Jazz and Improvised

Lumination
Joel Frahm Trio
Anzic Records ANZ-0091 (joelfrahm.bandcamp.com/album/lumination)

When I reviewed the Joel Frahm Trio’s debut album, The Bright Side, for The WholeNote’s Sep/Oct 2021 issue, I closed with the hope that we’d hear more from this tenor sax master in the cordless trio format. Lumination is the exciting follow up, featuring Frahm, once again, with long-time musical friends, collaborators and fellow Turboprop members, bassist Dan Loomis and drummer Ernesto Cervini.

Here again we are treated to ten original tracks: six by Frahm and two each by Cervini and Loomis, “illuminating” their talents not only as dynamic, virtuosic players, but also as gifted composers. Peppered throughout with good humour, the fun begins with Cervini’s The Nurse Is In, a swinging tribute to his beloved Toronto Raptors’ former head coach, jazz lover Nick Nurse, where, alongside the tight-knit, rhythmic interplay and improvisational “lay-ups,” you can catch Frahm’s quick quote of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. There’s some good-natured teasing in Frahm’s Disco Nern, a jaunty tribute to Cervini, with a cheeky quote this time from Istanbul (Not Constantinople). 

Frahm’s signature warmth and mellifluous playing are heard on his poignant Moonface Lament, written, apparently, during a sleepless night on tour. The mood changes with Loomis’ driving and kinetic False Spring, followed by Frahm’s cool contrafact, Kern You Dig It?, based on All The Things You Are by, you guessed it, Jerome Kern, and featuring Cervini’s deft brush work.

The Joel Frahm Trio is a classy, cohesive, collective of consummate musicians. Lumination is an ideal vehicle for their exceptional talents.

You Are the Right Length
Exit Points
Independent EP-501 (exitpoints.square.site/product/vinyl-lp-you-are-the-right-length/45?cp=true&sa=true&sbp=false&q=false)

Now a staple of the Toronto improvised music scene, Michael Palumbo’s monthly Exit Points series at Arraymusic strikes a perfect balance of genre-bending collaboration between musicians across disciplines and capturing moments of pure serendipity. It is extremely fitting that an LP release featuring different performances from this series feels like it transcends the live album medium into something that feels significantly more alive, breathing. 

Track lengths range from under a minute to over ten, and these lengths feel quite deliberate; each piece brimming with energy and momentum, trains of collective thought that clearly state their destination without having to arrive there. Sitting at the extremes of this spectrum of duration are the pieces Falling into Echoes and Sonoluminescence, which bear incredible resemblances to each other, setting a tranquil groundwork, then eventually opting to draw from reserves of tension that are not pollutants; merely a texture etched a little deeper, or a new source of light. 

The consequence of choosing excerpts of larger pieces and then sequencing them a certain way is that the profound power of spontaneous composition is apparent in an entirely different manner than the act of circumstantially stumbling upon it. Instances that did not inform each other in the literal sense begin to touch on meaning they would not have in isolation, moments collide to change each other irrevocably. When unfettered process becomes crystallized in product form, there exists a chance of reincarnation as shimmering as this.

Listen to 'You Are the Right Length' Now in the Listening Room

Simpletrio2000
Anna Webber
Intakt CD 430 (annawebber.bandcamp.com/album/simpletrio2000)

Away from their academic roles, Canadian tenor saxophonist/flutist Anna Webber now at the New England Conservatory and American drummer John Hollenbeck who teaches at McGill, join long-time associate New York pianist Matt Mitchel, for a tenth anniversary reunion of their Simpletrio. The playing focus: ten enigmatically titled Webber compositions.

Bookended by two modest groove tunes that expose their innate interaction as they blend reed honks, patterning and splattering keyboard strokes and metronomic drum beats, the exuberant mood they express animates the entire album. Although a track like 8va is languid enough to highlight Webber’s expressive bass flute lowing matched with intermittent piano clips, tough pressure and sophisticated linear melodies with mercurial timbral divergences characterize most of the other tunes.

Idiom VII for instance is built around a repeated unison riff, with interludes of reed tongue slapping, drum press rolls and carousing piano pumps. Meanwhile Miiire is a spidery tune that becomes speedier and more dissident as it unrolls without losing its horizontal flow. Prominent are Webber’s transverse flutters and peeps and Hollenbeck’s rim clanks, which at points unfold in tandem with the piano for more prominent sound coloration.

Countering the old saw that those who can do, and those who can’t teach, is this session involving Webber, who is Co-Chair of NEC’s Jazz Studies Department and Hollenbeck who has taught jazz drumming at McGill’s School of Music since 2015. Alongside Mitchell they prove they can definitely do.

Peaks and Valleys
Teri Parker’s Free Spirits
Modica Music (teriparkermusic.com)

Paying homage to two irreplaceable legends of improvised music, Peaks and Valleys is about as refreshing, moving and ingenious as a tribute can be. Playing two pieces each from the expansive works of Geri Allen and Mary Lou Williams, Toronto pianist Teri Parker’s group makes the absolute most of them, with these renditions being sobering in their clarity and the care taken in bringing out every nuance of the original recordings, while feeling like something entirely new is constantly taking place. 

Geri Allen’s classic Drummer’s Song starts out as exactly that, with Mackenzie Longpre’s exhilarating drum intro slyly and gradually implying the song’s central pulse, and then when Allison Au enters with the saxophone ostinato near the one-minute mark, everything somehow perfectly falls into place, a moment that captures that intangible feeling of rhythmic alchemy unique to Allen’s music, where a listener is fully along for the ride without ever entirely reaching an understanding of why all these moving parts are so perfect for each other. 

Parker’s own original pieces comprise the other half of the tracklist, with some containing more easily identifiable parallels to the album’s influences (Gemini II for example, both shares a title with an iconic Mary Lou Williams piece and an opening progression that could easily be a nod to her later period). Others, like the mesmerizing, goosebump-inducing Bear Hug, sound like a heartfelt message expressed entirely sonically, the kind that offers receiving ears a sense of belonging.