Towering, Funky, Innovative Big Band Jazz From Organist Matthias Bublath’s Eight Cylinder Bigband

From the first few spiraling seconds of the intro to the first track on the Eight Cylinder Bigband’s debut album – streaming at Spotify – it’s obvious that this is not your average large jazz ensemble. Other than Dr. Lonnie Smith’s octet, this may be the only big band in the world led by a jazz organist. Matthias Bublath orchestrates his song with innovatively intricate flair, matching that with his attack on the keys. There’s a deep New Orleans funk influence here, but that’s often cached beneath many layers.

The result sometimes requires a lot of rapidfire, meticulous playing from the eighteen-piece group, and they deliver. The first number, Midnight Intro is a starry Hollywood Hills boudoir funk groove beefed up with judicious orchestral swells and an energetically melisamtic solo from lead trumpeter Takuya Kuroda.

Nice Green Bo has some nice call-and-response over funky syncopation, part 70s Crusaders, part darkly blustery, cinematic theme, a lithely dancing alto sax solo at the center as the organ swirls and pulses in the background. Eventually, the bandleader adds a Riders on the Storm electric piano solo.

Bassist Patrick Scales opens Eight Cylinder with a tasty rumble underneath the brightly pouncing horns, the song shifting further into funk, dipping and rising again with tight solos from alto sax and trumpet, to a torrential coda from Bublath. The simply titled Gospel Song has one of the album’s most imaginative charts, a surreal blend of slow, summery bluesiness and orchestral heft, Kuroda contributing bubbly lyricism.

Home Cooking is a Meters-style soul strut with a defiantly allusive baritone sax solo and a wryly hazy, halfspeed psychedelic interlude where all the textures get woozy. Bublath switches to piano, then glittery, reverbtoned Rhodes in the brassy salsa-jazz number Return the Source

Guitarist Ferdinand Kirner’s spare chicken-scratch lines contrast with the orchestral grandeur in Dump the Goose as the horns tease out a New Orleans melody and the bandleader sails around. Sad Belt is moodier but no less funky and majestic as Bublath takes the music into sunnier terrain, with hints of gospel and a series of bracing tradeoffs between the organ and various parts of the ensemble.

The most straight-up funky number here is Mister Scales, spiced with an ebulliently bluesy guitar solo. The album’s biggest New Orleans funk homage is Outro Blow. They close with Bolero, which is a lot closer to Stan Getz’s adventures in Brazilian music than it is anything particularly Spanish.

Pushing beyond both the confines of the organ jazz and big band demimondes, this is a very entertaining project from a group that also includes trumpeters Nemanja Jovanovich, Florian Jechlinger, Reinhard Greiner and Andreas Unterrainer; saxophonists Ulrich Wangenheim, Florian Riedl, Alexander Kuhn, Moritz Stahl and Gregor Burger; trombonists Jürgen Neudert, Hans Heiner Bettinger, Erwin Gregg and Jakob Grimm, and drummer Christian Lettner.

Another Side of a Grimly Prophetic Post-9/11 Masterpiece

Pianist Vijay Iyer offers some eerie context for the new album InWhatStrumentals – streaming at Bandcamp – an instrumental version of his classic 2003 In What Language collaboration with hip-hop artist Mike Ladd. “We were just coming to terms with the facts on the ground, which today seem frighteningly ordinary: mounting intolerance and hate crimes against Muslims, Arabs, Sikhs, and other nonwhite people; traumatic raids of immigrant communities by the INS (later Homeland Security); the prospect of endless, amoral war waged under false pretenses; the callous neoliberal agendas of globalization and disaster capitalism; and an unprecedented power grab enacted under cover of jingoism and feigned incompetence.”

Plus ça change!

What differentiates this from the original is that there’s no lyric track. This turns out to be the rare hip-hop album whose music is as turbulently cinematic as the lyrics. The original album title was taken from a quote by Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who a few months prior to 9/11 was detained while trying to catch a connecting flight at Kennedy Airport and then sent back, rather than being allowed to continue on his way. The gist of Panahi’s question is that reason and common sense are useless when dealing with little Hitlers.

Listening to the music without the voices of a parade of people persecuted during the wave of anti-immigrant paranoia after 9/11 is a bit strange, and removes a whole layer of context. But that music has held up magnificently. The opening number, the first movement of the suite The Color of My Circumference has Iyer’s darkly swarming piano rivulets over anxious, insistent, circular rhythms. Eventually drummer Trevor Holder and bassist Stephan Crump join the pummeling attack, Rudresh Mahanthappa’s alto sax and Ambrose Akinmusire’s trumpet floating overhead. Everything soon fades out.

Along with Ladd’s coldly techy layers of spy-movie keys, cellist Dana Leong figures heavily into the ominous swirl and staggered pulse of The Density of the 19th Century. Throughout the rest of the album, the disquiet is relentless, whether from guitarist Liberty Ellman’s bordering-on-frantic, circular riffs, Akinmusire’s forlorn, desolate lines, Mahanthappa’s enigmatic bhangra riffage, and Holder’s tense, practically motorik rhythms. Some of these themes are over in little more than two minutes, others take more time to draw you into the vortex. Sometimes the bustle of these airport scenarios masks the sinister forces lurking at the gates, other times that cold suspicion and assumption of criminality is front and center. So when the band pivot toward warm roots reggae in Taking Back the Airplane, or offer calm, enveloping hope in Asylum, the effect is especially striking.

The artists are donating proceeds from sales of the new record to organizations supporting immigrant groups and communities of color imperiled by the lockdown.

A Lush, Sweeping Debut Album From the String Orchestra of Brooklyn

Although the String Orchestra of Brooklyn have been championing new composers for more than ten years, their debut album – streaming at Bandcamp – only came out late last year. It has two spacious, rather horizontal contemporary pieces alongside a couple of unselfconsciously vigorous Italian Renaissance works, The dynamics and range of the ensemble, as well as the singers, really shine here.

The first piece is Christopher Cerrone‘s High Windows, beginning with shivery sixteenth-notes behind sudden doppler bursts and a low drone. A sudden airy horizontality slowly gains momentum with terse moodiness rising from the low strings, the violins finally descending and joining the lattice. A muted loopiness in the return of the opening theme has icy echoes of electronic music; it ends in a long, somber series of waves.

Jacob Cooper‘s Stabat Mater Dolarosa unfolds at a glacial pace, sheets of sound drifting through the mix, akin to watching cirrus clouds on the horizon on a relatively windless day. Uneasy close harmonies rise and then fade away. The composer’s use of implied melody as the sound rises with an allusive ominousness from the low strings is very clever, especially as a choir enter wordlessly. With the singers sometimes adding harmony, sometimes doubling the violin lines, the atmosphere grows more somber, leading to a long descent into the abyss led by the basses. The rise to density afterward is much more disquieting, with a series of slow, massed glissandos. The effect where the singers have to pause for a breath is, well, breathtaking. Soprano Mellissa Hughes adds stark, plainchant-inspired lines over the waves of the concluding movement

Paganini’s Caprice No. 6 in G minor is actually more of a canon, also built around slowly shifting sustained lines, but with rapidfire, tremoloing violin. The ensemble close the album with a steadfastly marching interpretation of the first movement of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, the choir enhancing a gothic undercurrent.

Prime Early Orchestral Duke Ellington From the Jazz at Lincoln Center Ochestra with Wynton Marsalis

What do you do when your big band can’t play any gigs because of the lockdown? You put out an album to keep your fans satisfied until you can get back onstage. More of the large ensembles who play big concert halls around the world should follow the example of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, who’ve just put out a dynamically rich, aptly epic recording of a 2017 live performance of Duke Ellington’s Black Brown and Beige, streaming at youtube.

The big difference between this and the 1943 original is the sonics. Stereo and digital clarity are part of the picture. Interestingly, while JALC’s Rose Auditorium is a pretty dry room – for a jazz venue, especially – you can hear some reverb on the brass. And Marsalis is an Ellingtonian to the core: his passion for this music translates to both the orchestra and the listener.

The dips, swells and conversational contrasts between winds and brass are vividly distinct throughout the suite’s first number, Work Song. As early symphonic Ellington, it’s fascinating to see how the composer takes a folksy 19th century-style melody, makes a plush swing tune and then classical music out of it, seamlessly And the bandleader’s wry phrasing with his mute in response to the daily drudgery is spot-on.

Eli Bishop’s wistfully soaring violin solo in Come Sunday is just as impactful, setting up the long, balmy closing tenor sax break: this is a wind-down day, and it’s sad to see the weekend go. Kicking off with Marsalis’ coy reveille, Light is a good example of how far Ellington would go in pushing a swing theme beyond the confines of a 78 RPM record.

Vaudevillian drums anchor the hazy, complex harmonies of West Indian Dance, until the rhythm section push the beat and it’s choo-choo-ch-boogie, yeah mon! Emancipation Celebration serves as a jubilant coda. Then Brianna Thomas joins the band to deliver a broodingly hushed take of Blues Theme Mauve; a stunningly haggard alto sax solo draws a burst of applause from the crowd.

In the series of themes that follow, jungly drums give way to a funereal interlude that finally engages the piano, then a comfortable walz and a triumphant return to swing. The long tenor sax solo at the center of a warmly nocturnal Sugar Hill Penthouse has nonchalantly impressive range. The orchestra bring the suite full circle, conversationally, trumpeter Chris Crenshaw putting the icing on the cake

Playful Baroque Jazz, Among Other Styles, From the Endangered Quartet

If you’ve felt endangered this year, the Endangered Quartet can relate. But their debut album, Heart – streaming at Bandcamp – isn’t harrowing or particularly troubled music. It’s actually a lot of fun, and blends a wide variety of styles, as you would expect from a group whose individual members move seamlessly between the worlds of jazz, old and new classical music, and bluegrass. Multi-saxophonist Roy Nathanson and trombonist Curtis Fowlkes are part of the core of the legendary, noir-tinged Jazz Passengers. Jesse Mills is a highly sought-after classical violinist, and bassist Tim Kiah is not only a brilliant composer of serious concert music, but also an accomplished bluegrass musician.

The opening track is the strangest version of Bach’s Chorale, BWV 244-44 that you’ll ever hear. Mills and Fowlkes provide statey harmonies as Nathanson adds droll microtones and Kiah sings a warmly homespun lyric.

The Home-Makers is genuinely acid jazz: a loopy, insistent violin riff and surreal vocals interrupt a tiptoeing swing tune. The individual members shift elegantly from a pavane of sorts to very individualistic paths in Same, Same, with the same combination of drollery and utter seriousness as Ron Hay’s work with the Erik Satie Quartet. The Beatles’ Blackbird works surprisingly well in that context here as well.

The quartet pulse gracefully through the second part of Ornette Coleman’s The Circle With a Hole in the Middle, with a rapidfire ascent from Mills. They follow it with the wryly conversational, minimalist Marbles, by Mills and Hugo Dwyer. Con Anima, also by Mills, comes as quite a change afterward, a moody baroque piece with much more somber exchanges of voices and a big shivery coda. Returning to the A-section of the Coleman piece, they diverge but without deviating from a swing beat.

The four go back to baroque jazz with the comfortable pulsing miniature Sweet Intentions and the more acerbic Cry of the Wild, a Dwyer/Kiah co-write with animated solos from Nathanson and Fowlkes. The trombonist’s vocals add a knowing gravitas to Kiah’s eco-disaster cautionary tale Endangered Hearts, a souful 6/8 soul ballad with a spiraling Mills solo.

Edges, a Mills tune, has baroque bursts and trills over a trip-hop bassline; then the rhythm drops out and a rather solemn exchange ensues. Bombardment Reconsidered, by Nathanson and Dwyer, features light-footed exchanges over loopy riffs, Fowlkes in the role of troll, Mills signaling a rise in agitation. Kiah takes over the mic on the album’s closing cut, a spare, nocturnal chamber pop take of Leadbelly’s Goodnight Irene.

Intuitive, Fearlessly Fun Reinventions of Iconic Classical Pieces from Eliane Rodrigues

One of the funniest videos on youtube is a 2016 audience recording of the beginning of pianist Eliane Rodrigues‘ performance of Chopin’s Polonaise Fantasie, Op. 61 at a concert in her hometown of Antwerp. It’s obvious in the first few seconds that something is wrong with the piano. How she deals with it is priceless. Youtube pageview counts are notoriously inflated, but it wouldn’t be a surprise if all six million hits on this video were real: it’s that good.

After watching her in that situation, her solo piano arrangement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, on her new album Aeternum – streaming at Spotify – comes as no surprise. It’s the kind of thing you play at a party after everybody’s had a few drinks. Don’t even start with the famous first movement: put the second on and see how many people get the joke. And it doesn’t even start with a joke: Rodrigues reinvents it as a High Romantic tour de force, drenched in as much angst as devious humor.

And it sounds nothing like the comparatively tame, stolidly marching Liszt transcription: this is pure fun. Rodrigues uses a ton of space to ramp up the suspense, holds onto pivotal moments for dear life, employs rubato constantly to underscore as much gothic grimness as sheer buffoonery. This isn’t just punk classical: there’s immense depth and feeling when she’s not going for broke with the jokes. One suspects the composer, a recidivist bon vivant, would have played it much the same way.

Rodrigues also tackles a half-dozen Bach pieces here. Her approach to the Prelude and Fugue in G major, BWV 541 is practically breathless, with a stunningly light touch in places, even more so as the famous fugue theme begins. But she doesn’t stay there long, raising the volume with a crushing precision. Her take of the equally iconic Fantaisie and Fugue in G minor, BWV 542 is completely the opposite, riding the pedal for an approximation of organ resonance before backing away wistfully, syncopating while walking the bass hard, and conjuring up as much nocturnal glimmer as she can.

There are two other Bach pieces on the album. The Prelude and Fugue in A Minor, BWV 543 is another staple of the organ repertoire: her dusky introduction and angst-fueled insistence are spot-on, as is her steady but slashing, proto-Rachmaninovian interpretation of the fugue. And she teases out every bit of puckish humor, scampering phantasmagoria and grand guignol as anybody could want from the iconic Toccata and Fugue in D.

It’s obvious that Rodrigues really went under the lid with all of this. You may disagree with her dynamics but you can’t fault her for technical flaws or lack of chutzpah. Anyone who might think this music is stuffy (it’s actually anything but) has never heard Rodrigues play it.

An Unexpectedly Vigorous Yet Characteristically Dark Album of Arvo Part Music

Violinist Viktoria Mullova’s album of Arvo Part works with the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra under Parvo Jaarvi – streaming at Spotify – reads like a single contiguous piece of music. While not all of it is brooding and mystical, in keeping with most of the composer’s work, the overall atmosphere is characteristically somber. It may be a cliche to say that musicians from a composer’s home turf play that repertoire best, but with this album it’s hard to argue with that contention.

In the brief, austerely sober Song of Songs, which opens the album, spare, tolling bell accents linger through the ominous upward drive to Mullova’s first shivery cadenza; then silence. Airy highs draw a brooding response from the orchestra.

Her energetically circling, folk-inspired solo arpeggios, introducing the second piece, Fratres, offer not the slightest hint of the still, vast expanses that will unfold. This time it’s a woodblock and bass drum which signal Mullova’s elegant varations on the opening dance, over a crepuscular drone.. The rest of the strings follow with a much more somber, rhythmically disorienting development of the jaunty opening sequence. Meanwhile, the basses are unrelenting, holding a quietly sustained, enigmatic fifth interval.

Short, elegantly stabbing violin phrases lead to a momentary, strikingly dancing passage (for Part, anyway) in his rather rousingly crescendoing, vividly Bach-tinged Passacaglia. Mullova returns to insistent minimalism over an airy calm and fleeting, Arabic-tinged pizzicato to close it out.

The album’s centerpiece is the triptych Tabula Rasa. Ludus, the opening movement, follows a similar trajectory; this time it’s the piano which punches in as a stern anchor while the bells add sparse, enigmatic close harmonies. Essentially, this is Part’s Symphonic Dances, bristling with increasingly emphatic echo phrases punctuated by morose, reflectively quiet passages. That long, sustained chord at the end of the movement really packs a wallop!

A steady baroque-tinged cavatina theme takes shape in Silentum, the second movement: its seemingly endless wave motion looks back to Gorecki’s iconic Symphony No. 3. Where this ends with a steady descent to the depths, the Song of Songs reprise is delicate and hopeful, Mullova’s solemn resonance over loopy, steady upper-register piano. Slowly and methodically, the music grows more plaintive and more evocative of Pachelbel than any of the 20th century figures Part is associated with. For anyone reflecting on those we’ve lost during the lockdown, this makes an apt soundtrack.

A Rare Two-Piano Concert By the Lyrical Claire Ritter and the Hauntingly Acerbic Ran Blake

It’s going to be awhile before live music around the world is up and running again at pre-coronavirus levels, but there are innumerable great live albums we can enjoy in the meantime. One of the best of the past year or so is Ran Blake and Claire Ritter‘s Eclipse Orange, streaming at Spotify. Jazz musicians realized the innumerable benefits of making concert recordings just about as soon as the long-play vinyl record came into existence: Blake,  icon of noir jazz piano, has made more than one, while this is the first-ever twin-piano recording by Ritter, one of his protegees. They’re joined by saxophonist Kent O’Doherty for a college gig recorded in the fall of 2017 in North Carolina. It’s a long album, bigger on playful conversationality than the often chilling, highly improvisational tableaux Blake is unsurpassed at.

The show was a Thelonious Monk centenary celebration, and the group reinvent several of his tunes. But it’s the originals, and the improvisations, that are the real draw here. The simply titled Claire Ritter Story is the album’s opening number: there are places where this opaque, rather mysterious tune, with its mighty block chords, hints at going off the rails, but it never does. That will happen later from time to time. Beyond that, the playing is seamless and intuitive, Ritter usually in the good-cop role.

The duo’s devious repartee and rhythmic jousting throughout a thoroughly iced version of Blue Monk (that’s Blake in the right channel) energizes the crowd. Ritter’s title track, a lyrical solar eclipse narrative, doesn’t go thirty seconds without Blake bringing the glittering gremlins in. Backbone is a stride tune played through a funhouse mirror, while his well-known Short Life of Barbara Monk (a somber dedication to Monk’s late daughter) has a gorgeous focus that Ritter doesn’t wait to push into the macabre, only to pull it back.

O’Doherty joins in as the trio return to Monk for a jaunty but aptly phantasmagorical take of I Mean You, lightening later in Ritter’s High Top Sneakers. Blake shadows Ritter persistently in her lingering, Debussy-esque ballad In Between. Blue Grits has a sly, Monkish stroll, while Emerald and the Breeze has a gorgeously verdant closing-credits atmosphere.

Ghosts perambulate for flickering seconds and then stick around in the muted, stygian chords of Blake’s solo version of Summertime, echoed in his Improvisation of Selma, inspired by a Barbara Pennington painting. O’Doherty floats calmly over the gleaming neoromanticism of Ritter’s Karma Waltz, in contrast with the simmering agitation inherent in Waltzing the Splendor. Breakthru becomes a sort-of-wry game of knuckles, then the mood lightens with the Monkish ragtime of Cool Digs.

Blake goes under the hood for the summery soul ballad in Hubert Powell’s There’s Been a Change, then he makes it more of a song for all seasons. And he most likely isn’t the first guy you’d expect to be mining Brazilian repertoire, but he does that reflectively and reflexively here with famous Jobim and lesser known Ary Barroso themes. And if you ever wondered what Somewhere Over the Rainbow would sound like if Ran Blake – and Claire Ritter – did it, the answer is here. The Monkish take of Ritter’s Integrity ends the night on a deviously entertaining note

Defying Category With Svjetlana Bukvich’s Rich, Dramatic Compositions

As a composer, Svjetlana Bukvich has made a career out of jumping off cliffs and landing on her feet. Few other artists are able to bridge such a seemingly ridiculous number of styles without seeming the least bit out of place. Most, but not all, of her vibrant, dramatic, often darkly bristling compositions are electroacoustic, imbued with an irrepressible joie de vivre as wel as both a striking clarity and embrace of the absurd. It seems that she just writes what she wants to and lets everybody else figure out how to categorize it..or just leave it alone and enjoy its vitality. Her new album Extension – streaming at Spotify – is by turns surreal, futuristic, troubling and triumphant.

She plays zither harp through a maze of effects, joined by Susan Aquila on electric violin and David Rozenblatt on percussion, on the album’s opening track, The Beginning, flitting space junk and dancing, pingponging phrases over stygian washes. Bukvich builds the hypnotically circling prelude Utopia around a simple, insistent, wordless vocal riff spiced with her own bright electric piano, flickers from Jacqueline Kerrod’s electric harp over terse syncopation from bassist Patrick Derivaz and drummer Wylie Wirth. Is this art-rock? Indie classical? Does it matter?

Singers Kamala Sankaram and Samille Ganges harmonize uneasily over Bukvich’s dancing synth lines in the album’s title track: imagine an Ethiopian contingent passing through Jabba the Hut’s space lounge. Once You Are Not a Stranger is featured in three different versions throughout the album. Derivaz dips low to open the first one, string quartet Ethel building a pensive series of echo riffs overhead.

Janis Brenner sings a much more minimalist take of the second over the composer’s spacious piano chords. The lush final version, which concludes the album, switches out the string quartet for the Shattered Glass String Orchestra,

Graves, with Bukvich joined by Kerrod, Wirth, Nikola Radan on alto flute and Richard Viard on acoustic guitar comes across as a moody, distantly Middle Eastern-tinged art-rock dirge. Sankaram brings both gentle poignancy and operatic flair to Tattoo, backed by Bukvich’s brooding piano and orchestration.

The bandleader switches to synth, teaming up with cellist Raphael Saphra and bassist Joseph Brock for Stairs, a similarly uneasy miniature. Then Jane Manning trades off with Sankaram over Bojan Gorišek’s piano and Bukvich’s wry electronics in the Balkan-inflected Nema Te (You Aren’t Here, You Aren’t There). Fans of acts as diverse as Radiohead, Peter Gabriel-era Genesis, exploding pianist Kathleen Supove and postminimalist composers like David Lang will love this stuff.

Remembering the Brilliant, Underrated Ellis Marsalis

Since the United States is such a relatively young country, there haven’t been a lot of musical legacies here, at least by comparison to places like Mali or parts of India and Pakistan where musical families go back for centuries. There’s a strong case that the Marsalis family of New Orleans are the greatest American musical legacy. Sadly, we lost their patriarch, pianist Ellis Marsalis, last month.

His sons – trumpeter Wynton, saxophonist Branford, vibraphonist Jason and trombonist Delfeayo – may be better known, but Ellis Marsalis was a brilliantly distinctive and scarily purposeful player, an example to be emulated. He was 79 when he and Delfeayo made their only full-length record together, The Last Southern Gentlemen, in 2014. It’s deep music, mostly ballads, still up at Soundcloud.

The senior Marsalis plays with a delightfully offbeat, tersely incisive, eminently spacious touch. On the bouncy take of Autumn Leaves, that counterintuitive sense of rhythm is just plain irresistible: if you play an instrument, give this a listen and then put that at the top of your to-do lists, Ellis Marsalis giving you useful advice without opening his mouth.

Let the nocturnal father/son camaraderie of She’s Funny That Way waft through you, as bassist John Clayton and drummer Marvin “Smitty” Smith do here. There are places where the family frontline diverge, especially on the more upbeat numbers. Delfeayo’s uncanny touch matches his dad, especially on a slow, summery take of I’m Confessin. Phantasmagoria might not be the first thing you might think of getting from their bolero version of The Man With 2 Left Feet….but guess again. Everything on the recod seems to be about thinking outside the box, a legacy that the whole family has embraced. Since this album, Delfeayo has gone on to be arguably the family’s most articulate antifascist crusader. May other generations sustain that.