“This is the archetypal underground production, a marriage of music and poetry steeped in the American beat tradition, dripping with existential ennui and metaphysical musings, in which the music often feels like an afterthought, often sharply diverging from the vocal parts in a sort of schizophrenic effect.” —progmistress, Fire of Unknown Origin, May 8, 2011
If you love jazz, you won’t love this album by New York performance artist Copernicus. The man can play keys, but he’s more interested in shaking things up with his disjointed, shrill vocal overdubs, over what could’ve been very interesting, progressive jazz.
He basically gets in his own way and in the way of the superlative musicians in this 2011 release.
Copernicus’s latest album, “Cipher And Decipher,” has jazz in it, but shamefully enough, only in the background. Bits and pieces of a sound mix of various kinds of jazz (I hear Latin! I hear rushing drumbeats and caustic horn twists trying for avant-garde!) slip in and out — if you can ignore Copernicus, aka Joseph Smalkovski, screaming in the foreground petulantly, insistently demanding your attention with his derivative anarchist protestations and declarations against religion and war, for chaos.
His 13th release, and third through MoonJune Records, is really, really … annoying. It’s also depressing as hell. By the time you get through the first track, the tiresome, shock value for shock value, “Into The Subatomic” (“The oceans of the sky cry alone in the subatomic. Eat it! Eat it! Feel it!”), you’re wanting out — asap. And if you can last halfway through—by the time the morose “I Don’t Believe” lumbers on, you’re wanting out, literally, looking for a loaded gun or the nearest bridge to jump off (if only to get away from the subsequent earworms that will plague you for many nights to come).
Whenever a song starts sounding like it could be left alone with the more than capable musicianship of these guys — musical director Pierce Turner, Larry Kirwan, Mike Fazio, Bob Hoffnar, Raimundo Penaforte, Cesar Aragundi, Fred Parcells, Rob Thomas, Matty Fillou, Marvin Wright, George Rush, Thomas Hamlin, Mark Brotter — the great and mighty Copernicus has to come in and ruin everything with his clichéd, high-decibel outbursts, all improvised (big surprise).
“Free At Last” is beautiful, for the first blessed minute or so, only hinting at the doom and devastation, stylistically, to come, thanks to the guitarwork. Copernicus can’t let the music be, can’t wait to dissolve this anticipated reverie with his miserable, unoriginal couplets. To add insult to injury, Copernicus thinks it’s wise to riff off Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Free At Last!” speech for profound effect. Only, it’s not profound or effective, just banal and pointless.
“Mud Becomes Mind” starts off with an awesome scat reminiscent of Al Jarreau, followed by some fancy Latin guitar, and a blend of scat and Latin in true jazz-speak. Then Copernicus cuts in way too soon with, the nonsensical but formidable-sounding, “When the matter becomes the mind, we lose consciousness in nothingness.” The song disintegrates fast into a facetious, shallow piece of self-indulgent fluff, “Mud becomes mind. Mud becomes mind! Mud becomes mind!!!” Worst of all, the vocal over-speak invalidates and kills any of the good jazz music that was trying to come forth.
“Matter Is Energy” is an excellent avant-garde 1970s Blood, Sweat, and Tears-inspired jazz piece of probing horns, bass, and keys — minus the vocals. Take the crazy, but strangely purposeful (energy comes in many forms, most notably to destroy) stream-of-consciousness poetry rant — “The mass in the paper clip was all they needed to blow up Hiroshima. Your body is energy. Your body is mass. … Turn your body into an atomic reactor!... Give your bones to the dogs and let the dogs take them into heaven. E=MC2”). Please.
At some point, the songs become a farce and the delirious listener — in a desperate attempt to make sense of the nonsensical, jarring posturing — tries to find the worst example of beat poetry and Dadaism Copernicus tries to present in some believable, legitimate, compelling manner. For laughs. The listener doesn’t have far to go before hitting paydirt in #4, “I Don’t Believe.” This is quite possibly the worst song on the album. (The African-styled “Comprehensible” comes in at a close second; it’s a freak show of a man slowly losing his mind and exposing his earnest, impotent verbal diarrhea.) Mindlessly rote, musically lacking, and lyrically empty.
By the time the post-apocalyptic, free-form coupling Copernicus hysterically screams, “My god is better than your god! [from ‘Where No One Can Win’],” you’re done, you’re out, have a good night.
Copernicus can play, probably well. He just doesn’t.
He unfathomably dismisses the label of musician, preferring the moniker of performance poet and worse. He intentionally puts together the best musicians he knows — including some members of the Celtic rock band, Black 47 — some for many years, all for the job of producing this experimental album. Then, proceeds to cover over their excellent, varied musicianship with his abstract, all-encompassing, offbeat and off-putting narrative (listen to “Where No One Can Win,” and lose your mind).
The average jazz fan will find Copernicus’s “Cipher And Decipher” a huge turn-off and an insult to the genre. It’s definitely not for the mainstream.
But for those who are patient, not easily swayed by trends, don’t care about melody or structure, and able to look beyond the slight Copernicus gives to the music relegated as B-movie background, there is a message here, albeit a simplistic, clichéd one. He’s experimenting with concepts, ideas, and opinions from civilization’s culture about mankind’s tendency toward self-destruction, war, and fighting for infinite meaning amidst finite existence, under the theme of the inevitable revelation of the world as illusion.
It’s just not jazz.
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