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 May 15, 2008 More Catching Up Every few months, I get an anxiety attack over the growing pile of CDs in my living room. I feel an obligation to point out good music that I haven’t gotten to review at SoundStage! or GoodSound! -- I owe it to you and to the musicians who have done such good work. Herewith, a look at a few of those CDs:
Jazz bassist Avishai Cohen and his manager established Razdaz Recordz (sic) in 2002 to give Cohen an outlet for his diverse musical interests. Razdaz CDs are beautifully recorded and come in elegantly designed Digipacs, and the label’s catalog now has eight releases: five by Cohen, and the others by musicians who are associates of his. The trio for Gently Disturbed consists of Cohen on stand-up bass, Shai Maestro on piano, and Mark Guiliana on drums. Cohen’s jazz compositions are at once cerebral and emotional, with a firm sense of melody. He never descends into cliché or sentimentality, yet his tunes stay with you. "Eleven Wives," which he cowrote with Guiliana and Maestro, is rhythmically driving, but has at its center a simple yet memorable melodic theme that the band develops and returns to. Maestro, only 21, is already a confident and accomplished player whose style contains touches of the impressionism of Bill Evans and Michel Pettruciani, but with a slightly more aggressive edge. Guiliana is a fluid, highly musical drummer who plays with wit and sensitivity. It’s Cohen whose intelligence and taste hold Gently Disturbed together, though. His buoyant playing is full of inventive, challenging lines, but he doesn’t rely on technique alone. He weaves around the other two musicians while giving them firm support. Gently Disturbed is not a commercial effort by any means, but it is approachable and often deeply moving.
Amos Hoffman has recorded and gigged with Avishai Cohen, who contributes bass, piano, and vocals to Evolution. Like Cohen, Hoffman was born in Israel, where as a child he started playing guitar and oud (a stringed instrument common in Greece and the Middle East), before studying at the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem. Hoffman’s primary instrument on Evolution is the oud, and many of the songs are built on Middle Eastern scales, which Hoffman’s compositions infuse with African rhythms. The result is a heady mixture of jazz-based improvisation and exotic melodies enhanced by Ilan Salem’s alto flute playing. Ilan Katchka’s percussion centers the recording, and Cohen’s contributions, such as the arco bass solo on "Exploration," demonstrate his impressive versatility and restless sense of experimentation. While some tracks highlight each player’s speed and agility, others, such as "Exploration" and "Miss T," are tender and deeply felt. Hoffman mixes things up by, for instance, adding a trap kit to "Hamsa" to give the tune a slightly Western hue. "I Met You" could be taken for Israeli pop music, perhaps, but for the most part Hoffman plays music firmly rooted in Middle Eastern traditions. Evolution is challenging, unusual, and invigorating.
Chicago-born keyboard player Sam Barsh has also played with Avishai Cohen, and he’s fronted his own band in New York since 2001. The photo on the back of I Forgot What You Taught Me shows Barsh with his back to the camera, nude but for a melodica covering his behind. In other words, I Forgot What You Taught Me is somewhat lighter fare than the other two Razdaz titles here. It’s very sharp groove music, and Barsh has plenty of what Dr. John likes to call "the fonk." The tunes range from trance music ("Nu Trance") to funk à la Stevie Wonder ("Plans Change"), with a lot of soulful but somewhat indefinable tracks (e.g., "Between Dead and Alive") thrown in. It isn’t a jazz disc so much as a brainy collection of tunes you can swing your butt to. The band plays as an ensemble and lets things percolate a while. Tim Collins, on vibes, helps Barsh set the atmosphere, and Ari Folman-Cohen (bass) and Jaimeo Brown (drums) anchor things solidly -- Folman-Cohen’s loose, rolling bass lines are the glue that holds things together. Barsh has a great ear, and probably has it in him to write catchy pop songs that some soul diva can take to the top of the charts. That’s cool, but I hope he continues to make oddball recordings such as this one.
Wayne Horvitz’s extensive discography includes appearances on recordings by John Zorn, Fred Frith, Carla Bley, and other challenging musicians who operate somewhere outside the mainstream. Horvitz himself has led the Presidents and Pigpen, among other ensembles. One Dance Alone is the second disc by his Gravitas Quartet, which includes Peggy Lee on cello, Ron Miles on trumpet, and Sara Schoenbeck on bassoon. While Horvitz has written themes for the quartet to improvise on, the music feels as if it flows from modernist European composers. Some of the pieces, such as "A Walk in the Rain" and the quartet’s take on Elliot Smith’s "A Fond Farewell," have a slight jazz tint, but the rest are darker and more ruminative. The music is, at times, highly emotional, and the players often coax unusual sounds from their instruments -- grunts, moans, cries -- to evoke the feelings Horvitz’s settings bring forth. The Gravitas Quartet plays music that is hard to describe, but it challenges the listener both emotionally and intellectually. As angular and odd as this album might seem at first listen, it’s never merely abstract. Horvitz is, at bottom, a humanist, and One Dance Alone is affirmative and hopeful. As always with Songlines releases, the recording is wonderfully detailed and alive. Also recommended: A Walk in the Dark, by Wayne Horvitz and Sweeter Than the Day. This quartet (Horvitz on piano, with Timothy Young on guitar, Keith Lowe on bass, and Eric Eagle on drums) is much closer to jazz than the Gravitas Quartet, much more accessible, and further testament to Horvitz’s talent and versatility.
A Ride to the Other Side could have been released by Blue Note in 1963, when it might have joined Lee Morgan’s The Sidewinder on the charts. Derrick Gardner, who hails from Chicago, formed the Jazz Prophets in New York in 1991. His brother Vincent plays trombone in the band, and tenor saxophonist Rob Dixon has played with Gardner since the late 1980s. The tight ensemble playing can probably be attributed to the band’s longevity, but the deep feeling and the level of invention these players bring to their music can be explained only by their intuitive understanding of jazz. Still, for all the education Gardner and his sidemen have, A Ride to the Other Side never feels academic or stiff. It swings -- hard. Gardner wrote five of the nine tracks, and he knows how to grab your ear. The horn harmonies have the familiar sound of Blue Note’s hard bop, but Gardner has made them fresh and exhilarating. Vincent Gardner is an electrifying soloist, but it seems unfair to single out one player on a disc so filled with great moments. Gardner shares the spotlight generously, as well he should, but he is an impressively gifted trumpet player. His work on Bill Lee’s "Be One" is ballad playing of the highest order. And while I would have liked this disc had it been only indifferently recorded, it sounds terrific, with a wonderfully three-dimensional sound and lots of detail. I’ve reviewed two other Owl Studio releases and all three are sonically impressive.
Paul Carr is a Washington, DC-based jazz musician who has toured extensively and played with a number of well-known jazz players, and an educator who formed the Jazz Academy of Music in 2002 to bring music instruction to kids in the inner city. Musically Yours is his tribute to Joe Henderson, the great tenor saxophonist, who died in 2001. Carr’s biography on his website points up his debt to Texas tenors, especially Don Wilkerson and Arnett Cobb. Carr has some of the soulful, full-throated sound of those players, but he has a powerfully individual voice and tone of his own. He pays Henderson the great tribute of not copying him, choosing instead to absorb the lessons of the elder player’s improvisational freedom and compositional confidence. The two tunes by Carr show Henderson’s influence, but in them Carr stakes out his own territory. The Henderson pieces he has chosen are among the composer’s less known, including "Black Narcissus" and "Y Todavia La Quiero." The latter runs nearly ten minutes, with each of the players acquitting himself brilliantly and never taking the easy route. Carr is very ably assisted by Mulgrew Miller on piano, Terell Stafford on trumpet, Michael Bowie on bass, and Lewis Nash on drums. Warmly recorded, mixed, and mastered, and strongly recommended to admirers of Joe Henderson, and to those who admire jazz played with conviction. …Joseph Taylor
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Avishai Cohen Trio: Gently Disturbed
Amos Hoffman: Evolution
Sam Barsh: I Forgot What You Taught
Me
Wayne Horvitz Gravitas Quartet: One
Dance Alone
Derrick Gardner and the Jazz Prophets: A
Ride to the Other Side
Paul Carr: Musically Yours