Max Kutner's "High Flavors"

Guitarist extraordinaire Max Kutner is based in Brooklyn, arguably the epicenter of the US creative music universe, where it's still tough to make rent for a creative muso between solo and collaborative gigs. Earlier this year, he released Imaginary Numbers, an EP of blazing fusion with Android Trio, a band with fellow alumni of CalArts and Captain Beefheart's Magic Band. Kutner has also applied his exploratory approach in Zappa and Oingo Boingo legacy bands, but his forte is as a composer (previously showcased in the klezmer outfit Bubbeleh, Near Eastern-flavored Izela, and tuba trio Evil Genius). Now, with the release of High Flavors, at the helm of a top-flight quintet, he makes a major creative statement.

While the material dates back as far as 2017, basic tracks for the album were done in a single September 2021 session at legendary engineer (Swans, White Zombie, John Zorn) Martin Bisi's BC studios, after which Kutner spent a few months crafting overdubs and synth content and integrating samples. He and Bisi mixed the record in three eight-hour sessions early this year. The band -- Eli Asher on trumpet, Michael Eaton on tenor, Kurt Kotheimer on bass, Colin Hinton on drums -- is equally adept at interpreting challenging charts and extemporizing with invention and heat. They inhabit a set of eight Kutner compositions that cover a wide range of moods and colors.

Opener "Deramping" is a complex construction, built on a series of echolalic ostinatos. "A High Point of Low Culture" juxtaposes mutant swing with treated samples and a recording of Kutner's grandfather Art Stevens playing saxophone on a 1984 gig at Mickey Felice's restaurant in Patchogue, Long Island (my teenage stomping ground!). My current favorite track is "In Want of an Interpolative Escape Machine," which displays the most Zappa/Boingo influence of anything here, starting out as a madcap romp that gives way to an extended noise guitar solo, gradually returning to the circus-like theme. "Struggling Sometimes" reminds me of a prog rock version of Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra; the horn writing here is particularly piquant. "Towers Collapse" sounds like a collision between NYC's loft jazz '70s and its experimental '80s. "Less a Moral Lesson" starts out with a knotty theme that gives Asher room for a plaintive solo before Hinton takes a loose-limbed one of his own, then the rhythm section hits a funk groove and the theme returns to take us out.

As Kutner suggests, High Flavors is best experienced "the old-fashioned way," front to back, even in the absence of a physical-media version (which I acknowledge is an ecologically responsible choice, as geeked as I remain on The Romance of the Artifact). Besides being crammed with smart writing and absorbing instrumental detail, it's an exquisitely paced record. Owners of adventurous ears owe it to themselves to hear it.