I wrote a couple of weeks ago that a bass clarinet is a wonderful, magical thing. Thank you, Andrew D’Angelo–if there were any remaining doubts about the world’s greatest woodwind, you’ve now put them to rest.

BCDELUXE is D’Angelo’s first solo record, and while he is a multi-instrumentalist, the album is wall-to-wall bass clarinet. And boy oh boy, it is so much more than that. D’Angelo recorded the album at home, and out of consideration for his neighbors, he played everything softly. The immediacy of the resulting sound is stunning. It’s a cliche to say that a record makes it feel like you were there; BCDELUXE sounds like you’re sitting with the instrument in your own lap.

I mostly know about the recording technique because D’Angelo says as much in the notes. But there are audible hints. The clicking of keys–usually incidental, sometimes as a musical feature of its own–is unusually loud compared to the clarinet itself. Same thing with D’Angelo’s occasional vocalizations. It sounds like he’s almost shouting, but I suspect he wasn’t trying to make any sound at all.

The tunes show off all kinds of technique, from rapid-fire arpeggios on the opening “BIC” to clean, pure high-register work on pieces like “Happy Mellow.” Some are just an unaccompanied single bass clarinet; others are multitracked, either with two horns playing interacting melodies or with a choir of bass clarinets supporting an additional voice. Solo pieces don’t always lend themselves to protracted development; accordingly, track lengths vary from 56 seconds up to almost ten minutes.

The most remarkable aspect of this release is something you can’t hear. D’Angelo has brain cancer, and everything on BCDELUXE was recorded in short sessions between doses of chemotherapy. While you don’t need to know the biographical background to be impressed by the record, it’s a testament to D’Angelo’s focus and dedication that he even attempted it, let alone that he played well enough to sculpt something so assured.

Artistically, at least, D’Angelo is winning the battle against cancer. The rest of us have the privilege of hearing his reports from the front line.

EDITORS PICK:

I wanted to make a crack about how BCDELUXE is “the solo bass clarinet album the masses have been clamoring for,” but, by God, the masses should have been clamoring for it. You’d swear it was a demonstration disc on what the instrument was capable of, if D’Angelo didn’t have — and nail — such high artistic ambitions.

This can’t be called an unaccompanied bass clarinet album, because D’Angelo’s axe accompanies itself, via overdubs of differing timbres and textures. “Blues Lightening” offers three versions of D’Angelo, with soft-edged smoothness on the bottom and coarser, more aggressive tones in the foreground (though at some points the triple voices blend together), and it swings like hell. “Sonification” puts the breathy drones up front, with the higher, more melodic D’Angelo further back and drenched in reverb; the effect, not unlike that of medieval polyphony in an old stone church, is beautiful.

D’Angelo doesn’t need the multitracking. He swings without it on the brief interlude “Dingsbums” and achieves a folksier gait on another quickie, “Referendum.” Yet it’s hard to argue with the results when he does double or treble himself. “PK 3809” is exquisite, a romantic lullaby with an organ-like pedal point and delicate lyrical strains. The masterpiece of the session, however, is the closing “Light Language” (at nine-and-a-half minutes, almost twice the length of the second-longest track). The long drone tones are the highest voicing, creating a Bill Frisell-like atmosphere, with the low end being soft to the point of inaudibility at times and the middle tones carrying the melodies. At least, that’s the default setting; the three voices interweave, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in counterpoint; they play calls and responses, and they leave each other space to comment. Loveland Records owner Jakob Bro, who once roomed with D’Angelo and heard him practicing solo bass clarinet, long knew what the rest of us can now attest: All by himself, D’Angelo is both a virtuoso and a visionary. –Michael J. West