By Michael J. West | Published December 2024
It’s not “katabasis” (the Greek term for passage to the underworld) but “myth” that’s the title’s keyword. On one level, we’re exploring story traditions about an afterlife; on another, we’re meditating on their untruth. Pianist Hayoung Lyou’s trio is playing grim stuff here, and they approach it with grimness, too. Yet there’s also a current of ironic humor woven in. Like a Jean-Luc Godard film, The Myth Of Katabasis is constantly reminding you that the realm it’s evoking is a false one.
That current is not terribly suble. “Windup,” which examines the finality of death, is the album’s most playful tune, packed with gregarious Thelonious Monk-like rhythms and Andrew Hill-ian dissonances. But the intermittent, three-part “Descent” suite (which runs backwards, from parts III to I) isn’t far behind. Its dark solo piano improvisations break suddenly into lighthearted ballet rhythms, positioned somewhere between grace and delirium. On the other hand, “Ascension,” the idea of return from the land of the dead, might be the least fun, with rhythms and harmonic flourishes that elsewhere seemed fanciful now suggesting resignation, even psychic scarring. The jumpy, dissonant clusters in Lyou’s improv line become barbs.
Other instances, though, are, if not subtle, then at least ambiguous. “Negotiation” begins with a feeling of folly in bassist Thomas Morgan’s pizzicato doubling of Lyou on the melody’s triplet rhythms; it gains gravitas when drummer Steven Crammer joins in and Morgan switches to bow, despite the written part itself not changing at all. It’s when they fall away and Lyou goes into a refined, classically informed solo that these streams cross: What, the pianist wonders aloud, does it all mean? Anything at all? Both fatalistic and nihilistic, The Myth Of Katabasis doesn’t use its gallows humor to mock the idea of a broader, extra-mortal existence — just to interrogate it.
