Every weekday night from 6 to 9 PM, Columbia University’s radio station WKCR 89.9FM NY (best known to some as birthplace of the Stretch & Bobbito Show) broadcasts a program called Jazz Alternatives. The Wednesday edition, known as the Musician’s Show, features songs specially selected by a guest co-host, usually an upcoming or established player who comes to the studio to discuss his or her music and influences.
So it went that one Wednesday evening in the spring of 2013, while driving from my old apartment in Huntington Station to my girlfriend’s old apartment in the Huntington Bay area, I tuned my radio to its second preset only to hear some jazzman, whose name I didn’t catch, introduce a song called “Elephant in the Room” by Gunhild Seim & Time Jungle with Marilyn Crispell.
Quite the mouthful, huh?
To be clear, I heard all of that but couldn’t remember it, especially not after my mind was blown by the song’s opening notes, an arcane yet oddly familiar piano melody as unsettling as it was beautiful. I was utterly enthralled and instantly obsessed, on some Phantom of the Opera ish. The riff soon became a foundation for the song’s other players (Gunhild Seim on trumpet, Arlid Hoem on alto sax, John Lilja on bass, and Dag Magnus Narvesen on drums) to build on, each contributing another brilliantly imagined, perfectly restrained piece to the proceedings. By the time Arlid’s saxophone solo came whirling in around the 2:50 mark, I had nearly reached my girlfriend’s place, but I knew I would never forgive myself if I didn’t find out exactly who and what I was hearing.
So, I looked up WKCR’s phone number and called in, and the host graciously answered, provided me with the names of the group and the song (which I jotted on the back of a post-it note pulled from inside my wallet), and thanked me for listening. Such is the magic of non-commercial radio.
A Google search for “Gunhild Seim & Time Jungle with Marilyn Crispell” would produce the Elephant Wings album stream (located at the bottom of this post), and additional inquiries about Marilyn Crispell herself would lead my girlfriend and I to attend a duo performance with bassist Gary Peacock at the Rubin Museum of Art, where we would stick around after the show to purchase the pair’s new ECM Records release, Azure.
All of this is well and good in its own right, but none of it can compare to the rush I experienced upon first hearing the beginning of “Elephant in the Room.” For me, then, this song is all about how a single melody, no matter how simple or unremarkable in its form, when played just right, can pique a listener’s interest and remain fresh in the mind no matter how many times it’s repeated. Perhaps this very concept is the elephant to which the song’s title refers, for in the worlds of free-jazz and avant-garde, repetition is sometimes viewed as a dirty word. Yet here is a melody repeated almost ad infinitum, an unwavering loop that, at least in this listener’s case, truly gave the album its wings, inspiring me to reach out to the project’s Norwegian originators and request that they send a copy my way. And despite the album’s other strengths — of which, I’m sure you will find there are many — it’s that elephantine melody that led me to put this post together in the first place.
