Kim Cass

Bassist Kim Cass is among a vanguard group of Brooklyn-based improvisors who are creating works at the leading-edge of rhythmic acuity. Levs, his debut with Pi Recordings, features pianist Matt Mitchell and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, who called Cass “a singular composer and player: the man can do things that don’t seem possible on the bass, displaying a technical command of the instrument on the level of the most celebrated virtuosic performers in any genre of music.”

The compositions on Levs were inspired by the images of a selection of Cass’s favorite hand-notated classical scores, including those of 20th century figures like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Arnold Schoenberg, and Pierre Boulez. They inspired for him a different way of looking at music, illuminating a connection between the written form and the composers’ musical personalities. Cass is also a habitual doodler, and drawing is also an important aspect of his artistic expression. He writes out his scores meticulously by hand, paying as much attention to the aesthetics of the notation – viewing them as works of visual art – with the shape of the images and music naturally informing each other.

Cass’s compositions are deeply idiosyncratic, built on stilts of complex polyrhythmic structures over a sea of harmonic murkiness. Somewhat unusually, His music is composed from the perspective of the bass, with the piano parts written to dovetail his instrument. Cass and Mitchell dance together around the music, often coming together to form a unified, polyphonic sound. Cass’s hyper- articulate playing astounds with an exacting precision that seems beyond the instrument’s technical limitations, thrusting the role of the bass into an entirely new musical territory. Sorey's structured improvisations on the drums alternately reinforces and disrupts. The subtle addition of Laura Cocks’s flute, Adam Dotson’s euphonium, and Mitchell’s electronics help transport the listener to a haunted nether land. Paradoxically, the more complex this music is, the freer it sounds. It might project a façade of free improvisation, but the work exists as the direct result of intense, meticulous coordination.