Mastery inhabits the borderlands of certainty and inexplicability. It
erodes and then transcends the boundaries it spends lifetimes
defining. As this album’s title suggests, no one perceives this
dichotomy with more clarity than Joel Futterman and William
Parker. Just listen to the astonishing concluding piece of Why, the
newest collaboration between these veteran musicians and
philosophers, to witness the permeable beauty of dialogue in cross-
section focused enough to be incendiary, burning through layers of
ambiguity to reveal foundational relationships beyond the illusions
of facile cognition.
Futterman begins that final excursion with pithy upper-register
slides inside the piano accompanied by Parker’s open-fifth rhythmic
reiteration, a monolithic drone rife in equal measure with energy
and intensity that fans out multi-directionally, even as converging
constellations of counterpoint confound expectation even as they
condense around multiple points. Futterman’s sympathetic strings
at 1:52 ring in the change, Parker switching to bow at 2:10 with
such tenderness, such deep delicacy as he whispers the octave, that
the transition registers long after it’s occurred. His always exquisite
arco exudes the same light as Futterman’s glide across the piano
strings in a semi-static but transient moment of transformation, a
question answered in the instant it’s posed.
Like the concentric layers of meaning rapped up in that three-letter
title, the seven pieces cohere in brilliantly curved fragments around
the fourth, the album’s narrative center. The fluidly languid
opening, rising and falling through half-articulated pitch and pure
timbral exploration with the inevitability of tidal ebb and flow or of
lunar magnetic pull, prefigures the album’s translucent conclusion.
The fourth section’s nascent blues rhythmic repetitions masked only
by tonal freedom (7:03) prefigure the deep and gradually expanding
blues of the sixth piece, while similarly Protean backlit balladry
(2:46 and 15:48) echo and extend the first piece’s crystalline
conclusion. Yet, the vast fourth movement of this large opus is itself
a series of connected vignettes, autonomous microcosms still
connected at the deepest level, functioning in parallel modes of
existence, each defining the others while redirecting listener
attention via Titanic contrast and reenforcing re-acclimation with
the passing of each fraught moment of tension and release.
Despite the many layers in continual upheaval and stratification,
after the tropes, troughs, seismic redistributions and extended
illuminations, Why is a series of queries floated over multi-hued
uncertainty. Futterman regards the title as elucidating the unknown,
embracing both interrogatives and the solutions hidden at the heart
of their existence. When verbiage fails and practicalities prove
insufficient, the music articulates solutions, to questions not yet
posed and conflicts ancient and modern. Simplicity and complexity
coexist in every tone and timbre. Soothing the hurt and applying the
balm to wounds never quite healed, music inverts the frustrated
parent’s response to the ever-present titular question born of
innocence: “Because.”
