Immanuel Wilkins: Blues Blood (Blue Note CD 6555203; LP 6555204)
Saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins’s third album for Blue Note is a big departure for him. As a concept, it’s played out on a broad canvas that encircles and and engages with black historicity. It might have been just angry. In jazz terms that would have been provocative and antecedent; but, instead, it’s more meditative and incorporeal, as befits musicians drawing on a heritage that recognises how the blues as an uplifting music is ironically about conditions and experiences which led to violence and depression.
Blues Blood was commissioned by Brooklyn’s Roulette Intermedium, an institution that supports the creatively “new and adventurous”. It’s an ambitious album, the title of which puns on the reference to “bruise blood” made by one of the so-called Harlem Six, a group of boys wrongly accused of murder in the 1960s and savagely beaten by police while in custody.
The Wilkins quartet of himself on alto, Micah Thomas (piano), Rick Rosato (bass) and Kweku Sumbry (drums) is joined by vocalists June McDoom, Yaw Agyeman, and Ganavya, variously deployed, with guest appearances from singer Cécile McLorin Salvant, guitarist Marvin Sewell and drummer Chris Dave. To their cooperative efforts are added sundry electronica and metallica to create sound pictures of passion and sanctity, ranging from the impressionistic and static Apparition through the admixture of the title track that closes the album, with its effortless opening bebop and its closing final of black spiritual to the African drumming and vocalese of Air, one of a few fleeting interludes intended to be thematic links. The most effective link is Wilkins’s sax, flowing fast or sedately and always searchingly without hindrance among varied musical scales and moods.
In a jazz environment often petrified by lack of innovation, Blues Blood‘s intent and execution are refreshing.
Dan Siegel: Unity (Dan Siegel Music DSM 4049)
“All songs written and arranged by Dan Siegel” it says in the liner acknowledgements. “Songs” is a common enough term in jazz for instrumental charts, but on this album it gains special emphasis because pianist Siegel’s octet with additions sounds from the start like a band without a singer. The fact that no-one sings, despite the band’s being classy enough to raise the expectation, means attention has to be fixed on the band alone. Such a focus means one is conscious of something missing: namely, a singer.
If this seems convoluted, it derives from the frustration of realising that Siegel’s soulful tunes and orchestrations are crying out for lyrics to clinch their musical validity. The octet consists of Siegel on piano, organ and keys; David Ginyard (bass); Oscar Seaton (drums); Lenny Castro (percussion); Tom Scott (sax), Aaron Janik (trumpet) and Andy Martin (trombone). There’s also a single guitarist on each track, chosen from a group of five. One chart, Line Of Sight, also features the octet plus three brass.
Siegel’s role in taking responsibility for the melody at the keyboards and what there is of its development might be seen as the singer’s line instrumentally vocalised. Early on, the strophic pretensions of Best Foot Forward and Defining Moment reinforce this, the sections in which the piano part is enlarged coming across as the sort of interlude that takes place when the singer is taking a break. The uptempo romantic ballad Before I Go is a good example of a song waiting for a singer. These are strong tunes and pointed arrangements.
One hesitates to describe the Siegel band on this album as a backing ensemble; but if it were, it would be any singer’s dream accompaniment.
Jim Witzel Quartet: Breaking Through Gently (Joplin & Sweeney J&S 203)
If you rummaged in guitarist Jim Witzel’s new album at random and came out with his quartet’s beautiful rendition of Paul Simon’s Old Friends, it would be worth keeping if, for some reason, you were deprived of its other seven tracks. The chart, with its two-note descending motif singing the title, illustrates two features: the way a jazz group can so often be relied on to deepen pop-tune sentiments, and the reflection in that title of close relationships among the musicians.
The Witzel quartet includes the writing duo of Witzel himself and pianist Phil Aaron, the effective turbulence of bassist Dan Feiszli (who also recorded and mixed the album two years ago), and the ever-alert and responsive drumming of Jason Lewis. It’s almost de rigueur for a bandleader to say members of the group work effectively together, but in Witzel’s case it’s manifestly true.
If Breaking Through Gently could be described as laid-back in the West Coast sense it would only mean that the foursome is never prone to either over-excitement or excessive relaxation. The title track, by Aaron, comes last as a sort of quiet tumult. Elsewhere, Witzel embarks on fluent and lengthy chorus chases – harmonically probing on his composition Abjohn – alternating with Aaron’s piano, and with Feiszli’s bass chivvying things along on Aaron’s Firefly Waltz and Witzel’s The Little Dragon. Guitar and piano sometimes combine on unison theme statements and there are other nice touches – for examples, the piano’s ostinato pedal-note repeats that help close Witzel’s My Compass, and the jolly atmosphere of Aaron’s The Celebration, which in El Dorado mood is more easygoing than noisy.
Max Santner: Name The Colour (Boomslang Records, Boom 1276)
Those taken-for-granted processes of recording – mixing, engineering, mastering – are as important as the music composed by Berlin-based drummer Max Santner and played by his Mankai quartet on this seven-track essay in sonic possibility.
The four include vocalist Dora Osterloh, who is very much the keystone of Santner’s collective, a term always guaranteeing that, while collecting themselves, the band will exercise freedom only within strictish parameters. Santner’s charts never indulge his musicians in the sort of spiky angularity often resulting from no-holds-barred emancipation.
It’s thus probably permissible to envisage all the tracks as songs enunciated with a seemingly endless variety of vocalese and sprechgesang by Osterloh, who is joined, often in unison, by trumpeter Silvan Schmid. His high febrile flights and low chatter echo her own with musical consanguinity.
Each chart’s structure is linear in the sense of a horizontal beyond which the musicians are mostly never required to depart. Above a more-or-less uniform tempo – though there’s a late rallentando in the second track, In Everything – Schmid and Osterloh disport together in mutual, often endearing accord, while below the line Santner’s drums and Irishman Simon Jermyn’s bass reflect in their own timbres and instincts for assertion, the expressive ricocheting going on above. The way the four come together and engage topographically on the same strait can only be ascribed to the rapport of virtuosi.
The album’s title and that of the final track emerge from a Zen proverb – “Name the colour; blind the eye.” According to Santner and company, this illustrates society’s tendency to focus too narrowly on the myriad aspects of a complex world, one of the consequences of which may be an anxiety more appropriate to the 21st century than it was to 6th-century China.
Aided by that studio wizardry, Santner’s band reproduce and investigate all the variants of mental tumult and consternation. In music, even the difficulties of emotional resolution find a means of expression; and jazz combos can do more than swing in a leisurely fashion in common time.
