Music for Music: Alta Vista
Alta Vista: Exhilaration
By Dan Ursini ©2024
I try to write about cutting-edge music, often culled from surprising sources. Yet even I was amazed to find out that that the primary source material for a new album of experimental country music by Chicago-based jazz trio Alta Vista, is a 1934 book of sheet music entitled New and Original Favorite Songs of Famous Hill Billies. Some months back, double bassist Jakob Heinemann pulled the book from a recycling stack. He took a deep dive into it and quickly ascertained that a sense of ambiguity and vagueness seem to be built into its DNA. It may, or may not be, a collection of heartfelt country & western songs. Individual tunes may, or may not have been, composed/arranged/compiled by an individual named Will Livernash. Back in the 1930s, the songbook may have found use as radio show music—or provided the material for family singalongs. Regardless, period recordings of any of the book’s thirty songs are exceptionally scarce. Today, its Internet presence is limited to occasional appearances at auction websites like eBay.
Heinemann checked through the songs, and he found about ten that contained what he called “a simple beauty.” Then he reached out to a couple musician friends to work on the tunes and experiment with them. One is drummer Andy Danstrom, who was very impressed with Heinemann’s selections and curious about how to develop them. The other is guitarist Chet Zenor, who remarked, “I think the mystery of it all drew us in. In many ways it contextualized the music and allowed us to see how far we could push the songs in our own directions. For me at least, grappling with this ‘real vs fake’ question really inspired a lot about approaching the songs and developing the identity of the band.”
Danstrom described the early creative process: “We started off really out there and experimental, but all of us are committed to musicality. So we slowly dialed back.” What emerged was a commitment by the musicians to deepen the inherent musicality of the songs and convey the contours of the music’s emotional landscapes. Throughout, they express their love of country, as well as experimental jazz and other kinds of risk-taking music. They all play with exceptional concentration.
On the opening track, “Springtime Has Gone,” guitarist Zenor deftly sketches the pensive melody:
Using brushes on his drums, Danstrom creates a range of soft percussive textures. Heinemann exudes restless creative energy as he switches bass player roles between time-keeping, providing melodic support, and creating solo riffs.
The second track, “When the Deserts Are In Bloom,” is a huge personal favorite of mine. It displays the full impact of the approach that Alta Vista takes with these songs.
It begins with a tight, light groove between Heinemann and Danstrom. As Zenor plays the melody, he develops its anthemic resonance. Gradually, the rhythm section plays faster and louder—with Danstrom hitting deft rhythmic accents. A barreling momentum develops, and it is clear that this is a true road song. It makes sense that the accompanying video on YouTube is a compendium of Southwest desert road imagery:
The grooves in this song accentuate the band’s savvy employment of rubato, an elasticity of a song’s pulse against a steady accompaniment. Danstrom explains that rubato “sounds the best when it’s honest and unafraid to be disconnected. It sounds bad when everyone is trying to get on the same tempo. It sounds good when everyone is committed to their own tempo but listening and subconsciously adjusting.”
Learning these songs and making them work was a stretch for the entire Alta Vista trio. Chet Zenor shouldered a complexity of challenges that addressed the essentials of the whole project. He explained, “Being the main melodic voice for these songs where lyrics and melody are so important is a big challenge for me. And trying to translate those things on guitar has impacted me as a musician in a big way. Figuring out how to arrange these songs in a creative but true way has also impacted my approach to playing other peoples’ music. I have become more thoughtful about translating a song’s feelings and purpose.”
The choices Zenor makes are on special display in songs like “Where the Mountains Kiss the Sky”
and “Sailing Down the Golden River”:
These compositions move at extremely slow tempos. Any sound makes a difference, and the trio creates arrangements that are evocative, compressed, and indirect in expression. While the compositions may have been meant for a cozy family hour, they are performed by Alta Vista in a way that reveals another level—one that evokes the deep night of the Great American Yonder. Then as now, it is easy to feel alone in a landscape that inspires considerable awe, excitement . . . and anxiety. That reality is conveyed with great sensitivity by guitarist/composer/producer Dave Miller at his Whiskey Point Recording. He does outstanding work throughout.
A couple of the songs head in a totally different direction. One is an original by the band, entitled “W.M.T.S.F.” It opens with an energetic drum solo followed by a brief comic melody:
An even greater departure is “The Price I Had to Pay”:
It is a sonic portrait of something with a lot of momentum that rolls off the rails and crashes, bringing with it all kinds of damaged metal flying this way and that. Lengthy guitar crescendos echo with waves of aggravation and agitation.
This song is followed by the album’s last track, “It’s A Blue World”:
and the sonic contrast between them is brilliant. “It’s a Blue World” is a magnificently gentle and lonely track, evoking the deep moodiness of early rock and roll steel guitar instrumentals.
Heinemann reflected on everything the band learned while putting this album together. “I feel like we’ve developed something greater than the sum of us three individuals of musicians. We have a particular sound or ‘blend’ that I feel is unique. Hopefully people can connect with it. We can apply that sound to a wide variety of material. We’ve done covers of classical pieces, jazz tunes, and our new record we’re working on this summer is all original material.”
Indeed, at a recent gig at The Whistler in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood, Alta Vista devoted an entire set to originals composed by the band members. They are terrific in live situations, displaying an impressive capacity for speedy shifts in direction. To listen to them play new music expressing their own compositional voices was exhilarating Danstrom explained, “Now the deepest thing you can do is find a way to musically express your personality honestly. I believe this is also the best way to live. This band has been such a gift for me because it’s really fulfilling that desire to make nuanced, personal music.”
Dan Ursini and his wife Valerie live in Oak Park, Illinois. Over the years he has done many kinds of writing. Ursini served as the first resident playwright for the Steppenwolf Theatre of Chicago (1978-1983). His play, Sandbar Flatland, directed by John Malkovich, was produced in 1978 during the dawn of the legendary Off-Loop Theater scene in Chicago. In 1990 Chicago Magazine selected it as one of the ten best shows of the preceding 25 years. Beyond this, Ursini worked for ten years as a Contributing Editor for Puerto Del Sol magazine; he wrote performance art pieces presented at such Chicago venues as Club Lower Links and Club Dreamerz. Ursini wrote radio theatre presented on NPR in the early 1990s. Throughout all this, he has worked full-time at the Law Library at DePaul University where for a decade he also wrote articles for Dialogue, the DePaul law school’s alumni publication. In addition, he was active for some years as a bass guitarist in various Chicago blues/gospel/funk/lounge configurations. Currently Ursini is working on his latest novel. A play he wrote with Robert Rothman, A Mensch Among Men, a fictionalized account of real-life Jewish Chicago-area gangsters, has had two staged readings in Chicago. Dan can be reached at: danursini@aol.com
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