P.J.M. Bond - In Our Time (2023) Hi-Res

A decidedly ambitious project for his album debut, P.J.M. Bond has set out to produce a concept album based on the writings of Ernest Hemingway, on whom he wrote his thesis, with each of the songs titled after and a setting of extracts from vignettes and short stories taken from his 1927 collection. As such, it begins with the droning piano instrumental On the Quai at Smyrna, the title of a subsequently added 1930 short story set in Smyrna in 1922 and describing the evacuation during the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish War. Chapters from the story are interspersed throughout the accompanying booklet.

Featuring trumpet and Theo Sieben on banjo, mandolin, lap steel, and twelve-string and electric guitar, it goes back to 1927 for Indian Camp in which the semi-autobiographical Nick Adams, then a child, tells how his father, a country doctor, is summoned to a Native American camp to deliver a baby, an emergency caesarean with Nick as his assistant, the woman’s husband slitting his own throat during the operation, the story continuing on the piano-accompanied, whisperingly sung The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife, published in 1925 and the second to feature Adams and written as a counterpoint to the first, Bond introducing his own chorus (“Oh, release me from my pledge, I’m standing on a ledge, and I’m doing the best I can/Oh, the shotgun in my hands, I let the screen door slam to my wife, the doctor’s wife”) into the narrative.

Saartje van Camp provides singing saw and cello on both, set in the lumber town of Horton’s Bay, a third Adams story, The End of Everything, was published the same year, the relatively lively setting here featuring fiddle and dappled banjo. That’s followed by the fourth, The Three-Day Blow, Nick and his friend Bill get drunk in the latter’s father’s cabin after Nick’s girlfriend breaks up with him, something he refuses to admit. And so it proceeds, through a further twelve numbers, three more of which involve Adams, the sawing fiddle, jaw harp tribal percussive beat The Battler, the sprightly Cross-Country Snow (which features crunching snow steps recorded in Norway to capture the Swiss setting) and, suggesting early James Taylor, the musically contrastive two-part Big Two-Hearted River in which he’s the sole protagonist.

Then there’s the fingerpicked folks blues A Soldier’s Story about a man suffering depression after returning from WWI; The Revolutionist in which a young Hungarian Magyar communist revolutionary fleeing the White Terror to Italy and visits various museums, though featured here as a piano and string instrumental; Mr and Mrs Elliot, a falsetto piano waltz, in which a Harvard student marries an older woman and they try for a baby, becoming disenchanted with each other and the wife’s girlfriend moving in with her; the watery fingerpicked Out Of Season evoking Nick Drake and Paul Simon where a young expatriate couple in Italy hire a drunken local as their guide on an illegal fishing expedition; vocally treated, jazz junk morality meditation My Old Man, the story of a steeplechaser narrated by his son; the lilting piano arranged A Very Short Story about a doomed romance between soldier and nurse in Padua based on his own affair in Milan; and, another set in Italy, Cat In The Rain, with Reyer Zwart on upright bass, about a vacationing American couple written as a tribute to his wife and involving rain-sodden moggie.

The remaining number and the concluding entry in the collection, L’Envoi, in which the narrator and his wife are both restricted to the palace grounds, visited by the King of Greece, is again played out as a piano instrumental with a wind effects backdrop. Glowingly acclaimed by a highly respected Hemingway scholar, it fully deserves to reap the same rewards from music critics and audiences.