Nik Bartsch's Ronin
Stoa (ECM)
Review by Budd Kopman
What is this music? What genre does it inhabit? What label best suits it? Nik Bärtsch himself calls it Zen-funk, and it easily could fit the trance label, but only at times. Reichian or Glassian minimalism springs to mind, but again only at times. Calling it progressive rock would be a gigantic stretch. Is it jazz, whatever that means to you? Not if jazz requires improvisation or shuns through-composed music. Yet it has the feel of jazz, particularly in the drumming of Kaspar Rast (who has been Bärtsch's musical partner for 25 years) and the almost unbearable excitement that the music produces.
Stoa is none of these things and all of them simultaneously, and that is what makes it some of the most subversive and enjoyable music I have heard in quite a while. In the end it does not matter where you put it, and Bärtsch would be happy to have created his own, unnamable genre--call it Ronin-esque. To paraphrase Bärtsch, who quotes from Thomas Preston on his web site, a ronin is a solitary samurai who is not part of any clan. Despised and yet feared by everyone, the ronin must be on constant guard, no matter how masterful he is. However, a ronin who recognizes that he is free can explore the world and enlighten himself.
Bärtsch studied jazz first and then moved toward classical composition. He formed Ronin to be able to play more powerful music in a live setting where he could work out his ideas. His music is made up of small cells that mutate through the course of each so-called ”Modul,” five of which comprise the material. Often consisting of phrases with odd lengths or cross-rhythms that go in and out of phase, each composition is meticulously assembled. The tunes rely heavily on repetition but never get boring, rather pulling the listener closer and closer, developing a trance feel, only to shift out of it at just the right moment. Sections will abruptly end and then start up in a new tonal area.
The feeling of development within each piece is inescapable, along with a precision that is remarkable because the music sounds improvised and free, when in fact it is not most of the time. Part of the fun is trying to try to sense which side the music of the moment is on. The material is not static or fixed, however, and sections have changed through performance.
Time can be extremely deceptive as you get hooked into the mutating details and a fifteen-minute piece is over before you realize it. With no melodies and virtually no harmony, but with plenty of constantly internally clashing rhythm, this music's motivic development pushes you one moment and pulls the next. Whether or not you would call it jazz, its kaleidoscopic nature and simple complexity is riveting. Fabulous.
Review by John Kelman
One of ECM’s strengths is its ability to find young players with new conceptions that not only keep its catalogue fresh and innovative, but also often create insidious paradigm shifts which extend beyond the label’s purview. In recent years artists like saxophonist Trygve Seim and pianist Tord Gustavsen have--often in the subtlest of ways--helped reshape contemporary music. Add to that list 35 year-old pianist Nik Bärtsch and his group Ronin. As significant and groundbreaking an album as you’re likely to find, Ronin’s ECM debut, Stoa, is as much about what it isn’t as what it is.
While repetition plays a large part in Bärtsch’s largely through-composed music, that's not due to any kind of electronic looping. With the exception of a little Fender Rhodes, Ronin is an all-acoustic, real-time ensemble featuring, along with Bärtsch, bass/contrabass clarinetist Sha, bassist Björn Meyer, drummer Kaspar Rast and percussionist Andi Pupato. Minimalist composers, in particular Steve Reich’s percussion-heavy work, are important antecedents for Stoa.
But while Bärtsch‘s writing manifests unassailable architecture, the visceral grooves avoid the mathematically sterile trappings of pure minimalism. The repetitive nature of Bärtsch’s grooves could be considered hypnotic or trance-inducing if they weren’t so interactive and impossible to relegate to the subconscious. And while there’s a certain degree of improvisation in this music, it’s by no means a singularly defining characteristic.
So what, exactly, is Bärtsch’s music? He calls it “Zen-Funk,” and “Ritual Groove,” and both are remarkably vivid and astute descriptions. The five numbered “Moduls” that make up Stoa emphasize organically evolving and propulsive interlacing rhythms, an almost antithetical perspective about soloing, and an approach that demands constant attention, rather than lulling the listener into a meditative state. Steve Reich meets Steve Coleman, if you will.
Despite such a strongly defined compositional approach, the five pieces on Stoa manage to blend into one another and create a seemingly continuous experience, yet they remain clearly delineated at the same time. “Modul 36,” for example, opens the album with random strikes of a low piano note separated by long silences. A four-note arpeggio in 5/4 emerges, with Meyer’s bass line gradually suggesting harmonic movement. Rast enters past the six-minute mark and a steady groove finally emerges. The closest thing to a theme shows up around the seven-minute point, where Bärtsch and Sha alternate a series of long tones with a powerful unison flurry. Bärtsch improvises at various times throughout, and while he stands out, it’s less a case of virtuosity on display than responding to the maelstrom-like polyrhythms underneath. “Modul 32” is considerably darker, while the delicate beginnings of “Modul 33” ultimately lead to a more propulsive rhythm.
While repetition and gradual thematic evolution are fundamental parts of Bärtsch’s writing, so too is a compositional attention to melody that makes them more than mere experiments in intersection. Stoa is an important album that stands to expand the way we look at the junctures between repetitive motifs, insistent rhythms and form-based improvisation.
Review by Chris May
From out of nowhere, Switzerland--best known in the jazz community for hosting the increasingly irrelevant Montreux Jazz Festival, whose headliners for 2006 include Simply Red, Solomon Burke, Deep Purple, Sting and Bryan Adams--seems suddenly to be turning out some seriously intrepid and innovative young players.
In the space of a few weeks, we've been introduced, first, to twin brothers Andreas and Matthias Pichler, the drum and bass wunderteam featured on Austrian guitar genius Wolfgang Muthspiel's heartachingly beautiful Bright Side. And, now, several Alpine ranges, if not an entire planet away, to pianist and composer Nik Bärtsch and his Zurich-based band, Ronin.
Stoa, Ronin's debut, is the album James Brown might have made if he'd appointed Steve Reich musical director of the Famous Flames, though without the satin cape and the extremes of primal emotion. It's minimalism, Jim, but not as we know it: simultaneously cerebral and on the good foot.
Bärtsch calls the music “Zen-funk,” but a more useful description is perhaps ”visceral minimalism.” Bärtsch subscribes to minimalism's launch mission to explore the Einsteinian deep space of music-as-math, shuffling and stacking a deck of pre-composed melodic modules and intricately interlocking rhythms, but humanises the astro science with earthy funk-inspired bass ostinatos and kick-ass drums.
Remarkably, pretty well every sound we hear has been scored, right down to the smallest detail, even including Kaspar Rast's drums, which sound giddily spontaneous (Rast and Bärtsch have been playing together since they were twelve, which explains some of it). All the music is created in real time (Bärtsch created the band primarily to play live), with no loops and no overdubs. It's digital-age music performed with analog sensibility.
Sometimes Ronin sound like a through-composed Famous Flames or Family Stone, sometimes like Terry Riley at his mindfucking cross-rhythmic best, and at others like the Dave Brubeck Quartet locked in tight on a percussive Time Further Out groove, with Rast the emphatic punctuating counterpoint to Bärtsch's primitif riffs.
Throw in some Satie, an introductory two-minute nod to the Necks, some Japanese taiko ritual music and a little syncopated Chopin, and you have... well, not jazz, maybe, but something very special.