Benoit Delbecq and Fred Hersch Double Trio, Fun House

A double trio? Oh, yeas. Two pianists (Benoit Delbecq and Fred Hersch), two bassists (Jean-Jaques Avenel and Mark Helias), two drummers (Steve Arguelles and Gerry Hemingway, with Steve also on live electronics), everybody in an out zone, interacting in really nice ways. The album is Fun House (Songlines 1600-2). It's a good one.

Delbecq plays prepared piano for much of the time; Hersch the standard pianoforte. The contrast and intertwining of those two sounds and what the pianists are doing is a high note of the whole project, but intertwining of all with all is at a very high level, the bassists, the drummers, everybody is paying attention and bringing some wonderful blends to the situation.

This is abstract, ever modulating, pan-tonal, extra-tonal comp-improv with a great sensitivity to the sound-sculptural, tone-sound mix. It combines advanced "jazz" and advanced "new music" with a bracing success. And then the live electronics part is about real-time sampling, so that gives another dimension to it all. The configurations ever shift--in more or less every conceivable combination.

It is a very musical result. Extraordinary sonics. Thoughtful composed motives. Improvisational excellence. Beautiful immediacy. And it is different enough that you wont find that you repeat yourself, because there is nothing quite like this one. Get it!

Alan Broadbent, Heart to Heart

I am guilty. Guilty of not paying enough attention to Alan Broadbent the pianist. Alan Broadbent the arranger-composer, sure, I've long appreciated him. But Broadbent the pianist I've always tended to put into the arranger-composer sort of pianistic category. That only means I haven't been focusing, no doubt. Until now and his second solo piano CD Heart to Heart (Chilly Bin).

He has it all to hear here. The harmonic sensitivity, yes, but also a bopworthy right-hand lining prowess and inventiveness that sounds right and pretty original to boot. He swings rather mightily, too, sometimes with a walking bass line, sometimes not.

This is a live set, with good Broadbent originals, a Charlie Haden number, "Blue in Green," "Lonely Woman," etc. It hangs together beautifully, the improvisations coming through with brilliance and flair.

It's chockablock with excellent pianism. It's very much jazz at its best. It's a great way to hear why Broadbent the pianist is very much something else!

Chris Clark Quintet, Cedar Wisely

I don't tell you what to listen to, any more than someone tells me these days. All I do, and really all I can do, is describe things that catch my ear and you then do with that information what you will. If there is a consistency to what I do like it is I hope in no way programmatic. I don't have an agenda other than talking about the musical world we live in and what that may be about. If some of that is avant and some is not, some is electronic and some is not, if there is a certain inclusion of genres that in time has a consistency (assuming you read all three blogs), it's still all about the music.

So today there is some open neo-contemporary jazz from tenorist Chris Clark and his quintet, Cedar Wisely (Songlines 1599-2). Chris is a very inventive player with much to say, with a very nicely fluid chromatic improvisational stance. His tenor sound has the post-Shorter-Trane hard purity with harmonic overtones at expressive points of phrases. He writes music for the sextet that challenges the band to get into things yet also stands upright as substantial in itself.

The band is very good. Peter Epstein's alto and soprano nicely complement and spell Clark's tenor, giving a contrastive second horn that fills out the front line well. David Ake at the piano is a subtle ensemble player and a sort of post-Bleyian-Corean-Hancockian-Jarrettian, thoughtful soloist. Zack Teran on contrabass has a tightly wound looseness in tandem with drummer Jesus Vega yet also solos with authority. Vega is deceptively disarming in his matter-of-factness, yet there is a Motian-like instinctive and deliberate rightness to what he does.

Cedar Wisely satisfies. It does not get overtly in-your-face as much as it gives smart and inventive expression to the musical thoughts of the participants. And perhaps jazz should always have something of that. Not the sound of surprise as much as the sound of humanity speaking freely and eloquently. That's what Clark and company are doing.

Jacob Varmus, Terminal Stillness

Everything that moves lives. Music moves yet. Music is still alive. Music is very much alive in the mind and trumpet playing of Jacob Varmus. His album Terminal Stillness (self-released) gives you plenty of evidence.

Jacob has a beautiful sound, perhaps slightly reminiscent of Kenny Wheeler and perhaps Dave Douglas at times in that medium-hard purity of execution. He writes some very nice music in a kind of post-ECM lyrical mode. He gives us a great version of "Ju-Ju" too. And he fronts a band that has talent, subtlety and Kris Davis on piano (who we've gotten to know and love from her Clean Feed sides especially).

This session is from 2006, but it doesn't matter WHEN because it comes across as beyond time. Varmus is a talent, a beautiful player and composer-arranger. That's what this disk tells me and I am glad everytime I hear it.

More, please. Thank you!

Moo Lohkenn Source of Sound, Trace in Mirror

Moo Lohkenn, singer-artist extraordinaire. Drummer great Lou Grassi was very kind to send me a CD she did with him and the impressive Leonard Jones on contrabass, as the trio Source of Sound, Trace in Mirror (Konnex 5188). I am so glad he did!

Moo is one of those very rare artists who can sing in the free improvisation jazz zone and make it work, really work. I've covered some others too here of course. But she is IT also. A woman from IT-land! The trio is a total gas, with bass and drums blowing up a storm, and then Moo comes in and she is a horn, and a great horn! When she directs herself to a quasi-song for a few times here and there she shows a powerfully alive, crackling implied super-sophisticated sense of time and/or an iconic archetypal inheritor of the Afro-American roots in the field-holler, the work-song, the spiritual, you hear all that in her voice and yet it's avant all the way.

Now the first time through, to be honest, I was puzzled because so few can do this sort of thing right, and she was doing it in such her own way that I was flabbergasted! The more I listened the more I got into her circuit, her wave length, patched into her crackling live-wire presence and from then on I was there! Grassi and Jones are one hell of a "backing" rhythm team, though they are truly co-equals here. And it works. Play it twice and see!

This is extraordinary music. It is extraordinary singing. And it's out like the way out is in. Really!

The Bechet Legacy, Bob Wilber, Glenn Zottola, Birch Hall Concerts Live, 1981

"If you've plenty of time and you feel real needy, it's time to take a listen to Speedy...". So goes the opening jingle from the hilarious send-off of teen top forty radio of the late '50s, Arbogast and Ross's "Chaos," a two-sided, two-part single that for obvious reasons (when you hear it) never got radio air play and faded quickly. Speedy was the DJ of the gag, Speedy Clip. Nowadays time and need can be satisfied in so many ways that AM radio is barely a viable option for anybody, certainly not my readers, I would think. In my usual way I would suggest that you (ahem) BUY some music, feed the artists and a couple of their friends, and help good music continue on for our future generations. This is a handy way to keep yourself occupied and help keep our world filled with sounds. I recommend it! (But hey I am not putting down what good radio there is out there; listen to that too and keep it alive also ....)

One excellent CD that I throw out to you today as a suggestion is the new 2-CD set by the Bechet Legacy, covering the band in great form live in Lancaster, England, 1981. Fortunately the tapes were rolling both evenings and we hear, in excellent sound, Birch Hall Concerts Live (Classic Jazz CD-4, 2-CD set). It features in full-blown glory the soprano and clarinet of Bob Wilber and the Armstrongian-tinged, jazz-hot-school trumpet of Glenn Zottola along with a very sympathetic and stylistically proper combo.

This of course is old-school jazz made alive again in the present. The prominent attraction is Wilber, who is on a roll. As Sidney Bechet's most faithful acolyte he learned the style of the master to a "t", then went on to speak eloquently and masterfully his own soliloquies of Bechetistic profundity. Don't fool yourself, what he did (and does) is no mean technical feat, but he makes it swing with the joy and conviction of the best of jazzmen, and that's what especially counts. Time goes by and I think we appreciate the rare excellence of this artist more and more. At least I do.

Glenn Zottola and band are right there with him. They run through classic Bechet repertoire, like "Summertime" and "Egyptian Fantasy, " and other things Bechet didn't do that often that I know of, like Duke's "The Mooche" and "I Got it Bad and That Ain't Good." Whatever the Legacy did on those evenings, they put their all into it.

It's primo Bob Wilber, guarantee to stir your soul if you have one. So forget about Speedy Clip and check out this wonderful concert set!

Gilad Atzmon & the Orient House Ensemble, Songs of the Metropolis

There are times when the persistent presence of artists surprises me. That would be the case recently when I auditioned the new album by Gilad Atzmon & the Orient House Ensemble, Songs of the Metropolis (World Village 450024). The band has been together now for 12 years, gigging around Europe, the world, bringing their sounds to audiences across the planet, recording, doing what they do. Yet I had forgotten how long-lived they've been.

The new one is strong. Gilad has a kind of Eastern European tinge to his clarinet and soprano sax tone, especially. There are traces of Garbarek to be heard there too but it's all wrapped up in his own approach. This new one is all about cities/places of the world. Each cut is devoted to one, and the compositions flow nicely in a post-ECM kind of vaulted classicity. Sometimes it gets a little into a jazz-rockish funk zone, but whatever the stylistic territory Gilad soloes over it all with strength after strength.

It's excellent listening and a beautiful way to launch the band's 13th year. Atzmon can write and he can play. There is very ample evidence of that on these pieces!