Guitarist Bobby Broom, who has played with a Hall of Fame roster of musicians that includes Sonny Rollins, Stanley Turrentine, and Art Blakey, and who has led his own groups, including the Deep Blue Organ Trio and the Bobby Broom Trio, has a new album out.  This time, it’s all original compositions, and based on the results, it’s obvious he’s been holding out on us.  This music brings the blues and finds time to swing, but, strangely, there’s more of a rainy-day languor to it, even when the tempo and heat rise, and the music is anything but sleepy.  Of course, these types of emotional complexities in a creative piece are ably handled when it’s a veteran doing the crafting.  Broom has more than paid his dues to be considered a jazz vet.  But let’s talk about that music…

Your album personnel: Bobby Broom (guitar), Dennis Carroll (bass), and Kobie Watkins & Makaya McCraven (drums).

I liked this album well enough when I first heard it a couple months ago, but revisiting it over the course of those months has found it forming a stronger bond with my ears.  There’s a warmth to the music on this album that grows stronger as the music becomes more familiar.  It probably has something to do with Broom’s confident unassuming style on guitar; there’s an ease to his play that invites the listener to just kick back and listen, even as it gets the brain to sit up and take notice of the music’s technical strength.  It’s also probably a result of McCraven’s frenetic rhythms that don’t insinuate themselves upon the listener any more than does Watkins’ more laid-back style of drumming on this album.  And there’s no doubt that Carroll’s alluring bass work contributes to the album’s success, especially the slide from low to upper registers on a song like “Father.”  But all of those essential ingredients wouldn’t have the effect they do if it weren’t for the seamless interplay between each of the trio members… that unquantifiable whole-greater-than-sum-of-individual-parts that is so massively important in a group setting, and which, in my opinion, is the quality that frames the individuality of music apart from other creative mediums.  This isn’t an album of solos and support.  This a trio of musicians playing as one.  That kind of interplay is gonna bring some warmth no matter what the intended sound of the music is.

Though it’s not an album that will end up on my Best of 2012 list at year end, it is, however, an album that will be on a shelf near my stereo for quite some time, always wanting it in sight, because it’s gonna get played often.  An album need not be revolutionary or innovative to realize its greatness.  Upper West Side Story is pretty damn great.

Jazz from the Chicago scene.

Released on Origin/OA2 Records.

Download a free album track from AllAboutJazz, courtesy of the artist and label.

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A very cool album of renditions of Charles Mingus compositions, with a modern approach, but all the spirit of the originals. Plenty of solid trombone work, bass parts that keep a conversant chatter then switch to dreamy arco lines that amp up the mood to entire new plateaus of vibrancy. It wasn’t just Charles Mingus’s expressions of innovative music that made him special, but his devotion to the blues music that lay at the heart of it all. With Meditation On No Integration, Ah.Hum. recognizes this, because, this album, as maniacal as it sounds at times, has a soul that’s impossible to overlook.

Your album personnel: Simone Pederzoli (trombone, baritone flugelhorn, live electronics), Matteo Zucconi (double bass, laptop, live electronics), and guest: Alessandro Betti (guitar, live electronics).

The album opens with a furious assault of brass and electronics on “Like a Bastard,” which recedes into a restrained trombone section that occasionally growls with electronics or laughs with a mute. “Meditation On No Integration” somehow manages to sound even more whimsically eerie than Bill Frisell & Hal Wilner’s take on the composition. “Boogie Stop Shuffle” is an electric guitar right cross followed by a trombone left hook, reminiscent of the guitar-heavy coolness of Mingus’s Three Or Four Shades of Blues. Updated version of “Haitian Fight Song” (replaced with word “Libyan”) just might be the most haunting tune anyone will hear all year.

The second half of the album begins with “Bluesility,” a simple duo of bass and trombone, and a stripped down version of all the music that surrounds it on this album, which makes for a comparatively startling transition. “Goodbye Porkpie Hat” is transformed into a cool groove, accompanied by distant trombone and simmering electronics. And “Self-Portrait in Three Colors,” a sublime ballad on Mingus’s classic album Mingus Ah Um, is transformed into a ghost town… electronics rip through the composition, echoes of the melody call out from the past, and all that’s left is the Slow Fade to the album’s end.

This kind of thing could’ve been gimmicky, could’ve been a classless grab at some spotlight on the coattails of a truly great musician, but that’s not how it played out. A genuinely engaging and fun album, one that can summon up nostalgia for the days of originally discovering the work of Charles Mingus, but also an album that can be enjoyed on its own terms and viewed as a positive sign on the state of current jazz musicians’ vision as they balance the weight of the jazz past and the weight of their own view of their jazz future. Great stuff. Unnecessary to be familiar with Mingus’s work to listen to this album, just dive right in.

Released on the El Gallo Rojo Records label.

Jazz from the Bologna, Italy scene.

You can stream more tracks at Ah Hum’s Soundcloud page.

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With the use of electronics, rock tempos, and dramatic melodic excursions, the Esbjorn Svensson Trio brought about an innovative approach to the jazz piano trio, the New Piano Trio, and inspired a wave of followers in their wake.  Unfortunately, Svensson’s tragic death in 2008 cut short our opportunity to discover where he’d, ultimately, take his sound.

This collection of songs, recorded during the session that produced the album Leucocyte, illustrate just how much music Svensson had left in him.

Your album personnel:  Esbjorn Svensson (piano, electronics, transistor radio), Dan Berglund (double bass, electronics), and Magnus Ostrom (drums, electronics, voices).

It’s always a dodgy proposition to coalesce an album around the tracks originally discarded from consideration the first time around.  Its success hinges, primarily, on how the “original” album’s tracks were selected:  Was it based on attaining a consistent identity or were the tracks chosen based on encapsulating a range of sound and emotion?

Leucocyte had a menacing presence, even during its quieter moments.  Svensson’s piano notes had the shine of blades recently sharpened.  There were visible veins popping up off the muscles of Bergstrom’s bass lines.  Ostrom played the drums like he was cool just sitting in place, but was ready to pounce at the first opportunity to fight.

301 displays an alternate personality.  It’s an album of relaxed demeanor, of keeping cool during tense moments, of kicking back and appreciating life as it comes. Whereas Leucocyte makes a statement, 301 is content to let the message become whatever the music makes of it.

“Inner City, City Lights” shines out from behind a hazy fog.  The corresponding sizzle of electronic effects and rising sun harmonization counterbalance the straight-forward stroll of piano, drums, and bass.

The thing about E.S.T. is that it was first and foremost a jazz piano trio.  The electronics didn’t come in heavy doses until later.  Early E.S.T. still had all the dramatic tension and lilting melodies, but didn’t throw themselves into the tech experiments until later.  A track like “The Left Lane” shows E.S.T. in that early form, sans effects, full-on jazz trio, a tune that builds up intensity, then lets it gently crash on the shore.

The trio of tunes “Houston the 5th” and “Three Falling Free Parts 1 & 2” may as well have come as a set.  It begins with “Houston’s” abrasive electronic sizzle, which by itself would be out of place on the album, but in that it transitions so delicately into the gentle drift of “Part 1,” the effect would have been poorer without the dissonant lead-in.  No less dramatically, the stillness of “Part 1” transmutes into the electric ferocity of “Part 2”, which begins as a slow burn, Svensson’s piano providing the kindling, a flame which grows stronger with the crackle of Ostrom’s ferocious drumming, then rages out of control with electronic licks and distorted live wires of notes.  The end comes like a bonfire collapsing down into itself, the branches and supports become ashes, the crackle of wood snapping in half, and smoke rising up to the sky.

The album ends the way it began.  “Behind the Stars” and “The Childhood Dream” are peaceful drifting tunes, without pretension, the sort of soul-bearing honesty that good piano trios are capable of.  And in the light of the fact that the last song on the album is likely the last new song we’ll hear from this trio, the final lullaby tune has a poignancy beyond the music itself.

Ultimately, 301 doesn’t rank as one of the top E.S.T. albums recorded, but it’s a splendid recording, and fans of the trio should be happy for this one last glimpse into their music.

Released on the ACT Music label.

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