Wearied by the world, yet still in witness to its beauty and possibility, is how Secular Music Group: Volume 2, the new album by Connecticut-based foursome Secular Music Group, begins. The first song, “Angle of the Bowstring,” builds carefully, with moods arriving one by one: pensive piano, wistful sax, wry trumpet, anxious flute. Together, at last, they breathe a shared sigh, but not quite of relief. It’s unresolved, musically and emotionally, and would be right at home in a serious drama, playing over a montage of a wounded soul in liminal motion: an abandoned friend wandering the streets of Manhattan; an estranged child driving to a parent’s funeral; a struggling parent on the bus to their second job.
The second track, “Seven Cane,” which makes the rare choice to combine a meter of seven with a half-time feel, is percussively tropical and tonally brighter but not quite tropically bright. The long vamping verse is relaxed and islandy, the blink-and-miss-it bridge punctual and urbane. A horn solo with exquisite moments lasts about a minute, finishing with a fading trill. But before it can fade completely, a sax slides in with a rising trill, sublimely connecting its own coming solo. At song’s end, the bridge is finally given permission to linger, in turn satisfying the urge its prior ephemerality had created: to savor it.
The quality of Volume 2 may sound like a divine miracle once you hear how Secular Music Group, an “ensemble working in the soft margins of jazz, free improvisation and minimalism” who are performing two album release shows this Sunday at Firehouse 12, recorded it. The foursome—Will Berman, Greg LaPine, Yannis Panos and Chris Ruggiero, pictured above with Ted Morcaldi and Liz Wendelbo—laid the full-length record down in just three days, and they did it “entirely to analog reel-to-reel tape, a process that informs both the group’s aesthetic and workflow. Sessions are conducted without rehearsals; musicians receive skeletal notations shortly before recording begins. The process emphasizes spontaneity and interaction, capturing the music as it takes shape in real time.” That doesn’t sound like enough preparation, but I suppose you may not need it when you’ve spent decades gaining the skills and insights that can make improvisation sound planned.
Improvisation gets a lot of time on the fourth track, “Auilix’s Place,” which begins with a patient if somewhat sinister motif that reminds me of the way Hollywood scores Egypt (and somehow also brings to mind the 1975 cartoon adaptation of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi). Around two minutes in, a long trumpet solo over soft suspended piano begins, conjuring in part a baggy-eyed detective in a midcentury precinct still scouring his case files after everyone else has gone home. It’s almost three minutes on before the solo ends and the opening motif returns, followed some time later by a dreamy new chapter: a relaxing summer reverie under fluffy passing clouds of trumpet, sax and flute.
“Mirror Side,” the next song, starts like a happy excursion on the open sea, then evolves into another detective mystery courtesy of some very non-clichéd saxophone work. This latter mystery unfolds in the ’80s, naturally, when sax was king, and I think we’re in that part of the movie when the cop has had to turn in their badge for going too rogue, which will soon force them to go even roguer to unravel some double-breasted, shoulder-padded, high-waisted criminal conspiracy.
As for the very non-criminal conspiracy of SMG, a band that seems to merge and then disperse around the recording and releasing of albums, I also suggest further investigation. You can do that by listening, or following, or grabbing a rare seat this Sunday at Firehouse 12, where the vitality on the tape and the images it conjures could come even further to life.
Written by Dan Mims. Image, featuring SMG members Will Berman (black), Greg LaPine (green), Chris Ruggiero (orange) and Yannis Panos (hoodie) with Ted Morcaldi (gray) and Liz Wendelbo (striped), photographed by Radu Gheorghe and sourced from Firehouse 12.
