With the evocatively titled Ash, Dust, and the Chalkboard
Cinema, trombonist/composer Peter Nelson retraces his five-year struggle with a
debilitating condition that threatened to end his career as a musician just as
it was entering its ascendancy. The album's vivid compositions and enthralling
playing draw the listener in to experience the grueling emotional journey that
Nelson undertook, from the onset of mysterious symptoms through the isolating
battle with physical and mental pain through the rigor of healing and the joy
and revelation of recovery.
Released via Outside In Music, Ash, Dust, and the
Chalkboard Cinema enlists three different ensembles to tell its compelling
story, all featuring Nelson on trombone: an ethereal trio featuring
vibraphonist Nikara Warren and the wordless vocals of Alexa Barchini; a
hard-swinging quartet with pianist Willerm Delisfort, bassist Raviv Markovitz,
and drummer Itay Morchi; and a brilliant septet supplementing the quartet with
alto saxophonist Hailey Niswanger, trumpeter Josh Lawrence, and bass
clarinetist Yuma Uesaka.
A native of Lansing, Michigan, Nelson earned his degree in
Jazz Studies at Michigan State University, where he studied with heavy hitters
like bassist Rodney Whitaker. After recording two albums in his home state he
decided to move to Brooklyn in 2013, and soon found himself performing with
longtime heroes like pianist/bandleader Orrin Evans and drummer Matt Wilson.
Almost simultaneously, however, he started to develop strange symptoms while
playing.
At first the issues were minor: small, localized pain and
subtle feelings of anxiety. Before long, the symptoms escalated to include
chronic hyperventilation, severe shortness of breath, and excruciating pain in
the face down his back and arms. "Here I was playing with a lot of my
heroes, in musical settings that I'd dreamed about and I spent a lot of time
trying to cultivate," Nelson recalls. "And it became very difficult
to be on the bandstand while at the same time fighting my horn and fighting my
body. It felt like a physically violent way of losing my medium for relating to
the world, and was emotionally and spiritually crippling."
Nelson sought the help of innumerable doctors, physiologists
and educators, failing to find satisfactory answers from any source. After more
than a year and a half of intense pain and frustrating questions, Nelson found
his way to physiologist and trombonist Jan Kagarice, one of the world's leading
authorities on musicians' health. Kagarice diagnosed him with focal dystonia,
chronic hyperventilation and Chvostek sign, and in a single lesson reversed 60%
of his pain, immediately allowing him to play again.
His symptoms, it turned out, were the result not of some
curious illness but of bad pedagogy - bad habits inherited from teachers
working from a misunderstanding of the human body and the physical process of
making music. "The stereotype is that brass players have chops problems
and difficulty with endurance," he explains. "But the entirety of
brass pedagogy is not only physiologically destructive but physics-wise has
very little to do with how sound is actually made."
Five years after the onset of his symptoms, Nelson is fully
recovered and playing as beautifully as ever, pain-free. Writing the ten
compositions on this album meant excavating a number of difficult feelings, but
the trombonist was intent on engaging fully and honestly with the full spectrum
of his ordeal. He brings his experiences vividly to life with the help of his
gifted collaborators, each of whom have played an important part in his life in
one context or another, from the bandstand to the classroom.
Nelson is hesitant to reveal the meaning behind his somewhat
cryptic album title, but a few themes emerge: Ash and Dust make obvious
references to things crumbling away and left behind, referring perhaps to the
composer's symptoms or incorrect approaches. The Chalkboard Cinema, meanwhile,
suggests the somewhat illusory nature of education, jazz education in
particular - lessons taught as gospel but more akin to the flickering images of
the silver screen.
Ash, Dust, and the Chalkboard Cinema traces each step along
Nelson's road to recovery, from the creeping onset in "It Starts Slowly
(First in Your Heart)" to the confounding spiral of "Cyclical Maze
(Round and Round We Go)" through the zen-like mantra "Do Nothing (If
Less Is More)," a tribute to Kagarice and her life-altering teachings.
"Behind Kind Eyes (Thank You)" is a meditation on the loss of a loved
one, a nod to the tragedies that can occur around us while we're struggling
through our own, while "Closure is a Wasted Prayer (Release, Relax)"
ends with the ambiguous acknowledgment that expecting any chapter of life to
neatly draw to a conclusion is a fool's errand.
"We always want closure," Nelson says, "but
it's an almost laughable concept. I'm always going to be dealing with dystonia,
but it's not something that controls my life. The idea of putting a cap on this
whole process does a disservice to the process of excavating these feelings and
dealing with them. Everything that I learned about brass playing -- and more
importantly about myself and what music-making really means to me -those
lessons are priceless and I wouldn't change a thing."
Born in Lansing, Michigan, Peter Nelson discovered the
trombone at age 10. Earning a bachelors degree in Jazz Studies at Michigan
State University allowed him to study and perform with some of today's top jazz
artists, including Rodney Whitaker, Etienne Charles, Diego Rivera, Michael
Dease and Vincent Chandler. After spending a year after college producing and
recording his second album as a leader, Nelson moved to Brooklyn, NY where he
currently performs, composes, and teaches in a number of settings. Nelson has
been a finalist in every major North American jazz trombone competition and in
2012 was awarded the prestigious Sudler prize in the Arts. He leads multiple
groups and is also a sought after section player, having performed with jazz
orchestras backing the likes of John Hendricks, McCoy Tyner, Benny Golson,
Jamie Cullum and Terence Blanchard. As a composer, Nelson has amassed a body of
work that includes everything from jazz ensemble to contemporary pop. His
versatility as a performer has led to a wide variety of performances and
recordings with artists such as Christian McBride, Verve Pipe, Orrin Evans'
Captain Black Big Band, Jamie Cullum, The Hudson Horns, Marianne Solivan, the
Dan Pugach Nonet, Matt Wilson, Grupo Ayé, The George Gee Swing Orchestra, Fleur
Seule, Valerie Ponomarev, Michael Dease Big Band, and a score of others.
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