Roberto Fonseca
Zamazu
Enja/Justin Time
A delicious blend of Afro-Cuban ballads, bop-oid piano high jinx, introspective soul, classically infused Keith Jarrett-like meditation, and Brazilian slow dance rhythms. Next-generation Buena Vista Social Club pianist-composer-arranger Fonseca displays a lean, focused, intense musicality. Vocals are used sparingly and usually to descant or doubling effect. Drummer-percussionists Ramses Rodriguez and Emilio Del Monte Valdes, with bassist Omar Gonzalez, provide moody, unhurried infrastructure and Javier Zalba’s clarinet an enticing, sad call to the past. The album’s a finely textured tonic to accompany languid summer nights.
The Neil Cowley Trio
Displaced
HideInside
English pianist Neil Cowley was a classical child prodigy who later spun into the funk and soul scenes, then became half of a production duo concocting mellow jazz. That record company went kaput and, after too long nosing into computerized mixing boards, so did Cowley’s inspiration. He found it again in an acoustic childhood friend with 88 keys, a strong back, and infinite moods; hooked up with bassist Richard Sadler and Evan Jenkins on drums; rediscovered his love of chords and quirkiness and fun; rehearsed for a week; and did a two-day take at Real World Studios. The result is this no-gimmicks celebration of ensemble and rhythm and pure pagan piano pleasure. In “How Do We Catch Up,” the trio strides its way through the mud of an intricate rhythm like trail runners getting pyched and splattered at a creek crossing. The title track is a brooding meditation that speaks to displacement’s sad but alert wonder, as do “Mourn” and “Pillar to Post.” But tunes like “She Eats Flies” and “Clown Town” revel in clever, Zappa-esque whimsy. “That’s My Space” displays an elegant sense of line and a gracious practiced precision in chordal voicing. “Pinball Number Count” enjoys a lopsided funk groove. Displaced, Cowley seems to have rediscovered a deeply inward, childlike glee and astonishment at the exotic variety of intimate trio jazz, and, listening to it, we do too.
The Alan Ferber Nonet
The Compass
Fresh Sound New Talent
With a diverse background as sideman, touring show orchestra member, and studio musician, the wonderfully talented trombonist-composer-arranger Ferber offers a richly textured, complex, yet genial album of listenable but chance-taking tunes. He’s joined here by a number of New York-area musicians he met through a road show of Fosse, and in their relaxed, attentive group work you can hear the respectful intimacy of their collaboration. Ferber takes a not exactly shy, but low-key position, giving himself, for instance, a bubbling-up but hardly grandstanding chromatic cadenza in the title tune. He adapts the ambivalent beauty of guitarist Ben Monder’s “Luteous Pangolin” in an elegiac arrangement for horns only. “Lucky,” named after a mixed-breed dog, is a jaunty mixed breed itself highlighting the kick of twin brother Mark Ferber’s drums, and the suave strangeness of John Ellis’s inventive tenor sax wanderings. “North Rampart” is Ferber’s heartening, quiet tribute to New Orleans. “Sundown” is the group’s confident rendition of Alexis Cuadrado’s nod to “Night in Tunisia.” Bass clarinetist David Yates is featured in Dave Holland’s tune “The Razor’s Edge.” “Angel’s Landing,” named after a glorious hiking trail, pays homage to Debussy, Ferber says in his liner notes, but David Amram was the composer whose name kept popping into my head throughout this whole boundary-pushing album. I think that’s because both Amram and Ferber love the sound of horns and winds, and also have an exceedingly intelligent way of combining head and heart in sonorities that gratify but also provoke the ear.
John Fedchock New York Big Band
Up & Running
Reservoir
As if enjoying a fabulous tasting menu, Tune Head segued from Ferber’s inquisitive and often dark-hued improv-based arrangements to fellow New York trombonist Fedchock’s flashier, denser, more crackly ones. Let those with strong preferences shout them to the skies. I, wishy-washily enough, am thrilled by both sounds. While Ferber’s fledgling ensemble has barely emerged from its proverbial cracked egg, Fedchock’s has been on the circuit for two decades, and has built on the tight-chart lineage of Fedchock’s former patron Woody Herman. As player, Fedchock himself has a wondrous and unshowy speed and versatility that must make student trombonists drool, and not just when emptying their mouthpieces. The group overall has a shiny, brassy quality, but Fedchock is in a light, confident place with an instrument that with lesser players too often trips over itself in quick-slide solo work. As arranger, he’s got an especially sure hand with ballads. I love the clean broad-brush chromaticisms of his “Embraceable You.” Coltrane’s “Moment’s Notice” is splashed with some great spicy percussion from drummer Dave Ratajczak and Bobby Sanabria on congas. Fedchock gives Sonny Rollins’s “Alfie’s Theme” a skyscraper sureness behind the original’s knowing urbane stroll. And Fedchock’s own “J Birds,” “Elvin’s Empire,” and “The Ariztocrat” build with edgy charts on the ballsy driving big-band sounds of the 60s and 70s. Then, the eccentric strut of the concluding “Mr. Dudley” promises more respectful big-band innovation where this came from.
Darrell Grant
Truth and Reconciliation
Origin Records
Formerly a pianist with singer Betty Carter, Grant dipped for a while with Verve-Forecast into funk and worldbeat. Now a professor on the jazz faculty at Portland State, he offers here a lesson in how to interlace not just genres, but politics and music, in a way that’s powerful rather than preachy. Working with a superb lineup--John Patitucci on bass, Brian Blade on drums, Bill Frisell and Adam Rogers on guitar, and Joe Locke on vibes—Grant stirs traditional jazz, global rhythms, gospel, pop, and excerpts from famous speeches into a memorable mélange. He risks aesthetic impurity and political gimmickry in combining Gandhi, FDR, Nelson Mandela, Sting, Sheryl Crow, Jerome Kern, and a half-dozen other compositional and oratorical elements. But the risks generally pay off and then some. His arrangement of “The Way You Look Tonight” brings out the awed humility of exquisite beauty absorbed and makes you hear this sweet standard anew. The Gandhi speech in "Ubuntu," FDR’s “Four Freedoms” in “Resolution of Love,” and Mandela’s 1964 words in “When I See the Water” bring out the musicality of the rhetoric, and the inherent wishful purpose in the music. Sting has often had at least one foot in jazz and it’s only fitting to return the favor with a graceful lunge into pop. “King of Pain” here rings like a rebirth of the cool. I like Crow, but she never made me weepy performing her own tunes. JFK’s inaugural address and Dr. King’s “Mountaintop” and “Dream” speeches, set to Crow’s “I Shall Believe,” did. This is an ambitious, heartfelt, heady album that rewards attentive listening.
-Alexander C. Kafka
