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Patricia Brennan Septet
Breaking Stretch
Pyroclastic PR35
On her third leadership date, vibraphonist Patricia Brennan takes the strong foundation established by her percussion heavy quartet on 2022’s More Touch, and uses the addition of three horns to erect the towering edifice of Breaking Stretch. The powerhouse team of drummer Marcus Gilmore, bassist Kim Cass, and percussionist Mauricio Herrera remains intact, now supplemented by saxophonists Jon Irabagon on sopranino and alto and Mark Shim on tenor, and trumpeter Adam O’Farrill. Brennan’s imaginative and varied charts extract the maximum richness and excitement from her crew.
Brennan’s hinterland includes jazz, contemporary classical, and Mexican influences, but it is the Afro-Caribbean rhythm driven bands like Fania All Stars and wind-and-brass rock groups like Chicago, Earth, Wind & Fire and Blood, Sweat & Tears, which she name checks in the liners which are most pertinent here. The album boasts a vertiginous underpinning complexity, courtesy of Gilmore and Herrera in particular, which threatens to pull the unwary into a dizzying embrace. That’s further accentuated by the punchy horn section that suggests a bonus percussionist at times. Brennan’s voicings for the horns grabs the ear throughout, as she shifts between tricky unisons (“Mudanza (States Of Change)”), overlapping lines (“Los Otros Yo (The Other Selves)”), loose interweaving (the title cut), and two or three part inventions (“Suenos de Coral Azur (Blue Coral Dreams)”) with the breadth and depth further enhanced by using the full spread of registers.
Having launched diverse improvisational spaces through her writing, ensuing solos are pithy. As on her previous releases, Brennan co-opts pitch bending, distortion, and other electronic effects to extend the tonal palette of the vibraphone, while O’Farrill plugs in for some even more radical transformations, which make over the signature sound of his trumpet completely on three cuts. Even so, the circuitry never comes close to dominating, such is the tremendous intensity of the ensemble sound. Irabagon is the most left field of the soloists and his sopranino is Brennan’s secret weapon, cutting through to elevate already heady ferment into fever pitch, sliding between notes and in and out of tonality, as he does on “Palo de Oros (Suit Of Coins).” In contrast, Shim’s gruff tenor builds the tension without ever boiling over, exemplified by his slow burn passion on “555.”
Having shone in the bands of Anna Webber, Matt Mitchell, Michael Formanek, and Mary Halvorson, Brennan has not only absorbed those experiences, but has drawn on her own background to develop a distinctive concept. In doing so she shows herself to be a composer to be reckoned with, to complement her undoubted talents as an improviser. Breaking Stretch is like a finely tuned machine studded with jewels.
–John Sharpe
John Escreet
The Epicenter of Your Dreams
Blue Room Music 1015
On Seismic Shift (Whirlwind Records, 2022), John Escreet’s first recording in a traditional trio format, the British-born pianist introduced a new line-up with improvisers he’d reconnected with in Los Angeles, where he’d moved from Brooklyn just prior to the pandemic: bassist Eric Revis and drummer Damion Reid, who replaced his previous New York-based trio with John Hébert and Tyshawn Sorey.
For Seismic Shift’s follow-up, The Epicenter of Your Dreams, Escreet expands his new group to include tenor saxophonist Mark Turner. One of the more cerebral improvisers of his generation, Turner’s sophisticated approach is a surprisingly ideal match for Escreet’s trio. Like Revis and Reid, Turner also grew up in Los Angeles, similarly establishing his reputation in New York before relocating. All three call upon their experiences alongside Escreet, who conceived a program consisting of two covers by influential musicians and six complex originals worthy of his new ensemble’s versatility.
The album opener, “Call It What It Is,” dazzles with a keen sense of harmony and rhythmic fluidity, showcasing the band’s rapport and adventurous improvisations from Turner and Escreet. The impressionistic title track is a through-composed piece contrasting shadowy lyricism with an array of tone colors that concludes as a hushed ballad. A plangent saxophone underscores a romantic mood, revealing an expressive bass solo over a serene two-chord progression.
Besides Escreet’s originals, the trio covers works by two iconic pianists: Stanley Cowell and Andrew Hill. Seismic Shift featured a cover of Cowell’s “Equipoise,” but here it’s “Departure No.1,” which Escreet transcribed and arranged from Cowell’s 1974 solo piano album Musa: Ancestral Streams (Strata-East). Escreet and Turner dive into each spiraling, hard bop solo break as Revis and Reid propel them forward with elastic precision, culminating in a pithy drum solo. Escreet pays homage to another of his inspirations with “Erato.” Hill’s noir-ish ballad, originally recorded as a trio on 1965’s Pax (Blue Note), is faithfully reproduced, albeit at a faster pace. Escreet deftly interprets the oblique melody as the band quickens into midtempo swing, transforming the tune’s melancholy mood.
The spontaneously constructed “Meltdown” departs from the demanding formalism of Escreet’s writing. A collective improvisation that combines bowed bass, saxophone multiphonics, flinty snare patterns, and extended piano techniques, the haunting dissonance of “Meltdown” blurs the borders between composition and free improvisation. Its exploratory nature develops into the taut unison lines and rhythmic syncopations of “Trouble and Activity,” which demonstrates the group’s progressive inclinations with expansive deconstructions that yield exhilarating solos. Another standout, the angular “Lifeline,” stops and starts at a bustling pace, all four musicians anticipating each other’s moves through seamless passages where the energy never flags. Similarly, on the closer, “The Otherside,” Escreet plays with assured vitality, contrasting crashing chords with motivic playfulness.
The Epicenter of Your Dreams ranges from intricately composed post-bop to freewheeling improvisation, and while the raucous soundscapes Escreet’s group sometimes conjures aren’t always aligned with Turner’s cool-toned lyricism, they yield fascinatingly dynamic four-way conversations nonetheless. Aided by his seasoned bandmates, Escreet updates traditional post-bop with a vivaciously modernistic approach that encourages repeat listening.
–Troy Collins
Erik Friedlander
Dirty Boxing
Skipstone SKST 031
A longstanding and prolific veteran of the Downtown scene, cellist Erik Friedlander has released almost two dozen albums under his own name since the mid-1990s, while simultaneously working as an in-demand sideman with artists ranging from The Mountain Goats to John Zorn. Issued on his Skipstone label, Dirty Boxing explores the surprising similarities between the disciplined art of music and the strategic combat of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA).
Drawing musical parallels to the athletic movements of MMA is not unprecedented however, as jazz has often been compared to sports in terms of improvisation and teamwork. Friedlander states, “I’ve had a growing fascination with the mixed martial arts for about 3-4 years now ... Just like a fighter picks and mixes different martial arts techniques, a musician pulls from various influences and experiences to shape their unique sound and vibe.” The musicians featured on Dirty Boxing comprise Friedlander’s regular working band, The Throw, which includes pianist Uri Caine, bassist Mark Helias, and drummer Ches Smith, last documented on A Queen’s Firefly (Skipstone, 2022).
The punchy album clocks in at just over a half-hour, with the fervent opener, “Sprawl,” offering an immediate impression of combat; melodious cello figures and pneumatic bass lines interlock with intricate drum patterns, underscoring exuberant piano filigrees, like boxers dancing around a ring. “Foot Stomp” follows, a tricky mixed meter number that emulates the darting movements of a fighter; the leader’s singing arco soars over a repeated phrase from the band, before Caine takes flight with Smith in aggressive form. Named after footwork used to escape being pinned to the floor by an opponent, “Shrimping” recalls a Baroque dance. A descending phrase from the cello works in opposition with an upward motif from Caine, who plays with elegant, neo-classical precision before the mood changes to dissonance and back again.
For this project, Friedlander experiments with modular compositions, enabling the basic structure of a tune to change each time it is played, while highlighting one member of the band. As such, Smith demonstrates his chops on “Ground and Pound,” while Helias’ pizzicato runs dominate “D”Arce,” a dynamic piece based on a choke hold. Elsewhere, the confident vibe of “Contender” shifts dramatically into uncertainty, reflecting the inevitability of confrontation. The aptly named “Submission” regales with mournful cello, stark piano, tender bass, and Smith’s supple brushes, all conspiring towards melancholy resignation. The rollicking closer, “Kimura,” on the other hand, ends the date with lively stop-start rhythms.
The CD edition of Dirty Boxing includes a bonus album that provides an even greater view of Friedlander’s expansive artistry, Floating City. For this singular effort, Friedlander and Helias are joined by vocalist Sara Serpa and guitarist Wendy Eisenberg; Serpa sings beautiful wordless vocalise, while Eisenberg picks a clean-toned acoustic, lending the date a lush, chamber-esque ambience. Ethereal and transportive, the disc consists of a multi-part suite that weaves together harmonious melodies in lyrical fashion – a far cry from the vivacious extrapolations of Dirty Boxing, which further documents Friedlander’s wide-ranging aesthetic interests.
Friedlander has long explored what the cello can do in a jazz context while embracing established traditions. Celebrating the unexpectedly refined beauty of physical combat in a musical setting, Friedlander challenges expectations by combining disparate worlds in a most creative manner. Bolstered by the athletic interplay of his quartet (and a surprise bonus album), Dirty Boxing is a winning effort in a consistently imaginative discography.
–Troy Collins
Stephen Grew
Now We Are Here
Discus 174
It has always seemed to me that the semi-improvised Baroque fantasia portends the gusts and glowing embers of Romanticism, skipping right over Classicism’s relatively gallant propriety. Leaping the centuries, if any further evidence of the now-numerous directions taken by “improvised” solo piano vocabulary over the last half century were needed, Stephen Grew provides it on Now We Are Here. He builds on last year’s remarkable Chasm, also on Discus, but the instrument from which he now draws the many colors comprising his sound pallet leads him in astonishing and unimagined directions as brief backward glances are far outnumbered by deconstructive innovation.
Grew’s technique is formidable. There’s nothing particularly novel about that, but as with the most complete artists, he employs it in the service of what comes across as instantaneous divination, a Herculean delving deep into the crystal center where consciousness and intuition converge. Grew writes that the music on offer is the product of a decade of practice on a certain piano, presumably this one, though that isn’t specified. Listen at 7:04 of the titular piece – one of three lengthy episodic excursions and three briefer ones – to hear one of the things that sets the piano apart from so many others. Amid Grew’s usual and jaw-dropping terraced dynamics, he boldly articulates an A which repeats with each stroke, a technique that might be observed in a solo piano piece by Ravel. While I’m uncertain whether or not he’s hitting the note again with that dazzling rapidity, occurrences in future tracks place it in the realm of possibility. “Raw Energy, High Charge,” which is a perfect descriptor, opens with similarly repeated notes whose tempi become integral to the very fabric of the piece as rhythm, pitch and timbre blur beyond easy recognition. Grew ascends and descends in figurations that embrace and eschew proportion by turn, similarly foundering notions of arpeggio and cale until, at 0:16, a momentary respite is achieved and a harmonic stasis reached, staggering as much for its brevity as its poignance. Yet, it’s not all “free” counterpoint and dissonance, far from it! Dig the ascending melodic fragment emerging from its amalgamated contexts at 0:23, a gorgeously gemmy minor idea that only repeated listening demonstrates actually had its genesis two fraught seconds earlier.
It could be, though, that the disc’s outstanding features revolve around variety, the moment to moment changes occurring with blinding speed and precision to match. “Secret Worlds”’ first minute brings one of those vastly implicative changes as a Gargantuan decrescendo carries peace and repose in its wake. A four-chord phrase blending Satie, Messiaen, and Berg with a bit of Sorabji included turns something akin to the trickster’s tables, inviting us into the depth and space of a creative episode of extreme registral play and delightful delicacy, occasionally bringing plucked piano strings into the discourse. As with Chasm, the recording mostly occupies the center of the soundstage, but the reverberance of the acoustic tends to veer off toward stage left. All that said, and this is one of the elements that casts the disc in a unique sonic light, those repeated notes throughout often appear to be emanating from parts of the room itself. Headphone listening will clarify this point of textural intrigue. The production is rich and full, but the rapid-fire ping-ponging of tone repetitions offers the illusion of the space in dialogue with itself, or with the music, or both. Given the unity via diversity of the ideas in each lengthy or brief piece, and they run the gamut from 1:32 to nearly 22 minutes, the fact that so many ideas and contexts recur on so many connected levels boggles the mind while opening the ears wider than ever expected.
Summarizing a disc like this is equivalent to describing the intricacies of an ocean wave up close. Its cyclic nature encompasses so much more, spiraling from one iteration to another with the similitude of varying structures in stark but flowing juxtaposition. Each gesture anticipates the next even while its identity evaporates, leaving only a series of associations as individual as they are dependent, ironically complete and open to the interpretation of listener retrospection. Unlike so many improvisers, Grew is not so much making a definitive statement as posing questions that contain multiple and morphing solutions. This fluid series of conceptions, or fluent ambiguities from which periodic glimpses of the familiar appear and vanish, coalesces into one of the most intriguing, rapturous and assuredly fantastic solo piano albums ever to cross my desk.
–Marc Medwin
Frank London The Elders
Spirit Stronger Than Blood
ESP-Disk’ ESP5099CD
Veteran trumpeter Frank London is navigating some very tough challenges these days, having been diagnosed with a fatal disease of the blood. The resourceful improviser and composer isn’t feeling only gloom, though. On this meaningfully titled album, London and The Elders – pianist Marilyn Lerner, bassist Hill Greene, and drummer Newman Taylor-Baker, with saxophonist Greg Wall guesting on a few tracks – explore the deep bonds of musical and personal connection. The result is a fine recording, emotionally rich and musically churning.
“Let There Be Peace” opens things with a huge jolt of energy, equal turns swaggering and rhapsodic. But like so many of the pieces here, regardless of their initial color, the group can’t resist a bright head that swings like mad. Brimming with a heavy spirituality indebted to Shepp, with bright post-bop lines threading everywhere, the music is a tonic. The horns sound simply marvelous together, which is no surprise given London’s and Wall’s long history together, and the trio behind them is supple, earthy, and sharp.
Just check the deep, Mingus-tinged “Resilience,” with a testifying Wall bringing the joyful noise as Lerner moves wonderfully between thematic explorations and juicy chromatic asides. Emotion is everywhere, in short, not least on the gorgeous title track: London is in fine form on this sailing, dark melody, which has something of the stripped-down melancholy of late Trane. This emotional abundance, combined with the group’s feel for dynamics, makes this an especially compelling and impassioned record. They can dig into a somewhat traditional piece, like the lyrical “Poem for a Blue Voice,” or a sizzling klezmer tune like “Abundant Love,” with equal conviction and intensity. I guess that’s why London can gig with both Ran Blake and Iggy Pop.
But for as playful and gleeful as the music often is, it’s hard not to feel the vibe shift of the closing “Resistance/Healing,” which is dedicated to the late Ron Miles. Hill Greene starts it off with a very impassioned bowed meditation, one of the album’s true highlights. It’s a defiant, life-affirming piece, capturing not just London’s own life at this juncture but something of emotional intensity of the times.
–Jason Bivins
K. Curtis Lyle + George R. Sams + Adi Bu Dharma Joshua Weinstein + Damon Smith + Ra-Kalam Bob Moses + Henry Claude
29 Birds You Never Heard
Balance Point Acoustics bpaltd25025
There are moments in which an implication emerges with such poignancy that it shapes its numerous and varied contexts. “Harmonize my black mule, baby,” intones K. Curtis Lyle, triading his way back through the vicissitudes of his own past and through the multiple narratives evoked in every instant of this gorgeous and amply visceral sextet offering from Damon Smith’s always intriguing Balance Point Acoustics label. Trumpeter George R. Sams, bassists Smith and Adi Bu Dharma Joshua Weinstein, percussionists Ra-Kalam Bob Moses and Henry Claude, all in Lyle’s company, emote over the overlapping histories, emergent freedoms, and the hard roads to get there only music can document in such polyphonic technicolor.
The piece for which that opening serves as titular line conjures obvious shades of The Collected Poem for Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lyle’s 1972 collaboration with Julius Hemphill. It’s the first released recording documenting his prodigious historical acumen in the service of a view both unified and wittily disparate, an evolving story told in versified instants, bits of lore and pragmatic wisdom captured in shards of memory for which the music is a perfect foil. While pulse rolls through this meeting of improvisers, it’s simultaneous clarity and diffusion is elasticized to fill and glide through each moment, thick and warm at the low end and sharp, crystalline or even aphoristically piquant in the upper registers. Only deliberate on the allusive title “The Gold Standard Andrew Hill Deconstructs James Booker” to glean an insight into the low rarified rumbles with which drums and bass support muted trumpet and various types of percussion, from marimba to shakers. To hear some of that all-encompassing pulse, listen out at 7:50, Moses and Weinstein inhabiting the same percussive space, setting the stage for Smith’s beautifully sparse solo. “Damballah and Aida Weidho the Old Gods” trods similarly narrow yet fertile ground, awash in what sounds like tongue-drum and marimba evocation complemented by the basses and, eventually, Sams’ Dixonesque flugelhorn, mellow reminiscence saturated with delay but never at detail’s expense. These stretches of time, particle-driven washes of sound, exist in spaces more akin to states, instants of being with all of the elements etched razor-sharp but unified.
The poetry follows suit. “Praise for trumpets,” exhorts Lyle, “They were the vocal chords of the 20th century.” Truer word never found its way to paper or lips. His various levels of praise mirror the music surrounding them. “Praise for the stillness that lies in turbulence,” Lyle marvels at the near-silence allowing his words the room to imbue it, to render it whole. Similarly, As Moses’ cymbals scintillatingly suggest and toms roll muffled thunder, Smith and Winstein’s arco and pizzicato counterpointing in sympathy with Sams’ muted trumpet, a pharaoh (possibly Albert Ayler?) is magically transported to Arkansas via the mystical soma cycles of Claude’s shakers. It is difficult to imagine a more deftly unified statement of words and music in long-form tandem.
There are so many moments of clarity, such sonic epiphanies, that cataloging them is a fool’s errand, just as it is to relate absolutely the sheaf of additional Lyle poems accompanying the disc to any one musical occurrence. Be all that as it may, one of the most imposing and majestic concludes the album’s only instrumental, “Five Peacocks Ingest the Mandrake,” as, from 9:22, the bassists’ drone fills the space with a crushing luminosity. Moses and Claude have just completed their own cycles in drums/and/marimba dialogue, preceded by Moses and Smith in modal communion, and then, like the spell cast by heat-haze, it all comes together, slowly rising and then dispersing, histories unified and held in stasis, an imprint of praise in sound.
–Marc Medwin