How long can you hold on to a secret? Two years, that’s how long I’ve been holding off on sharing Fred Simon and Liz Cifani’s masterful Time And The River, another in a series of quite autumnal, pastoral, ambient/New Age records that speak to some kind of not-so-profoundly “American” universality. “How come? And how so?” you may be asking yourself.
Because I’ve felt a degree of responsibility in sharing this one correctly. It’s not often, perhaps ever, that I’ll get to talk about Evanston, Illinois, the place I call home. It was in my city, right next to Lake Michigan that all tributaries leading to this album were once found. So, rather than write a history that doesn’t exist, for the longest I’ve tried my best to find those responsible for its creation and let them share their story. Unfortunately, as is sometimes a theme here, some stories are left to remain a mystery. And as much as I tried, neither involved have reached a point to make that leap with me. So, where does that leave us?
It leaves us trying to piece together what we do know.
Here’s what I do know. In the mid ‘80s, out of my fair lakeside city, Evanston, Illinois, a fledgling record label called Quaver Records tried to create a Midwestern version of America’s West Coast Windham Hill. Created by one David A. Baker and a crew of practicing attorneys, somehow, when not signing legal documents, they pooled their resources together to start this imprint, signing artists from in and around the area (the Rogers Park neighborhood in Chicago and the city of Evanston itself, artists like Fred Simon, Dave Onderdonk, Tom Splitt, and Frank Caruso, for a brief 2 years or so, they had a curious stable of musicians that straddled the line of jazz, neotraditional, new music and ambient music.
Borrowing, if not tweaking, the aesthetics of Windham Hill and ECM — each record on Quaver was dedicated to a specific instrument (piano, guitar, synth, etc.) and each cover featured a striking visual minimalism to match the largely meditative releases they put out. Then, as soon as this small label got going, it disappeared with nary a trace, leaving nothing more than a PO Box address as a memory.
Fred Simon’s path to Quaver and Time And The River began as a pianist composer working with some of the leading lights of your favorite fusion crews like Ralph Towner and Larry Coryell in early group Simon & Bard with saxophonist Michael Bard. An Evanston Native, Fred had studied at the University of Illinois in Champaign, Urbana, originally a cellist he quickly left that instrument for the piano, transforming a love for the melodic rock of the Beatles and early impressionist composer, into one knee deep in the world of jazz. His 1984 debut, Short Story, proved him adept at solo piano compositions that reminded of the lyricism of Keith Jarrett and of the experimentation with open air sonics in the vein of Lyle Mays.
A year later, an opportunity opened up: Why not collaborate with harpist Liz Cifani? Hailing from New Orleans, Liz had arrived in her station in life by doing many notable things: becoming the youngest member (then lead harpist) of Chicago’s Lyric Opera orchestra, building Northwestern’s harp department, contributing harp to various notable works by others like Supafly from Curtis Mayfield, in and around Chicago. Liz, although the older of two, understood vast swathes of music — traditional, classical, baroque, soul, and contemporary — in a way a masterful musician understood any music they could hear by ear.
Why Time And The River sounds so timeless is because it took what could have been a staid gambit — a duo of piano and harp — and expanded it further. Quaver spoke of trying to feed this creation of a “New Acoustic Music”, in this case, using Liz Cifani’s intricate playing as a bed to enhance its edges with electroacoustic instruments and imaginative arrangements. Fred’s surprisingly tasteful sonic choices draw some of the most tuneful edges you could have adorn to songs like “Time And The River”, “Meshes”, and “A Likely Story”. Liz is given free reign, too, featuring in melancholic solo songs “Carolsong”, “If I Could Tell You”, and “Suite: New Pavane”.
As stated before, Time And The River is just perfect autumnal music (even if it was recorded in the middle of the summer), with largely all-instrumental songs finding little ways to make it vocalize very Ravel-ian kinds of seasonal emotion. Take the title track, featuring the vocals of Bonnie Herman, grabbing little brooks of crystalline tonality to show the cyclical passage of floating time.
“Meshes” is a startling take on ambient minimalism, using the impressionist ideas of the past in some new kind of aesthetic music. Yearning and searching, much like in the work of Toshifumi Hinata, Fred knew his way around making a synth pull out that ghost from artifice. “A Likely Story” (who I believe features the guitar of fellow Quaver roster mate, Dave Ondendork) approximates some of the fascinating blue sky ambient music of Mr. Metheny, yet features intriguing turns where Liz plays these hypnotic melodies that are uniquely theirs.
Sharing equal billing allowed both Fred and Liz to take some proper inspiration from each other. “Once And For All” wouldn’t sound so dreamy, if Liz didn’t find a way to bring the pearly gates right to the cloud streaked sounds Fred was striking. “Other Voices” wouldn’t end the album on such a romantic little dance. Seemingly drawing from the watery, blustery, brisk environs that I know too well, each song on Time And The River strikes something at the intersection of nostalgia and divination. Somehow, this oldest of all musical instruments, that harp, can find a way to weave a new story, not exactly from the aether, but from exactly what was around it, at exactly that living moment.
So, what color is this memory? It’s the one I see now outside my window: amber, gray, and yellow, a faded scene held together by multiple fine strings, playing out on the album cover laying on top of my desk. Here’s hoping that either Fred or Liz, eventually, find the time to fill out all these other rungs I couldn’t make out.