Music Lab – Stanley Schumacher and the Music Now Ensemble

A professor walks into a album studio. This is not the beginning of a joke, exactly, though Stanley Schumacher clearly wants you to wonder.

The conceit driving Music Lab — his second outing with the Music Now Ensemble, following the puckish Way Cool — is that we are attending a series of lectures delivered by one Professor Musikmacher, a fictional pedant whose classroom happens to be an experimental sound laboratory in Berlin, or possibly a parody of one. I confess I approached this premise with the wariness of a man who has sat through too many artist statements explaining why the silence matters more than the notes. But Schumacher, bless him, is having fun. And more importantly, so is his ensemble.

Start with “Bone Moan,” four minutes and twenty seconds of trombone writing that had me thinking less of Xenakis than of two elderly men arguing at a lunch counter — the two trombonists of the Music Now Ensemble trade smears and glissandi with a vocal, almost operatic sense of inflection, closer to Sprechstimme than to anything in the Kai Winding tradition. It’s a bit of shtick, sure. But the players commit to the shtick with the seriousness of chamber musicians tackling late Beethoven, and that commitment is what saves the whole enterprise from novelty-act territory.

“What’s In A Name” is the disc’s thesis statement, for better or worse — an extended taxonomy of genre labels recited over a shifting bed of improvised texture, Folktronica bumping up against Turntableism bumping up against terms I’d wager even Alex Ross would have to look up. It’s funny the first time. By the third listen the joke wears thin, though the underlying provocation does not: what exactly do we mean anymore when we say “classical music”? Schumacher clearly thinks the category has collapsed under its own weight, and he’s not wrong. I’d have trimmed ninety seconds off this track, but I understand why he didn’t.

The stronger material lives in the pieces that stop talking about music and just make it. “Noir,” at over seven minutes the disc’s most fully realized statement, unfolds like a film score for a movie that was never shot — string bass walking in shadow, horns entering like headlights sweeping across a wet street. There’s a genuine sense of harmonic patience here, tension held rather than resolved, that recalls (distantly, and I mean this as praise) the atmosphere Gil Evans could conjure with minimal means. “B Movie,” the longest track at eight minutes, tries something similar and only partly succeeds; it meanders in its middle third before the ensemble finds its footing again in a closing passage of real menace.

“Mouth Sounds” and “Ear Training” are, I suspect, the professor’s most direct pedagogical jokes — the former built from vocalized noise, breath, click and hum, the latter a kind of ear-training exercise gone feral, intervals thrown at the listener like chalk erasers. Neither quite justifies its length. “Performin’ Artiste,” mercifully the shortest track after the eight-second “Audio Logo” that opens the disc, is a tight, almost vaudevillian sketch, and I wished more of the album had its economy.

The closer, “Machine Language” at eight minutes nineteen, is where Schumacher’s compositional hand is surest — dense, layered, more written-through than improvised, with the horns locking into rhythmic cells that build and release with a control the earlier “lecture” tracks sometimes lack. If this is where the Professor is headed next, I’ll follow gladly.

Does it all add up to more than an elaborate bit? Mostly. Free improvisation dressed up in academic drag is a well-worn conceit — think of the Willem Breuker Kollektief’s institutional satires, or even Peter Schickele’s P.D.Q. Bach routines, though Schumacher’s tongue is planted rather less firmly than Schickele’s. What distinguishes Music Lab from mere gag reel is the sheer craft of the playing: intonation in the brass is dead accurate even at extremes of mastery, ensemble coordination in the free passages never degenerates into mush, and Schumacher’s own hand on the mixing board keeps the whole thing sounding lived-in rather than sterile.

Is it Good or Bad, to borrow the binary I actually find useful? Call it Interesting, with real Good buried inside — “Noir” and “Machine Language” alone are worth the price of admission. Recommended, with the caveat that you’ll want to skip a track or two on repeat listenings. The Professor, I think, would approve of that kind of selective attention. It’s practically the lesson.