Dec 6 2016
This Is Jazz Today: Tunnel Six, Sloth Racket, Amaro Freitas, Avant-garde Labor Union and Stuart McCallum-Mike Walker
Tunnel Six – journeys, places, stories (Self-Produced)
The newest from the Tunnel Six ensemble falls pretty well in line with what’s come before. The dramatic builds of intensity, the soaring melodicism, the amiable charm of folk music and how it shakes hands firmly with a modern jazz built on a foundation of imagery and mood more than it is blues and swing. Their debut Lake Superior came out swinging with the dramatic surges and thick melodies, and it really didn’t hold back on the moodiness either, and their follow-up Alive kept to the same formula. It was simply more of the good stuff. Now, with their third recording, the same elements are present, but the expressions are delivered with a greater confidence, and no less importantly, with a wide-open lyricism that trades in the focused intensity for a substantive story arc. Either through compositions that are scripted to open things up or (perhaps “and”) the confidence of the musicians to improvise on the seeds of the ideas and bring something unexpected to bloom. Whatever the reason and whatever the intent, there’s a fullness to this music that wasn’t there before. The sound is much the same, but the ability to express it is dramatically changed.
Your album personnel: Chad McCullough (trumpet), Ben Dietschi (saxophones), Brian Seligman (guitar), Andrew Oliver (piano), Jesse Dietschi (bass), Tyson Stubelek (drums) and guests: Casey Nielsen (guitar) and Regina Harris Baiocchi (spoken word poetry).
Artist site | Listen | Buy: Bandcamp – Amazon
Sloth Racket – Triptych (Luminous Label)
This music is hyperactive and it doesn’t sit still and it’s a whirlwind display of forms of expression and influence, and all of it comes off as serious and fun, both. But what is easily the best quality of this debut from the quintet Sloth Racket is how they come together at planned landing spots along the way, briefly taking a break from rampant improvisation and chaos. There is a sense that bandleader Cath Roberts didn’t write a composition so much as simply show the band a map and, pointing at various spots, state, “We’re going to visit here and here and here and spend quality time together, but how we spend the time in between those places is entirely up to each individual.” Because even in opening track “Crossed Swords,” the glimpse of the blues and a focused harmonic passage and the causation of a groove all come together far too neatly for it not to have been preordained. The anticipation of that kind of event builds a lovely bit of tension, and in its way, gives the chaos an indirect shape and form in the process. The effect is even more dramatic on the 20-minute finale “Endgame.” Very cool.
Your album personnel: Cath Roberts (baritone sax), Sam Andreae (tenor sax), Anton Hunter (guitar), Seth Bennett (bass) and Johnny Hunter (drums).
Artist site | Listen | Buy: Bandcamp
Amaro Freitas – Sangue Negro (Tratore)
Pleasant straight-ahead set from pianist Amaro Freitas, bassist Jean Elton and drummer Hugo Medeiros (plus guests). Nice sprightly bounce to the up-tempo pieces, plenty of moodiness to the slower tunes. The trio generates a nice chatter between themselves, and its the rhythmic nuance that carries the conversations into compelling directions. Some Afro-jazz and Latin jazz influences, but the album basically keeps to the center line of jazz territory. Good stuff.
Your album personnel: Amaro Freitas (piano), Jean Elton (bass), Hugo Medeiros (drums) and guests: Eliudo Souza (sax) and Fabinho Costa (trumpet).
Artist site | Listen | Buy: Bandcamp – Amazon – eMusic
Avant-garde Labor Union – Cosmic Tube and Infinite Skin (Miare Music)
Two saxophonists, two drummers and the kind of music that could set the whole world on fire. This quartet from the Mie Prefecture of Japan hits the gas pedal from the first note and rarely lets up. They develop an intriguing drone on “Transgen,” but that’s about as close as they get to slowing things down. This music lacks subtlety, and that’s a big reason for why it’s so damn enjoyable.
Your album personnel: Akano Shibahito, Mano Kazuhiko (saxophones) and Miyazaki Yasunori, Miki Isamu (drums)
Artist site | Listen | Buy: Bandcamp
Stuart McCallum & Mike Walker – The Space Between (Edition Records)
A duo recording between two guitarists, McCallum and Walker, that highlight their strengths and highlights commonalities in perspective that belie their different sounds. Yes, there’s some indie-rock components here as well as some contemporary jazz fusion… a basic familiarity with each musician will guarantee no surprises there. But their common practice of being melodically focused and immersing themselves in a train of thought and taking the possibilities of those melodies as far as they can go is why this album comes out as gorgeous as it does. The balance between acoustic and electric guitar voices adds a nice bit of texture, as does the addition of a string quartet on half of the tracks. This is the peaceful kind of recording for when the rain is falling outside and the only thing you want to do with your day is sit by the window and watch it come down.
Your album personnel: Stuart McCallum (acoustic guitar), Mike Walker (electric guitar) and guests: Laura Senior, Gemma South (violins), Lucy Nolan (viola) and Peggy Nolan (cello).
Artist site | Listen | Buy: Bandcamp – Amazon
*****
What’s remarkable about Interview Music (A Suite for Quintet+1) is how fluid the music remains while navigating a course of dense compositional guideposts. Much of this has to do with the way trumpeter 
Every now and then I give a rundown of recent releases on the 
Giovanni Guidi
I’m not sure anybody is able to generate a melodic presence quite like guitarist 
There’s a bunch of points to make about this excellent recording, but there’s no way anything should be said about it, ever, without first addressing the album’s title-track “In Movement.” It’s one of the very best tracks to be released all year. 
It’s always pretty easy to assume what you’re gonna get with a Nik Bärtsch recording, and while consistently living up to expectations, he still somehow keeps putting out an album with its own personality. His newest has him with an old/new ensemble going as Mobile, but there’s overlap with older projects and prior collaborators. It’s on “Modul 60” that this particular group at this particular time shows what it’s all about. The guest string quintet insinuates a cadence of slowly rolling waves, and the way that Bärtsch and crew modulate their pointilism-style rhythmic approach so that it keeps its determined pace but comes off more as raindrops softly pelting the surface of the waves, it opens up a view to a new kind of serenity. It’s an illuminating moment and it alters the context of the entirety of the album… even those moments that are exactly what you’d expect from a Bärtsch project. And if this synopsis is your introduction to Bärtsch’s music, this is an excellent place to start listening.
Some albums are able to get as loud as they want and still occupy a very tranquil place. It’s “May Day,” the third track on guitarist Ryan Blotnick’s newest, that signals Kush is one of those recordings. It begins peaceably, but with an insistent bit of melodicism. That insistence grows into an imperative, and that’s when voices get raised. The opening salvo is Michael Blake’s tenor sax and then spreads from there. The thing of it is, even as the intensity gradually increases, the heat generated still possesses the presence of embers burning furiously in a fireplace. And that’s because the previous track “Lunenburg” laid down a scene of sunset melodicism streaking colors across the song, and sometimes the light burned too brightly to look in the eye, but all of it was soothing and welcome. That had a lot to do with opening track “Kush” and its ambient presence, where glittering fragments of melody are a night full of stars and the twittering rhythm section are the crickets calling up to it.
Dec 7 2016
Recommended: Donder – “Still”
There’s “Aurora” and how the patient build of intensity marries the slow melodic steps of piano with the rapid sprint of drums to the finish line. It’s not that far removed from the approach on “Spin/Zeppelin,” but this time excelling in a far more sparse environment. “Welle” has divergent melodic lines, and the way it’s expressed as an insistent pulse by bass and an intermittent fluttering by piano and a soft crash and peel by drums shows how ominous tones can be generated in a minimalist atmosphere. And all of this goes down in the context of a lullabies like “Andrej” and “Adem” and the tuneful, but melancholic “Snjór.”
But in addition to the deft silence-disturbance patterns the trio utilizes, the other component of this album’s success is how they manipulate the scale of their expressions. The passages of silence are punctuated at either end with a sharp clarity of melodic intent, as if the pauses were nothing more than the brief turning of pages in a story. And when the trio does stir things up and strain the definition of what exactly entails a peaceful tune, they deliver those moments with a tight focus, and its why the sense of volatility hangs in the air even long after the initial sonic impact has faded and the silence begins again to take hold.
A seriously captivating album.
Your album personnel: Harrison Steingueldoir (piano), Stan Callewaert (bass) and Casper Van De Velde (drums, glockenspiel).
The album is Self-Produced.
Listen to more of the album at the artist’s Bandcamp page.
Music from the Brussels, Belgium scene.
Available at: Bandcamp
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By davesumner • Jazz Recommendations, Jazz Recommendations - 2016 releases • 0