In the ranks of contemporary jazz drummers, Gerald Cleaver is a heavyweight, both as a sideman and as a leader with a predilection for leaderless combos. He can fit in a variety of contexts as he’s most often situated in the avant-garde, but his new record, a truly solo affair, comes from a thoroughly unexpected place. Signs is a set of solo electronics, with seven tracks on the LP (cyan blue in an edition of 100, or standard black, both with an mp3 download) or 11 on the CD (also an edition of 100) and digital. As it plays, the inventiveness and the disciplined striving for an ideal become boldly apparent; the music is 1,000 miles away from any dilettantish digression. It’s available now on 577 Records.
Gerald Cleaver has been described as a first-call jazz drummer, a distinction that’s totally deserved and means something, but there are numerous other ways to communicate the extent of skills, and one is name recognition. This means that whenever I was perusing the shop racks in the ’00s and saw his name on the cover of a release (as is the contempo jazz norm, mostly on CD), the chances I’d blind buy the disc increasingly went up.
Of course, Cleaver’s prolific enough that I haven’t heard everything with his name on it. This is jazz we’re talking about people; it’s not even close. I’ve been fortunate to have enjoyed a fair portion of his work, but as a reviewer of music from across the spectrum of styles, I’ve not heard a new record featuring Cleaver since Hidden Voices from the Aruán Ortiz Trio back in 2016. That’s a long time. Too damned long.
And so, even as Signs came to me as a major move away from what has made Cleaver’s rep, I felt it necessary to check in on his more recent output. But What Is to Be Done, with a leaderless trio of Cleaver, Larry Ochs (of the ROVA Saxophone Quartet), and guitarist Nels Cline (of Wilco and more), released on CD and digital by the Clean Feed label in January of last year, was captured in performance in Richmond, VA back in 2016.
Live at Firehouse 12, credited to Cleaver and Violet Hour, came out on CD and digital courtesy of Sunnyside last November, but its contents, a show from the New Haven, CT venue (also a studio and label) features the quintet that cut his 2007 set for Fresh Sound, Gerald Cleaver’s Detroit (where he was born and raised prior to moving to NYC). It was apparently recorded sometime during the same era.
Although these discs weren’t appropriate for tapping into what Cleaver’s been up to lately, I spent time with both anyway, and they ended up pinpointing, through sheer versatility from inside the realms of jazz, why Signs is such a success outside the genre. Part of the reason is that, unlike so many musicians (artists in general, really) Cleaver hasn’t gradually fallen victim to conservatism, as Firehouse 12 essentially hits the spot between hard bop in the Art Blakey mode and the advancements of Andrew Hill and Jackie McLean. A decade later, a night with Ochs and Cline is a much freer, much wilder affair.
This supports that Cleaver is still taking chances in his music, but here’s the kicker; Signs, which was recorded between 2017-’19 in Brooklyn, doesn’t suggest a man who’s winged it and then reaped a big lucky payoff. Rather, it registers as a set of highly constructed and contemplated pieces that underscore the influence of the Detroit electronic music scene, which Cleaver soaked up during his youth.
The tracks underscore but don’t merely replicate. Detroit techno was deeply tied to clubs and gyrating, and while a clear rhythm does emerge in Signs’ opener “Jackie’s Smiles,” it’s also not formulated as a dancefloor banger. But as the Detroit sound was multifaceted, which means it was more than merely body music (it was danceable stuff with depth), a simple homage from Cleaver would serve neither side of the equation.
“Jackie’s Smiles” establishes Cleaver’s method on Signs. Patterns are set into motion and then layered; what begins as a cyclical weave of sharp tones quickly gets the rhythmic kick as added pulses enter the program. There are slight adjustments, but more importantly additions, as the track blooms into an engaging whole. In short, from a foundation of sparse electronics it arrives in the neighborhood of full-bodied techno.
It’s with “Amidst Curses” that Cleaver shifts into a zone that’s far more redolent of the 1990s, with clinical bleeping, blooping and chirping, a crisp but unharried rhythm, and the gradual emergence of electronic dissonance, the whole reminiscent of something Warp or Astralwerks might’ve put out in the early part of the decade.
In “Blown,” Cleaver stretches out and expands upon the method of patterns and layering heard in the opener, though developments around three minutes in see a transition from a more experimental (if calmly unwinding) territory toward an enveloping swarm of electro accompanied by stuttering synthetic bass drum hits that blossom into a burst of rhythm.
The opening motif does get seamlessly reasserted but with the momentum unabated as fresh elements are integrated right up the finale. The much shorter “Tomasz” broadens the record’s range even more, with it’s sonic cascades reminding me a bit of academia’s early electronic excursions, but with less of a lab coat sensibility as the track glistens, lifts off and then glides toward a plateau that’s almost kosmische.
Following is “Signs” in three distinct tracks numbered I through III. The presence of rhythm hovering halfway between thump and throb unites the bunch, but there is also a hearty mess of squiggling, chattering and spasming across the triptych. Altogether, they roll sweetly and emphasize Cleaver’s love of sound as sound.
Bonus track “Ferrous Past” increases the experimental aura with post-glitchy aspects, but halfway through starts rubbing up on me in an almost early ’80s Residents-like manner. Wild. “Radiator” picks up this ball and runs with it like greased lightning, sounding a lot like the San Fran group’s soundtrack work before redirecting into reverberating and thudding repetition appropriate for a dystopian dance cavern. “Photic Plains” unfurls as intertwined rising and falling sustained tones, while “Day Red” exudes a chilly, futuristic, somewhat science-fictive atmosphere for the finale.
Suffice to say, Cleaver’s traveled pretty far from his Detroit techno inspirational bedrock, though the connection that remains is that appreciation for sound as sound. Which links up perfectly with his jazz work. And hey, if Signs inspires you to dance, by all means do it.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
