Levs by Kim Cass

Bassist Kim Cass is among a vanguard group of Brooklyn-based improvisors who are creating works at the leading-edge of rhythmic acuity. Levs, his debut with Pi Recordings, features pianist Matt Mitchell and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, who called Cass “a singular composer and player: the man can do things that don’t seem possible on the bass, displaying a technical command of the instrument on the level of the most celebrated virtuosic performers in any genre of music.”

Originally from Bar Harbor, Maine, Cass is known for his fearless mastering of fiendishly difficult music including on such Pi releases as Mitchell’s A Pouting Grimace (2017), and Phalanx Ambassadors (2019); Mitchell and drummer Kate Gentile’s Snark Horse (2021); and Gentile’s Find Letter X (2023). He’s also had a decade long partnership with saxophonist Noah Preminger, with whom he has performed on a dozen releases, including the co-led projects Thunda (2021), and The Dank (2023). He has also performed on various projects with John Zorn and regularly with vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, including on her critically-acclaimed release More Touch (2022). His own 2015 eponymously entitled release features writing for solo bass and electronics that Jazz da Gama describes as “coming from a quite different dimension—the fourth dimension – the spectral one.”

The compositions on Levs were inspired by the images of a selection of Cass’s favorite hand-notated classical scores, including those of 20th century figures like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Arnold Schoenberg, and Pierre Boulez. They inspired for him a different way of looking at music, illuminating a connection between the written form and the composers’ musical personalities. Cass is also a habitual doodler, and drawing is also an important aspect of his artistic expression. He writes out his scores meticulously by hand, paying as much attention to the aesthetics of the notation – viewing them as works of visual art – with the shape of the images and music naturally informing each other.

Cass’s compositions are deeply idiosyncratic, built on stilts of complex polyrhythmic structures over a sea of harmonic murkiness. Somewhat unusually, His music is composed from the perspective of the bass, with the piano parts written to dovetail his instrument. Cass and Mitchell dance together around the music, often coming together to form a unified, polyphonic sound. Cass’s hyper- articulate playing astounds with an exacting precision that seems beyond the instrument’s technical limitations, thrusting the role of the bass into an entirely new musical territory. Sorey's structured improvisations on the drums alternately reinforces and disrupts. The subtle addition of Laura Cocks’s flute, Adam Dotson’s euphonium, and Mitchell’s electronics help transport the listener to a haunted nether land. Paradoxically, the more complex this music is, the freer it sounds. It might project a façade of free improvisation, but the work exists as the direct result of intense, meticulous coordination.

According to Mitchell: “As an improvising bassist he possesses a fearsome command that stems from both a comprehensive immersion within the entire history of jazz and improvised music and a meticulously developed instrumental virtuosity that must be heard to be believed. As a composer he achieves an absolutely new and utterly honed multifariousness within which he refracts and resynthesizes his myriad preferred musical precedents. Levs is vertiginous and lush and should linger as one of this era’s jewels.” And recent Pulitzer Prize-winner Sorey extols: “Kim’s music is highly- concentrated, thought-provoking, forward-probing, and incredibly demanding for any musician or listener to experience. His music is totally idiosyncratic. To me, he is one of the greatest bass players on the planet who possesses a singular vocabulary as a composer and player: the man can do things that can be and cannot be done on the bass. His work as a composer beautifully concerns itself with manifold aspects of time, temporality and groove.”

Levs is volatile yet dreamlike, and imbued with a sense of ominous mystery.