Harris Eisenstadt September Trio, The Destructive Element

For my money Harris Eisenstadt is a key composer, drummer and bandleader on the new jazz scene today. Happily there have been a good number of recordings to document his music, and today we have another fine one.

Harris joins together with two beautiful players in his September Trio for the disk The Destructive Element (Clean Feed 276) in a program of Eisenstadt compositions. They are place setters sometimes for some excellent improvisations--yet have a memorable quality either way for the best of the new. In Angelica Sanchez and Ellery Eskelin, piano and tenor, respectively, Harris has chosen well. Angelica may not be a household name as yet but she impresses strongly here as elsewhere as a pianist who can get inside a tonality and take it to farther reaches when it seems right, all with her own way of going about it. Of course Ellery Eskelin is a monster artist, someone who keeps turning in great performances and remains a fresh voice, an evergreen so to speak.

The program goes from strength to strength as composition and artist meld into what is a most creatively probing series of chapters in a seriously absorbing "book" of music. My system is crashing this morning continually so I must cut this a bit short and check my virus software!

The Destructive Element is to me one of the minor masterpiece of this year thus far, eminently worth your time.

Devin Gray, Dirigo Rataplan

In just a day it will be April 10th, time for the debut album by Devin Gray to be released. It is going under the title Dirigo Rataplan (Skirl), which roughly means as I understand it "lead beating of the drums," or more understandably "leading from the drum chair." Since that is what Devin does here, it is apposite, it works. Mr. Gray plays some hip, driving, leveraged drums on this album. He leads a very hip quartet and has provided them with some nice compositions to boot.

Gray is 28 (I can remember that!) and so relatively young, but he chose some more weathered, less cherubic colleagues for this foursome. They were excellent choices both on paper and in their sound utterences. It's the intelligent bass-wielding of Michael Formanek, Dave Ballou on trumpet, a wizard of sound and line, and the beautifully personal tenor heft of Ellery Eskelin.

They have a kind of free-strutting quality to what they do here. There's a linearity that is made more driving, complex and free by the all-over quality of Devin Gray's time keeping. It gives the players impetus to loosen up and give their best.

And that makes for a wonderful disk. As a Bullwinkle J. Moose Cheerio ad from my youth had it, "go, go, go. . . but watch where you are going!" And so this quartet goes freely but not so much willy nilly. They know where to go and they go there.

Get set for some ravishing improvisational adventures. You'll get plenty of them on Gray's impressive debut. (And I will NOT comment on the graphic design of the cover, since, as the song has it, "a duck may be somebody's mother.")

Gerry Hemingway Quintet, Riptide

Gerry Hemingway has been deftly mixing it up on drums with some of the most accomplished new jazz artists for years. He has a new album out with his quintet, Riptide (Clean Feed 227), and it shows how he is a jazz composer and bandleader of note as well. First, the quintet itself: along with Gerry on drums are a formidable two-reed tandem of Oscar Noriega and Ellery Eskelin, the electric guitar smarts of Terrence McManus, and the acoustic and electric bass of Kermit Driscoll.

It's a date filled with good improvisations, sometimes collective with horns and guitar taking the front line, sometimes individual. The compositions are excellent frameworks for the band, devoid of cliche. There is some space in the music for Kermit and Gerry's good feel playing to come through as well.

If you want some idea what the music sounds like. . . it has the long in-and-out group oriented development of DeJohnette's classic New Direction days and some of Tim Berne's ensembles at their best. The 13 minute "Gitar" and its segue into "At Anytime" is a good place to hear the fully stretched and limber group going at it for a long loose straight-time midtempo feel that turns to swingtime towards the end. This is just an example of the ensemble's strengths: they listen to one another and compliment what is going on while articulating the compositional elements along the way. There's a spacey balland and by the time you get to "Meddle Music" things are into a free rock groove that has some nicely out McManus guitar work. "Backabacka" combines free ska with minimalistic repetition in quite interesting ways.

Well that's enough of the highlights to give you an idea. Strong music in the in-and-out zone, fully contemporary, that's Riptide for you. There's enough electricity from McManus' guitar and Kermit's bass guitar in some segments to break up the acoustic qualities that predominate and set them off.

It is a fascinating and fun ride. Gerry Hemingway comes through as a bandleader and the band comes through as a band. What more? Hear this one, most definitely.

Harris Eisenstadt, September Trio

With Paul Motian passing away recently, he is on my mind. As I listen again to Harris Eisenstadt's latest, September Trio (Clean Feed 229), I am reminded of Paul's drumming and the sort of music the first Jarrett Quartet and Motian's own groups made. Not that Harris is copying. But his drumming, his composing, his group sound here is in a lineage that in some ways has evolved out of those milestones of our more or less recent past.

But September Trio stands on its own in an excellent way. The compositions are strong, Ellery Eskelin sounds great (with a hint of Dewey Redman here) and Angelica Sanchez comes through with a rubato creativity that does have some relation to early Jarrett, but expands outward with some beautiful voicings and note poems.

Three accomplished players, three strong concepts, carefully thought-out Eisenstadtian music. This has a cantabile quality and a thoroughgoingly modern lyricism. Beautiful music! Harris comes up with another winner on this one!