Andrew Drury, Content Provider

You may know Andrew Drury as a fired-up, most original drummer who has sparked many a session in avant contemporary jazz around New York and over the world. What you may not know is the Andrew Drury who is a potent composer and bandleader. That you can hear wonderfully well on his brand new release Content Provider (Soup and Sound 50001). He sometimes reminds you how much he digs Eddie Blackwell, but there is so much more, too.

He's picked some very game players in Briggan Krauss on alto, Ingrid Laubrock on tenor and Brandon Seabrook on electric guitar. (Brandon is perhaps more well-known as a blazing banjoist, but as guitarist here he sounds quite good, quite at home.)

The compositions are challenging and filled with rhythmic complexities and noteful stamina. The music suits Andrew's very involved and hip drumming and he takes advantage with some great work. There are free elements and some heavy rock moments thanks to Brandon's heat. Briggen and Ingrid make a great two-horn team. They work some very involved two-horn dialogs that get over-the-top in very cool ways. And of course they solo individually with their own very personal approach.

Brandon's guitar work is pretty exceptional--he goes out and gets some real steam with avant metal moments that certainly get my attention. And the two horns and guitar voicings of some of the themes are really strong and right at you!

So the electric part may get some purists snarled up. It's time we recognize that it's not only legitimate to do this (and how many years ago did Sharrock first startle us?), but it can also, as here, be a vital expression of our contemporary world.

It still ain't what you do. It's still the way hatcha do it . . . as Jimmy Lunceford's band put it so many years ago. And the way Andrew Drury and band do it is beautifully. Beautifully alive.

This is a drummer's album in some ways. It has the rhythmic vitality that drummer-leaders give you when they feel it. And it has a very vital energy and electricity that speaks to our world today. So, yeah! Dig on this one because it has the courage to make a beautifully huge noise!

Paradoxical Frog, Union

Paradoxical Frog returns with a second album, Union (Clean Feed 262), that continues in a way where the first left off (see earlier review on these pages via the search box at the top of the page). It's a trio of Kris Davis, piano, Ingrid Laubrock, tenor and soprano sax, and Tyshawn Sorey, drums and also melodica and trombone for this outing. It's a very serious venture of high modernist composition/freedom, all three contributing their pieces and all three performing with collective and individual strength and originality.

Kris Davis plays carefully thought-out, harmonically expansive lines that Ingrid Laubrock counters with her own personal take on modernity. Tyshawn Sorey is the percussive dynamo that he is, for this trio a meticulous sound sculptor as well as a driving force.

The music has the New Music spaciousness and control with some of the energy and propulsiveness of New Thing. It comes off very well because these are a well-matched, gifted threesome.

Music of the era. . . music without a commercial bone in its virtual body. . . music that stakes critical ground in the new age we live in. . . music you should hear.

Paradoxical Frog? It Doesn't Croak. It Makes Intriguing Music.

Paradoxical Frog is a trio with Kris Davis on piano, Ingrid Laubrock, tenor, and Tyshawn Sorey on drums. Their self-titled new CD (Clean Feed 183) gives you 75 minutes of their music, and there's nothing to be disdained about any of it. It's serious avant improv. Serious in that it doesn't try to entertain. The three players are after some good expression of their musical minds, and those minds are fertile.

There's chemistry in the combination of these three. Tyshawn Sorey is a drummer of sensitive accompaniment and fire-breathing power when needed. Ingrid Laubrock is a potent weaver of significant form. Kris Davis has a great linear sequencer wired into the musical neural network. The playing generally is out of the Cecil Taylor camp but not in the sense of taking on any of Cecil's lines or phrasing per se.

There is much to get oneself immersed in. And in fact, immerse one must, for this is music that doesn't allow itself to be relegated to the background. It soars. It settles into an evocative quiescence. It dishes out jagged abstractions that anyone who digs the free vocabulary will understand and love, I would assume.

Unassumingly, quietly, Paradoxical Frog makes some stunningly good music that has the essentialism of "new music" but the passion (when needed) of the improv approach. It's revelatory of the three players and their vision, individually and collectively.