The chance to easily see up-and-coming jazz musicians as well as the big names is a privilege of living in NYC. Jazz in my understanding has never been about a final state, so it seems like an important rite for a jazz lover to observe young musicians trying out new ideas. Emmanuel Michael’s performance at The Jazz Gallery in Manhattan was an opportunity to do just that. Unlike the last show I saw where I knew the music like the back of my hand, I had never heard of Emmanuel Michael or any of this music beforehand.

The performance was titled In Regards to Olfactory Memories I Wished to Forget. Translation: it’s music about smells the artist wished he didn’t remember. I’m grateful not to associate music with smells. If I did, I’d imagine a mixture of sweet, bitter, and occasionally raunchy aromas filling the evening. The program listed equally whimsical titles for the pieces, as you can see below.

Emmanuel Michael, who took up guitar at age 8, performed with a jazz orchestra of three cellos, a viola, two flutes (one doubling on alto sax), a bassoon who also doubled on alto sax, a french horn, a double bass, two drummers and one additional guitarist.

Any modern jazz orchestra traces some lineage back to Gil Evans‘s groups: a latin-tinged jazz blended with the airy levity of a flute-dominated orchestra section. Take that as the starting template, add fast but gentle lead guitar runs and a dab of hip-hop beat and you can imagine the sound of these pieces. Michael’s tone was clean and undistorted (think of Bill Frisell‘s sound) but with a long echoing reverb, giving his playing a dreamlike veneer. I don’t know if recordings exist of Olfactory Memories or that ensemble, but you can hear an example of his guitar here.

The structure of the compositions frequently deviated from the traditional head-solos-head format of jazz (statement of a theme melody, then various instruments take turns improvising a solo, and the theme is re-stated at the end). Some pieces drifted around a single riff, while others changed mood and tempo halfway through, as if narrating a change in action or disruptive event. Most featured two soloists at most (Michael plus a saxophone, flute or the other guitar), and rather than improvising over the same chords, each player would come in during a different section of the piece. Only the soloists seemed to fully improvise, while the rest of the orchestra kept embellishing a short continuous theme to accompany them.

Michael, raised in South Dakota and based in New York, likened the structure to repeating meditations for worship in traditional African American and Western African diaspora churches. He writes in the Composer’s Notes:

“Rather than movements, I think that these […] are auras that do not have an endpoint, and should be continuously floating in our thoughts throughout the entire performance.”

Michael grew up listening to MP3s on a Portable Gaming Device that allowed him to reverse the audio by increments of 3-7 seconds. He would loop his favorite short segments of music and listen to them for hours on end. This strikes me as an organic recreation of how DJs sample segments to use in hip-hop and club songs. I could hear this aesthetic in the short themes the orchestra repeated to accompany the soloists.

The most interesting piece of the night featured a guest vocalist called on stage for the final two numbers. Michael began playing unaccompanied, using pedals to loop himself back at varying tempos and play over it, like a round of singers slowly trailing off. He likes to establish multiple pulses in music, both percussive and non-percussive, according to the program. When the vocalist entered, her voice was so distorted by the synthesizer knobs she was twisting that it sounded like an alien slowly morphing into human form. Rather than a song proper, the spoken word poem meditated on the concept of “why would you ruin my good day by telling me about your bad day?” She modulated variations of this message in and out of intelligibility as the orchestra drifted between keys at a slow to moderate tempo, making the words feel like a thought bouncing around in one’s head or popping back into mind over the course of a day. The reference may be in poor taste these days, but it reminded me most immediately of the schizophrenic feeling Kanye West creates by bouncing his voice between channels in the 2nd verse of “Blame Game”. Michael brilliantly achieved his goal for “auras” to “be continuously floating in our thoughts” and give the music “multiple” pulses on this number.

The musicians played with a start-and-stop hesitancy that I don’t think was deliberate. It was the first of four shows the group was to perform, and players looked to Michael to cue them verbally or with head nods to move to a new section or comp underneath a soloist. The two drummers, seated right next to each other, frequently gestured for the other to adjust the volume or confirm when it was time to hand off a beat.

Michael credits the choice of two drummers to multi-drum arrangements in the diaspora dance music his Ugandan and South Sudanese parents exposed him to growing up. It requires great precision and careful planning for two drumsets (rather than one drumset + congas or other percussion) to stay balanced and provide the other instruments with a steady pulse without clashing with each other. The two drummers in this set traded roles many times, one keeping a beat with rimshots and cymbals while the other added coloration on the toms, but the extra caution needed to stay off each other’s toes diminished the expanded sonic range gained by two kits. I think one drummer, perhaps accompanied by a dedicated percussionist, would have played freer and given the music a more confident foundation.

The three cellos (augmented by a bass and viola) had room to play ghost notes, eek out gritty scratches, and slide into the high, almost feedback-like frequencies left available by the absence of violins. That said, I wish the strings were featured more prominently. They sounded like backdrop to the wind instruments despite sitting in front of them. I’d have even made the guitars a tad louder to cut through the mix and take more of a leading role.

And is it just me, or is the French horn an especially difficult instrument to play? Just three buttons to press and a very long spiraling tube to blow the sound through. No offense to anybody I’ve known, but in nearly every symphony I ever played in growing up, the French horns have struggled to play in tune. (We played the William Tell Overture in my first youth symphony concert. I can still hear the French horns lurching out of tune just as they make their grand entrance to announce the start of the hunt. See around 8:35 in this recording for the part I’m talking about.) It’s tragic because the French horn can add such buttery warmth to an arrangement, but alas the horn occasionally sounded out of tune tonight as well.

This show was an entertaining and at times beautiful work in progress. The paint was definitely still drying, though thankfully again that wasn’t an olfactory sensation. But perhaps a group of musicians getting to know new material, reacting to their mistakes, listening to each other and finding their way as they go is what jazz is all about.