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Andy Haas: Humanitarian War
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Andy Haas |
With tracks entitled "Depleted Uranium" and "White Phosphorus", and others alluding to cluster bombs and steel rain, Andy Haas registers his disgust at the vile rhetoric of the current US administration. Parallel to that self-evident anger runs a singular creative response. Haas was once saxophonist with Canadian New Wave group Martha and the Muffins and has more recently been heard with Fred Frith and Keiji Haino. Solo, he performs ten absorbing improvisations, without overdubs, bringing together the Middle Eastern sonorities of the shofar ram's horn and double-reed raita with live electronics, a taal tarang digital tabla and bursts of high pitch fife. The nasal wail of the raita, neatly matched with electronics, is suitably communicative rather than casually exotic, and the shofar retains its traditional militant capacity to convey alarm. Protest can too easily drift into platitudes. Haas makes his point and at the same time takes an imaginative leap beyond what is all too obvious and lamentable. As the bitterly oxymoronic title suggests, this is a powerful and angry statement of anti-war sentiment. Track names conjuring high-tech weapons systems - such as "Depleted Uranium", "White Phosphorus", and "BLU 108B Cluster" - rub up against the timeless Middle Eastern sonorities of exotic reed instruments, which, in turn, are fed through Haas' extraordinary real-time, live electronic manipulations. The result is a vivid and unsettling depiction of war crimes in the Persian Gulf: high, keening, wailing notes warped and disfigured by electricity, like a Muezzin caught in flames as an ancient mosque is razed to the ground. |
Haas wrings an enormous range of sounds from his manipulations, summoning the shriek and disorder of war - sirens, explosions, violence and distress - careening over the top of dense tabla rhythms, smothered with reverb and spiraling into an infinitesimal point of ultimate complexity. Like Hendrix's "Machine Gun", it's a gripping example of the possibilities of protest through sound. As a former sax player with Martha And The Muffins (come on, guilty pleasure or not, who doesn't like 'Echo Beach'?) this new CD owes nothing to that experience. More recently he's played with John Zorn. Mr. Haas has clearly moved on and on this CD he plays shofar, raita, fife, taal tarang with electronics EFX all live with no overdubs. The result is industrial, ambient, middle-eastern, techno, indo/free/space jazz and probably lots more. It's anything but the "noise" that many folks have trouble with regarding improvised modern jazz.
Stand-outs are the hypnotic 'White Phosphorus' and the scary 'BLU 113 Penetrator' and 'Depleted Uranium (pts I & II)'. As suggested by the ironic contradiction implied in the title, "Humanitarian War", this is an album created as a protest against "preemptive" wars. By means of a musical approach framed within the electroacoustic music, yet rich in ethnic sonorities, Andy Haas builds surrealist pieces, disquieting, suggesting images of the chaos and the injustice inherent to any war. |