On New Tones home-made Detroit electronics and huge horn sections blast big band funk and riotous jazz. NOMO's roots are firmly planted in the fertile soil of African polyrhythm and American free jazz, and bandleader Elliot Bergman's tracks draw inspiration from cultures and generations wildly different than his home setting. In many ways (at least geographically and sonically) NOMO are a distant relative of the TRIBE collective. Undoubtedly they carry the spirit of the legendary Detroit-label's creative output.
Nomo
New Tones
[Ubiquity; 2006]
Rating: 8.4
Nomo's eponymous debut was one of last year's more pleasant surprises. The Michigan group's Afrobeat-inspired big-band jazz offered plenty of thrills, though its unique identity was still emerging. On New Tones, they've taken that basic blueprint and transformed it into a sound that's more their own, incorporating home-made instruments, a harder, funkier rhythmic attack, and a healthy Congotronics influence. His Name Is Alive's Warn Defever is back in the producer's chair, and the groove this time around is several fathoms deeper than it was the first time.
As he began writing and arranging these tracks last year, Nomo leader Elliot Bergman obviously absorbed the ragged electro-trance music of Konono No. 1 and the other Kinshasa groups brought to light by Crammed Discs, and his latest tracks incorporate things like "electric sawblade gamelan" and "nu-tone symbals." The album kicks off with a spluttering electric thumb piano riff, quickly joined by staccato blasts from the horn section. As the pieces fall into place, the song gets more crazily awesome by leaps and bounds. When the processed bass and drum kit drop in together under the horns, the whole thing just blasts off, and every note being played by the dozen-plus lineup feels like it's serving the greater good.
Skipping around the album, it's almost impossible not to find a killer rhythm track butting heads with thundering brass. "One to One" rides a nasty polyrhythm, laying a swaying 6/8 rhythm against a 4/4 stomp to create an unstoppable groove. You could stick with that charged sway for half an album and not get tired of it, but Nomo moves on after five minutes into the Fela-inspired "If You Want", balancing crunching horns with peaceful passages dominated by Rhodes piano and flute. The relative brevity of these pieces-- they range from eight minutes to just three-- is a strength in that it gives you exactly what you need from each composition. Hard-hitting heads, controlled breakdowns, tight solos and sharp attention to detail keep these songs fresh, and they're not allowed to overstay their welcome.
So in just three minutes, "Fourth Ward" takes you on a crazed exotica odyssey, brittle horns floating in the spacious production over Afro-Cuban rhythms in a texture that shoots Duke Ellington's Cotton Club-era jungle music into the 21st century. Sax and ring-modulated synth tangle in the open rhythms of "We Do We Go", with the sax frequently sounding more otherwordly than the synth, while the bassline of "Hand and Mouth" threatens to swallow the rest of the song. Their cover of Joanna Newsom's "Book of Right On", meanwhile, echoes the early-70s free funk of Donald Byrd and Luther Thomas.
As the album simmers to a close with the majestic horns and clanking metal percussion of the slow-burning "Sarvodaya", the sense of having taken a journey is palpable (heck, that song alone is quite a trip). Bergman has taken Nomo well to the next level on its sophomore effort, forging a clattering, vital sound that bridges styles and decades with ease.
-Joe Tangari, May 31, 2006
Review by Thom Jurek
The distorted thumb piano and handclap rhythms that introduce the title track of NOMO's second full-length (and its debut for Ubiquity), are jarring; they're instantly foreign and sharp, and lay out a different world of groove before those enormous horns -- the band's trademark -- electric bass, guitar, keyboards, and drum kit kick in full bore. When they do, it's off on an adventure that welds spiritual jazz, Afro-funk, old-school soul jazz, and a healthy sense of child's play tightly together. Here, electronics and dub make their appearances as sub-languages, but the drive train, the M.O., is rhythm wound upon more rhythm, coiled around still more. Elliot Bergman, the band's composer, arranger, and saxophonist, and producer Warn Defever, pay close attention to space, texture, pace, and dimension. The next cut, "Hand to Mouth" takes it all further. The sound of a Rhodes, a harp, slippery bright guitars, and punch-drunk horns all turning on a dime suggest Fela playing with Alice Coltrane and Roy Ayers in the JB's, in the wild and delightful complexity of this monster. Bergman's charts are quirky, but they're killer. On "Fourth Ward," it's as if the serial toughness and attack of Banda Black met Sun Ra's sense of humor and punchy swing, with a knotty, polyrhythmic pattern driving the whole thing, and yeah, it does wear its debt to Nigerian innovation on its sleeve. But it's not just the music that makes New Tones so startling and such a compulsive listen. Bergman and Warn Defever use production techniques to warm or accent the many blunt edges and loose wires of sound compacted and expanded on the album; spacey fades, treble wipe-out and in-the-red levels are common but are employed in unexpected ways and off locations in a given tune's structure. The multivalent melodic layers in "Reasons" showcase Bergman's keyboard playing. He makes his synth sound like a Wurlitzer and the Coltrane nod is obvious. But those interspersed lines, as wooly as they are, lie at the bottom. The horn section creates two more melodic lines that criss-cross, and Erik Hall's guitar acts like a second bass, keeping a pronounced lyric groove during the tenor solo. All these harmonic threads cut and weave: the in-and-out presences, the spectral trances of reverb and tonal juxtapositions as they bounce on the blanket of polyrhythms at the track's core, dictate not only pace and groove, but attack. The spiritual center of this music can be felt on virtually every track, though the grooves are so circular and infectious, it's tempting to simply focus on their endless renewal. The other aspect of New Tones is its willful but unpretentious exoticism. Given how deep-rooted it all is, it can be easy to overlook -- and under-hear -- all the subtle processes at work. Bergman's compositional sense of dynamic is finely tuned. He understands the tension at the heart of great jazz, and he knows just how far a particular motif can be stretched before it breaks. At the point where everything begins to converge, he introduces new ideas, never letting the old ones disappear completely; with a wry sense of humor and a keen ear he allows them just enough of a spectral trace so the listener does not get lost. The reverb and razor wire wah wah guitar chord riff that introduces the "We Do We Go" is heightened by dubby bass and synth lines that echo -- in spirit if not in actuality -- "Get Up Stand Up" by Bob Marley. It's all snaky, the keyboard moves like a Loa, floating but never coming to rest with a sense of spiritual ebb and flow. The tenor solo in the middle merely creates another labyrinth to follow into the rabbit hole. As a changeup, NOMO cover Joanna Newsom's "Book of Right On." It's spooky and nocturnal, yet it feels like a love song bubbling up from the cinematic underworld Jean Cocteau's had Orpheus hear on his car radio. The arrangement is sophisticated musically, but it's the truly gorgeous weave of sounds that Defever and Bergman frame the tune inside. It feels like Les Baxter's adventurous sense of perversity dancing with the elegance of Ellingtonia on a carpet of dreams and visions. The closer, "Sarvodaya," is named for the well-known Sri Lankan charity organization. It features a group chant, singing with loving kindness under the bells, cymbals, handclaps, and gamelan sounds. There is no funk here, though it is rhythmically contagious in its own quiet way. It is a prayer for wellness, compassion, and tranquility; for the needs of all to be met. One can almost hear the celestial ghost voices of John Coltrane and Don Cherry singing in the choir -- so to speak -- as the mantra winds and goes, goes, goes, into the heart's center. "Sarvodaya," is a nakedly spiritual cut that adds depth, balance, and dimension, a different kind of pleasure on New Tones, a set is that invites us all into the garden of ass-shaking delights.
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