Don Byron and the Bang on a Can All-Stars

"A Ballad for Many"

Canteloupe Music

2 Stars

There’s always order to be seen in chaos.

It’s the reason Jackson Pollock gained an audience, the reason John Coltrane’s free jazz leanings became high art, the reason anyone listens to The Beatles’ “Revolution 9.” As Emerson put it, “art is a nature passed through the alembic of man”; it can translate the havoc of the world into a form that’s easier to understand.

Except when there’s nothing to translate, in the first place.

Jazz clarinetist Don Byron’s latest album, “A Ballad for Many,” certainly deals in disorder. The first half hour of his collaboration with the Bang on a Can All-Stars—an instrumental group whose core of material comes from avant-garde composers like Brian Eno and Steve Reich—is dissonant enough to make acid jazz sound like Muzak.

But Byron—who played with the Harvard Jazz Band in concert earlier this year—waits too long to resolve this atonal mayhem into something more accessible. Tension isn’t a counterpoint to his music; it’s the grammar he uses to compose his art.

That grammar is at its most flowery in “Eugene,” a six-part suite Byron composed to accompany a 1961 TV show from comedian Ernie Kovacs. The music’s as esoteric as its muse, working mostly with the diminished scales that jazz players often use to add color to their solos.

This oddball tonality is made even odder by the instrumentation, contrasting Wendy Sutter’s cello with Mark Stewart’s undulating electric guitar. The result is intriguing, not alienating.

However, a language is only useful around those who speak it, and it’s hard to find an audience that’s fluent in the diminished scale. Even fairly serious jazz musicians will find these pieces exhausting; untrained listeners will find them completely impenetrable.

The album’s saving grace is its second half, the soundtrack to a documentary about the Tuskegee Airmen titled “The Red-Tailed Angels.” Byron finally comes home to the major scale, composing a piece that beautifully expresses the tension between duty and rebellion that the Airmen embodied.

Tight snare-drum marching beats play off the syncopated swagger of a clarinet, creating a theme that runs from “Integrity” straight through “Credits.” Unlike “Eugene,” the music makes you want to see the accompanying show out of curiosity, not confusion.

But then Byron returns to instrumental masturbation in “Show Him Some Lub,” which mixes chants of different creeds and cities against a frenetic clarinet backdrop. It’s particularly bewildering after the minimalist charm of “Red-Tailed Angels,” and it gives the album the feel of B-side collection instead of a unified work.

Ironically, the record might be better with a bit more Don Byron himself. The virtuoso clarinetist only lends his talents to three tracks, and he makes each one of them spectacular. He has the intonation and mechanical sensibility of Charlie Parker—and apparently, no composition can obscure it.

Don Byron shouldn’t trust his music to anyone else—a lesson too late to learn for this “Ballad.”

—Reviewer Nicholas K. Tabor can be reached at ntabor@fas.harvard.edu.