On April 7 came word that music producer Hal Willner, whom she describes as "one of my mentors," had succumbed to COVID-19. Yet the darkness outside kept infringing.
Over the course of the pandemic's first few destabilizing weeks, Wasser listened to the session's tapes, sifting and organizing their sounds and stretches, getting lost and found in the music. The spring 2020 tour that her band Joan as Police Woman had scheduled to promote a new album was canceled, and she holed up in her Brooklyn apartment, locked down like the rest of us. When Wasser finally put Allen and Okumu in a cab afterwards, she thought to herself, "One day I will make a record, or something, with this."Ī few months later, she found herself with all the time in the world to figure it out.
Okumu would describe the session as "a kind of reverie, intimate and profound," and you can hear it in the deep crevices of the tapes, where a between-song interlude captures the gregarious Wasser joking about turning this one-time engagement into a weekly gathering: The men's laughter in response sounds uninhibited, full-bodied, like spiritual comfort as a creative mood. In their improvising, three sets of cultural references - Allen with his unique take on West African rhythm, Wasser the prodigious songwriter sketching soulful rock-pop impressions, Okumu's melting-pot London studio acumen fueling and midwifing their shared pluralism - overlapped, synthesizing a fusion-like global funk. The trio played for several hours without stopping, broke for dinner, then came back for more. "All of a sudden, we were floating," Wasser would later tell me on a sun-splashed October afternoon in the backyard of a Brooklyn restaurant, a smile dawning on her face.
When the drummer restarted, the other two wandered into his watery rhythm, and fit right in. "Is that OK with you?" Allen assented, and the three gathered in a close circle to play - Okumu on bass to Allen's right, separated by a small partition to minimize bleed, and Wasser on keys facing Okumu. Wasser, who had organized the session, answered: "We're not using a click." Her hope, she explained, was to create a less regimented, more imaginative and free-flowing recording atmosphere, without any unneeded technological stress, even if it meant forgoing the metronome track musicians use in the studio to stay in time. Allen put on headphones and immediately played one of his signature drum fills, the kind that effortlessly evokes both an accidental stumble and a brilliant equation. He strolled past his playing partners for the night, Joan Wasser and Dave Okumu, and headed directly for a drum kit already set up to his specs by the engineers the man Brian Eno once called "the world's greatest drummer" was not a stranger to the space. Tony Allen was the last musician to arrive at Midilive Studios, in the Parisian suburb of Villetaneuse, early on the evening of Nov. Her latest album, The Solution Is Restless, began as a marathon jam with Afrobeat innovator Tony Allen. Joan Wasser turned a prolific session-player career into her own band, Joan as Police Woman.
0 kommentar(er)
