and Kenny Werner in your record collection."
Stephan Lucacik
"to-nite" Music,
Nitelife & Leisure Guide
November 24 - December
7 issue, 1999 |
"Stich Wynston drummed for those streetwise rabble-rousers from Toronto,
the Shuffle Demons. The cover shot shows him doing a yoga backbend
in a white room, indicating something more austere. Modern Surfaces
play that sparse rhythmically deft music pioneered by Bill Evans and developed
by Paul Bley and Bill Frisell; it is logical that Bley should guest on
piano. Guitarist Geoff Young has his own stinging sound, making for
jagged, interrogative duets with Wynston. Mike Murley (another
ex-Demon) makes suitably clean and chill sounds on sax, but it's on "Self
Sacrifice" - Wynston's drum solo that ears prick up. He has Tony
Oxley's ability to use timbral contrast to suggest an avant-garde percussion
ensemble. Wynston's existentialist rap "What Do You Want" - brother
to Sabir Mateen's "What R U Going To Due?!" - shows how nervy, creative
musicianship can stem from a sense of confrontation."
The Hi-Fi News
U.K. publication
April 10, 1999 |
"Drummer and pianist Wynston leads a band featuring Geoff Young (guitar),
and Mike Murley (saxophones) with fellow Canadian Paul Bley guesting on
piano on some tracks. Bley's influence looms large over Wynston's
work, in spirit if not always in execution. As a percussionist, Wynston
is concerned less with metre than with creating textures and building atmosphere,
while the absence of a bass player allows for untethered harmonic exploration.
In investigating the possibilities inherent in this particular line up
and while maintaining an exploratory agenda, the musicians for the most
part eschew individual virtuosity in favor of a considered, coherent group
sound, making for effective sonic juxtapositions."
JazzWise Magazine
U.K. Jazz magazine
September 1999 |
"... all stop-go structures, glittering spaces, pregnant harmonies, sudden
flurries emerging from lyrical rests.... genius..."
The Wire
Toronto magazine
August 1999 |
"... a combo that takes great delight in mixing, matching, cutting, pasting
and reinventing this beast called jazz"
Music Diary
U.K. publication
August 1999 |
"The Modern Surfaces band builds upon the principles of one of the founders
of a new kind of improvisation in the world of avant garde jazz, namely
pianist Paul Bley. As the musicians are not able to ensconce themselves
in the comfortable platform of a metre (a bas is even not present), they
are forced to improvise to built up a completely different base. At one
hand, this results in complex musical pieces who demand some intellectual
effort from the audience. On the other hand there are the sober, nearly
modally song structures who let the audience recover there breath. In both
of the cases the band creates automaticly an atmosphere where the horizon
is everytime completely and surprisingly different.
During the British part of their European tour last year (that brought
them even to the Travers in Belgium) the band was now and then extended
by Keith and Julie Tippett. They also were on the same bill with Peter
Dickinson and Carlos Ward. On their CD, they are accompanied by Paul Bley."
Stage Magazine
Belgium based publication
(original transcript in Flemish)
April 2000 issue |
"Definitely not for the faint hearted, Modern Surfaces is the sort of jazz
we used to label "free". There is structure - for
example, unison lines, guitar and sax - but in general the
impressionistic approach is in direct opposition to basic jazz form.
The possible exception is Canadian drummer Stich Wynston's drum and cymbal
sound: it's definitely out of bebop. His technique is clean,
his sound crisp and well recorded.
Sometimes you get the feel it's all very arbitrary - for example,
guitarist Geoff Young's noodling in "Environments". On the other
hand, there are occaisions when he's confident and sounding like Terje
Rypdal. One thing's certain: there's not a lot of humour here
- although the whistling birds are cheerful. It's pensive,
dark and flows in stops and starts. That's not a bad thing:
once in a while, the listener needs a challenge! Just be warned that
on Modern Surfaces there aren't four consecutive bars of what most drummers
would call groove. Yet again, Wynston's sound - and indeed,
Paul Bley's sparing piano - have their own compelling drive."
Drums Etc. magazine
Quebec based drum
publication
May-June 2000 issue |
"Crispell also played a set with drummer Stich Wynston's Modern Surfaces.
His trio, featuring saxophonist Mike Murley and guitarist Geoff Young,
used space as a partner to sound while blurring the line between composition
and improvisation. Wynston's preference for interrupted, non-flowing
lines worked well with Crispell's stark approach. Murley soloed intelligently
in keeping with the broken, staccato pace on this program that continually
hit seimic peaks propelled by the drive of Wynston."
Frank Rubolino
Cadence Magazine
Observations during Guelph Jazz Festival performance Sept 2001
November 2001 issue |
"Pianist Paul Bley recorded several albums in the early 1960's, with bassist
Steve Swallow and clarinetist Jimmy Guiffre, that basically defined a chamber
approach to free-jazz improvisation, so it's fitting that Bley should appear
on this album, led by drummer-pianist Stich Wynston who, along with saxophonist
Mike Murley and guitarist Geoff Young, delves into the world of improvisation
on a series of 14 pieces. The tracks are short, divided into
duos, trios and a few quartets. The compositional structure is open-ended,
the overall tone fairly quiet and the interaction among the players empathetic
in the extreme. ... this is a gorgeous piece of work."
Mike Chamberlain
Hour Magazine (Montreal)
September 1, 1999 |
"Leader of this interesting album of a Canadian trio is drummer Stich Wynston,
with the polished saxophonist Mike Murley and the versatile guitarist Geoff
Young. But it is imperative to immediately state that the 14 tracks
here are illuminated by the artistry of Paul Bley, unquestionable star
pianist of the last forty years (maybe even more). The Record is
issued on Buzz Records, part of the Dutch label, Challenge Records.
The notoriety of Bley is a given, the members of the trio aren't celebrities
but have collaborated with many outstanding musicians - not only in the
avant-garde - that everyone has worked with: the leader, for example, has
worked with Julius Hemphill, Holly Cole, the refined pop singer Jane Siberry,
and is a prolific composer, Geoff Young is also a good composer, he has
worked with Kenny Wheeler, Dave Young, John MacLeod; Mike Murley has many
International professional experiences having participated in tours and
on recordings with Kenny Wheeler, Randy Brecker, John Abercrombie, Jack
McDuff and he is also a member of the quartet Metalwood. Murley has
released many of his own recordings some of which have been critically
acclaimed. All told, the three aren't basking in fame but have surely
had optimum experiences, matured much in their avant-garde and in the quality
pop situations: from which flourishes their love of melody, but also
that for dissonant ambience and psychedelic sounds, alternated with frequent
exquisite chamber-like music (in perfect ECM style).
It goes from harsh sounds on "Hamentosh McFarfel" to the intimate Bleyesque
"Ravenna", from the violent and visionary electric saga finale "What Do
You Want" to the melodic "Kolbo". The contributions of Paul Bley
then, should be put in the Real Book of the new millennium."
Mario Calvitti
All About Jazz (Italy)
Translation from Italian
CD review of Stich
Wynston's Modern Surfaces With Special Guest Paul Bley
Chosen for one of
this publications "Records of the Year" |
"Despite its size and cultural diversity, Canada is a relatively unfamiliar
country compared to its southern neighbor. However, I recently had
an opportunity to encounter this group of talented Canadian individuals
who are the focus of this review.
They call themselves, Stich Wynston's Modern Surfaces. It comprises
Geoff Young on guitar, Mike Murley on saxophones and Stich Wynston as the
group's core member both as drummer and composer.
Each of the trio's members has rich experience performing with free-jazz
musicians from around North America and Europe. In the past year,
they invited guest Canadian pianist Paul Bley, who collaborated with renowned
musicians Art Blakey and Sonny Rollins, for a recording of their album.
The recording has been released under Netherlands' BUZZ label.
The trio has the ability to produce sounds that defy the size of the group
and its lack of a bassist. Most bands that lack a bassist face
difficulties supplementing that part and are usually plagued with unnatural
sound balance and thin production. SWMS, however, produces a naturally
full sound and retains their unprecedented sense of balance among the players.
I was awed by the effectiveness of the solution to this potential shortcoming.
Although the trio sets its mind in favour of the avant-garde approach,
their music did not suggest a single-minded attempt to break the shell
of familiar genres and styles. My recent observation of their performance
presented a perfect harmony between a well-structured, well organized musical
architecture and a shade of volatility that is characteristic of avant-garde
art. On the whole, their music more or less exhibited the colour
of jazz but it definitely did not fall into the category of bebop or modern
jazz styles.
The prime feature of SWMS's music is probably its potential to develop
into any form of music; it has flexibility. The trio does not particularly
arouse and elevate the audience to an aesthetic level. However, their
music emits a scent of relaxation and warm satisfaction.
The free SWMS concert, which I attended, took place this past October at
a theatre located inside the Canadian Embassy who generously sponsored
the event."
Satoshi Kojima
Strange Days Magazine
(Japan) Translated from Japanese
November, 2000 |
"It would be damned hard not to stand up for this CD 'with special guest
Paul Bley' - free improvised music from a Canadian trio: saxophone, guitar
and drummer Stich Wynston who also occasionally plays piano. Piano
and drums take over the more lyrical part whilst sax and guitar come along
most on the more raucous parts. Neverhteless, it is not brutally
played, but tone conscious and sensitively communicated."
Rolling Stone Magazine
(Germany) - reviewer unknown - translated from German
February 2000 |
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