Bob Gluck's Exceptional Piano Trio Outing: "Returning"

Bob Gluck goes his own way. He is an excellent pianist, with harmonic and melodic ideas to spare. His recent Returning (FMR 292-0710) finds him in formidable company. Drummer Dean Sharp has the sensitivity and big ears to thrive in the intimate free-oriented trio setting. Michael Bisio has basso profundo status these days. He has become a major player (see my recent interview with him in All About Jazz), and for good reason. You have to have independent inventive prowess plus good team-interactivity to thrive in an open piano trio setting as a bassist now (and mostly always), and Michael surely has both.

Returning shows the integrity and artistic brilliance of those early Paul Bley trios, then affirms that this is the Bob Gluck Trio, with certain affinities, but with the compunction and talent to extend the forms and personalize them.

The level of playing has consistency. It is high throughout. The music can be forceful, or whisper to you. It can get a head of steam in the linear swing-zone, then turn around and head into space. The improvisations revel in thematic logic and yet remain open to spontaneity.

Gluck is a stylist of stature. The trio has six hands, and at least three feet (in the musical sense) and they are put magnificently to use here.

Highly recommended.

Elliott Caine Sextet Live On "Hippie Chicks" CD

Despite the psychedelic title (Hippie Chicks On Acid)(Wondercap 07006) and the tongue-in-cheek cover art, this CD documents a modern hard bop sextet date shading into energy territory (something like Lee Morgan in the Lighthouse period).

Trumpeter Elliott Caine has that extroverted, big brassy sound of the Navarro-Brown through Morgan-Shaw school. His sextet has notable other solo voices too--Carl Randall on tenor, Maheesh Balasooriya on piano, Nick Mancini, vibes; and a crack bass-drums team of Bill Markus and Kenny Elliott, respectively.

This puts you into gear with 65 minutes of live immediacy. The tunes are effective blowing vehicles written by Mr. Caine in a later Blue Note boldness of style.

Your enjoyment of Hippie Chicks will have a direct relation to where you stand vis-a-vis this style. It's music that brims over with life. While it probably won't win any awards this year, it will find a welcome place in your collection for its fire and honest free-swinging approach.

Nordic Connect Weigh In With The Tuneful "Spirals"

Nordic Connect? Yes. We have the band's Spirals, their second CD (Artist Share 0097), a jazz-rock present day program with some tuneful originals penned by the various band members. Ingrid Jensen appears to be the bandleader and she turns in some very nice trumpet, fluegel and songs; her sister Christine has definite prowess and imagination on alto and soprano; Maggie Olin gives a good showing on piano and Rhodes; then there's a capable rhythm section of Mattias Welin on contrabass and Jon Wikan, drums & percussion.

It's mildly electric music with a lyrical side, a little ECM-like, gossamer-winged free floating alternating with loose jazz-rock grooves. The trumpet and sax effusions are exemplary; Olin's keys charm. It's quite beautiful really.

There's more to be said. I am pressed for time today though, so I apologize to Nordic Connect and my readers for the brevity. This is a good one. A pleasure to hear. Please, I want some more.

Matt Bauder Fields Excellent Quintet for "Day in Pictures"

Reed-tenor jazzologist Matt Bauder has integrity. He writes well. He plays with the assurance of someone who has internalized the music, grasped its essentials and communed with his instruments to emerge with a kind of brilliance and right-sounding quality. And as a bandleader he can pick the right people too.

A Day In Pictures (Clean Feed 210) gives you plenty of evidence to consider, and plenty of inspired moments to appreciate. He's gathered together a quintet that gells nicely. Matt's tenor sets the in-and-out clock to midnight, and the time flies by. He's lucid, he's given it all some thought and brims with good ideas, well executed. He does not ape somebody else. He apes himself. His clarinet playing goes someplace too.

Nate Wooley brings the seasoned polish and flexibly masterful playing style that gets him more and more attention on the scene in recent years. He forms a perfect foil in the front line. Bauder and Wooley meld as one in their approach, but remain themselves in the process.

The new voice of Angelica Sanchez on piano gets good exposure on Pictures. She, the complete pianist: beautifully concise in her phrasing on the inside moments; logically lucid in the free-er spots. She has real talent and does much to make this session hum.

The rhythm team of Jason Ajemian on bass and Tomas Fujiwara at the drums brings the ideal balance of swinging drive and daring looseness that beautifully suits them for Bauder's in-and-out.

Finally, the pieces. They are brilliant as well. There's a nod to the history of the music, some classic Blue-Note-like referencing that shimmers when placed in a more modern context. And there's much else about these pieces. They show the hand of a talented jazz composer.

So there you have it. Five excellent players playing first-rate modern jazz. One excellent jazz scrivener showing seven of his best numbers. The combination has real heft, power, excitement.

Very much recommended.

Joel Douek's Soundtrack for "The Wildest Dream"

When you think about it, a good movie soundtrack gives the opportunity for any old average everyday person to be exposed to forms of music that might not otherwise reach his or her ears. While a person is busy watching a movie they get the music without having the pressure of a "pure listening" situation.

Historically the orchestral soundtrack was a given, though the early days of the medium sometimes found an orchestra recorded in less-than-ideal conditions, playing less-than-ideal music. Who hasn't watched an otherwise wonderful old movie and winced at the content-bowdlerized romantic cliches, the orchestra sounding like it has been crammed into an old shoebox? Soundtrack examples by Korngold, Copland, and their ilk were exceptions to the rule of painful mediocrity that more or less prevailed, both in content and sound quality.

Things of course have changed. For those soundtracks that still rely upon a full orchestra, the sound quality is at worst acceptable to the sensitive ear. And the movietone cliches have mostly gone the way of obsolescence, like the "sweet" bands of the '20s-'40s and the easy listening sounds of a Mantovani.

Of course that is not to say that every soundtrack is a gem or that cliches never occur. It's just a different breed of them one encounters.

With all that as an introduction on this Easter Monday morning, I bring to your consideration Joel Douek's soundtrack to an Everest exploration adventure recounting of George Mallory's final, tragic expedition to climb Mt. Everest in 1924, as portrayed in the movie The Wildest Dream (Altitude AF01CD). Now I have not seen the movie, so I cannot comment on the soundtrack's effectiveness vis-a-vis the unfolding of the story. I approach it here as pure music.

The sound quality is excellent. The Prague Symphony Orchestra turns in a convincing performance, as does vocalist Lisbeth Scott for her cameo. So now what of the music? If we take Joel Douek's engaging score as paradigmatic of what is happening now (perhaps a dubious proposition if this were some scholarly diatribe, but it isn't) we see some interesting tendencies. Yes Romanticism is still with us with these sorts of things, but it has been evolved and altered over time so that it no longer sounds like B-grade Tchaikovsky-Rachmaninov pastiche. It's a late sort of Romanticism for one thing. And newly present is the cavernous soundscaping, along with a modern ambiancy, a more highly evolved orchestrational usage that comes out of the past 100 years of orchestral composition--from the Impressionists through to the high-classic Avant Garde and the Minimalists that followed. Corigliani's music for The Red Violin comes to mind, and not necessarily to the detriment of Douek and his score.

No, there is nothing inferior going on with this soundtrack. The awesome bleakness of Everest comes alive here in singularly ravishing beauty, especially in those passages where choir joins orchestra. At the very end there is a kind of singer-songwriter thing, a song sung by Lisbeth Scott that no doubt might get some sort of crossover radio play. It's a very attractive song. But it's the orchestral-choral music that most captivates to my ears. I am reminded of Sibelius, spaced-out in a post-everything-that-came-after context.

So if beauty grabs you and you don't care what modern things are missing from a piece of music (you can get that elsewhere in any event) I think you'll find this thrilling, ravishing, irresistible. It most certainly stands on its own. It stands tall. We've come a long way from the cheesy Tchaikovsky-orchestra-in-a-shoebox days.

Plunge Brings Chamber Jazz to a Good Place in "Tin Fish Tango"

New Orleans is a trombone town. Aside from Kid Ory and the tailgate players. Today for example you have Delfeayo Marsalis, Jeff Albert and . . . Mark McGrain. It is with the latter of the three that we concern ourselves today. He is an integral member of the trio Plunge, the others being James Singleton on contrabass and and Tim Green on alto. They are joined by guests reedman Tom Fitzpatrick and Kirk Joseph on Sousaphone for several numbers of the new CD Tin Fish Tango (Immersion 10-05).

Mr. McGrain's trombone and his compositions are front and center throughout. He is a fine player and writes fully realized material that suits the player resources well. There are times when I am reminded of the Giuffre Trio in the classic days when Bob Brookmeyer and Jim Hall teamed with Giuffre for a music that favored paired-down jazz roots, arranged effectively and cleverly for the resources at hand and swung pretty hard, yet with a free element as well. Plunge does that, only in a way that somehow suggests NOLA roots and occasionally such rootsy offshots as the Dirty Dozen Brass Band (maybe that's because of the lively entrance of the Sousaphone on those numbers that have it).

Everyone plays well. James Singleton in particular benefits from the small-group density. But all are on their game.

It's a very attractive outing. It gets down to the bone, in this case a fish bone? Very very nice. Bravo and I look forward to an encore!

Pianist Ricardo Gallo's Tierra de Nadie: The Great Fine Line

Some free improv dates are neither here nor there. Ricardo Gallo's The Great Fine Line (Clean Feed 209) manages to avoid that. It's here. By that I mean it has an immediacy. The composed sections structure the freedom in ways that bop heads frame the improvisations. Only this is not bop derived in any palpable way.

But like for example one of those Sonny Simmons ESP dates from the '60s, there is the framework of the melodic head routines and there are rhythmic-harmonic and melodic turning-pivoting points that the soloists work within. Those structural elements provide a scaffolding to the proceedings. And they do so in varying ways.

On the level of the players themselves there is good musical event making. Gallo is a pianist who works out of structures himself, regardless of whether they are those set up for the band's improvisations or just self-imposed. So in that way his playing is a microcosm of the larger group context.

Trombonist Ray Anderson plays himself, which makes him a good addition to just about any date I can think of that he has been on. He can get flat-out boisterous but there is a more introspective side to his playing as well.

And he makes a good contrast with fellow front-liner Dan Blake, who is mostly on soprano but straps on his tenor for two numbers. Blake is a little chameleon-like, tailoring his improvisations to the moment. His soprano work comes off more convincingly than his tenor on this date, but of course that may just be the luck of the draw and what take ends up being used? That's only speculation. At any rate the two engage in effective and consistently interesting two-part improvised counterpoint at times, and that gives you some of the high points of the set.

Mark Helias is his dependable inspired self here, whether arco or pizz. Satoshi Takeishi and/or he and Pheeroan Aklaff provide a dynamically loose and entirely appropriate percussive foundation for what is going on.

Gallo the bandleader is quite present here in the choices made on who does what and when; Gallo the pianist I would like to hear more of in a smaller context to get a better handle on where he would go, but what he is doing on this one shows that he is a player of promise--like Andrew Hill in his prime, Gallo is dedicated to doing what fits his compositional stance. And finally Gallo the composer of heads, tails and centers certainly comes through here in good ways. He DOES do a short duet with Aklaff on "Improbability," and it comes off as slightly tentative but not uninteresting.

Those who don't have the money for everything may find this one less indispensable than some other new releases. But protracted listens may well make you a believer. It is a fine band and Gallo puts a singular stamp onto the proceedings in ways that make me want to hear more of him. I am glad I have heard this one and will most definitely be listening more. So there you are.