Buster Williams (photograph by Michael Oletta)
Sound, despite its constant incursion on each day's human complexity, defines an essential emotional framework of our too distracted lives.
Music is the ultimate agency and augmentation of the brute episteme sound confers on thought and feeling.
That sonic world precedes us.
It survives our brief time on earth, irreducible to memes, generalities and intellectual explication.
The force of its overt as well as subliminal impact cannot be undervalued without mis-comprehending the power, and delicacy, of sound's ceaseless seductive significance.
As a live "in performance" recording engineer for more than forty years, I can attest to the simple truth that capturing the full sonic impact of an acoustic bass played with command and delicacy is virtually an unrivaled challenge.
In the hands of a master bassist cajoling a superior instrument, its often overlooked astonishment, glory and enchantment are perhaps without musical rivals.
Jazz Bass, 2018: a fantasy (Photograph and image editing by David W. Robinson)
Buster Williams is not merely a superior jazz musician.
He is a sublime artistic provocateur who allows his bass to exude delicacy, hipness, and virtually unearthly intrigue.
In my frequent experience across several decades listening "on site" to Kenny Barron (a jazz pianist without equals) at Bradley's in New York and multiple venues on the west coast, Buster's lyric accompaniment has never been solely an augmentation of musical "speech" and seduction.
It is a spiritual partner, the foundation of music's enchantment and meaning.
Michael Oletta's unique capacity to snatch a moment of musical immediacy from disappearance, here once more captures the
dignity of music's enchanting wakefulness . . . sound and sight, as Wallace Stevens notes, become "a new knowledge of reality."
