Iconic Guitarist and Bassist Release a Blissfully Gorgeous Duo Record

The preeminent jazz guitarist of our time and one of our era’s greatest and most distinctive bassists played a gorgeous 2017 duo session originally released as part of a box set which is now available for the first time as a stand-alone vinyl record. Bassist Skúli Sverrisson wrote the music on his album Strata – streaming at Spotify – for guitarist Bill Frisell, whose resonant lyricism and judicious, terse overdubs are a perfect fit for these sublime melodies. Frisell likes working in a duo situation and in 35 years of recording, this is his best album in that configuration. Pretty much everything Frisell has ever done since this blog went live has ended up in the ten-best list at the end of the year and this should be no exception.

The first track on the record is Sweet Earth, a lingering, echoey, jangly, distantly Britfolk-tinged theme. The bass is typically so sparse that it’s almost invisible…or simply seamless. The second song, Instants has the feel of an arpeggiated Nordic space-surf instrumental: right up Frisell’s alley, or one of them. Again, the intertwine of the two instruments is such that it’s often impossible to figure out who’s playing what, especially as the song takes on a more fugal feel, or when the bass is shadowing the guitar.

Frisell plays twelve-string on the ravishing, chiming, bittersweet Vanishing Point, a waltz pulsing along on a steady, emphatically minimalist bassline. Ancient Affection is more complex, Frisell adding ominously psychedelic fuzztone resonance beneath the increasingly intricate, glistening thicket overhead. Sverrisson’s spare chromatics add suspense to his steady arpeggios beneath Frisell’s spare, echoey riffs in the austere, moody Came to Light, which closes the first album side.

Side two opens with Cave of Swimmers, a slow, rapt, warily strolling theme with distant baroque echoes. There’s also a spare, gently emphatic fugal sensibility in Amedeo, Frisell’s low accents adding a warm resolve to this otherwise rather opaque tune.

Sverrisson’s variations on a staggered, loping riff hold the foreground as Frisell fills out the picture with a lingering bittersweetness in Afternoon Variant. The simply titled Segment is an echoey tone poem of sorts. The duo wind up the album with Her Room and its gentle echoes of a well-known David Lynch film theme. Whether you call this jazz or jangly rock – it’s both, in the best possible ways – this is one of the most unselfconsciously beautiful albums of the year.

A Wild, Gorgeously Surreal Jazz Mass From the Czech Republic

You have never heard anything as surreal or triumphantly outside-the-box as the B-Side Band’s performance of Jaromír Hnilička’s Missa Jazz, streaming at Spotify. Structured in segments that follow a traditional liturgical sequence, it’s a jazz symphony, the Chamber Orchestra Brno and the Ars Brunensis chamber choir bolstering this large ensemble from Brno in the Czech Republic. Its ancestors seem to be Mary Lou Williams’ gospel suites, but also Pachelbel and Tschaikovsky…and the unhinged psychedelia of the Electric Prunes’ Mass in F Minor, maybe. This is an amazing piece of music, obviously recorded live in a big space with generous natural reverb.

After a brightly crescendoing quasi-baroque intro, the kettledrum announces the jazz ensemble, who launch into a theme that would play well behind the opening credits of an adventure movie. They swing it hard at the end.

The introit has shiny, resonant trumpet over suspenseful strings, up to a slinky, noirish groove with distant echoes of 19th century African-American gospel. The choir enter in the epic, almost twelve-minute kyrie, strings and winds approximating an organ prelude. From there the group shift through bluesy baritone sax over a slithery swing, a sedate hymn-like interlude from the reeds and then a stormy, brass-fueled march of sorts.

After a stately choral introduction, the racewalking, brassy gloria has New Orleans tinges and lively trumpet and trombone solos.

The group go back to suspense for the graduale, with desolate trombone set to starry strings and a sotto-voce, deliciously Ethiopian-tinged pulse that hits a jaunty bit of a march and then makes a lowdown return.

Omnis Gentes Jubilate Deo, a minimalistic chorale, sets up the similarly terse credo: Hnilička’s voicings, where together the groups effectively mimic the textures of a pipe organ, are spot-on. After a bit of a Sanctus and a Pater Noster, a windswept suspense returns in the “interludium.”

The choir make a final entrance for the momentary, stately agnus dei followed by a communio which bristles with unexpected contrasts and persistent unease as the strings rise from a brooding tone poem of sorts. The saints jubilantly swing their way out in the concluding postlude.

Saturday in the Park: Not the Fourth of July, But We’re Getting There

Late Saturday afternoon, the faint smell of honeysuckle filtered down across the elevation inside Central Park at around 82nd St. on the west side. There wasn’t a huge crowd there, but on low-hanging tree limbs, rock ledges, an outer ring of a bench and across the lawn, a silent and rapt audience had gathered to see tenor saxophonist Mark Turner leading a trio with Vicente Archer on bass and Johnathan Blake on drums. For free.

There was a gig bag for tips parked conspicuously in front of the band. This is what live music has come down to in New York in 2021: desperate times, desperate measures.

Before the lockdown, Turner would routinely sell out a weeklong stand at the Vanguard, and this crowd would have filled the joint. Until the Vanguard and whatever’s left of this city’s imperiled venues can legally reopen at capacity, we are at least blessed to have this weekend series which has been keeping hope alive…and keeping some of the world’s foremost jazz musicians at least somewhat employed.

Photographer Jimmy Katz’s Giant Step Arts not only sponsor the shows: they’re recording live albums here now. Genius move. People who missed this will be able to enjoy a series of defiantly strong performances made in the face of one kind of adversity after another. And future generations will hopefully take inspiration from the kind of heroism ordinary citizens displayed, staring down the absurdity of a global surveillance-state coup d’etat.

Sirens, helicopters and random chitchat notwithstanding, Katz, Turner and his band got a pleasantly and expertly conversational record out of this one. The saxophonist sussed out the scene: balmy atmosphere, gentle breeze, chill crowd and a set delayed about 45 minutes by a few droplets from an imposing but otherwise merciful bank of thunderclouds. He and the trio then explored a similar sense of calm, spiced with steady, lively, purposeful interplay.

Turner didn’t reach for the highs until about half an hour into the show, seemingly weighed evenly between canonic postbop hits and originals. But he did thrill the crowd with a real stunner of a downwardly spiraling, chromatically withering glissando in the first number. Archer followed shortly afterward with an undulating solo that grew grittier as Blake egged him on.

The second number established a pattern: Turner playing with a matter-of-fact lyricism, all subtle shades and understated optimism as Archer bubbled and grew slinkier while Blake added his usual blend of counterintuitive color and adrenaline. If you want to hear Johnathan Blake at his most mysterious – he’s done far more explosive shows as part of this series – this will be the record to get. Although his carnaval-esque groove on the third number eventually spilled over into exuberance, taking the whole band with him.

Giant Step Arts’ next concert in the park, this May 21 at 5 PM is an especially adventurous one, with cellist Marika Hughes‘ New String Quartet featuring Charlie Burnham on violin, Marvin Sewell on guitar and Rashaan Carter on bass. The show may be on the hill to the immediate north of the the 81st St. entrance, or in the space under the trees about a block north and east. Just follow the sound and you’ll find it.

Haunting, Stunningly Individualistic, Exotic New Orchestral and Piano Works From Konstantia Gourzi

Anájikon, the new album from Konstantia Gourzi – streaming at Spotify – will blow your mind. Gourzi’s often haunting compositions bring to mind sounds from traditions as far-flung as her native Greece, Armenia, Iran and India as well as contemporary minimalism. The rhythms here are strong and prominent, with heavy use of percussion. There’s more of an emphasis on melody than harmony, and Gourzi’s tunes are rich with chromatics and implied melody. There’s a careening intensity to much of the orchestration.

Gourzi conducts the Lucerne Academy Orchestra in the achingly lush, often utterly Lynchian Two Angels in the White Garden. A dramatically dancing percussion riff – and a hint of Richard Strauss – punctuate the mournfully tolling and then enigmatically swirling, allusively chromatic interludes of the first part, Eviction. The rhythms are more muted in Exodus, the brooding swirl of the orchestra receding for a hauntingly minimalist piano theme anchored by ominous bass and flickers throughout the ensemble. Part three, Longing has a dense, stormy pulse, akin to Alan Hovhaness in a blustery moment. The orchestra rise from stillness over looming, pianissimo drums to a bit of a Respighi-ish dance and then contented atmospherics in the conclusion, The White Garden.

The Minguet Quartett – violinists Ulrich Isfort and Annette Reisinger, violist Tony Nys and cellist Matthias Diener – first contribute Gourzi’s String Quartet No. 3, The Angel in the Blue Garden. The first movement, The Blue Rose begins with an insistent, staccato violin pulse anchoring achingly beautiful, lyrical cello and then a similarly melancholic, modal, Armenian-tinged viola line; it ends surprisingly calmly. Movement two, The Blue Bird pairs spare, broodingly soaring cello against fluttery echoes from the rest of the quartet – anxious wings, maybe?

The Blue Moon: The Bright Side is more minimal and hypnotic, high strings shimmering and weaving an otherworldly melody over a persistent cello pedal figure. The muted mystery of Turning, which follows, is over too soon. The Dark Side begins with a circling, distantly Balkan-tinged dance, pizzicato cello and viola answering each other beneath plaintive lustre.

Violist Nils Mönkemeyer and pianist William Youn close the record with a stunningly and starkly lyrical performance of Gourzi’s Three Dialogues For Viola and Piano, the most vividly Hovahaness-esque work here. Part one has variations on an allusive, poignant melody descending over simple, alternately lingering and insistently rhythmic piano accents. A catchy, circling bell-like interweave persists and finally rises in part two. Part three is at first shivery and otherworldly, then Youn runs a rippling riff beneath Mönkemeyer’s austerely looping, sailing lines. If this is your introduction to this brilliant and fascinatingly original composer, you are in for a treat: this might be the best album of the year so far.

An Intriguingly Poetic Spanish and English Jazz Album From Roxana Amed

Singer Roxana Amed writes vividly and poetically in both English and her native Spanish. The Argentine expat’s transition to a new life in the free state of Florida was not easy, but it inspired her to new, individualistic heights of creativity that blend Buenos Aires art-song with American jazz and other styles. Every time she hears a tune she likes, it seems she wants to write lyrics for it: so much the better.

Her new album – streaming at Spotify – is titled Ontology. Is this a magnum opus, her Being and Nothingness? It’s more of a concise document of where her music is at right now. She’s got a killer band behind her, the core comprising the reliably excellent Martin Bejerano on piano, with Mark Small on sax, Edward Perez on bass, and Ludwig Alfonso on drums.

Guitarist Aaron Lebos runs a menacing loop as Bejerano adds sinister glitter in the slow, slinky, Lynchian intro to the album’s opening track, Tumbleweed, Small wafting in from the distance. Amed’s uncluttered images of a troubled heart completely adrift add an increasingly disquieting edge as the music grows more anthemic, Perez dancing on coals out of the choruses. It’s a hard act to follow.

Chacarera Para La Mano Izquierda is a darkly rhythmic Bejerano tune with allusively celebratory lyrics by Amed, pouncing along with thorny syncopation. Small’s balmy lines float over Bejerano’s unhurried, glistening motives, guitarist Tim Jago adding resonance to Amed’s new vocal version of a Kendall Moore ballad, Peaceful: the gist is that a moment of calm gives us strength to regroup.

Amed reinvents Wayne Shorter’s Virgo as a slowly unfolding, misty-toned, blues-infused cosmology, backed by just spare piano and sax. For Miles Davis’ Blue in Green, she draws on the Cassandra Wilson version: Amed’s take has considerably more of a bounce, fueled by Jago’s dancing solo over Lowell Ringel’s bass and Rodolfo Zuniga’s lively drums.

Last Happy Hour is not a requiem for a bar but for Bejerano’s father, in the form of  a saturnine, stately pulsing, raptly mystical garden tableau. In her liner notes, Amed admits that tango for her is a pretty dark place, and that’s reflected in the rubato interludes in the otherwise spring-loaded Milonga Por la Ausencia, a conflicted look back at her home turf.

The album’s title track is an emotive nocturne, a tale of escape and return set to Bejerano’s gorgeously impressionistic piano, with terse bass and spare, moody sax trailing behind. Amed’s plaintive chromatics and Bejerano’s alternately resonant and scrambling piano rise agitatedly, only to back away for Small’s allusively ominous solo in El Regreso, the album’s big showstopper.

Amed lends her voice to two iconic Ginastera piano works, Danza de la Moza Donosa and Danza del Viejo Boyero. The former has a whole new level of mystery in what’s essentially a ragtime tune: exactly what happens to the dancer, we don’t know, but the end doesn’t look good. The latter is an exuberantly humorous exploration of indigenous Argentine beats, fueled by Zuniga’s polyrhythms.

Goodbye Rose Street, a rainy-night farewell to Amed’s old Buenos Aires neighborhood, shifts between glistening rubato and a bit of a stately, haunting ballad. The simply titled Amor, built around an ominously circling, hypnotic Bejerano riff and variations, rises to a towering angst capped off by Jago’s crashing guitar, a portrait of hope against hope. A rough translation from Amed’s more poetic Spanish:

Like the delicate sparkle of the moon
That draws the shadows of the rain
Like the wind that brings a seed
Hidden in storms of ash

She winds up the album with a spare departure ballad, Winter, just her gauzy vocals over Bejerano’s precise, considered, bittersweet neoromanticisms. It asks more questions than it answers: definitely a song, and an album, for our time.

Plunge Into the Depths With Lucie Vítková and James Ilgenfritz

Lucie Vítková and James Ilgenfritz’s new album Aging – streaming at Bandcamp – is a series of dronescapes. As relentlessly bleak music, it could just as easily be a portrait of the past fourteen months as much as an exploration of what a drag it is to watch the years pile up. Just remember that getting old is a state of mind no matter how many trips you make around the sun.

This is microtonal music. With one exception close to the end of the record, none of these seven long interludes move very far from a sonic center, and it’s frequently impossible to distinguish Ilgenfritz’s bowed bass, abrasively keening harmonics and extended-technique slashes from Vítková’s electronics.

Slowly rising and falling pitchblende resonance is flecked with crumbling fragments of grey noise, clunking loops and ghostly flickers – a deep-space icebreaker clearing the junk from what’s left of the Death Star, maybe. Oscillating scrapes, buzz and boom, achingly unresolved close harmonies, sirening bends and dopplers all filter through the mix. The funereal, tolling chords and darkly contrasting textures of the almost fifteen-minute fifth track are the high point of the album, such that it is. The one after that, a study in high harmonics, more or less, is the most animated.

On one hand, someone with no experience on stringed instruments could probably play this whole thing, or an approximation thereof, after a few tips on bowing. On the other, it really maintains a mood. If you like the lows and the low midrange, this is very enjoyably immersive.

A Provocatively Philosophical, Deeply Articulate New Album From Alexa Tarantino

Alexa Tarantino’s new album Firefly – streaming at Bandcamp – could be interpreted as a protest jazz record. It came together during the lockdown, and the tech oligarchs’ relentless quest to destroy the arts and reduce all surviving humanity to cogs in a soulless machine has without a doubt impacted much of the material on it.

But it’s more of a philosophical than political statement, and ultimately an optimistic one. In her liner notes, Tarantino provides context to the album’s central suite, A Moment in Time: “It’s a raw and personal snapshot of a day in a creative’s life, and the responsibilities that come with this lifestyle which, to most of society, appears ethereal, idyllic, novel, and curious. Today’s fast-paced world of technology and instant gratification has centered the human priority on money, material items, flashy success, and social media following. Essentially, it’s ‘How can I get, produce, or be the next best thing, right now?’ While we’ve seen how this has skyrocketed us forward in the realms of technology and science, it has undoubtedly impacted human thought, attention, and connection, forever.”

Tarantino obviously has her eye on the sinister implications. It begins with Daybreak, a moody latin soul groove anchored by drummer Rudy Royston’s spare, loose-limbed boom and bassist Boris Kozlov’s lithe pulse, pianist Art Hirahara and vibraphonist Behn Gillece providing a spare gleam behind Tarantino’s airy, wary alto sax. Essentially, it’s the cradle of the day’s artistic inspiration.

Tarantino switches to alto flute for Surge Fughetta, a warmly baroque-tinged miniature by Kozlov. She goes back to sax and chooses her spots to soar and spiral in Surge Capacity, a bustling, anthemic, purist minor-key romp that explores the magic moment when creative inspiration strikes, with briskly prowling solos by Hirahara and Royston. Then she picks up the alto flute again for Le Donna Nel Giardino, a balmy, verdantly swaying portrait of a playful female garden spirit, Hirahara’s sparse, allusive lines offering subtle contrast to the calm cheer overhead.

Next is Rootless Ruthlessness, a gritty, tightly clustering picture of inner turmoil, self-doubt and self-sabotage, and the struggle for an artist to get their inner critic to shut up. Hirahara switches to Rhodes as Royston charges onward, the bandleader leading a morose, tormented descent where everything falls apart before pulling it back to a triumphant drive out.

She takes a break from the suite with an unhurried, expansive take of Wayne Shorter’s Lady Day, Kozlov bowing a soulful solo to echo Tarantino’s expressiveness. The suite returns as she switches to soprano for Violet Sky, a seaside sunset bossa groove with some very cleverly orchestrated echoes between Hirahara’s Rhodes and Gillece’s vibes, Royston adding the occasional wry flicker or turnaround.

The finale, The Firefly Code challenges us to find our souls amidst this awful mess, basically. Tarantino articulates her thought: “Our individual lights perhaps are not shining as bright as they were a year ago. But the bottom line is that we shine brighter together than we do apart. We, especially artists and creatives, are resilient. My hope is that after a time of ‘darkness,’ we as a society will re-emerge brighter than ever – with a renewed appreciation for the little things – an extended embrace with someone we love, the sound of the birds chirping while sipping our morning latte, or the way that staring at a painting, listening to a composition, or reading a poem makes us pause, think, and feel…in a way that no amount of Instagram likes or followers ever could.”

She opens it on alto flute, the band shifting from a brooding, allusively Ellingtonian sway to more of a bounce as she picks up steam and spins around, matched by Gillece’s pirouetting solo. Royston’s emphatic drum break signals a very unsettled return: the choice is up to us, Tarantino seems to say.

There’s more: the suite doesn’t begin until five tracks in. To kick off the album, we get Spider’s Dance, a low-key, catchy Hirahara tune meant to illustrate an arachnid mating ritual: in this particular universe, these creatures are more romantic than sinister.

Tarantino’s alto flute wafts purposefully but enigmatically in Mindful Moments, a clave tune by by Gillece where Royston has all kinds of subtle fun with on his rims and toms.

Move of the Spirit, an acerbically upbeat Royston swing anthem has a deviously amusing Tarantino quote and rippling solos from Gillece and Hirahara. A second Shorter number, Iris is a long platform for a thoughtfully constructed alto sax solo. This is one of the best and most important jazz albums of the year.

Playfully Conversational Improvisation From an Allstar New York Crew

The new Playfield Vol. 3: After Life album – streaming at Bandcamp – is just out. The eight-piece improvisational band’s single, drifting, roughly half-hour track here is a tantalizing snapshot of the kind of multi-generational alchemy that was ubiquitous in this city before the lockdown.

Hearing Luisa Muhr launch the record all by herself with her lustrous vocalese is a trip: the irrepressible multimedia artist’s dance improvisations often turn archetypes inside out and can be spellbinding. A playful bit of an exchange with sax player Daniel Carter lures in Eric Plaks’ drifting electric piano, followed by Ayumi Ishito’s similarly resonant sax and the stark textures of guitarists Aron Namenwirth and Yutaka Takahashi. Bassist Zach Swanson maintains a steadily looming, terse presence, drummer Jon Panikkar taking his time on the way in.

Wah-wah and skronk spice the cloud, Carter in erudite bluesy mode. A decay to austere, wary chromatics gets pulled back up gingerly by chucka-chucka from one of the guitars while the other lingers. The saxes waft as the guitars veer from icy ambience to more jagged incisions, Swanson strolling contentedly by himself, occasionally with a triumphant leap.

Muhr returns briefly to set up a deep-space interlude, Carter shadowing Ishito’s balmy lines, which take on a desolate late-night streetcorner melancholy. The guitars build an increasingly spiky thicket, Muhr chilling back in the mix and then suddenly picking up with a bit of achingly frenetic scatting.

Plaks wryly introduces a familiar New York theme at just after the 25-minute mark, and the whole crew can’t resist messing around with it: obvious as it may be, the joke is too good to give away. Swanson tries to drag the whole crew into swing while Muhr spaces out her distant arioso riffs and the group flutter their way out. The group play the album release show outdoors at 166 N 12th St in Williamsburg this afternoon, May 16 at 3 PM.

Haunting Music From Happier Times

While the past year has seen a lot of artists desperately mining their archives for concert recordings in order to maintain some semblance of a performing career, violinist Meg Okura’s Live at the Stone album with her NPO Trio is not one of those releases. This 2016 concert was one of the last at the iconic venue’s original Alphabet City digs before it moved to the New School, only to be shuttered in the lockdown. This particular set – released a couple of years ago and still streaming at Bandcamp – is expansive, klezmer-centric, and despite the energetic interplay between Okura, pianist Jean-Michel Pilc and soprano saxophonist Sam Newsome, is rather dark.

As the initial 38-minute improvisation – divided up into six separate sections here – gets underway, Okura and Pilc are at their most orchestral. The violinist plays through a series of effects including delay, loops and massive amounts of reverb. The pianist, for the most part, maintains a glittering High Romantic gravitas.

Pilc echoes Okura’s cascades as she runs them through reverb turned up to the point of slapback. Building a series of builds variations, she’s joined by Newsome, who takes centerstage achingly as Pilc and Okura rustle and rumble underneath.

About three minutes in, Okura introduces the stark, central 19th century klezmer theme, Mark Warshawsky’s Oyfn Pripetchik. Newsome searches longingly with his microtonal washes until Pilc and Okura bring a steady rhythm back, the piano taking over scurrying, pointillistic variations. Then the violin moves to the foreground, leading the music from plaintive and insistent to spare and starry. Newsome’s stark clarinet-like tone, especially in the most somber moment here, fits this music perfectly.

Somber chromatics come front and center and remain there the longest in the fourth segment. Newsome leads the group down into minimalism, Pilc raising the energy with his jackhammer pedalpoint, a bit of a klezmer reel and a brief minor-key ballad without words. Newsome drives the band to a chilling, shivery coda.

There are two other improvisations here. The first, Unkind Gestures, is based on Coltrane’s Giant Steps, is vastly more carefree and jauntily conversational, Pilc’s rumbles and basslines contrasting with Newsome’s keening, harmonically-laced duotones. Okura opens the almost nineteen-minute closing number, Yiddish Mama No Tsuki, with a sizzling klezmer solo, Pilc following with eerie belltones down to what sounds like an altered version of the old standard Mein Yiddishe Mama. Revelry and wry quotes interchange with airy acidity, disorienting clusters, a brooding Newsome solo and surreal blues from Okura and Pilc.

One quibble: not one but two tracks cut off right in the middle of gorgeously melismatic Newsome solos, a real faux pas. People who listen to this kind of music have long attention spans and don’t care how long a track is.

A Colorful, Catchy, Hard-Hitting New Album From Rob Garcia

Drummer Rob Garcia has a long and storied history playing with some of the greatest creative talents in the New York scene. But he’s also a composer, with a fiercely relevant, fearlessly populist streak. His latest album Illumination – streaming at Spotify – has more of a general spiritual theme. The chordless quartet here is an interesting configuration for him, with Noah Preminger on tenor sax, John O’Gallagher on alto and Marcos Varela on bass. As you would expect from Garcia, there’s lots of good translucent energy on this record: it’s one of the most colorful and tuneful drummer-led projects of recent years.

They open with a straight-up swing tune, First Glimpse Into the Shadows, an aggressively flurrying hook giving way to judicious scrambles from the saxes as Garcia colors the music with one acerbic flourish and offbeat smack after another, Varela rising from a casual stroll to looming chords to drive a peak home.

The quartet build the title track off a bright, insistent riff, shifting from a funk-inflected groove to loping syncopation as O’Gallagher spins wildly, Preminger and Garcia shadowing him. Garcia’s variations on a gritty, chugging pulse fuel the triumphant coda.

Father Get Ready begins as a latin soul groove reduced to most succinct terms, Garcia both nibbling and chewing at the scenery, with a characteristically outside-the-box yet tersely blues-infused Preminger solo.

Little Trees has a similarly lively, coyly accent insistence that could be Afro-Colombian, plus more deliciously adrenalizing, rapidfire sax work and a rewarding duel at the end. Garcia works circular variations from his rims and toms as Silver Dagger slowly coalesces into a soulful, syncopated pastorale with more precise, hard-hitting sax work and a fondly bouncy bass solo.

Likewise, the group venture outward from the cheery, anthemically bucolic melody of Colinas de Santa Maria. The increasingly combative, quasi-fugal interweave of the saxes is a cool touch, as is Varela’s Afrobeat-tinged solo.

Garcia opens the sagely bluesy ballad Gracias with a stately 12/8 groove, a vehicle for purist blues work by the whole band. JJ Sensei – a dedication to Garcia’s longtime employer and martial arts guru Joseph Jarman – turns into a lively, swinging launching pad for feral sax, as well as a wryly expansive drum solo.

The quartet wind up the album with two tracks titled Parallels. The first begins with rather wary syncopation and straightens out as the horns simmer and reach precisely toward escape velocity. The second, a catchy, staggered, edgily chromatic funk tune, winds up the album on a high note. Garcia is really on a roll with this material: wouldn’t it be great if this same band could reconvene in the studio, or even onstage.