Tom Varner: SWIMMINGLiner notes for Swimming (OmniTone 11903)

Pick one of the most difficult instruments to play and one of the most difficult types of music, and you've made the same improbable choice Tom Varner made: the French horn and jazz.  Ever since his elementary school music teacher marched out a parade of instruments and he preferred to choose one from a picture, Tom knew he was different.

To be different and still distinguish himself, Tom had to become a virtuoso, which he's done not only in his playing, but in his composing as well.  His horn work and writing have garnered praise from critics and fans alike.  Down Beat said of Martian Heartache, "If a young Duke Ellington were writing 'Harlem Airshaft' today, it might sound something like this disjunctive, spirited and humorous 15-part mental soundtrack of urban living."  England's Mojo magazine, in a review of his American songs project The Window Up Above (New World), described Martian Heartache and its Soul Note predecessor The Mystery of Compassion as "dazzling essays on group writing and playing," going on to call Tom one of "the most enlightened performers in New York jazz."

As a result, Tom has been regularly invited to work and record internationally with musicians as diverse as Miles Davis, George Gruntz, Steve Lacy, Franz Koglmann, Bobby Previte, Orange Then Blue and even Natalie Merchant.

Though his chosen instrument and musical genre are difficult, fortunately his music —though ever adventurous —is easy on the ears.  Part of that comes from the careful planning that goes into every recording, each of which is always an event. Biblical themes and spirituality, science and sci-fi, mythology and folklore, down-home Americana and urban kitsch, James Brown funk and twentieth-century music are frequent threads in the colorful cinematic Tom Varner weave.

"It's a gradual shaping, 'order out of chaos,' like a sculpture that's being created out of a big block of something that has no form," explains Tom, about preparing for a new record.  "It usually takes a couple of years. And within those two years, I'm gathering the material that's reflecting in many ways where I'm at during that period of my life, and then shaping it with as much clarity as I can as it becomes that final statement."

Swimming continues the manifold Tom Varner tradition.  Realized as the final part of a trilogy of albums, Swimming resolves the "spiritual search" begun in Mystery of Compassion and struggled with in Martian Heartache.   Admits Tom, "it's a reflection of how my life has changed so much in the last two years.  I've gone from being single and living alone in one room (the sort of 'starving artist' lifestyle) now to being married and having moved and having more of a sense of resolution in many aspects of my life."

The title track was written in the summer of 1998 at the Blue Mountain Center, an arts colony in the Adirondack Mountains, where Tom was a guest. He had a month to get away from the daily grind in New York City to just practice, compose, listen to music, read ... and swim in a beautiful crystal-clear lake.

"It was heaven," recounts Tom. "Every day I swam in this beautiful lake, and every day I wrote new music —'Swimming' grew out of that."  In fact, so did most of the album.

"Pantoum" was also born at Blue Mountain, the multidisciplinary convergence of Tom's doing counterpoint exercises from Walter Piston's Counterpoint and attending a poetry reading of a fellow artist reading a pantoum (a poetry form where lines 2 and 4 of each four-line stanza become lines 1 and 3 of the next).

Interlocking counterpoint is heard in the high-energy "Strident," described by Tom as "an in-your-face-strident-and-yet-with-humor-
and-yet-with-urgency" piece.  The work ends with four Psycho-like shrieking stinger notes.  After writing them into the piece, Tom remembers "laughing out loud, thinking 'That'll certainly be an exciting but hilarious, crazy, loopy ending to this crazy, loopy piece!'"

Those adjectives might also describe parts of Tom's Seven Miniatures for Mark Feldman.   "I was listening to the LigetíBagatelles for Wind Quintet (some of the most beautiful things I'd heard in a long time) and I thought 'Ah! I'll do some miniature vehicles for Mark Feldman where each one touches on something different, and some would just let Mark do whatever the hell he wants.'"  And touch, paw, claw, scratch —and dazzle  —Feldman does.

The two "biblical" pieces on the album reflect Tom's long time interest in first-century history, the upheaval of the Roman Empire, and early Christianity.

"Paul Goes to Rome" is the result of two more books Tom brought to the Adirondacks —a famous counterpoint book by Johann Fux (which Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven used as youngsters) and a biography of Paul written by A N Wilson.  Tom describes the Wilson as "a fascinating picture of the first century and that willful, almost strident, urgent sense of Paul saying 'Okay, if I'm coming to Rome, I'm coming to Rome, if you're gonna chop my head off, go ahead and chop it off, baby!'"  It reflects a mixture of what Tom calls "apocalypse and transcendence."

"Samuel Gets the Call" merges what Tom characterizes as the humor of "Yvonne DeCarlo as the Pharaoh's wife" and the "dead seriousness of serving God through music" with a "lush and sexy tenor sax feature for Tony Malaby.   One can also hear God calling Samuel, the boy in the temple, in that opening motif."

"Maybe Yes" perhaps best epitomizes Tom's newfound sense of resolution that Swimming represents.  The piece is "about the artist's question 'Is it possible to be a searching, creative artist and not be a tortured, searching, creative artist?' In other words, can I be happy, can I be married, can I have a slightly nicer home, and have a lot of good things in my life and keep doing music?" explains Tom.  "I was finally to that point where the answer to that question was 'maybe yes.'"

Later Tom recounted, "When we finished recording 'Chicago Interlude,' Tony Malaby looked at me and said, 'Man, Tom, I really dig this music.  It's so, so human.'   That meant a lot  —I knew I was on the right track.  Not maybe, definitely yes."

—Frank Tafuri

[Read Tom Varner's complete interview.]

  

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