November round-up
Alongside direct responses such as Mehldau’s, it’s easy to imagine other musicians finding time and cause to consider subjects to which they personally relate during this time of constraint.
It’ll be largely coincidental, of course, as many such projects will have been gestating before the current emergency began, but this doesn’t detract from their value. It’s always revelatory to hear new work from Maria Schneider, who is a remarkable composer and bandleader and also an activist in the fields of data control and intellectual property. She directs her attention to this in Data Lords, a formidable double album that deploys the forces of her big band to evoke the artificial world of technology and its exploitative uses, and the contrast it presents with the ebb and flow of nature and the real world. This powerful, uncompromising music is very much the sound of protest and a plea for humanisation, reflected in her sophisticated arrangements which are variously disturbing, strident, unsettling, puckish, uplifting and intoxicating. (Artistshare) ★★★★★
Others may find themselves reflecting upon their formative influences, a process which has led pianist and composer Django Bates to explore and create new arrangements of the music of Charlie Parker. The latest manifestation of this is also a largescale outing, combining his own group Beloved with the Norrbotten Big Band to produce Tenacity. The programme subjects a string of Parker tunes to a storm of rapidfire extensions, inversions and interventions which, while they may irritate purists, actually invoke the wildfire spirit of their originator far more than slavish reconstructions. Bates does tend to add an entire lorry-load of kitchen sinks to such undertakings, but we’ll forgive him that and simply enjoy the obvious glee with which the performers realise his ideas. (Lost Marble LM009) ★★★★
Saxophonist Tim Garland offers a different take on the above process, effectively re-imagining the classic Stan Getz/eddie Sauter 1961 Verve album Focus as Refocus. Garland retains the format of a saxophone fronting a chamber orchestra, but like Bates he also adds his own band to the mix. Also like Bates, Garland’s approach to the music doesn’t ape that of his subject so much as convey facets of the latter’s thinking, which allows his own animated, articulate style to bounce nicely off the churning string arrangements. The whole makes for arresting listening. (Edition EDN1159) ★★★★
By contrast, Omega, the debut album from altoist Immanuel Wilkins, previously a sideperson to the likes of Wynton Marsalis and Jason Moran (the latter also being the album’s producer), is a glorious exercise in inventive, melodic modernism. Nevertheless, two tracks mark both recent and historical occasions which saw black Americans lose their lives to inimical regimes, providing a knowing dissonance in an otherwise celebratory and transformative set. Overall, this is as fresh and powerful a quartet set as you’ll hear anytime soon. (Blue Note 0894797 ) ★★★★★
Last but in no way least, in the spirit of waiting until two come along at once, Allison Neale is another altoist/leader with a distinctive voice. The doyenne of neo-cool school expertise, she wears her heritage with pride on her latest outing Quietly There which, like the music of her influences, is both laid-back and reassuringly robust. (Ubuntu Music UBU0062) ★★★★★