Max Johnson: When the Streets Were Quiet
New Focus Recordings

Scan Max Johnson's CV and the impression crystallizes of a highly regarded bassist with credits any jazz artist would envy. He's toured, recorded, and performed with Muhal Richard Abrams, Nels Cline, Ingrid Laubrock, William Parker, Joseph Jarman, and Kris Davis, and has issued nine albums under his own name and had a hand in more than fifty others. But a closer look reveals him to be a musician of immense versatility and a composer comfortable in multiple idioms. Currently a music theory teacher at Brooklyn College and a graduate of The New School, Brooklyn College, and Vermont College of Fine Arts, Johnson has established himself as a contemporary music composer with a number of commissioned classical works to his name. In 2018, he created Clawed, a work for oboe, horn, and harpsichord, for the University of Glaskow to celebrate Claude Debussy's centenary and followed it with I Have Heard the Chimes at Midnight, a piece for brass trio and piano written at the request of the Steven R. Gerber Trust.

It's Johnson's composer side that's featured on When the Streets Were Quiet, a set of four chamber works that reflect positively on his talents in that area. Whereas another figure straddling genres might create works that likewise draw from different music types, Johnson is here operating exclusively within the contemporary classical realm. Splendidly bringing the composer's through-composed material into being are violinist Lauren Cauley, violist Carrie Frey, cellist Maria Hadge, clarinetist Lucy Hatem, and pianist Fifi Zhang. They give Johnson's thoughtfully crafted pieces assured readings and bring into sharp relief his artful deployment of counterpoint, mood, and compositional arc.

Johnson doesn't play on the fifty-two-minute release, though he does conduct its opening piece, Minerva. Scored for clarinet, violin, viola, and cello, the 2021 piece lunges forth with short phrases battered about from one player to another. Minerva never sits in one place for long when its tendrils coil and re-coil for more than ten adventurous minutes. This is a work where every performer's engaged and critical to the result, though solo and duo passages surface along the way. The momentum slows for a dramatic central exploration, but that episode aside, Minerva is generally animated by restlessness and a barely containable energy.

As evocative as its title, Nine O'Clock, When the Streets Were Quiet (2020) pairs clarinet with string trio in a piece dedicated to Kafka. Some of the nightmarish surreality of his stories might also be heard in Johnson's when the instruments—tremolo giving the strings a shuddering quality—establish a somewhat foreboding foundation for the fourteen-minute setting. After leading the performance aggressively, the clarinet drops out, leaving the strings to convulsively wrap themselves around one another like mating snakes. Subtly, the strings elongate their lines, after which the clarinet surreptitiously re-enters, this time as part of a textural mass of rather Ligeti-esque character.

Following that engrossing nightscape, the instrumentation reduces to violin, viola, and cello for 2017's String Trio, a seventeen-minute foray into writing that calls to mind works by Bartók and Berg that likewise push beyond traditional harmonic writing into chromaticism and atonality. At the five-minute mark, a yearning expression lightens the mood, but briefly, as the music soon enough plunges into knotty territory, all short stabs and emphatic gestures, before expanding on the soundworld by adding pizzicati to the bowing. Also a trio, Echoes of a Memory concludes the release with a work for clarinet, viola, and piano, this one advancing from a solemn, ethereal opening to, first, a prolonged meditation and, secondly, flowing interplay between the instruments before the pace arrests for a contemplative coda.

February 2023