Green Bermudas (Eremite MTE02)
Ellery Eskelin with Andrea Parkins
(This review was intended for publication in CD Music and the Arts but alas that magazine is no more...)
Time:
57:38
Sonics: 9
Music: 9
Tenorist Eskelin has a real talent for taking the potentially maudlin and
giving it real sentiment through, of all things, irony. In this way, he is
the Douglas Sirk of jazz, and sampler/puckish sound-terrorist Andrea
Parkins of his regular ensemble shares his sense of melancholy mischief
(Eskelin's employer, the drummer Joey Baron, also guests on one track).
Thanks to the sampler, the duo is any number of musicians or moods,
sometimes playing out of time, or at intentional cross-purposes.
A few pieces feature a manipulation of songs performed by Eskelin's
father, the late composer-for-hire Rodd Keith. Keith's MSR recording studios advertised
in the back of populist magazines such as the National
Enquirer, soliciting doggerel of the general public, and turning it into
very quickly written and somewhat crazed pop songs, which it would press
into a bunch of singles to sell back to the "poet", now filled brimming
with ambition. What was created was a sort of unduplicable outsider Pop art. Eskelin and Parkins take that poetry turned into music, and turn that
music back into poetry.What might at first appear mere mockery shows
itself, through the father-son bond, to be deeply touching.
Yet it is exactly "deep" feeling which is under the microscope. "(With
Drums and Bells)" features exactly that -- if one didn't know better, one
might assume one was hearing a rare BYG Black Power recording. But when
Eskelin's transcendental lugubriousness comes twisting in, skirting over
the time, it calls exactly how one IS supposed to feel into question. His
solo take on the standard "Flamingo" sounds as if it comes out of a
transistor radio you've hidden under your blankets along with your
lonesome body. "Flamingo" isn't just touching, it accesses the history of
touchingess -- unlike many in NY's Downtown circle, Eskelin and Parkins
play with feeling because of their brains, not in spite of them.
David J. Strauss
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