Music Reviews from the Staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House

 

June 18, 2025
Marches Rewound and Rewritten - Maria Faust Sacrum Facere
Label: Stunt Records
Catalog #: STULP 25071
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
Release Date: May 9, 2025
Media: lp, cd & digital download
bandcamp.com entry
discogs.com entry

It is the occasional habit of the staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House to include in a review the path by which they came to listen to the album under consideration. In this particular case, this listening history may actually be relevant to the review. In 2018, we discovered an album, Lake of Light by American bassist William Parker, which combined our love for free improvisation and for unusual instruments, as it was wholly performed on a quartet of waterphones. The album was released on Gotta Let It Out Records, based in Copenhagen. By hook or crook, we dug our way deeper into the releases on Gotta Let It Out. Two of these records, Birthday and Høbama really astounded us with the extraordinary impact of the music. The only musician in common on Birthday and Høbama was an Italian pianist, Emanuele Maniscalco, of whose musical talents we had unfortunately been ignorant until this happy meeting.

It is another habit of the staff of the PPPH that, when we discover a musician whose music really speaks to us, we follow the musician in subsequent years through collaborations with various fellow musical adventurers. Sometimes, we also follow a musician backward in time through their discography. In this way, we are introduced to many new musical voices. In this particular case, Emanuele Maniscalco introduced us to the music of Maria Faust, first on Maria Faust Sacrum Facere (2014) and later on Organ (2020). We enjoyed both those records very much, especially the organ playing of Maniscalco in the latter release.

So, when it came to our attention that there was a third album by the ensemble Maria Faust Sacrum Facere, in which Emanuele Maniscalco appeared, we were eager to hear it. We paid almost no attention to the title of the album.

As patrons of Bandcamp who prefer to purchase music on a physical medium, we get to listen to the music for a first time twice. We listen to the digital files upon initial purchase. In the case of Marches Rewound and Rewritten, we listened to the digitial files multiple times. Three weeks later a copy of the lp arrived in the mail and we listened again. Having had a little bit of time for our thoughts on the music to incubate, we are now inclined to share a few words on Maria Faust's interpretation of the music of marching.


photograph: Some of the delightful postage on the package containing our copy of the lp shipped from a town on an island of Estonia. You don't have to be a philatelist to appreciate these stamps.

First of all, the multi-instrumentalist Maniscalco plays neither piano nor organ on Marches Rewound and Rewritten, but returns to drums, which was the instrument on which he entered the world of Jazz. (We have often thought of him as a kind of Italian Tyshawn Sorey—innovative drummer, pianist and composer.) As all nine tracks on the album take the form of marches, the drums play a pretty prominent role. Still, we were kind of shocked by the literal truth of the title; Marches Rewound and Rewritten is an album of marches! The entry on discogs.com lists the genres of the album as "Jazz" and "Brass & Military". If you, Gentle Reader, are like us and have never had any interest in the music of marches, then read a little further to see how Maria Faust and company turn these marches on their head.

To describe the proper context for our listening, we note that our vinyl copy of the album arrived on Wednesday, June 18, 2025. Four days earlier, our loathsome President of the United States of America celebrated his 79th birthday in a most un-American tradition, with a gigantic military parade. So we were really feeling pretty antagonistic toward marches both in concept and reality. (For further reading from the PPPH on the subject of DJT, see this link.)

Ultimately the appeal of this album is that Maria Faust and her collaborators possessed the musical creativity to package within the framework of marches sentiment that is wholly incongruous with the meaning of marches. This is the riddle that is present in the music and it cannot be unraveled in a single listening. At least, it required many listenings for us and a revisit weeks later on vinyl to get to the realization of the underlying mechanism by which the album works. Undoubtedly listeners with more serious musical minds will come to this revelation much earlier than we did.

Some of the marches are deconstructed. Others give way to free improvisation as the march is unwound. Still, other tracks adopt a mournful tone that harkens (at least to our ears) to the tradition, originating in the 1800's, of brass bands at Black funerals in New Orleans. This blending of genres is one of the calling cards of creative music. When the members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicans (AACM) first gathered in the Southside of Chicago in the mid 1960's, they had as an explicit goal that they would play their own music—not just original compositions but original compositions inside or outside whatever idiom they thought best expressed their intentions. They were not to be limited to stereotypes of Black music of the day. The global legacy of the AACM is this simple idea of creative music in original voices across and between genres. We hear that spirit in the Marches Rewound and Rewritten. The music possesses intelligence and creativity but also courage. It takes courage to create an album of marches targeted to a contemporary jazz audience that (we speculate) comes to the album with very little predilection for marches.

There were some tracks where we enjoyed the music purely at ear value. There were other tracks that succeeded based on our appreciation of intent and message. In any case, Maria Faust approaches the marches with great sensitivity. She simultaneously respects the march while subverting its meaning, an admirable achievement.

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