Peter Evans: Ars Ludicra

In the band's handful of releases the past decade, Peter Evans' Being & Becoming has defined itself by an unusual pattern of influence. As the former leader of superstar avant-garde quartet Mostly Other People Do the Killing, Evans has always played the agitator, the many-hats uncompromising auteur, challenging in both sonic intellect and actual practice. He lies squarely in jazz, but borrows heavily from the classical cornet repertoire, early devotional music, and as disparate sources as Detroit Techno and the South Indian Carnatics. His musical philosophy can be aptly represented by a waterlogged crate of vinyls deep in an East Village bodega. 

Ars Ludicra displays Evans' musical cosmopolitanism at full blast. Joined by familiar faces Joel Ross and Nick Jozwiak, and featuring Michael Shekwoaga Ode's last performance in the ensemble before Tyshawn Sorey's acclaimed entrance, Being and Becoming has never been truer to its mysterious name. 2023's Ars Memoria (in English, the art of memory), despite a rabid experimentalism and Ross' eerie vibes, was a fairly analogue record. Jozwiak's synths are kept to a comparative minimum, a baroque echo to Ode's ecstatic binding. The self producedArs Ludicra (literally "art of play," though in interviews, Evans translates it as "art of the game") allows Jozwiak a wider zone. Apart from "Malibu," every track explodes with arpeggiators and droning squawks, often in tandem or actively antagonistic to extended phrases by Evans. 

More than just a change in band synergy, the ubiquitous synths puncture the philosophy of all players' experimentation. The recording is set in hallowed ground: the arboresque Jersey Shore Van Gelder studio where much of the foundations of Jazz as a genre quickly metastasised. The studio affords even recent records with a sort of verdant, earthy immediacy. Especially for the trumpet, higher octaves sound more piqued, lower ones regal and verbose. Much of Lee Morgan's moody warmth in his earlier recordings can be attributed to the oaken walls and van Gelder's poignant engineering, and too, if there are shades of Morgan, Miles Davis and Donald Byrd in Evans' playing here. Jozwiak's synths and Moogs are all overdubbed, none produced during initial recording. The strange, spacy tones in "Hank's" and ebullient croons in "Pulsar" are all ridiculously sharp and genuinely from out of nowhere, intrusive and without much presaging from the rest of the ensemble. 

Such a move is risky, especially in a record concerned with the absolute freedom of its components and the immediacy of their improvisations. But instead of stifling the instrumental textures, it presents an exciting diatribe between two contradictory sounds. The effusively digital and nostalgic analogue spiral into each other, forcing the other into perpendicular directions. The points and figures suggested by Ode's syncopated stickwork are filled in by the synths like an intense charcoal shading. Jozwiak's overdubbing doesn't interfere with the band's freedom, but reconstitutes it. In "Images," the low drone is as sharp and swooning as a Jeff Mills boiler room set, and swerves in between the ambience of the studio with a hummingbird's accuracy. Unlike many efforts in the genre, Being & Becoming is focused on woven, choral tapestries. The synths provide an extension of the record's polyphony, like an elegant soprano piercing through a Thomas Tallis composition. This polyphony is both the record's M.O. and Evans.' All musical knowledge is unified under his direction, even by force. Ars Ludicra not only refers to the joy in play and experimentation, but the immense collection of "toys" under the band's yolk. Sonic entanglements that breach times & worlds, reach back right where they started.

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