Unless you keep solid tabs on European contemporary jazz, chances are you’ve never listened to Iain Ballamy or his main project, Food. It’s fairly depressing that such a talented performer and composer only got to me by the chance mailing of a promotional CD. Nonetheless, Food’s “Molecular Gastronomy,” which features Ballamy on saxophone, caught my ears at once. Ballamy is joined by the master percussionist Thomas Strønen in what was once a fairly traditional acoustic outfit, but has become a startlingly original combination of breakbeat and bebop.
Food is not a new group, and their most appreciated effort with Ballamy on board is 2004’s “Last Summer,” released on Rune Grammofon. Although the album was recognized as integrating a rare type of subtle electronica into classic jazz, the result then was nowhere as pronounced as it is on “Molecular Gastronomy.” The band has slowly seen its membership degrade until this latest release, where only Ballamy and Strønen remain in the core rotation. It seems that this reduction has done wonders for the group’s sound and dynamic. Their latest effort is a fiercely concise juxtaposition of Ballamy’s acoustic resonances and the industrial precision of Strønen’s percussion.
Ballamy and Strønen’s genre conjunction has already done a job on the several critics who’ve tried to digest the album. Generally agreed on as the duo’s most accessible work, PopMatters lamented that “the link between experimental food and experimental music here may have to remain in the musicians’ minds.” I’d like to think that a sonic description of experimental cooking isn’t the most pertinent problem “Molecular Gastronomy” addresses.
Trying a different angle, UK critic John Bungey admitted that the “Anglo-Nordic electro-acoustic music [of Food] doesn’t pose much of a threat to the Arctic Monkeys.” He then proceeded to say that the album “could make ambient music respectable again.”
What’s fascinating about both descriptions (aside from the hyphens in Bungey’s) is the vocabulary both reviews use. “Experimental, electro-acoustic, ambient” all skimp over the same underlying fact. Apparently, the taboo word is “jazz” itself. Even the progressive jazz minds at Allaboutjazz.com gloss over the word, calling one track “nearly ambient” and another composed of “percolating electronic rhythms.” I don’t mean to disparage any of the judgments about the record, because they’re all accurate. But it’s a shame that reviewers are hesitant to make a new dichotomy more overt for the current generation, who by and large sees “jazz” as the sonorities and textures of the ’50s and ’60s.
“Molecular Gastronomy” is not an avant-garde or experimental work; the album uses sounds and structures that have been around since at least the early ’90s. The album is one of many convincing ideas of where all jazz should be in relation to the technological prowess of our time.
That said, it’s not hard to understand why an album as beautifully modern as “Molecular Gastronomy” gets compared to the Arctic Monkeys. With drum sounds that seem lifted from a Bjork album and reverb reminiscent of vintage Radiohead, Food has done something that would have made the jazz musicians of 50 years ago turn up their noses. By borrowing from the sonic vocabulary of “experimental rock” (or rock at all, for that matter), Food is doing their part to break the mold of a “pure jazz” solely concerned with traditional structure, technique, and form.
So whose fault is it that Food doesn’t and probably won’t get credited properly? Wynton Marsalis’, at least partially. As long as jazz musicians like him sit on their Juilliard thrones and release tracks like the “Feeling of Jazz,” pieces bound by the stiffest of swings, nothing will change. The living traditionalists who refuse to admit that synthesizers can be used for other functions besides replacing real musicians are only part of the problem. The bigger issue at fault would be unwise to tackle here“the human need to define rigid categories and then vigorously defend them.
The bottom line: it’s pointless to try to convince critics to call “Molecular Gastronomy” the state of jazz or even jazz at all if they don’t want to. But as Ballamy and Strønen continue to receive their well-deserved share of attention for the project, it will continue to bug me when critics (including myself) call their music avant-garde. Although the band’s masterful subtlety sets them apart from the rest of the electronic-jazz community, the tools remain the same, and unfortunately jazz, just “jazz,” will be left out of the headline again and again.
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