I recently watched Ken Burns’ documentary series, Jazz. While wonderful in its historical depth, ultimately it left a sour aftertaste. The first 40 years of the music’s history was covered in episodes 1 to 9. The second 40 years, finishing in 2000, the year of the documentary’s production, was covered in episode 10, the final episode. And it basically framed the entire series as an apologetic for Wynton Marsalis’ particular brand of bland jazz retroism. It gave free jazz a place in the canon (just) but wrote off fusion, the last forward-looking style covered in the series at all, as having lost the plot.
Which brings us, in a roundabout kind of way, to Pollen Trio. The juxtaposition of Roll Slow against Jazz in my own experience was particularly revealing. In my head, at least, Roll Slow just about functions as the lost history that Ken Burns overlooked. It starts out with ‘Tilt’s which, while certainly far less dense than Ornette Coleman, is strongly rooted in the traditions of free jazz. It’s a beautiful piece which utilises acoustic drums, piano and trumpet in a way that none of the 60s jazz heavyweights would find unfamiliar, apart maybe from some moments of extended technique on the trumpet. But, like any jazz work, this is just the head, the starting point. What then takes place across the album is a gradual, subtle disintegration and deconstruction of the traditional form, heading towards electro-acoustic improv, digital processing improv, through to noise and drone, then back out again. All the exciting developments that the old school jazz purists would prefer not be even considered part of the same universe but which, over the last 40 odd years, have continued to keep the music vital and progressive.
The album’s centrepiece is, undoubtedly, ‘Redshift’, a dark and brooding monster that doesn’t ever really explode into anger, but you can hear the menace lurking. Austin Buckett creates the low end drone with the roiling bass notes on his piano, contrasting these with needle stabs on the extreme high end of the same instrument. Two minutes in and the piano and Evan Dorrian’s drums roll in unison swells while Miroslav Bukovsky’s trumpet duets with with processed loops of itself. It’s really only timbre and tone, the acoustic instruments, Bukovsky’s mellow Miles Davis blurts, which tie it in any way to jazz, showing just how far the form can be stretched without snapping.
From there, the final four tracks have the same laid back tone as a late night lounge trio. But the form is far more abstract. This contrast between expectation and the actual sound presented keep the tension up and hold attention. ‘Procession’ finds a loop that sounds like it was played on plastic recorder fly around the stereo field while, again, the percussion instruments boil away underneath. And ‘Erupt_OFF’ brings the album full circle, finishing off with straight ahead timbres being skittled through processing in a muted free jazz universe.
Roll Slow is a beautiful album. It relishes in its technical accomplishment and exploratory inventiveness in a way the DIY underground could only dream of, yet retains the raw power of Noise and improv. It’s greatest accomplishment is to balance these disparate elements into a whole that acts like a great album should, taking you on a journey across its course and keeping you glued to hear what the next step might be.
Adrian Elmer
