Gunther Schuller's notes for "Dogmental"

We met by chance in an elevator, Andy Biskin and I. He recognized me, and in the less than two minutes it took to get to our respective floors, I learned that he was a clarinetist, that he composed music, and led some kind of a chamber jazz group. Some months later I received a tape containing a dozen Biskin compositions for a quartet of clarinet, trombone, bass, and drums. Receiving several dozens of tapes a year, usually of negligible interest, I was surprised to be more than impressed by what I heard. I was enchanted, amazed and intrigued to find music of such wonderful originality and sophisticated wit and humor.

Humor in music is a rare commodity; often enough attempted, it also often fails. If not done skillfully, the music just remains bad and silly. Like humor itself, it must be approached "seriously" and "perfectly," and timing is everything. Like humor itself, it is best based on ordinary, common situations turned loose by clever distortion, exaggeration, surprise — and a Chaplinesque love of the subject.

Biskin's music here is based on thrice-familiar musical "objets trouvés" (found objects, as the French have it), which are then twisted and reshaped into comic creatures, to lead their own lives. Such manipulations have to be done subtly and concisely, with a fine, precise edge — offspring of both the intellect and emotion. Anything less than that, the music becomes merely obvious and vulgar, a mish-mash of trite clichés. We are here not in the world of guffaws, but of wry chuckles and inner delights.

I think Biskin treads this fine line brilliantly, and in his way associates himself — I don't mean consciously nor (worse) self-consciously — with such great earlier genres as the best Hollywood cartoon music, the choicest Raymond Scott and Spike Jones, and — even earlier — the witty, scintillating scores of Georges Auric in France in the 1930s for the films of René Clair (A Nous la Liberté) and Cocteau's 1928 Italian Straw Hat.

While using well-known, simple forms and materials — march (Flim Flam), polka (Sad Commentary), waltz (Rondel), Latin tinges (Brunching at the Bistro) — there is even a brilliant mariachi bit, delivered by Ron Horton, in Flim Flam — Biskin's music is transformed into marvelous jazz by the players' improvisations, contributions that almost miraculously amplify Biskin's own harlequinades.

In his own playing, for all its originality, Biskin pays loving unslavish tribute to his clarinet forebears Pee Wee Russell and Jimmy Guiffre, just as Bruce Eidem delights in reminding us of everyone from Tricky Sam Nanton to Lawrence Brown to Urbie Green, and Ron Horton the likes of Lee Morgan. And how subtly yet enterprisingly both rhythm sections contribute to the "Biskin effect."

Whether in the sudden "wrong notes" as in Field Days; the theory lessons in "augmentation" and "diminution" (expanding and shrinking materials) as in Laughing Stock; the haunting balladry of Little Elsa; in the rousing virtuosity of No Bones and Off Peak; the outright zaniness of Dogmental, the lacerating raucous outbursts in Rondel; the delicious repetitiveness of Laughing Stock — I feel that Biskin gets it right all the time, with superb timing and exquisite taste.
Here I've told you why I felt compelled to produce this delectable CD. Now it's your turn. I truly hope you will find in it the same pleasures I did.

Gunther Schuller