Volume 28 Issue 4 | February - March 2023

ut expandable, repertoire. Here that notion
has grown from a single studio session and
a piano trio to nearly four hours with brilliant
saxophonist Greg Osby joining Sorey,
pianist Andrew Diehl (the star of Mesmerism)
and bassist Russell Hall, recorded over three
nights at New York’s Jazz Gallery.
It’s a mode that’s rarely heard on record
(where composer royalties are an issue),
though it’s the lifeblood of the jazz club, a
concentrated dialogue around a common
repertoire, though here broader than
usual. Its thematic bases include American
Songbook titles (Cole Porter’s Night and Day,
Van Heusen and Burke’s It Could Happen
to You) to earlier jazz forms (Fats Waller’s
Jitterbug Waltz, Billy Strayhorn’s Chelsea
Bridge) to bop and free jazz (Thelonious
Monk’s Ask Me Now to Andrew Hill’s Ashes
and Ornette Coleman’s Mob Job), several
heard in different forms from different nights.
The performances brim with life. Osby
is central here, whether broadly lyrical or
pressing toward expressionist intensity,
generating continuous lines that accommodate
themselves to the varied material but
have a life of their own. This celebrates the
core jazz experience, a small group exploring
the melodic and harmonic possibilities, the
expressive resonances and collective meanings
of a song at length (20 minutes in the
case of Three Little Words). It’s a contemporary
embodiment of a great tradition.
Stuart Broomer
Hyaku, One Hundred Dreams
Satoko Fujii
Libra Records 209-071 (librarecords.com)
! Hyaku, One
Hundred Dreams is
pianist/composer
Satoko Fujii’s 100th
CD as leader and a
fitting celebration
of her remarkable
career, launched
in 1996 with duets
with Paul Bley. Among images of her first 99
works, South Wind, the fourth, leaps out, its
title track figuring significantly for me during
20 years of teaching jazz history. Based on
an Okinawan mode, it combines dramatic
energy and pacific beauty, embodying what
jazz has increasingly become, an inclusivist
art alive to local dialects and the possibility of
global values.
The contrasts, too, are dramatic, reflecting
how much has changed. South Wind’s big
band was conventional, with sections of
trumpets, trombones, reeds and rhythm
instruments, with Fujii the sole woman
among 15 musicians; Hyaku is a nonet with
individual emphases on both instruments and
musicians, its ensemble almost evenly split
between women and men. Further, Hyaku’s
five-part suite blurs composed and improvised
components.
From its beginning, Hyaku introduces
essential qualities in Fujii’s music, the subtly
organic shape of her initial piano figures, the
landscape-like incidental percussion, the
dream-like flow state and an undercurrent of
welling energy. Each movement will extend a
continuum with what has gone before, theme
statements, improvised solos and ensemble
passages achieving rare homogeneity. Each
member of a brilliant ensemble will appear
in the foreground, from trumpeters Wadada
Leo Smith and Natsuki Tamura through
bassoonist Sara Schoenbeck, tenor saxophonist
Ingrid Laubrock, electronic musician
Ikue Mori and bassist Brandon Lopez to
drummers Tom Rainey and Chris Corsano.
Stuart Broomer
Unstuck in Time: The Kurt Vonnegut Suite
Jason Yeager Septet w/Miguel Zenón
Sunnyside Records SSC 1672
(sunnysiderecords.bandcamp.com/album/
unstuck-in-time-the-kurt-vonnegut-suite)
! Kurt Vonnegut
was a satirist,
science fiction
writer and
outsized personality
who is still
quoted and revered
long after his
death. The pianist
and composer Jason Yeager has been a
huge fan for years and had composed
several jazz pieces inspired by Vonnegut’s
writing. Unstuck in Time (named after Billy
Pilgrim’s condition in Slaughterhouse-Five)
is a compilation of these pieces released to
honour the author’s 100th birthday.
All the works are lively, build off Vonnegut’s
idiosyncratic narratives and characters and
utilize Yeager’s septet which, in addition to
the rhythm section, contains combinations
of saxophone, clarinet, trumpet, trombone
and vibraphone. Blues for Billy Pilgrim has
a wistful feeling, with a Thelonious
Monk-like melody with a rowdy trumpet
solo. Bokonon opens with a delightful
hip-hop vibe and features a vivacious
staccato alto sax performance by Miguel
Zenón. Kilgore’s Creed begins with the band
chanting (from the novel Timequake) “You
were sick, but now you are well again and
there’s work to do” before working into a
jazz polka rhythm, overlaid with excellent
ensemble playing and solos.
Unstuck in Time is everything Vonnegut
would have loved: eclectic and sensitive
compositions and performances that show
how jazz can have a lot of fun while paying
homage to an artistic hero.
Ted Parkinson
Heyday
RJ LeBlanc
MCM; Bent River Records; Diese Onze
Records (rjleblanc.bandcamp.com)
! The embodiment
of smoothness,
Heyday has the
fluidity of a living
organism, with nary
a transition feeling
contrived and a
staggering level of
sonic detail. Into
The Sun is a composition that takes calculated
risks while never coming across as arrogant.
Each metre and tempo change is seamless,
without clear delineations necessary in terms
of solo sections versus premeditated grooves.
In the track’s third and fourth minutes,
the synth ostinato slows to a halt, but the
momentum of the music isn’t compromised,
as it either punctuates a backdrop of
thunderous percussion or brings the song
to a close.
Montreal bassist RJ LeBlanc as a session
leader is dazzlingly adept at precisely that:
taking one simple musical element and
finding a thousand different uses for it. In
a less overt way, the way LeBlanc incorporates
harmonics on his bass in the mesmerizing
emotional core track Chanson pour
Marguerite is quite fascinating. Extended
passages employing harmonics are used in
the beginning as a means of introducing the
primary melodic figure, used as an interlude
connecting sections, and then underneath the
guitar (Nicolas Ferron) to create a climatically
uplifting ambient soundscape. Meanwhile,
this album perhaps shines brightest when
LeBlanc brings along the entire ensemble,
with Saturnales in particular being a dizzyingly
dense achievement of married sound.
The track, like the album itself, is an exploration
of ingenuity and how invigorating it can
be to have friends to realize your ideas.
Yoshi Maclear Wall
Songwriter
Alex Bird; Ewen Farncombe
Independent (alexbird007.bandcamp.com)
! Alex Bird doesn’t
need an accompanist.
With a single
phrase, the directness
of his voice
conveys so much
emotional information,
that even
the most silent
seconds have an
unshakeable sense of fulfillment to them.
Pianist Ewen Farncombe, knowing this, gives
Bird plenty of voids to work with. There’s
an endearing ebb and flow to their tandem,
like the cordial exchange of shared dance,
a conversation, a flurry of interjections or
two shopping carts gracefully rolling across
66 | February & March, 2023 thewholenote.com