334: Cool Spring, by David Rothenberg, Bernhard Wöstheinrich and Jay Nicholas

David Rothenberg, Bernhard Wöstheinrich and Jay Nicholas (USA/Germany)
Cool Spring (2016)
5 tracks, 51 minutes
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David Rothenberg’s music challenges the accepted – or, rather, assumed – definitions of what music is or can be. In fact, he goes further and adds questions about who or what musicians are or can be. Big themes, then. You can see why Rothenberg is not just an accomplished musician but a professor of philosophy at New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Using his clarinets, a sharp mind for jazz and improvisatory music and, most importantly, an attentive and unfaltering ear, Rothenberg has plumbed new depths in research into non-human music. Over the past 15 years, he has released books, films, articles and albums about the music inherent in the lives of insects, marine mammals and birds, including creating majesterial, uncanny and ultimately ephemeral collaborations between himself and the animals, performing together on equal footings. I have been lucky enough to witness several performances by Rothenberg; by far the most memorable have been several occasions, from late night to early morning, where he created stunning improvised music with nightingales in the parks of Berlin, some of which have been captured in the recent album Nightingale Cities and film Nightingales in Berlin.

That was somewhat of a diversion. In Cool Spring, Rothenberg’s collaborators are a pair of sapient hominids like himself, electronicist Bernhard Wöstheinrich and bassist Jay Nicholas. The music is deep and intense while still managing to be relaxing in its own way; it’s chill-out that relieves parts of your mind and fully engages others. It does this as a combination of ambience, free jazz, broken downtempo beats, avant-garde, environmental sounds, spacey electronica and even hints at styles as varied as dubstep, folksong, classical. It’s surely art music in every sense of the term.

But even though this album is inescapably humanly organised sound, Rothenberg’s adventures into the sonics and songs of the animal kingdom are all over it. The most direct evidence is in some of Wöstheinrich’s samples of birds and insects, but the way Rothenberg approaches the clarinet, in his phrasing and his melodiousness, the way his lines flit and flirt with each other, obeying their own rhythmic rules but never clashing with the rest of the created aural environment. The whole flow of the pieces on this album, the shapes they trace and the stories their developments tell, is impacted by the natural world around us.

In all of his work, with humans or other animals, David Rothenberg creates in harmony with the sounds of our living planet, rather than operating above it, and is always compelling while he does it, be it in the medium of music, film or words.