Edenfred Files

Darryl Harper The Edenfred Files The Edenfred Files almost sounds like something out of spy fiction, but it's meaning is straightforward. In the summer of 2009, clarinetist Darryl Harper spent two weeks in an artist residency program called Edenfred, in Madison, Wisconsin. He used the time to work every day with the two contrasting lineups featured on this CD. What we're hearing, then, is a prcis of the creative adventure that Edenfred represented for all involved. While we were at Edenfred, Harper recounts, we met a woman who specialized in arts audiences and quantitative analysis. We met a poet, a children's book author, a visual artist. We had a salon where everyone shared their work, and that was really beautiful - very inspiring to be around people working in these other disciplines. Harper spent week one at Edenfred with pianist Kevin Harris, honing a duo collaboration fruitful enough to have been given a band name: Into Something. The second week saw the arrival of bassist Matthew Parris and drummer Harry Butch Reed, Harper's longtime partners in the Onus Trio. On The Edenfred Files Harper brings together both aesthetic worlds - duo with fleshed-out piano harmony, trio with no chords - and offers a fresh, eloquent statement on the challenges and straight-up fun of ensemble playing. Can a duo be called an ensemble? Absolutely. Harper recalls: When I was in Boston between 2004 and 2006, one of the first courses I took at New England Conservatory was called 'Duo Ensemble' and it was taught by [saxophonist] Allan Chase. There were eight of us. We did all this heavy listening to duo recordings, and each week we had to prepare pieces along different parameters. He would mix us up, so we'd be with a different partner every week. It had a big impact on me, and it got me thinking that I'd like to develop that kind of playing, with that kind of transparency and exposure. I happened to meet Kevin right around that same time and I thought we had a great chemistry. The clarinet-bass-drums trio format, certainly not an overused one in modern jazz, is something Harper first documented on the 2004 HiPNOTIC release Triphony. Featuring Parrish and Reed and released under the name The Onus, this album marked the debut of a wonderfully spare and agile unit, playing compositions by Harper, Andy Jaffe and Stevie Wonder, plus Limehouse Blues and five pieces credited to the full trio. In 2009 came Harper's Stories in Real Time, merging the Harper-Parrish-Reed trio with another initiative called the C3 Project (three clarinets, bass clarinet, piano, voice and rhythm). Harper was broadening his ensemble concept, focusing on ambitious works by guest composers Ken Schaphorst, Roland Davis, Sunggone Hwang and others. On The Edenfred Files we hear Harper paring it down again, embracing a simple blowing vibe that highlights the whole band on Jerry's Blues, a 24-bar waltz. The tune's composer, Vicki Wiseblatt, was a fellow clarinetist and faculty member at George School in Pennsylvania in the mid-'90s. We played a lot of classical stuff together, Harper says, but she had written this blues and showed it to me to ask for suggestions. I really loved it, and the trio's been playing it ever since. One standout feature on the trio cuts is Parrish's ability to move in and out of melodic roles, doubling lines with the clarinet and yet never losing momentum or depth of tone. Both Matthew and Butch have a wonderful sense of orchestration, Harper says, maximizing all the potential of the trio to get the biggest sound, or the most intimate sound, going back and forth. The trio deals with blues of a very different nature on Julius Hemphill's Kansas City Line - originally a solo alto sax performance on the 1977 Hemphill recording Blue Boy. As I made clear on Stories in Real Time, Harper says, I was heavily influenced by the World Saxophone Quartet, so I've listened to Hemphill a lot. I just love the immediacy of his playing and the sincerity of it. You can't mistake it - it's Julius Hemphill. We think of Monk along the same lines,