“Assembly Required” and “Americans” by Scott Johnson (Live at Roulette Intermedium)
Just minutes before show time, Scott Johnson wasn’t in a green room letting the anticipation build in the house for his big entrance onto the stage. He was in the audience tuning his guitar, hanging out with friends and family and enthusiastically welcoming any familiar faces still trickling into the venue. He began the show standing before the crowd of fifty or so in attendance and, without the help of a microphone, explained the back story and source of inspiration of the piece he was about to perform. This cozy, intimate air Scott had established with his pre-show antics extended into the performance of the first piece of the night, Assembly Required. The near complete lack of any amplification of the band made for an intimate listening experience that allowed the subtle quirks and nuances of each player’s technique to breathe life and charm into the music in a way that’s impossible to replicate at large venues.
The piece itself developed and expanded on recurring themes and motifs like classical chamber music might, while employing lush harmony you would expect to hear in a modal jazz composition. However, it also featured rude, heavy metal chugs played in unison by an unlikely combination of piano, cello, shamisen and chunky distorted guitar, and disorienting exercises in dissonance that often devolved into violent, cacophonous noisescapes. It certainly wasn’t classical music, however, to call it fusion or modern jazz would fail to paint the picture of how eclectic and adventurous it was. Like a lot of my favorite music tends to do, Assembly Required tastefully incorporated elements from a wide range of musics without being able to be pinned as being any one of them.
The second piece of the night entitled, Americans, was performed by an eight piece combo accompanied by recordings of meticulously edited vocal samples taken from interviews Scott conducted with several immigrants living in New York. This piece explores the hidden musicality that people naturally inject into the way that they speak, and features many painstakingly composed melodies, solis, drum fills, and extreme changes in dynamics that mimic the pitches and rhythms of the vocal samples they are accompanying to near perfection. Americans fit much more neatly into the idiom of fusion jazz than Assembly Required did, however, that’s not to say that this piece was any less inspired or interesting than it. The music featured screaming bass clarinet parts, burning tempos, heavy syncopation and menacing atonal harmony just as often as it collapsed into quiet, suspenseful rubato movements and even stretches of dead silence. What really surprised and impressed me about Americans, however, was how much of an impact the lyrics from the vocal samples had on me. The recordings of powerful, memory-soaked testimonies that several immigrants delivered in interviews with Scott were played during the soft rubato sections of the piece, and key phrases from those interviews became the vocals for the more intense sections. These chopped up phrases were played dozens, if not hundreds of times throughout the piece, however, I felt that the repetition was a powerful compositional device that helped to emphasize the most moving parts of the immigrants’ testimonies. I almost always focus my attention on the aesthetic quality and delivery of lyrics in music and refrain from trying to decipher what lyricists are writing about (to this day I still don’t know what most of my favorite songs are actually about), however, the complete lack of style or aesthetic in these vocals rendered my auto-pilot music digestion process useless and challenged me to find artistic merit in the story telling and sentimentality of the lyrics — a process that’s very alien to me. Of course, I’m just describing the subjective experience I had at the concert, and it’s entirely probable that Scott Johnson is completely unaware that his composition would ever affect someone the way it’s affected me, but music that takes risks and challenges people to amend their ideas on what music should be sometimes rewards open-minded listeners with new perspective or wisdom.
