The bass speaks – 193CD (2025), Uroboro (Discus Music)
The poet and jazz musician Keith Jafrate is a prolific creator: he has books to his name going back to the 1980s (one that often gets a mention is Songs for Eurydice from 2004). He has also created and appeared on numerous albums. In recent years, he’s been part of Matt Webster’s Signia Alpha, alongside poet Nick Toczek.
Uroboro is Italian for Ouroboros, the Greek symbol that depicts a snake devouring its own tail. The band started life as a trio, brought together by Jafrate to play his own compositions, comprising of himself plus Anton and Johnny Hunter, who he met through the Noise Upstairs, a monthly improvisation event held at the Golden Lion in Todmorden. As time went on, it expanded into the larger collective enterprise we see here. the bass speaks is the second album they’ve made to be released by Discus Music (you can buy them both together as a bundle).
the bass speaks started life as a series of poems, written in response to a humorous suggestion by Uroboro’s bass player, John Pope. As Jafrate says, he ‘suggested … that i should write a pamphlet entitled how to write a bassline, because he liked playing the basslines i’d written. i thought that was a lovely thing to say, even though it was tongue-in-cheek, and we all laughed about it and moved on. but the idea stuck in my mind, and i began writing poems that addressed it, though not in any practical way…..’
The initial idea might’ve been tongue-in-cheek, but the end result was a sequence of thirty-seven serious – though playful – poems entitled the bass speaks or how to write a bassline. It led to Jafrate composing a suite incorporating four of the poems (although the album comes with a copy of the whole sequence – it’s an album and a poetry book in one). As he says in his notes on the album: ‘all the poems are music. i see no separation between the two media, never have.’ And indeed, immersing yourself in the poetry and the music, it’s hard even to tell where the two end and the world itself begins: he talks, for example, of ‘the green oak’s improv’, trees reaching for the light the way an improvising musician reaches for the next thing to do. Throughout both the poems and the music, you get the feeling that everything is interconnected and may indeed be only one thing: I could say that the words and the music move through time as a river flows to the sea, but to connect them with a simile – or metaphor, for that matter – feels inadequate (rivers are frequently referenced in these poems). As he says, in one of the poems, ‘I sound the roar of presence’. And the ‘roar of presence’ is everything. We live in ‘the wide land of the embodied song’, in which ‘ the shape of melody’ and ‘the melody of shape’ are one and the same thing. And as for how we fit into it all, as he says: ‘i dreamt my body was itself a dream’ (an idea which connects, in a way, with the name of the band). His vision, however is not passive. As he says:
we will make change
as certain as the slender ready yellow-dipped yellow-tipped
missiles of the daffodil will burst’
[poem 35]
Reading that, and not for the first or only time while reading the sequence, I found myself thinking of Dylan Thomas. (If only he’d been a jazz musician. He did inspire an album by the Stan Tracey Quartet, but that’s another story). And on the subject of resonances with other artists, you could say Jafrate looks to inner space the way Sun Ra looked to outer space. To borrow a line from Sun Ra, space, in both cases, is the place.
The music itself lives up to the promise of the poetry. Jafrate’s compositions, as performed by Uroboro, pull off the trick of sounding mellow and serious at the same time (it might help explain what I mean when I say Silvie Rose’s vocals in the third track immediate set me thinking of the Vienna Art Orchestra. Elsewhere there are echoes of Bjork). The tracks tend to be long – they’re all over ten minutes – as this is music that takes time to grow and develop in a way that’s always absorbing. You could use it merely as a soundtrack for the coming summer if you want, but, to do it justice, you’ll also want to immerse yourself in it, free of distractions.
Interestingly, the bass itself isn’t given the sort of prominence in the music the album title might lead one to expect. As Jafrate says, ‘only after we’d finished recording did it occur to me that at no point in the compositions had i left space specifically for a bass solo! but the suite is not about the bass in that sense, instead it tries to show how the bass … leads not by being in the foreground but by making a path for the whole ensemble to follow, by making a craft for the whole ensemble to sail in.’ Nevertheless, John Pope gets to play some great duet passages with Sylvie Rose’s flute and Faith Brackenbury’s violin. The bass plays a prominent role, too, at the beginning of track 5, ‘I can do no wrong’, which builds up into an absorbing, slow-moving counterpoint involving voices, sax and arco bass with the piano weaving figures in and out of the legato lines (the slow release, contrapuntal climax is a common strategy on this album and it works every time).
the bass speaks is an enchanting album. It’s not only well worth a listen, it’s also well worth buying as, as I said, it comes with the poetry that led to its making. In addition, it comes with the mandala-like images created by Luca Jafrate that go so well with the poems used on the album.
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Dominic Rivron
LINKS
the bass speaks: https://discusmusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-bass-speaks-193cd-2025
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