Iain Ballamy’s Food peppers the aural senses with 2001’s Organic & GM Food, paying
tribute to its inspiration while pushing the music into subconscious areas. If this record is a meal, its
contents are not to be easily digested by everyone. It drives forward with a potent musical
sensibility and aesthetic sense. The less traditional your tastes are, the better. I hated avant-garde
music--
until now.
Free (or avant garde) jazz sometimes gets a bad rap for being too emotive. Iain Ballamy
challenges that with this 53-minute collection of explorations that are far best resident in the
individual’s imagination. Words scarcely suffice in describing music that can be interpreted in so
many ways. That is precisely what tends to annoy traditional jazz folk about music like this. Its
emotive
nature does defy definition, but one wonders: what is the value of that defiance?
Nobody could rightfully dispute the global value of Ballamy’s musical tangents with band mates
Arve Henriksen, Mats Eilersten and Tomas Stronen. The best proof is the suspension of
instrumental definition; it is at times difficult to know who is playing what and that beautifully blurs the
line between the rationale and the creative within human expression. The rational-creative
dichotomy is bridged here as best it can be by four men playing 12 tracks in a recording studio.
Food is a fabulous blend of countless hours of sampling and the wilds of Scandinavian folk
voice. Stronen’s multiple uses of percussive elements mixes with Eilersten’s rhythmic low-end
guitar. This combination is fabulously offset by the horn works of Ballamy and Arve Henriksen.
”I think my musical approach…,” writes Ballamy “was in stark contrast to the Norwegians, who
seem to have a very natural and free way of playing.”
Ballamy and Henriksen work most powerfully here. Their wavy forays into subtlety make the
listener teeter between what he hears and what he thinks he hears. Their stream of consciousness
almost mocks time and sense. Ballamy and Henriksen voice their individual instruments
conventionally in songs like “Arve’s Part”; at other times, however, the delicacy of their playing
evokes images of musicians transcending their cognitive borders – as in “Steady Eddie” and
“Floater.”
Iain Ballamy must be commended for pushing his creativity so far beyond his initial avant garde
work with Bill Bruford and Django Bates in the 1990s. In this day and age, music like this is very
hard to finance – as evidenced by Ballamy’s releasing his last four albums on four different record
labels (including thanks to the government of the United Kingdom). Still, Iain Ballamy is regarded
among world leaders in this morphic musical area.
We must laugh with Iain Ballamy, too. His hilarious entitlement of certain songs reminds us to
keep it all in perspective. “Chef’s Special” is a musical version of that great salad; “Too Weird?”
forms a rhetorical question. The leader writes of falling over laughing as he drank tea and listened to
the temperament of drummer Tomas Stronen’s previous works. Sometimes, it is highly transcendent;
sometimes, it is just music.
Organic & GM Food is Iain Ballamy’s version of irradiated jazz. Its greatest value is its
very existence and whatever strangeness that led to it. If you don’t like this kind of Food, you
can always order something else.
Visit www.ballamy.com.
~ Gregory J. Robb
