Jemeel Moondoc, Connie Crothers, Two

Two (Relative Pitch 1009) pits Jemeel Moon- doc's alto with Connie Crothers' piano, recorded live at Connie's Loft in 2011. Good free explorations are what you would expect, and that you surely get.

Jemeel's post-bop outness shows strong roots here, transformed, and Connie's rootedness comes through a little bit more than on some of her other recent collaborations. What is nice especially about that (and what in part distinguishes the set) is that neither are looking back. They are continuing their movement forward into new avant freedom. It's just that the past figures as reference point a little more from time to time than perhaps on some other recordings lately.

There's even a song . . . or two. Jemeel's "You Let Me Into Your Life," for one, with a harmonic-melodic base which they launch off of. Connie's "Deep Friendship" isn't as much taking on song form, but it has compositional guideposts that serve as the basis of a free salvo.

This is the first time the two have recorded together and that turns out to be an auspiciously good thing. Both bring their "A" game, not that I have heard either in a "B" mode. They do what two improvising masters do best when engaging in spontaneous two-voiced interplay: to respond to each other's uniqueness with the uniqueness that is their own and in the process create something not quite the same, intermelded twoness, as what they might have done by themselves or with any other possible twosome.

They have mutual brilliance and the shining that comes about is that much better in tandem, like the earth if it had two suns and it was a beautifully sunny day. Like that.

Ernie Krivda, at the Tri-C Jazz Fest

Tenor master Ernie Krivda has carved a worthy niche for himself as a post-Rollins, post-Dexter bop traditionalist, an improviser of great invention, someone who chooses to continue to play in a classic older style of jazz, and to thrive musically in the process.

There have been quite a few albums. Here is a new one, Live at the Tri-C Jazz Fest (Cadence Jazz Records 1237). It's Ernie fielding a trio and and quartet at the Cleveland event, in 2008 and 2009, respectively. The music centers around jazz classics by Dexter, Monk, Trane, Rollins and Benny Golson. The bulk of the disk is taken up by the 2009 quartet date, with fired-up performances by Ernie with Claude Black (piano), Marion Hayden (acoustic bass), and Renell Gonsalves (drums). Four numbers give ample time for Mr. Krivda to work his magic. Though occasionally the tenor intonation gets slightly off, you get used to that because Ernie is wonderfully lucid here. Claude plays some full-fledged piano and the rhythm section churns, but it's all about Ernie in the end.

The earlier date gives us one selection, "I Remember Clifford." This time it's Ernie with a different group, a trio that includes Peter Dominguez on acoustic bass and Ron Godale on drums. It's definitive balladry. Dominguez sounds great arco in the beginning, just he and Ernie, then it goes to the full trio. Dominguez takes up the bow again for a nice solo. But if you don't know Mr. Krivda in action, listen to this track and you will get it!

There have been many young Turks who have come along and made Neo-Trad a factor in the Jazz Business. Truth is no one does it better than Ernie. It's in his bones to play like this. He works his vision of the mainstream with full conviction, authentic fire and the ease of a man who has been with it since the style was current, speaks it fluently as his "native tongue" and has the eloquence, fluidity and poise of a master.

This album brings that home to you full-force! Ernie is an institution of his own, Jazz at Ernie's Vital Center, so to speak. It's all on this CD.

Jeffrey Hayden Shurdut, Sound Journal, 2007

There is one thing you can depend on in life, at least. That is, you can depend on Jeffrey Hayden Shurdut to be out there in the trenches month after month, creating very good to excellent free jazz, free music, or whatever you might want to call it. He gets around, finds the best free musicians, can play cohesively and movingly on piano, reeds or guitar, is a real leader-organizer, finds playing situations and gets the music out.

He may be the Eddie Condon of the avant garde jazz scene in a way--a good player who brings others together and creates an environment for serious blowing.

You can hear it in the JaZt Tapes Artist's Promo CD-R release Sound Journal (JaZt Tapes 031). This one goes back a little to a live date in NYC, 2007. It's one free improvisation lasting 50 minutes, with Jeffrey on the piano, Blaise Siwula on saxes, Marc Edwards on drums, Daniel Carter on saxes, flute, clarinet and trumpet, Nick Gianni on contrabass and also tenor, flute and soprano, and Enrico Oliva on alto. The CD-R came out in 2011.

This one gives you a thick carpet of free maelstroming, Ascension-like multi-horn layers, all-over piano cascading, and Marc Edwards' muscular free-drumming style.

Some excellent blowing happening here. Everybody is keyed into one another, responds with the right thing for a collective mayhem that is exhilarating! If you like a good blow-out this one has it.

Find out more about this disk and how to get it at http://www.janstrom.se/6.-recordings/6.3.-jazt-tapes-6267605

Noah Preminger, Haymaker

Noah Preminger comes at us with his third release, Haymaker (Palmetto 2163) and with it he shows us some more of his modern roots. We have a quartet here: Preminger on tenor, Ben Monder on electric guitar, Matt Pavolka on acoustic bass, and Colin Stranahan on the drums. There are mostly originals, by Preminger and one by Monder in an advanced contemporary vein. They are very good.

As I listened over time to this one I was once again impressed with Preminger's poise and sureness. He plays! And it also hit me that this band, whether they intended it or not, at least on this disk show heavily the influence of and pay a kind of tribute to the Paul Motian trio with Joe Lovano and Bill Frisell. There is a loosely swinging in-and-out quality here like that trio and the Preminger-Monder interactions show also a tonal-harmonic based spaciness of a sort that certainly the Motian trio carved out for themselves at times.

Well and so that isn't to say that these are carbon copies (a very dated metaphor alas), cc's of the original threesome. There is much very good music to hear and some strong original touches too. Preminger is extraordinarily lucid and has his own sense of what and when to play, though more and more I hear that Lovano-Bergonzi-Garzone zone in him, a Bostonian vibe if you will. He's young though and working his way to his very own rip of things. Monder is very good too and makes this group sound as it does in large measure. The rhythm team Pavolka and Stranahan have finesse and push to get this all moving.

You have to start somewhere with your music and at album three Noah has gotten off to an auspicious start. We will no doubt, most of us, be listening closely and eagerly to see where it all goes in the years to come. Meanwhile Haymaker gives us a very nice ride and bears close scrutiny well.

Open Graves, Somewhere Beyond or Behind, Jessie Olsen Bay, Paul Kikuchi

Where are we going? Can anyone tell you? I allude to an "old" song by Tony Williams Lifetime but it applies today as it did then. One answer is contained in the music of group-duo Open Graves. Perhaps that is not a name designed to charm average folks, but their music is far-from-average so there is complementarity there.

Open Graves is Jesse Olsen Bay and Paul Kikuchi. On their recent EP Somewhere Beyond or Behind (Prefecture 007), available in a limited edition of 150 CDs, they extend their uncanny exploration of aural ambiances. For this one Jesse mans various metal percussion and "broken and acoustic guitars." Paul gets on metal percussion as well, along with prepared piano and a drum set.

As with previous releases by the unit and by Paul with other configurations, this is some of the most aurally evocative music you can hear today. It's composed-improvised in ways that have an almost ritual unfolding. Imagine the music of Morton Feldman and some of Alvin Curran's installations and/or sound poems. A similar attention to space is operative, in its own way. So those two innovators come to mind as I listen to Open Graves music, especially this EP. Like with those artists there is a richly moody-cosmic sound world at hand, not dense or boisterous, but spaced in exotically inventive ways. Sound color is at a saturation point, wonderfully so...and originally so.

Get this one for starters. I think they are doing something fundamental, new and exciting.

By a more-or-less total coincidence I post on Paul Kikuchi's birthday, June 7th, so let's all wish him a happy one!

Lucian Ban, Mat Maneri, Transylvanian Concert

According to my stats this is post 1002 in the Gapplegate Music Review series on this blog. Thanks for sticking with me, thanks for reading, and stay tuned for much more to come, I can only hope.

The future of music, what you will hear today, tomorrow, 20 years from now, we can no more be sure about than about anything else in the future. Some things we can know, like for example it is quite likely that the minuet will not make a major resurgence. But are we sure? Who would have thought that hi-fi bachelor pad music of late '50s-early '60s provenance would come again to our attention?

So when pianist Lucian Ban did with Alex Harding the Tuba Project a number of years ago (covered recently on these pages, see May 1, 2013 posting), I would not have expected with the kind of dynamic hard-blowing music of that album to hear him now with a very different approach. And I am sure it is because I have not gotten to know Maestro Ban's music intimately in the widest sense. For here he gets together with the wonderful violist Mat Maneri for a live recording of duets where very open improvisation meets new music structural elements and very different compositional templates.

Transylvanian Concert (ECM B0018433-02) puts Ban and Maneri in a zone quite fitting for a new ECM release. There are subtle, inspired, freely transpiring compositions by Ban and one by Maneri, a collaborative composition and a Maneri arrangement of the spiritual "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen."

It gives you that lovely deep Maneri viola sound. Nobody sounds like him that I know of--and it is not gushy, not vibrato-centered, just squarely direct in a beautiful way. Then of course they both get improvisations going that one must savor--they are exquisite, not like a cannister of caviar, but with the beautifully natural crystalline cubism of grains of sea salt. There is a robustness to the beauty, a reflectiveness, an honest forthright somber-penetrating feel to the music.

You hear the blues in its essence, you hear some of the ultra-chromatic bridges to a sophisticated harmo-melodic end of new music-free music and even folk strains. And whatever they do in this concert, it is on that rarified level of two masters in a highly inventive mood.

Both Ban and Maneri are in peak form. It serves as a beautiful introduction to the two artists, or a reaffirmation of why you found these player-composers interesting in the first place. If there is an ECM sound, as of course there has been for a long time, it doesn't stand still. This one is an example of how the music moves forward in good ways.

Chris McNulty, The Song That Sings You Here

Singers. Jazz singers. So many out there right now. So many releases. And in the thick of it all it sometimes hits me that to be a really great "jazz singer" is perhaps one of the hardest feats of all. You have the spirits of the titans behind you, never gone because so much a part of the tradition. Billie, Sarah, Ella, Carmen, Betty. Tough acts to follow. Some make it different, try to break the mould and go the way they hear it. Others straddle the tradition and give us mainstream styling that nonetheless is original.

Chris McNulty is in the latter mode. And she is very good. The Song That Sings You Here (Challenge 73341) will give you a good listen. It's Chris and a jazz combo. There are some McNulty originals, good ones. There are some standards not typically done, "How are Things in Glocca Morra," "Jitterbug Waltz," the beautifully bittersweet, regretful "Last Night When We Were Young."

She has subtlety, a nice instrument, phrasing chops. The arrangements have a limber quality yet do not seem "thrown together" with any sort of haste. And there are solid soloists to step in for a little instrumentality between choruses. Mike Ledonne gives us a nifty arrangement of "On the Street Where You Live" and Chris gives us a very nice set of vocalizings overtop.

So here's a good one! It's not rehashed by-the-numbers stuff. It stands out.