(Press release)
Following on the heels of Animation’s
2010 RareNoise debut, Asiento (the
group’s live take on Miles Davis’ 1970 fusion landmark, Bitches Brew), and 2011’s Agemo (a radical remix of the six tracks
from Asiento utilizing the new 3D60
surround sound technology), saxophonist-composer-bandleader Bob Belden tells
his own story on Transparent Heart.
With his new Animation lineup consisting of young students he recruited from
his own alma mater, the University of North Texas (23-year-old keyboardist Roberto Verastegui, 24-year-old bassist Jacob Smith,
32-year-old trumpeter Pete Clagett and 19-year-old drummer Matt Young), Belden
unveils a dark narrative of Manhattan as seen through the musical diary he has
composed over 29 years of living in the Big Apple.
An
imposing electronic noir masterwork, Transparent
Heart travels from Belden’s initial awestruck impressions of New York City
(“Terra Icognitio”) to his feelings of foreboding (“Urbanoia”) and hope (“Cry
in the Wind”) as a city dweller on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, to the
pervasive angst of post-9/11 Manhattan (“Seven Towers,” “Provocaterrorism”). He
also addresses the mass exodus of artists from the city (“Vanishment”) and
concludes his musical memoir with the clash of the social classes manifested in
the Occupy Wall Street movement (“Occupy!”). Drawing on elements of electronica
and the prevailing influence of Miles Davis’ turbulent post-Bitches Brew electric phase, Belden has
concocted a powerful, provocative suite of music that is charged by the
intensely driving, highly intuitive playing of his energetic young Animation
bandmates.
“This record is not a jazz
record, it’s about my life in Manhattan,” says the Grammy Award-winning
composer-arranger-producer. “And things have been very tense here since 9/11.
In essence, the music on Transparent
Heart is a reflection of that, and not of jazz tradition or jazz history.
So what you have here is a way of looking at Manhattan through music.”
Belden explains that the concept for Transparent Heart has been in the making
for more than 30 years. “My first trip to Manhattan came in 1979 when I was
with Woody Herman’s band. I’ll never forget seeing all the tall buildings and
how they created a canyon effect. That’s ‘Terra Incognito.’ Then after moving
here in 1984, I lived in a hardcore neighborhood where you look out your window
every day and you see somebody selling a piece of clothing that they stole to
buy a rock of crack, you see women prostituting themselves or children selling
drugs on the street because their mommy and daddy need the money to buy crack.
And you hear about people getting stabbed and killed in your neighborhood all
the time. That’s ‘Urbanoia.’”
“Cry in the Wind,” with Clagett’s
muted trumpet carrying the melancholy theme, comes directly from another
personal experience. “One night I was sitting at home – my studio apartment was
on the ground floor of the building I lived in – and I heard the voice of a
woman crying for help. So I took my phone out there, saw this woman who had
apparently just been stabbed, and called 911. I asked her, ‘Can I help you?’
and she reached up and grabbed my hand and wasn’t going to let go until the
ambulance got there. I was able to help this woman live because I cared. So
this tune is about hearing the cries in the wind that you hear all the time in
the city. There’s always somebody here in desperate need of help. And you can
hear that extreme sense of loneliness and helplessness in this song.”
The darkly propulsive title track
echoes the hard-hitting production that Bill Laswell brought to Herbie
Hancock’s 1983 hit single “Rock It.” As the native of Goose Creek, South
Carolina recalls, “When I moved to New York City, I was totally into Laswell
and was experimenting with multiple drum machines and making demos that were
using that robotic kind of drum sound. And nobody in jazz dug it at all. They
hated Laswell, they hated ‘Rock-It,’ so they thought I was an idiot. Over time
I reshaped the underpinning of the song. I recorded it with Joe Chambers a year
and a half later, then we recorded it in 2000 with Tim Hagans and now we just
recorded it again with this edition of Animation.”
“Seven Towers” is Belden’s reaction
to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. But as he points out, “9/11
wasn’t just about the Twin Towers, there were seven towers there that were
affected. And this tune recreates my own timeline of 9/11, from the time I was
first aware of it to the time when the second plane hit the South Tower. I was
there. I watched it happen downtown and have video footage that I shot. So in a
sense, it’s a real personal, autobiographical piece. It starts with the NORAD
radio broadcast, where they’re trying to determine what that object is in the
air. They call the Pentagon to find out, and it turns out that it’s an airplane
that has struck the North Tower. And you hear the NYPD and NYFD respond. It’s
very haunting.”
“Provocaterrorism” deals with the
immediate aftermath of 9/11. “A lot of the small businesses that were so
dependent on the whole World Trade Center complex just died after the terrorist
attack. It was the beginning of a Darwinian approach to economic survivability
in Manhattan. And ‘Vanishment’ refers to the exodus of artists and musicians
who couldn’t afford to live there anymore to a point where the localized
creative culture in Manhattan is gone now. There are people now who work here
in the clubs but who don’t live here. And you have this influx of college
students who have no real attachment to the city. So suddenly, the Manhattan of
post-9/11 is very different from the Manhattan that existed when I moved here
in 1984.”
The final track, “Occupy!,” is the
most intense and harrowing of Belden’s musical memoir. His turbulent ode to the
Occupy Wall Street movement is imbued with the sounds of screams and violence
in the streets during clashes between protesters and police. “All the crazy
social engineering and social displacement in Manhattan is summed up in the
occupy movement,” he explains. “These are people who are angry and frustrated
and they have nowhere else to address their grievances, so they take to the
streets. They are essentially declaring war on Manhattan. And the other occupy
movements in other cities are declaring war on Manhattan in absentia.”
For Belden, Transparent Heart is his method of using music as a tool to get
people to think about social issues. “Why can’t music be returned to its place
as a social engineer or a reflection of society that might provoke thought?
That’s in the great tradition of Wagner, Debussy, Satie, Copland. Stravinsky
was a provocateur. Shostakovich is my role model for this because he was able
to put into music the terror of the Soviet empire. That’s where I’m coming
from. This record is not about tunes and solos and arrangements, it’s a way of
telling a story that has something to do with my life.”
Adds the acclaimed producer, “What I
learned from doing Miles From India
(2008) and Miles Español (2011) is
that I’m not Indian and I’m not Spanish. And I can’t tell Miles’ story anymore.
With Black Dahlia (2001) I was telling
Elizabeth Short’s story. Transparent
Heart is my story.”
Animation will be returning to the UK
in late September to play more live
dates, they recently played various shows in London,
where they received critical praise from both the media and public. .
This included an “Ambisonic” presentation, which will be repeated again. The
UK’s leading Jazz magazine, Jazzwise stated that the “Ambisonic live
experience is a taste of things to come
in the live jazz arena as the sound of Belden’s sax, keyboards or spoken word
samples were pinged around the eight specially positioned speakers that
surrounded the audience.”
Transparent Heart new studio album released September 25th.
www.rarenoiserecords.com
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