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Silke Eberhard Trio
Being-A-Ning
Intakt CD 435
Nothing piques my interest more than the words “sax, bass, and drums trio.” Like other chordless trios, there is nowhere to hide. The format quickly reveals the extent to which a group has developed its own vocabulary and approach. The opening tune “What’s in Your Bag” demonstrates that the Silke Eberhard Trio (Eberhard, alto; Jan Roder, bass; Kay Lübke, drums) has no need to hide. The threesome is a tight, crisp, and simpatico ensemble that navigates the numerous changes in texture, tempo, and affect of Eberhard’s compositions. “What’s in Your Bag” is built around a jerky, helter-skelter head. But unlike some of the trio’s contemporaries, the complicated rhythms are not the point but the means to group interaction. As Eberhard juggles jaunty, post-bop lines, and short muted screams, Lübke slips in an occasional backbeat, and a repeated figure makes a couple of laps through the group. “Lake,” as in Oliver Lake, is another angular, intervallic, up and down tune that begins with an easy medium swing that quickly gains in complexity. Here Eberhard shows how easily and quickly she can turn on a dime, quickly moving from chirps and altissimo runs to lovely held notes to heavy marcato articulation. “Stranger Bossa” – which shows very little rhythmic relation to the more familiar bossa – highlights how Roder’s clean articulation and lighter bass tone is a perfect match to Lübke’s crisp feel on the kit. Roder takes a floating solo over Lübke’s playful work on the rim and sides of the snare drum. Eberhard comes in quietly, first as a supporter of her bassist and then slowly emerges as the soloist. Despite her place up front, she plays at a quiet level throughout her solo, which demonstrates one of the trio’s defining qualities: taste. It makes its point without having to beat the listener about the face and head to do it. The trio’s every collective gesture is subtle, understated, often quiet, and so well executed it does not have to prove itself with pyrotechnics and bombast. The music on Being-A-Ning is hard to play, but it goes down so easy. For example, the title track is a light, up-tempo swinger on which Eberhard channels her inner Lee Konitz, unfurling long breezy post-bop lines supported by Lübke’s tasty brushwork. While Eberhard might go a little further out than Konitz would as she finishes her phrases, the track is not too far removed from Konitz’s landmark album Motion. Being-A-Ning is also often a study in contrasts and juxtaposition. “Golden Fish” alternates between a quasi-march and out of time, rubato laden sections with Roder lightly scraping his strings and Eberhard staying quite reserved. “Sao” has a bass and percussion duo section that is quickly followed by a solo alto cadenza. “Die Urwald II” is perhaps the most refreshing piece on the album. It’s Eberhard at her melodic best supported by Lübke’s quiet use of mallets on the kit. The piece quietly simmers but never approaches a boil; not everything needs to hit two hundred and twelve degrees. Where other groups would have fulfilled what they assumed to be the tune’s destiny by blowing the hell out of it, this trio stays true to form: exhibiting an understated, tasteful virtuosity.
–Chris Robinson
Bertrand Gauguet + Jean-Luc Petit
Radiesthésie
UNRec 251
French reed players Bertrand Gauguet and Jean-Luc Petit team up here for a program of five duos recorded at the Chapelle Saint Martin, a church in Bignac, France dating back to the 12th century. Radiesthésie is the French word for divining or dowsing; not only the use of objects to search for water but also the attempt to gain insight into a question or situation by way of ritual or practice. That quest for insight aligns with the methods the two deploy to probe the timbral intersections of their respective horns in the warm resonances of the stone chapel. This is patient music, with each of the players doling out their sounds with contemplative exactitude. Also key are the choices they make from their arsenals for each of the improvisations. With Gauguet on alto and baritone saxophones and Petit on contrabass clarinet and sopranino saxophone, their choice of instruments provides a rich palette, from dusky low end to the expansive range of alto to trilling, high-end sopranino harmonics.
The five improvisations explore various pairings. Things kick off with “Le pendule de Thôt” as the breathy blast of low horns sets the trajectory for the back and forth of bass-heavy growls, frictive reed flutters, percussive phrases, and pinched overtones. The two balance velocity and density of sound, building concentrated flurries that slowly evolve into overlapping long tones that move across the range of their instruments. The six-minute “L'effet idéomateur” pairs alto and sopranino for a measured dialog of free lyricism shot through with burred harmonics. Over the next three pieces, the two collectively spin serpentine, interwoven lines that accentuate the warm resonance of the chapel and each is a study in considered listening and interaction.
–Michael Rosenstein
Gwen Laster New Muse 4tet
Keepers of the Flame
www.gwenlaster.net
Violinist Gwen Laster’s New Muse 4tet was formed as a conventionally configured string quartet in 2015, and made an impressive debut with Blue Lotus (Gwen Laster/Gameboard). The 4tet went through a few personnel changes with the departure of violinist Hsinwei Chiang, then cellist Alex Waterman. A series of guests sat in before the jelling of the current lineup with charter member, violist Melanie Dyer, cellist Teddy Rankin-Parker, and Andrew Drury. A percussionist with a long history of playing with improvising string players like Jason Kao Hwang, Drury introduces a new spectrum of colors on Keepers of the Flame, using percolating rhythms and well-placed dabs of color to add torque and loft to a high-contrast program. However, the chemistry that the curiously under-documented Laster (as she can be quite stunning as times) established with Blue Lotus remained intact, the interplay between the strings remaining central to the essence of the work – Dyer’s linchpin-like quality stands out repeatedly. Compositions like Laster’s deep grooved title piece and bluescentric “Drishti” achieve the rare state of being both gritty and polished, and ensemble improvisations like “Black Sun Shifting Raga Bhivani” and “Foraging for Freedom Improv Collective” have semi-tangible, yet insistent cohering agents. There is also an engaging counterintuitive approach to the sequencing of the material, as the pace winds down to a concluding atmospheric improvisation with spoken and sung text. The music fades into the ether, leaving the listener a bit dazed, almost breathless, and wanting more.
–Bill Shoemaker
James Brandon Lewis Quartet
Abstraction Is Deliverance
Intakt CD 437
The fifth release by James Brandon Lewis’ Quartet reaffirms the expressive breadth of the classic acoustic quartet. Now five albums deep with this lineup – pianist Aruán Ortiz, bassist Brad Jones, and drummer Chad Taylor – Lewis continues to extract new possibilities from familiar terrain. Across eight originals and, in a departure for this outfit, a single cover, Lewis once again displays his mastery as a tunesmith, though the surface clarity typically conceals deeper complexities.
A case in point is “Even the Sparrow,” a favorite that has followed Lewis across several projects, including For Mahalia, With Love (TAO Forms, 2023) by his Red Lily Quintet and eye of I (Anti-, 2023) by his trio with Christopher Hoffman and Max Jaffe. The version here unfolds with deceptive simplicity. Lewis’ tender variations on the stately theme hover just above Ortiz’s chiming responses and a rumbling bottom end drone, while Taylor’s percolating mallet work and persistent hi-hat chatter lend an unsettling energy. Jones threads a warm, counter-melodic line beneath the whole. The effect is quietly disarming – its lyricism almost masking the subtle temporal disjunctions that animate it.
Throughout the session, the group functions less as a backing unit than as a circulating force around Lewis’ tenor. His incantatory style wrings the last drops of meaning and feeling, in a burnished readily identifiable tone, which perhaps owes something to his church upbringing. The saxophonist finds ready complement in Taylor’s exuberant undertow. Their rhythmic dialogue, honed over years of collaboration, is foundational, and perhaps made possible by the steady ballast provided by Jones. The bassist is the one who holds course, even as everyone else loosens the moorings as they do on the title track. Although they may drift toward abstraction, the quartet never loses sight of the shore. There’s a collective intuition at work: the freedom is real, but always tethered to form.
Among other highlights, the opener, “Ware,” pays tribute to David S. Ware with reverence rather than mimicry, channeling his fervor without aping his sonic assault. “Multicellular Beings” moves in an opposite direction – gauzy and slow-moving, its sparse line shaded by Lewis’ delicate multiphonic flutters. The band’s expansive reading of Mal Waldron’s “Left Alone”, (which also features in the repertoire of his trio), stands out for its restrained emotion, Lewis tracing the contours of the melody with unruffled insistence, shadowed by Jones’ brooding arco counterpoint, before the set closes with “Polaris,” an elegiac, almost ceremonial piece that gradually expands in grandeur, even as disputation lurks.
What emerges across Abstraction Is Deliverance is not only a showcase of Lewis’ compositional skill but also a compelling argument for the vitality of the saxophone quartet in contemporary jazz. Each member contributes distinctively, but in service of a shared conception. The music welcomes, but rarely sits still for long. Beneath its apparent serenity lies a deep engagement with tension, space, and spiritual yearning – qualities that mark Lewis as one of the most potent voices on the scene today.
–John Sharpe
Carol Liebowitz + Nick Lyons
The Inner Senses
SteepleChase LookOut 33152
You have to drill deep into the notes for The Inner Senses before Lennie Tristano’s name turns up, all but buried in Nick Lyons’ bio, which mentions the altoist has played with Roger Mancuso “(5 years with Lennie Tristano).” But annotator Vinnie Sperazza doesn’t take long to bring up the duo’s mentor, the late Connie Crothers, perhaps Lennie’s most accomplished piano disciple. She broadened his pure but often narrowly stylized conception, and could get away from his soundworld as well, as on Steve Swell’s salute to Bartók (reviewed in PoD 54). Lyons and pianist Carol Liebowitz follow Crothers’ lead in loosening up the Tristanic concept.
His influence gets more submerged with each generation, but listening to the duo improvise you may think of Lennie anyway, not least because Lyons’ cottony-to-acidic tone and phraseological poise suggest a healthy appreciation for Lee Konitz. Beyond matters of piano style, Tristano’s message was about close listening and responding, and aiming for the clarity of genuine improvised counterpoint. Once a line is enjoined, the players should entwine.
On “River That Flows Both Ways” the careful you-go-first esthetic is akin to respectful English free play (though it’s decidedly tonal). Liebowitz’s left-hand voice is strong, even when she descends into a pedal-down maelstrom. The music can be changeable the way weather is, winds kicking up and dying down. Either player may grab a passing melodic shape and worry it a bit, without taking things too far. There can be more textural variety in these improvisations than we associate with LT jams. Texture can get thinner or thicker than Lennie’s – piano doesn’t always aim for the single clean contrapuntal line. The relationship between voices can get fuzzier, less natty.
OK, enough about what this music isn’t. On “Night Sunflower” you may hear the internal swing in either player’s line (with some intermittent walking bass from piano left) – each may swing independently, or they may lob the beat back and forth, or tighten or limber it up as one. There’s a playful quality that tempers any potential air of austerity. Lyons gets a bit Ornette-shouty; the stagger between the pianist’s hands keeps things from sounding neatly baroque. Their cover of Crothers’ “Ontology,” taking its cue from the tune’s rests, makes jaunty use of negative space – like Wadada’s and some other AACM music, it can live in the pauses. (It’s the only piece that isn’t a straight improvisation.) On “Phantasm,” things get so spare and quiet before the midpoint, you think it’s ending, but they keep going, cautiously, barely raising their voices again before a quiet alto coda.
They can get lively and coherently dissonant also. There’s never a moment when either loses sight of the other’s line. That’s not the only way to go in improvised music, but it’s a choice they live by.
–Kevin Whitehead