Chris Forbes - Blood River Shaman (2021)

Blood River Shaman

The roots of this particular trio run deep but Hill Mike and I never actually played all together until we were part of a quintet that Steve Swell assembled in the late 2000s. From the very firstwe felt a very strong connection. To me, playing with Hill is grounding. His sound and presenceis like a sequoia, deeply rooted and yet rising to the heavens. TA is oceanic, like the north shore of Oahu in the winter. His sound washes over you in waves. For me as a pianist, I feel like I float over the foundation that the two of them give me and it makes for a pretty titanic set each time we play. In fact the intensity of this set is pretty indicative of my music at the time, which I callmy “wild bear” period.
The music on this set was finally honed by several successive performances at I-Beam Brooklyn. It was part of an evening of the Kettle Collective, a group I was a member of at the time. We had been performing most of the tunes since out first gig in 2011 and they were
reaching a really high state. Blood River Shaman was written specifically with this group in mind. It is an example of one of my “sketch” tunes, in which two contrasting gesture are notated but not in any final form. The succeeding twenty minutes explores the tension between the
aggressive first gesture and the more lyrical second gesture. Though there are elements of traditional solos, the piece exemplifies our trio concept, which is of a three way conversation throughout rather than solo and accompaniment.
In the performance Open the Gates, Papa flowed directly from Blood River. This was a new “tune” for the night. It was based on the “all interval” set from Eliot Carter’s Piano Concerto butmarried to a Haitian Rara rhythm. The performance stays at a slow burn until the rev up at the
end which explodes into silence.
Out of that silence comes a monumental Hill Greene bass solo which sets up A-Wa-Re, a tune I had originally written for a band with Matt Lavelle and Wil Connell and which also appears on the first Zone album. Based on a synthetic scale derived from the two chords of the solos, the
tune has a Japanese feel to it and was named after the ink painting term A-wa-re, which means the sense of loneliness you find in an autumn landscape. The Morning of the World is our standard encore and the roots of this sketch go back to the 1990s. I had reread Messiaen’s Technique of My Musical Language and while experimenting
with his concept of added resonance I discovered that I could make my piano sound like it was a Javanese gamelan, especially if I played melodies in one of the traditional Indonesian scales. This tune uses a modified version of the pelog scale which is exposed in a gentle manner and then continues to double up in rhythm. There is a long middle section that takes the piece out and builds up tension until the main pelog passage returns again and the piece winds down to a gentle conclusion. This whole recording represents this trio at the height of its powers and I couldn’t be prouder of it. It rounds out the portrait of me as an artist that Unseen Rain has presented - lyrical soloist, lover of standards, and avant-garist. I was grateful to Scott Friedlander for capturing that night and to Larry Hutter for mastering it so well. I am especially grateful to Jack De Salvo for putting the record out. Most of all Im grateful to Hill and Mike for their friendship and impeccable musicianship. More to come! – Chris Forbes

Blood River Shaman features leader Chris Forbes' prodigious pianisms and compositions. His trio includes legendary double-bassist Hilliard Greene and spectacular drummer Michael TA Thompson. Though regarded as a singular improviser and a pianist with an approach that is so original as to be paradigmatic and capable of improvising an entire solo album (Mountain Ocean Mirror Sky, UR9911), leading a trio playing themed standards (Film Noir, UR9897) he is also a formidable composer. All of these gifts are evident on Blood River Shaman. His bandmates are exemplary in this remarkable live recording at Brooklyn's iBeam.