Jazz Recommendations – 2017 releases

The Jagged Spheres trio builds a world within a world on their sophomore release, II.  The melodies are one such world.  To live in this world is to live in tiny spaces shaped with a precise beauty.  These melodic fragments are sometimes tight little arcs and other times the fragments possess a sing-song motion and then there are those resembling a satisfied sigh.  To live outside this world is to exist in a world of unending chaos, of dissonance that crashes and groans and strikes in every single direction.  The first world is set inside this tumultuous environment, and the truly remarkable quality about this recording is how the trio allows it to remain completely unscathed.  Tracing the path of a melody on this session is to watch a figure walk through the heart of a hurricane and emerge from the other side untouched by even a single raindrop.  It’s fascinating to see this pattern repeat again and again, and the attention is perpetually divided between the perilous journey of the melody and the frenetic excitement of its environment.  Even in the relatively calm opening of “Snatched,” it’s a pattern that repeats itself.  In fact, witnessing it occur in a wide open space and speaking rarely above a murmur, it brings home just how delicate the process must be.

Their 2014 debut (as a trio) was one of my Wondering Sound jazz picks.  It was a curious album then, as it still is now.  Their follow-up possesses a more cohesive vision and a methodology to see it through.  It’s no less strange than the debut, but that strangeness just seems to make more sense the second time around.

Your album personnel:  Anna Webber (tenor sax, flute), Elias Stemeseder (piano, synth) and Devin Gray (drums, percussion).

The album is Self-Produced.

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

Music from Brooklyn, NYC.

Cool album cover by Jussi Jääskeläinen.

Available at:  Bandcamp

The vibrant mix of joyful enthusiasm and raw power resonates through every note of It Is What It Is!  The Trio Bastonal of saxophonist Magnus Mehl and dual trombonists Eberhard Budziat and Stephan Kirsch don’t hold back when they want to muscle a melody through harmonies thick as ocean fog.  On this session, they bring in guitarist John King and drummer Hans Fickelscher, and the immediate advantage is that they are able to serve the dual role of providing definition to those melodic intentions and mark a trail for them to traverse.  But that’s all secondary to the unadulterated fun radiating from this music.  The title-track opens things up with a burst of rocket fuel and all the fire it can burn off.  “Melancholia Balkanoia” doesn’t stray far from that approach, but eases into it more slowly.  The Eastern European influence emerges gradually, giving shape and form where before there was none.  And then the album changes direction, and brings in the blues and gospel on “S.O.S. (Same Old Shit)” and “Swab Soul aka My Swabian Soul,” and veers into avant-garde territory with the three-part “Unfold Time.”  But no matter how the music presents itself, it’s delivered with heart.  This holds true on the album finale “Auf der Wielandshöhe,” with its funk groove and rock edge.

All kinds of serious fun here.

Your album personnel:  Eberhard Budziat (trombone), Stephan Kirsch (bass trombone), Magnus Mehl (alto & soprano saxophones), John King (guitar) and Hans Fickelscher (drums).

The album is Self-Produced.

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

Music from Korb, Baden-Württemberg, Germany.

Available at:  Bandcamp

It’s the perpetual contrast in speeds on Frozen Songs that locks the attention in place.  The Ray Dickaty project Noise of Wings juxtaposes the patient melodic sighs of dual saxophones against a frenetic bass and drums delivery, and how those two elements collide and diverge and coalesce throughout a piece is more than a little bit fascinating.  On tracks like “Hymnal” and “New Rays of the Rising Sun,” the percussion comes in bursts of activity, and utilizes the silence to enhance the suddenness of their emergence.  The results can be quite stunning.  And they achieve a similar effect with the opposite approach on tracks like “Circle Stones on a Sundial” and “Veiled Motion” by unleashing a constant rhythmic downpour.  It fills up every empty space in the song, and sometimes saxophonists Dickaty and Maciej Rodakowski bob along its surface and sometimes cut a path right down its center.  It’s in these latter instances, where the dual saxophonists overtake the fervor of bassist Wojtek Traczyk and drummer Hubert Zemler, that the true depth of the quartet’s sound is revealed.

These Ray Dickaty projects each have something fascinating to absorb.

Your album personnel:  Ray Dickaty (tenor sax), Maciej Rodakowski (tenor sax), Wojtek Traczyk (double bass) and Hubert Zemler (drums).

The album is Self-Produced.

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

Music from Warsaw, Poland.

Available at:  Bandcamp

What’s especially appealing about Polar Sounds is how Acrepearls treats their melodies after they’ve been crafted.  The trio keeps the melodies simple, short and to the point.  They are each pretty in their own way, and very focused… as if a solitary raindrop were meant to only capture a solitary ray of sunlight and nothing more.  But once that melody is set free, pianist Nicolas Schulze, drummer Thomas Leisner and saxophonist Kai Mader jostle it with waves of electronics, nudge it forward with staggered tempos, let it glide over serene waters, and sometimes bring a turbulence to those same waters with bursts of dissonance.  The resultant motion from these actions results is an illusory reshaping of the melodies… obscuring some aspects of them, skewing the attention to one aspect of the melody, and sometimes setting it to resonate at a frequency quite different than that which first accompanied its arrival.  “Boyz” is the approximation of excited dance in a tranquil environment.  The disjointed locomotion of “Homeopathic” gives the sense of a melody attempting to take two separate paths.  The slippery tempo of “Minsk” is the sonic equivalent of running up the down escalator.

But the album is at its strongest when it charts a course through serene environments.  “Lonesome Floeways” is a lullaby out on the prowl for sleepy heads.  The slow build of tension on “Foggy cold-air in the valleys and depressions” shows how rising volumes can add intensity to the expression without subtracting from the strength of the tranquility.   And the combination of an erratic drone and a sing-song melody on title-track “Polar Sounds” is absolutely mesmerizing.

Some massively arresting moments on this gorgeous recording.

Your album personnel:  Thomas Leisner (drums, drumsynth), Nicolas Schulze (piano, analog synth) and Kai Mader (tenor saxophone, loops).

Released on Lalonova Records.

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

Music from Potsdam, Germany.

Available at:  Bandcamp | Amazon

If you go by his recorded output, there’s never a time that trumpeter Taylor Haskins has been normal.  His early recordings show an intuitive awareness of the meeting points of post-bop and indie-rock, and his acuity in that particular area resulted in some music that rivaled what other like-minded souls, such as Ben Allison and Kneebody were doing at the time.  The passing of time saw Haskins’ sound evolving into music that focused increasingly on melodic possibilities and how they would thrive in different environments.  There was the folk-jazz of 2010’s American Dream, the chamber strings of 2014’s Fuzzy Logic and the 2011 electro-acoustic project Recombination.  While a strong electronic presence is nothing new for Haskins, Recombination was emblematic of something more definitive.  His newest recording Gnosis very much presents itself as the penultimate vision of that particular area of exploration.

“Hazy Days” is a hypothetical soundtrack for an AI who is always on the go.  Electronic keyboards sing out in robotic languages that melt into drummer Nate Smith‘s beat-driven subtext, and the structure of the song emerges intermittently from the cloud of electronic effects.  “View From Here” is much the same approach, but it has broken free from the clouds, and the direction of the song’s focus rings with clarity.  Much of this change is directly attributable to the guitar and bass of guests Nir Felder and Fima Ephron, who deepen the electronic textures while charting a direct route for the melody to traverse.  It’s a similar result for their treatment of “Equal Night.”

There are a number of guests on Gnosis, and it’s refreshing how much the session leader gives them space to leave their imprint.  On title-track “Gnosis,” the ethereal effect of Jamie Baum’s alto flute pushes Haskins’ trumpet to even greater heights with the gentlest of nudges, while Brandee Younger directs her harp to overlay those harmonic convergences with tiny specks of melody, as if sunlight shimmering upon the rippled surface of the sea.  And then there’s the contrast of the organic sounds of trombonist Josh Roseman and the hand percussion of Daniel Freedman with the electronics on “Lost Worlds,” and how their tone is the calming effect of a rising sun at the end of a manic night.  More fun in contrast is found in the way the pulsing undercurrent of Todd Sickafoose’s electric bass is vastly different from the wild expressiveness of keyboardist Henry Hey, and yet they still sound joined at the hip.

This is, by far, the most different that Haskins has sounded from himself in the beginning and from the pack, now.  And considering where he started and the places to where modern jazz has advanced, it’s a remarkable achievement.  It’s also more than a little bit fascinating.  And while Gnosis behaves as a watershed moment in the continued evolution of an artist, it might also be yet another launching point.  It’s something worth hoping for.

Your album personnel:  Taylor Haskins (trumpet, piano, synthesizers, analog EVI), Nate Smith (drums) and guests:  Henry Hey (Rhodes, Wurlitzer), Todd Sickafoose (acoustic bass), Fima Ephron (electric bass), Nir Felder (guitar), Daniel Freedman (hand percussion), Jamie Baum (alto flute), Brandee Younger (harp), Josh Roseman (trombone).

Released on Recombination Records.

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

Music from the Champlain Valley in New York.

Available at:  Bandcamp | Amazon

And if you want to read more (and hear) about Haskins’ prior recordings, check out this write-up published around the time of his last recording (go read it).