Darren Johnston – The Edge of the Forestv (CF 133)
Ben Goldberg’s clarinet takes flight immediately, with Sheldon Brown adding extra oomph on tenor sax and bass clarinet while the leader pokes in bits of trumpet and lays in wait for his breaks. This is postbop that looks forward, with such a broad range of moves and details that you have to credit the composer. These days, virtually all jazz musicians claim that title, but few convince you it matters.
http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-11-24/music/jazz-consumer-guide-loosening-or-tightening-up/
Samuel Blaser Quartet – Pieces of Old Sky (CF 151)
“Pieces of Old Sky” is Samuel Blaser’s fourth recording as a leader. Previous sessions led by the Swiss trombonist include a quartet (“7th Heaven”), a solo trombone CD, and a duet CD with pianist Malcolm Braff – all issued within the past year or so. Not yet 30, Blaser is blessed with a penchant for musical experimentation, along with a Herculean work ethic and a massive amount of talent. All of this is clearly evident on “Pieces of Old Sky,” in which Blaser also made the astute decision to retain the services of drummer Tyshawn Sorey, bassist Thomas Morgan (who worked with Blaser on “7th Heaven”), and guitarist Todd Neufeld. Not only are these fellows three of the most interesting jazz musicians on the scene today, but they also work together in a trio led by Sorey. There’s both a combustible chemistry and a deep understanding between these four musicians, and the level of interplay and the content of that special telepathic je ne sais quoi on this disc approaches the heights reached by the Dave Holland Quintet in its heyday, though the music here is quite a bit free-er than Holland’s recent small group efforts.
“Pieces of Old Sky” is dominated by somber moods and moderate to slow tempos – a bit like a great lost ECM session. This is exemplified by the title track, a 17-minute-plus epic of darkly pensive moodiness, pregnant pauses, and impossibly magical interplay. ‘Mandala’ is a strangely mutated blues that drifts into an elegantly sparse setting for solos by Blaser and Neufeld. Here, Neufeld’s guitar stands out. Like several of today’s 20-something up-and-coming jazz guitarists (Mary Halvorsen, Ila Cantor, and a few others come to mind), his choices and sounds are remarkably free of obvious ‘player-type’ influences. Morgan’s bass playing similarly combines eloquence and economy. ‘Red Hook’ is a fearsome piece with a tricky, convoluted head that melts into a free-ish section that features some of the CD’s most heated improvisational moments. Neufeld breaks out a distortion unit or two for some jazzy-metal noisemaking, while Sorey storms around on his toms like a madman. ‘Speed Game’ is similar. Though not quite the noise-fest that its title led me to believe, there are some sublime exchanges between Blaser, Sorey and Neufeld during the piece’s lengthy collective improvisation. Throughout the entire CD, Blaser is simply amazing – his soloing reaches amazing heights of creativity and technicality and he never loses sight of what his band-mates are up to. As a soloist, one of Blaser’s reference points is the late, great Albert Mangelsdorff – this is especially evident when he uses multiphonics.
“Pieces of Old Sky” is an equally impressive and inspired recording by four of the finest young musicians around today. By all means, seek this one out!
http://www.jazzreview.com/cd/review-20790.html
Samuel Blaser Quartet – Pieces Of Old Sky (CF 151)
****½
Seldom have I heard music that is so open-textured while being harmonically coherent at the same time. Credits go to Samuel Blaser on trombone, Thomas Morgan on bass, Todd Neufeld on guitar, and Tyshawn Sorey on drums. The magnificent title piece slowly evolves out of the basic and almost pristine sounds of the four instruments. They take their time to clearly articulate each note, leaving the listener to enjoy its superb quality, slowly and deeply, minimalist in a way, creating an atmosphere that is both sad and dark. Blaser’s trombone-playing is what it should be in my view, slow, measured, giving his instrument its full-toned expressivity. Then listen to Neufeld, whose guitar tones are crisp and clear, with punctuated and extremely functional interventions, and when you hear it, you think, brilliant, this is how it should sound and no other alternative is possible, just to illustrate the wonderful balance. Morgan’s bass is in the same vein: a note here, a pluck there, just co-creating a fragile sound-structure, woven from the most ephemereal threads. Sorey’s drumming is equally functional: he doesn’t lay any real foundation for the other musicians, he adds the sizzle, the beat, the brush-stroke at the right moments, adding to the texture. The slowness of the opening piece is only matched by “Mandala”, which is even more open-textured, more sparse, yet followed by the aptly named “Speed Game”, but even then the tempo declines and freedom emerges. The other uptempo composition “Red Hook” is also a winner, with long unison lines and a wilder improvisations.
In all, a great album, with a very powerful musical vision of aural delicacies, a gourmet of sounds to savor, each individually and combined. Take your time and enjoy, a real treat.
http://freejazz-stef.blogspot.com/
DENMAN MARONEY QUINTET – Udentity (CF 137)
Pianist (or “hyperpianist”? Hold on, please) Denman Maroney is clearly trustful in the abilities of an average mind. Trying to explain the polyrhythmic concepts that underscore the large part of this music, he says that “there are at least two and more often three tempos going; the listener is free to choose which one(s) to relate to”. Perhaps this musician is not aware of the fact that the majority of a typical audience is not even able to stay anchored to a rudimentary 4/4 with a couple of shifted accents, let alone a superimposition of composed metres. Many pathetic characters come out with various kinds of bullshit about complex mathematic “mysteries” underlying the perfection of the universe, yet they could not name an interval or an elementary beat if threatened at gunpoint. Such sorts of involuntary victims of artistic diversity are not likely to be grateful for the labyrinthine qualities of this excellent album. Hell, this group doesn’t swing, if not for an allowed minimum.
Right, the hyperpiano. Besides numerous interlocking figurations executed with concentrated investigational attitude, Maroney – who appears positively gifted with a scintillating musicality coming from the insides of his brain – frequently plays the “regular” keyboard with a hand while enjoying the pleasures of extended techniques with another, the whole enhanced by the exploitation of several objects on the strings which generate “complementary overtones that move in contrary motion, one down toward the fundamental and the other up toward infinity”. Already fantasizing in regard to enhancement of awareness and realization? Wrong: the record’s title is the contraption of “undertone identity”, a concept introduced by Harry Partch which is too complicated to tackle in a sheer review. You can still learn the definition and use it in your intellectual conversations: nobody – except a few brighter individuals – go actually checking for the truthful core of these things, otherwise a lot of sapient icons would be swallowed by the very blob of their appalling ignorance.
Let’s not digress, though: the quintet performs fabulously throughout Udentity. Ned Rothenberg (alto sax, clarinets) employs a toothsome transitoriness in the methods applied, alternating altruistic repetition bathed in cutting dissonance and interchangeable anti-patterns which dignify the entire timbral tissue. He’s perfectly corresponding to the trumpet of Dave Ballou, who on a different side of the blowing spectrum avoids any kind of hypertrophic irresponsibleness, privileging lines that – although extremely respectful of the composer’s original plan – shine for intelligent restraint. If Michael Sarin’s drumming is entirely perfect for the overall design of these creations, his sober delivery a true injunction against the smell of moth-eaten “flexibility” characterizing the bulk of jazz drummers, bassist Reuben Radding is to be admired both as a solid donor of corpulent foundations for the general structure and an extemporaneous originator of bedazzling melodic sketches in places where an arcoed elegy is probably going to lead a sensitive receiver to deeper perceptions than an innocuous “pulse”.
Just to give a vague idea of how this stuff sounds, let me tell you that those whose ear-training includes Stravinsky and Zappa should greet this CD pretty warmly. Maroney has managed to tickle our interest with complications that sound good, lively, natural, without a hint of agony. Discomposure and angst are to be found somewhere else; here, we only appreciate an outstanding collective control over a series of well-developed strategies.
http://www.touchingextremes.blogspot.com/
SAMUEL BLASER QUARTET – Pieces Of Old Sky (CF 151)
A combination of rare events in this circumstance. A trombone-led ensemble, not exactly a common happening, and my complete, possibly indefensible lack of knowledge in regard to the four musicians who form the quartet: leader Samuel Blaser, guitarist Todd Neufeld, double bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Tyshawn Sorey. One never ends learning, indeed.
The music in Pieces Of Old Sky is sombre, brooding, rarely moving out of a shadowy zone where the attempts of eliciting a faint smile get frustrated by heavy pensiveness and crawling dejection. Blaser’s acoustic personality results quite preponderant; perhaps not really him as a soloist but the trombone itself, especially given a not overly extensive palette. The focal melodies are at times near-memorisable (“Mandala” peculiarly recalling “It Ain’t Necessarily So”), somewhere else they zigzag a little, unfolding in reasonably complicated fashion according to an acceptable degree of atonality.
There is room for further excursion, though: Morgan’s bass, directly related to the main instrument in terms of frequency adjacency, is a reassuring presence whose affirmations are defined by the paucity of notes played rather than their geometric disposition. Both Neufeld and Sorey prefer instead to remain at the edges of interventionism, spreading a barely visible powder over the instrumental tissue through emaciated figurations and merely hinted patterns that fade away almost instantly, typically encouraging Blaser’s return to a thematic home of sorts.
Although it’s difficult to talk about “enthusiasm” after having listened to this album, the mood it creates is, if you pardon the oxymoron, uniquely familiar. Essentially, what emerges is the strength of a well-behaved group, a collective aptitude tinted by the authoritative, immediately identifiable timbre of its mild-mannered boss. A finely regulated democracy where everybody knows who is in command, and is all the more happy for that.
http://www.touchingextremes.blogspot.com/
Herculaneum – Herculaneum III (CF 140)
In some respects what we have here is music that’s a step on from Jimmy Giuffre’s work in the 1950s, but if it’s the chamber music notion that unites the two bodies of work across the intervening half-century, it’s clear that this band marches to a rhythmically more vigorous aesthetic. The music is at times alive with a kind of tensile energy that similarly invalidates the Giuffre comparison, but what unites the two is a sense of exploration, of goals ill-defined and thus made all the more worthy of pursuit.
As much as anywhere else, this comes across on “Prosecco/mcv,” where looseness of rhythmic input is perhaps more compelling than the solo voices, especially when an off-kilter unison passage has the effect of forewarding David McDonnell’s alto sax solo. He’s clearly fired by what’s going on around him, though not to the extent that he resorts to screaming through his horn. The resulting collective fire is a refreshing one.
“Mahogany” has trace elements of the quartet Paul Desmond had with Jim Hall; the lyricism that was always a hallmark of that group is here in shades, but in his solo, guitarist John Beard favors a harder, less harmonically oblique approach than Hall.
Echoes of time-honored West Coast tropes are rife on “Egyptian Femme,” although in this case it’s the more abstract work of some of Shelly Manne’s groups that hold sway. This doesn’t matter anyway as such is the nature of the music these days that perhaps that represents one of the many avenues less explored.
The ensemble’s balance is best exemplified by “Red Dawn,” where the underlying anxiety of the line is offset by the deft handling of material. The chorale of the horns serves as a jump-off point for improvisation on the part of both McDonnell again on alto sax and trumpeter Patrick Newbery, whose sometimes quasi-militaristic phrasing conjures up the parade ground at some even more dystopian point in the future.
“Eyeball” is the piece least accommodating with the past. Meter is largely abandoned at first, in favor of vaguely ominous washes of sound, before things settle down in a less abstract vein. Again the horns serve a kind of choral purpose which sets them at odds with the rhythmic momentum, but the resulting tension, never resolved as it is, affords the soloists the greater freedom. http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=34763
Charles Rumback – Two Kinds of Art Thieves (CF 152)
Che la scena creativa di Chicago sia ricchissima di talento è un fatto piuttosto risaputo, anche se non va dimenticato che da sempre la Windy City ha trovato anche in giornalisti, associazioni e etichette di tutto il mondo un’attenzione sempre viva: ne è un esempio questo disco della portoghese Clean Feed a nome del batterista Charles Rumback [componente della Lightbox Orchestra di Fred Longberg-Holm], musicista che in questa prima prova da leader ha voluto con sé – in una tipica conformazione a due sassofoni e senza strumento armonico – l’altrettanto sconosciuto Joshua Sclar al tenore e due promesse ormai affermate come l’altista Greg Ward e il contrabbassista Jason Ajemian.
Le sei composizioni del disco esplorano differenti mood e interazioni collettive, ma con una certa propensione all’astrazione che si affida troppo alla sensibilità dei singoli componenti e sembra invece un po’ meno consistente dal punto di vista dell’efficacia espressiva. Non è tanto la mancanza di temi significativi, quanto piuttosto una sorta di continuo vagare esecutivo la cosa che rende il disco meno interessante di quanto potrebbe: i musicisti sono in sintonia [Ward in particolare ha sempre uno sguardo armonico lucido e tagliente] ma il lavoro non ci sembra troppo coinvolgente e non ha l’immediatezza che può avere – tanto per rifarsi a un esempio molto vicino – il quartetto di Mike Reed.
La profonda sintesi dei tanti elementi in gioco [le tradizioni cui Rumback fa riferimento sono chiaramente molte e complesse] viene giocata infatti sul piano di una sensibilità coloristica e angolosa che rimane come sospesa sopra le inquietudini del presente. Non se ne lascia toccare se non dentro una cornice artistica definita e poco immediata e questo, nel mare delle uscite discografiche e web, rischia di non centrare l’obbiettivo.
Comunque una buona band.
http://italia.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=4587
Júlio Resende - Assim Falava Jazzatrustra (CF 158 )
Pianist Julio Resende Puts A New Shine on Mainstream Jazz
In recent months thanks to Cleanfeed, Ayler Records and the kindness of Rodrigo Amado, I’ve gained a new appreciation of the Portuguese jazz scene today. It’s vital. Julio Resende’s new CD Assim Falava Jazzatustra (Cleanfeed) brings that home once again in a direct and exciting way.
Julio leads a fine quintet on this recording and they do a series of originals and a cover that provide much interest and variety. The music is in a freebop-and-beyond vein with the riffing rockish drive of “Don’t” to the mesmeric “Ir e Voltar ” (with superior guest vocalizing from Manuela Azevedo) and much in between to spark the senses and stimulate the ears. A big surprise is a bluesy balladic solo piano cover of Pink Floyd’s “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” that works perfectly.
Resende reflects the influence of early- to mid-Jarrett but uses that as a springboard to what is hard driving and contemporary all the way. As a soloist he is a clone of nobody and shows pianistic subtlety as well as formidable linear thrust. Alto saxophonist Perico Sambeat and tenorman Desiderio Lazaro are also strong soloists and with Resende’s imaginative improvising form a consistently revelatory triumvirate. Doublebassist Ole Morten Vagan has moments to shine as well and acquits himself with some very lively discourse.
When a session like this (recorded live incidentally) works well it does so for the pieces, the soloing and the push of the rhythm section. Assam Falava Jazzatustra comes through with all of those elements in place. Is Resende the Zarathustra of jazz? I don’t know and it is only an encapsulating idea to get you pondering at any rate.
This is a blast to hear! I recommend that you do so!
http://gapplegatemusicreview.blogspot.com/
Júlio Resende - Assim Falava Jazzatrustra (CF 158 )
El pianista portugués Julio Resende ha publicado el jocoso Assim Falava Jazzatrustra. A pesar del título, la música deja espacio para pocas bromas. Compuesta en su totalidad por Resende, salvo la versión de “Shine On Your Crazy Diamonds” de Pink Floyd, cuenta con unos magníficos arreglos para una formación en la que además de músicos portugueses participan el saxofonista Perico Sambeat y el contrabajista noruego Ole Morten Vagan. Todos ellos tienen espacio para lucirse en temas animados como “Jazz.pt” o en la magnífica “Don’t”, que con sus cambios de tempo es la encargada de abrir el disco y mostrar el nivel al que este grupo es capaz de trabajar. Por su parte, el pianista es protagonista absoluto de una preciosa versión del archiconocido tema de Pink Floyd. Otra gratísima sorpresa más a añadir al haber del catálogo de Clean Feed.
http://www.tomajazz.com/bun/2009/11/julio-resende-assim-falava-jazzatrustra.html
Marty Ehrlich Rites Quartet - Things Have Got To Change (CF 150)
Multi-reedman Marty Ehrlich steers his estimable band-mates through a progressive-jazz jamboree that offers a prismatic stance. The leader has performed and recorded with the respective artists over the years in various ensembles. This outing, however, sustains a prominent groove quotient amid a few slight chamber inferences. Therefore, the quartet projects a distinct personality as improvisation and composition tender a prolific balancing act.
Ehrlich and trumpeter James Zollar project vocal-like attributes amid swing, airy bop and bluesy passages, while also instilling solstice and blistering choruses in spots. With “On The One,” the quartet locks into a circular pattern, nicely counterbalanced by Erik Friedlander’s bowed-cello lines. Moreover, the band segues into an orbital sequence of events that translates into the sounds of praise. Then on “Slices Of Light,” they gel during a swaggering shuffle vibe, where the hornists’ punch out a peppery motif.
They finalize the program with a composition by the late and influential saxophonist, composer Julius Hemphill titled, “Dogon A.D.” On this piece, the quartet executes an eleven beat rhythmic pattern, firmed-up by drummer Pheeroan Aklaff’s hard-hitting backbeats and the frontline’s rocketing horns. Overall, Ehrlich presents an album, teeming with intersecting theme-building exercises that reside on a vast plane, and countered with dips and spikes along the way. Nothing gets too out of hand or off course on this shrewdly arranged studio date.
http://www.jazzreview.com/cd/review-20809.html
