Romain Collin, The Calling

What starts in the jazz community doesn't always stay in the jazz community. To put it another way, when a upcoming jazz artist gets a reputation among fellow musicians and advance-garde enthusiasts, with some luck and the right releases, his or her music can come to be appreciated in the wider music-listening world. Such a fate may well be in store for pianist-composer Romain Collin. His album The Calling (Palmetto 2156) will be officially out this coming month (though it appears to be available now, at least as a download). I have an advance copy playing one more time as I write this, and I must say that his is the sort of music that could garner him a wide coterie of enthusiasts.

It's a piano trio throughout, with Collin joined by Luques Curtis and Kendrick Scott on double bass and drums, respectively. They are augmented by John Shannon on guitar and Adrian Daurov on cello for several tracks.

In part this music is about the acoustic jazz-rock piano trio sort of thing that Jarrett and then Mehldau, Benevento, and a number of others have made a part of their approach. Romain and his trio play with the sophisticated interactions one expects from a good piano trio: interplay and openness with arranged-composed signposts along the way. There is a very interesting, identifiably original compositional richness to Collin's music that sets him on in his own plane, so to say. Sometimes it is lushly rhapsodic, sometimes pointedly thrusting in a rhythmically kicking fashion. He has a lyrical strain to him that many will find to their liking. And from a technical standpoint his playing shows he has been thoroughly schooled pianistically and makes imaginative use of that background. He can also throw a solo at you that will give you pause and make you smile.

This is a kind of wistful jazz-rock romanticism with compositional heft. His music has all the earmarking of a wider audience. He's the sort of artist that can convert new age lovers into something more formidable without sounding like he is "playing down" to them.

That's a knack. It is a thoroughly enjoyable album with some heavyweight pianism. I wish him all success.

Danny Fox Trio, The One Constant

There are new and interesting things happening with the piano trio in jazz today. Acoustic rock elements and non-traditional forms appear increasingly in some of the new ensembles. The Danny Fox Trio is one of them, and their CD The One Constant (Songlines 1588-2) shows them forging ahead nicely with a very modern approach.

The trio showcases the individual and ensemble talents of Danny Fox, piano, Max Goldman, drums, and Chris Van Voorst van Beest on the upright bass. It's a program of interesting originals that unfold in interesting ways. There is a rock influence but they aren't exactly playing rock. They are playing new music with a straight eighth-note periodicity for the most part and there are ostinatos that contrast with counter themes in ways that make for interesting tensions. And there are rhythmic kicks built into the song-structures that both have a new music connotation and the anticipation-delay feel of big band music, at least as I hear it.

It's not a typically improvising sort of trio in the bop sense. Danny Fox improvises melodically-harmonically in ways that sound modern and relate to the themes introduced. But you won't hear a Bud Powell lick.

What the music gives you is in the NEW realm. It's involved and quite interesting. Hear them!

Kali Z. Fasteau, Kidd Jordan, Newman Taylor Baker, Live at the Kerava Jazz Festival: Finland

Several things you can depend upon with Kali Z. Fasteau's congregations. First, of course, that she plays an impressive battery of different instruments in freely evocative ways. She sets moods and follows up with the right sort of note conjuring. It is as a wind/reedist and pianist that she perhaps most impresses, but it is the overall sound envelope and flow that remains at the forefront of her music. Secondly she is a great facilitator. She gathers together some seminal players in interesting ensemble combinations, and she sets up an improvisational situation where they give us their very best.

This is true of her recorded output as a whole. It is very true of Live at the Kerava Jazz Festival: Finland (Flying Note 9012). Here we have a 2007 concert that teams Kali with tenor titan Kidd Jordan and the big-ears drumming of Newman Taylor Baker.

It's a collective ensemble much of the time and Kidd Jordan sounds beautiful. Baker gets maximum traction from listening and contributing just the right percussive wash, and Kali alternately brings in important contributions on piano, echoed flute, drums, vocals, soprano and bowed strings.

The Kerava date has that cosmic dimension one has come to expect in Kali's music. With the formidable trio lineup of Fasteau-Jordan-Baker things most definitely get going.

Dick Wood, Not Far From Here

There was a soulfully raw sound in many of the new thing freedom bands in the early days that somehow seems to have all but disappeared in many corners of the free zone these days. Dick Wood's Not Far From Here (pfMENTUM 065) brings that back in no uncertain terms.

The band charges ahead throughout, led by Wood's alto and flute. With him are Dan Clucas, cornet, Hal Onserud on acoustic bass, Mark Trayle, electronics, and Marty Mansour on the drums. For two cuts they are joined by Dan Ostermann on the trombone and Chuck Manning on tenor.

Dick writes all the pieces, which have an early Simmons, early Dixon-Shepp-Cherry feel to them. The band blows through them with the conviction, looseness and fire of an early Art Ensemble, though I wouldn't go so far as to say that therefore they are the next AEC. The point is that they go about their music in ways that are not especially polite, and that's good.

This is a group effort with lots of cross-improvs and sounds both little and big. Nobody is going to blow you away as the improviser of the century, but collectively they get it very right. And that's refreshing. That's good to hear.

Post Jazz Mistress, "Global Warming"

After 10 years of playing together the Italian guitar-bass-drums trio Post Jazz Mistress have developed the kind of rapport, blend, and kinetic energy reserved for the very talented and collectively persistent units in the music. I say that and yet I don't believe I have ever heard the band until now and their new release Global Warming (TRP Music 0057). It's Osvaldo Di Dio, Vincenzo Virgillito, and Antonio Fusco, on guitars, contrabass and drums, respectively.

The album has some of the lyricism of Metheny, the controlled spaciality of later Terje Rypdal, and perhaps a few other things in there as well. There is a compositional and instrumentational division of labor that comes out of a sure and passionately committed treatment of their material. All three voices are equally important in the putting across of a piece and the improvisations that come out of it. Like the old classical jazz '78s, a number may be 2/3 compositional, but when the solo comes in, you are ready for it and the soloist says what he does with a sort of haiku profundity-in-controlled-brevity.

The pieces, the integrated trio sound, and the gorgeous guitar and bass wood/metal drums skin/wood/metal sensual beauty of it all make this one a knockout. Sophisticated jazz-rock lovers take note. This one will make you smile and then play it again, smile and play it again, smile...

Herculaneum, "Uchu"

Here today we have the fifth album by Herculaneum, Called Uchu (Herculaneum Sound). It's an LP on limited edition vinyl.

The band, a sextet, is headed up by Dylan Ryan, the drummer, who pens many of the originals. The rest of the band is Nick Broste: trombone, David McDonnell: alto saxophone, Nate Lepine: tenor saxophone, Patrick Newbery: trumpet, and Greg Danek: bass. Uchu makes it clear that the band espouses their own brand of modern, well-composed jazz, with interesting ensemble routines and a fired-up rhythm section. There is good contemporary idiosyncratic tenor soloing from Lepine, but everybody in the front line can and does solo with accomplishment. They get some collective solo excitement going at times too.

This is new jazz--modern in the post-Holland, post-Byrne, post-Threadgill sense. It is fresh, tight, freely unfolding at times, and charging forward with some exciting music. I find it rather exhilarating. Here we have a band for our times. They deserve greater exposure and recognition. Nice album!!

Nordeson Shelton, "Incline"

Nordeson Shelton is Aram Shelton on alto sax and Kjell Nordeson on drums. Incline (Singlespeed Music 009) is a set of freely improvised pieces by the duo. They found themselves working together in the San Francisco Bay area around 2005, first in a quartet on the Clean Feed album Cylinder, thereafter as the duo Nordeson Shelton.

Nordeson's drumming and his kit expand the usual sound parameters with an interesting array of metalic objects, small drums and large, and some trashy sorts of cymbals among the usual ones. He sets up interesting backdrops and counterlines to Aram's alto which has a creatively dry sound. Aram in turn creates less-standard sorts of lines than the usual free-horn barrages, though he is not above applying some heat at times.

Nordeson Shelton show originality and imagination on this one. It may sway a little towards the new music side of the nm-jazz spectrum but it doesn't short-change immediacy in the process. A promising beginning. Indispensible? No. Interesting? Yes.