Sirius Respect: The Respect Sextet Plays the Music Of Sun Ra and Karlheinz Stockhausen
My Top 10 Jazz CDs of 2009 : Jason Crane, 2009 Village Voice Jazz Critics Poll
Jet Flight (Ra) (3:41)
Leo (Stockhausen) (5:48)
Shadow World (Ra) (9:47)
Dienstagslied (Stockhausen) (1:10)
Angels and Demons at Play (Ra) (9:36)
Lights on a Satellite (Ra) (6:32)
Pisces (Stockhausen) (3:46)
El is the Sound of Joy (Ra) (9:51)
Set Sail for the Sun (Stockhausen) (5:40)
Velvet (Ra) (0:52)
Capricorn (Stockhausen) / Saturn (Ra) (13:42)
The Respect Sextet
Eli Asher: trumpet, slide trumpet, melodica, percussion
James Hirschfeld: trombone, tambourine
Josh Rutner: tenor saxophone, bass clarinet, melodica, radio, percussion, trombone
Red Wierenga: piano, keyboards, redspectronics, percussion
Malcolm Kirby, Matt Clohesy: bass
Ted Poor: drums, percussion
This CD allows the music of two of the 20th century’s musical giants to be heard as they’ve never quite been heard before.
Sun Ra and Stockhausen have a lot in common: mysticism, astrology, a self-constructed cosmology and (intertwining) compositional language, the idea of “advanced” musical and intellectual work, and an early, involved adoption of synthesizers.
In choosing the repertoire, Respect wanted to draw comparisons and contrasts between the two composers and address the question of how “space” influenced their work.
A truly unique “crossover” release that is bound to appeal to new music, jazz and improvisation audiences.
The Respect Sextet is an up and coming young jazz group based in New York and garnering a lot of positive press.
Each of the band’s six members are individuals with their own projects, writing their own compositions and playing in other bands, from new music groups Argento Ensemble and Alarm Will Sound to the gospel group The Campbell Brothers to Bjorkestra and Cuong Vu’s Trio – a broad spectrum of music. Their previous CDs have included covers of tunes by Art Ensemble Of Chicago, Lee Konitz, Herbie Nichols, Albert Ayler, and Misha Mengelberg.
Liner notes by Robert Iannapollo, who writes for Cadence, All About Jazz, NY, and Signal To Noise.
About their previous CD, ‘Respect In You,’ Cadence Magazine wrote, “…from Salvation Army hymnody to Aylerian ecstasy…one of this year’s outstanding new discs, providing more food for thought and pure enjoyment than just about anything I’ve heard lately.”
Reviews
Karlheinz Stockhausen and American avantgarde bandleader Herman Blount – who traded under the persona Sun Ra – were kindred spirits. Stockhausen insisted that he hailed from Sirius, while Sun Ra constructed a potent allegory for his position as a creative black artist operating in segregated America by claiming he was from Saturn.
The New York-based Respect Sextet juxtapose pieces by both men on “Sirius Respect” with such striking results one wonders why no one made the connection before. They lean more instinctually towards Sun Ra’s aesthetic. The jagged, leapfrogging line of his Shadow World holds no fear for them – the groove is deep, the solos unfailingly exploratory. Pieces from Stockhausen’s Tierkreis and Aus den sieben Tagen are decked out with punky backbeats and a rockist atmosphere. But fear not: Stockhausen’s open-form scores not only withstand the onslaught, they are elevated.
— Philip Clark, Gramophone
My Top 10 Jazz CDs of 2009 :
Jason Crane, 2009 Village Voice Jazz Critics Poll
Sirius Respect
The Respect Sextet play the music of Sun Ra and Stockhausen
Mode Avant 06
Just had a pleasant surprise in the mail — I was wondering why on earth I’d be getting a review copy from Mode Records (great label, but their focus is on the contemporary classical world not jazz), but opened it up to discover the Respect Sextet’s latest disc, Sirius Respect. People who participated in my 2nd blindfold test (not the most recent one — the one before) may recall a long, seriously groovy track on there by these guys, a cover of Fred Anderson’s “3 on 2”. Anyway, the new one coincidentally gave me flashbacks to a not-so-charmed meeting between the Art Ensemble of Chicago & Hartmut Geerken on a dual tribute to Sun Ra and Mynona (an author previously unknown to me), which had its moments but was really trashed by Geerken (who seems to have decided to chop up the tape to his own satisfaction). As a double tribute Sirius Respect works a hell of a lot better, as you can imagine. I’m no Stockhausen expert — I have exactly two albums of his music — but the main thing I’d say, listening to this, is that it really sounds beautifully stitched together, not like they’ve simply alternated tracks by the two composers. This is largely because they’re drawn on Stockhausen’s more “open” pieces, including 3 from Tierkreis and one from Aus Den Sieben Tagen (a purely verbal score). Actually, I could have used more Stockhausen here (only 5 brief tracks), maybe some of the more formal writing, though I can understand the band’s wanting to make this work as a project, & as jazz. Which it does. — The Sun Ra covers are really spirited, imaginative reworkings, the kind of thing that sounds like an arrangement that’s accreted intuitively over many performances rather than just being decided on top-down. & they pick many of my favourite tunes too, like “Velvet” and “Saturn”. Plus “Angels and Demons at Play”, which if I’m not mistaken they played at the Toronto gig of theirs I caught a few years back — it’s one of those slow-burn Respect performances, making good use of the band’s predilection for “little instruments” and incidental percussion, a 5/4 bossa that fans out softly like moonrays. “Lights on a Satellite” is all gorgeous-melancholy chords, like Gil Evans arranging for the Arkestra.
Incidentally, this has got more of a fusiony aspect to it than other Respect albums I’ve heard (Red Wierenga plays electric keyboards on many tracks), so I’m thinking that they must be obliquely referencing Miles Davis’s interest in Stockhausen in the early 1970s.
— Nate Dorward, organissimo.org, April 2009
Links
The Respect Sextet Profile
