Linda May Han Oh Releases Her Gracefully Kinetic Marcel Marceau-Inspired New Album at the Jazz Standard

Linda May Han Oh is the only jazz bassist to ever make the cover of the Village Voice. That speaks both to her enormous popularity in the jazz community as well as her appeal beyond it. As a sidewoman, her distinctive style is tireless, purposeful and tuneful to the max: she’s never content to merely walk scales, but she also isn’t self-indulgent. Her own compositions have flair and wit and a general sense of optimism. Her latest album Walk Against Wind, inspired by the exploits of legendary mime Marcel Marceau, is streaming at Bandcamp. She’s playing the album release show on April 19 at the Jazz Standard, with sets at 7:30 and 9:30 PM. Cover is $25.

Her jaunty bass solo kicks off the lithely dancing opening diptych, Lucid Lullaby; guitarist Matthew Stevens throws some similarly goodnatured sparks into the mix, tenor saxophonist Ben Wendel adding airiness. The second part is a tone poem of sorts where Oh anchors Wendel’s serenity with stygian, sustained bowing.

Firedancer is more about the dancer than the flames, propelled by guest Fabian Almazan’s minimalistic pedalpoint and Wendel’s judiciously steady figures. Speech Impediment is Oh at her wryly amusing best, her own irrepressible vocalese punching in tandem with Wendel’s insistent upper-register lines over drummer Justin Brown’s flurries and clusters. Then the conversation restarts between Wendel and Stevens.

Oh switches to Fender for the bubbly Perpluzzle, a study in contrasts between Stevens’ distorted chords and Wendel’s gracefully kinetic melody over Brown’s shadowboxing beats. The title track alternates between an unexpectedly dark march over a catchy modal hook and a doublespeed variation that’s just short of frantic: clearly, getting out into the gusts was a challenge, but once you’ve got your footing, apparently all is well.

Oh returns to Fender for the similarly hypnotic, catchy Ikan Bilis, gingerly spiced with Minji Park’s traditional Korean percussion. The enigmatic Mother Reason juxtaposes Wendel’s occasionally Joe Maneri-ish, microtonally-tinged longtone phrases against Stevens’ resonant chords and slow, methodical single-note lines.

Stevens builds tension with a rising-and-falling phrase throughout Mantis as the rest of the band hovers distantly. Oh and then Brown scour the ocean floor beneath steady guitar/sax harmonies in another hypnotically catchy number, Deepsea Dancers. Stevens, Brown and Almazan – on electric piano – prowl energetically over Oh’s moody, chromatic pedalpoint in Midnight, a Hollywood hills noir set piece with a long, deliciously fiery crescendo out. The album winds up with the bouncy Steve Coleman-esque syncopation of Western. Good to hear such a consistently strong collection from such a major force on the low strings.

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Chris Dingman Releases His Richly Nocturnal New Album at WNYC”s Greene Space

Chris Dingman isn’t just a talented jazz vibraphonist: he’s a brlliant tunesmith. He probably scored his album release gig with his band the Subliminal and the Sublime this June 26 at 7 PM at the Greene Space because he wrote a popular WNYC radio theme that everybody in the organization knows, so nobody could say no to the idea. Cover is $15 and worth it: if magically enveloping, dreamy music is your thing, go to this show and get lost in it.

Truthfully, Dingman could probably write a catchy radio theme in his sleep. For this project, he’s assembled a crew of cutting-edge New York talent – Loren Stillman on alto sax, Fabian Almazan on piano, Linda Oh on bass, Ryan Ferreira on guitar and Justin Brown on drums – to play a warmly nocturnal series of longform compositions that in a previous century could be spliced into familiar tv themes, or film sequences. The opening track, Tectonic Plates works off a resonant, simple, echoing melody built by bowing the vibraphone, rising from the quietest, shifting shades to a balmy sax passage. Ferreira’s guitar switches from ambience to chords only as it ends.

The epic Voices of the Ancient is a throwback to the late 70s with its wavelike, dynamically shifting rhythm, Stillman taking centerstage judiciously. Much of Dingman’s work has a saturnine ambience, and this seventeen minute-plus piece is a prime example. From the intro, bassist Linda Oh manages to be both an anchor and a marionette simultaneously, Dingman and Almazan supplying a hypnotic glitter and then backing away as a 70s neon-jazz theme coalesces and then takes a long trajectory upward, Ferreira’s pinging guitar leading the way. They take it out with a long, gentle, steady postlude worthy of any Times Square documentary circa 1977.

The album’s gently but insistently cinematic centerpiece, The Pinnacles, rises from an intricately below-the-surface piano-and-vibraphone confluence of currents, making way for Stillman’s balmy sax. Dingman’s judiciously resonant lines bring to mind Milt Jackson, Stillman following a more offcenter tangent as Brown pushes the group to transcend 70s hippie tedium. And suddenly, just when you least expect it, there’s a long, pulsing moment of terror.

The lingering, expansive outro makes a comfortable segue into the album’s conclusion, All Flows Forth, with its gentle syncopation, insistent alternating rhythmic accents and interlocking, pointillistic polyrhythms. On the way out, the band swings it and sways it, emphatically and memorably. In an era where the Bush family, their collaborators and apologists are buying up global water assets, Dingman’s wary naturalistic themes makes more sense than ever.

Nocturnal Magic with Chris Dingman’s The Subliminal and Sublime at SubCulture

Saturday night in the sonically exquisite downstairs digs at SubCulture, vibraphonist Chris Dingman‘s The Subliminal and Sublime previewed what might be the best album of 2014. It takes a lot of nerve (or cluelessness) to characterize your music as sublime, but Dingman’s obviously aware that he’s caught magic in a bottle with his new five-part suite commissioned by Chamber Music America. “You’re going to have to figure out where one part ends and the next one begins,” he told the crowd before giving it a Manhattan premiere. The band – Fabian Almazan on piano, Ryan Ferreira on guitar, Loren Stillman on alto sax, Linda Oh on bass and Justin Brown on drums – was clearly amped to begin recording the following day. In about an hour onstage, dynamics rose and fell in glistening, twilit waves with echoes of Brian Eno, Pat Metheny and the Claudia Quintet as well as Bryan and the Aardvarks, a group that Dingman contributes to as memorably as this one.

The suite began with lingering, airy motives, Dingman bowing his notes, Ferreira deftly twisting his volume knob, a still, spacious wash of minimalist high harmonies. Tempos varied from spacious and seemingly rubato, to straight-up four-on-the-floor, to more knotty, as the arrangements rose and fell through cinematic, anthemic themes fueled by Brown’s majestically emphatic cymbal and tom-tom work, back to hypnotic, minimalist washes of sound. The conversational rapport between Almazan and Dingman mirrored their approach in Bryan & the Aardvarks – half the time, it was hard to tell who was playing what, making that distinction pretty much beside the point. Oh’s one solo of the night was was an elegantly precise, tensely climbing lattice; later in the night, she kicked off a thematic shift with a plaintive series of bell tones that the rest of the band picked up hauntingly. Ferreira alternated between lingering, airy motives and precise, minimalist picking as Dingman – one of this era’s most consistently interesting and individualistic vibraphonists – spun a richly echoey vortex illuminated with glistening cascades, insistent two-handed rhythmic figures and poignantly whispering passages that at least seemed to be natural markers between segments. The sheer hummability and bittersweetly resonant quality of the melodies are signature Dingman traits. It was good to see this show being filmed; let’s hope that at least some of it makes it to the web.