Roundup #2 (New Releases)

Time for the second installment of new jazz releases from 2011. Read the first here.

Ben Allison, Action-Refraction (Palmetto) "Green Al," the funky closer to Allison's Think Free (2009), is one of my favorite tunes, and I was glad to hear that the bassist's new album, a collection of covers (with one original), has a companion track, Donny Hathaway's "Some Day We'll All Be Free." It doesn't grin as much, but then neither does the band: Action-Refraction is darker, looser, and harder than Think Free, but the musicianship is at just as high a level. A cover album could be a cop-out, a filler disc compensating for some lack of direction or vision on the part of the leader, but Allison's cover album holds no such compromises. Instead, we get a bleakly expansive sound, filled out with synthesizers and deep-set bass, thick saxophone and tightly snapped drums. These are the vehicles by which we travel through Allison's cover soundscape, shifting dimensions and tempos and moods with each stop. "Some Day We'll All Be Free" is a standout track, one with all the pathos of "Stairway To Heaven" at the end of a middle-school dance, the night passing by a car window, the bedroom ceiling at 2:30 in the morning. It's not just a cover of a song; it's a cover of a whole world, and an imaginative and captivating one at that.

Fred Hersch, Alone At The Vanguard (Palmetto) There are many pianists influenced by Bill Evans, but all tend to display a different side of Evans's style. Fred Hersch is certainly the child of the late Bill Evans, the Evans who sounded most at home with his own two hands and setlist full of tunes ready for rubato and the kind of towers of flowering lyricism Evans loved to build. Hersch (who last year recovered from a serious coma in time to record Whirl, one of the best albums of 2010) has already recorded what I regard as (along with Brad Mehldau and Keith Jarrett's work) the most important solo piano record since Evans's own solo albums: Songs Without Words released on Nonesuch in 2001. He begins Alone At The Vanguard, a set of nine standards and originals, with "In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning," which he ornaments beautifully into a lushly curlicued rumination. Thus begins a series of portraits (not all of people, some of emotions) that vary easily and naturally. This isn't a groundbreaking disc, or one with as much direction as Songs Without Words (or even James Farm - see below), but it is beautiful for the playing alone, with all its fulfilled expectations and predicted touches. 

Aaron Goldberg & Guillermo Klein, Bienestan (Sunnyside) This is a dream band, and unlike most dream bands, it makes dream music, too. Goldberg has long championed South American music through covers and in his own compositions, and Klein's band Los Guachos and other projects have consistently explored the pianist and composer's Argentinian heritage in profound and fascinating ways. Add the Puerto Rican altoist Miguel Zenon, the Los Guachos member Chris Cheek, and bassist Matt Penman and drummer Eric Harland (who can also be found on James Farm - see below), and the mix is a potent one. There are standards (including a brilliant run through "All The Things You Are"), covers, and originals (all by Mr. Klein). The sound is amazing, highlighting Harland's crisp rhythmic acrobatics, Zenon's thickly agile tone, and the woody fullness of Penman's bass. No tune feels sloppy, no complex arrangement detracts from the original source - not even the two Parker tunes, "Moose The Mooche" and "Blue For Alice," which speed up and slow down like a musical 300. Goldberg's piano is a constant, with Klein coloring tunes with the Rhodes and occasionally asserting himself on his own compositions. This is a great disc, an assured recording that creates its own musical world fully and easily. It's a world I'll be visiting again soon.

Gerald Clayton, Bond: The Paris Sessions (Emarcy) It takes guts to start your album with a song built around a three-chord resolution from one of the greatest pianists of the last twenty years. The version of "If I Were A Bell" that begins Clayton's record is built around a motif from Brad Mehldau's 1997 recording of "Blackbird," and while I think that Clayton doesn't yet rank with Mehldau, I understand the homage (and to Clayton's credit, he does choose the tastiest part of "Blackbird" to build on). Clayton has always managed to sound like another version of something - a more sensitive Robert Glasper, a funkier Mehldau, a modern Tristano. This composite personality displays itself on The Bond Sessions, but is more consistently inconsistent here than anywhere else. Clayton may never settle into one voice, but that same reluctance to dig in and stay put becomes his voice (it helps that Clayton's triomates, the great drummer Justin Brown and bassist Joe Sanders, are so creatively uniform throughout). Highlights are"If I Were A Bell"  (despite its overshadowing quotation), a fiery "Snake Bite," and a subdued imagining of "All The Things You Are."

Joshua Redman, Aaron Parks, Matt Penman & Eric Harland, James Farm (Nonesuch) I first heard about this band from Parks's mom, sitting in the audience at the Village Vanguard. She didn't explain the name, so I'll leave that speculation to Down Beat. On to the music. I think that this record gets the Most Bewilderingly Unsatisfying Award for 2011. Four great musicians, ten tunes with a lot of promise - what went wrong? Parks's synthesizers and keyboards never sound as convincing as his piano, and Redman swings back and forth between his usual soulful self and blatant Mark Turner licks (check out "1981" for examples), which don't sound right and just make me wish that Turner had been chosen as the saxophonist instead. Harland is seemingly on every other record these days, and while his talent is huge and his worth proven time and time again (see Bienestan above), this isn't one of those times - he just doesn't bring enough new sound to the table. I hope that this quartet lasts for a few records more; there is potential here, and more discs would certainly allow these four to define and explore it more fully.

Lee Konitz, Brad Mehldau, Charlie Haden & Paul Motian, Live At Birdland (ECM) I read about this quartet's engagement at this venerably reincarnated New York club when it happened, back in 2009, and I've been waiting for the record ever since. Here it is (it's released in September), and it's magnificent. Konitz, Mehldau and Haden have recorded together before, for Blue Note, but, while genius dripped from my speakers when I played Alone Together, there was something missing. As is so often the case, that something was Paul Motian, and with the addition of his drums, the equation can now be called complete. I first skipped to the second track, "Lullaby Of Birdland" (could any tune be better than this?), and was instantly immersed in all four elements of this quartet: Earth (Haden), which provides a changeable and unfathomable deepness to the foundation upon which all else rests; Wind (Konitz), which blows sharp and melodic; Fire (Mehldau), darkly burning flames which ride up on the beat and at times seem to pull the others in its path; and Water (Motian), all gently crashing ride cymbals and dripping snare and hi-hat smacks. There's free jazz here, and ballads, and standards, and history, but it doesn't matter. These four are the elements of music, and they defy labels. All we can do is listen.

JD Allen, Victory! (Sunnyside) JD Allen is, to put it simply, a great saxophonist, the kind of saxophonist who can carve sound out of a solid block, hew it and chisel it to his liking - and his liking doesn't require smooth edges and pretty curves. His longtime pianoless trio invites comparisons with Sonny Rollins, but they are more easily found with Giant Steps-era Coltrane (check out "Fatima," play "Syeeda's Song Flute," be amazed) and Dewey Redman in his Keith Jarrett American Quartet years (the lone standard, "Stairway To The Stars," betrays a debt to Dexter Gordon reminiscent of Redman's own Gordon influence). Many of the tunes on Victory! are short (the longest is five minutes), but none seem hurried; these are short tunes for vision's sake, not economy's. Bassist Gregg August and drummer Rudy Royston take advantage of the record's flat, almost dead mix, the bass sitting low but conspicuously and the drums spread out over the speakers, cymbals splashing right and left but never too loudly. Allen's trio is an instrument in itself, and whether it moves in a Coltrane-like organized chaos/volcanic groove ("Sura Hinda") or a well-oiled yet meaty swing ("Mr. Steepy") or anything in-between, it always surprises and it always intrigues. 

Comments

[Bronisław Kaper]

Yo man, Aaron's mom did explain the name: It's just the first letters of all their names. Josh Aaron Matt Eric (I hope Downbeat didn't speculate too hard into that one.)

Interesting fact: I believe Rebecca Martin said that her house is on the cover of that album.

[Jon Wertheim]

Right, but not the "Farm" part... I read an interview with Eric Harland where he was basically like, "JAME sounds stupid, so we added Farm." Not sure I follow the reasoning, but...

Thanks, uh, Bronislaw. I love "Green Dolphin Street." haha

j