Lucas Pino’s No No Nonet Is a Hit

Alto saxophonist Lucas Pino is a highly sought-after commodity in the New York scene, but he’s also a formidable composer. He and his coyly named No No Nonet have honed their sound with a regular residency at Smalls for more than a couple of years. Their latest album, That’s a Computer is streaming at Spotify – is a classic example of a band with smart charts which make them sound larger than they really are (although nine players are a handful, especially if you have to round them up for gigs}. They’re playing the album release show tomorrow night, Nov 19 at 7:30 PM at Smalls; cover is $20.

The album opens auspiciously with Antiquity, a brooding, rather bitter jazz waltz over edgy changes that remind of Frank Foster or Chris Jentsch at his most intense. Rafal Sarnecki’s guitar lingers; burnished horns rise and fall, Pino pirouetting elegantly rather than going for the jugular, especially after the lithe interlude midway through.

Horse of a Different Color is a big, bustling swing shuffle driven by Glenn Zaleski’s piano over Desmond White’s brisk bass and Jimmy Macbride’s drums. The interweave between reeds and brass – alto saxophonist Alex LoRe and baritone saxophonist Andrew Gutauskas with trumpeter Mat Jodrell and trombonist Nick Finzer – is especially tasty, as is Pino’s wafting runs punctuated by the piano and then the rest of the horns as Macbfride works a wry offbeat shuffle groove.

The lustrous ballad Film at 11 opens with rainy-day splashes of guitar and a slow brushy beat behind the horns’ glistening, sustained harmonies, Zaleski in spacious wee-hours mode. Pino’s mistiness matches the ambience; the slow, minimalist horn harmonies as it winds out add indie classical astringency.

Look Into My Eyes comes across as sort of a mashup of the album’s first and third tracks: darkly catchy hooks within a lush postbop framework, Pino again taking his time reaching takeoff velocity. The circling flock of counterpoint kicking off Finzer’s trombone solo is one of the album’s high points.

The album’s most majestically towering number is Frustrations, guest Camila Meza’s wistfully tender vocalese juxtaposed with bittersweet horns, the rhythm section giving everybody a wide, spacious berth. Gutauskas’ bass clarinet solo methodically parses the enigmatic atmosphere.

A bright, incisive clave tune, Sueno de Gatos has Afro-Cuban flair, and an almost conspiratorial camaraderie between Meza’s voice and the pulsing brass, the bandleader adding bluesy purism up to an unexpected, massed-staccato minimalist interlude. The album’s final cut is a jubilantly strutting vignette, Baseball Simiulator 1.000 (if you follow the sport, you know that a 1.000 average means a hit every time up).

Apropos of that baseball reference – there’s considerable irony that a band named after a certain 1920s Broadway musical would be released in a year when the Boston Red Sox won their fourth world championship in the past fifteen years. The producer of that musical, Harry Frazee also owned the Sox – and sold off all their star players in order to finance it. The Yankees took on almost every single one of those contracts. Babe Ruth and the rest of what was once the Sox put on pinstripes and became baseball’s first and arguably greatest dynasty. The Bostonians, their talent depleted, plummeted to last place: it would take them more than a decade to return to respectability.

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Eclectic, Purposeful Trombonist Plays a Subterranean Album Release Show this Wednesday

You want instant cred? Get recruited by Anat Cohen to play in her Tentet. That’s the deal with trombonist Nick Finzer, who’s playing the album release for his new one, No Arrival this Wednesday, May 23 at 8 PM at Subculture, 45 Bleecker just east of Lafayette, downstairs from the Culture Project Theatre. Advance tix, available at the box office, are $20.

Most of the new record – streaming at Posi-Tone Records – is originals. To Finzer’s credit, this isn’t a full-throttle situation: he mixes up tempos and styles, and for a guy with his vaunted technique (check his youtube masterclass channel), he doesn’t waste notes. On the opening number, Rinse And Repeat, Finzer’s sextet work an insistent, understated cha-cha groove, Alex Wintz’s guitar and Victor Gould’s piano throwing answers to the bandleader’s ongoing quest of a solo, saxophonist Lucas Pino following, completely tongue-in-cheek, Jon Irabagon style.

The blithe New Orleans stroll that introduces Never Enough offers no hint of the welcome haphazard direction it’s going to go in…or Pino’s nifty bass clarinet solo. Always fun to take chances, right?

Likewise, the first of the covers, Leonard Bernstein’s Maria theme from West Side Story, understates the latin flavor, dancing along on the pulse of Dave Baron’s bass and Jimmy Macbride’s drums, the bandleader’s balmy solo front and center. They revert to similarly subtle latin syncopations a little later with George Gershwin’s Soon.

Tomorrow Next Year – Finzer’s “we’re gonna get through this somehow” response to the fateful 2016 Presidential election – is a bustling, vampy urban tableau, Finzer and Pino having fun with a famous Albert King riff. The band build momentum out of a pensive, searching tone poem of sorts in the album’s title track – the momentary pairing of Macbride’s cymbal bells and Wintz’s belltone chords is a cool touch.

Chugging sixteenth-note volleys from Finzer and Pino, and a tightly clustering Gould solo propel Pyramid, from Duke Ellington’s Ellington Far East Suite, while expansive solos from Finzer and Wintz elevate Only This, Only Now from existential gloom. The album closes with two covers: a mighty, churning reinvention of Prince’s The Greatest Romance Ever Sold, and Strayhorn’s A Flower Is A Lovesome Thing, a showcase for Finzer’s wry, Wycliffe-esque finesse with a mute. It’s an impressive effort from a highly sought-after player whose best days are probably still ahead of him.