Natural Information Society is Chicago Music History in Motion
photo by Ike Day
A little less than two years ago, I found myself alone in New York City for a week. My school’s COVID reopening plan meant that I had to take a semester off in fall 2020 and then do two straight semesters from the winter through the summer of 2021, and September of that year felt like my first real time off in ages. Over the course of the pandemic I had become obsessed with avant-garde Jazz and experimental music, and was kicking myself at the amount of musicians whom I could have seen during the before times but missed the chance due to my willful ignorance. So I used this trip to New York, which happened at a time when live music was still only just starting to return, as a means of making up for all of that lost time. Though I had plenty of friends in the city, I spent most of my time alone, hopping from one show to the next, often going to two or three shows a day. It was an astonishing cluster of brilliant, creative music, including Amirtha Kidambi & Darius Jones, Daniel Carter, Jason Nazary, gabby fluke-mogul, Samara Lubelski, Bill Nace, Sam Newsome, Elliott Sharp, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Hiro Kone, and the late, great Jaimie Branch. But the highlight of the entire thing was getting to see Natural Information Society, a group that wasn’t even based in the city, perform with William Parker.
The bassist and bandleader William Parker is a musician whom I hold in more reverence than perhaps any other musician living today. The importance of his music and his presence in the Jazz and free music scenes is far too grand for me to summarize in writing here. The same goes for his importance to me as a listener; his albums as a bandleader were among the first free Jazz albums I listened to, so it wouldn’t be too much of an overstatement to say his music changed my life. But that night in Brooklyn, Parker was not on stage to play bass or lead a band. Alongside Natural Information Society’s core group - bandleader Joshua Abrams on the guimbri (a North African lute with a deep, resonant sound), Lisa Alvarado on harmonium, Mikel Patrick Avery on the drumkit, Jason Stein on bass clarinet, and legendary percussionist Hamid Drake playing frame drum - Parker played the donso ngoni, a string instrument associated with hunters and griots in the Wassoulou region of West Africa, as well as the shennai (an Indian double reed) and the bansuri (and Indian flute).
The donso ngoni has been around for several centuries, but as a listener I associate it the most with the work of Don Cherry. There’s a scene at the beginning of a brilliant Swedish TV documentary on Cherry available on YouTube in which he plays a rhythm on the donso ngoni which he says reminded him of blues musicians such as John Lee Hooker and T-Bone Walker, and the sound of the railroad. Cherry’s music took in rich musical histories - including Jazz and Blues as well as Indian Classical music, Gamelan, and Turkish folk - while simultaneously deconstructing the limitations often placed on their individual practitioners. Additionally, there was always something deeply futuristic about his music to me (“Ancient to the Future,” as the Art Ensemble of Chicago might say), whether it was the utopian ideals surrounding the arrangement of the music or his collaborations with electroacoustic pioneers such as Jon Appleton and Jean Schwarz. His “organic music,” as he called it, paired together musicians who sometimes didn’t even speak the same language but found common joy in the act of playing and creating music. Save for a few collaborators, I don’t think Cherry had any true contemporaries in making this organic music, but he provided a framework for its expansion, and Parker, Abrams and Drake may be the three musicians who have, together and individually, pushed it forward in the most fully-realized manner.
Like Cherry, Natural Information Society’s music is rooted in spiritual, folkloric musical traditions. The most obvious one comes from the music of the Gnawa, an ethnic group in Morocco who were originally brought to the country as enslaved people from West Africa. Their music, used to accompany Sufi rituals that also incorporated elements of West African tradition, often consists of call-and-response vocals, clattering castanet percussion, and rhythms provided by the guimbri. The resulting music is some of the most repetitive, hypnotic and ecstatic music out there, and I’ve read that rituals tend to go on for extreme lengths of time. Like William Parker, Joshua Abrams is a bassist, and in that role he has been a member of The Roots (for a brief period very, very early on in their career) and the great Post-Everything folk group Town & Country, as well as a collaborator to everyone from indie legends such as Tortoise, David Grubbs, Sam Prekop, and Bonnie “Prince” Billy to groups with Chicago Jazz stalwarts such as Nicole Mitchell and Fred Anderson. In the context of the Natural Information Society, however, he exclusively plays the guimbri, often in a manner that provides a groove and a shape to the group’s continually expanding music. Besides the guimbri, the hallmarks of the group’s sound are Lisa Alvarado’s lightly fluctuating harmonium drones, which seem to be rooted in Indian Classical music, Hamid Drake’s tabla and frame drum playing, and weaving horn arrangements that subtly call to mind the usage of polyphony in forms of traditional African music.
Also like Don Cherry, their music goes far deeper than kitschy “World Music” tropes. I always thought of Cherry as just as much a contemporary of composers such as Terry Riley (whom he collaborated with on the still-never-officially-released “Marijuana Summit”) and La Monte Young. Both of these composers were crucial early figures in the development of Minimalist composition, and it was composers such Phillip Glass and Steve Reich that made this music omnipresent, to the point of almost becoming part of the American landscape. Glass and Reich were students of Western Classical composition who incorporated influences from music that, at the time, was not afforded respect from music academia, ranging from the traditional spiritual and/or folkloric musics previously mentioned to John Coltrane and even Chuck Berry. The legacies of these composers are complicated in a way that I don’t have the space to get into in just a few sentences. Glass and Reich’s early music still holds up, but their influence also gave way to mountains of kitschy soundtrack-filler dreck, music that will be the easiest to replicate when AI begins stealing jobs from musicians. In a story as old as time, music that once presented a challenge to the academic establishment was sucked up into its vortex.
Cherry’s music has yet to meet this fate, in part because Jazz musicians (especially left-field ones like Cherry) are almost never given the level of respect from academia as Serious Composers like Glass and Reich, but also because I don’t think it's possible. Cherry’s feels as though it evolves continuously because the emphasis is on playing and creating music moreso than form, which goes directly against the idea all-too-present in academia that form means everything. In this sense, I think Cherry presented a sort of alternative vision of Minimal music that gave way to the compositional elements of Natural Information Society, in the same sense that Glass and Reich gave way to the Dessners and Muhlys of the world. In other words, the Minimal music of NIS could be described as what would happen if the influence of Ravi Shankar and John Coltrane present in Glass and Reich’s pieces was built upon into a new kind of category-defying trance music, rather than being discarded as soon as the money came flowing in.
As important as Cherry is to the group, I think more than anything Natural Information Society is a product of Chicago’s unparalleled rich musical history. If the endpoint in making this kind of music was to make some sort of statement against genre or the categorization of music, these influences aren’t the means to an end, or truthfully the means to any end. The music is, to me, simply reflective of how Chicago’s musical culture has existed for generations. The city is full of creative musicians whose biggest desire seems to be to play, and to collaborate and foster connections with other artists. This often does translate to defying genre conventions, but Chicago’s music doesn’t exist in a landscape in which music must either work within one genre or without any genre, as the debates between “straight ahead” and “free” jazz in the 50s and 60s were often similarly framed. An example along these lines that Michael Zerang (another musician Abrams has collaborated with) told me about was that Hamid Drake has played in both Jazz groups and a Reggae band in the city. I can’t speak for Mr. Drake, but I’d imagine that, to him, playing in a reggae band was less making any sort of statement about the genre boundaries between Jazz and Reggae and had more to do with the fact that Reggae music fucking rules, and I’d imagine being able to play it is a beautiful experience.
Since Time Is Gravity, the latest release from Natural Information Society, feels particularly indebted to Chicago’s present-day music scene. This is in part because of the lineup, which is among the largest on any NIS record and is a stunning roster of Chicago Jazz all-stars, including saxophonists Nick Mazzarella, Mai Sugimoto, and unsung legend Ari Brown, and cornet players Josh Berman and Ben LaMar Gay. Each NIS release changes and builds upon the previous in subtle ways. 2017’s Simultonality album felt like their most groove-oriented, while 2019’s double LP Mandatory Reality emphasized the minimal aspects of their music with a set of slow, lengthy performances that shifted in ever-so-subtle directions. Their most recent release prior Since Time is Gravity, the 2021 live album descension (Out of Our Constrictions) featuring British free improv legend Evan Parker, was a single hour-plus piece bursting with frantic energy that managed to recall House music, Free Jazz, and the live improvisations of The Necks. None of these releases represent a sharp stylistic left-turn of any sort, but each release has expanded the group’s sonic palette while staying firmly rooted in their signature sound.
In this lineage, Since Time is Gravity distinguishes itself as perhaps the darkest sounding of Natural Information Society’s releases. Again, this is not to say the group has traded blissed out communal improvisation for guttural free jazz skronkery; “Murmuration,” the longest track on the LP, could have easily fit onto Mandatory Reality. Still, the larger ensemble on this record creates more room for dissonance in its arrangements, however subtle it may be. Album highlight “Is” presents a collective procession of microtonal horns marching over a loping beat provided by Abrams, Avery and Drake. Though most of the individual tracks are not as lengthy as those on Mandatory Reality, Gravity stands out as being a particularly drone-centric affair from NIS. “Immemorial” is an eight minute sustained drone, and if you squint, you could almost here it as a condensed Phill Niblock piece with the more than welcome addition of Drake’s tabla playing.
“Stigmergy,” one of the most densely layered tracks on the album, is a swarm of heady solos ornamented by dubby effects and grounded in a drum machine rhythm reminiscent of Lee Scratch Perry’s “Dub Revolution.” The sound system experiments pioneered by Perry and others were arguably an even more radical form of Minimal music than the one associated with Glass and Reich. By incorporating them into this album, NIS furthers its living, breathing, evolving form of cooperative collective composition and improvisation. It also goes to show that there are still many unexplored sonic avenues for the group to take on future releases. I look forward to following them there.