An intriguing album just got released.  It’s a compilation album, teaming up various artists associated with Brooklyn jazz label Loyal Label and Norway’s Fenetre Records, a label that specializes in ambient/electronica/other-type music.

Most tracks are solo pieces, with the instrumentalists playing live over compiled sounds and beats prepared in advance, and sometimes recordings of themselves playing different parts on their instrument… a dynamic mix of improvisation built on the backs of compositions.  The end result of the collaboration is neither Jazz nor Ambient Electronica, but an odd sound experiment that revels in dissonance and tranquility, without giving free reign to either.

Your album personnel:  Jon Irabagon, Nate Wooley, Eivind Opsvik, Clayton Thomas, Okkyung Lee, Kammerflimmer Kollektief, Ben Gerstein, Toby Driver, Kim Myhr & Sebastien Roux, Svarte Greiner & Kjetil Møster, and Splashgirl.

Opening track “Le Havre” is bassist Clayton Thomas creating a pulsing electro-acoustic drone… low moans sliced in half by high-pitched metallic mewling.  That’s followed by the Jon Irabagon track “Six In One,” with its looped saxophone lines as a flock of bats spiraling up into the sky in tighter and tighter circles, growing more ominous as their individual forms move as a singular fearful mass.

On the third track “4,” what begins as the blip-and-scratch of a post-modern spaceship captained by Kim Myrh & Sebastien Roux, becomes a tranquil guitar lullaby.  Toby Driver‘s guitar on the fourth track “Wet Color” is sometimes peaceful, sometimes spastic, like kicking back in a recliner with a bad case of cabin fever.

On the fifth track “There’s A Crack In Everything,” Kammerflimmer Kollektief is an empty bottle bobbing on tranquil waves in an electronic sea.  This creates an unsettling transition to the subsequent track “Brushed Like A Dry,” where Svarte Greiner & Kjetil Møster create a frantic dirge of twittering woodwinds and creaking strings.  On track seven “Unfolded Rings,” cellist Okkyung Lee channels her inner slasher flick, a beautiful song to murder by.

Eighth track “Winter Blues,” has Ben Gerstein offering a mix of his trombone, warped sounds and effects, and the sounds of children talking.  Ninth track is bassist Eivind Opsvik‘s “Sticks, Eyes, Feet, and Brains,” the most tuneful piece on the album.  An infectious rhythm that elopes with a lush bowed bass, they dash off into the sunset together, mixed feelings of urgency and contentment.

On the tenth track “Quincy-Mayger,” Nate Wooley creates a modern electro-hymn with long droning trumpet lines and effects.  The wall of prayer gains intensity at an inexorably patient rate.  Album ends with the breezy skip-and-hop rhythms of Splashgirl‘s “We Took Him Out To See the Sun,” a cheerful flow of gentle notes.

This is one of those albums that isn’t going to be attractive to a wide cross-section of the music listening public.  That, however, doesn’t appear to have been a consideration in the planning of this album.  What does appear to be of preeminent importance is giving artists from disparate sounds and origins wide latitude in expressing themselves with as much innovation as their hearts could bear.

Unfettered creativity, then sent out into the world for all of us to hear?  I like that.  You might, too.

Available at eMusic.  Available at Amazon: MP3

When Deric Dickens emailed me about Speed Date, I was hooked on the premise alone.  When he began listing off some of his collaborators, I was fully in at that point.

Here’s what I learned about the album before I sat down to listen to it.

• Dickens wanted to record with some of his New York City musician friends.
• He wanted the album to be predominately free, but to also base some of the music around Ornette Coleman- and Don Cherry-inspired melodies he’d been writing.
• He wanted to keep things short.  Nothing over ten minutes, preferably far less.
• He wanted to impose a restraint.  As a result, it gave the album a great hook (more on that shortly).

This is what I love about the creative process.  Artists who have worked together previously, recognize that they shed in the same peapod, and they decide to record an album that allows complete artistic freedom as long as they abide by a nifty hook/restraint.

Your hook for this album is the stopwatch.  On six of the album’s twenty tracks, a stopwatch was set to expire at just under a minute fifteen seconds, and when that timer went off, that was the end of the tune.  In fact, on title-track “Speed Date,” the timer alarm is audible at the end of the track, something I’m glad Dickens left on the finished recording… it’s just more proof of the good cheer of this album’s origins.  No track is less than a minute twenty in duration, and only one track exceeds five minutes in length (the seven and a half minute tune “Swing It Sista,” with Jeremy Udden).

In many ways, this is a ridiculous challenge set to the musicians.  They’re required to sit down, aware of the time constraint under which they must suss that creativity out, and then they’ve got that stopwatch staring at them.  To my mind, the reasonable reaction to that scenario is to laugh.

Here’s what my assumption was about the music before I sat down to listen to it:

• This was going to be fun music.  Challenging, probably, but in the spirit of fun.

I was right.

Your album personnel:  Deric Dickens (drums, percussion), with guests:  Jeremy Udden (alto & C-melody sax), Jon Crowley (trumpet), Ben Cohen (tenor sax), Kirk Knuffke (coronet), Jeff Lederer (tenor sax, clarinet), Matt Wilson (drums, wooden flute, Marks Mark Bottle).

All of the tracks are duos between Dickens and a guest musician.  Six guests in all, they each participate on three tracks total, except for Wilson and Knuffke, who participate on four tracks each.  While Speed Date does have a remarkable cohesion considering its sizable guest roster, it’s also noticeable how each guest artist is able to give voice to their specific sound on their respective tracks, and the consistency of that sound across the span of their contributions.

On trumpet, Jon Crowley generates an energetic bounce throughout.  Sometimes it’s a buoyant march, sometimes it’s a sadistic hopscotch, hitting notes that don’t seem to make sense in the moment, but perpetually sounding to land right where they were supposed to (Dickens sounds like he’s played this game before).

On alto and C-melody sax, Jeremy Udden provides his familiar lazy Sunday afternoon sway.  Dickens sounds right at home matching Udden’s easy breeze pace.

Ben Cohen’s first contribution on tenor sax is about as straight-ahead jazz as it gets on this album, but the other two tracks he blows on possess a plaintive lighthouse moan, and Dickens colors it with percussion like the sounds of a pier, as the sea gently laps against it.

Jeff Lederer is tough to nail down.  Whether on tenor sax or clarinet, he is shadowboxing personified.  Sometimes circles Dickens’ rhythms, sometimes he creates squiggly lines that Dickens playfully tries to nail down, and sometimes they trade spastic bursts of sound.

Three of Kirk Knuffke‘s four contributions have plenty of fight to them.  Shooting out sharp notes on cornet, sometimes definitive statements, sometimes inquisitive challenges.  On his fourth and final track, Knuffke sounds to be done with all the provocation, and he and Dickens have an amicable conversation on their instruments.

Drummer Matt Wilson, who aided Dickens in the planning of this album, has four enjoyable tracks, either doubling up on drums or playing a wooden flute, giving an intriguingly rustic haze to Dickens’ free jazz bursts of rhythm.  On “Termites,” the duo utilizes a full bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon.  Once the bottle became less full, Wilson uses it as a wind instrument while Dickens mans the drums.

Taken as a whole, the album is to appreciated as much as a creative experiment as a music listening experience.  For musicians to embrace a fun, exciting challenge, and then endow the music with those same qualities, that’s the kind of thing we should want from our artists… to take chances, to produce creative pieces of quality, and for it spring from some kind of emotional basis that elevates the piece from simple craft to inspirational art.

This one came from a place of good humor.  Speed Date communicates that loud and clear.

Released in 2011 on Mole-Tree Music, which appears to be Dickens’ own label.

Jazz from NYC.

There’s a nice interview of Deric Dickens by jazz interviewer extraordinaire Jason Crane on Crane’s site, The Jazz Session.

You can stream the album, and purchase it, on Dickens’ Bandcamp page.  There’s also a link on the Bandcamp page to purchase the physical CD, too.

Available at:  CDBaby | Amazon MP3

There are solo albums when it is just an artist and their instrument, alone in a room, and their sound as naked as sunlight in a world without shadows.  No looping, overdubbing, effects, or other wrinkles; just one sound all by its lonesome.  Albums like Lynne Arriale’s Solo and Colin Stetson’s New History Warfare Volume II: The Judges are nice examples of this.  The reward of these albums is the stark honesty such music provides, that the artist, with nowhere to hide, puts the music out there As It Really Is.  The danger manifests with the risk that the artist has less to say or is less able to say it than the endeavor requires.

But then you also have the kind of solo album where the artist takes any and all instruments that catch their fancy, and utilize all of the tools that modern technology offers them, the result often sounding like an ensemble recording:  Textured, diverse, and prolific.  An artist sitting alone in a roomful of instruments and toys, an entire world of sound available to them, a world full of shadows to complement the sunlight.  There is an appeal in a recording that employs this method, that in the boundlessness of possibilities, the creative vision can stretch out as far as it chooses, as opposed to creating the perfect world with less.  The danger in this approach is that the music ends up sounding like a lot of disjointed noodling.

John Surman‘s solo effort, Saltash Bells, falls into the latter category, and, thankfully, does it right.

Your album personnel:  John Surman (soprano, tenor, & baritone saxes, alto, bass, & contrabass clarinets, harmonica, synthesizer & effects).

This is early morning music, something to greet the sun as it rises over the horizon.  This is late night music, a lullaby for the crickets as they doze off to sleep.

The tenor and bari saxophones and clarinets take turns humming comforting notes while synthesizers and effects add a susurrus pulse to fall between woodwind heartbeats.

The soprano and alto saxes and clarinets call out softly but urgently while synthesizer rhythms scoot right along beside them.

Occasionally, the sound of bells chiming, a sound more soft than sharp, providing a bit of nuance that goes a long way in a recording like this.

On some tracks, like “Glass Flower,” it’s clean, simple, and sparse.  On tracks like “On Staddon Heights,” the sound is more akin to a modernized version of the jazz-new age successfully performed by the Andy Summers/Robert Fripp crowds in the eighties… shiny and frenetic, with a warm comforting sheen.  Tunes like the title-track “Saltash Bells” are pristine like freshly falling snow, and mournful like dreams of summer days lost.  But nuance aside, this is an album that could’ve been presented as one long track; the cohesion is thick as the music is light.  It’s music that embodies those elements that make people love soundtracks and want to refer to albums as cinematic.  The imagery isn’t seen as much as implied.  Music of an opaque haziness, like out of dreams.

It’s the harmonies than carry the day.  The layering of sounds, looped over one another, are the prettiest damn things you’ll hear.  The melodies are more often hinted at rather than stated, even when they lead out on a tune.  Because, ultimately, the beauty of the album is illustrated by those harmonies.

Surman has been making moody quasi-jazz albums for decades, mostly for the ECM label (significant in that ECM Records is the vanguard label when it comes to introverted Euro-Jazz).  Saltash Bells isn’t a huge leap forward for him.  Hell, it’s hardly the first solo album he’s recorded.  1995’s A Biography of the Rev. Absalom Dawe doesn’t sound too far distant from Saltash Bells, though it’s generally more austere in sound.  Likewise, 1979’s Upon Reflection comes off as a slightly more caffeinated version of Saltash Bells.  1988’s Private City incorporates many of the New Age sensibilities that were prevalent at the time in Jazz, and not as strongly represented on Surman’s current recording.  The only real variation in sound for the solo format for Surman would be in comparison to 1972’s Westering Home, which delves into the curious blend of World Jazz and avant-garde blossoming in that decade.

I guess where I’m going with all this Looking Back is that I had hoped for a new plateau in solo creativity from Surman on his current recording.  It’s a little disappointing that didn’t happen, though only as much as one can be disappointed with one’s favorite blanket, taken right out of the dryer all warm and comfy.

This isn’t experimental music or music that takes huge leaps forward for him personally or the genre as a whole.  It isn’t prodigiously challenging, nor does it present a compelling joyousness.  It’s not going to make my year-end Best of 2012 list.  However, it is a beautiful album that I have been listening to several times a week for the last couple months since first I heard it.  I don’t expect this trend to change.  Saltash Bells doesn’t do anything new, but Surman proves he’s more than capable of doing it right each and every time.

Jazz from the UK.

Released on the ECM Records label.

Available at eMusic.  Available at Amazon: CD | MP3