Alex Coke on listening and the possibility of sound
Austin jazz player makes new aural landscapes 'It's Possible'

By Brad Buchholz

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

While living in Amsterdam in the 1990s, Austin jazz musician Alex Coke was constantly pedaling around the city on his three-speed bicycle. But as much as he loved music, Coke could never understand why so many people on the street were plugged into Walkman players. What could be more beautiful, he thought, than the exotic music of the streets, the sounds of the city?

"It was the coolest thing, hearing everything with a Doppler effect as you moved along on the bike," says Coke, one of Texas' most distinguished flute and saxophone players. "You hear this kind of hissing as you move through the environment, along a busy street, past a canal. You hear a boat horn, a car horn, another bike bell, the snatch of a conversation. I just loved that. It's organized sound.

"You can make a case that it's art. Or that it isn't. But the experience is very John Cage, in that it makes you open up and hear things. To truly listen."

Coke's love of sound ã and the exotic blending of sounds ã is most evident on "It's Possible," a new album of acoustic improvisational music (on the Voxlox label) featuring Austin vocalist Tina Marsh and renowned African-style percussionist Steve Feld in duo and trio settings. Coke refers to it as an "art" record (as opposed to a "commercial" one), and for good reason. "It's Possible" colors way, way outside the lines in the way it blends world music textures with avant garde sensibilities, bounces back and forth between the literal and the abstract, accentuates the display of sounds as it eschews traditional soloing. And yes, it even allows Coke to crash a voice-and-flute party on one cut with his impressive array of whistles and squeaky toys.

"When (the Web site) CD Baby asked me to list a genre for 'It's Possible,' I said something like 'free improvised world music jazz ã or something ã with vocals,' " says Coke, who comes across like a hip and happy, free-thinking professor of creativity, his tousled hair streaked with gray. "I think the label they chose was 'jazz vocalese.' And that's kind of true, just as you wouldn't be wrong to call it small group jazz ... or avant garde jazz ... or atonal ... "

In many ways, "It's Possible" replicates the sensation of stepping off the bus in a foreign land where you are surrounded by a swirl of exotic sounds and cadences. It can be disorienting at first. But in time, you begin to recognize a certain beauty in that confluence of sounds and cadences, begin to appreciate certain patterns in them, or maybe find yourself humming to new music you hear in them ã even while acknowledging that you don't always understand the sounds.

On the album's opening cut, Marsh sings lyrics improvised from Antonio Machado poetry as Feld creates loping, savannah-style soundscapes on a "bass box" ã an African thumb piano that sometimes (as Townes Van Zandt might say) sounds like tuned "rain on a conga drum" or an exotic stand-up bass. Meanwhile, Coke plays swirling passages on flute that at certain moments suggest wildness and open sky. Then a new song comes ã and things really get wild.

"It's Possible" often suggests climates, environments: wind, humidity, the buzz of insects, the moan of the earth, the human moan of Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman." Coke wanted a concise feeling to the 15 compositions; none is longer than five minutes. On several songs, the musicians improvise in the studio as they listen to environmental source material ã say, the buzz of a rainforest or the call of frogs or a tolling bell. For the finished album, the original tapes of the frogs and forest have been removed, leaving only the three musicians (vocal, reed, percussion) playing together in a fashion that sometimes suggests free-jazz chamber music.

"We've been working a lot, when the time comes to solo, on the idea that we play together ã that we all solo together," says Coke, who is clearly fascinated by diminishing or reinterpreting the notion of "foreground" and "background" in jazz playing. "I'm trying not always to be in the foreground all the time, but to be a part of the music."

"It's Possible" ... but is it jazz? Maybe. Maybe not. It's certainly not bebop, or background music. Engaged listening is virtually required. "It's Possible" is in many respects its own musical art gallery ã a sequence of installations or paintings that invite listeners to interact with it and project their own narratives onto it. It's hard to imagine all but three or four cuts (such as the exquisite "Secret Love," which presents the American standard beneath shimmering African starlight) standing a chance on most jazz or noncommercial stations; the strength of the album is in the whole of its vision. And for all its organic and acoustic soul, for all the play and puns within the music and on the CD cover, it will be for many an acquired taste.

"I'm not interested in being a preservation society," Coke likes to say, suggesting it's hard to honor the spirit of jazz by holding too fast to its tradition or in trying too hard to emulate its most popular formulas. "The tradition I'm trying to hold down is to express myself. John Coltrane was never a copy. Neither was Coleman Hawkins or Ben Webster or Ella Fitzgerald. All of them were expressing themselves, for better or for worse. Whether people like the music or not, there's really nothing else you can do."

BY JAY TRACHTENBERG

The new collaborative album from veteran Austin compadres Alex Coke, Tina Marsh, and Steve Feld, It's Possible (Voxlox), is fearless in its vision and certainly not for novices. Portions of this challenging set of improvised music are reminiscent of abstract sound collages from Chicago AACM pioneer Roscoe Mitchell, but reedman Coke and vocalist Marsh, who have dialogued musically for years and developed an intimate language, landmark recognizable touchstones ‚ Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman," Charles Mingus' "Eclipse," and Harry T. Burleigh's "Deep River" ‚ to which they give their own unique spin. Their duos are augmented subtly by Feld's melodic and percussive ashiwa bass box, the four-tune medley "Steve Lacy Suite" a fitting tribute to an improvisational master and mentor.