Wayne Shorter, Erik Friedlander, Simon Moullier, SML, Klein/Rosaly/Warelis
Happy Friday, Happy Summer! I’m going to assume that you have other sources for your political anxiety, so I’ll refrain from commenting on such matters, for now. Instead I bring you the latest installment of Take Five, a monthly(ish) digest of new and notable music that I’m actively enjoying. In case you haven’t been following along, here are the previous installments: April | May | June. We’ll go ahead and call this one our July edition, even though we aren’t quite done with June yet.
Before we dive in, here’s a clip from the Netflix movie Leave the World Behind, a stylish but vacuous apocalyptic thriller by Sam Esmail. I watched it this week, and can’t say I recommend it. But there was one delicious scene worth plucking and sharing.
If this were social media, I’d maybe share it as a “tag yourself” meme — but who are we kidding? You’re reading The Gig. You are Mahershala Ali.
Earlier this week, Blue Note Records announced a new series of archival releases by the Wayne Shorter Quartet, curated with exacting input from the maestro. The first release in the series, due out on Aug. 23, is Celebration, Volume 1 — a recording from the 2014 Stockholm Jazz Festival, originally broadcast live on the French television channel Mezzo. According to Carolina Shorter, Wayne handpicked this recording: “When he heard the Stockholm concert, he said ‘this is the album!”
I’m sure I will have more to say about Celebration, but for now, let’s all luxuriate in the first available single, which arrives with video footage. The song is “Edge of the World (End Title),” which you may recall from the 1983 thriller WarGames, a breakout vehicle for young Matthew Broderick. Here is the original soundtrack version of Arthur Rubinstein’s theme, with a martial snare drum and a melody played on harmonica — “a sound that instantaneously described a human feeling,” as Rubinstein once said.
Shorter, as you probably know, was a massive movie buff — not a snobbish cinephile, but the sort of voracious genre enthusiast who found inspiration with the eagle eye of a prospector combing a sand dune. This is pure conjecture, but I have a hunch that he called this tune just before the band hit that evening: note how studiously Danilo Pérez peers at the sheet music splayed across his piano soundboard, and how tentatively bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade initially engage.
As Shorter settles into the melody on soprano saxophone, exuding serene conviction, the band gathers itself, coalesces around him. The tempo rustles, the dynamics ripple and swell. Everybody here knows how to work with an anthem, and when Shorter nails the final high C, it feels like the planting of a flag. Tellingly, Pérez swirls around that tonic for a while, but then punctuates with a question mark, pivoting to a D-sharp chord (or is it E-flat?). That hint of irresolution feels true to the hopeful yet wary antinuclear message of the song. By the look of it, Shorter approves.
Erik Friedlander, “Sprawl”
If you’re familiar with the work of cellist Erik Friedlander, you may recall an album and band called Broken Arm Trio: his nod to the cello forays of Oscar Pettiford, which began after said injury left him temporarily unable to handle his double bass. (I once reviewed the band at Barbès.) I’m thinking about broken limbs because Friedlander’s latest, out today, pays homage to mixed martial arts — the discipline and the sport, along with the market and the jargon.
Friedlander titled his MMA jazz album Dirty Boxing, after a practice that functions just like it sounds. The band he’s assembled, The Throw, could reasonably be described as a supergroup: Uri Caine on piano, Mark Helias on bass, Ches Smith on drums. Their energy is hair-trigger responsive, muscular and nimble, as you can hear on the opening track, “Sprawl.” In case you weren’t aware, a sprawl is a defensive technique used to escape takedown attempts; I hear a slippery urgency in the song, which toggles between a calypso-esque beat and a fast-percolating swing.
Simon Moullier, “808”
Over the last several years, vibraphonist Simon Moullier has kept raising the bar (no pun intended) on his own narrative of emergence. Elements of Light, due out on Candid Records on Sept. 20, seems likely to continue the unbroken skyward trajectory. Featuring a flexible young quartet with pianist Lex Korten, bassist Rick Rosato and drummer Jongkuk “JK” Kim, the album opens with “808” — its title being a reference to the vintage Roland drum machine, and not (one presumes) my old area code. Click that link on the song’s title to hear it in full on your streaming service; the video above previews the first two minutes. This is the only song I’ve heard from the new album so far, but I appreciate the way it recalls a semi-acoustic lyrical fusion band like Steps Ahead, even as its machinery hums in a 21st-century key.
Thanks for reading The Gig. If you’re enjoying Take Five, or anything else we do here, tell all of your friends! Or even just that one friend.
SML, “Three Over Steel”
The acronym SML will be familiar to anyone who’s worked in retail apparel. In case you needed further assistance, its new album, out today on International Anthem, is titled Small Medium Large. There’s an implicit promise in that name, the idea that something here is bound to fit. (Set the XL aside for a sophomore release?) Or maybe it’s a nod to the actual size dimensions of its members: Anna Butterss on electric bass, Josh Johnson on saxophone and electronics, Jeremiah Chiu on synths and samplers, Gregory Uhlmann on guitar, Booker Stardrum on drums and percussion.
The music on Small Medium Large went through the same iterative process as a recent album by guitarist Jeff Parker, Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy, which also featured Johnson and Butterss. Basically, the musicians engaged in long-form improv at ETA, a Highland Park venue (sadly now shuttered), and then chopped and reshaped the results into new studio tracks. The end product, on a tune like “Three Over Steel,” delivers deftly refracted funk jams that feel as if they could go on forever (but clock in under six minutes). I consider it catnip. If I were anywhere near L.A. the week after next, I’d be hitting one of SML’s free album-release shows at Zebulon.
Klein/Rosaly/Warelis, “thickofit”
So what if the band name sounds like a personal injury law firm? This collective trio — bass clarinetist Tobias Klein, drummer Frank Rosaly, pianist Marta Warelis — locates a thoughtful and personal dimension in their open improvisations. Throughout tendresse, the trio’s new album on Relative Pitch, the ear adjusts to a method that privileges small, furtive gestures and a slow, accumulative mass.
The album opens with “thickofit” — a sly title, as I see it, because the music doesn’t drop you into the action so much as gradually raise the temperature until you realize things are at a rolling boil. Hang with the track for all 13 minutes, and you’ll be rewarded with truly potent dynamism from these three resourceful players. The magic lies in how we get there, a moment-by-moment play of reactions and contingent choices that could never be precisely replicated.
That does it for this edition of Take Five. Have a good weekend! Don’t let yourself spin out. Enjoy some music — and let me know what you think, while you’re at it.
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