Photo courtesy Shifting Paradigm Records
Left to right: Allison Miller, Dayna Stephens, Johannes Wallmann, Ingrid Jensen and Nick Moran.
Some people can mark their pandemic experience with a new hobby or a few new pounds. Johannes Wallmann can mark it with a new record.
For Wallmann, a pianist, composer, band leader and director of jazz studies at UW-Madison, Elegy for an Undiscovered Species was one of the more normal things that happened in the past year and half. Its June 25 release is on as scheduled, and its recording at UW-Madison’s Hamel Music Center on Feb. 21-22, 2020, happened just before everything turned upside down in the U.S. because of COVID-19. The recording sessions were preceded by a concert on Feb. 20.
“A lot of people have come up to me and said, ‘That was the last thing I heard live before the pandemic,’” Wallmann says. “It really bookends the pandemic for me.”
Those looming world-shaking events that surrounded Elegy don’t show up in the music, but the record is not without its drama. Its cinematic feel echoes a lush, orchestral film score as much as a jazz quintet’s record — and that is by design. Beyond a combo of players that Wallmann called his “dream team,” Elegy also includes a 14-piece string section made up of eight violins, three violas and three cellos.
Courtesy Shifting Paradigm Records
“I wanted it to be a recording where it really felt like the strings were part of the jazz band,” Wallmann says. “It’s a jazz album. It’s not a jazz-classical hybrid and it doesn’t pretend to be that.”
The strings joined Wallmann and four other players. Three were New York-based musicians: Ingrid Jensen on trumpet, Dayna Stephens on tenor saxophone, and percussionist Allison Miller. Rounding out the combo was Madison bassist Nick Moran.
By the time the New York musicians were set to arrive in Madison, the pandemic was beginning to cause worry for Wallmann and his project.
“I wasn’t worried about crowds yet, but what I was really worried about was air travel and how that would affect Dayna, Ingrid and Allison,” he says. “Because at that point the travel ban to China was already in effect.”
But there were no travel complications and the recording went off without a hitch. What emerged is an elegant seven-track recording that shows off its individual players while offering layers and depth that the strings provide. Unlike the jazz players, the strings don’t improvise, but still get their chance to shine.
One track in particular, “Longing,” shows off the orchestra. The bossa nova tune features the strings in between a Wallmann piano solo and a Stephens saxophone solo.
“It’s a very standard jazz format of the melody surrounding three solos — the piano, the strings, then the saxophone,” Wallmann says. “I treat (the strings) as an individual member of the band, but not as 14 individual players. They’re one player with the depth of 14 players.”
The drama in Elegy for An Undiscovered Species has a purpose; it is in part protest music inspired by the Anthropocene extinction — the current extinction of creatures due to human activity, some disappearing before they were even discovered. The title track leads off the record, and also ends it with a short reprise. Its building intensity reflects Wallmann’s protest.
“It’s something that makes us all feel helpless, you wonder what you can do as an individual,” he says. “When I’m feeling helpless, I write music. At minimum I can write for one of those species, to acknowledge its existence.”
Another tune, “The Greater Fool,” is also inspired by larger events, though written before the real estate market started going bonkers. It’s based upon the economic theory that an asset’s intrinsic value is less important than what its perceived value will be later, when another “greater fool” will acquire it for the same reason. At one point, the value will tank and someone will be stuck with it.
“There’s always going to be someone who is the greatest fool and people think it’s not going to be them,” Wallmann says. “And that’s kind of how we are treating the planet.”
Though protest is a thread through Elegy for an Undiscovered Species, Wallmann says, in the end it’s also just music.
“If someone doesn’t want to make that connection, it would absolutely work as something else,” he says. “It has a cinematic quality to it, so if someone wants to enjoy it for a James Bond feel, that’s cool. I don’t want music to be a downer for people.”
Elegy for an Undiscovered Species will be released on June 25 on Shifting Paradigm Records. It will be available on CD and on Bandcamp.
The Johannes Wallmann Quartet (Johannes Wallmann, piano; Tony Barba, tenor saxophone; John Christensen, bass; Devin Drobka, drums) will perform June 22 at Olbrich Gardens Summer Concert Series. Tickets are $15. More information: olbrich.org/events/summerconcert.cfm
Johannes Wallmann & Precarious Towers (Wallmann; Christensen; Drobka; Sharel Cassity, alto saxophone; Mitch Shiner, vibraphone) will perform Aug. 8 as part of the Pursuit of Happiness festival at McPike Park.
