With his fourth album, Calamities of Silence, Oakland-based guitarist and composer Ryan Pate has created a series of striking soundscapes inspired by writers and thinkers who’ve grappled deeply with the existential human dilemma. The texts serve as a heady launching pad for a suite that’s sonically expansive and emotionally inquisitive, encompassing lushly orchestrated ambiance, beautifully calibrated melodic passages, and stark meditations. Featuring drummer Devin Gray, pianist Omree Gal-Oz, Pate on electric guitar and occasional piano, synths, and percussion, and Aaron Kruziki on bass clarinets, alto sax, flutes, and accordion, Calamities of Silence opens a fascinating new chapter for Pate, introducing a compositional vision that draws equally from post-bop idioms and contemporary classical music. .
Calamities of Silence expands on the cinematic sensibility Pate introduced on Human/Alien. With an intricately constructed lattice of melodic themes and harmonic movement the four-part suite is a seamless combination of ensemble improvisation and Pate’s composition, arrangement and post-production sound design. The project is both a response to and sonic mulling of themes that feel particularly resonant in a time of conflict and historical accounting. “The impetus came from some authors I’ve been reading, particularly Albert Camus and James Baldwin,” Pate says. “I’ve also been listening to a lot of contemporary classical music focusing on texture and color.”
The album opens with the title track, a spacious, elemental sojourn built around the contrasting cadences of Kruziki’s rumbling bass clarinet and Pate’s shimmering synth textures and celestial piano plinks. The piece introduces a plaintive theme that reoccurs later in the suite, evoking the insistent voice of the overlooked and oppressed. In many ways the album’s centerpiece is the second movement, “Between Indifferent Skies,” which picks up where “Calamities” leaves off. Using three primary voices—alto sax, guitar and drums—the almost 14-minute piece ebbs and flows with its own emotional logic, gathering in thick sonic swirls. The lapidary orchestration builds up from the ensemble, as Pate added counter lines, melodic fragments and chiming textural elements to craft a spacious musical conversation. The title is drawn from a book of short stories by Camus. “His view is that the universe is pretty indifferent,” Pate says. “You have to find your own meaning.”
In many ways the album’s first half keys on the close creative bond between Pate and Kruziki. While Pate shaped the suite’s sound design in painstaking post-production, he was determined to leave plenty of space for Kruziki to explore. “I’d write a graphic score for the flute with dots or lines,” he says. “I wanted a lot of spontaneity and the spirit of jazz and improvised music, and I can’t imagine any other musician coming in like Aaron did. I was able to pick and choose his spontaneous notes, layering that on top of something I improvised.”
After the intricate overdubs of “Indifferent Skies,” Pate recalibrates the suite again with the delicately filigreed solo guitar movement, “Mirrors of Disquiet.” While spontaneously composed in the studio (i.e. improvised), the piece offers an impressionistic recapitulation of themes introduced in the two previous pieces. The album closes with “Love in Animosity,” a study in calm, self-possessed resistance. With his warm, sinuous, single-note guitar line weaving through Kruziki’s woody bass clarinet in the opening passage, the piece takes on a glint of beaming sunlight with Gal-Oz’s thoughtful piano, a luminous quality enhanced by Kruziki’s buoyant flute. Concluding with a resolute sigh, the suite embraces both sadness and anger, “an arc of turbulence,” Pate says. “The conclusion was inspired by James Baldwin’s work, which contains a lot of righteous anger, and a lot of love and purpose expressed with an intensely intelligent voice.”
In many ways Calamities of Silence reflects Pate’s wide open aesthetic. Responding to the historical reckoning underway in the nation, he gathered a cast of inspired collaborators who brought to the project deep sympathies as well as abundant musical gifts. “During this period of global humanistic struggles, Ryan offers the world his positive understanding of sound through his brilliant musical mind,” says drummer Devin Gray, an invaluable rhythmic partner for a wide spectrum of leading New York improvisers. “His compositions create modern melodic Americana atmospheric musical landscapes like no one else has done before in this way.”
credits
released October 9, 2020
Ryan Pate - electric and acoustic guitars, piano, synths, percussion, voice, audio production.
Aaron Kruziki - alto saxophone, bass clarinets, flutes, accordion.
Devin Gray - drums (2)
Omree Gal-Oz - Piano (4)
Composed and produced by Ryan Pate
Recorded by Ryan Pate and Aaron Kruziki (1,2,3,4) and Myles Boisen (2)
Mastered by Nahuel Bronzini
Design by Ian Carey and Ryan Pate
The new album from Israeli-born and NY-based guitarist Gilad Hekselman centers on playing that is both melodic and percussive. Bandcamp New & Notable May 14, 2022
