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A review of Myriam Alter’s ‘Where Is There’ (2007)

Myriam Alter is one of those musicians about whom the Internet seems to know very little. What Google manages to dig up more or less tells the same story: Alter hails from a Belgian family of Sephardic Jews. She started piano lessons at age 8 but abandoned the instrument at 15 for other preoccupations. After studying psychology at university, she worked for an advertising agency and later ran a dance studio. When she was 36, she rediscovered the piano and slowly but determinedly built a career for herself as a jazz performer and composer. She has made a number of well-reviewed records — with carefully hand-picked band members and frequently someone else at the piano — that are little-known but quite beautiful.

Alter’s music — like that of Enrico Rava, for example, or Stefano Bollani — reflects a typically European jazz sensibility pointing back all the way to Django Reinhardt. Unlike American jazz, it incorporates a myriad of influences that aren’t based in the blues, such as Italian folk songs, the oddly dichotomous happy/melancholic melody lines of the Klezmer tradition of Eastern Europe and a sense of (melo)drama that may stem from French chanson or cabaret.

Adding to this eclectic mix is the cello of Jaques Morelenbaum, an increasingly well-known Brazilian instrumentalist who regularly appears with his own ensembles and the big luminaries of Brazilian popular music, like Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso. Apparently an integral part of the Brazilian musical establishment by birth (he’s married to a well-known singer, his sister plays clarinet for the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra, etc.), Morelenbaum has unique musical abilities as a classically trained cellist who’s worked in popular world music and jazz all his career. More rhythmically oriented and less stiff than Yo-Yo Ma (whose efforts in playing Brazilian music always left me cold — similarly to a lot of the rest of his recorded work), Morelenbaum has an innate empathy for Myriam Alter’s melancholy flirtations with the strong Sephardic/Moroccan percussions she offers in ‘Was It There’ and other tracks. These rhythms may, in the end, not be that different from what centuries of the slave trade brought from Africa to Bahia (musicologists, I imagine, may have definitive ideas about the migratory patterns of rhythms and instruments through the various diasporas, intersecting in North Africa, the Middle East, the Mediterranean and the Iberian Peninsula).

For music that is essentially through-composed (possibly with room for improvisation/cadenzas for some of the solo instruments such as the clarinet and solo saxophone, both excellently played here), Alter’s pieces have a spontaneous character and remind us of many different musical traditions at the same time. In general, they have a “old world” sensibility and — unlike other experimental world music and much jazz — do not require an ‘open mind.’ One reviewer perceptively notes that “[i]t’s the kind of music that for once will not chase the family members out of the room, it may even attract them.”

Myriam Alter’s ‘trick,’ of course, is her ability to pack musical interest, complexity and challenge into deceptively light-sounding fare — something she does with unfailing certainty on Where Is There. At the surface, this music is only fleetingly ‘sad’ or ‘melancholy.’ In fact, it’s packed with the same kind of minor-key joyful abandon that we know and love from Django Reinhardt’s gypsy jazz from the 1930s which also disregarded all the rules of the blues and in so-doing established an authentically European and unique voice in popular music.

The recorded sound is of the highest order and reminds me of recent ECM records of a similarly acoustic nature. Highly recommended.

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Dave Matthews, particularly with the Dave Matthews Band, isn’t recognized enough for his songcraft. It gets lost under the weight of popular perception about Dave’s music, live shows and achievements: touring jam band, incredible musicianship, big sound, long shows, lots of dope smoked at every show, generally appealing to those who once followed the Grateful Dead (how those two were connected I’ve never understood). Dave’s songs also get lost a little because people say they don’t understand what his lyrics are about, and perhaps because the songs have a certain tentative complexity of rhythm and melody – a quality that makes them sound experimental but that’s actually very planned, calculated and predictable.

I’m a dedicated listener to DMB, regardless of whether it’s their studio or live records. I also tend to order all of their Live Trax releases, which are only available from the Dave Matthews Band website. And while I appreciate the bigness and crispness of the band’s sound (Stefan Lessard’s phenomenally powerful and groovy bass, Carter Beauford’s tight and tireless drums, LeRoi Moore’s muscular saxophone, Boyd Tinsley’s sweet violin and Dave’s acoustic folk guitar that somehow glues it all together), I also love Dave’s songs in their lyrical craziness and melodic, fearless musical invention (he sounds like so many singer/songwriters we know, yet completely unique, all at the same time). Dave’s songs are love songs, sad songs, happy songs, crazy party songs; songs about women, history, life, being on the road and alternate life outcomes. It’s a canon of work as varied, strange, richly developed and textured as many other great songwriters’ – Springsteen, Dylan, Paul Simon, James Taylor.

Live at Radio City, like the earlier Live at Luther College, is that rare Dave Matthews live record that leaves all the musical pyrotechnics at home and foregrounds just the songs. Tim Reynolds, Dave’s long-standing acoustic live cohort, is certainly an excellent guitar player and shines in the acoustic solos here (and, of course, Dave himself is also an under-recognized master of the acoustic guitar, providing pulsing, driving rhythms). But this is about the songs, proving that they can hang together beautifully without 15-minute jams, create their own strange poetry and be compelling, even if you don’t really always know what they’re about.

Favourites for me are “Gravedigger” with its embedded nursery rhyme, a beautiful cover version of Daniel Lanois’ “The Maker” (which is of course also incredible in full DMB live regalia), and “Crush,” to name but a few of many. Over the years, Dave’s voice has begun to sound more and more like Peter Gabriel’s in tone and timbre – it has a dark and quiet but clear command of the musical space set up by the song. It’s an expressive and instantly recognizable voice (like Sting’s or Phil Collins’) that doesn’t really fit into any specific genre. Much like Dave Matthews himself doesn’t fit into any genre, I suppose. Maybe he creates his own.

I can’t really recommend this ‘acoustic’ set strongly enough. It’s best heard together with Live at Luther College because it provides a continuation of sorts – old songs versus new songs, old sound versus new. I could sometimes do without the talking between songs (strangely, Dave – writer and singer of such deeply intelligent songs – doesn’t sound either witty or particularly bright in his ‘announcements’…) but that’s a very minor drawback.