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Album Review
Marsalis performs a rendition of Keith Jarrett’s 1974 LP, “Poseer” and Lehman plays “the music of Anthony Braxton,” revealing new lessons.
By Hank Shteamer
Wonderful jazz composers are legion. But the list of wonderful jazz composers whose paintings are reproduced through artists regularly?It is a much more exclusive club.
Thus, when a jazz musician devotes an entire disc to the paintings of a less famous figure, she reads it as an act of deliberate, even courageous pleading. Soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy did it for Thelonious Monk in 1959, releasing “Reflections,” the pianist’s first tribute album, which paved the way for a broader engagement with monk’s sui generis e-book; Similarly, in the 1980s and 1990s, pianist Misha Mengelberg, trombonist Roswell Rudd, and the collective known as the Herbie Nichols Project, made strong instances in the Nichols’ previously hard-to-understand paintings.
Two new jazz releases place a pair of saxophonists taking similar stands. Braxton, the unorthodox nonpublic visionary who is also Lehman’s nonpublic mentor and former collaborator. The backings provide the strength of the curtains in question while achieving a safe kind of expressive take-off that makes them more than memory blankets.
Jarrett’s club has unusual needs for the potential performer. It’s an album of emotional extremes that embraces ecstatic exuberance and a desire for prayer. It is also almost inextricable from the idiosyncrasies of its creator, revered as an improviser but underrated for his prolific writing, which culminated in the 1970s with bespoke works for a quartet in the United States and which European heard about “belonging. “
Marsalis has already approached the demanding masterpiece of Jazz, covering the entire “A Supreme Love” through John Coltrane in the study and at the level in the early 2000s, but for his best, his “belonging” goes further. In the original album, The Name Song is a brief reflexive interlude, touched as a duo without only between Jarrett in the piano and Jan Garbarek in tenor. Marsalis takes his time with the work, pointing out the theme in the soprano saxophone and leaving the area for the rhythmic segment: pianist Joey Caldrazzo, bassist Eric Révis and drummer Justin Faukner, establish a lovely texture through Ballad Rubato. Upon returning, Marsalis begins to touch sweets and aqueous aqueous sentences, then cres at a penetrating intensity for the last statement of topic, the fanated organization to adjust as its tone becomes increasingly urgent. It is a functionality that honors and amplifies the good dark appearance of the source material.
“The Windup” represents the other “belonging” post. A curling and acrobatically sinuous theme, it suggests that Boogie-Woogie has understood the impression, evoking a temperament for the infectious degent. Marsalis’ quartet has followed as a favorite in recent years, and a past edition has given the impression of the group’s 2019 live album, “The Secret Between The Shadow and the Soul. “As in this performance, Faulkner is the driving force behind the new study intake. Here, it gets even louder, supplementing the piano and opening the VAMPL bass with a festive rhythm actively dialed in via a syncopation dam on the soft snare and bell.
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