Fired by a
shared passion for challenging but engaging music, Earprint has quickly forged
a sound with what its members refer to as an "aggressively melodic,
shamelessly youthful approach." The explosive quartet's self-titled debut,
due out October 21 on Endectomorph Music, displays creative invention,
intricate composition, and raw combustibility in equal measure.
The
chordless collective brings together four musicians from diverse backgrounds:
saxophonist Kevin Sun comes from picturesque New Jersey and trumpeter Tree
Palmedo from the grayer Pacific Northwest. Bassist Simón Willson hails from
Santiago, Chile, while drummer Dor Herskovits was born and raised in Israel.
Despite their far-flung histories, the quartet established an immediate rapport
while studying together at Boston's New England Conservatory, and Sun
encouraged them to work together - and to challenge one another.
"I
wanted to put something together where I could really work on writing difficult
music," Sun explains, a desire prompted by such inspirations as Steve
Coleman, Vijay Iyer, John Hollenbeck, and Sun's mentor, saxophonist-composer
Miguel Zenón. "One thing about being in school is that you can rehearse an
insane amount; I could write music that was as hard as I wanted it to be and,
eventually, we could make it happen."
Perhaps most
impressive about the group's music is that, despite the level of virtuosity
demanded to play it, listening to it is anything but an abstruse experience.
All four members of Earprint contribute memorable tunes, whose hairpin twists
and turns inspire spirited improvisations. The lack of a chordal instrument
provides ample space and freedom, which the quartet seizes with bravado.
"We're
all players that like to take chances and feel free to venture out to different
places in the music, and that's really allowed when there's that space between
us," says Herskovits. "After a while, it felt like we could play
anything. Eventually it didn't matter if the music was complex or simple - it
was all something that we could hear naturally and that felt amazing to
play."
The darting
horn lines of Sun's "Nonsense" open the album. Written years ago
while the saxophonist was participating in the Banff International Workshop in
Jazz and Creative Music in the scenic mountains of Alberta, Canada, the piece
is a densely layered miniature that serves as a jaunty and odd-angled
introduction to the quartet. It's followed by Herskovits's Ornette
Coleman-inspired "Happy," where the punchy, speech-inspired melodies
and whiplash shifts capture the titular mood, however idiosyncratically.
The title of
Willson's "School Days" acknowledges Earprint's beginnings in the
halls of NEC, but shares its name with a painting by the late Boston-based,
African-American artist Allan Rohan Crite. The color and sense of movement in
that piece was a direct model for Willson's taut, supple composition. Sun wrote
"Boardroom" from a less obviously inspirational source: after playing
a background music gig for a corporate function (hey, those student loans
aren't gonna pay themselves), he found himself stuck listening to a litany of
quarterly earnings and projected revenues, so he turned those droning numbers
into a far more interesting musical equivalent.
Sun's
meditative "The Holy Quiet" was inspired by the tragic shootings in
Charleston; the piece captures the sorrow and anger invoked by the terrible
incident with a percussive clamor featuring both Sun and Palmedo joining
Herskovits, while Willson intones a harrowing bowed howl. A driving rock beat
fuels Palmedo's more light-hearted tune "The Golden Girder Strikes
Again," a fanfare for the "brutish elegance" of an imaginary
supervillain whose body has been replaced by a mass of gold-plated support
beams.
Sun's
"Malingerer" is the album's most spacious piece, featuring a slowly
accumulating melody and a languorous air but ending with an unexpectedly
vigorous conclusion. The alternately methodical and frenetic "Clock
Gears" is Herskovits's sonic portrait of the intermeshed workings of a
clock mechanism, while the aptly named "Anthem" is the result of a
task that Sun set for himself, scrawled in an old notebook and later
rediscovered: to write an "anthemic, two-horn song." Voilà.
Sun's
sprightly "Colonel" is named after his family's beloved Yorkshire
Terrier, and greets the ear with the hopping, yipping brio of an excited
Yorkie. Finally, Herskovits's "Six Nine" is indicative of the
evolutionary paths that many of the band's tunes take, starting as a simple
groove and growing in emotional and musical complexity to its current form.
In some
ways, the members agree, the band itself is following a similar path, with the
depth and profundity coming from the players rather than the page. "It's a
little bit more balanced between things that are more challenging and things
that are more free to play on, with a mixture of styles: free music, jazz,
neo-classical, rock and roll, all kinds of stuff," Herskovits says. Sun
adds, "In the beginning, I would write a 7-page score for a song that
would be six minutes long. Gradually I ended up writing less and less, so by
the time we got to the album I could just write one sheet and there would be
enough material."
Maybe some
of these discoveries have been made by composers before, but with each passing
generation inspiration and urgency are found anew. Earprint declares the arrival
of a band that's harnessed state-of-the-art composition and earthy tunefulness,
with no sign of slowing down.
