Pardon me a bit today, for there is a whole lot to unpack behind this work Flesh & Bone’s Skeleton Woman. So, I’ll have to parse things out just a bit. First, I’ll classify this release under the “fourth world” banner but still feel that’s not quite doing justice to it. Part jazz, part ambient, part wordless, ambient “New Age” shamanic mysticism it’s music befitting the story it’s inspired by: Skeleton Woman by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés (who some of you might know from the pioneering Jungian Mestiza Latinx literary work Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype).
As to how it sounds: there’s a fiery meditativeness to it — I know that sounds contradictory — which speaks of an attempt to bring a dreamy, slightly gory, story to sonic life in a way that speaks to the true meaning behind its arc.
Flesh & Bone began a side project/duo by then married musicians Peter Kater and Chris White. Peter was a German-born, but Jersey-raised, classically-trained keyboardist who moved to Boulder, Colorado and fell in love with American’s own world music (that of the American indigenous people of the western plains and southwest). In America’s southwest, Peter explored a transformation into “healing music”, shifting from an earlier, smoother jazz sound into one more in tune with the world of sound being explored by R. Carlos Nakai, a future collaborator.
Chris’s route to this release was closer to the author it was inspired by. She began her life moving around the states, as most family members of a military family are made to do. When Chris’s family finally settled down in Colorado she began her studies in theater and dramatic writing. Chris, at that moment, was the most accomplished of the two, having a sprawling creative career as an actress, playwright, and singer. Although a semi-regular live performer it wasn’t until sometime in the late ‘80s, that Chris’s session work as vocalist led her to Peter and in due time their relationship blossomed both professionally and romantically.
Skeleton Woman tries to sonically draw out the multi-layered meanings behind its titular story, that of a bundle of “flesh and bones” fished from the sea, who mysteriously coalesces itself into a woman that slowly fuses itself into/from the body of the visibly scared man whose kindness transforms into a love for a woman he, initially, couldn’t comprehend. The music itself tries to present that intriguing ancient fable by allowing the couple to create distinct mood music that comes together into one moving whole as the story does.
Whether it gravitates from haunting and tropical, like Chris White’s penned “Cliffside Village” to seductive and sinewy like Peter’s “Fisherman’s Song”. Skeleton Woman sounds like a personal soundtrack to a story that is the most vivid in one’s own imagination. Clarissa Pinkola Estés said it best when she described it as: “…music cast as a psychic net.”
Helping create this gorgeous, unclassifiable bit of music is experimental percussionist Glen Velez and ECM cello maestro David Darling who inject all sorts of mercurial sonic things that speak of a deep well of hidden North American music that can be quite nocturnal and haunting on songs like “The Bone Chase”. Skeleton Woman songs like “Seduction (Call Of Her Soul)” distill Chris and Peter’s own love, as nurtured by the story, through a yearning duo of melismatic singing and piano. Other tracks like “Inocente (Sleep Of Trust)” and “Ocean Song” are pure weightless, floating tonal music, unlike anything Peter did anywhere before.
With a running time of 51 minutes, even if you’ve never read the story, Skeleton Woman does its perfect job of painting this literary picture of the divine feminine intertwining with the masculine mystique.