Pandelis Karayorgis Quintet, Circuitous

Boston-based Pandelis Karayorgis is a post-Monk avant pianist with poise, great ideas, real torque and feeling conjoined with a lively musical mind. And he writes compositions that reflect his angular way and stay with you long after you've heard them. For the recording Pandelis Karayorgis Quintet Circuitous (Driff 1304) he gathers together a significant group of Chicago jazzmen in a studio date recorded there. These are musicians often associated together (see previous reviews on this site) and their conjunction with Pandelis is most fortuitous, fortunate, fabulous, productive.

The musicians involved are Dave Rempis, tenor, alto and baritone, Keefe Jackson, tenor sax, bass and contrabass clarinet, Nate McBride, contrabass and Frank Rosaly, drums, cutting edge musicians all.

The set involves all Karayorgis compositions. They set the tone for the improvisations and inspire all to some of their best work--the powerful Rempis, puckish, ascerbic Jackson, angular Karayorgis, deep exploratory McBride and the wise ranging swing and free intelligence of Rosaly. This is symbiosis at its best: the Chicago artist clearly get a jolt from their association with Pandelis and vice versa.

A fine date, great example of Karayorgis today and a testament to the creative thrust of four exceptional Chicago improvisers. Grab this one.

Carline Ray, Vocal Sides

There are some vocalists that have that special something, so that the moment you hear her/him you feel you are in the presence. That surely hit me from the moment I put on the CD by the octogenarian wonder, Ms. Carline Ray--and that CD is called Vocal Sides (Carlcat). Whooo, she goes way back. She was married to bandleader Luis Russell (and look him up if you don't know that band--it was smoking) she graduated from Julliard AND the Manhattan School of Music, she was guitarist and vocalist for the legendary International Sweethearts of Rhythm, then went on to be a featured vocalist with Erskine Hawkins Big Band, and then, get this, the bass player in Sy Oliver's band!

And she as of this recording is still going strong, eighty-something, making this vocal album with her daughter Catherine Russell, a beautiful singer herself and the subject of praise on these blog pages--you check, I'm writing this at 3AM! The songs were recorded between 2008-2011 and they bear witness to a masterful vocalist whose voice has deepened and become ever more burnished, somehow stronger than ever.

She goes through a very interesting set of songs here, from bop to movements from Mary Lou William's Mass, which Carline sang years ago on the original recording, Thad Jones's "A Child is Born" and some rousing gospel duets with her daughter. As a special bonus we have the 1961 demo "Lucille," written by Luis Russell for Louis Armstrong to sing to his wife. It never happened but the demo is something else. It's a rewardingly wide-ranging set sung with soul, grace and elegance.

Carline Ray still had it! She had boiled it down over the years and we get her very essence. Listen and you'll get there. Alas I just read that Carline Ray passed on last month. She was 89. May she rest in peace. All sympathies to her family. This recording captures her in her last years, in full flower. That's how we should remember her.

Harris Eisenstadt September Trio, The Destructive Element

For my money Harris Eisenstadt is a key composer, drummer and bandleader on the new jazz scene today. Happily there have been a good number of recordings to document his music, and today we have another fine one.

Harris joins together with two beautiful players in his September Trio for the disk The Destructive Element (Clean Feed 276) in a program of Eisenstadt compositions. They are place setters sometimes for some excellent improvisations--yet have a memorable quality either way for the best of the new. In Angelica Sanchez and Ellery Eskelin, piano and tenor, respectively, Harris has chosen well. Angelica may not be a household name as yet but she impresses strongly here as elsewhere as a pianist who can get inside a tonality and take it to farther reaches when it seems right, all with her own way of going about it. Of course Ellery Eskelin is a monster artist, someone who keeps turning in great performances and remains a fresh voice, an evergreen so to speak.

The program goes from strength to strength as composition and artist meld into what is a most creatively probing series of chapters in a seriously absorbing "book" of music. My system is crashing this morning continually so I must cut this a bit short and check my virus software!

The Destructive Element is to me one of the minor masterpiece of this year thus far, eminently worth your time.

Book of Three, Continuum (2012), Taylor Ho Bynum, John Hebert, Gerald Cleaver

Anyone who regularly reads this blog and listens to what comes out knows that Taylor Ho Bynum is a heavy--a cornetist with a great imagination, good ideas and a personal sound. Similarly bassist John Hebert and drummer Gerald Cleaver are important presences on the new improvisation scene, top caliber players with original musical personalities. Put the three together as Book of Three, turn them loose and you've got something. That's what happens on their CD Continuum (2012) (Relative Pitch 1012).

Of course a trio configuration like this one gives all three artists a clarity of presence and exposes their playing in the most aurally transparent way. Bynum, Hebert and Cleaver rise to the occasion and create a very open, pulsating happy three-way coincidence.

They start out with a Bobby Bradford number, and one is immediately put in mind of the Bradford-Ornette nexus and the great music it has produced. But of course this is a trio with its own way so one then adjusts to the improvisational distinctiveness they bring to the music. The program goes on to feature compositions in a three-way collaboration, some solid Cleaver pieces and one each by Jim Hobbs and Salim Washington.

The play is the thing with these creative three, ultimately, and we are treated to some excellent interactions. All sound great, whether swinging along with a time element or diving into freetime excursions.

One comes away from a hearing of this disk with the desire to hear it again, and again. A sign that this is important music is that the luster never fades the more you listen. It only glows more brilliantly. This is one to hear, by all means.

Giuseppi Logan, ...and They Were Cool

When an artist is off the radar as long as Giuseppi Logan was, it is understandable if his comeback is subject to a certain amount of fits and starts. That has been the case to my ears but in his new one ...and They Were Cool (Improvising Beings 16) he is firmly in his zone. Giuseppi fronts a quartet for this one in a program of freely spinning improvisations. There's Giuseppi on alto and piano, Jessica Lurie on flute and alto, Larry Roland on bass and Ed Pettersen on electric guitar.

Now certainly Maestro Logan has never been known as a high-velocity technician and he is not that here. But he is most certainly back to full form as a free thinking, original sounding avant reedest. And his bandmates complement him contrastingly and appropriately, Jessica as an excellent front-line reedest who stylistic remains very much herself yet meshes nicely with Logan, Ed Pettersen as a very stimulating electric presence that still maintains a group balance while he brings his own line and texture weaving to the table, and Larry Roland in a nearly classically free role of foundation builder and expansion creator.

This is a new, reconstructed Giuseppi that nevertheless reminds us why he was interesting in the first place. He is brashly out in a starkly affective way here and his bandmates do much to further his vision. New-thing-ologists, take note.

Mike Wofford, It's Personal

Mike Wofford first came to my attention as a key member of Shelly Manne's later configurations toward the later '70s-early '80s. He also played a key role as accompanist to Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald. He has always struck me as pianist thoroughly embodying the bop and after ethos but very much in his own intelligent and soulful way.

That he sounds better than ever these days is clear from his latest, a solo outing called It's Personal (Capri 74121-2). And surely this is a very personal summing up of where Wofford has been and where he is, through an impassioned set of rather unexpected standards and memorable originals. I like how he starts with a striking voicing of Jackie McLean's classic "Little Melonae," which swings yet brings out at the same time the advanced sound of that composition. After so many years, the work still sounds startlingly fresh and Mike gets his best into it.

From there we get a lively program of Ellington-Strayhorn, Dizzy, Carisi's perennial "Springsville," prime Gigi Gryce, even a Talking Heads song, in a complete package that gives you a satisfying in-the-moment portrait of Wofford's fertile melodic-harmonic way in its full-strength glory.

Wofford's cumulative from the inside-out self-presentation moves, charms and strongly delivers the pianistic goods. It is certainly personal but its appeal seems to me nearly universal, insofar as any jazz can be that. Listen and you will hear what I mean, I hope.

Nobu Stowe & Alan Munshower with Badal Roy, An Die Musik, 2006

Another something different today, from the batch of CDs Nobu Stowe kindly sent. It's him with drummer Alan Munshower and Badal Roy, the tabla virtuoso, in a program of total improvisations from 2006 called An Die Musik (Soul Note).

This is almost free rock, you could say, free acoustic music for piano, drums and tabla in a straight-eight vein. Not that it is brimming over with rock riffs, backbeats or other tell-tale insignias of the rock world. It isn't. In fact it states a series of free spontaneities centering around Nobu's piano, occupying its own post-Jarretian landscape where the extemporized harmonic underpinnings are often insistently stated and improvised upon in conjunction with the fine drumming and, when Badal is present, the tabla setting up open yet structured grooves that play counterpoint to the pianistic presence.

The music breathes well. Nobu has consistency of inspiration yet can be unpredictable in where he will go. Rhythmic drive serves as foundation, as the constant, and the drums-tabla interlocking against the piano stay at an inventively high level throughout.

It's a different sort of date, by no means perfect (which is quite understandable given the no-safety-net total improv situation), but enormously stimulating once you get on its level. I know of nothing else quite like it. The three are integral to the result and there are virtually always interesting, multiple levels of interaction to focus in and out of, the rhythmic, the pianistic left-hand grooves, ostinatos and overall harmonic shifts coming about in tandem with the rhythm, Nobu's melodic-improvisatory right hand ...

It's a fascinating disk, with many rewards to discover if you approach it with an open mind. Listen to it a few times and you will see, I think, what I mean.