Mar 15 2014
The Safety Net: Julian Joseph – “The Language of Truth”
Back in the day, when I was in the thick of my immersion of the jazz of the 1950s and 60s, I occasionally came up for air long enough to grab something from the modern day. One such album I still listen to frequently. The Language of Truth, the debut album by pianist Julian Joseph, had a tone and fluency that I found quite appealing, and which sounded very different than the bop that typically dominated my listening schedule. The album had a melancholy, meditative quality, which it maintained even when notes poured down in a tumult of activity, and this was something that connected me. It still does.
Your album personnel: Julian Joseph (piano, keyboards), Jean Toussaint (tenor & soprano sax), Alec Dankworth (bass), Mark Mondesir (drums), and guests: Sharon Musgrave (vocals) and Dee Lewis (vocals).
The opening track “Miss Simmons,” a solo Joseph piece, has a lively demeanor, yet emits an introspective calm from its center. It’s also ample evidence of the conversational tone this album adopts throughout, an easy lyricism that finds the right words at the right time, yet never feels compelled to try to impress with excessive verbosity.
“The Language of Truth” has a prowling cadence and a sax that yawns out notes with languorous delight, before building up with a bubbling personality. It gives hints of the purposeful treatment applied to the tempos, of strategically altering their trajectory in a way that results in a corresponding change in how melodies are shaped and how harmony reflects off its surface.
Most of the album tracks keep to the quieter side of things, but a few, like “Don’t Chisel the Shisel,” “The High Priestess,” and “Tyrannosaurus Rex,” each display frenetic tendencies… flurries of piano notes, drums and cymbals a torrent of percussion, charging at full speed to where feet no longer seem to touch ground. And though drummer Mondesir is relentless on these tracks, the way in which he synchs up with Joseph and directs the shifting tempos shows that his contribution is more than just a display of force.
“The Wash House” is upbeat also, but again, it possesses a quiet disposition that keeps things peaceful, accentuated by Joseph’s little bursts of melody shadowed by Dankworth’s bass. The jaunty “Brothers of the Bottom Row” keeps a light spring to its step, a catchy cadence easy to follow along with.
“Art of the Calm” features the quiet saxophone sighs from Toussaint, his tone matched by Joseph’s patient expressions on piano. It has a presence that instills a hush over a room, enveloping everything.
There are two vocal tracks on the album. Sharon Musgrave’s smoky delivery nails the bleak mood of Curtis Mayfield’s “The Other Side of Town.” Joseph has a nice solo turn, but it’s Toussaint’s accompaniment on soprano sax, coming in at perfect moments to accentuate the blues in Musgrave’s voice that is the song’s highlight. The second of the two features Dee Lewis’s vocals on “The Magical One,” and spotlights the shifting tempos that occur throughout this album, regardless of whether the rhythm section’s foot is heavy on the gas pedal or just cruising slowly along.
Just in the same way it got things started, the album ends with a Joseph piano solo. “Ode to the Time Our Memories Forgot” brings the affair full circle, ending with a contemplative piece that behaves as a resolution to the album’s opening sentences of “Miss Simmons.”
An album I’ve been an enthusiastic fan of for coming up on twenty years.
Released in 1991 on Atlantic Jazz.
Jazz from the UK scene.
Available at: eMusic | Amazon CD
The Safety Net, a Bird is the Worm series that highlights outstanding older albums that may have flown under the radar when first released and deserve to be revisited.
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Mar 17 2014
Something Different: Dana Lyn – “Aqualude”
The traditional folk musics and blues that inform much of Jazz, both past and present, shine brightly from the unconventional music of Dana Lyn. Her bizarre visualizations of the sounds of the soil are curious oddities and stunning displays of beauty. Her newest recording, Aqualude, is an example in point.
Your album personnel: Dana Lynn (violin, viola, angel door, music box), Mike McGinnis (clarinet, bass clarinet), Jonathan Goldberger (guitars), Clara Kennedy (cello), and Vinnie Sperrazza (drums).
An album with a chamber music aesthetic and a bit of rock ‘n roll in its DNA, this folk-jazz recording modulates sounds between swaying down-home dances, a ferocious grind and crunch, quirky conversational asides, and sweetly stated melodic glides.
The album brings the heat with opening song “Carping,” as Golberger’s electric burn trades volleys with McGinnis’s clarinet, giving a sense of the battle between light and dark. This leads, a bit incongruously, to “Mother Octopus,” a tune with a stately elegance, even when it displays kinetic affectations that challenge the music’s fluidity of motion.
But this isn’t to be entirely unexpected. Lyn is part of the collaboration Bach Reformed (along with guitarist Rob Moose), a project that takes the J.S. Bach Suites for Unaccompanied Cello and the Sonatas and Partitas for Violin Solo and remakes the raw materials as structures for duets. It is not your typical classical music recording, weaving together a back porch languor of folk music with the courtly grace of Baroque, and resulting in an album easy to engage while simultaneously curious in that
way museum artifacts affect viewers with a crosshatch of contexts… a sense of existing in multiple moments and differing points of reference.
It’s a pleasant form of disconcertion, the kind where variables don’t necessarily come into focus and, instead, remain teasingly just out on the periphery of vision. It’s a sensation that leaves its mark all over Aqualude.
The avant-garde piece “Queequeg,” exudes the modern jazz approach of wedding post-bop jazz freedom with indie-rock poetic structure, leading to a song that drummer Sperrazza moves in a unified direction, even as it barely retains its shape and form. “Yeti Crab Theme Song” is the album’s masterstroke, assimilating all of its various influences and perspectives into one cohesive expression… and sounding both gorgeously melodic and rhythmically animated in doing so.
“Pyramids” opens with the moonlight beauty of violin and clarinet rising and falling in synch with an exquisite finesse, maintaining that state of grace even after guitar’s pronouncements alter the cadence into something sharper and hardened. When Kennedy enters on cello with a deep and urgent hum, the song’s disposition becomes one with a heavier atmosphere, eventually building up into a frenzied conclusion.
“The Snow is General” leads a dual life as avant-folk song and contemporary classical pastoral, planting its feet in one territory or the other, and switching between the two with an unpredictable frequency. There could be some parallels drawn between this song and the music & compositions of Threads Orchestra and Jonathan Brigg, another ensemble that defies any type of definitive categorization and inhabits territory all to its own.
And the branches of Lyn’s folk music expressions can be traced back to similar roots as her previous recording, The Hare Said a Prayer to the
Rainbow and Followed the Fox Down the Hole, a forward-thinking presentation of traditional Irish music.
A duo collaboration with guitarist Kyle Sanna, the recording is grounded in the source of its inspiration, while affording itself plenty room for personalization by the artists, who, obviously, live in the present day and can’t help but feel the compulsion to create music in ways that reflect their own experiences in the light of Today.
Aqualude is just a more comprehensive fulfillment of this approach, encompassing a wider array of music influences and breathing them out with a panoramic display of evocative imagery.
Aqualude ends with the angelic harmonics of “Yeti Sleeps,” a song that floats peaceably downstream, gradually gaining speed but never dispensing with its soothing nature. The song trails off, ending with a return to the eerie underwater ambiance of the album’s interludes. And really, for an album comprised of songs of the sea, there’s no other way to go out.
A gorgeous and intriguing album, and one of those rare instances when a recording that sounds like nothing else has the possibility to appeal to just about everybody. Differentiation for the masses.
Released on Ropeadope Records.
Music from the Brooklyn scene.
Available at: Bandcamp | eMusic | Amazon MP3
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By davesumner • Jazz Recommendations, Jazz Recommendations - 2013 Releases • 0 • Tags: Something Different