There’s little way of knowing what path the music might follow once Actual/Actual takes flight, the feel and direction of each performance shaped by everything from the band members’ individual moods on a given day to the increasingly dire political realities currently unfolding within the country at large.
“You often hear people make the analogy of improvisational music to conversation, and I think it’s apt in a lot of ways,” said keys player Gerard Cox, who joined saxophonist Rent Romus for a mid-April interview (drummer Troy Kunkler and vibraphonist/trumpeter Josh Strange round out the four-piece improvisational jazz group). “And conversation is often like, ‘What’s on your mind?’ That’s what people end up talking about, right? The things that are on their mind. And I think it’s the same with improvised music, where it follows whatever you happen to be thinking about on the stage. And right now, a lot of that could be political.”
“I do feel like this music, and the music I’m doing on a personal level, is truly resistant against the current situation in our society right now, especially with where I’m coming from as a queer person,” Romus said. “And I’m not saying this because I want to impose it on anyone. I’m only saying that on a personal, deep level, what I’m doing, to me, represents freedom.”
When the musicians gathered at Musicol in Columbus a couple of years back to record Actual/Actual’s sophomore album, Dimensionality, which releases digitally via Edgetone Records on Tuesday, April 22, these conversations reflected an entirely different reality, often standing as dynamic snapshots of the relationships being developed in real time between the existent players and further augmented by guest contributors Melvin Cortez Jackson (French horn) and percussionist Aaron Putnam.
“Curtain Calls,” for one, mirrors the feel of a successful first date as it builds from halting back and forth bleats to an intricately melodic swing – the awkward early get-to-know-yous flowering into an effortlessly deep heart-to-heart. Other tracks, such as the nine-plus minute “Perpendicular Funicular,” find the crew locked in an expansive musical search. As the track progresses, long passages that evoke a person poking and prodding their way through a dark room give way to sections in which the drums ignite and the other players respond in kind, bathing everything in brief, fiery light.
Romus described the process of playing within Actual/Actual as one of “intense listening,” and this idea reverberates throughout the recording, the musicians balancing their want and ability to really blow things out – “That’s kind of our thing, we’re total shredders,” Cox said – with the knowledge that sometimes what the moment requires is for them to be still.
“And I think that starts with everyone [in the band] having respect for themselves, which also means that there’s an empathy and respect for the people you’re with,” said Romus, who will join the members of Actual/Actual in a record release concert at Old First Presbyterian Church tonight (Monday, April 21).
Onstage, this dynamic evidences itself in an evolving push-and-pull that can draw the music in wildly different directions. At one concert in Sacramento, Cox said the musicians engaged in a “Steve Coleman free-funk thing,” while a later Pittsburgh performance centered a passage in which the players built on an extended, deeply layered Latin groove. “[And I] don’t really know where it came from, but it just felt like the move we were actually supposed to make,” Cox said. “Being open to the moment, we should be surprising ourselves at times, too.”
Cox and Romus first connected in 2006 when Romus, who lives in the California Bay Area, played a Columbus show at Milo Arts, initially connecting over their shared affinity for the Columbus multi-instrumentalist Hasan Abdur-Razzaq, who served as a musical mentor to both prior to his 2021 death – an event that Cox said brought the two closer owing to this shared personal connection and the reality that the two musicians/presenters serve as “often lonely ‘keepers of the flame’” and could mutually benefit from the support.
In searching out other players to collaborate with in Actual/Actual, Cox said he wanted the collective to be multigenerational – “We could just play with older people, but I’m tired of these groups where everyone’s the same age,” he said – while also considering the personalities of the other players and how each could shape and inform the evolving dynamic..
“I’d say that’s the quiet part of any band that has some longevity. It’s really like, how well do the people understand each other? Do they have the same sense of humor? Do they want to talk about the same sorts of things?” Cox said. “If things are socially awkward, I find it can be hard to get the music off the ground. I really do. And that doesn’t mean I’m in favor of forming a band where everyone has the same background and the same outlook. … When Hasan was around, he was hanging around with all of us, and we all had very different backgrounds, but there was this shared grace and humility, and none of us took ourselves too seriously. And when you have those things intact, it’s easier to get along, and that makes the musical situation more relaxed and far more creatively fertile.”
It also allows space for personal growth and change, with Romus, for one, sharing the radically different musical space he exists in now than when the two first crossed paths nearly two decades ago. At the time, Romus said, he often existed in darkness, tormented by physical and mental pains that he kept walled off from all but a select few in his life. “I wasn’t social,” he said. “Well, I was social on the outside but I wasn’t on the inside.”
These dynamics reached a crisis point early in the Covid pandemic, with the musician declining to go into specifics but allowing that things became “much deeper and much more dark and destructive” before the weather finally broke, introducing a sense of light into his existence that has impacted everything from personal relationships to the way he approaches his playing.
“Music was always the place where I found true joy in my life, no matter what else was going on,” Romus said. “Now music is not only that, but it feeds my entire existence to a point of beauty and grace, and I live in the moment every day, grateful I have opportunities like what we’re about to do again. … It’s something I really appreciate now, and it’s beautiful.”
Andy is the former editor of Columbus Alive and has written for The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Stereogum, Spin and more.
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