Peter Evans Quintet, "Ghosts": Further Adventures in Chop-Bop Land

Peter Evans is headed somewhere. Have trumpet, will travel to a new netherland. It's been unfolding bit by bit for those who are following. His work in Mostly Others Do the Killing (more on that in a few days), his last Cleanfeed album as a leader (all this see below for reviews), and now this new one, Ghosts (More Is More III).

It's a quintet with Evans, Carlos Homs, piano, Tom Blancarte, bass, Jim Black, drums (one of my new favorites BTW), and perhaps most tellingly, Sam Pluta doing live processing.

It's a hot group that swings and pummels forward with Evans playing a LOT of trumpet. All that would be interesting enough. But they continue their bop chop-shop stylings. Take "All the Things You Are," or the changes and such, and imagine it as a plate glass window. Then smash the window and reassemble the pieces a little differently than how they "should" be. With the help of the live processing this is taken even further than Peter has taken it previously. The music breaks off chunks and places them smack in the middle of the linear bop road, making for little and sometime big detours out of the linear usuality of a typical point-A-to-point-B bop soloing routine.

It's breathtakingly interesting. It's out-coming, all the way from a trad premise to a space tumble out of bop-orbit into electronic free-fall and on from there.

It is one of the more interesting ways to skin a cat that I've heard in years. And it would have been enough for Peter Evans just to do the out virtuoso trumpeting he started us with a few years ago. This is not your Grandpop's bop either (see yesterday's review). But it digs up Grandpop (or his music) and sends him into space. And out there in space, his standard starts to mutate into something it wasn't. Until it isn't.

Well now, this is very cool and needs to be HEARD. Don't like people messing with the old ways? You'll hate it. Take offense at the use of electronic manipulation? You'll hate it. If you do hate it, that should tell you something. That means something. To get a hate reaction means that somebody is onto something. New. Peter is.