Danny Fox Trio, Wide Eyed

Last March 27, 2012 I covered the Danny Fox Trio and their album The One Constant. They are back with a new one, Wide Eyed (Hot Cup 133) and it continues where the last left off. Once again Danny is at the piano, Chris Van Voorst Van Beest is on acoustic bass, and Max Goldman is at the drums.

Like The One Constant, Wide Eyed has a contemporary new jazz feel to it with rock influences and intricate compositional structures, a sort of Bad Plus in categorical terms via how much group structure is called for, but nonetheless with their own original compositional and improvising stance.

Danny composed the 11 pieces you hear; the entire trio had a hand in how they arranged the performances.

As with the last album there is space for open freedom and structure surrounding it. The music hearkens less to Paul Bley or Cecil Taylor new thing approaches and more, if you will, to "progressive" (even I dare say Brubeckian) and "new-music influenced" tendencies.

The compositions are well done and the trio makes a lively sound out of it all.

I recommend you hear these three. This album delivers its own sort of punch. Well done.

Sylvain Rifflet and Jon Irabagon, Perpetual Motion (A Celebration of Moondog)

When an album wakes you up, and you play it maybe three times before you start getting the hang of where it is coming from, that certainly bodes well for the ahead qualities of the music. I experienced that with the album by Sylvain Rifflet and Jon Irabagon, namely Perpetual Motion (A Celebration of Moondog) (Jazz Village 570047D).

Moondog, as many will know, was a fixture of non-conformity, a hobo who crafted his own music well outside the mainstream of anything going on in the United States at the time, save perhaps Harry Partch, but even then more a parallel than a matching force. Moondog was a fixture of New York outsider art, performing on the street and creating a number of albums in his day that mostly puzzled the world but influenced those open to its iconoclasm. His was a folk avant music, if you will...more out of time than ahead of it.

So French reedist Sylvain Rifflet amassed his tenor, clarinet and electronics gear and melded with American new light Jon Irabagon (perhaps best known as a member of MOPDTK) on alto and tenor, adding to it all with an unusual group and recreating Moondog anew with some striking rearrangements of his music. Sylvain conceived carefully of a reworking of the music, utilizng a children's choir, Irabagon's glowing sax work, adding Bejamin Flament on percussion, Phil Gordiani on guitars, Joce Mienniel on flutes and MS 20, and Eve Risser on piano. It all was recorded and video'd live at the 30th Banlieues Bleues Festival.

The audio has a sort of assertive iconoclasm in keeping with Moondog's outsider stance. It goes in many different directions in a new jazz-meets-new-new diversity. Rifflet and Irabagon do some great improvising together and separately, and the rest comes together with a sort of anything goes and the devil take the hindmost boldness.

This is music better heard than minutely described. What's nice is it goes the distance in its own way so that even if you know Moondog inside-out this adds to his legacy and gives us contemporary jazz that fits no mold at the same time.

Get with this one. No, I am not going to mention Blue. This recording gives you reasons to move on, very good ones.

Louis Sclavis Quartet, Silk and Salt Melodies

I have not been hipped to French clarinetist-composer Louis Sclavis all that much until now. I did like his work with the Eldorado Trio (see review from back on November 10, 2010). His new album Silk and Salt Melodies (ECM 2402) has been on my player and I appreciate what I hear.

The music has a general ECM vibe, meaning in part it is melodious and spacious. But there is also an active element, a noteful, partially folk-inspired aspect that sets his music in a larger context than just a lyric melodiousness would imply. (And of course ECM music is more than that anyway most of the time.)

As a player he is well worth hearing. How many clarinetists are active today? Not enough but he qualifies as one to hear. And the band on this date has a kind of singularity. The sound colors of the band make for something that stands out. Gilles Coronado on guitar is widely eclectic. Benjamin Moussay on piano and keyboard has prowess and a very pianistic modernity. Keyvan Chemirani brings out a key ensemble trait with his finely executed traditional Persian hand drumming on the zarb (tumbek).

Together they match up with some serious compositional contributions from Sclavis. The results stand out as chamber jazz of a very worthwhile sort. It's all different enough that having this to hear repeatedly is very recommended.

Jean-Marc Foussat & Ramón López, Ça barbare, là!

The jagged linearity of synthesizer and electronics soundscaped and interspersed with brief loops combines with freely imaginative drumming on the hard-hitting album Ça barbare, là! (Fou CD 04), by Jean-Marc Foussat & Ramón López. We have covered some of Foussat's inventive work in past months (type his name in the search box for those). This one has an especially spontaneous dynamic with the open-field experimental improvisations of Foussat manning the electronic array of sounds and Ramón López coming through with very appropriate free drumming via a full arsenal of percussive sound colors that he uses appropriately and creatively.

The music has a DIY immediacy that does not hearken to jazz roots or what typically comes out of the new music area. It is neither as much as it is itself.

And what that is perhaps is better heard than described. Or perhaps I should say that it is difficult to describe. There are music-noise events spontaneously generated with varying degrees of energy and intensity. The electronics give us widely differing sound poetry with continuous and discontinuous sequences that López counters with an assured sense of gesture. It is music that is experimental, yes, but not at all tentative. It is not at all formal sounding as much as it is human.

And in the end it is the panorama of colors that beguiles and attracts. It has a more expressively direct than overtly abstract demeanor, meaning this feels like soloing, improvising in a personally idiosynchratic way. And for that is more akin to "jazz" than new music audio lab kinds of electronics (and I am thinking more of the electronics of the '60s composers when I say what it is not).

After a few listens I found the entire album convincing. It is "out there" in the orbital sense and it is very much a mutually exploration of two like-minded pioneers out to discover themselves.

So if you like uncharted experimental improv territory, this covers it well! Even with originality, as far as that word applies here (and it does). So listen.

Yom, Le Silence de l'Exode

If this blog goes further afield than some to cover the world in its widest sense, it is in part because I believe firmly in the interconnectedness of "serious" music today. There is much in the way of cross-fertilization of styles to be heard on the contemporary music scene.

A very good example of this can be found with the clarinetist-composer Yom and his Klezmer-meets-the-world approach. Le Silence de l'Exode (Buda) is an integrated compositional suite that addresses the Jewish Exodus and the diaspora as a musical state of mind. Yom is joined by a contrabassist, a cellist, a Persian traditional percussionist and at times an oud player to create a hauntingly eclectic fusion of Jewish and mid-eastern elements.

The virtuoso clarinet of Yom takes center stage for the most part. He is a formidable player with a fabulous tone that is both Klezmer-like and also suggests the ornate, noteful cross-roots of the style through what sounds like Greek, Turkish, Baltic and mid-eastern ornate clarinet sub-styles. His very engaging, spectacular playing has a beautiful complement in the bass, cello and percussion with their composed-improvised parts. And the cellist especially, but the others too get the chance to show virtuosity as the suite unfolds.

Perhaps nowhere is it more clear how contemporary fusion jazz and mid-eastern music are natural allies in sound. I would not hesitate to call this one a kind of tour de force for the Klezmer clarinetist and his band. It journeys virtually to a time when the music of the Israelites may indeed have sounded something like this, but in any event Yom shows how his own Klezmer affiliations benefit from a widening of the perspective. It is a musical presentation that has great power by virtue of its strongly integrated inspiration and haunting melodic qualities.

Everyone fits together to fashion a music that convinces with its compositional-virtuoso way of looking at the musical roots of the region and the diaspora as a whole.

Bravo! A spectacular record. Peace.

Phil Haynes, No Fast Food, In Concert, with David Liebman and Drew Gress

With a trio of sax, bass and drums in modern advanced jazz these days we expect to have a good amount of interplay between the three artists. Drummer Phil Haynes and his No Fast Food trio has that and maybe even more than is the norm. Haynes has supremely capable improvisers in David Liebman on tenor, soprano and flute and Drew Gress on bass. No one needs to tell you that if you follow the music, yet Phil's compositions and the sequenced dynamic that is on display between Haynes and cohorts make this band explosively triple.

Often enough these days if a band is drummer-led you may not be able to tell. He or she may not always be out front. Not so with No Fast Food. Phil Haynes gives us lots of excellent drumming, though he is in no way out to steal the show. It is a naturally organic triple-sound.

You can hear this plainly and to good advantage on the 2-CD In Concert (CornerStoreJazz) out fairly recently.

The music is culled from two small jazz venue appearances. Both find the band in top form. Liebman seems to be grateful for the hard swinging, open approach of the trio, for he sounds his very best. He is a living master, of course, and does not hang back. Drew Gress has paid dues and played with all kinds of folks, gaining in poise and stature cumulatively as time goes by, so that now he is doing some of his best work. He may not come off the tip of your tongue if someone asks you to name three of the top modern jazz bass players today, but there is no doubt he is one of the very finest for sheer musical imagination and deeply rich tone. And Phil Haynes! He swings hard like Elvin, has an acute sense of set sound and inventive figuration like Tony, and he plays with the others, not especially against them (and not to take away from the latter strategy when it works). He shines forth as an especially well-integrated musical drum master in this trio. A player who has soaked up the tradition and gives out with himself.

That's what you hear in these two full disks, the sound of a very together trio that can play a blues with a soulful contemporary stance, take it out, and at the same time work within varying compositional structures for a program that never tires.

It is perhaps a sleeper? There is so much coming out these days that you might miss it if you are not paying attention. But you should not because it is some great new jazz!

Get it if you can. For Liebman. For Gress. And for Phil Haynes.

Frank Lowe Quartet, Outloud, 1974

After his first album Black Beings came out (see February 2010 review at http://gapplegateguitar.blogspot.com/search?q=black+beings for my take on that), Frank Lowe went back into the studios, this time with Joseph Bowie on trombone, William Parker on bass, and Steve Reid at the drums. It was May 1, 1974 and "loft jazz" was at a peak in New York. The tracks recorded then were intended as Lowe's second but instead his label at the time had him return to the studios to record what became Fresh, a different sort of album altogether.

Happily for us the real second album, Outloud (Triple Point 209), is now available in a state-of-the-art 2-LP set that includes the welcome bonus of the group at Rivbea for the second LP.

After the two-tenor (Lowe and Joseph Jarman) onslaught of Black Beings this was a slightly less dense outing. Outloud gives us Lowe as the sole tenor. He is inspired to create a mix of testifying outbursts and some passages of more openly melodic improvisations that show a slight influence of Archie Shepp but as an inspiration, not as a copy. It is all Lowe. William Parker is truly on fire on bass. His playing is exemplary in every sense. Steve Reid stokes the fire with driving drums. Joseph Bowie is at his raucous and inventive best. The Frank Lowe compositions are excellent vehicles and set the table for a great improvisatory meal of sound, so to speak.

This is a heretofore unknown new thing loft era avant jazz classic. The Rivbea session, captured sometime soon after with Rashied Ali as engineer-recordist adds to our full appreciation of that band. The music is just slightly more dense. Trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah joins the group for the final side and gives us all that makes him the great improviser he is.

The accompanying booklet is excellent. This is what a (new) reissue should be: beautiful pressings, great graphics and superior music in all senses. Very much recommended.