The collective trio, Brew, formed in the late 1990's, is heard here in its first recording made both in studio and live at the Knitting Factory in 1998 and 1999. This is one of 2 discs released as a double CD. The other is all recorded in studio in 2019, and you are encouraged to hear both as it creates an interesting comparison, showing the evolution of this remarkable trio.

Liner Notes by Brent Hayes Edwards:

With these extraordinary sessions, recorded two decades apart, it is finally possible to appreciate a trio whose work stands out even in the voluminous discographies of three master musicians. The history of Brew dates back to the late 1990s, when Miya Masaoka and Reggie Workman first came together to perform a few duo concerts, before inviting Gerry Hemingway to join them to form a collective trio. Heat documents the ferment of their initial explorations, with tracks from a studio recording in 1998 as well as a concert at the Knitting Factory in 1999. Although they came together intermittently in the following decade, their commitments to other ensembles and to teaching made it difficult to sustain a more active presence, especially after Hemingway moved to Switzerland in 2009 to take a position at the Hochschule Luzern. After a few concert performances spread over the next decade they eventually were able to reunite in the studio to record Between Reflections in November 2019.

This release offers an unusual opportunity, in other words, to consider the changes and continuities in the trio’s work across a divide of twenty years. The name Brew is appropriate to a music that comes to us only after a long wait: it takes time—and the heat and effervescence of fermentation: something sweet broken down into something intoxicating—for elements to steep and mix in a solution.

Although there are other improvising trios in which strings play a prominent role, it is above all Masaoka’s koto that gives Brew its unique sound. It may be overly simplistic to describe it as an “East-West” transcultural mix, in part because, as Masaoka has pointed out, the koto itself originated before the 10th century in the transcultural atmosphere of the Gagaku orchestra in the Japanese imperial court, which brought together musics from China, Korea, Vietnam and Persia. The trio dramatizes the subtle but stark differences between Masaoka’s koto and Workman’s bass, a matter not only of tuning but also of material (whether nickel-plated steel, nylon, or silk) and techniques of bowing and plucking (whether directly with the fingers or with tsume fingerpicks). The koto is a particularly labile instrument—it is capable of conveying the plaintive vulnerability of the human voice one moment and the sharp wail of an electric guitar the next, or even the wooden thud of a bamboo gamelan jegog—and its mutability somehow brings out and emphasizes the tonal breadth of the bass and drum set, too, in a way that might not come across as forcefully in a trio fronted by a horn or piano.

As intimate as it can be, Brew is an insistently orchestral trio. Its sonic palette seems to exceed the actions possible by three players. This may be less apparent in concert, where what Masaoka might call the “visual presence” of the players hovering over their various instruments becomes part of a choreographic drama. But listening to these recordings of Brew, we are propelled into an atmosphere of pure aural contemplation. There are a number of historical precedents of small group formations taking advantage of the multi-instrumental capabilities of their members to explore a range of timbral combinations. One way to describe Brew is as a radical expansion of this principle: all three musicians deploy multiple instruments. Workman plays musical saw and percussion in addition to the bass, and in the 2019 session Masaoka switches to the Vietnamese monochord or dan bau (hooked up to a guitar amp) on a number of tunes including Cutting by the Pound, Cricket’s Paradise, and Tug. Hemingway and Masaoka also often make recourse to electronic sampling along with their acoustic instruments. As a result, it becomes difficult to identify each player as a single “voice” in the fabric. Instead the voices seem to proliferate—not three, but five, then four, then seven—as the sounds multiply and one can’t always tell where they’re coming from: is that metallic whine a bow against a saw or a dan bau, a drumstick scraped against the edge of a cymbal or a computer sample? The music rejects our inclination to reduce it to a set of individual statements; instead we are confronted with the elusive ebb and flow of a swarm or a cloud.

For listeners familiar with the music that Hemingway, Masaoka, and Workman have each recorded with other ensembles (BassDrumBone, MZM, or Trio 3, for instance), the interplay of Brew is unexpected and engrossing. At its core, Brew might be called an enterprise in the dynamics of mutual attunement: an astounding demonstration of sustained sensitivity to what percolates at the outer reaches of auditory perception as improvising musicians interact in real time. Moment by moment, their exchange constructs what Hemingway calls a “sanctuary” of sound, a “chance to be lured into a freedom in which our regulated lives are suspended” in a way that leaves us with a keener capacity for perception. One of the delights of this ensemble is that the musicians’ concentration, their responsiveness, is so clearly discernable: as with all great music, we come to realize that what we are listening to is listening itself: a trio of players hearing and responding to one another.