Volume 23 Issue 9 - June / July / August 2018

Free Yourself Up
Lake Street Dive
Nonesuch 2 567158 (nonesuch.com)
!!
I first came
across Lake Street
Dive when I caught
their (viral) YouTube
cover of The Jackson
Five hit I Want You
Back, shot live on
a street in Boston.
I was immediately
drawn in by lead singer Rachael Price’s throaty,
soulful voice. Add to that the four-piece band’s
tight vocal harmonies, groove and cohesion
and I was hooked. But that was six years ago
when doing cool covers in jazzy/R&B style
was their main thing. Now the group’s songwriting
is at the fore with their latest release,
Free Yourself Up, and their sound has shifted
to a more swaggering electric/soul/pop feel.
Vocal harmonies, however, are still a strong
and endearing feature of the band.
Bass player Bridget Kearney (formerly of
Joy Kills Sorrow) did most of the songwriting
on the album either alone or with bandmate
Mike Olson (trumpet, guitars). Her specialty is
breakup songs and she and the band manage
to make them driving and soulful yet still
melodic, as in Good Kisser and the beautiful
Musta Been Something. The songs co-written
by Olson and drummer Mike Calabrese are
lyrically a little more insouciant but still clever,
as in the very funky Red Light Kisses and
Doesn’t Even Matter Now. Generally the album
is a head-bopping ride and I bet this band
would be a lot of fun to see live. Details of their
extensive tour – including a stop in Toronto on
June 25 as part of the TD Toronto Jazz Festival –
can be found at LakeStreetDive.com.
Cathy Riches
Concert note: Lake Street Dive performs at
the Danforth Music Hall on June 25.
Something in the Air
The Continued Relevance of
Composer/Performer Roscoe
Mitchell
KEN WAXMAN
More than a half-century after his recording debut, multi-reedist
Roscoe Mitchell shows no sign of slowing down as a player or
composer. One of the founders of the Association for the
Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and the Art Ensemble of
Chicago (AEC), Mitchell, who also teaches, keeps the AEC going
alongside experiments with ensembles ranging from duos to big bands.
Many of the bigger configurations are pliable, however, so what at first
appears to be a large ensemble turns out to be several subsets of
musicians who more faithfully portray some of Mitchell’s thornier
compositions.
Bells for the South Side (ECM 2494/2495
ecmrecords.com), a two-CD set, is an
example of this. Although an additional eight
players are featured interpreting a dozen
Mitchell originals, the band members –
percussionists Tani Tabbal, William Winant
and Kikanju Baku, trumpeter Hugh Ragin,
reedist James Fei, keyboardist Craig Taborn,
bassist Jaribu Shahid plus Tyshawn Sorey,
who plays trombone, piano and drums – are usually divided into
various-sized groups featuring Mitchell on soprano, sopranino, alto or
bass saxophones, flute, piccolo, bass recorder and percussion. The
resilient Winant skilfully employs tubular bells, glockenspiel, vibes and
marimba during the 11 Chicago-recorded tracks, either in contrast to
other instrumental motifs or as a clanging continuum. On the title
track, for instance, his combination of bell shakes and bell-ringing
echoes alongside washboard-like scrubs as a perfect backdrop for
equivalent honks from Fei’s contralto clarinet and delicate storytelling
from Ragin’s piccolo trumpet. Meanwhile, Spatial Aspects of the Sound,
the leadoff track, demonstrates how tubular bell-hammering plus
segmented scrapes from other players (using Mitchell’s specially
constructed percussion cage) serve as discerning contrasts to formalist
timbres from pianist Taborn and Mitchell’s piccolo. These sorts of
meaningful challenges meander throughout the discs, as when Fei’s
sopranino and Mitchell’s bass saxophone move from shrill peeps and
tongue slaps to a pastoral-sounding coda; or when Shahid, Tabbal,
Ragin, one pianist and Mitchell on The Last Chord work brass tweets,
reed snarls, keyboard asides and bass-and-drum deliberations into a
theme that extends the concept of how a free-oriented group should
sound, offering simple swing and timbre scrutiny in equal measure.
Slippery reed and brass excursions are as common as carefully harmonized
and calming horn sequences here, as are delicate passages from
vibes and piano which set off equally intense drum forays pulsating
from any or all of the percussion kits. The extended and concluding Red
Moon in the Sky/Odwalla wraps up these sound currents, then
expands the program. Taborn’s and Fei’s electronically pushed waveform
pulsations and space-invader-like wiggles give way to martial
drumming and screaming reeds that amplify the wistful, contemporary
jazz narrative suggested earlier on Prelude to the Card Game, Cards for
Drums, And the Final Hand, but with Ragin’s cascading grace notes
and Mitchell’s nasal vibrations rejuvenating the narrative still further.
Finally, the gentle swing of Odwalla, an AEC classic, is the setting for
Mitchell’s mournful alto solo and some drum pitter patter.
A decade previously in Sardinia (2005),
Mitchell, playing alto and soprano saxophone
plus flute, met pianist Matthew Shipp, with
whom he had been collaborating for more
than a dozen years, for seven variations on
Accelerated Projection (RogueArt Rog 0079
roguart.com). In these pure improvisations,
the players alternate solo passages with those
moments where their thought processes
could be that of a single mind. Feeling out
each other’s dynamics and drawbacks, they
experiment with sweeping and clattering keyboard lines, pinched reed
peeps and augmentations in solo and duo configurations. By the time
the fourth track arrives, though, they’ve worked out an interactive
concoction. At that point, just as they’ve serenely probed every musical
nuance, they rev up to hardened staccato with so many timbres packed
into their playing that they threaten to overflow the sound limits.
Accelerated Projection VI is the climactic synthesis, where after experimenting
with inner-piano-string pulls plus ethereal flute somersaults,
they limit themselves to the keyboard and saxophones. On soprano,
Mitchell’s honks and split tones vibrate every note and its extensions
to the limit, as Shipp turns from key dusting and caressing to highfrequency
chording that echoes and links to the reed output. From that
point on, an exercise in smoothing out key jiggles and overblown reed
shrills leads to an instance of sophisticated tonal fusion.
Flash forward 11 years to Toronto and Ride the Wind (Nessa ncd-40
nessarecords.com) preserves a concert Mitchell was involved in,
featuring an 18-piece Montreal-Toronto Art Orchestra (MTAO) specially
assembled by trombonist Scott Thomson and bassist Nicolas Caloia to
play expanded arrangements, transcribed and orchestrated from some
of the saxophonist’s compositions, many of which were previously
recorded with Taborn and Baku in trio form. With Gregory Oh as
conductor, Mitchell supervises rather than plays, except for a brief
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