Matt Ulery's Loom / Large, Festival

Matt Ulery is one of those Chicago jazz presences that I welcome with virtually everything I hear of his, going back to my Cadence days. I may miss a few, but he never fails to interest me on those things I do receive.

His latest is a big band Loom/Large and the album is called Festival (Woolgathering Records 0003). Or rather, I should say that the first half of the program is a 14 piece outfit complete with strings and the second half is by his quintet.

An increasingly sure sense of "orchestration" is to be heard on the large band numbers, from the ravishing arrangement of Rowles' "The Peacock" through to the Ulery original.

Matt plays bass and tuba here in his developed, special way. The large band is especially well apportioned and there is an impressive handling of sections and good solo spots. Zach Brock is especially lucid on his violin solos.

The quintet numbers (Ulery plus Russ Johnson on trumpet, Geof Bradfield on bass clarinet and clarinet, Rob Clearfield on piano and pump organ and Jon Deitemyer on drums) show his increasing use of the small group as a sort of mini-orchestra with significant arranged passages and an overall lyrical compositional bent which reminds us where Ulery has been but also how his fluid line sense continues to grow.

Ulery gives us one of his very best here. More lyric than avant, you find yourself drawn to the endless charm of his inventive imagination.

Excellent album.

Harris Eisenstadt, Canada Day IV

Harris Eisenstadt turned 40 last month. To celebrate it he held forth for a week at the iconic NY new jazz venue The Stone. I had planned to cover a mention of it in tandem with this new album, for it sounded quite ambitious and varied. Unfortunately the past several months have embroiled me in logistical and economic traumas that needed much of my attention (and still do) so that I somehow missed the timing of this posting by a mile. Unlike some music review institutions that operate with an abundance of reviewers, the Gapplegate "empire" consists of only me, so hardly an empire, and it involves at times a considerable amount of work just to closely listen to and schedule all the reviews. So I am most sorry to have missed the boat on the Harris birthday festivities.

But I come to you now as an enthused reviewer of this music, this new album, Canada Day IV (Songlines 16142). The Canada Day series gives us Harris Eistenstadt's primary ensemble and forms an important platform for his chamber jazz compositions. Volume IV shows an ever-growing, organic mastery of compositional structuring within an improvisational setting.

The quintet is a very accomplished combination of exceptional musicians that do full justice to the music. Most readers of this blog will recognize the names and I hope know something of the musical abilities of the group. There is Nate Wooley on trumpet, Matt Bauder on tenor, Chris Dingman on vibes, Pascal Niggencamper on bass, and of course Harris on drums.

They are put through their paces in a series of seven substantial Eisenstadt compositions. The musicians get good space for improvisations and make the most of it. The compositions have a way of permeating the improvisational segments either overtly or in terms of a specific rhythmic-harmonic-melodic mood.

What strikes me about the ensemble and Harris's helmsmanship is the continual presentation of unusually quirky, unexpected or otherwise asymmetric forms that lend themselves especially well to creative presence in the band and the personal stylistic idiosyncracies of the players. The compositions are complex enough that you as a listener grow into them over time. They are not fully grasped, at least for me, at first hearing but instead unfold their riches as you listen again. And the soloing too has a depth that becomes more and more apparent the more one hears the album.

To me that is the best sort of music, the sort of thing one continually gains from as one lives with the tracks for a while.

Harris Eisenstadt may not at this point get a huge amount of accolades out there. But to my mind he is an outstanding voice in the new jazz, a formidable talent that needs to be heard. And this is one of his very best albums. Hear it by all means. And listen more than once! Highly recommended.

Wayne Horvitz, Some Places are Forever Afternoon

Do not take Wayne Horvitz for granted. He is not fixed into the scene like a peg in a hole. His latest album, Some Places are Forever Afternoon (Songlines 1612-2), subtitled "11 Places for Richard Hugo," is a collection of interrelated compositions inspired by the places the poet dwelled in and the verses that came out of his place in that space.

The pieces are scored for a seven-instrument ensemble: Wayne on piano, Hammond B-3 and electronics, Ron Miles on cornet, Sara Schoenbeck, bassoon, Peggy Lee on cello, Tim Young, electric guitar, Keith Lowe, bass, and Eric Eagle on drums.

It is music redolent of the American West that Hugo immersed himself in. It is music that conveys a musical evocation, each piece taking inspiration from a line or two of Hugo's verse.

Beyond that it is contemporary composition of a modern jazz, post-jazz sort with space for improvisations but an emphasis on the seven-part writing and how it can evoke something of Hugo. But then it is more besides. You find yourself in boogie blues rock territory for a few minutes, for example. You find yourself in various musical settings, some more compositionally formal than others, but all brilliantly conceived and realized.

Each instrumental artist injects something of self into the parts, whether improvisatorily or in the interpretive reading, the realization of pulse and texture. Like Duke's music, this suite thrives in the way the parts work for the ensemble artists. Ron Miles takes some beautiful solos, too!

It is music that has that special something that captures moments in the contemporary air, things that very much sound like they grab at the possibilities of the contemporary as it lays out potentially, but then ultimately come at you in a distinctively Horvitzian manner.

It is not quite "Americana," in that it is very personal and less "universal," but it surely captures some local elements and transforms them. You find for example, that you have entered a sort of country and gospel realm, but not so much literally as transformatively. And so it goes throughout.

The music has such image-ination that it speaks far more elegantly than I can with words this morning. Suffice to say that the music gives you, the listener, a wealth of connotations and a hearty population of meaningful ghosts of thought-images, all to do with I guess the feeling of "being there" that Richard Hugo so vividly conveyed in verse.

It is a milestone compositional offering by Wayne Horvitz. It gives us a depth of field that reminds us that Horvitz has a multi-dimensional musical imagination. It is music to hear right now. A fantastic achievement, really. Viva, Wayne!

Colours Jazz Orchestra Plays the Music of Ayn Inserto, Home Away From Home

The recording at hand is about a convergence, a happy coincidence of a big band residing in Senigallia, Italy and a talented jazz composer. Colours Jazz Orchestra Plays the Music of Ayn Inserto, Home Away From Home (Neuklang 4097) vividly documents the ultimate fruits of that collaboration.

Massimo Morganti's Colours Jazz Orchestra is a wonderfully precise and swinging big band with good soloists and an ensemble sound that rivals the best out there today. Ayn Inserto is a US-based artist with a real sense of the possibilities of large big band jazz, a successor in progressivity to George Russell and Gil Evans, truly.

Of the seven works on the disk, five are composed by Ayn, all are her arrangements. Joe Henderson's classic "Recorda Me" and Daniel Rosenthal's "Subo" are the arranged numbers, the rest give us the Inserto compositional way, diverse, well voiced, adventurous.

The 18-member Colours Jazz Orchestra makes for a mighty confluence of sound throughout. And they are tight, very much so!

There is an orchestrational brilliance to this music and a sense of part writing that shows a total immersion in the big band world, both cognizant of the roots and extending them outwards and upwards with originality.

Rather than give a blow-by-blow account of the music on this posting, I should probably just recommend it strongly and let you hear it for yourself. It is extraordinarily well written contemporary jazz that is more progressive than flat-out avant. Such distinctions do not mean a good deal, anyway. She is a voice out there, a real voice! Listen!

Douglas Detrick's Anywhen Ensemble, The Bright and Rushing World

Something quite beautiful this morning. It is a ten-part jazz composition called The Bright and Rushing World (Navona 5955), written by trumpeter-composer Douglas Detrick and featuring his Anywhen Ensemble, a quintet that includes trumpet (Detrick), soprano and alto sax (Hashem Assadullahi), cello (Shirley Hunt), bassoon (Steve Vacchi) and drums (Ryan Biesack).

It has some room for improvisation but the main thrust is the rather wonderfully voiced ensemble writing. The improvisations extend the mood and tonal thrust of the composition as a whole quite nicely. But it is especially in the body of the written syntax that we find a kind of musically subtle nirvana.

Detrick's music is lyrical with the tang of modernism to situate the feelings and bring us to the middle of that rush of a world. Douglas remarks in the liners that once he finished composing the work it gained a life of its own. That is certainly true of any creative act, and yet in the musical personality of the quintet's performance we find that Detrick himself still lives, of course. Not in any mundane sense. The performances are themselves a big factor in the success of the work. The ensemble has a definite personality that reflects no doubt Detrick's vision of the music.

So you put the two together and you have a disk that sings with the best of so-called "Third Stream" qualities--the modern classical and the jazz sensibility joined together for a work that has genuine thrust. It makes me want to hear Detrick write for a larger ensemble, though this quintet work stands on its own without the help of further works to validate the musical sensitivity and talent of Douglas Detrick. That's already here. Captured on disk for us.

I find this album intriguing, so much so that I do not care where it fits or what "school" it belongs to. It is an excellent work that sounds better every time I hear it.

The rise of the AACM taught us that composition and improvisation can be whatever it pleases, depending on the creativity and will of the music makers. It may partake of classical elements whenever it wishes. What counts is the result. Detrick triumphs in that way here. Give it a close listen!