David Buchbinder, Walk to the Sea

Where else but on Tzadik would you find such effective combinations of the Jewish Tinge and....anything and everything? That's a rhetorical question. The new David Buchbinder album that puts together Jewish and Cuban elements in collaboration with pianist Hilario Duran continues where Odessa/Havana (2007) left off, and yes, it's another Tzadik original. Walk to the Sea (Tzadik 8177) gives us a firey, large band out of Canada, fine singers with a Landino influence, hip soloing from trumpeter Buchbinder, Hilario Duran on piano, and some other heavyweights in the band. The group is tight and on a roll, if it's possible to mix such metaphors. It's the truth.

The charts are really something else and the band nails them. The first album succeeded nicely. This one triumphs! The truth is that a Jewish tonality and a Latin groove work perfectly in tandem--when Buchbinder and Duran put the two together. It's music of a progressive sort, too. The lines are hot, solos supercharged, and new music is made.

This is a hell of a disk!

Brian Settles Trio, Folk

Making a joyfully free noise is a good thing with a trio of tenor, acoustic bass and drums. And you get that very completely with the Brian Settles Trio and their CD Folk (Engine 2013).

Brian is on tenor, Corcoran Holt on bass and Jeremy Carlstedt, drums. There are well-varied compositions that the trio works off of, and they are from the pen of Maestro Settles. They give pacing and set up the varied improvisations well.

This is swinging and loose, ecstatic and boisterous, fired up and committed modern free. Brian sounds terrific with swinging chromatic-centripedal outness. He has a great tone with declamatory depth. You hear the history of the lineage he comes out of, a little Rivers, a little Trane, a little of all sorts of inflections but phrased and noted his own way.

Corcoran and Jeremy really kick it well, matching hardness and drive with Brian's blaze. This is music with heat. It might lower your fuel bills this season. But of course it sounds and that's good for any season.

Mr. Settles sets an inferno of his very own on this set. You gotta love it!

Eri Yamamoto Trio, Firefly

The piano trio in jazz remains one of the constants over the many years of group performances through to today. There can be an intimacy to such conflagrations of course, and especially for the pianist but increasingly for the bassist and drummer, it is a medium to express pure instrumentality, the sound colors available limited by the fixed nature of the instrumentation.

That is put to very good advantage on the Eri Yamamoto Trio's Firefly (AUM Fidelity 079). This one is not her first, but it is her first live recording, from the Klavierhaus, New York.

We have Eri at the piano in a program of all Yamamoto compositions. They and she have lyricism and a sort of restrained yet potent power, in a sound that reminds slightly of Carla and Paul Bley when they combined composition and performance in trio settings. The music is freely articulated, sometimes openly pulsating, other times with a more latent, rubato sort of swing.

David Abrosio on bass and Ikuo Takeuchi on drums work well with Eri in a free driving way. David solos nicely and Ikuo drums with excellent attention to dynamics and detail, so important in the trio mode.

The soloing of Eri has harmonic and melodic definitiveness. She makes excellent use of chromatic and expanded tonal elements to groove in modern ways, but can be diatonically lyrical too when she feels it.

This is a trio to hear. You who appreciate the middle ground between the open intensity of Cecil T. and the lush harmonicity of Bill E. and Herbie H. when in that mode, here it is. It's original and well done. She fits in that middle ground well, but in her own way. So give this one some time and you'll be well-paid by some very good music.

Carla Bley, Andy Sheppard, Steve Swallow, Trios

By now I would imagine anybody who knows the music knows that Carla Bley has created an extraordinary body of jazz compositions and arrangements, become an excellent pianist of her own sort, and a bandleader of great imagination. For Trios (ECM 2287) she pairs down to a threesome of note: her partner Steve Swallow on electric bass (and isn't it time we recognize just how wonderful a player he has become on that instrument?) and Andy Sheppard on soprano and tenor.

It goes back as far as "Vashkar" (which is a thrill to hear again) and then forward to new things. This is one of those intent yet slowly unwinding sets that Carla and Company do live. But with Manfred Eicher's production touch it is an acoustically stunning setting as well.

There is Sheppard's sometimes post-Garbarekian tone and his own musical sense, a thing of real sonance and very smart note choice, Carla's ever-evolving introspection in extroversion internal-external piano style and the so-musical electric bass of Steve. He never lets you forget that this is a bass GUITAR, both in his ensemble playing and especially in his solo moments.

All three work together to make this more than "just" jazz composition, though of course it is that.

The music hums along like an infinite top, never needing rewinding (at least not by anyone listening). The hard work playing, writing, getting a threesome that sounds just right. All that was long accomplished before the studio date. This is not effortless music; it just sounds that way.

And it rewards! Thank you Carla, Steve, Andy!

Wayne Wallace Latin Jazz Quintet, Latin Jazz-Jazz Latin

When I was a Sophomore in High School I was assigned a rookie English teacher who began the first class with "I am so-and-so, I graduated from so-and-so university and I like girls!" Now of all the things to start with, that probably wasn't it. We took it the wrong way and he may well have meant it the wrong way but either way he was off to a bad start. So when I say I like something I sometimes remember that teacher and how what you like may be best repressed or at best may be irrelevant.

However when I say "I like Latin jazz", I feel it is entirely appropriate. It's the truth. And because I do, I immediately responded to the album Latin Jazz-Jazz Latin (Patois 014) by the Wayne Wallace Latin Jazz Quintet. The title is the right one, because Maestro Wallace and the band lead us through some jazz standards done Latin style and then through some Latin material done with a good Latin jazz feeling.

Wayne Wallace plays in a hot, extroverted trombone style that is virtually indispensable for this music. He is especially good at it, too. There are plenty of solo opportunities for the band members and the special guests and that is as you'd hope. The arrangements are very hip, exciting, hot. It's Bay Area Latin--which as we saw a few weeks ago with Salsa de la Bahia, has had more of a jazz component than not over the years. But Wayne is tops there, virtually speaking. And this album gives you the why. There's his quintet, who are absorbed equally in modern jazz expression and Latin groove. Along with Wayne we have Murray Lowe doing the Latin and the jazz thing on piano, David Belove, a very nimble and hip electric bassist, and the rhythm team of Colin Douglas on drums and Michael Spiro on percussion, doing what is key and doing it with fire.

Add to that a bit of overdubbing and a set of guest artists that build the sound up to large-band size when needed. More bones from Wayne, trumpets, Pete Escovedo on timbales, plus for Cuban traditional authenticity, violins and flutes. Then there are four singers to give that vocal thing the punch it needs, when needed.

Maybe 20 years ago if somebody told you they were going to do a Latin jazz version of "Giant Steps", you would not think it could be done. Wayne does it here and it's ultra-hip, which only goes to show you how well-endowed the band is, but also how what once was considered impossible, even dangerous, now has entered our playing and listening beings as what we can do and hear in the normative sense. Wayne does not do it any humdrum everyday way, far from it, but you get the idea, I hope.

The whole set is filled with Latin and jazz goodies executed with heat, passion and soul.

If you, like I, "like" Latin jazz this is your album. It's as hip as anybody and it has that total groove going! Get in and ring in the new year with killer tracks.

Travis Sullivan's Bjorkestra, I Go Humble

I can think of examples where a cross-fertilization of musical genres goes flat. It used to be more common, when the musical-cultural world was changing and there were odd overlaps. Andy Williams sings the "Fish Cheer"? Nothing quite that bad. "The Hollyridge Strings Play the Beatles" was one project that probably never should have happened, although it would no doubt be funny to hear now.

Because of all that I will admit I had misgivings when I put on Travis Sullivan's Bjorkestra's I Go Humble (Zoho 201312). It's the songs of Bjork arranged for big band and vocalist. I expected the worst. I was wrong.

It turns out that the good sense of Travis Sullivan in the way he arranged the songs carries the day, along with the fine musicianship involved. We have singer Becca Stevens doing the vocals. That's one key element. She sings with the sort of feeling and power that makes her voice Bjork-like without being a straight copy. She is very good. Then the big band is a well-rehearsed and talented bunch. And the arrangements somehow manage to keep the music faithful to Bjork while adding a straight-ahead contemporary big band flourish that works completely.

Partially perhaps it's because Bjork's vocal parts set up a tonality that is potentially wide-open. And there is always space over, under, around or between the melody line, so that Sullivan can do things with her music that might not have been possible with a less innovative melodist. Nevertheless it is to Sullivan's credit that it all comes together so well.

There are some Bjork chestnuts of course. All the songs Sullivan chose to arrange keep a balance between band and original melody line. They do it so well that I was surprised to be completely taken with it all. It is excellent!

Gapplegate Music Review Records of the Year, 2013

I decided it was time to start picking my records of the year for the majority of genres I cover. I did not in the past, except to name Wadada Leo Smith's major album set last year, partially because the genres were mixed up higgledy-piggledy in the various blogsites and partially because everything that makes it into a review here is a winner, or else I would not review it. That latter is still true, but with the maturation of my blog pages it's more clear than ever what goes where, as much as that can be. So I am picking this year for nine categories. See the other blogsites for the rest of my choices. Here are three that all fit one way or another into the "jazz" category.

Best Jazz Album, New Release: KAZE, Tornado, with Satoko Fujii and Natsuki Tamura (Circum Libra) See review, October 17, 2013.

Best Jazz Album, Reissue: Oscar Pettiford Modern Quintet, 1955 EP (Bethlehem) See review, November 13, 2013.

Best Wild Card Album, Beyond Category: Dawn of Midi, Dysnomia (Thirsty Ear) See review, July 17, 2013. http://www.gapplegateguitar.blogspot.com/2013/07/dawn-of-midi-dysnomia.html