ANNETTE PEACOCK
An Acrobat's Heart
ECM
1733 012159-496-2

I cannot help but be fascinated by Annette Peacock. A self-taught keyboardist, vocalist, composer and performance artist who hung out with Timothy Leary, and Richard "Ram Dass" Alpert in the early 1960s, and later collaborated with Salvador Dali. She married bassist Gary Peacock and, through him, met Paul and Carla Bley. Paul Bley soon recorded several of Annette's striking compositions, and the pair married in 1966. Together, they pioneered the use of keyboard- and voice-triggered synthesizers (e.g., on recordings such as "Dual Unity" and "Improvisie") in a spontaneously improvised live setting. Bley describes some of the obstacles they faced (musical and otherwise) in his recent autobiography "Stopping Time" (Vehicule Press, ISBN 1-55065-111-0). Peacock, whose live performances impressed David Bowie, was subsequently signed to a major label (RCA) recording contract. So, in less than a decade, Peacock went from composing tunes behind-the-scenes for Bley's acoustic jazz trio, to performing groundbreaking electronic music, to nascent pop stardom. Her musical career since then has been one of unexplained fits and starts, of sudden and seemingly opaque shifts in style, content and instrumentation. After releasing I'm the One in 1972 (on RCA), Peacock disappeared for a while. She resurfaced in the UK in the late 1970s, where she recorded with jazz / rock drummer Bill Bruford (Feels Good to Me). She then released two albums under her own name (X-Dreams and The Perfect Release) for the short-lived Tomato label, followed by a string of stylistically varied LPs on her own Ironic Records imprint. As I have long been a fan, I know that the only thing one might expect from Annette Peacock is something different. Particularly appealing to me are her smart, muscular jazz-funk / rap recordings The Perfect Release (1979) and Absract Contact (1988). In 1992, Bley, Gary Peacock and trumpeter Franz Koglmann recorded a CD of her early compositions for Hat Art (CD 6118). Though the critical response to Annette was overwhelmingly favorable, Peacock herself did not record again until 1997 when she appeared on a few tracks of Marilyn Crispell's Nothing Ever Was, Anyway (another compendium of Peacock compositions).

An Acrobats' Heart is a collection of Peacock's asymmetric, oblique, highly personal ballads. Here, Peacock accompanies herself on piano, with backing by the Cikada String Quartet: yet another rather risky artistic move, and yet another new musical setting. To call the music here jazz would be totally inaccurate. There are no solos, no improvisations in the usual sense (though I get the feeling that Peacock comes up with some of her lyrics off-the-cuff). Tempos are uniformly slow to the point where music itself seems amorphous: Peacock's voice and sparse piano seem to dissolve into the strings. Though it suffers a bit from a certain lack of musical variety, An Acrobat's Heart is an edgily beautiful collection. Peacock's clear, vibratoless voice, on its own, is lovely enough to keep my interest for well over an hour. For my money, she is one of the sexiest singers around, though this CD seems particularly well suited to solitary listening. The accompanying lyric booklet permits the listener to ponder at length Peacock's smart, though emotionally naked, lyrics. An auspicious, and most welcome, return.

Dave Wayne

Track Listing: 1. Mia's Proof; 2. Tho; 3. weightless; 4. Over. ; 5. as long as now; 6. u slide; 7. The heart keeps; 8. ways it isn't; 9. Unspoken; 10. Safe; 11. Free the memory; 12. ,ever to be forgotten. ; 13. Camille; 14. Lost at Last

Personnel: Annette Peacock, voice, piano; The Cikada String Quartet: Henrik Hannisdal, violin; Od Hannisdal, violin; Marek Konstantynowicz, viola; Morten Hannisdal, violoncello