a series of intuitive paintings moving by

 

 

Wally Shoup is the point where sounds and pictures flash, where saxophone and quicksilver combine, where musician and painter meet, where heat and light meld and explode outward. He's a painter who portrays landscapes with a saxophone reed, a survivor who knows how to paint what he's seen. He's done more than just survive in the thirty-something years he's been playing music.

"Improvised music" of the sort which this record so brilliantly expounds might be spoken of as the sophisticated end product of a diverse delta of fluents and histories. Simply put, it's the music of Wally Shoup, Brent Arnold and Toshi Makihara, composed on the spot. Each of these men have distinguished histories in musical performance, but their art is to somehow forget all that and allow the moment to direct their actions. Out of that, this trio, as Shoup says, "seeks to intuit the music unique to that time and space and play it with emotional clarity-an ongoing goal of improvisation, to my mind."

Shoup has worked with both these musicians for some years now, Makihara appearing on Hurricane Floyd (recorded in September1999 with guitarist Thurston Moore); Arnold having been a part of Shoup's Project W since the mid-nineties. The choice of cello over contrabass should be a subtle tip-off to Shoup's vision for this trio. More than simple propulsion, in the cello, lyricism and anguish pour into each other, dripping with color. Makihara (who's apt to play a solo concert using no more than a snare drum) is concerned just as much with texture and framing a vignette as with driving the ensemble with rolls, rimshots, and bombs. Confluxuses is not about peeling the paint from the walls, it's about sound painting windows, windows on never-seen worlds, worlds that are nevertheless distinctly American in their borderlessness.

Secret Tear opens like something off Shoup's first record, Scree-Run Waltz. Now a 'collectible,' this 1981set of raw duos with percussionist Ross Rabin shows Shoup's early interest in sculpting noise using dilapidated electronics. On Tear, the interplay of cello and sax "feedback" makes an unmistakable electronic-sounding counterpoint, punctuated by Makihara's rattletraps. Then cellist Arnold breaks from the scrapey opening into a mellifluous romanza, aching with longing and loss.

In fact, romantic panoramas pass under the gallop of much of Shoup and company's music. Lend your ears to Fault Line-the scientific-sounding title notwithstanding, it's a stark Western novella set in a high desert somewhere, where cruel escarpments give up their jagged rule to the enduring, infinite flatness; an expanse that, upon closer reading, teems with tiny creatures.

Convergence for Three consists of a prelude, plunge, and tsunami. After a short discussion of terms, there occurs one of those ear-defying moments when an entire group en masse jumps off a cliff. Before they bottom out, Arnold begins strumming strings at tensely spaced intervals, propelling the music back up and outward. Shoup chorales over the top, building swooping arches, leaving vapor trails while Makihara steamrolls forward great engulfing waves of momentum. Then it washes over, leaving standing a single string-pluck-a tiny flag on an empty beach.

Con Fluxus nearly evaporates in the middle-the trio flicks nits of noise at each other over an ever-widening chasm; Shoup hops on a big black bird of notes and flaps out, unabashedly rhapsodic and yearning.

Like his visual art, Wally Shoup's music gathers a teeming clutch of abstract details and assembles them into something with a face on it-sad and funny, muscular yet vulnerable. He sings with a voice forthright and free of irony-something all too rare nowadays. We should bear witness to his humanity.

 

Tom Djll first met Wally Shoup in 1978. He lives in Oakland, California, where he plays trumpet and writes about music for The Wire, Signal to Noise, and other publications.