MTB: Solid Jackson (Criss Cross Jazz Criss 1423 CD)
There’s an element of reassembly on this album. The MTB trio (pianist Brad Mehldau, tenor saxophonist Mark Turner and guitarist Peter Bernstein) is joined by bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Bill Stewart to replicate, almost, the quintet on the album Consenting Adults, recorded in 1994 by Criss Cross and released six years later. The only change is that Stewart replaces the original drummer, Leon Parker. The music is contemporary, accessible New York at its best. Mehldau and Bernstein supplied two charts apiece, Turner one, and the others are by Wayne Shorter, Hank Mobley and Harold Land.
The quintet makes its statements effortlessly and in a generally relaxed manner, even on speedier numbers such as the modal-sounding B-flat opener, Solid Jackson, a teasing arabesque of a tune by Mehldau with a kind of Scotch snap. Mehldau’s Maury’s Grey Wig, an elegant ballad, is probably the best of the eight tracks with which to illustrate the aforesaid relaxation and lack of strain. There’s an early Bernstein solo that Turner almost transforms into a duet before the piano reappears in that unheralded manner typical of how soloists throughout the album emerge from the quintet’s natural ebb and flow; they come and go without formality, Turner with a tone and temperament midway between Lester Young’s slithering motion and Coltrane’s ever-onward ferocity, Bernstein almost minimally above the changes, and Mehldau with all-enveloping leadership and keen probing intent.
Turner is reminiscent of the composer in Hank Mobley’s Soft Impression, a minor bluesy number stamped with a Jazz Messengers imprint, and again showing how solos appear naturally out of the mix and slip back into it. Turner uses simple building blocks for his 1946, soloing airily after leading off. Bernstein glides with the motion of his Ditty For Dewey, and the band gives a heartfelt outing to Land’s animated ballad, Ode To Angela. Note particularly Grenadier’s ample bass tones and how they accentuate his sure sense of direction, and the way in which Stewart’s solo follows Mehldau’s on Shorter’s Angola at the same on-rushing pace. Lots of other drummers would stop and collect their thoughts before embarking on out-of-context pyrotechnics.
The recording is first-rate and typical of Criss Cross’s attention to balance and detail. It was done 25/26 November 2023 in the Samurai Hotel Recording Studio in Astoria, NYC.
Elephant9 With Terje Rypdal: Catching Fire (Rune Grammophon RCD 2236)
Veteran Norwegian guitarist Rypdal is grafted on to that country’s heavy progressive trio Elephant9 for a performance recorded live. Composition credits are Ståle Storløkken, the band’s keyboard player and synth wizard (four tracks) and bassist Nikolai Hængsle (two). The critic David Fricke makes an additional claim for the recording location – Nasjonal Jazzscene in Oslo, lauded for its super sound-system. Each of the trio members, including drummer Torstein Lofthus, had already performed alongside the guitarist. So, it’s as much a friendly reacquaintance as a collaboration.
The origin of this music lies in Jimi Hendrix, the electronic Miles Davis and big-venue, Keith Emerson-style prog-rock. On the album, Rypdal also recalls his long electro-fusion career with the ECM label. According to Fricke, Storløkken was a student at the Trondheim Conservatory when he first encountered “the really, really loud” Rypdal in concert. While the reverb of sounds produced in a big performance space can be avoided on on record – sound engineers have their own wardrobe of wizardry – the album gives a sense of a power station made musical, of the listener being almost unable to hear the watts for the volts, and with Rypdal supplying finesse and fire to add clarity, or, at least, audible embellishment. It’s not all volcanic eruption.
Maybe the guitarist, now rising 80 and a few months before his 70th birthday when these tracks were recorded, was in the mood for leavening Elephant9’s clamorous uproar with spun-gold melodies, only intervening when he thought fit and making the melodious contrapuntal to the trio’s ferocity, or incipient ferocity. The first two tracks, I Cover The Mountain Top and Dodovoodoo invoke Wembleymania and prog-rock excess in lasting over 20 minutes apiece. For Psychedelic Backfire we might be in the hall of the mountain king at a funeral of a boatload of fishermen dragged to the deep by the screams of the undead sailor Draug. It’s Elephant9 as elephantine, with lamentational choruses by Rypdal and Storløkken and some late wake-up thrashing by Lofthus.
It might be heresy, or advanced years, or memories of my mother commenting that I and my infant brother and sister made enough noise for six, but I looked forward to a break with Hængsle’s John Tinnick at four minutes, 56 seconds (the title is what “gin and tonic” sounds like in a noisy bar). That said, the tune is manic fast-machine, with Rypdal trailing a flapping pennant on a rollercoaster. When it slowed and finally stopped, I didn’t hesitate to get off after what, with another two tracks to go, turned out to be a journey into my almost forgotten past. I hope the boys didn’t quibble over their electricity bill.