Jon Irabagon's "Outright!"

Jon Irabagon is one of those adventurous souls that comes along every so often. He interjects a kind of "anything goes" philosophy into all he plays, and he covers just about everything you can think of. On Foxy (see earlier posting) he showed how he could play one bebop number for 79 minutes in a trio context and generate the kind of excitement that is reserved for the rarest moments.

It's time to set the clock back to 2007, and his quintet Outright! (Innova 699). This is an excellent disk. It gives you the ensemble context of his music in ways that intrigue the ears.

For most of the album, Irabagon's alto is joined by Russ Johnson's trumpet, Kris Davis on keys, Eivind Opsvik on bass, and Jeff Davis at the drums. Jessie Lewis joins on guitar for one cut, the Outright! Choir steps into the fray on yet another, and a big-band version of the group prevails for ten minutes on yet another.

This is ensemble music that unleashes Mr. Irabagon's very expansive stylistic grasp. The music ranges from highly original free-avant excursions to bop, swing and even New Orleans style. What impresses me about this one is the organic synthesis that happens between the pre-planned composed aspects and the improvisational. There is a seamless meld most of the time, a natural unfolding of the music toward a totality that does not show its seams.

This is provocative, very lively jazz-improvisation. It gives you another take on why Irabagon is becoming very important on the scene today.

Grunen Gets A Green Light For Its Advanced Piano Trio Improv

We are back again on a Monday morning after a recharging weekend. And we greet the week with a strong piano trio whose new album is titled appropriately Grunen (Clean Feed 202). The music is like a luxuriant springing up of plant life. And like a naturally flourishing patch of green the music does not follow a regimented order of how to develop and grow in tandem, but rather fills the spaces and leaves others in ways that are anarchically beautiful.

For the record (and otherwise) Grunen features pianist Adam Kaufmann, bassist Robert Landfermann and Christian Lillinger on the drums. This is most definitely NOT a Bill Evans type trio. It begins and ends on the edges of musical abstraction. Each member is integral to the whole. Adam Kaufmann plays with a great variety of attacks (including the conventional, inside-the-piano and prepared). He creates brilliantly brittle new music-oriented clusters, melodic fragments and sharply edged chords while Landfermann and Lillinger work to create a sponteneously out counterpoint of sounds and pitch-noise eruptions.

This is by now an approach that has a fairly long lineage from early Bley and Cecil through to a good number of others.

And it's not that what they are doing is brand spanking new on the improv scene. What counts is that they do it so well. It's obvious on listening that all three musicians have gained a real control and facility for the outside improvisational possibilities of their instruments and they combine together in ways that fascinate and provoke your attention.

The out piano trio has a winning new three-way promulgation on Grunen. It's really four-way, though, because you the listener are invited, even required to participate by unraveling the inherent logic of their free dialogs. There's much here to piece together in the aural imagination. Very much recommended.

Nathaniel Stookey's Junkestra

Cage-Harrison's "Double Music" for percussion ensemble; the music of Harry Partch; Cage's Prepared Piano Sonatas and Interludes; Lou Harrison's home-made gamelan music; the sound-sculpture music of Lasry-Baschet. . . there are some precursors to Nathaniel Stookey's Junkestra (Innova 773). However that just gives you the idea that new percussion sounds are not as new as one might think. It does not take away from the sonorously exciting appeal of Stookey's music.

Junkestra (2007) is a three-movement suite of sorts. A "Dance Mix" concludes the CD. All told, you get 15 minutes of music. Fifteen minutes of music well worth hearing, though.

There are seven percussionists involved, plus some beautiful playing from David Weiss on the musical saw. The instruments involved give out a sound halfway between a gamelan orchestra and some of the impromptu sounds I would get in my youth when I dragged my mother's pots and pans out of the kitchen and went to work.

The sound is exotic, yet familiar in that way. And the music is very well crafted and very well performed. It's modern music that is actually fun! I love it. And it's an important addition to the percussion repertory. A great listen!

Brad Goode, Trumpet "Tight Like This" CD

Brad Goode has been around. Ernie Krivda, Von Freeman, Jack DeJohnette and his own bands for some time, not to mention many other associations. He is a trumpet player with roots. His first strong influence was Satchmo and he studied with Cat Anderson.

His new Tight Like This (Delmark 594) has much going for it. There are strong roots here, but they've been taken somewhere new. There are some older numbers, Cugat's "Nightingale," an Irving Berlin tune, a classically hip "Softly As In A Morning Sunrise." And there are also a goodly number of Goode originals, which hang together nicely.

He and his fine quartet take that music somewhere different. It's rooted, as I said, but it's transformed to fit in their own contemporary world. Adrean Farrugia is new to me. He plays a very hip piano, very lucid and not coming out of an obvious influence. He swings and makes real musical sense with his improvisations. Kenny Sill is a hot bassist, capable of walking the dog to death or taking a nice solo. Anthony Lee kills me on drums. He can crack the sky or quietly sizzle along. And Brad's trumpet is not easily classifiable. So let's not try. He's a terror with or without the mute. He runs cool and hot, in the best sense. He's remarkably poised.

Well, I suppose you can tell I liked this album quite a bit. Check it out, check it out.

Steve Reich, Our Reigning Minimalist King, and His Latest

Steve Reich's compositions have shown development, a kind of period-to-period movement. There were the initial electronic and instrumental process studies (like for instance "Come Out"), the first extended ensemble works ("Four Organs"), an increasing African/Indonesian element ("Drumming"), the injection of a sophisticated melodic inventiveness ("Music for 18 Musicians"), the heightened focus on vocal elements ("Tehillim"), the development of an orchestral palette and introduction of slow movements ("The Desert Music"), the attention to speech elements and how they inflect into musical phrasing ("Different Trains") and on from there. With Reich's 2010 release Double Sextet / 2 X 5 (Nonesuch 524853-2) we find him doubling back, in a sense, to the chamber style of his third and fourth periods. Now that's fine with me. He crafted some minimalist masterpieces then, like the "Octet/Eight Lines," and any chance we get to hear him construct pieces out of his own paradigmatic melodic-rhythmic singularity is worthwhile indeed.

There are two pieces on this disk, as the title suggests. "Double Sextet" was written for the eighth blackbird ensemble. They record the two sextet parts via overdubbing. It's a wonderful piece in a classic Reichian vein. The fact that it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 is an indication of the recognition he now gets, and deservedly so.

"2 x 5" was written for a five-piece electric Bang On A Can ensemble, including two electric guitars, electric bass, piano, and drums. What they play is not rock in any sense, but Reichian line-raveling for what otherwise could be a rock band.

Both pieces mesmerize without a catatonia-inducing stasis or an overarching banality (two faults I occasionally detect in some minimalists). This is prime Reich, with all the subtlety and wonderful ways. He stands at the forefront of those who have forged this modern style and I believe he is the very best of them all. This album gives you some intriguing and very pleasurable evidence!

Rodrigo Amado's "Searching for Adam," Important New Improv Set

Rodrigo Amado needs to be heard by all those into the free thing. He's poised, filled with good improv ideas, and his new album, Searching for Adam (Not Two 837-2) shows it all off in a very good light. The band is an impressive lineup of New York's finest--Taylor Ho Bynam on cornet & flugelhorn, John Hebert, bass, and Gerald Cleaver on drums. The rhythm team has bold fire and dynamic energy to spare; Bynum is a stick of dynamite. He crackles, sizzles and sears his way through the set, truly on fire.

And Rodrigo? First off I love his old-school tenor sound. He channels Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster and he channels early Archie Shepp's channeling of same. But the notes and phrases are Rodrigo's and they work together potently. On baritone the sound of Serge Chaloff comes to mind--gutsy or expressively tender from moment to moment. RODRIGO's notes, again, not a string of bop cliches. The BIG sax sound is not something many jazz departments out there seem to be teaching, so Rodrigo's sound is all the more rare these days, but all the more welcome. Sound is not something you can easily teach I guess, nor is the logic of a way of phrasing, sound and note-wise. So Rodrigo is doubly valuable in that he excels at both aspects.

The band has a clear direction and they go there. It's simply one of the best free ensemble disks so far this year. OK, the year is rather new, I'll grant, but I suspect I'll be saying the same thing come December.

Those who don't know Rodrigo Amado's music are missing out. This one is a great place to begin. Track it down and get down with the tracks. You'll be happy you did, I think.

Neue Bilder: The Music of James Harley

James Harley composes in the now somewhat venerable tradition of classic modernism. That is not to say that he is some clone of Webern or Boulez. It's only to say that the periodicity and flow of his music has little of the droning insistency of minimalism or the lavishly applied impasto of the neo-romantics. It means he pays careful attention to sound color; he constructs complex, many-voiced aural tapestries that create a sonorous musical whole out of the comings and goings of the individual instrumental voices. The fact that he does this is not exceptional. It is the quality of the invention, however, along with the attention to the part writing that puts him in a good place as, to my mind, one of the most important Canadian composers active today.

The album Neue Bilder (Centrediscs 15010) gives you a good sampling of his music, well performed by the New Music Concerts aggregation under Robert Aitken. Two larger chamber ensemble works form the origin and terminus points for a concert that also includes three more intimate chamber works: for solo flute (very imaginatively performed by Aitkin); flute, cello and piano; and bass flute and percussion, respectively.

This is a winner. Recommended.