Paula Santoro, Mar do Meu Mundo (The Sea In My World)

What makes Brazilian samba-pop-jazz so wonderful when it is done right? Saudade? That and everything else that makes up the heritage of the music. Paula Santoro is a new singer on the scene there, from what I understand. And her album Mar do Meu Mundo (The Sea In My World), which was out late last year, gives me that glowing warmth I get from the greats from earlier eras. There is a poetic quality, a bitter-sweet presence.

She has a beautiful voice, impeccable in almost an off-hand way. Perfect. Direct. The songs are very appealing. The arrangements have a contemporary feel but also those great Brazilian roots--nylon-stringed guitar, triangle, berimbau, carnival-style choruses sometimes, all those good things.

It's a great album. I am not just saying that because I do love it. You want Brazil today? Here it is!!

Norma Winstone, Dances without Answer

If you are in a mood, and who isn't these days, you sometimes want music that goes along with it and you sometimes want music that brings a change in your mood. I try and go with the mood of any given music and try to forget whatever mood I am in, because otherwise I would listen only to certain things and that would be depriving my senses of something of what's good out there.

Norma Winstone's new album Dances Without Answer (ECM B0019863-02) has a very definite mood--introspective, looking at what was, what was meant to be and what was not, of hopes deferred, dashed, or kept inside glowing brightly in spite of it all. The British singer has become ever increasingly a story teller. Her lyrics evoke a sadness, an intelligent one, balladic. She delivers them with the nuances of the jazz singer she is. The album has some very good songs--those she co-wrote with various personages or added lyrics to, and some "covers" of songs by Tom Waits, Fred Neil, Nick Drake, etc.

The sparsely open sound is very right for the ECM treatment and the mood of the songs. There's Norma on vocals, Klaus Gesing on bass clarinet and soprano sax, and Glauco Venier on piano. They get an uncanny cantabile sound that places you squarely into the universe of the lyric and sometimes consoling tones. "Find the truth or let the secret die", she sings. And you believe you should. Even if you don't know the full story and fill it in with your own details. In that way this is music minus one--minus you the reflecting, listening being.

It's a good one. It's good company and fine sounds. Lyric and filled with content.

Fabric Trio, Murmur

Groups you don't know that much about are in many ways the more challenging. If you don't have ears, you are in trouble. Because you have to hear just about solely what's going on instead of reacting to ear and reputation, legend or what have you.

Unfamiliar bands have less to live up to, in a way, but then at the same time they have to grab you all at once, so to speak. For me it's easy enough. If I don't find a more-or-less unknown band interesting I simply don't cover them.

The fact that I am covering the Fabric Trio and their album Murmur (No Business LP 66) means they struck me as good. They consist of Frank Paul Schubert on soprano and alto, Mike Majkowski on acoustic bass and Yorgos Dmitriadis on drums.

This is a band firmly in the free jazz mode, recording in Berlin circa 2010. Schubert has a flowing line, great control of harmonics and a very nice way of getting from "A" to "B". He in part gives the band cohesiveness by the connective logic of his free improvs. Mike Majkowski bows harmonics nicely, and pizzes and arcos with grace and ideas. Yorgas Dimitriadis can make pleasing junk percussion sounds or flat-out head and hit for the unknown stars with high-stakes free energy.

If you like the free mode with some quiet exotic-sound times and then also some hair-raising energy and excitement, this album is for you. No Business is only pressing 300 of these babies on vinyl so get one now or presumably lose your chance.

Recommended.

Elektra Kurtis, Ensemble Elektra, Cutting Through, Featuring Bob Stewart

Violinist-composer-bandleader Elektra Kurtis kindly sent me several of her recordings and I am in the process of enjoying them. First up is an Ensemble Elektra album that came out in 2010, called Cutting Through (Milo MR119). The unusual instrumentation, the musical personalities involved, and what Elektra does with it all makes for something unique.

The ensemble features tuba wizard Bob Stewart; then there is Stuart Popjoy, who you may also know from Iron Dog and Bassoon, on bass and synth. Elektra and Curtis Stewart make up the string section on dual violins. Lefteris Bournias plays clarinet with that uncanny tone of some of the players who come out of Greece, Turkey and Eastern Europe, a sort of clarinet equivalent to the zourna, musette, wooden flute, etc., that you might hear with a rich tone like this if you sample World Music at all. Don Babatunde Eaton plays percussion, world Afro-Eurasian percussion I guess you could say, and he's good. On the drums is Kahlil Kwame Bell, who has a hip flexibility and can swing, rock or otherwise help set up the varied grooves in the music.

Elektra has incredible technique and a singing tone. She's obviously had plenty of training but she sets it loose for this music that you might call World Music Fusion--with some very Greek and Eurasian traces underneath it all which are very cool. Curtis is an excellent violinist as well. They impress with ensemble strength, loosely rubato moments and some hot improvising. Bob, Stewart and Lefteris make for a very solid ensemble as well but then can solo in ways that keep you interested. And the percussion team keeps on smoking it throughout.

There is no mistaking this ensemble for another. It has groove but then it gets such a collective sound in the compositions that you become immersed very quickly in it all. And the invention in the compositions stands out strongly. There's freedom, too, in parts.

This is a total music experience! Elektra is a marvelous player, a brightly shining music-smith and a very wise chooser of ensemble players. I am smiling!!

Jon Irabagon, It Takes All Kinds

Jon Irabagon plays sax like he's been through the style wars and has emerged catalysed and all the better for it. But he's too young to have been on the frontlines then. Yet somehow he's internalized the insightful lessons gained by assimilating the sounds that went before and melding them into his own very alive approach. What makes him so important today is not just that he goes in his own way where he will, but that there is more than one Irabagon. There's Irabagon the over-the-top dionysian bebop mad-hatter like on the full length version of Doxy he did a few years ago. There's the jokester that still takes it outside like on Lundbom's Big Five Chord, and there's the player of many voices who rechannels it all in Mostly Other People Do the Killing.

And today, another Irabagon, that of the serious new-new thing artist on It Takes All Kinds (Irabagast Jazzwerkstatt 139). This is a live trio date at a German festival last year. And it is excellent going. First of all Barry Altschul has been playing with Jon for a while now and it is paying off big in interactions. Barry sounds like his old self with that orchestral-but-swinging drum thing he was doing with Circle, Sam and Anthony Braxton way back. Only he has the maturity of time and growth in plain evidence. In other words he sounds as good as ever! Mark Helias has been playing off and on with Barry for years and so he too has a maturity of association added on to a tremendous sense of space and place in his playing.

This is Jon's date so they do Jon's tunes--which have a bop and after completeness-in-change feel to them. And his playing gives nods to the greats of the past but also gets very much his own multi-dimensional phrasings happening. He is part of a continuum, but a step of his own, which is of course much the way things evolve when they do.

In a way, a very healthy way, this music sums up why the style wars of the '80s and after were bullcrap. There was nothing to challenge. The music was growing, is growing and must not be stopped. So here we are today with how that growth leads to new-in-old and new-in-new classicism, whatever that means. But no, really. It's how the free movement and the past can hook up and move on. One way, anyway. Connie Crothers the other day is another. There are many ways, potentially and in actuality.

Jon's playing is definitive of that. So is Barry's. And so is Mark's. This is a trio of importance playing music that affirms that jazz lives and does so strongly, right in the present. We don't need our heads buried in the sand. Listen!

Connie Crothers Quartet, Deep Friendship

Connie Crothers has been making seminal new/avant jazz for many decades. And there is no excuse if she doesn't always get the recognition in the press she so deserves. It's all laid out in the recordings and you can catch her live in and around the city (New York).

She has a new album out that, after some quite exciting and engaging duets with some brilliant players, returns to her classic quartet. They played a set at the Jazz Room, William Paterson University in NJ, in 2010. Fortunately it was well recorded and the results are for us to appreciate in Deep Friendship (New Artists 1058).

This is the band best known for its freebop demeanor. That means that the music is outside the mainstream but has deep bop roots. Long-time Crothers associate Richard Tabnik blazes on alto sax. Even longer-time band member Roger Mancuso plays a loosely swinging set of drums. And Ken Filiano, a bassist known and appreciated for his work with Connie and others as well, is a key part as he has been for a while.

So why is this something to hear? It's some intricately hip after-bop numbers--three by Connie and two by Richard. They have been done before on earlier albums, but that in jazz just means they are serving as the springboard for a fresh improvisatory outlook, which is as true of this group as it is of any.

Richard blazes as a relative of Bird who has built his own nest--in other words, post-Bird. Ken walks beautifully and plays some excellent solos, too. Roger kicks out the jams both in time and in solo.

But I find myself on this album especially listening to what Connie is doing. When she comps the harmonies are thickened, sometimes to the point that they are flat-out clusters of dissonance and then, no, you get your bearings with some very rootsy chordal voicings and all in a flow that shows the deep, deep roots she has in the tradition but how much she pushes that tradition to the edge. That is what good freebop should do but often doesn't quite. With Ms. Crothers and the band they do so without fail. And Connie's solos show that too only perhaps even more so.

No one plays like this out there except Connie. Others may get in that zone but she is way ahead of them all when it comes to extensions and transformations of what has gone before.

Everything clicks on Deep Friendship. Connie shows us that she is at the top of the game. So do yourself a favor and dig in to this one! My highest recommendation for this one--and Matthew Shipp's from the other day. For the piano these are two sides to a brilliant coin. Years from now people are going to be kicking themselves saying, "why didn't I get with this music sooner?" Now is the time.

John Lurie National Orchestra, The Invention of Animals

John Lurie and his Lounge Lizard group made some of the most innovative group jazz of the '80s and '90s. If you never heard the music you should. At some point John began experiencing complications from late-stage Lyme Disease (which needs to be better understood and recognized for the severe debilitation it often can be) and could no longer play. He's been doing wonderful paintings, though, in a style as uniquely his as his music.

But before all this, sometime between the Lizards' heights and now, he did some trio work with Calvin Weston, drums, and Billy Martin, percussion. They dubbed themselves the John Lurie National Orchestra and fortunately put some of their excursions onto tape.

The Invention of Animals (Amulet Records) gives you 40 minutes of it. It's John on soprano giving out with his intricate kind of Mbuti Afro-solo and outer realms improvisations while Calvin and Billy lay down some good rocking Afro drums.

It's pared down Lurie but no less interesting. That's why you should get it. I am not telling you what to do, but no kidding, this is good music!