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Vattel Cherry’s BassRespänse - Review
By Richard Chocrane, Musings

It's one thing to do this kind of thing with two horns and a rhythm section, and another thing entirely to attempt it with four double basses. Vattel Cherry, however, as done just that, and pulled it off, too. Bassrespanse are an audacious undertaking, but the music is entirely convincing.

The arrangements are, as you might expect, the thing. These pieces contain a great deal of composition and the layering of percussive, pizzicato and arco elements enables the quartet to create their own virtual equivalent of drums and horns. There's very little cheating -- some small percussion instruments make appearances, nothing else -- and that's part of the pleasure of a group like this; one hears the whole palette of free jazz through a very specific filter, which can be extremely enlightening and full of surprises. Solos are generally taken arco and, as you might expect, they're often more avant garde than the sorts of things Hall and Outsource get up to. Here there's far more energetic scraping or plucking going on, restless and often abandoning pulsed rhythms. These are emphasised, obviously, in collective improvisations like "Ready Set Go", but even these aren't undisciplined -- the four create sonic textures and stay with them, evolving them slowly rather than running about aimlessly as the title might suggest. There are also through-composed pieces like the gorgeous "Waltz for Four Basses" and the sprechgesang "Louis Devereaux", Dele's guest spot. The words of the latter tell a not-very-interesting story about the eponymous character watching his own funeral, but the performance is exuberant enough to carry it. The reedsmen guest together on the last track, a rather bitty affair with some nice moments.

Bassrespanse are, particularly as an unaugmented quartet, a fascinating listening experience. Not because groups of basses have never played this kind of music before, but because these players seem to have developed a way of playing it which is extremely effective, both traditional and experimental. By its very nature it may not be a long-lived project, so try to catch up with them if you can.

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