Denny Zeitlin, Both/And, Solo Electro-Acoustic Adventures

Pianist-keyboardist Denny Zeitlin got off to an auspicious start in the '60s with a series of piano trio recordings that showed an advanced harmonic-melodic imagination and real improvising prowess. In the '70s he integrated synthesizers into his music, making a set of "progressive" sides that showed a fused outlook devoid of some of the cliches that sometimes plagued the music made then. With the '80s-'90s Zeitlin returned to the acoustic side of his music. But in the decade to follow he began taking advantage of the advances inherent in MIDI-based sound modulator synths and their wider palette of sampled and synthesized sounds.

That experience led to a sonically diverse, near orchestral solo style that bears significant fruit in the new release Both/And (Sunnyside 1352). It's an entire album of improvisations/spontaneous compositions created on acoustic piano and an array of sampling/synthesizing gear.

There will of course be those who dislike all electronics on principal. Nothing I say here will, I suspect, have any bearing on their beliefs. They are entitled to them--and so be it. For those, however, with more open ears/minds this album holds much of interest, even delight.

Of course the first thing to consider is that the modern electronic instruments are just that, instruments. Like a Hammond B-3 or a cathedral organ they have a certain number of sounds that can be accessed. With the sampling capabilities of the modern synths there are more unlimited possibilities, but always within the finite framework of the instrument(s) and their capabilities. The trick with any instrument of this sort, just like an organ or even a harpsichord, is what you bring musically to the situation, how you "orchestrate" your sound and with what musical elements.

And perhaps what is most striking about this disk is that. Not the sounds, which have interest within themselves in any event, but the improvisational imagination, the inventive orchestrational musical mind of Denny Zeitlin. That is what makes this music have a certain consistent excellence, his ultra-creative, generative knack. It is everywhere to be heard on these tracks. What perhaps is most remarkable is how the line creating, harmonically expansive, rhythmically alive Zeitlin comes through intact, rather brilliantly so.

Those who only want acoustic music can leave this one alone. They will miss out on some first-rate Zeitlin however. For the rest of us, there is Both/And. We do not need to chose between acoustic and electric because Zeitlin builds on top of both aspects of his playing and of the music at large.

Impressive and delightful!

The Convergence Quartet, Slow and Steady

Free music is no simple matter. It can work marvelously when the chemistry between players is right. Or it can earnestly go along but never quite reach a collective point of convergence. Happily, the group named after such occurrences, the Convergence Quartet, achieves such a state consistently and rewardingly on their album Slow and Steady (No Business NBCD 53).

The band has excellent chemistry. Taylor Ho Bynum (cornet), Alexander Hawkins (piano), Dominic Lash (double bass) and Harris Eisenstadt (drums) each has a hand in the compositions presented (live at the Vortex in England as part of the London Jazz Festival). They are substantial. And each contributes excellent improvisations within a first-tier group dynamic.

I have not explored the music of Alexander Hawkins much at all but he shows himself stylistically well-suited to this outfit, with both a free/new music and a harmonic sensibility as needed. Like the others in this band he is not readily pigeonholed as a follower of x, y, or z, but rather has his own voice.

It's a beautifully hewn set! No one dominates; everyone dominates. There is tender introspection and hard-edged dynamics side-by-side here. It will make you think. It will let you feel. It will inspire you to a far away musical mindset that energizes and causes reflection. Very much an album to hear.

Mostly Other People Do the Killing, Red Hot

Mostly Other People Do the Killing is one of today's finest new jazz bands. They view the past with a healthy sense of humor born out of respect, then go on to create their own original world out of the building blocks of tradition. Their latest album does for old-time jazz what earlier ones have done for other styles: uses it as a springboard for a sound of total immediacy. Red Hot (Hot Cup 126) is the name of the new one, and as usual with their albums the first thing that hits you is the hilarious send up of album/publicity shots of the period represented. In this case we have one of those formal, stiffly posed shots of the band awkwardly hulking around the seated leader, who if possible looks even more awkward. If memory serves it looks like a photo taken of Fletcher Henderson's band back in the day? Either way it sets the tone for the music to follow.

For this '20s-early-'30s jazz tribute we have the regular band (and a fine one they are) of Peter Evans (trumpet), Jon Irabagon (soprano and C-melody saxes), Moppa Elliot (bass) and Kevin Shea (drums). They are appropriately joined by David Taylor (bass trombone), Brandon Seabrook (banjo and electronics) and Ron Stabinsky (piano) to flesh out the old/new sound with the basic sound configuration appropriate to the style.

But then as you might expect they take the style on as their own but in the process at (most) times rip into it/extend it in various outside ways.

It seems to me of all styles to parody the early jazz one is among the very hardest. It is so different than the various later incarnations which still get plenty of performance time today, styles that still are in our ears so to speak. And perhaps as a result the MOPDTK exuberance is less up front on this album. It's there, for sure, but a little more subtly so. Fact is, as much as MOPDTK have fun within the parameters of taking on the early ways, they also seem to be concentrating on bringing the essence of the era to light. The additions of Taylor, Seabrook and Stabinsky do much in that way, through Stabinsky in a cadenza or two and Seabrook throughout making some period-sympathetic but far outside statements. Dave Taylor sounds great as always.

The above is not a quibble, it's only pointing out how this album is partially a departure from the usual MOPDTK. The arrangements are much more thoroughly central to the music here than typically. They are funny but also a kind of old-new meld of a different sort and so there is much to absorb. In the end the absorption transforms to a thorough appreciation. This is very smart stuff--and a little bit less smart-arse than the norm, but yes also very smart-arse stuff.

That's something I love about the band. They go at it without the wax museum, jazz-is-the-classical music or classical-is-the-jazz music museum idolization. Whatever jazz is today, it can still be fun while also having greatness/cutting-edge currency. MOPDTK's Red Hot most definitely has both!

Julia Hulsmann Quartet, In Full View

German pianist Julia Hulsmann gathers a quartet together for her third ECM album, In Full View (ECM B0018446-02). I missed the first two, both trio outings, but the new one is something I am very glad to be hearing.

If there is a "cool school" alive today, much of it has been spawned by ECM artists. In Full View is one of the finest examples of the new, introspectively internalized yet vividly communicating jazz sets one can hear.

Trumpet master Tom Arthurs brings a quiet intensity to the outfit, with a post-Wheeler kind of purity of tone and a way around the tonalities of the quartet's compositions represented here. Julia is thoughtful and in no way anemic, perhaps impressionist may be a word that works for her performances. The solid rhythm-team foundations of Marc Muellbauer on double bass and Heinrich Kobberling on drums do much to set up the two-person front line, to reinforce the melodic-harmonic-time grounding, to set off the beautiful playing of Hulsmann and Arthurs.

All band members contribute compositions and they set the mood well. Julie Hulsmann is onto a group sound that quietly fills your listening being with intrinsically musical content, nicely turned musicianship of a high order. This one is different enough that you need to return to it several times to fully adjust. It's quite beautiful.

Bobby Miller and Ron Enyard, Live at Herbie's, 1967

When fate preserves a single recording of a jazz artist who otherwise is not at all known, and that recording gives you a tantalizing glimpse of that artist's capability and talent, the feeling can be uncanny.

Such is the case with the recently released Live at Herbie's (Cadence Jazz 1234). It is a well preserved recording of a quartet holding forth at some length at a small Cincinatti club in 1967. Ron Enyard is on drums and swings with fire, Sam Jackson is at the piano, Bergoine Denny is on bass, and at the tenor is the too-unknown-to-be-legendary Bobby Miller.

There isn't a great deal known about Miller, except he was active in the '50s until his death in 1979. And from the evidence of this recording he deserved attention. An erratic lifestyle brought on by substance abuse apparently translated to times when his playing was not representative of how good he was. But then on other nights, such as the night this was recorded...

The disk captures three long numbers and a shorter set-ender on a tape recording typical of what you might get when you are documenting a gig--but it is quite reasonably clear for all that. The tunes comprise standard jazz improv platform-launching material typical of what you might hear in a club at the time. Within those parameters we hear the Bobby Miller we missed. He has great passion and facility, out of the bop tradition extended--with a sound and approach somewhere between Rollins, Gordon, and early-middle Trane. But that doesn't begin to capture the immediacy of his playing on this set. And the influences are secondary to where he takes the music. He is blazing!

Bobby Miller should have been a jazz star, based on what and how he plays on this CD. That he wasn't is tragic. We can console ourselves and revel in the man's artistry nonetheless on Live at Herbie's. A tantalizing and enriching listen!

Vandeweyer, Van Hove, Lovens, Blume, Quat, Live at Hasselt

A foursome that includes vibes and piano may initially put you in mind of the Modern Jazz Quartet. It's a natural reaction for those who have absorbed the jazz canon going back at least that far. But though there is a certain kind of quietude at times in common with MJQ, the quartet Quat doesn't occupy the quasi-formal bop-classical-tonal-composed-head territory of the earlier group. Listen to Quat's CD Live at Hasselt (No Business NBCD54), however, and you will find there is much going on in an intimate interactive setting that the MJQ also excelled at, though the Quat quartet firmly occupies a modern free improv context. Quat comes through with four middle- to long-lengthed improvisations that surely bear repeated listens.

Who is Quat? It is a European free jazz ensemble that includes Els Vandeweyer on vibes, Fred Van Hove on piano and accordion, and the two percussion-drum team of Paul Lovens and Martin Blume. They are in excellent form here, running the gamut between the new music end of free music and the more expressionist improvisation side, jazz if you will, and everywhere in between.

Ms. Vandeweyer, not someone I have been exposed to much, has a post-Hampelian all-overness that works very well with Van Hove's comprehensive keyboard scatter and cluster approach. The Lovens-Blume pairing works very well with the two-person melodic frontline, laying back a tad and laying down dense but often quiet washes of exotic and virtuoso-istic sound colors.

There is a very effective balance between the four that gets maintained throughout. All four voices meld in continuously permeating, endlessly varying abstractions of sound.

I found the subtlety of the music to take several listening sittings to embrace. Once the foundational listens were done with I started hearing the whole as a creative and sequential inevitability.

This is high-ambition freedom music. They do not veer into multi-stylistic referential moments (save for a brief moment when Van Hove's accordion has an almost folksy but still free-new connotation) but stay pretty firmly within a special zone that advances the abstract sound world that perhaps more typifies the European improv school than is the case with their American counterparts. They do it so well, though, that you fall into the music more than wonder what else there could be. What is, is in the best sort of way.

MJQ it isn't. It's Quat. Beautiful sounds. Recommended.

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.