CD Review

It's been seven years since Greg Howard took us on a flying tap to the moon with his first solo Stick release of live improv. "Water on the Moon" planted a flag for exploratory Stickists in a spot where few others have quite yet landed. Howard has blasted off again, this time for somewhere beyond the known stars.

"Ether Ore" is a minimalist gem, an example of maximum restraint within sonic spaces as wide and tempting as faraway galaxies. These live performances do have their moments of contained outburst and percussive inventionsistic counterpoint. But they are foremost a striking lesson in how to create so much and so little at the same time, using so little of what much could have been used.

How does this work? Imagine that you have a large toolbox filled with dozens of tools. With them you could build anything, from a crate to a cabinet to an elaborate villa. Now imagine that out of all those tools you choose only three, maybe four. With them you build something more beautiful than all the tools combined could have created.

This is "Ether Ore's" large step for high-tech Stickist-kind. With a rack of digital processing and a floor strewn with a cockpit's worth of ground controls, a boundlessly capable player like Howard might have rendered chaos like a supernova. Instead he slips a hammer and pliers -- i.e., a few nice effects presets -- into his strapped-on rocket pack and comes back to Earth with eerie morsels not quite known to man. Howard notes that there are no static looping devices (only long-lingering delay regenerations), something at times hard to fathom given the richness in texture and the endlessness of impression that fill the ears and brain. This minimalist approach, in hardware and in thought, gives these tracks a coherence and focus often missing from gadget-laden seat-of-the-pants performance.

Aurally, this is a vivid and liquid headphones recording loosely in the orbit of Pink Floyd's haunting and crystalline "Whish You Were Here" or Vangelis' creaturistic and earthy "Soil Festivities" -- electric and electronic in body but airy and acoustic in spirit. The production mood is a bit ECM with a touch of early Windam Hill. At times Howard's superb tapping technique and the crisp yet warm recording give his Sticks (both 10-string and Grand) the woody pop of a perfectly plucked classical guitar. At other moments, the pings are more precious metallic, closer to the zing of a glassy dreadnought. Within that range, his tone remains refreshingly distinct, avoiding the trench of instantly recognizable or clichéd Stick timbres. While this is undoubtedly a Stick album, the ambient passages are truly transcendent. It hardly matters what the instrument is. The music is there.

It's also here and now, as "Ether Ore" crosses the rarely traveled bridge between live performance and studio craftsmanship. While the album's speaker sparkle could hang with that of any good sound-room concoction, the music is as charged and organic as its creator's blood and bones in the heat of the moment. If ever the creativity cynics thought recording and live improv were inherently at odds, Howard may have proved them wrong. Time will test the longevity of his ideas, but their sonic and tactile effects here are timeless, spaceless, and otherworldly. Composer Benjamin Boretz once said, "In music, as in everything, the disappearing moment of experience is the firmest reality." Boretz evidently never heard Howard in the moment, and "Ether Ore," now alive and kicking for digitized eternity, might have revised his perception of firm musical reality.

"Ether Ore" is largely consonant and harmonically transparent, making it more accessible than its extraterrestrial itinerary might have you expect. This is greatly to Howard's credit, as he exhibits an uncanny ability to, on the fly, weave vast familiar influences into a singular sound all his own. No telling what courses through his veins these days, but he spins my memory through John Abercrombie, Michael Brook, Pat Metheny, Mike Oldfield, Tangerine Dream, Steve Tibbetts, the "Train of Thought" side of Ralph Towner, and, at his extreme outer reaches, the earliest buzzings of the confounding and subterranean Biota.

Back to Earth now. This album is also a great deal. For the usual price of a CD, you get a companion DVD of Howard live in a performance that is as educational as it is inspiring. The discs are packaged in familiar NASA file images, and the 13-minute video adds a more memorable visual dimension to the journey. (The bold and popular cosmic shots work well here, though custom art as fresh and nuanced as the music would have added a nice touch).

Even closer to home for us tappers, Howard has achieved another notable feat. Whether he intended to or not, he has forever resolved the discussion over which is "better": 10 strings or 12. This perennial question, sustained largely by newcomers mulling their first Stick purchase, now has a clear answer: Buy this CD and you'll hear for yourself that the deep sky's the limit with either. His Sticks are also tuned differently, with the Grand in Matched Reciprocal and the 10 in Baritone Melody. Again, Howard finds no limits with either. The tracks roughly alternate between the two instruments, and Howard blends them such that the most advanced tappers will be hard-pressed to tell which is which. While you likely won't discern the string counts and tunings, you will detect the difference in pickups (ACTV-2 Block on the Grand, hybrid Stickup-EMG on the 10), which makes the album an excellent showcase for these technologies.

"Ether Ore" exhibits the most exciting type of musical and sonic exploration, the kind that invites the world to watch when anything could go wrong. Fortunately for us, the pilot is perfectly trained and equipped. We get all the excitement and none of the risk.

Commencing countdown. Engines on. The voyage begins at
www.greghoward.com.

John
johnedmonds.net