NILS BULTMANN / Terminally Unique
Nils Bultmann (viola, keyboards, Wurlitzer, breath, vocals); Roscoe Mitchell (tenor saxophone, flute); Parry Karp (cello); Paddy Cassidy (djembe)
Nils Bultmann plays a mean viola, handles keyboards well enough and improvises with vocals and breath for good measure. He has collaborated with people of the calibre of Evan Parker, Frank Gratkowski, Myra Melford and – also present in four track of this CD – Roscoe Mitchell. This project was created from a series of improvisations, compositional sketches, and field recordings. With the help of Pro Tools it has evolved into this present form. Nils Bultmann is a violist, improviser, and composer currently based in the San Francisco Bay area. Rooted in classical technique and tradition, he has developed his own voice within the context of a wide variety of musical styles and art forms. Active as a performer in the United States and Europe, he plays both classical repertoire as well as his own compositions and is involved in collaborative projects of dance, film, and avant-garde improvised music. He has generated an expansive body of work in the recording studio, including solo and multi-track viola music as well as collaborative and improvised material. He also writes through-composed works for traditional instrumentation including for solo pieces, string quartets, and orchestral music. He has appeared as a soloist with orchestra premiering his own work. As an improviser, he has worked with Ken Butler, David Wessel, Frank Gratkowski, Myra Melford, Evan Parker, and Roscoe Mitchell. In September 2004 he was a guest at the International Symposium for Improvised music in Munich, Germany to perform two new works by jazz saxophonists¹ Roscoe Mitchell and Evan Parker, as part of the Transatlantic Art Ensemble which was recorded and released on ECM Records.
TRACK LIST
Welcome (2:11)
2 (2:27)
the madness (7:20)
Sketches of spirit (2:05)
marched upward (5:09)
brutally adored (2:43)
still strangely serene (2:30)
Reverently (2:58)
absorbing (1:46)
again (4:18)
the pulsing (4:46)
primal (3:25)
silent (1:10)
ocean (7:28)
REVIEWS
Massimo Ricci , Temporary Fault
Nils Bultmann plays a mean viola, handles keyboards well enough and improvises with vocals and breath for good measure. He has collaborated with people of the calibre of Evan Parker, Frank Gratkowski, Myra Melford and – also present in four track of this CD – Roscoe Mitchell, and is a component of the Transatlantic Art Ensemble. Despite the eminent past partnerships, Terminally Unique represents my first run into this artist’s music, a satisfying one. Besides Mitchell, helpers on this release include Parry Karp (cello) and Paddy Cassidy (djembe).
The album was shaped, with the aid of Pro Tools, by editing the most significant parts of a massive series of studio takes collected and gathered over the years, which comprise (in their creator’s words) “improvisations, compositional sketches and field recordings”. There are two or three distinct flavours that instantly materialize while listening to the results. The impressive technical ability of Bultmann on the main instrument is reinforced by the marvellously evocative Eastern quality of his phrasing, sliding lines and introspective melodic intuitions corroborated by an almost tragic atmosphere of contemplative ineluctability, often turning into veritable anguish (listen to the bloodcurdling screaming accompanying the notes in the initial section of “Brutally Adored”). As he decides to let the environment join the vibe, the viola becomes just another colour in a landscape that doesn’t promise a future of beatification, regardless of the apparent peacefulness (“Ocean”).
In general, what transpires is the aspiration of avoiding definite labels, the articulate structure of the playing notwithstanding. Every piece clearly shows its distinctive nature, characterized by accents of interior research that sound nearly memorable at times, of the more ordinary kind elsewhere, where the harmonic edifice is built somewhat unsurprisingly (certain Wurlitzer-based two-chord progressions come to mind). Classiness tends to prevail even in those circumstances, though. A pleasant record enriched by a couple of outstanding duets, and which transmits an explicit feel of coordinated autonomy.
The opening bars of this CD – from the tune Welcome – signal romantic gestures in the air, like someone standing on a rock overlooking the ocean, motioning with torches to eventual ships way out in the darkness. The piece has the intensity of a Bach partita and the melancholy of anyone’s introverted thoughts in fall. Melancholy and a certain elegant attitude to life in clear view of death is characteristic of the sound of the viola, certainly obvious in this brief encounter with a solo piece by Nils Bultmann.
Mr. Bultmann [1975, Germany] stands his very own musical ground out West, if you consider him from out East. He grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, now residing in the San Francisco area. He is – as this first work on the CD suggests – a violist, and as the wonderful, dedicated, graceful and ceremonious playing reveals, he comes out of classical perspective on art, but he improvises masterly, too. In addition to his classical repertoire, he plays his own compositions, and also works in the wider settings of dance and film. This CD also shows part of his avant-garde side.
While I’ve been sitting here thinking about many things, I’ve had the first track – Welcome – on repeat, long after I stopped listening consciously for this review, and it suddenly dawned on me, after I woke up out of my thoughts, that the little melody had created a whole atmosphere in which I’d existed for all that time of thinking. It colored my thoughts and dreams in violet and blue, to almost black, with a slight scent of Nag Champa incense.
Roscoe Mitchell joins Bultmann on track 2, in a tune called… 2… trilling away in lyric statements on his tenor saxophone, while Bultmann lets his bow bounce lightly in rhythmic, kind of Kletzmery patterns, inwardly repetitious. Mitchell’s saxophone sonorities stand on toe, sticking long bird necks up across the wild reeds. The piece is a communication, two close but different beings out of a fairytale or a dream, discussing how to get out of this world alive! Wonderful!
Third is the madness; a longer piece at 7 minutes. Starting as a soundscape; a cityscape with people talking, moving, or a brief encounter in a North African market place – a djembe played by Paddy Cassidy twirls the moments on a chain of causality, skipping past the units of time like a rabbit through the underbrush of a dry land. Bultmann’s viola and Parry Karp’s cello tighten up the worldview, rising up the staircase of the Tor up above Glastonbury’s witches’ conference like water up trees in osmosis and capillary action. The djembe renders this bit a special, African long distance historical reconnaissance, the hot air of day changing into the bitterly cold, star-gleaming desert night; the sounds of cardamom being crushed in bronze mortars for the strong coffee in the Bedouin tents, life reducing itself down to the solid bare necessities; a nice, down-scaled position on the slowly turning giant. You can hear the low hum of existence. The body isn’t even a hideout anymore, but a good starting place for the universe to meditate on itself.
