look with thine ears
past concerts
météo, Mulhouse, FR | DOM, Moscow, (RUS) | NewAdits, Klagenfurt, AT | soliloquios, Porto, PT | Elastic, Chicago, IL (USA) | Casa del Popolo, Montreal (CA) | Jazz em Agosto, Lisbon (PT) | Chelsea Art Museum, NYC (USA) | ‘à l’improviste’ France Musique, Paris (F) | Institut Français, Berlin (DE) | Les Atelier Claus, Bruxelles (B) | Festival Bruisme, Poitiers (F) | WIM, Zürich (CH) | Dalet Art Gallery Philadelphia (USA) | ONMusik, Köln (DE) | Kongsberg Jazz Festival (NO) | soliloquios, Porto, (PT) | Jazzdor Strasbourg (F) | Jazz à Luz (F) | HetBos, Antwerp (B) | Blow Out! Oslo (NO) | Sound Disobedience, Ljubljana (SL)
CD liner notes
Pascal Niggenkemper has explored numerous paths of expression in the past five years, from his duo with fellow bassist Sean Ali and the co-led trio baloni to his sextet 'le 7ème continent,' his septet Vision 7 and a host of ensembles in between with such partners as Gerald Cleaver, Thomas Heberer, Cooper-Moore, Simon Nabatov, Tatsuya Nakatani, Eve Risser and Tyshawn Sorey. Look with thine ears is his first solo recording, and it's safe to say there has never been a recording quite like it. It builds on the range of Pascal's musical experiences and desires and channels his impulses through a prepared bass, expanding the instrument's sonic range and developing the manifold possibilities for multiple voices. That polyphonic notion is paramount: as he says, "I am trying to work with multiple layers which happen simultaneously in each piece."
Since 2009 Pascal has been interested in generating musical landscapes through preparation. In 2014 he played with Michaël Attias and Satoshi Takeishi in a production of Shakespeare's King Lear: "The play had a strong impact on me in terms of the language and the acting. I was excited to use all these new techniques in the play, expanding my knowledge and reflecting it for the first time with words and acting." A sense of psychic terrain is engrained in the present music, from Pascal's reflections on Lear and his experience of the sounds of the metropolis since moving to New York a few years ago to the immediate physicality of the bass itself, its surfaces and materials, its special and secret buzzes and resonances.
Preparation here emphasizes the bass as landscape. Even beyond extended techniques, Pascal seems to anatomize the bass, using stops to alter string lengths, developing a host of alterations that will make of each string a kind of individual instrument, and adding reactive and resonating materials to bring forth sudden simultaneous sounds of a different character from the instrument itself. Given the scale of the instrument and the nature of the changes, notes can arise at some distance from the usual sound holes, capturing other resonances, changing the instrument's characteristic sound shapes.
He atomizes the instrument as well, staring with his ear into its particulate matter, exaggerating the metal of the strings and tuning mechanism, the wood of the body, neck and bridge. String instruments are finished in a thin varnish to allow the wood to resonate. As they age, they open up, becoming more resonant. It's an interactive process. Pascal's expansive method gives voice not only to his own impulses, but the instrument's as well, freeing those inner, incidental sounds not in keeping with the master plan of classical decorum.
The king wanders in the city–blind, at first disconsolate, then opening– ever more alive to its mysteries in ways previously unknown, alive to the beauty and abstraction in the frictive air, even in the anxious anticipation brought on by knife-edged high frequencies. Even knowing it's a bass, we can only make more-or-less-educated guesses about the precise construction of the sounds, each of us assembling instead a sonic map of one's particular magic city. Thus, "This shall not be revoked" might be a decisive moment in a set list discussion between The Thing and Eddie "One String" Jones. Even "sharper than a serpent's tooth" is a grinding tool in an auto body shop or a dentist's drill heard by a tooth. "Unpublished virtues of the earth" might eulogize Scott LaFaro and Charlie Haden (gone 53 years apart) together inventing the future of the bass on Ornette's Free Jazz (augmented by some percussion and here a flash of sarangi).
Pascal is not just a topographer of an unknown city of sound, he's also a kind of one-man-band and something of a Frankenstein. There's a cajun/ calypso jam band loose on the joyous "Let me kiss your hand" (the same one that will next "Smell of mortality") and there's a newfound human presence in his bass, breathing in the circles of "Be this perpetual."
Pascal recalls, "Lear's phrase 'look with thine ears' grabbed my attention and I started to reflect on it: use the ears to understand people and the world. Using the visual sense, people are usually open and interested in experiences. It's such a beautiful sensation to listen to all sort of sounds and music, visualizing ideas of space with your ears." Stuart Broomer, January 2015