Jazz Recommendations – 2012 Releases

It’s not that far-fetched that a Beatles tune might coax a tear out of me.  Those melodies, those perfectly constructed songs, they know how to get their hooks into a listener’s heart.  What is unusual is when it’s someone other than the Fab Four to draw it out of me.  Vocalist Nicky Schrire opens her album by creating a little medley out of her own “Freedom Flight” as an intro into the Beatles’ “Blackbird.”  The rendition isn’t overdone, actually quite subtle, yet is evocative like crazy.  It sets the tone for the album, and it establishes the approach of Schrire on the rest of the album.

Your album personnel: Nicky Schrire (vocals), Nick Paul (piano), Sam Anning (bass), John Goldbas (drums, percussion), and guests: Paul Jones (tenor sax), Jay Rattman (clarinet), Brian Adler (percussion), and Peter Eldridge (piano, vocals).

Something I like about Schrire… the way she uses non-word vocalizations, it’s right up my alley.  She doesn’t treat them so much like notes as rhythmic tools, much like how some poets excel not as much by the meaning of their words but in the pleasant effect of the words bouncing off the reader’s head.  Schrire has that artful talent of voice as percussion, and thankfully, we’re talking the tasteful drumming of a Jon Christensen and the well-trained fire of a Billy Hart.

On “Me, the Mango Picker,” Rattman’s clarinet and Schrire’s vocalizations are butterflies on a summery day, fluttering about lightly, and offering little indications of where they’ll flutter next.

Another Schrire original that works well is “Ode to a Folk Song,” which has her singing demure and keeping notes at a steady simmer until that moment when she lets the group explode with sound, especially a fiery contribution on tenor by Paul Jones.

A couple tracks don’t live up to the standard set overall by the album.  The rendition of James Taylor’s “Shower the People” falls flat for the most part, except that the percussion-vocalization collaboration sends the song off very strong.  Admission of Material Subjective Bias:  I despise James Taylor’s music with an intensity I’m unable to describe without repeated profanities, so unless you possess the taste and wisdom to agree with me on this subject, you might not want to put to weight my opinion of that track too heavily.

But overall, just a real nice album, one that grew on me slowly, but once it got its hooks in me, I warmed up to it real quick.

Released on the Circavision Productions label.

Download a free album track at AllAboutJazz, courtesy of the artist.

Available at Amazon: CD | MP3

The trio of Samo Salamon, Michel Godard, and Roberto Dani have been collaborating for a substantial time now.  It goes to show how that kind of investment can pay off.  For all intents and purposes, Eleven Stories shouldn’t work as well as it does.  The compositions possess an odd tunefulness, the melodies have a disembodied quality, and, well, guitar/tuba/drum trios aren’t exactly what the stuff of jazz is made from.

But the thing of it is, the album does work.  It works really really well.

The album has a pleasant sway to it. Salamon has, over time, developed a signature sound on guitar, a razor sharp edge that makes an impression without drawing blood.  When he gets moody on guitar, as he does on “Kei’s Melody,” Salamon evokes whisper of early-ECM Bill Frisell.  When Salamon gets the heart racing on guitar, he sounds like an electrical wire swiftly uncoiling.

Godard forgoes the oompah of the stereotypical tuba, instead bringing the calming throaty gurgle of a forest stream (for instance, the song “Three”), and there’s a heavenly soulfulness he achieves on “Chinese Bath” that is a joy to hear.  Tuba’s gonna sound big no matter what, but Godard has consistently shown the instrument’s delicate side, on this album, past Salamon recordings, and those under Godard’s own name, both in a classical setting but also on other jazz albums, like the excellent 2010 recording Terre Lontane.

In addition to his time spent with Salamon and Godard, drummer Dani has made some notable appearances with Stefano Battaglia.  On Eleven Stories, it’s his tool box mix of percussion on tracks like “Sour” and “Cold Feet” and “Three” where he really shines, because despite their insistence and diversity, the percussion blends right into the stream of things, riffing on the same eccentric quirks in the playing of his trio mates.

The tracks are pretty evenly dispersed between those that brood and simmer and those that crackle and combust.  I think the brooding tunes are the stronger ones on the album, but it’s a close enough score between the two that the difference is likely attributable to personal preference.  Did I mention this was a live album? Well, it is. Sound is perfectly fine.  If it weren’t for the applause between tracks, one would never know it.  Specifically, the recording comes from the last gig, in Germany, of a European tour in April 2011.

Your album personnel: Samo Salamon (guitar), Roberto Dani (drums), Michel Godard (tuba, electric bass).

The album is Self-Produced.

Jazz from the Maribor, Slovenia scene.

Download a free album track at AllAboutJazz, courtesy of the artists.

Available at eMusic.  Available at Amazon: MP3

I first became familiar with Jon De Lucia’s Luce Trio back when it was in its Kickstarter stage.  He submitted a preview track from the album (if he were able to get it recorded) to the AllAboutJazz Download of the Day.  I still recall being floored by its sparse lilting beauty, that a tune with such a solemn demeanor could pack such an evocative punch.

That track really stuck with me.

But in the deluge of new music that hits my inbox, memories begin to fade a bit.  That’s why I was so thrilled to find a completed recording of Luce Trio titled Pieces, Vol. 1, and no less thrilled to discover that the preview track was an accurate representation of the sublime music presented on this album.

Your album personnel:  Jon De Lucia (sax, sruti box), Ryan Ferreira (electric guitar), and bassist Chris Tordini (acoustic bass).

Looking to bring a jazz improvisational approach to baroque and early musics, De Lucia imbues solemn austere music with a candle’s flickering warmth.  As he describes it…

The baroque era is known to have produced some of the
greatest pre-jazz musical improvisers. So I thought—and there
is a tradition of this in jazz—that we could bring improvisation
into play while playing the music of Bach and Handel.

The album was recorded at St. Ann and the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn, an astute match for the music and its source material.

The album opens with the De Lucia original “Chant.”  The silky drone comes from a sruti box, which is similar to a harmonium, and De Lucia can operate it with his foot as he plays sax.  Between that, Ferreira’s guitar hum, and some arco on bass, a rich soil has been tilled for De Lucia’s flowering saxophone notes to sprout up to the church ceiling.

The second track is the one that first captured my attention month ago.  The Handel aria “Lascia Ch’io Pianga” has De Lucia pirouetting gracefully on sax as guitar and bass take deliberate staggered steps in opposite directions and contrasting elevations.  It gives the effect of two people walking a spiral staircase in differing paths, and the motion created is the slowly twisting centrifugal force of saxophone.  It still amazes me how embraceable this track is for all its elegance, which typically inspires more of observation from a distance.

Four of the nine album tracks are De Lucia originals.  Bach is hit upon three times, including the chorale “Jesu, Deine Passion,” which closes out the album with a bedtime story fit for comforting moonlight and twinkling stars on a clear winter night.  The remaining two album tracks are, as mentioned above, by Handel, and one by Elizabethan lutenist John Dowland.  De Lucia takes two compositions of Dowland’s (“I Saw My Lady Weepe” and “Flow, My Tears”), and let group improvisation fall between the two.  Much to its benefit, this creates an effect of three part story more than two compositions merged into one.

Is it first thing in the morning and the sun is just starting to play with shades of blues and pinks and oranges in the morning sky?  Play this album.  Is it late at night, the crickets are yawning, and there’s a sense of a world asleep?  Play this album.  Or any moment, when a respectful silence fills the air and you need music to fit right in, Pieces, Vol. 1 is the answer.

You can stream the entire album at the artist’s bandcamp page.  You can also purchase it there in CD format or any number of digital formats.

Download a free album track at AllAboutJazz, courtesy of the artist.  And you can also download the track I reference in the intro, which is a demo version of an album track, also available at AllAboutJazz, courtesy of the artist.

The album is Self-Produced.

Jazz from the Brooklyn scene.

Available at Amazon: CD | MP3

If it becomes available at eMusic in the future, I’ll add the link then.

A strangely compelling album by guitarist Mark Solborg.  At first blush, it sounds like large ensemble avant-garde… the clash of thunder, streaks of dissonance, honking and squealing.  And those elements are there, except it’s so much more than that.  Solborg weaves in sweet melodic lines, subtly at first, but becoming insidious and unmistakable for the thrashing beauty that they are.  Want an example?  Check out opening track “Mrs. Pedersen Takes the Tram.”  And then there are tunes like “2620,” of gently nudging serenity, of monstrous notes spoken in a soft voice and with good intentions.  It’s an album of contrasts and incongruities which all fit together with a surprising tunefulness and dynamic interaction.

Your album personnel: Mark Solborg (guitar), Anders Banke (tenor sax, clarinet, bass clarinet), Jeppe Skovbakke (bass), Bjørn Heebøl (drums), Gunnar Halle (trumpet), Laura Toxværd (alto sax), Torben Snekkestad (tenor & soprano saxes, clarinet), Jakob Munch (tuba, trombone), and Chris Speed (tenor saxophone, clarinet).

If one were to take a cross-section of this album, there would be visible strata of avant-garde music, of free improv jazz, of post-bop and some drone.  In this, the album isn’t original; it’s in the way that those strata converge and separate and converge yet again that make this album so special.  The interplay between the artists, coming from different places and merging together in a way that creates new exciting sounds, it makes for an album that finds new ways to delight and surprise.

“Almost” is a drunken stagger, with horn burps, woodwind moans, and guitar twittering absently to itself.  The tune has a steadily growing intensity, and what began as a drone builds up to a satisfying roar.

“The Whispers” begins with sheepish blips and gurgles, but the instruments gradually forget to use their inside-voices, the volume increases, tempo builds, and then, suddenly, it just drops off into silence.  When the voices start again, it’s back to church mouse status, except that the ambiguous sounds have a coherency lacking at the start of the tune, a passage of smoldering airiness, like a plume of smoke drifting up from a small campfire.

The album ends with the punchy “Open Parenthesis (With Bob).”  Lines aren’t competing with one another so much as perpetually finishing one another’s sentences.  There is a brief eye of the storm for an alto sax solo, but this quickly cedes way to a torrent of tangled improvisation, one that ends as a concentrated mass surging inexorably onward to the album’s final note.

And when it gets there, it would be an understandable impulse to hit the play button and start it again from the top.  I’m pretty taken by this recording.

Originally performed at the 2010 Copenhagen Jazz Festival, where the album was recorded.

Released on the ILK Music label.

Jazz from the Copenhagen, Denmark scene.

Available at eMusic. Available at Amazon: CD | MP3