TO MARCH IS TO LOVE / Ode to Abdul Wadud. Tennessee’s a Drag. A Man Approached Me. As Wide as All Outdoors. Union Art. Oh Johnny Dear. Sateatime. To March is to Love, Parts I & II. Guidance Received. Casals’ Rainbow (Janel Leppin) / Ensemble Volcanic Ash: Janel Leppin, vc/pno; Sarah Hughes, a-sax; Brian Settles, t-sax; Anthony Pirog, gt; Luke Stewart, bs; Larry Ferguson, dm / Cuneiform Records, no number; available as CD or LP on Bandcamp (Recorded live in Montreal, 2023)
Janel Leppin is a jazz cellist who has been part of the Washington, D.C. music scene for two decades, has released a solo cello album The Brink and singer-songwriter albums as Mellow Diamond in addition to founding this particular group, Ensemble Volcanic Ash. Yet like so many avant-garde jazz artists, she has a low national profile. This album is the first I’ve ever heard of her.
The opener on this stunning disc, Ode to Abdul Wadud, pays tribute to the jazz cellist who played with the Arthur Blythe Ensemble in the early 1980s. The music has some of the same vibe as Blythe’s but not a lot; it is a brief statement of theme with a lot of percussion. The real fun begins with Tennessee’s a Drag, and here we get the full brunt of Leppin’s style. It is not delicate, sophisticated music like the jazz cello album by Tomeka Reid, but rather hard-driving, earthy music (in this particular case with a driving 7/8 beat with the stress accents broken up within each bar, pushed hard by Luke Stewart on bass and Leppin on cello while the horns play together and solo in the foreground. Because it is played at a slow tempo, A Man Approached Me might be thought of as a ballad, but there is nothing very ballad-like about it; the music is edgy, with Leppin playing her instrument on the edges of the strings; then, halfway through, there is a dramatic pause, followed by a an aggressive, medium-tempo yet very simple theme played by the saxes but followed by a strange, out-of-tempo solo by Leppin.
Indeed, the strange vibe one gets from this album is always integrated with those two strong-voiced saxophonists playing over a very solid but not overly flashy rhythm section. None of the music, as I mentioned earlier, is highly sophisticated, but it is complex enough to hold one’s interest—a sort of deep-down, dark brown, earthy sort of music that grabs hold of you without being overly aggressive. A lot of this has to do with the rhythm section, and both bassist Stewart and drummer Larry Ferguson manage to push the group forward while maintaining a certain amount of subtlety in their playing. It’s quite a feat. In some of these pieces, such as As Wide As All Outdoors, she even simulates a bit of a Mingus vibe; yet, amazingly, the band never quite breaks out into funk or fusion in the classic description of that kind of music although it clearly has a funky underside that is always clearly audible.
There is really no other music I’ve ever heard like this album—at least, not exactly alike, and that was what fascinated me and held my interest. As the music progresses, there are two things that hold one’s attention, the incredibly solid sound created by just two saxes and Leppin’s own improvisations played against the solid foundation laid down by Stewart and Ferguson. On Union Art there is a rock guitar solo by Anthony Pirog, and this I could have lived without (in fact, I’m going to cut it when I burn the album, I hated it so much), but to each his or her own. I’m sure there are some listeners out there who like this sort of thing. I’m just not one of them and never will be.
The novelty of Oh Johnny Dear is that it opens with a cello-bass duet, and a strange one it is, but this is nothing compared to the strangeness of the theme or its quirky rhythm, which I couldn’t quite get a handle on. On this track, too, the saxists are finally separated, with tenor Brian Settles playing a sort of ground bass underneath alto Sarah Hughes’ baroque fantasies above. Settles later joins the rhythm section as underpinning while Hughes continues to spin out complex lines above the others. Again, this is something different from the norm, even from the “norm” of this album’s style. And then, another complete change of gears: Sateatime is a lovely little jazz waltz with the saxists playing in their most lyrical and least aggressive style.
As one can see in the header, the title tune is divided into two parts, and although they are related the second clearly sounds like a sequel to the first: slower, moodier, less rhythmic. Both parts of this piece have a very definite feeling of mixing jazz with classical form, something I’ve been advocating since I was in college during the early 1970s.
Ah, but the second half of To March is To Love eventually explodes into a riot of semi-chaotic musical motifs, particularly Leppin’s very wild and chaotic cello solo which is all over the place in its own strange atonal world while tenor player Settles runs some Coltrane-like changes on his horn and the rhythm section splits apart like insane atoms. Maybe Leppin calls this music “love,” but I sure don’t. It sounds more like To March is To Explode, yet after a while it is the leader’s cello, playing a broad bowed melody on her instrument, that leads the music slowly back towards its original slow pace and some sanity…although the rhythm section refuses to cooperate with her. Casals’ Rainbow, the concluding track, is yet another shift of gears, a piano solo by Lippin with a sort of Carole King beat but much more aggressive.
It isn’t often that I’m at a loss for words in describing any particular music, but there were several moments on this album that defeated me, and it is not because the music was too complex but, rather, that it was so radically different from anything else I’ve ever heard. Ensemble Volcanic Ash occupies its own earthy, grunting, headlong push through these simple-yet-complex musical structures, like a pet dinosaur that you think will stay tame because you show it affection. You’ve really got to hear this album to understand it.
—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley
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