In recent months, so many important jazz albums have been reissued that it almost seems trendy. The flood of rediscovered albums is a wonderful complement to the complex, eclectic jazz being made today. Often these reissues are not classic recordings at all, but particularly avant-garde works by noted performers that have slipped through the cracks. Such is the case with Meredith Monk’s forgotten Dolmen Music. Following up on the success of Monk’s recent work, ECM has reissued this subtle and complex early recording.
The deepest of the album’s pieces is “Dolmen Music” itself, nearly 30 minutes long, which is as haunting as it is unique. Stonehenge, composed of dolmens (a type of rock structure scattered throughout the countryside in France and England), is the main influence. In this site, steeped in the mysteries of the cosmos, Monk finds a metaphor for the unpredictability of improvised music. Its circular formation is also important here, and the piece alludes to this through its looping vamp lines and in the nontraditional staging of the vocalists, who sit in a circle, surrounded by stones.
In “Overture and Men’s Conclave,” the first of the piece’s six movements, the sound of wind (summoned by an airy cello) becomes a recursive chant, then collapses into the murmurs of a men’s congregation that speaks in tongues. In “Pine Tree Lullaby,” an eerily soothing cello hints both at music’s power to bring sleep and at its vitality, persistent despite the darkness of the forest at night. The two elements—death and life—now brought together are held in tension with the final two movements. “Conclusion” loops back to the beginning, repeating the themes once more and making it seem as if death and life coexisted all along.
Monk’s eclecticism sometimes makes the music difficult to appreciate—as is the case with the other tracks on the album. But when it is poised in a situation as demanding as that of “Dolmen Music,” this eclecticism, a property intrinsic to Monk’s voice itself, shines as both the rock from which the others in the archway are hewn and as the gravity by which those rocks press the earth to reach, together, toward heaven. It is the voice that, pre-lingual, summons music and magic from these stone gates that are agape and singing silently—the mouths of God.
