Josh Sinton Is Your Private Busker

Josh Sinton made his new solo baritone sax album b – streaming at Bandcamp – in two days. As he tells it, it took him thirty years to figure out how to do it. And that includes playing plenty of solo shows, including a volcanic electroacoustic gig on contrabass clarinet at Issue Project Room in the spring of 2019 where it actually seemed that he might pass out, pushing the sound to the limits of what a pair of lungs and a bunch of pedals can create.

While that was a pretty harrowing performance, the new album is 180 degrees from that. Low-register instruments have seemingly unlimited potential for jokes, and this album is full of them: no spoilers! This is closer to the archetype of the solo busker with his back to a brick wall, in the wee hours somewhere in Manhattan. Yet it’s hardly forlorn. The music is playful, thoughtful and irresistibly funny in places.

Sinton takes his time: he’s hardly in a hurry to fill up the sonic picture. In the opening number, he follows a jaunty leap with a chromatic turnaround and rhythmic accents, an exercise in staccato and more than a few jokes.

Space plays a big part in the second improvisation, Sinton creating an unselfconsciously wry sense of suspense. As the album goes along, there are stretches of ballads and a fleeting gospel tune. We get all kinds of extended technique: trills, duotones, reed rattles, ridiculously peevish microtones and more, all juxtaposed with catchy riffs, long sustained tones and echo phrases that can be carefree, or snide. This isn’t about sizzling chops – although those are obvious here. This is about having fun, without falling back on cliches or practice patterns. When listening to this, you may want to resequence the tracks and put the goofy fifth one at the very end: again, no spoilers.

Perhaps tellingly, Sinton has a quartet album scheduled for this October, amplifying his musical vision of the world “where all people help all people to be free of fear, free to be themselves, free to love and free from advertising.” How cool is that?