A Darkly Conversational New Duo Album From Pianists Angelica Sanchez and Marilyn Crispell

Pianists Angelica Sanchez and Marilyn Crispell each have earned substantial fan bases for very different reasons. Crispell was one of the first women among the loft jazz pioneers of the 70s; Sanchez’s panorama of global influences is vast as her melodies are translucent. Stylistically speaking, you might think that a piano duo collaboration between the two would be a stretch. And that’s exactly what they do on their new album How to Turn the Moon, streaming at Bandcamp. It’s the first piano duo record for both artists, an intuitive. elegantly executed, largely improvisational effort. Crispell is at her most thoughtful and melodic while Sanchez reaches for a lingering, neoromantically-inspired 70s ECM sound. Sanchez is in the left channel, Crispell in the right on this generally very serious, often rather dark album.

There are a lot of tradeoffs and role reversals here. As the album goes along, the two begin to opt for more intertwine than the sharp dynamic contrast they work earlier on. The epic Ceiba Portal is a synthesis of all those devices, from a bracing, Mompou/Satie-like weave that builds to a steady, emphatically strolling overture of sorts, then a big crescendo to a final enigmatic fugue. The moody, spacious call-and-response and uneasy, starry Messiaenic tonalities of Sullivan’s Universe – a Sullivan Fortner shout-out, maybe? – has the same conversational disquiet.

There are a couple of surreal, suspenseful inside-the-piano pieces here. Ancient Dream has Crispell brushing the strings for lute-like phrases as Sanchez flits around, then Crispell takes to the keys, pensive and minimal. Space Junk is more mysterious, both pianists going to the lowest lows to conclude on a memorably murky note. By contrast, the harried quasi-boogie that closes Rain in Web is the album’s most aggressive interlude.

The exchanges of bell-like figures and purposeful, cascading variations in Calyces of Held rise and then return to moodiness, each pianist taking a solo turn. The more broodingly resonant Windfall Light becomes a platform for exploring that dynamic more darkly. Twisted Roots has more interweave, but also suspense, Crispell’s spare, blippy phrases echoing Sanchez’s solemn precision. The opening and closing numbers could have been left on the cutting room floor, but what’s in between them often brings out the best in both musicians.

Organist Yuri McCoy’s Symphonic Roar: Truth in Advertising

A cynic would say that the title of organist Yuri McCoy‘s new album Symphonic Roar: An Odyssey of Sound from the Paris Conservatoire – which hasn’t hit the web yet – is redundant. After all, epic grandeur and volume are what bring out the faithful in the organ demimonde and keep them coming back. On the other hand, as explosive and adrenalizing as this album is, it’s also remarkably subtle.

McCoy discovered that he had a couple of organs in his native Houston which were especially well suited to the wide expanse of characteristically French colors in this program, a mix of popular repertoire, a dazzling rarity and a brand-new arrangement of a strange relic from the Paris Surrealist movement.

He opens on the spectacular 1997 Fisk-Rosales organ at Rice University with Jean-Louis Florentz’s showstopper La Croix Du Sud. If you’ve ever wondered what Malian psychedelic rock would sound like on a pipe organ, this is it, rising from a hypnotically assertive Tuareg riff to an increasingly wild swirl of variations meant to evoke the dizzying ecstasy of Sufi dance. Florentz was a student of Messiaen, so that influence is apparent, especially in the piece’s starriest moments; Jehan Alain is another one, along with another piece that will follow later on the program here. The frenetic polyrhythms camouflaging an anthemic, Alainesque theme early on, the sudden flares over a brooding pedal note and the series of long climbs afterward will give you goosebumps. What a way to kick off an album.

McCoy follows with an increasingly blistering, breathtakingly dynamic take of the famous allegro vivace movement from Guilmant’s Sonata No. 2. He mines burbling phantasmagoria and finds a creepy anthem in Joseph Bonnet’s brief Will O’the Wisp. Then he concocts a bracing blend of icy, wafting and majestic registrations for Saint-Saens’ Fantaisie in D Flat, rising from an unexpectedly wistful introduction, to stately, airy angst, an anthemic hymn of sorts, and back.

McCoy moves to the 2017 Nichols & Simpson organ at his home base, Houston’s South Main Baptist Church to play a particularly expansive, deep-sky take of Louis Vierne’s iconic Clair de Lune. He winds up the record with his own brand-new arrangement of Edgar Varese’s sprawling 1926 symphonic work Ameriques. Varese had left France behind for the US by then: there’s a classic European wonder at American energy and vitality here, as well as a dissociatively shifting, one might say schizophrenic expanse of remarkably forward-looking ideas that sometimes edge over into the macabre. Percussion plays every bit as much a part as the organ: Brady Spitz and his “assistants,” Colin Boothby and Grant Wareham have just as much fun with their sirens and castanets and assorted implements as McCoy has in the console.

Ensemble Fanaa Bring Their Magical, Mysterious Middle Eastern Grooves to Prospect Park

It was a pleasantly cool Wednesday night in the late summer of 2016. The evening had gotten off to a disappointing start with an album release event in the dingy basement room at the Rockwood, where a talented tunesmith’s pickup band pretty much phoned in what could have been an electrifying set. As it turned out, the electricity that night would happen a little later in another basement room, at Rye Bar on the south side of Williamsburg, where Ensemble Fanaa played two rapt, mysterious, genuinely transcendent sets of Middle Eastern-flavored jazz.

This blog had given a big thumbs-up to their debut performance at Barbes earlier that year. This show was arguably even better. Tenor saxophonist Daro Behroozi spun a web of otherworldly microtones, slithery chromatic melody, hypnotic resonance and the occasional ferocious burst as drummer Dan Kurfirst switched between his kit and a boomy dumbek for intricate polyrhythms as well as slinky snakecharmer grooves. Bassist John Murchison held the center, often playing subtle, sometimes haunting variations on a pedal line. If memory serves right – this was a long time ago – he switched to the magical, incisive Moroccan sintir bass lute for a handful of trance-inducing, gnawa-inspired numbers.

Game plan at the time was to write up this show to plug whatever the trio’s next gig was. But they were all busy in other bands at the time, and if they actually played somewhere else within the next couple of months, it was so far under the radar that this blog missed it. The good news is that Ensemble Fanaa are doing an outdoor gig on April 20 at 5:30 PM in Prospect Park, close to the 11th St. entrance off 7th Ave. Considering that this band’s music is on the serious side: haunting, and rapturous, and mystical, nobody in the group seems like a weedhead. But if that’s your thing, there is no other 4/20 show that can match this one for psychedelic ambience. And it that’s not your thing, this still promises to be the best concert of the month.