Jazz Recommendations – 2016 releases

There’s an interesting effect in the way the songs of As We Fall are fully revealed as the culmination of the solos.  The ensemble play of the quintet Awake certainly adds to the strong melodic presence of this album, but the process of each member concentrating on one individual facet of the composite melodic imagery allows for not only an enjoyable slow reveal of the final picture, but also provides a great perspective and understanding of all of the depth that contributes to the ultimate manifestation.

Most of the tunes have a dreamy presence, but even when a track like “Snake” flashes some teeth or when guest Emile Parisien sparks a flame with his soprano sax on “Imperfect Circle,” it’s nothing that deviates from the overall melodic focus.  If anything, when the changing tides of intensity spike upward, it only serves to accentuate the peaceful loveliness of the album’s quieter moments.

The Jazz & People label has been having a pretty strong 2016, and this release by Awake just adds to that reputation.

Your album personnel:  Romain Cuoq (tenor sax), Anthony Jambon (guitar), Leonardo Montana (piano), Florent Nisse (double bass), Nicolas Charlier (drums) and guest:  Emile Parisien (soprano sax).

Released on the Jazz & People label.

Listen to more of the album on the label’s Bandcamp page.

Jazz from the Paris, France scene.

Available at:  Bandcamp | Amazon

Evergreen (Canceled World) sounds fashioned from pieces having no relation to one another except for the fact that one follows the next.  But the intriguing aspect about the debut from Gabriel Zucker‘s ensemble The Delegation is how that initial impression is occasionally refuted by the emergence of patterns from within the randomness of sound.  Sometimes it’s short melodic fragments that echo earlier passages.  Sometimes it’s the cyclic appearance of influences of modern big band jazz, chamber, pop, and avant-garde vocals and electronics and effects.  Sometimes these elements march in a parade and sometimes they fold back upon themselves so that one bleeds into the next.  And then there’s the surges of intensity and peacefulness and sometimes it gives a hint of something approaching predictability.  But no matter which form the pattern manifests, its presence is fleeting, giving only the faintest sense of a grand vision.  Sometimes that’s enough.  But sometimes, even when cohesion isn’t an option, there’s always the present moment and what it has to offer now.  Sometimes that’s the best way to enjoy an album.  And then sometimes, as it does on the album’s final track “Yellow Paint (Summaries II)/End Of Time (Canceled II),” everything comes together, coalescing into a unified, logical expression just in time for it to all come to a close.

Your album personnel:  Gabriel Zucker (piano, electronics, voice), Adam O’Farrill (trumpet), Eric Trudel (tenor sax), Jacob Teichroew (tenor sax, clarinet), Bryan Qu (tenor sax), Mark Chung (violin), Ron Lawrence (viola), Eric Allen (cello), Artemisz Polonyi (voice), Lorena del Mar Hernandez (voice), Bam Bam Rodriguez (bass), Gabriel Globus-Hoenich (drums) and David Su (electronics).

Released on ESP-Disk’.

Listen to more album tracks on the artist’s Bandcamp page.

Available at:  Bandcamp | Amazon

There’s no denying that guitarist Mary Halvorson has a unique sound.  It’s like she’s creating a soundtrack for a movie scripted entirely in morse code, to where any melodic implications are simply the aftermath of the rhythmic strategy.

There are times her music makes me suspicious, like it’s all a big put-on.  But forward-thinking music that is a few inches ahead of everything else out front tends to have that quality.  It’s a place where inspired brilliance and addled confusion can become indistinguishable from one another, and the willingness to buy in is conflicted by the uncertainty if there really is any there, there.  This is a good thing.  Challenging music shouldn’t be easy to absorb, and its unpredictability shouldn’t be by-the-numbers.  Challenging music should make the listener question what they’re hearing and even their own beliefs and reactions to it.

When Halvorson is out on her own doing her thing, the music can come off as opaque, impenetrable.  But when she’s able to shepherd into the fold musicians that add a strong melodic perspective, that’s when her music’s personality really comes out, and her morse code approach is brought alive in the imagery of living color.

Her newest album Away With You lands dead center of the latter category.  There’s a panoramic perspective that brings out the fullness in each piece, and serves up a number of different points of connectivity.  The harmonic component gives a greater sense of the music’s depth, and it’s an effect that carries over even when the music enters a passage that’s sparse and strung out.  Her rhythmic approach isn’t the least bit tamped down for this session.  There are times when she implies the melody via a rhythmic scatter plot.  But adding the wind instruments of Jonathan Finlayson, Jon Irabagon, Ingrid Laubrock and Jacob Garchik allows her to fill the gaps in between and results in a much richer sound because of it.  Adding further intrigue to the session is the addition of pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn to her core trio of bassist John Hébert and drummer Ches Smith.  There’s a game of espionage between the two, but it’s rarely obvious who is the one being shadowed and which of the two guitarists is pulling the strings and what it all means when it sounds as if they’re acting in concert.

It’s not an album completely out of the blue.  There are some real parallels to be drawn between Away With You and Halvorson’s 2013 release Illusionary Sea (which received the #15 slot on this site’s Best of 2013 list).  Aside from the same line-up (less Alcorn), the changing tides of tone and tempo, as well as the heightened melodic presence inform both recordings.  But on Halvorson’s newest, the concept of change seems to be getting addressed with a storyteller’s conceit rather than as the natural result of elemental forces.  This brings a definition to the songs that has the counterintuitive effect of bringing their complexity into greater focus… and yet another (welcome) challenge.

Your album personnel:  Mary Halvorson (guitar), Susan Alcorn (pedal steel guitar), Jonathan Finlayson (trumpet), Jon Irabagon (alto sax), Ingrid Laubrock (tenor sax), Jacob Garchik (trombone), John Hébert (bass) and Ches Smith (drums).

Released on Firehouse 12 Records.

Listen to more of the album at the artist’s Bandcamp page.

Available at:  Bandcamp | Amazon | eMusic

What’s fascinating about the newest from drummer Dan Weiss is how Weiss’s forward thinking vision incorporates influences of birds-of-a-feather from past generations, how the old New Sound still informs its New School descendants. Using rhythmic phrases of legendary jazz drummers as conversation starters, Weiss launches off into an innovative jazz orchestration project that echoes the experimental works of Archie Shepp’s 1970s spiritual jazz-protest music hybrid works as well as of the works of Alice Coltrane from that same period, where spiritual jazz incorporated the use of electronics and non-traditional jazz instrumentation as it attempted to achieve a higher consciousness.

Each title references the drummer whose work provides the seed of the song. But much in the same way that saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa’s Bird Calls used only tiny filaments as the base for a much thicker thread of inspiration for each tune, Weiss narrows the scope of the influence before launching off into dramatically more expansive forms of expression. The Elvin Jones comping rhythm from his Coltrane days is a primary building block of the tune “Elvin,” but the cyclic melodic patterns and swirling current of voices reflect new footprints on the brand new territory Weiss takes his ensemble forward into on Sixteen: Drummers Suite. It’s about how those legendary drummers would talk and the connections between them as drummers, not the form and substance that those conversations ultimately manifested.

His newest builds on the foundation of his excellent 2014 release Fourteen, and continues Weiss’s exploration into the possibilities of jazz orchestra in the modern day. But the Drummers Suite premise provides greater focus to the cross-currents of electronics, voices, rhythmic approaches and melodic crafting. And for what amounts to a pretty thrilling album, that additional clarity is what allows its intelligence to shine through.

Your album personnel: Dan Weiss (drums, tabla, vocal percussion), Thomas Morgan (acoustic bass), Jacob Sacks (piano), Matt Mitchell (keyboard, piano, glockenspiel, organ, vibraphone), Miles Okazaki (guitars, vocal percussion), Stephen Cellucci (percussion, vocal percussion), Katie Andrews (harp), Anna Webber (flute, alto flute), David Binney (alto sax), Miguel Zenon (alto sax), Ohad Talmor (tenor sax), Jacob Garchik (trombone, tuba), Ben Gerstein (trombone), Judith Berkson (voice), Lana Is (voice) and Jen Shyu (voice).

Released on PI Recordings.

Listen to more of the album at the artist’s Bandcamp page.

Jazz from the Brooklyn scene.

Available at:  Bandcamp | Amazon