Thursday, July 30, 2020

John Fedchock NY Sextet lays down good blend of solo and collective excellence

Desirable outcomes in studio recording sessions usually mean that the material is known well in advance to the parti
Trombonist-bandleader John Fedchock
John Fedchock leads a unified sextet
cipants and the bandleader structures it in such a way that solos, accompaniment, and ensemble passages seem soldered into place.

I like when, from moment to moment, everyone seems to be focused on presenting a musical object more than foregrounding "expression."  That's the impression I pick up from "Into the Shadows" (Summit Records), the latest recording by the John Fedchock NY Sextet.  And that doesn't have to mean the jazz that results seems cut-and-dried —  a simple triumph of planning.

Trombonist-bandleader Fedchock has created arrangements for himself and five colleagues that maintain pulse and momentum while giving us something as solid and functionally appropriate as a well-made chair.

To take from the album the clearest link to the tradition of great jazz sextets, "Alpha Dog" is an easily rocking update of the hard-bop tradition. It's deliberately abstract, I think, to avoid seeming less like an Art Blakey Jazz Messengers tribute.  Typically, concise solos run throughout the performance, covering everyone but the drummer, Eric Halvorson. The other players are Scott Wendholt, trumpet and flugelhorn; Walt Weiskopf, tenor saxophone; Allen Farnham, piano; and David Finck, bass.

The band presents an assertive profile in such a number, but it can also render a soft-focus sound that coheres, as in the flowing samba "Manaus."  That piece features one of several outstanding Wendholt solos. Others that caught my ear on repeated listening happen on the standards "I Should Care" and "Nature Boy."  The latter arrangement catches the mystery of the original song without having to slow down to a ballad pace; in fact, the phrases are punched up without presenting the song in gaudy new garb.

Also fetching was Fedchock's uptempo arrangement of "I Should Care," with Farnham introducing the tune in an engagingly cryptic fashion. Fedchock ends that piece with a coda, featuring the drummer. Halvorson also gets a fusillade of last words in "Star Eyes" against a five-chord riff in the piano. That tune had the Fedchock solo that struck me most favorably, as once again everyone has his say in a round-robin solo format. But there's no showboating here: It's an unspoken "Hey, everyone, we've got a good chair to make: every detail has to fit and display complementary workmanship."

The title tune, one of five Fedchock originals, is pretty much a trombone showcase, yet even with that emphasis, the arrangement is all about the the sextet. The ensemble stays close to the theme in its accompaniment, as if to underline the import of the trombone. Here is leadership of a kind we might wish for in other arenas: The  man in charge accepts responsibility, carries it off well, and allows those working with him due opportunity to shine. Fedchock ventures into the shadows, to be sure, but emerges from them shining.

[Photo by Enid Farber]

Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Deeply rooted suburban fantasies maintain resonance

It's easy to get puzzled by the Trump-driven narrative shoring up his reelection prospects. As used as we think we are to the perspective that he has also imposed on the Republican Party, there are new swerves in his rhetorical aggressiveness. It's hard to keep up with them all.

A recent one was the inclusion of a prediction that Joe Biden, if elected, would destroy the suburbs. What was that all about, I wondered, until I saw Trump's tweeted warning to "suburban housewives of America."

"Housewives"! Were they twisting their hands nervously in immaculate aprons as they looked out the kitchen window at a perfect lawn and a white picket fence? It fell into place: the Trump slogan "Make America Great Again" focuses squarely on the dream of a pristine suburbia.

Suburban dreams in the makIng: Levittown under construction
And that means solidly white enclaves, the heritage of the Levittown developments that followed World War II, the metastasized suburbia enabled not only by the mass transit around a few metropolitan areas, but by the proliferating cross-town expressways that promised quick access to cities where white-collar work was concentrated and back again to a haven purposely designed to put people among their own kind.

Prejudice — the othering of minority groups — was built into the triumph of the American suburb. Today, the perceived disaster of a Biden victory is presumed to carry with it the completion of racial and ethnic integration. Typically Trump casts his mind into a way-back machine picturing a suburbia not anywhere as diverse as it has become. It's a world where it's OK to think of the women whose votes he is likely to lose in November as housewives.

In big cities, competing ethnic groups have learned to sort of get along over the past century or so. They have to mingle somewhat in the conduct of daily life. There have been dramatic flare-ups, of course, but these have also served as warnings to suburbanites. And urban strife, along with federally designed escape routes and legal exclusions, has been pictured as something the suburbs can avoid.

Big-city irony would shift to suburbs
But it's not easy: A party of black teenagers in a Dallas suburb leads to a police officer wrestling a bikini-clad girl to the ground. Scary, yes, but worlds away from the 1919 race riot in Chicago sparked by a black swimmer crossing into water considered exclusive to whites. That event is among the markers of the prejudice that warps the maturation of the hero of James T. Farrell's "Studs Lonigan." And the lines are fiercely maintained: Though Studs and his gang include, with some disparagement, a Jewish pal, the neighborhood slut draws the line at accommodating him in the bedroom. She has her standards.

In the large cities, the inevitable meltdown of ethnic purity creates dream worlds that Philip Roth, in the heavily ironic title of one of his best novels, called "American Pastoral." Trump's suburbia is still populated by the legacy of the American diaspora, and he suspects it's kind of a last stand. His housewives and their commuting husbands ("Honey, I'm home!") are the shepherdesses and swains updated from the classic pastoral.

Roth was writing about his hometown, Newark. In the nearby city of Paterson, Allen Ginsberg grew up. The Jewish middle class of which they were a part had a place in the big cities that their people  did not easily find in the suburbs. One of those north New Jersey towns was home to my paternal grandfather, who once told my mother that he would never sell his home to a Jew. When I told his sister, my great-aunt, that I was headed to Harvard to begin graduate school, she replied crisply: "I don't like Harvard — too many Hebrews."

It was a world of casual bias, radiating from the WASP establishment out through the Jewish populace and into black and brown communities. Towns that were wealthy enough to keep their independent character could morph into suburbs of the metropolis and remain white havens.

Ezra Pound nailed a prejudice he linked to the suburbs.
In a  1967 conversation with Ezra Pound in Venice, Ginsberg heard this confession from the older  poet, who had slid out of the charge of treason for incendiary World War II broadcasts into a mental hospital, which, unpleasant though it was, eventually yielded to an old age in calm Italian exile: "The worst mistake I made," Pound said, "was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism."

Why "suburban"? Pound's  admission fingers the culture that sustained prejudice. If rural America was hostile to outsiders, it rarely had to be inconvenienced by them. And the big city allowed groups to self-segregate socially while keeping commerce uneasily, and unequally, integrated. Suburban anxiety was unique, built upon the fear of loss, hopefully a remote nightmare. To keep the fear at bay, the illusion of suburban purity, of households headed by June and Ward Cleaver, had to be maintained. The fiction is still powerful, Trump hopes. Suburbia is the fulcrum.

"The commuter towns and leafy developments circling Philadelphia and other U.S. cities — areas with increasing racial diversity and a growing number of college-educated voters — have been a clear source of trouble for the president and his party," says a July 25 Associated Press article, headlined "Trump plays on fears in campaigns for suburbs."

In his Paris Review interview, Pound told Donald Hall that tales of his post-frontier origin in Hailey, Idaho, could offer little explanation of his iconoclastic ways. "I grew up  near Philadelphia. The suburbs of Philadelphia." The adjective "suburban" was thus wisely chosen as an indicator of his notorious prejudice. Later in the interview, Pound said truly: "We suffer from the use of language to conceal thought and to withhold all vital and direct answers." That's one of many possible answers that could be put forward to explain the attractions of suburbanism.

And the suburban mindset might well be universal. In his expansive 1940 poem "New Year Letter," W.H. Auden describes humanity as "The children of a modest star, / Frail, backward, clinging to the granite / Skirts of a sensible old planet, / Our placid and suburban nurse."

The image is one that hints at desperation, an unavoidable dependence that we can't free ourselves from. Events may properly suggest that our earthly home is neither "sensible" nor "placid," but we are inclined to say well, let's go with that. Our suburban dreams demand it. That's what Trump and his supporters are counting on.

Sunday, July 26, 2020

Eighth Blackbird takes flight with a linked program by three composers

Susannah Bielak's cover design hints at the gems within.
An adventurous new-music ensemble teases out the meaning of its name with "Singing in the Dead of Night" ( Cedille Records), a collection of music by three composers whose works under this title are linked to lyrics of the Beatles song "Blackbird."

Eighth Blackbird is named after a stanza in Wallace Stevens' poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," which runs like this: "I know noble accents / And lucid, inescapable rhythms; / But I know, too, / That the blackbird is involved / In what I know."

I can't guess why the "eighth blackbird" of Stevens' poem attracted the ensemble's attention as a best summation of its artistic mission.  But surely the compositions of David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe in "Singing in the Dead of Night" are loaded with noble accents and lucid, inescapable rhythms, though the latter in particular might well have escaped less expert musicians.

The three works are presented in the order Eighth Blackbird has settled upon in concert since 2008. The three movements of David Lang's "these broken wings" (no caps in any of the titles, the way Eighth Blackbird used to style its name) are in the first, third, and fifth position. The division makes sense both in complementing the Gordon and Wolfe pieces and in representing the unique blend of percussive sounds (including deliberately dropped items) and wind and string sonorities that Lang calls for.

Recorded last fall at the University of Chicago, a Midwestern "hot spot" for new music since the palmy days of Ralph Shapey, "Singing in the Dead of Night" is a worthy contribution to the celebration of Cedille Records' 30th anniversary this year.

Julia Wolfe's long piece, which lends its title to the recording, most deeply represents this Paul McCartney line in "Blackbird" — "into the light of the dark black night."  Its intensity and thick figuration seem  to struggle to evince light in the imagination's darkest night. The music is frankly irritating at times in order to plunge, with no textual underlining needed, into the mystery of that line and the obstacles to any flight out of darkness. It's a work that actually seems to want to be longer than it is (nearly 19 minutes); no easy escape is suggested. Ending with the cryptic rubbing of sandpaper, "singing in the dead of night" adds to my impression of the strong personality this composer shows in the compositions of hers known to me.

Michael Gordon's "the light of the dark" follows up on the rhythmic jumpiness of the opening track, the first movement of the Lang piece, after moaning cello glissandos set out troubling portents relieved by skittering violin, flute and clarinet skittering and steadying accordion chords. The relentless pulse of "the light of the dark" is subject to stunning pauses. A buoyant, rapid lyricism emerges from the clarinet. The passacaglia form organizes the bafflement inherent in the topic and the changing instrumentation.

The second movement of Lang's piece, alluded to above, evokes feelings of stasis associated with the subject of this program. And his finale, which concludes the CD, bears the apt title "learn to fly'; the style is a kind of rambunctious minimalism.  It seems to point the way to a resumption of vitality and the shedding of any dark black night's most troubling implications — especially in the current time of political and pandemic anxiety.

Thursday, July 23, 2020

Fused names and simpatico artistry of French saxophonist and Italian pianist fuel Spirabassi

Giovanni MIrabassi (left) and Stephane Spira are a compatible duo.
"Improkofiev" is the major work on the new CD of that title representing a meeting of minds between Stephane Spira (whose website provides access to the release) and Giovanni Mirabassi.

The seasoned musicians, a soprano saxophonist and a pianist, respectively,  collaborate with seeming effortlessness in their punning salute to Sergei Prokofiev, specifically drawing upon the Russian composer's First Violin Concerto.

The three-movement suite references the concerto chiefly in its tunefulness and its hints of sentimentality, always a vein accessible to Prokofiev that he used to balance his nose-thumbing sauciness and modernist flair. The near-constant demands on the soloist are not replicated in the jazz suite. The signature spikiness and skill with disjunctive lines characteristic of Prokofiev make the suite's first movement the most satisfying as a tribute. So does the presence of an extra voice, the flugelhorn of Yoann Loustalot.

The remaining two movements of the suite proceed without Loustalot, which detracts from the suite's coherence. Why not keep the second horn player around through "New York Dream"and "No Strings Attached"?

The first four tracks have an individuality and pungency that the suite projects less consistently. The other classical tribute, a perky waltz version of Erik Satie's "Gymnopedie No. 1," is a charmer. The other borrowed piece, Carla Bley's "Lawns," sustains most successfully the Mirabassi-Spira partnership, which is unshakable, with complementary solos, and easily takes in a transition to a Steve Wood bass solo.

Donald Kontomanu's drums start off "After Rain," a piece whose title seems to apply well to the feeling of abandon and freedom that emergence from a drenching spell provides most of us with. It's a great exposition of the quartet's rapport, flowing ahead without looking back once.

The opening "Ocean Dance," which like "After Rain" is a Spira composition, never becomes oceanic in volume; this is not a forceful ensemble. But its variety of motion and glinting playfulness are aspects of the sea to which the clean lines and crystalline tone  of both players in the group's portmanteau name give body and invite the listener to jump in: the water's fine.

Monday, July 20, 2020

Australian pianist sets down a manifold expansion of solo jazz piano

Alister Spence has set down on two discs a different kind of solo improvisational maximum, worthy of comparing to, but not dependent on, such a milestone as the Keith Jarrett "Köln Concert."

Alister Spence in "Whirlpools" offers a wealth of puzzlement.
The veteran Australian pianist-composer has assembled 23 free improvisations, eccentric to most kinds of jazz pianism, where his roots are. Over the course of two brightly recorded discs, "Whirlpool" (Alister Spence Music) amounts to a highly charged example of what this essential instrument in just about all Western music can express on its own, with relatively few unconventional techniques now and then expanding the sonic palette.

Spence's keyboard lucubrations are not for everyone, it's safe to say. Like the music itself, the titles he's chosen vary from illuminating to baffling. They are all uncapitalized, starting with a parenthetical short word connected by implication with a longer word, which may or may not be read as standing by itself or essential to the full title.

The listener is charged with applying the title to what he hears or else concluding that the title's meaning must be private. In "(over)taken," for example, the track opening Disc 2, there are chase elements that are resolved along the way, with the pursuit eventually absorbed. I get the "overtaken" meaning, but "taken" alone seems murkier as a structure for which "over" is a kind of porch.

Inevitably, and putting the titles somewhat aside, connections to music the listener is familiar with will be made. Given Spence's apparent aesthetic freedom, the similarities may play no part in what the pianist is consciously attempting to do. There are repetitive structures that suggest minimalism, for example, except that harmonically the static tremolos that preoccupy both hands in "(under)standing" are more cluttered. That piece also raises another problem with the project: As I hear the tremolos fill the canvas less insistently, the shaking continues in the right hand, and some calming bass chords set up a single-line finish to the album's longest piece (8 minutes, 17 seconds). Is the coherence accidental or artistically driven?

So a couple of central questions emerge. They may have bothered Spence as well, but they certainly irritated me, stimulating my response (and not always favorably). The performer in free improvisation has to decide whether to reject elaboration or indulge it: When and how should he undertake shifts in texture, tempo, and mood?

And that raises a central question for the listener: Am I hearing musical statements that amount to more than a hill of magic beans? Or is the performer sifting through those hills of beans looking for something different and stimulating for himself? Sometimes a relaxed feeling strikes one as just what is needed, as when the mezzo-forte dissonance in a close-textured melodic line yields to a relaxed feeling in "(back)water." But in that case I was nagged by a sense that Spence was treading water waiting for a new inspiration. And how patient must I be with what could be mere
dithering? On the other hand, maybe cultivation of patience is essential to the point of "Whirlpool." Maybe I am mistaken to try wresting too much meaning from what Spence is up to. If he is occasionally at sea (even briefly, and some of the pieces are fragmentary), so be it.

Finally, just to offer some guideposts to adventure-seeking listeners, I heard aspects of Cecil Taylor's action-painting approach, without so much barbed dissonance, as well as hints of Bill Evans' gentler musings. There is clearly an attraction to pure rumination, but there is also a cryptic, allusive quality, with some of the wryness of Erik Satie. In a couple of pieces — "(well)spring" and "(sub)stance" — there seems to be the clear influence of Claude Debussy's preludes. The latter Spence piece in particular, with its sense of something magnificent and abandoned beneath the surface, brought a strong suggestion of "The Sunken Cathedral."

Like real whirlpools, these pieces under that title generate self-contained forces both dangerous and inviting. Spence is prepared to rest in being fascinated with what he knows and what he is given to explore. How much that focus sustains fascination for the listener is open to question.

Sunday, July 19, 2020

'Under My Thumb' sums up the current President's view of the USA

The President seems fond of using “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” at his rallies. With those mass gatherings...

Posted by Jay Harvey on Sunday, July 19, 2020

Ricardo Grilli lends his guitar-centered inspirations to changes of time and place

A Brazilian-born guitarist living in New York, Ricardo Grilli has a creative fixation on dates and
Brazilian-American guitarist Ricardo Grilli has a lot on his mind.
settings for his musical practice and development. Without filling in all the evident blanks by which he substantiates this focus, it may suffice to indicate that "1962," his new CD's title, is the birth year of his mother.

The obvious generative force of such an association accounts for much of the music he has set down here with the assistance of tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, pianist Kevin Hays, bassist Joe Martin, and drummer Eric Harland (whose first name unfortunately appears as "Erick" on the album cover).

In "1962" (Tone Rogue Records), Grilli shows the penchant of jazz guitarists to use the instrument to connect with both the vernacular street and the lofty empyrean. An edge-to-edge vista of darkest interstellar space dominates the jacket's design. After some preliminary solo noodling ("1954-1962"), the listener is spirited off to "Mars" as the band jells around the first of the remaining nine originals.

The earthy side is nailed down in "Signs (Blues for Peter Bernstein)," a salute to a fellow guitarist well-established in the current jazz universe. There is a firmly rooted Hays solo to help define the unusual blues theme.

"Coyote" begins to exemplify a recurrent Grilli practice: guitar and saxophone in smooth unison on the theme. It amounts to a signature sound for this band. The flowing samba brings to the fore Turner as a soloist. His presence on the disc lends Olympian calm to the ensemble. Grilli may wish to allude compositionally to disturbing changes in contemporary life, but his muse avoids shocks. Turner is the ideal partner in the way he uses his instrument: Most tenor saxophonists pay energetic tribute to Dionysus; Turner's guiding spirit is Apollonian — a touch aloof, more concerned with bringing light than heat to the bandstand.

Grilli likewise doesn't play with a lot of flash. Outsize display is not his thing, and he doesn't push his instrument often beyond plain timbres. The complications are never about note-spinning, but when they are a factor, it's all for the sake of the ensemble.

Harland kicks "The Sea and the Night" into high gear, even as the mood remains reflective. The rhythmic intricacy has a dash of flamboyance, but it's a well-tended flame.

Another Latin-flavored tune, "Lunatico," named after a Brooklyn bar,  features a perky bass solo. Martin is otherwise in evidence mainly as a serviceable partner to his colleagues.

As the disc stretches toward the program's conclusion, I found the music well-thought-out but maybe too thoughtful. Grilli is a bandleader-composer quite sensitive to his forces, but, even as "Voyager" ends the disc with hints of exploration outside the norm, communication with mission control seems all too devoted.

Thursday, July 16, 2020

He's the Top, all right, but only in the topsy-turvy world he made

In the upside down world Trump has done so much to create, there can be little doubt: He’s the Top!

Posted by Jay Harvey on Thursday, July 16, 2020

Veteran drum maestro highlights trio dexterity in 'Catch Me If You Can'

Jeff Hamilton takes care of business.
With his Hoosier roots impeccable (born in Richmond) and his durability a source of justifiable pride, Jeff Hamilton has held a place on the A-list of drummers for several decades. His new trio recording, "Catch Me If You Can" (Capri) adds to the distinction.

This is not an artist focused on breaking new ground, however.
If personality and the skillful means to express it count for much, Jeff Hamilton is an understandable role model for how to put one's stamp on an ensemble while projecting individuality as well.

You will find his mainstream concept of (what is usually called) the jazz piano trio worthy of the conventions it adheres to and  refreshes throughout these ten tunes.

He chooses sidemen with an expert knack for amplifying his vision; the pianist, Tamir Hendelman, has been with him for more than 20 years. The new bassist, Jon Hamar, fits right in. And the style allows the range of nuance and technical aplomb in the leader's drumming to be essential to the picture without dominating it.

The firmness and transparency of the Jeff Hamilton Trio's presentation is immediately effective on the opening track, "Make Me Rainbows." The song has lots of space between its phrases, ideal for showing off Hamilton's inviting brushwork and the variety of tone he gets from his cymbals.

George Cables' "Helen's Song" is a shrewd followup, again marked by exquisite cymbals. Hendelman's left hand and Hamar's bass set a pattern from which the tune  effortlessly leaps up.

There are  three tunes explicitly repurposed from big-band settings: Thad Jones' "Big Dipper," Artie Shaw's "Moonray," and Woody Herman's "Bijou." On the Herman-associated Ralph Burns tune, Hamilton's tom-tom solo is pungent and concise. "Moonray" is quite trio-oriented, despite its big-band origins, showing that Hamilton is not wedded to explicit tributes to a genre in which he's done excellent work.

Hamar's original tune "The Barn," though written for this group, sounds like a big-band piece ready for some current big band to take up to repay the tribute. The bassist's virtuosity gets a fine showcase in his own "Bucket o' Fat," which has an attractive calypso or "islands" feel and includes an idiomatic brushes solo.

The disc's title tune, a challenging contribution by Hendelman to the trio's repertoire, shows off the group's unity with a stop-start line that puts every man on his mettle. For the listener, it's just exhilarating.  I suggest catching the Jeff Hamilton Trio if you can.

Friday, July 10, 2020

A "break beat play" helps Fonseca Theatre Company break back into Pandemic World

FTC's "Hype Man": Verb and Pinnacle lay it on the line with beat support from Peep One.
The cover of the trim program of Fonseca Theatre Company's return to live productions carries an intriguing graphic.

 The illustration gets at a main source of tension in the play, "Hype Man" by Idris Goodwin, with performances through July 26. A hand stretches toward us and toward a handheld microphone: Is the hand grasping or releasing? Is this a gesture reaching for relevance and amplification or is it a mic drop? Desperation or triumph?

The hip-hop culture of assembling sound material — stealing, tweaking or borrowing it, with creativity and personal testiimony the catalyst — necessarily prioritizes a reputation for authenticity.  But where does identity come into conflict with authenticity? How well can you "represent" if the goal of acquiring and holding onto public attention, expanding a coterie into a mass following, remains uppermost?

Pinnacle (Grant Byrne) is a white rapper with ingrained loyalty to the genre in which he's inevitably an outsider. He's the artistic soul of a group also including a proud, troubled African-American known as Verb, the play's title character (Aaron "Gritty" Grinter). A hype man projects and points up the main rap, exciting the audience, so the partnership is essential. Providing the out-front duo with equally essential rhythmic and melodic foundations is a producer known as Peep One (Paige Neely). A genius of "beats," technically astute and also a hip-hop devotee, she's conflicted by her mixed heritage and sensitive to the genre's marginalization of women.

The performances sizzle with a blend of bravado and anxiety at an energy level that rarely dips, and then only when it needs to. The sound design is especially vivid, and the rapid-fire dialogue is amazingly well-articulated and passionately delivered. An upside-down American flag, with Jasper Johns-style smudging, makes for an effective backdrop, signaling the nation's current distress.

At one point, there's a tight bit of satire directed at symphony orchestras. It reinforces the show's emphasis on the collaborative nature of the arts; otherwise I didn't quite catch its dramatic relevance. Spearheaded by Verb, the ensemble passage questions the high pay of classical musicians under contract who may contribute a couple of cymbal crashes at the end of the piece. I've heard this sort of thing before: Compensation per note for the "bang gang" seems absurdly high compared to, say, violin section players.

I must speak up for my community here: In symphonic music, the function of hype man is liberally passed around. Often it may fall to percussionists. I'll never forget an Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra performance of George Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F. There's a climactic slow-down in the third movement, topped by a gong smash in splendid isolation. But this time, the extra player hired for the pops gig missed his cue. Conductor Erich Kunzel raised his arm, and...nothing. No hype man. It was as if the rapper had his enviable Gershwin ride, exquisitely detailed, with hood scoops and custom wheels, parked at the curb all ready to go — with its tires slashed.

There's history involved in every line of endeavor, and it never becomes irrelevant. Verb at one point lifts up the hype-man progenitor of Bobby Byrd, whose "Get on up!" kept introducing James Brown's lines "Stay on the scene like a sex machine." Verb's past troubles, from which he was released several times by Pinnacle, plus his sometimes needling curiosity about Peep One's background, all play a part in his anxiety. So history is inevitably pertinent, even in such a now-focused music as hip-hop. Is Pinnacle just an ambitious sort-of ally, or a bro all the way? That's the challenge posed by his reluctance to go political.

Pushed by a new police shooting to let his smoldering rage surface, Verb surges past the internal spats that keep roiling the collaborators — all of it under Daniel A. Martin's directorial control — to honor the latest victim publicly, imperiling Pinnacle's notion of what success in their field requires. This one is a storybook atrocity: A 17-year-old kid, speeding toward the hospital to visit his ailing grandmother, winds up pursued by a fleet of police cars, then shot 18 times. Kill and overkill, again.

This is the new Grimm's: the wolf waylaying Little Red Riding Hood, and wheedling from her how to find Granny, whom he intends to devour.  The wolf thus wants to control present and past. In the same way, oblivion is a requirement to maintain the dismissive predatory narrative that goes "Racism is dead." That's why the current protests thrust forward a hype-man call of "Say the name!" and the ongoing response elaborates upon "George Floyd!"  with a slew of other martyr names.

With swift finality, the actors move high and low around the stage, their gestures and spontaneous shouts shading over into break beats and rhymes. The basis for moving forward together becomes clear to three young people trying to blend skills and inspiration as the creative juices flow. There's a constant struggle to stay unified amid the temptations of splintering and looking for greener pastures,  resistance to rivals' piracy, and eventually breaking through instead of breaking up.

The dream is that ultimate mic drop, but by the end of the 75-minute conjuring of "Hype Man," the hand in the program brochure looks to be the claw of supremely focused effort, memorializing urban lives and events and taking momentary comfort in its ability to keep reaching.

[Photo: Ben Rose/The Identity Complex] 

Thursday, July 9, 2020

Prolix and prolific, pianist Eldar Djangirov continues to load his music with intensity and detail

Eldar Djangirov with the vehicle for his grand improvisatory fantasias.
Hailed as a jazz prodigy as soon as he resettled with his family in the United States shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, where he was born, Eldar Djangirov has released recordings in abundance.

All that I've heard speaks to his ample resources of technique and imagination.  And with "Rhapsodize" (Twelve Tone Resonance), his most recent release fronting a trio, there is further evidence of his creative amplitude, presented in 11 installments of mostly originals.  Raviv Markovitz, bass, and Jimmy MacBride, drums, are his game companions.

The first three cuts present too much of a muchness, for my taste: After an ebullient run through "A Night in Tunisia," the Dizzy Gillespie evergreen, the trio explores the sensory overload of today's airports (pre-pandemic, of course) in a piece called "Airport," with the piano sound extended and maximized technically. Then comes the heavy overlay of what I presume is the massive audience ruckus he means to evoke in "Anthemic."

Thus is "Rhapsodic" launched, and while only a tin-eared listener would dismiss the line-up as a thrice-told tale, it seems that better placement of the three tracks might have made for a more refreshing way into "Rhapsodize." It certainly comes as a relief (in Track 4) to bask in the plaintive introspection of "Willow, Weep for Me," the Ann Ronell classic beloved of jazz pianists ever since Art Tatum.

Then, just as we are ready to appreciate the individualism within the trio, the disc offers  that opportunity with "Burn," which Djangirov explicitly describes as a tribute to the hard-bop tradition. The driving unity of the piece at a comfortably fast tempo allows the listener to appreciate Macbride's deft support. "Burn" also features an excellent Markovitz solo.

"Black Hole Sun" gets the Djangirov treatment in a manner that helps uphold the "new standard" banner — indicating that recent rock hits (this from Soundgarden) can be successfully adapted for acoustic-trio purposes. Classical fans receptive to jazz treatments probably will take delight in the lickety-split excursion the trio takes through Bach's C-sharp major prelude from "The Well-Tempered Clavier."

Of the rest of the disc, the title piece displays the effervescence of which Djangirov and his colleagues are capable; the performance offers reassurance that this amazing pianist doesn't inevitably insist on overwhelming you — which he can do as well as anyone.

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

'Racing a Butterfly': Anne Mette Iversen memorializes via small-group jazz an encounter while running

Bassist-composer Anne Mette Iversen
A major force in acoustic small-ensemble writing, Anne Mette Iversen has a visionary grasp of program music in jazz. The Danish bassist, a luminary in the Brooklyn jazz scene at the turn of the century,  is now based in Berlin.  This CD expands on the legacy of her founding connection with Brooklyn Jazz Underground and is released on its label, BJURecords.

In "Racing a Butterfly," Iversen and four other players have lots to do in projecting her visions onto a picturesque screen. The genesis is the sight and the feeling of visually tracking a butterfly during a run one morning in France. There was an interplay between runner and insect that seemed playful and intentional to Iversen, so she decided to translate the experience into music.

In the title tune, appropriately, the theme seems to have lots of air beneath its wings. Peter Dahlgren's trombone solo lifts the well-formed theme to a higher plane. Often, though Iversen's music doesn't spotlight extensive solos, her band members have defining solo turns that make the compositions memorable. John Ellis' tenor-sax solo in "Triangular Waves"  is an example, and Otis Brown III's super-animated drumming behind Danny Grissett's piano solo caps the distinctiveness of that track.

The leader's bass solo gives characteristic flair to "Parallel Flying," just before the horns enter with a wistful melody. Normally, nothing raucous ruffles the Iversenian landscape, yet there is a wealth of nuanced expression in the compositions and the way they are elaborated, with unfailing unity in the ensemble portions.

The closest to disturbance is "Cluster," whose character is established by an insistent chordal pattern in the piano, after which Ellis' saxophone darts and swoops over a restless theme. Dahlgren's bluesy trombone outing yields in due course to a variegated drum solo punctuated by piano chords, recalling the track's assertive opening.

To reconfirm the theme of the album and put a seal on the band's internal rapport, "Butterflies Too" closes out the set restfully all around, but not before everyone gets a fleet workout in "Reworking of a Butterfly."

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