Jon Irabagon, Behind the Sky

Jon Irabagon has been quite prolific of late. I covered the new MOPDtK the other day on these pages, there is a solo album that I'll be covering soon and a Barry Altschul Trio recording as well. But today a quintet gathering--for Behind the Sky (Irabbagast 004). It is about loss and the mourning process, as well as a celebration of the life of some loved ones and mentors he has lost recently.

Now none of the music sounds like a funeral march, mind you, because Jon channels his feelings in affirming ways. What it all is about is a series of 11 originals that work themselves out with a changes-oriented approach that I suppose one could call "mainstream," yet it all has a living quality that doesn't put it in the "safe" music realm. It all breathes.

Joining Jon is his regular trio of Luis Perdomo on piano, Yasushi Nakamura on bass and Rudy Royston on drums (!), and they sound absolutely great here. Then trumpet and flugel icon Tom Harrell joins in on three numbers and sounds as masterful as ever.

For all the hubbub of Blue, which MOPDtK released a while ago and apparently still is raising hackles out there, in Jon's playing on the album I cannot help but detect just a pinch of mid-period Trane and Cannonball. Not so much as you would say he is channeling them, because it is all Jon, but in the phrasings and masterboplicitous flow of his exceptional noteful barrages you can hear a little of them, but made original as one would expect from Jon at all times. So Blue in the end was a stepping stone to something new as much as it was a statement in itself. Artists work that way, yes. Growth is a growth "through," not just a willy-nilly sprouting upwards like the wild weeds of seasons come and gone.

All this is secondary to the music at hand, which is something to hear and appreciate, and, of course is another stepping-stone to future Irabagonian developments. If he looks back as he looks ahead, it is fitting here especially as a memorialisation of those he has lost, of our continual loss of the old present made way for, the inexorable movement we sometimes wish could stop for a while, but both organically, culturally and historically it cannot.

You need not know any of this to dig the music, which has an edgy fire to it, a cohesiveness of all, and three excellent soloists--Luis P. is supercharged here, too.

The rhythm section hits it hard and burningly, make no mistake. Rudy is a firebrand on the date and Yasushi is right there, also.

It may be yet another way station on the continuing Irabagon journey, but it also is vibrantly alive music, excellent for both the fire and reflectiveness of it altogether. Jon is challenging himself and his contemporaries to keep on. They do. And the music that results embodies the past and moves it to the ever-present now in very enjoyable and considerably brilliant ways.

Highly recommended.

Joe McPhee, Jamie Saft, Joe Morris, Charles Downs, Ticonderoga

If you've been reading this blog regularly you will notice that Joe McPhee has been very active of late. And so today we have his vital presence again, on a quartet date, with Joe, Jamie Saft (piano), Joe Morris (in his double bass persona) and Charles Downs (drums). The album is another goodie, called Ticonderoga (Clean Feed 345).

The four let sail with four collective, freely improvised pieces in the best tradition of post-new thing expressive heft. It's great to hear Joe carry forth with his tenor and soprano on this album. Clearly he is inspired and comes through with his personal way, fluid like crazy and able to create stunning hairpin turns of expressive color, vibrato and non-vibrato, a master of his instruments who both sounds and phrases with a linear conversational logic and fluency that puts him at the top of reedists in the "free jazz" zone.

Jamie Saft is a treat in this context because you don't hear him that often on disk in this total blow-out vein. He makes full use of the inside-the-piano possibilities as well as conventional note-ing and he creates a beautiful congress with Joe and Joe's way to get beyond. Jamie is monsterful and masterful here, beyond Cecil Taylor while in some ways channeling his legacy, but adding to it with a less cyclical, more linear horizontality.

I've said this before about Joe Morris on bass but I will say it again because it still has relevance for sure: that he is the kind of bassist who can, in the language of pitching in baseball, "expand the strike zone," that in other words he creates a busy and cogent foundation of expanded tonality that allows the soloists to go wherever they will in terms of key center and beyond and make it all seem inevitable and right. And he does it all with a rhythmic all-over quality that lets the band go in time wherever they will, too, freely.

Charles Downs has that special all-over quality on the drums as well. He establishes a multi-present open rhythmic space and ever varies it while using the kit sensitively for all the sound fields he uncovers at any point in timelessness. Whew.

And in this quartet setting all four get a oneness of result that takes years to do right like this. I never tire of exceptional freedom sets of this sort, because there is a continuity of variability and there is nothing to tire of--for there is never just one thing happening. Like the best free players, they all are bent on creating a confluence born of an open totality, an infinite variability within the free jazz parameters they come out of, which takes all of the past and makes it present in a future now, if you can dig what I am trying to say.

In short, a free gathering of total togetherness, a whole of great artistry born of linear fluidity and exceptional avant virtuosity. Is that enough? You bet it is! It is an album of vital presence and if you dig the outer realms this will make you smile and play it twice, more than twice!

Rodrigo Amado, This is Our Language

When the Portuguese avant jazz titan tenorist Rodrigo Amado fields a quartet of edgy all-stars, what do you get? You get This is Our Language (Not Two MW 922-2). And that translates to some great music. It's Rodrigo with the extraordinarily capable vets Joe McPhee on pocket trumpet and alto sax, Kent Kessler on double bass and Chris Corsano on drums.

This is a moderated free-for-all, a series of solos, duets, trios and full-band performances, with an emphasis on the latter. All four most certainly know what they are about. And they generate some exceptional kinetics. Rodrigo is inspired to create blazing mottos and sonic-expressive outburst that show him fully together, a mature artists in full bloom. Joe McPhee with both trumpet and alto brings his "A" game of ideas and lets loose with a space clearing vibrancy perfectly attuned to Amado's outbursts. Kent Kessler is a dynamo of bass energy and a very cohesive voice in the ensemble. And Chris Corsano has that raw-but-schooled explosiveness and timbral breath that spurs all forward.

It's all you could hope for in a spontaneous meeting of these four. The chemistry is all very much there. So much so that this is some of the best work of all four...and as a quartet, look out! This is one heavy quartet and Rodrigo should be proud to have brought this together so excitingly.

I recommend this album to anybody and everybody. Newcomers to Amado, newcomers to free avant, or those who know these four very well. The pump is primed and the musical riches flow abundantly and creatively. Oh, yes, it does!

Mostly Other People Do the Killing, Mauch Chunk

Mostly Other People Do the Killing is the potent mix of the now quartet format: Jon Irabagon on sax, Ron Stabinsky, piano, Moppa Elliot on bass and Kevin Shea on drums, doing music that evokes the heritage of jazz from a contemporary viewpoint, often with outright humor or tongue-in-cheek subtlety.

For their latest outing they do not add guests as they sometimes do, but stick with a new quartet format for a program of hard bop, classic Blue-Note oriented music. Mauch Chunk (Hot Cup 153) refers to a small town in Pennsylvania once a part of the thriving local coal industry, now fallen on hard times and renamed Jim Thorpe in honor of the sports hero and with the hopes of attracting tourism.

There are seven Moppa Elliot numbers to be heard here, all fitting in with the hard bop way but played with some outside avant tendencies that come in at times rather brilliantly in ways that may make you smile and even laugh. In my case it is the laughter of appreciation of their adept and seemless multi-language jazz attack. Irabagon's alto and Ron Stabinsky's piano often as not are the instigators of the bad-boy transgressions that no doubt would result in detention for all four if this was music high school.

Yet the music is dead serious at the same time, like Don Pullen could be when he gravitated out of changes-oriented soloing to expressively free outness.

There is enough brilliance from Irabagon and Stabinsky here to keep you listening intently, yet the compositions have the stylistic authenticity and contributory advancement that makes the band convincing on more than one level.

No, this isn't going to raise a furor like "Blue" did. It is no rote restating of the literal past but a serious interaction with it, a forwarding of it, a renewal of older forms for today and a confrontation of today with yesterday.

For that it is a must-hear. This is seriously ahead jazz with the ability to laugh. It's another feather in the caps of the players and the pen of Moppa Elliot. So I suggest you dig into it.

Ochion Jewell Quartet, Volk

Ochion Jewell takes a personal encounter with police brutality in New York City and makes some excellent music that exorcises it, or at least goes a ways in doing that. In a case of apparently mistaken identity, in 2011 Ochion was accosted in a train station by plainsclothesmen, strangled into unconsciousness, then held on phony charges that included planting evidence on him. The case was dismissed, ultimately, but the effects on Ochion's psyche were lasting. From all this comes his excellent second album, Volk (Self Released), based on various world folk musics. By affirming the humanity of music Jewell reaffirms the birthright of peaceful existence, or at least that's my take.

Ochion holds forth on tenor sax in original and very soulful ways. He brings to the session his quartet of long-standing status: Amino Belyamani, a pianist from Morocco, Sam Minale, Persian-American bassist, and Qasim Naqvi, drummer of Parkistani-American heritage. They are joined by guest Lionel Loueke (born in Benin) on guitar.

This is music that jumps out at you as outstanding from the first. Ochion is simultaneously gruff and lyrical, soulful and cerebral, and the folk music resituated gives the band an avant but rootsy and tonal matrix that all the band members take advantage of to give us some really fine modern jazz. It's freewheeling but not always in the realm of super-edgy, which of course is fine, though Ochion lets loose at times in ways that are nothing short of great. The noteful charms of Ochion, Amino and Sam mix with freetime and rhythmically stop-and-go routines initiated mostly by Benyamini. Altogether in this way everything comes across as fascinatingly dramatic and very musical.

Ochion has all the makings of a tenor master and his band is something to hear. Anybody who wants to get with some new sounds must hear this, no kidding! Music hath charms that may not change injustices, in itself, but it sure goes a long ways to counter it all with a life-affirming presence. That's very true here.

Rob Mazurek, Exploding Star Orchestra, Galactic Parables, Volume 1

Rob Mazurek, cornet master, composer, bandleader, has gone about his way in the past decade making some of the most interesting, provocative and forward-moving avant jazz recordings of all, with or without his Exploding Star Orchestra. Now we have a 2-CD set with that orchestra in some of his most ambitious and successful music yet, the Galactic Parables, Volume 1 (Cuneiform).

It comprises two overlapping versions of the multiform work, for recitation, large band and electronics. The first disk was recorded live in Sardegna, Italy; the second in Chicago. The band differs somewhat in personnel on the two sets, but we hear from some of the best either way. Rob appears throughout on cornet and electronics as does Jeff Parker on guitar, Damon Locks does text recitations and electronics, Matthew Bauder is on tenor and clarinet, Angelica Sanchez is on piano, John Herndon, drums, and Matthew Lux on bass. The Italian set includes Mauricio Takara on percussion and electronics, Guilherme Granado on sampler and synth, and Chad Taylor on drums. The Chicago set includes Nicole Mitchell on flutes and voice. I list the personnel in full because the music has much to do with them, their open improvisatory acumen and their well-healed performance of the compositional elements. And they are some heavies!

It is on both disks an apocalyptic, cosmic, beautifully out confluence of recitation and large band sound, electronics and instrumental textures. The texts are poetic and at times altered electronically. This is free big band as lively and innovative in its own way as Sun Ra's classic assemblages, both out and nicely structured, compositional and alternately super-free.

And these are some very together players, too. They do not flag but turn in great work.

It is a Mazurek triumph! So, what, would you expect me to tell you to buy it? Yes! Rob, the artists and the label deserve your support! And the music is excellent. Buy it. Go see them, too.

William Schimmel, Theater of the Accordion

Accordionist William Schimmel is a master of his instrument and a master of the quirky adoption of all kinds of musical source material to his own specific ends. We hear this readily and rather delightfully on his Theater of the Accordion (Roven Records 51115).

What strikes one first off is the sheer breadth of his reach. W.C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues" (with Wynton Marsalis nicely guesting on trumpet), reworkings of music from Mahler's Ninth and Strauss's "Der Rosenkavalier," Schoenberg, Bluegrass, and more besides.

It all becomes pointedly accordionesque in Schimmel's hands. He is a consummate master of the instrument, somewhat offhandedly spontaneous and carefully re-presentative in one moment to the next.

"Wozzeck, the Winner" takes the classic loser of Berg and Herzog fame and makes of him the opposite, in a rather hilarious sort of radio play.

And then the "Carnival of Venice," that mouldy old potboiler, becomes something other in his hands.

It's all quite impressively accordionistic and yes, quirkily so. And it is high artistry audio-fied, for sure. Anyone with a sense of adventure and fun who wants to hear some contentful accordionizing will be very pleased with this. I certainly was.