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