Review of Elsa Nilsson’s Band of Pulses, “Pulses”

Here’s an odd album that keeps its secrets. The band’s name appears nowhere on the spare sleeve. It’s not even clear from the promotional materials if the band’s name is Elsa Nilsson’s Band of Pulses, Band of Pulses, or just Pulses. The cover art just has Pulses twice (once upside down) with a crude drawing that has little to do with the music. There are no track listings or composer credits. The recording was released on Ears & Eyes Records.

The music inside the cryptic sleeve has no problem communicating. Sweden-born Elsa Nilsson is an adventurous flautist who plays with energy and conviction. Her responsive quartet takes on an unusual project: a suite of mostly improvised music set to the voice of poet Maya Angelou reading “On the Pulse of Morning,” written for Bill Clinton’s 1993 inauguration. (Was the poem chosen because it has the word “Pulses” in the title? Or was the band named after the poem? Another mystery.)

It works to mixed effect. The music has shifting textures and rhythms, paralleling the range of the moods and registers of the poem. There are free passages, fast flurries, angry electronic outbursts, probing excursions, and tranquil meditations. Angelou’s reading is used in varying lengths across the album, sometimes with just a line or two, and sometimes in longer passages. At its best, the poetry sections launch the band into new musical directions with renewed energy. At its worst, the band scurries about with little or no connection to the poem’s content. At one point Angelou says “Lift up your hearts/Each new hour holds new chances/For new beginnings” while Nilsson’s switches on her FX pedals and makes her flute sound like a furious electric guitar and a sour distorted trombone.

What I find most interesting are the composed passages where the band plays in unison with the pitches, rises, falls, and intonations of Angelou’s speech. I wouldn’t have expected this, but it sounds like something Ornette Coleman would have played. Free of keys, harmonies, and conventional jazz phrasing, the musicians and the poet become one, and the melodies sound liberated and honest.

The album is a mixed bag, but it’s original, heartfelt, reaching, and it sure isn’t the same old thing. It follows Angelou’s advice: “The horizon leans forward/ Offering you space to place new steps of change.”

Originally published on the Arts Fuse, October 1, 2023.
https://artsfuse.org/280672/october-short-fuses-materia-critica-3/