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Ashes and Diamonds

by Rob Clearfield

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    Beautiful, limited-run French/English edition of score of Ashes and Diamonds with in-depth personal essay and analysis by composer Rob Clearfield. Featuring images by Emily Pfaff, design by Jen Boyd.
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  • Bilingual French/English edition of score of Ashes and Diamonds with in-depth personal essay and analysis by composer Rob Clearfield. Featuring images by Emily Pfaff, design by Jen Boyd.
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1.
I. Adagio 15:17
2.
II. Gigue 05:48
3.
4.
5.
V. Furioso 05:46

about

Greg Ward - alto saxophone
Rob Clearfield - piano
Sam Weber - bass
Quin Kirchner - drums

Release shows:
Nov 2, 2023 - Merriman’s Playhouse (South Bend, IN)
Nov 3, 2023 - Origins Jazz (Lexington, KY)
Nov 4, 2023 - Constellation (Chicago, IL)
Nov 5, 2023 - Sugar Maple (Milwaukee, WI)
Dec 13, 2023 - Club 27 (Marseille, France)
Dec 14, 2023 - Sunside (Paris, France)

Pianist and composer Rob Clearfield presents Ashes and Diamonds, a 5-movement work exploring the nature of transitions from one era to another, and how cataclysmic events bring about both positive and negative changes. With a title borrowed from Andrzej Wadja's 1958 film, Clearfield's cinematic approach to composition is on full display as he and his quartet (feat. Greg Ward, Sam Weber, and Quin Kirchner) blur the lines between modern jazz and contemporary classical vocabularies and paradigms.

This marks Rob Clearfield's first record of all original compositions in seven years. Following his 2016 trio effort Islands, Clearfield released a mostly improvised solo piano album (Whatever You're Starting From, 2018) and co-led projects with Caroline Davis (Anthems, 2019) and Quin Kirchner (Concentric Orbits, 2022). During the same period, he relocated from Chicago to France, residing first in Paris before settling in his current home of Marseille. As a pianist, he continues to perform around Europe and the US with artists including Itamar Borochov, Makaya McCraven, Simon Moullier, Yuhan Su, Hermon Mehari, Matt Ulery, and Grazyna Auguscik, among others. He has been commissioned by the Brazos Valley Symphony Orchestra (College Station, TX) in 2019 and 2023 to compose new works for orchestra with improvising soloists.

At 47 minutes in length, Ashes and Diamonds is Clearfield's largest composition to date. “I always wanted to write something on this scale, developing themes across multiple movements,” Clearfield explains, “but I usually maxed out around 12 minutes, which is what happened when I wrote the first movement. There was a nagging sensation, though, that the piece wasn't over. After sitting on it for a few weeks, I was inspired by something I heard in a friend's live-stream concert, and pretty quickly I arrived at the opening figure of the second movement. From there, the piece slowly came into being: sometimes in flurries of ideas, sometimes literally one note at a time.”

The Covid-19 pandemic was in the foreground of the writing process. Clearfield started writing in earnest in September 2020 while sick in bed with the virus. Still relegated to a bedroom quarantine, he worked out his ideas on an un-amplified electric guitar and clicked the notes into notation software one by one. It was his first attempt at writing music in several months. “Emotionally, the piece is all about the pandemic,” says Clearfield, “both my experience of it, and the idea more generally that big events result in irreversible changes, positive and negative.”

Irreversible changes, positive and negative – like ashes and diamonds uncovered in the wreckage of an inferno. The title comes from Andrzej Wajda's 1958 film of the same name, which takes place on the last day of WWII in Poland. A young resistance fighter is at a crossroads as his superiors are shifting their opposition from the Nazis to the Soviets, while the Allies' victory presents an opportunity to defect into civilian life. Accustomed to following orders, he's ill-prepared for this new level of autonomy and finds himself overwhelmed by the choices thrust in front of him.

“That's a feeling I believe many of us experienced in 2020,” explains Clearfield. “We were living our lives, doing our thing, and then BAM: your day-to-day life is totally different, and probably your industry changed dramatically overnight, or you lost people very suddenly, or a rough case of the virus permanently altered your health, or you can't make money anymore, or maybe you're just reacting to other people in your life facing those sudden challenges. Some of us had to decide pretty quickly what we were doing with that. It's not a set of choices we could have prepared for. And a lot of people are going through this at the same time; which adds to the chaos and uncertainty.”

That instability coupled with other unexpected hardships pushed Clearfield to explore a new approach to composition. In the past, his writing gravitated almost unilaterally towards lyricism and catharsis, but that aesthetic proved insufficient to express the full spectrum of emotions he was experiencing, which included frustration, hopelessness, and detachment. “I underestimated my own naivety about humanity, about other people's selfishness and untrustworthiness, and that disillusionment was counter to the more hopeful worldview I had been trying to express in my music before the pandemic. Coming out the other side of it now, it's not exactly hope or redemption that I want to evoke, but I can at least say 'I went through this, I feel this way, and if you feel this too, if you went through it too, I see you and your experience is valid.' ”


About the composition and recording:

The first movement, I. Adagio, opens with a piano drone in the high register. As the saxophone and cymbals accompany with fluttering textures, the bass plays the most central theme of the piece in the low register. This texture will return with roles reversed at the very end of the last movement, demonstrating one of the throughlines of the composition: we're living the same life as before, but things are fundamentally different.

The six notes of the central theme are the foundation of much development throughout all five movements of Ashes and Diamonds. Frequently, this set of pitches is transposed and re-ordered to form new melodies and chords

The music keeps starting and stopping: A solo-piano fantasia of dense chords, climaxing in the rhythm section playing the opening theme. Stop. A new melody based on the aforementioned pitch set. Stop. A solo saxophone passage. Stop. For the first several minutes of Adagio, the momentum struggles to get going. “The writing process itself was like that for me,” says Clearfield. “Some of these ideas started as an orchestral piece, which I worked on off-and-on in 2019, then abandoned. When I picked it back up in late 2020, I had a clearer vision of who would play it, what they could bring to it, and that helped maintain the momentum.”

A saxophone solo, beginning almost seven minutes into the piece, galvanizes the ensemble and the composition itself into a fixed rhythm – the energy of one moment is finally allowed to feed into the next. Greg Ward finds a soulfulness in the underlying polytonal vocabulary, bridging the weight of the composition with the exuberance of improvisation. Quin Kirchner supports Ward with fluid dynamism, shifting between double-time subdivisions, heavy backbeats, and lush cymbal colors – their connection through years of collaboration in each other's projects is on full display.

As Ward's solo builds to a climax, a brief solo-piano cascade is interrupted by a clashing melody played by the saxophone and bass in unison. The themes of the movement come crashing together and are left unresolved. It's a frustrating, discordant moment that dissolves into a drum solo.


Kirchner's solo leads directly into II. Gigue, which is built on unison melodies. Aside from the recurring two-note piano figure at the beginning and a bass pedal near the end, the whole band plays one melody together for the whole piece without chords until the very end, when polyphony finally breaks through and everyone improvises together. The stark unison texture offers a transparent simplicity with melody and rhythm in the foreground, in contrast to the ambiguity and indirectness expressed through polyphony and harmonic density in Adagio. Kirchner shows exacting patience throughout the movement as his fiery grooves drive the ebb and flow of the intensity.


III. Lento is the most intimate movement, displaying a more pronounced influence of the classical canon. Clearfield's affinity for the multi-layered pianism of late romantic and 20th-century composers takes center stage as a solo-piano elegy unfolds over several minutes, pulling together loose fragments of all the themes of the composition. The constant stream of small, recurring gestures is like a dream filled with memories. We're traveling back through time, only remembering bits and pieces. Chronology is muddied. An unchanging motif of descending thirds continues, keeping one foot in the present moment.

The dream-like journey through memory leads to the middle section of the middle movement, as the full band enters with a lyrical, flowing vamp based on the central theme of the piece. Clearfield reminisces, “This is the kind of music I used to write. So much so that I didn't allow myself to write much else for a long time. When we linger on the last chord of the section, I'm looking back at what came before, not quite ready to say goodbye but knowing that it's time to move on.”

“This moment,” he continues, “was partially inspired by a scene in the film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, where a character finds himself looking at photos of when he was younger. The whole movie kind of stops for a minute and there's an inward journey that the viewer goes through.”


Sam Weber's probing, thick chords begin IV. Passacaglia. Here and throughout the composition, in improvised and written passages alike, Weber's approach vacillates effortlessly between “electric bass” and “bass guitar” – embracing the traditional role of the bass one minute and playing chordal, guitaristic textures the next. His cadenza becomes a duet as Ward enters, and the saxophone and bass engage in lyrical counterpoint, the improvisation gradually morphing back to the composition.

The main theme of Passacaglia is built on an 11-measure cycle in 7/8 meter. This irregular form is further obscured by a strong accent one quarter-note before the cycle is repeated. Where it begins and ends is blurred, emphasizing the circular nature of the progression. Clearfield's lone improvised solo of the record comes over this figure. The pianist takes his time to develop small cells into a vast canvas; a microcosm of his compositional process. Weber and Kirchner exhibit an easy spontaneity, allowing the listener to forget the complexity of the material while staying locked into the arc of Clearfield's ideas.

At the climax of his solo, Clearfield superimposes a polytonal chordal passage from Adagio over the Passacaglia cycle. The bottom drops out and the chordal variation becomes the base for a new melody. When the rhythm section re-enters, they play the central theme with a heavy backbeat while Ward explodes in a fury of noise and extended techniques.


All the themes of the composition collide in a cacophonous piano-drums duet at the beginning of the final movement V. Furioso. After the opening call-and-response, the bass holds down a pedal under a jagged sax-piano melody. From there, layers of dense chords and counterpoint are piled on – each time an idea is completed, the energy ramps back up in a new fury, never fully releasing the tension.

When the movement eventually begins winding down, each instrument makes its way to a recurring theme. In the final section, the bass drones on C, while the saxophone and piano repeat their angular melody with syncopation removed. At the conclusion, the piano plays the central theme in the high register over tranquil cymbal and saxophone accompaniment while the bass continues its drone: a texture almost identical to the beginning, yet fundamentally different.

credits

released November 3, 2023

Recorded by Brian Leach and Jimmy Bonks Buonforte at Joy Ride Studio (Chicago, IL) April 16-17, 2022
Mixed by Ben Rando at Studio Eole (Aix-en-Provence, France)
Mastered by Anthony Gravino at High Cross Sound (Urbana, IL)

Layout and Design by Jen Boyd
Paintings by Emily Pfaff
Front cover: Stare at the Sea by Emily Pfaff, 2023

Ashes and Diamonds composed by Rob Clearfield

Website: robclearfield.com
BandCamp: robclearfield.bandcamp.com
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