Jazz Recommendations

The trio of Samo Salamon, Michel Godard, and Roberto Dani have been collaborating for a substantial time now.  It goes to show how that kind of investment can pay off.  For all intents and purposes, Eleven Stories shouldn’t work as well as it does.  The compositions possess an odd tunefulness, the melodies have a disembodied quality, and, well, guitar/tuba/drum trios aren’t exactly what the stuff of jazz is made from.

But the thing of it is, the album does work.  It works really really well.

The album has a pleasant sway to it. Salamon has, over time, developed a signature sound on guitar, a razor sharp edge that makes an impression without drawing blood.  When he gets moody on guitar, as he does on “Kei’s Melody,” Salamon evokes whisper of early-ECM Bill Frisell.  When Salamon gets the heart racing on guitar, he sounds like an electrical wire swiftly uncoiling.

Godard forgoes the oompah of the stereotypical tuba, instead bringing the calming throaty gurgle of a forest stream (for instance, the song “Three”), and there’s a heavenly soulfulness he achieves on “Chinese Bath” that is a joy to hear.  Tuba’s gonna sound big no matter what, but Godard has consistently shown the instrument’s delicate side, on this album, past Salamon recordings, and those under Godard’s own name, both in a classical setting but also on other jazz albums, like the excellent 2010 recording Terre Lontane.

In addition to his time spent with Salamon and Godard, drummer Dani has made some notable appearances with Stefano Battaglia.  On Eleven Stories, it’s his tool box mix of percussion on tracks like “Sour” and “Cold Feet” and “Three” where he really shines, because despite their insistence and diversity, the percussion blends right into the stream of things, riffing on the same eccentric quirks in the playing of his trio mates.

The tracks are pretty evenly dispersed between those that brood and simmer and those that crackle and combust.  I think the brooding tunes are the stronger ones on the album, but it’s a close enough score between the two that the difference is likely attributable to personal preference.  Did I mention this was a live album? Well, it is. Sound is perfectly fine.  If it weren’t for the applause between tracks, one would never know it.  Specifically, the recording comes from the last gig, in Germany, of a European tour in April 2011.

Your album personnel: Samo Salamon (guitar), Roberto Dani (drums), Michel Godard (tuba, electric bass).

The album is Self-Produced.

Jazz from the Maribor, Slovenia scene.

Download a free album track at AllAboutJazz, courtesy of the artists.

Available at eMusic.  Available at Amazon: MP3

I first became familiar with Jon De Lucia’s Luce Trio back when it was in its Kickstarter stage.  He submitted a preview track from the album (if he were able to get it recorded) to the AllAboutJazz Download of the Day.  I still recall being floored by its sparse lilting beauty, that a tune with such a solemn demeanor could pack such an evocative punch.

That track really stuck with me.

But in the deluge of new music that hits my inbox, memories begin to fade a bit.  That’s why I was so thrilled to find a completed recording of Luce Trio titled Pieces, Vol. 1, and no less thrilled to discover that the preview track was an accurate representation of the sublime music presented on this album.

Your album personnel:  Jon De Lucia (sax, sruti box), Ryan Ferreira (electric guitar), and bassist Chris Tordini (acoustic bass).

Looking to bring a jazz improvisational approach to baroque and early musics, De Lucia imbues solemn austere music with a candle’s flickering warmth.  As he describes it…

The baroque era is known to have produced some of the
greatest pre-jazz musical improvisers. So I thought—and there
is a tradition of this in jazz—that we could bring improvisation
into play while playing the music of Bach and Handel.

The album was recorded at St. Ann and the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn, an astute match for the music and its source material.

The album opens with the De Lucia original “Chant.”  The silky drone comes from a sruti box, which is similar to a harmonium, and De Lucia can operate it with his foot as he plays sax.  Between that, Ferreira’s guitar hum, and some arco on bass, a rich soil has been tilled for De Lucia’s flowering saxophone notes to sprout up to the church ceiling.

The second track is the one that first captured my attention month ago.  The Handel aria “Lascia Ch’io Pianga” has De Lucia pirouetting gracefully on sax as guitar and bass take deliberate staggered steps in opposite directions and contrasting elevations.  It gives the effect of two people walking a spiral staircase in differing paths, and the motion created is the slowly twisting centrifugal force of saxophone.  It still amazes me how embraceable this track is for all its elegance, which typically inspires more of observation from a distance.

Four of the nine album tracks are De Lucia originals.  Bach is hit upon three times, including the chorale “Jesu, Deine Passion,” which closes out the album with a bedtime story fit for comforting moonlight and twinkling stars on a clear winter night.  The remaining two album tracks are, as mentioned above, by Handel, and one by Elizabethan lutenist John Dowland.  De Lucia takes two compositions of Dowland’s (“I Saw My Lady Weepe” and “Flow, My Tears”), and let group improvisation fall between the two.  Much to its benefit, this creates an effect of three part story more than two compositions merged into one.

Is it first thing in the morning and the sun is just starting to play with shades of blues and pinks and oranges in the morning sky?  Play this album.  Is it late at night, the crickets are yawning, and there’s a sense of a world asleep?  Play this album.  Or any moment, when a respectful silence fills the air and you need music to fit right in, Pieces, Vol. 1 is the answer.

You can stream the entire album at the artist’s bandcamp page.  You can also purchase it there in CD format or any number of digital formats.

Download a free album track at AllAboutJazz, courtesy of the artist.  And you can also download the track I reference in the intro, which is a demo version of an album track, also available at AllAboutJazz, courtesy of the artist.

The album is Self-Produced.

Jazz from the Brooklyn scene.

Available at Amazon: CD | MP3

If it becomes available at eMusic in the future, I’ll add the link then.

A strangely compelling album by guitarist Mark Solborg.  At first blush, it sounds like large ensemble avant-garde… the clash of thunder, streaks of dissonance, honking and squealing.  And those elements are there, except it’s so much more than that.  Solborg weaves in sweet melodic lines, subtly at first, but becoming insidious and unmistakable for the thrashing beauty that they are.  Want an example?  Check out opening track “Mrs. Pedersen Takes the Tram.”  And then there are tunes like “2620,” of gently nudging serenity, of monstrous notes spoken in a soft voice and with good intentions.  It’s an album of contrasts and incongruities which all fit together with a surprising tunefulness and dynamic interaction.

Your album personnel: Mark Solborg (guitar), Anders Banke (tenor sax, clarinet, bass clarinet), Jeppe Skovbakke (bass), Bjørn Heebøl (drums), Gunnar Halle (trumpet), Laura Toxværd (alto sax), Torben Snekkestad (tenor & soprano saxes, clarinet), Jakob Munch (tuba, trombone), and Chris Speed (tenor saxophone, clarinet).

If one were to take a cross-section of this album, there would be visible strata of avant-garde music, of free improv jazz, of post-bop and some drone.  In this, the album isn’t original; it’s in the way that those strata converge and separate and converge yet again that make this album so special.  The interplay between the artists, coming from different places and merging together in a way that creates new exciting sounds, it makes for an album that finds new ways to delight and surprise.

“Almost” is a drunken stagger, with horn burps, woodwind moans, and guitar twittering absently to itself.  The tune has a steadily growing intensity, and what began as a drone builds up to a satisfying roar.

“The Whispers” begins with sheepish blips and gurgles, but the instruments gradually forget to use their inside-voices, the volume increases, tempo builds, and then, suddenly, it just drops off into silence.  When the voices start again, it’s back to church mouse status, except that the ambiguous sounds have a coherency lacking at the start of the tune, a passage of smoldering airiness, like a plume of smoke drifting up from a small campfire.

The album ends with the punchy “Open Parenthesis (With Bob).”  Lines aren’t competing with one another so much as perpetually finishing one another’s sentences.  There is a brief eye of the storm for an alto sax solo, but this quickly cedes way to a torrent of tangled improvisation, one that ends as a concentrated mass surging inexorably onward to the album’s final note.

And when it gets there, it would be an understandable impulse to hit the play button and start it again from the top.  I’m pretty taken by this recording.

Originally performed at the 2010 Copenhagen Jazz Festival, where the album was recorded.

Released on the ILK Music label.

Jazz from the Copenhagen, Denmark scene.

Available at eMusic. Available at Amazon: CD | MP3

There is a consistent pull to this album, as if the music is tugging at the ear.

The music stays elusively, seductively one step ahead, drawing the listener in close, enough to feel the warmth of the music and the gentle tap of its rhythms, but never enough to grasp it.  This is a sensation that makes it easy to hit the play button again after the last note has played.  It’s not so much an addiction as a need to capture the music.

Drummer Scott McLemore has a couple albums under his own name, but also influential collaborations with pianist Sunna Gunnlaugs, the ASA Trio, and experimental pop artist Amy Kohn.  The mix of influences of straight-ahead modern jazz, Icelandic/Nordic/ECM moody jazz, and eccentric pop music all show their influence on Remote Location.  It’s a curiously quirky, enchantingly catchy album that has a pop music sensibility retrofitted for the natural complexities of a jazz composition.

Your album personnel:  Scott McLemore (drums), Óskar Guðjónsson (tenor sax), Andrés Thor (accoustic & electric guitar), Sunna Gunnlaugs (piano, wurlitzer), and Róbert Þórhallsson (contrabass, electric, & acoustic bass guitar).

A couple examples of what I’m talking about…

The nine minute long “Citizen Sitting Zen” just drifts along for all of six minutes, offering wispy notes, and establishing a demeanor of perfect serenity.  And then guitar approaches from the distance with crunching footsteps, growing louder and closer, breaking the peacefulness the song had spent so much time establishing.  But executed with a deft precision, sax and percussion and keys mesh it all together and recreate that initial serenity, just at a greater tempo and volume.  It makes for a low-key but thrilling turn of events, and it’s arguably the best tune on the album.

And the perky “Dunegrass,” which begins with a catchy repetition of phrase by Gunnlaugs on piano, which Guðjónsson adds some accompaniment to.  McLemore kicks in an amicable pattern, but the entrance of Andres Thor on acoustic guitar really makes the tune shine bright.  And when Gunnlaugs riffs on that opening phrase by exploring its different facets, that and the acoustic guitar and drums that sound like sand blowing across a deserted parking lot, its like post-bop for the Great Wide Open spaces far from the streets of New York City… an airy expansiveness that never lets itself get too far from the earth that launched it.  It’s a bit of a magical tune with an ambiguous groove and sweet lovely melody.

Several of the album tracks are concretely positioned in the sound of the Icelandic scene where McLemore now calls home.  It’s got plenty of the flavor of Nordic Jazz, but where Nordic tends to gravitate to the atmospherics, Icelandic keeps closer to the earth with a folk song pragmatism and children’s lullaby charm.  Tracks like “Balkelero” and “Woods At Night” and “Secrets of Earth” and “Charlottesville” fit that bill.  While not the most compelling tracks on the album, we are talking about an album here and not just a collection of various songs.  “Dunegrass” wouldn’t have had the same kick were it not for the sighing ambiance of “Charlottesville.”  And the transition from the steadily rising energy of “Woods At Night” creates a nice dynamic with the simmering groove of “Waking.”  In fact, its the push and pull of the album’s shifting intensity from track to track that is one of its most redeeming, and entrancing, qualities.

The album is bookended by tracks at opposite ends of the spectrum.  Album opener and title-track “Remote Location” has an anxious gate.  Bass twitches nervously, and then the tune’s muscles relax.  By the time guitar makes its entrance, the song seems to have found its groove, and even a return to the opening statement lacks the opening tension.  Things settle in nicely after that.  The album ends with “Movement for Motian,” a ballad that cycles more than sways, like leaves caught in a dust devil.

Released on the Sunny Sky Records label.

Jazz from the Reykjavik, Iceland scene.

You can stream the album in its entirety on the artist’s bandcamp page.  You can also purchase it there, both as CD or Download (in a number of different file formats).

Download a free album track at AllAboutJazz, courtesy of the artist.

Available at eMusic.  Available at Amazon: CD | MP3