Mark Feldman - Sounding Point

In my 30+ years following violinist Mark Feldman, no record I know shows him off better than Sounding Point. He’s made much great music in groups, but solo play gives him maximum elbow room, fully exposing the richness of his sound, his distinct personal voice, and his sensitivity to sonic texture and pacing, all at the service of musical storytelling. Take for example the shortest piece here, the improvised “Rebound.” He starts with a simple gesture, the bow’s horsehairs bouncing lightly on the strings, a gesture he periodically returns to (and ends with), between scenic flights: high notes and trills, bracing close-interval wailing on adjacent strings, a burst of percussive pizzi- cato, falling glissandi, whispered notes barely bowed.... Fancy stuff. Yet those expansions and contractions, and the contrasting dynamics, sound natural as breathing. 

This recital was a long time coming, 26 years after his solo debut. (As Mark recalls, Intakt had first asked for a follow-up around 2008.) By the time Feldman recorded Music for Violin Alone in 1994, he’d lived a few musical lives already: playing rock in Chicago and country music in Nashville before hitting New York where his chops, invention, big ears and quick response time quickly made him a key player on the downtown/Brooklyn improvising scene. By 1994 Mark had begun his long association with frequent employer John Zorn, who produced that solo CD. Back then I’d called it “lyrical and technically boggling” – a reflection of everything he’d put together so far. 

That’s all ancient history (I can hear Mark say, as he’s reading this) but that’s the point: He’s led a whole other life since, reflected in this more seasoned if equally audacious music. Feldman spent 10 of those years playing in quartet with guitarist John Abercrombie, a musician and person he can’t praise enough; that connection led to Feldman’s 2006 quartet album for ECM, What Exit. Even more cru- cially, in 1995 Mark met Swiss pianist Sylvie Courvoisier, his collaborator ever after, in duo, trios and various quartets. In notes to their 2018 Time Gone Out (Intakt 326), Stéphane Olliver recounted Sylvie’s first impression of him: You could hear how he drew on jazz and classical without stepping into either camp; his improvising was very free but always aware of context. Those were her values too. They bonded, and have issued a bounty of recordings as co-leaders ever since, rein- forcing each other’s best tendencies. 

Violin Alone demonstrated his resourcefulness and conceptual rigor; he played onefurious piece entirely on his low string. Still, he says now, “I felt my technique was deficient, so I worked on it.” He is now much handier with a wider range of so-called extended techniques – sliding harmonics, picking strings with his left/fingering hand while bowing, bowing or batting at strings with the bow’s wooden spine, et cetera et cetera – to the point where he deploys them un-selfconsciously, mixing them freely. Feldman winks at the violin virtuoso tradition here with a few furious four-string arpeggios. 

“People who say, ‘I hate virtuosity,’ I wish sometimes they’d listen to the music and not notice the technique” – focusing on content not vocabulary. Sounding Point is all but made to order for that. Technical- ly impressive as it plainly is, it’s more about those musical stories – a variety of them, told by various means. “Unbound” and “New Normal” like “Rebound” are improvisations; “Maniac” with its recurring ele- ments – fluttery arpeggios, a fast plummeting pizz lick landing on open strings, a stairstep descending melodic sequence – is more pre-struc- tured, even as it leaves him room to extemporize. Two pieces are borrowed. “As We Are” is Sylvie’s; Mark’s self-contained call-and-re- sponse takes a cue from her trio version (on the recent Free Hoops) and he really makes the melodic hooks sing. (It also shows his various ways of addressing the beat, sometimes leaning into it, sometimes leaning back.) 

Ornette Coleman’s 1987 “Peace Warriors” is one of three pieces conspicuously using overdubs; Mark had arranged it for performance by two violins, and plays both parts in complementary not contrasting voices, making it sound deceptively violinistic. In the improvising he goes his own way, fragmenting the time and the theme, inspecting it from various angles. “I’m inspired by Ornette, but I’d never try to copy him. I try to be true to my esthetic. But can I mention how much I love his violin playing?” There’s a bouquet of lovely episodes here, like the sequence starting around 2 : 24, where a plucked note precedes a softly bowed high D, as if resonating in sympathetic vibration; or the Aaron Copland hoedown that breaks out a minute and a half later, with some of Feldman’s best stridio di gatto playing. 

Also multi-tracked is “Sounding Point” – that’s where the bow meets the string in violin parlance, by the way – with its softly undulating figures under the signature fragile flautando bowing that once earned him the nickname Zamfir. More and more violins beef up the album’s big piece “Viciously” (derived from the last eight bars of “Tenderly” – a connection not immediately apparent). There his sense of drama (and comedian’s expert timing) really come to the fore, as it builds in short order (and subsides and builds again and again) from a buzzing- bee start. Varied, compositionally savvy, full of improvised delights and studded with grand gestures, it’s Mark Feldman music all over: a portrait of the artist now. 

~ KEVIN WHITEHEAD, 2020 

Author of Play the Way You Feel: The Essential Guide to Jazz Stories on Film (Oxford University Press)