A Slightly More Subtle But Hardly Subdued Album From the Explosive Captain Black Big Band

Of all the projects that pianist Orrin Evans has his fingers in, his Captain Black Big Band are arguably the most exciting. They’re definitely the loudest. It’s amazing how Evans manages to find the time for them, considering that he leads smaller groups, everybody wants to play with him, and until the lockdown he had the closest thing in the jazz world to a serious money gig, taking over the piano chair in a certain popular trio and then elevating them above…where they were before.

Auspiciously, the Captain Black Big Band have a new album, The Intangible Between streaming at Spotify. The difference this time is that they aren’t quite as much of a careening beast as they’ve been in the past. Part of that’s due to the bandleader writing most of the charts, selecting very specific groups from a vast talent base to play the songs, and in general, varying the size of the orchestation more.

The album’s first track, Proclaim Liberty, opens with brassy optimism, then after a rippling bit of suspense, the band hit an anthemic drive. The tumbling pairings of piano and drums are as avant-garde as anything Evans has ever done, the solos from trumpet and sax as adrenalizing as ever.

His wide-angle swing arrangement of This Little Light of Mine rises with the horns out of a carefree piano-trio intro that offers a nod to Coltrane and telegraphs that there’s going to be plenty of room for spontaneity, notably a fiery sax-drums duel and some savagery from the bandleader himself.

The tenderness of Sean Jones’ flugelhorn throughout an understatedly majestic Todd Bashore arrangement of A Time For Love contrasts with an underlying tension, which evaporates when the rest of the horns float in. Evans dividing his hands between piano and Rhodes is an unexpected textural touch.

With its New Orleans ebullience and bright hooks, That Too comes across as a slightly stripped-down take on the completely unleashed sound the band made a name for themselves with, trombone and then soprano sax bringing in the storm.

Their loose-limbed, Sun Ra-ish take of Thelonious Monk’s Off Minor features a rhythm section bustling with four (!!!!) bassists and two drummers behind shreddy trumpet, spacy Rhodes and a rise to plenty of the group’s signature, barely controlled mass chaos.

Evans’ beefy yet spacious chart for Roy Hargrove’s Into Dawn gets lit up by spiraling alto sax, trumpet that delivers both sage blues and wild doublestops, and some serious crush from the piano. The album’s biggest epic is Evans’ arrangement of Andrew Hill’s Tough Love. In practically sixteen minutes, the group shift through fluttery stereo pairings of basses and piano, gritty dueling saxes, uneasily shifting sheets of sound, the whole ensemble helping Evans deliver an astute, politically insightful lyric by his brother, author and hip-hop artist Son of Black.

They wind up the record with I’m So Glad I Got To Know You, Evans’ elegy for his drummer friend Lawrence Leathers building from spare, stricken solo piano, to hints of calypso and a fond gospel sendoff. This is a mighty entertaining and rewardingly eclectic effort from a group also including but hardly limited to drummers Anwar Marshall and Mark Whitfield Jr., saxophonists Immanuel Wilkins, Troy Roberts and Caleb Wheeler Curtis, bassist Luques Curtis, trombonist David Gibson and bassist Eric Revis.

Advertisement

Catching Up with Ralph Peterson’s Duality Perspective

If there’s anything at all worthwhile that came out of the hurricane that hammered the east coast, it was in the almost complete shutdown of parts of New York. With no way of leaving the neighborhood, the issue of catching up with some albums that had been sitting around far too long basically forced itself. Veteran drum extrovert Ralph Peterson’s The Duality Perspective was one of those. His Larry Young-inspired Unity Project record from last year was a lot of fun; this one’s a lot more diverse. There are two bands here: the first an interesting, upper register-dominated quartet with vibraphonist Joseph Doubleday and clarinetist Felix Peikli out in front of Peterson and bassist Alexander Toth. The second, a sextet features the always formidable Curtis Brothers – Luques on bass and Zaccai on piano – plus Tia Fuller on alto sax, Walter Smith III on tenor and Sean Jones on trumpet. Both groups turn in terse and purposeful performances; the quartet handling most of the quieter material, the sextet getting the more upbeat fare. Peterson, who’s also a trumpeter, writes as vividly as ever here, and plays with a remarkable judiciousness for someone who’s always been best known for his robust boom.

The opening track, One False Move pairs off brightly spiraling clarinet against a circular bass/vibraphone hook and then a tight bass/drum interlude, Peterson at his most succinct. They follow that with a somewhat less phantasmagorical take of Thelonious Monk’s 4 in 1, Peikli’s nonchalant legato establishing a mood that the band never wavers from. Addison and Anthony, a ballad for a couple of younguns in Peterson’s life, has the terse, suspenseful feel of an early 70s Milt Jackson piece, while Bamboo Bends in a Storm joins the bass and vibes, tiptoeing yet carefree. They essentially segue out of that with Princess, a lively swing tune.

The sextet sequence opens with the ballad Coming Home, Fuller and the piano shifting from thoughtful and spacious to more carefree, Zaccai Curtis establishing a clenched-teeth focus that he uses to set the tone from this point forward: his intensity grounds these songs firmly even as solos fly away from the center. Their take on Monk’s Impervoius Gems gets bouncy Ethiopian-tinged metrics, a bright horn chart and progressively intense crescendos from the whole unit, while Fuller’s energetically purist melodicism fuels the staggered sway of the title track. On the considerably trickier You Have No Idea, Jones takes over that role with his romping, blues-infused spirals. The album ends with Pinnacle, which is everything we’ve come to know and love from Peterson: a flurrying horn chart, brisk swing, lively bantering from the whole band and a purposeful, volcano-on-the-loose solo from the bandleader. Good tunes, inspired playing, good listening on every possible level.

The Gerald Wilson Orchestra’s Legacy Does Justice to the Windy City

It’s been a great year for big band jazz releases and this is a particularly enjoyable one. The Gerald Wilson Orchestra’s new one, Legacy jazzes up the classics and celebrates nonagenarian composer/conductor Wilson’s Chicago home turf with dynamic charts that range from stark and suspenseful to lush and majestic. As you would expect from this guy, the band is monstrous, with up to 20 players, building from the A-list rhythm section of Renee Rosnes on piano, Peter Washington on bass and Lewis Nash on drums. A lot of the ideas here are very ambitious, but Wilson always cuts to the chase, with a why-didn’t-I-think-of-that logic and directness. Case in point: the opening Variations on a Theme by Stravinsky, which is less gritty eeriness than blazing intensity followed by a long swing passage with bright sax and trumpet solos. It’s a three-and-a-half minute hit. Who would have thought?

A mysterious bass pulse underpins the lushly melodic, warmly crescendoing Virgo, which they take up and back down methodically, swing it with a blithely spiraling Anthony Wilson guitar solo and later on intersperse some big swells with bright alto sax. They go out the way they came in. Variations on Claire de Lune starts as a slowly swinging piano blues, acknowledges the otherworldly theme and then goes doublespeed with jovial alto sax and gritty trumpet, and eventually a memorably slow fade. Likewise, Variations on a Theme by Puccini kicks off bluesily – it’s hard to find the classical tune here until it rears its wiggy head coming out of a deliciously tuneful baritone sax solo. September Sky, a warmly reflective, Hubert Laws-inflected indian summer flute tune gets an equally startling and effective doublespeed breakdown with the whole orchestra roaring, Rosnes bringing it back down in a heartbeat as the brass rises majestically in the distance against her wee-hours flourishes.

The rest of the album is a suite titled Yes Chicago Is… Referencing numerous famous Chicago venues and a well-known Dylan tune as well as the local sports franchises, it’s a very smartly crafted theme and variations, beginning with a pensive, nocturnal third-stream piano/bass motif. What comes after? Some striking chromatics; shapeshifting, melodic swing; a slyly insistent ballpark theme capped off by playful baritone sax; some nifty tradeoffs between swirling atmospherics and joyous trumpet; and a surprisingly serioso outro. Clearly, Wilson’s relationship to his hometown is a complex one – it beats the hell out of Sweet Home Chicago. There isn’t a single miss on this album, a real treat, which has been out since the end of last month on Mack Avenue.