Dopolarians, Garden Party 

These are notes on the compositions and performances for the Dopolarians release, Garden Party. 

Cover painting by David Hall. Cover design by Chad Anderson. 

Personnel: 

Alvin Fielder — Percussion 
Kidd Jordan — Tenor Saxophone 
William Parker — Bass 
Chris Parker — Piano 
Kelley Hurt — Voice 
Chad Fowler — Alto Saxophone, Saxello 

Photo by Marc Pagani, left to right: Chad Fowler, Kidd Jordan, William Parker, Kelley Hurt, Chris Parker, Alvin Fielder 

We recorded this at Marigny Studios in New Orleans, Louisiana in early June 2018. We all traveled in to do the session near Kidd Jordan so he wouldn’t have to travel as he had recently gone through some challenges with his health. This was his first time playing tenor saxophone in months. 

The group and the session itself is a collection of reunions. Chris & Kelley and Chad played together regularly but had lost touch for almost 20 years. Alvin and Kidd were old, dear friends and collaborators, going back to when they formed the Improvisational Arts Quintet decades previous to the session. William had, of course, played extensively with Kidd and Alvin over the years. Chris, Kidd, and Alvin had all collaborated many times previously, including Chris’s performance on Alvin’s last session as a leader, “A Measure of Vision”. Despite the many connections, this was the first time this group of people had come together. 

Apart from William, who hails from New York, Dopolarians is a decidedly southern affair. Alvin is from Meridian, Mississippi. Kidd is from New Orleans. Kelley is from Memphis, Tennessee (where Chris and Chad both met her), and Chris and Chad are from Arkansas. 

Sadly, this session was the last date Alvin would make. He fell sick in late 2018 and passed away on January 5, 2019. Alvin was and is an inspiration to multiple generations of jazz musicians, a dear friend, and a mentor. We miss you, Mr. Fielder. 

Alvin Fielder — Photo by Marc Pagani 

C Melody by Chris Parker, Alvin Fielder, Kidd Jordan & William Parker — When we were preparing for the session, Chris told stories about playing with Kidd in New Orleans and creating tunes on the spot. One person starts playing and the rest of the band plays the tune as if they already know it. We did a few pieces sort of like this on this session. C Melody started with no plan. Just Chris setting up a melodic motif. The melody becomes an ostinato, repeated in variation throughout while the rest of the group improvises around it. Chris and Kidd frequently play together as one, loosely connected instrument. Kidd’s ear is remarkable as always. For a totally free piece, it’s surprisingly hummable on subsequent listenings. We wanted to make accessible, beautiful free music in this session. C Melody embodies this. Enjoy the rock and roll ending. It’s almost corny. 

Dopolaria by Chad Fowler — Broken Italian words crammed together, ‘Dopolaria’ literally (but incorrectly) translates to “After the Aria”. It’s a love song. The theme is inspired by a fragment of a Puccini melody. The goal was impressionist beauty and catharsis. 

Garden Party, by Kelley Hurt — You know how married couples make up cutesy names for each other and their pets? Or how they might make up songs and do other rituals in private that they wouldn’t dare share outside the home? Garden Party comes from that place. As Kelley describes in the introduction, it’s a song she sings at home when she sees the bunnies come out in their garden behind the house. It’s an improvised children’s song for their home. Alvin says, “I’ve never played that straight before!” 

Father Dies; Son Dies, by Chad Fowler — There’s a Zen koan about a rich family asking a zen master to write something for them which would symbolize prosperity to come. The zen master comes back with the shocking phrase: “father dies. son dies. grandson dies.” Death is inevitable, but there is a natural order to things. Father Dies; Son Dies is a meditation on impermanence and the inevitability of death. 

Guilty Happy, by Chad Fowler — The title “Guilty Happy” refers to the feeling you have when you first notice a moment of happiness during the process of mourning a loved on. You know it’s OK — even healthy, but it still feels wrong to feel alright. The melody is manic and repetitive (the score actually says “play until you can’t stand it”). The solos weave between major and minor centers. As Kidd improvises, the piece dissolves into an unexpected, melancholic ballad. Alvin evokes Max Roach as William holds down a groove with some hint of unwritten changes for the tune. Kelley’s vocal work during the ballad section is haunting. Alvin, as always, has the last word. As William put it directly after the tape stops, “you could cash a check with that snare roll, Al!” 

Impromptu, by Chris Parker — Composed in the moment at a rehearsal, Chris’s tune is a joyous, deranged bebop piece. It’s free but not really free-bop. We played the style un-ironically but without constraint. During a rehearsal, Alvin suggested bringing back the bridge and “playing it straight” on occasion, which gave it a cohesion of form but without any rigidity or need to stick to changes, number of measures, or even a specific tempo. The bass and piano solos on this tune are a highlight of the entire record.

Jazz improvisation — especially free improvisation — happens as a deep, intimate connection of communication between its players. Improvisers feel what the others are feeling through intuition, inflection, tone, harmony, melody, tempo, facial expression, body language, and many other microscopic untraceable nuances. It happens in the moment — the shared moment — in a shared space and time. 

The year 2020 brought to our population an unexpected and unprecedented level of isolation. For musicians, this meant that gigs were canceled, tours were scrapped, and recording sessions were indefinitely postponed. Musicians were suddenly unable to even co-locate to rehearse or collaborate. This new global constraint made the aforementioned constraints around improvisation obsolete. 

Some musical genres lend themselves well to long periods of social isolation. Composers can sit alone writing, revising, and even listening to some soulless rendition of their work played by a computer. Electronic music creators typically work on computers, possibly collaborating with others from across the world. 

The worst possible fit for social isolation in music is improvised jazz. But, the people of the world didn’t just stop talking to each other because of imposed social isolation, so we decided to try to keep talking musically. 

Our first experiment started as the result of a conversation between Chad Fowler and Joel Futterman. Joel and Chad both live in, for most avant-garde jazz fans, would be considered perpetually socially isolated locations. Small towns in the South. In a phone conversation about how to further develop the art of free improvisation while alone, Joel suggested putting on “simulated concerts” at home along with existing records. Joel sent Chad a copy of his solo piano CD Pathways to play along with. 

Chad recorded one of these simulated concert practice sessions to send to Joel. Having recorded into multi-track recording software, Chad decided to do an experiment. He sent his saxophone track, minus the original piano recording, to a friend to record a guitar track on. Then he sent that to another friend. Then to another. (One of these was WC Anderson). The final result was surprising. It’s beautiful, reactive, improvised jazz music. The performers seemed to be anticipating each other’s moves, and reacting to each other in real time. All this with the now-tacit influence of an original piece, no longer audible but still present in the essence of the music. 

It was beautiful creative music. Why not make more? Chad and WC started recording short pieces for each other to “react” to. With the completion of each new piece, came the inevitable surprise — even elation — over what had happened when the two came together. What starts with just a solo saxophone or a solitary drummer comes together to transform into, as the overused saying goes, more than the sum of its parts. Over the course of a couple of months, an entire record formed.

Below, we list all of the tracks and which instrument formed the source material (i.e. who went first). But, we invite you to play a game with this. Listen and see if you can guess. In fact, see if you forget this is two people geographically separate who didn’t even do so much as talk on the phone once during the recording of these pieces. We think you might. We often forget this is even us when we listen. 

With this record we hope to bring you some strange mix of the feelings of isolation, anxiety, anger, fear, and — most important — joy. What started as a heretical experiment, creating music that can only be created in person in the moment with real time communication, asynchronously with only one direction of true interaction. There are no rules in free jazz, but we were pretty sure we were breaking the rules anyway. 

Credits: 

Chad Fowler - saxophones 
WC Anderson - Percussion 
Marc Franklin - Engineering 
Jim Clouse - Engineering & Mastering 
WC Anderson - Art & Design