A Humble Review of the E.C.F.A. quartet's Die Mitte aus der Welt
By Kerim Peirce, public admirer
Carl Smith will eat anything (a trait held over from his homeless days): substandard meat, pasteurized-process cheese food, grape drink, even insects. But he rarely drinks or smokes, in fear for his fragile lungs and liver. In fact, he may even browbeat other horn players for doing so. The hypothesis, which this reviewer is getting at, is that Mr. Smith's strong-flowing stomach chi may be at the root of his beefy but lilting tenor sax sound.
Within the evolving incarnations of the Emanation, Creation, Formation, Action jazztet, Holland Hopson is jocular sidekick to Smith's brooding iconoclast, with Alexander providing dramatic suspense and Friedrich as tasteful gondolier. Mr. Smith makes no pretense; indeed, the man cannot lie.
He speaks his complex, precision-engineered harmonic dialect to us as if we are historians of the Germanic tradition -- from Bach to Brotzmann -- and in so doing, makes us so. Indeed, Hopson writes a tune for Lacy as channeled through Shoenberg (cut #5), and Selbstverwaltung (#6) is like swinging Webern. That you Frenchies would put out such a record serves as a beautiful testament to the new collectivist culture of the European Union.
Listen to the record, will you? I don't know what the title means, either. Why are the songs written for others? Because these musicians seem to think they owe their peers and predecessors some credit for their art (a ridiculous idea, I agree). But my protestations, such as the one where I beseech Smith to invite listeners in a bit less frostily by naming his albums and tunes in a language slightly less inscrutable than his beloved German (pages of verb conjugations lie amongst the charts on his music stand, and he has given saxophone lessons to a German matron in exchange for tutelage in her native tongue), fall upon deaf ears.
The pacing of the record is top notch: bursts of swing follow passages of long-coat tailed counterpoint and are then calmed by poignant balladry. In a fitting coda, Coke's tune loosens Smith up with an Ornettelike head, then turns the tenor men loose over Friedrich's hot-tempered swing to quite satisfying ends. After a rhythmic interlude, Smith takes a solo turn. Here we see Carl Smith with his necktie loosened, as he sounds in person, in a littlish room, with people sitting in chairs and leaning against the walls, their mouths open, and their heads bobbing a little, or a lot.