Miles Okazaki's "Miniature America"

This new recording by guitarist-composer Miles Okazaki -- out July 19 on admirable artist-owned indie Cygnus Recordings -- is quite extraordinary, and it's taken me a few pleasurable spins to wrap my head around. 

Because it's inspired by visual art (sculptures by Ken Price, wall drawings by Sol Lewitt) and text (a radically edited page from Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, randomized final lines from poems) and co-produced with esteemed record-man David Breskin (Modney, Dan Weiss, Ches Smith), it's impossible for me not to view it as part of a continuum with previous art-inspired work Breskin has done with Bill Frisell (Richter 858), Nels Cline (Dirty Baby), Kris Davis and Craig Taborn (pieces played at the Museum of Modern Art here in Fort Worth in response to sculptures in the museum's collection). Unlike producers who focus on capturing what went down in the room -- a strategy I usually prefer -- Breskin likes to feed artists prompts to spark their creativity. 

I'll admit to being aware of Okazaki primarily as "the guy who recorded Thelonious Monk's entire canon for solo guitar" (WORK, 2018), but he's also recorded two trilogies of albums, MIRROR for Sunnyside (2009-2012) and Trickster for Pi (2017-2019). Since 2021, he's run the Cygnus label with drummer Dan Weiss; their double album Music for Drums and Guitar was the label's premiere release. While there's great guitaring aplenty on Miniature America -- including use of a quarter-tone instrument on "The Cavern" and fretless on "Whack A Mole" -- and an all-star band to boot, the real story here is the innovative compositional strategies Okazaki employs. 

Much of the work, the composer says, was done in post-production: "We made dozens of different little episodes. Dense blocks of sound. I took them home and carved away at them until just the minimum remained, and then played along." The sumptuously illustrated booklet that accompanies the CD provides some clues to his methods, including score examples. You can hear what Okazaki's talking about most clearly on "Lookout Below," where he plays rapid-fire unisons with a revolving cast of other instruments or voices. The rhythmic flow on "Wheel of Cloud" and "A Clean Slate" is provided by sequences of band members reciting the final lines from poems. On "Pulsation Station," Okazaki's guitar negotiates the territory between two groups playing at different speeds.

A thread running through the album is the melody which Matt Mitchell plays on piano over the crowd chatter -- which reappears pristine on "A Clean Slate" -- of opener "The Cocktail Party," trombonist Jacob Garchik essays over Okazaki's chords on "The Cavern," a choir of Ganavya, Jen Shyu, and Fay Victor sings on "The Firmament," and Ganavya solos on "In the Fullness of Time." 

Speaking of that all-star band, besides the aforementioned worthies, Miniature America is also graced by the contributions of vibraphonist Patricia Brennan (whose septet record Breaking Stretch drops September 6 on Pyroclastic), Caroline Davis on alto (whose recent collab with Wendy Eisenberg, Accept When, is a fave at mi casa), Anna Webber on tenor and flute (whose Shimmer Wince on Intakt from last year I need to hear), and Jon Irabagon (Mary Halvorson, Mostly Other People Do the Killing) on mezzo-soprano, sopranino, and slide sax. A fine bunch, whose collaborative spirit helped make this breathtaking album a reality. 

Things we like: Nasheet Waits, Tarbaby

Not long ago, I got to watch the livestream on sfjazz.org of Dave Holland's New Quartet. Holland's probably on more records I love than any bassist but Charlie Haden, solely on the basis of his work with Miles Davis, Sam Rivers, and Anthony Braxton. He and his band played a well paced set of new material (which I can't wait to hear recorded). It was nice to hear pianist Kris Davis playing shimmering Chick-with-Miles stuff on electric, and working in a bop-adjacent idiom I hadn't heard her in before, as well as a new Davis original that had a Monk-via-Dolphy feel. Altoist Jaleel Shaw said a lot on his horn, with a distinctively light sound. 

But the band member I couldn't take my eyes off was Nasheet Waits, who played a little like Tony Williams used to in the '70s (those tom rolls!), but with a looser-limbed swing. So when not one but two new Waits recordings materialized in my inbox, I was primed to listen. Both albums drop June 28 and are part of Giant Step Arts' Modern Masters and New Horizons series (co-curated by Waits and trumpeter Jason Palmer).

New York Love Letter (Bitter Sweet) is only Waits' third album as a leader in a career dating back to the early '90s, including stints with Max Roach's M'BOOM and Jason Moran's Bandwagon. The album features Waits in a quartet with vibist Steve Nelson (who's also worked with Dave Holland, in the bassist's late '90s-early Aughts quintet and big band), tenor man Mark Turner (a veteran player whose Live at the Village Vanguard was released on Giant Step Arts in 2022), and bassist Rashaan Carter. The program consists of two Waits originals, alongside one composition each by his former employers Moran and Andrew Hill, and two by John Coltrane. All the pieces reflect aspects of Waits' experience of NYC: growing up, becoming part of the jazz scene, and enduring pandemic isolation there. The band was recorded live at Central Park's Seneca Village (historically the first free Black settlement in New York) in 2021 and at Hunter College in 2022.

On Moran's "Snake Stance," Turner displays some of his Warne Marsh influence, and Nelson takes a scintillating solo, while Waits propels things along assertively. Hill's "Snake Hip Waltz" continues the herpetological theme (which Waits relates to "a quality you really have to inhabit being a resident of NYC") and gives the soloists a wending melody to work their way around. The live recording captures all the nuances of Waits' percussive attack. 

"Moon Child," the first Waits original, is a quietly ruminative piece, inspired by its composer's Greenwich Village childhood, with Nelson out front for the theme and a luminous solo. "The Hard Way" musters ferocious energy, appropriate for a piece inspired by the railroading of the Central Park Five (one of whom now serves on NYC's City Council). The tempo slows to let Turner and Nelson wring all they can from the changes, then Waits takes off on a polyrhythmic wonder of a solo, leading into "AW," a gently lyrical theme dedicated to both Seneca Village founder Andrew Williams and Waits' son August. 

Of the Coltrane tunes, "Liberia" invokes the spirit of Pan-Africanist leader and Harlemite Marcus Garvey, opening with cymbal sounds like the creaking of a slave ship, giving way to Turner's reading of Trane's modal melody before the leader kicks the band into gear. With solos all around, it's an album high spot. Finally, the "Central Park West" here might supplant the reharmonized take on Jack DeJohnette's Special Edition as my favorite version of the tune. The warmth and intimacy of Turner's rendition, followed by Nelson's pianistic response and Turner's closing remarks, brings closure to the date.

Tarbaby is a trio -- active since the late '90s and frequent collaborators with saxophone elder Oliver Lake -- that teams Waits with pianist Orrin Evans and bassist Eric Revis. Philadelphian Evans has performed and recorded extensively over the last quarter century, including stints with the Mingus legacy bands, The Bad Plus, and his own Captain Black Big Band. I'm familiar with Los Angeles native Revis from his City of Refuge album for Clean Feed with Andrew Cyrille and Kris Davis; I need to check out his 2020 album Slipknots Through a Looking Glass on Davis' Pyroclastic label. You Think This America is Tarbaby's sixth album and first live date, recorded at NYC's Hunter College.

The selection of material demonstrates how the musicians in Tarbaby are both rooted ("stuck," if you like) in tradition, while also pursuing their own ideas and visions. Opening track is Ornette Coleman's "Dee Dee," from the Golden Circle, Volume 1 album. The trio on that record is one of the best ways to hear OC's voice unfettered; it's interesting to hear how Evans weaves a matrix of harmony around the simple, sing-song melody. "Comme Il Faut" comes from Crisis! -- the first Ornette record I heard -- and hews closer to the original, particularly in the rhythm section action. Tarbaby stays in a free jazz bag to close the album with Sunny Murray's "Tree Tops."

David Murray's syncopated waltz "Mirror of Youth" (from the titanic saxophonist's collaboration with poet Saul Williams, Blues for Memo), draws on Evans and Waits' experience playing the tune with the composer, with bassist Revis adding his own spin to the interpretation.  Andrew Hill's "Reconciliation" dances obliquely, in Monkish fashion. The cover of the Stylistics' '70s soul hit "Betcha By Golly Wow" is both a nod to Evans' Philly roots and a recognition of the songcraft of writers Thom Bell and Linda Creed. (Tarbaby has previously recorded songs by Prince and the Bad Brains.) I'd never previously noticed the similarity between Jimmy Cox's venerable "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" and D'Angelo's "The Door" until this version, which Evans embroiders in uptown fashion, shadowed by Revis at every turn.

Tarbaby's originals feel of a piece with the revamped classics. On Evans' Latin-tinged "Red Door," for instance, the composer's solo plays around with time before a deft pizzicato interval from Revis and a tumbling solo from Waits. The pianist's "Blues (When It Comes)" is an abstract modal piece marked by relentless forward motion, driven by Waits' crisp propulsion and Revis' brisk walking (including his solo), ending with an exchange of solos between piano and drums. And Evans takes Waits'  ballad "Kush" (previously recorded on 2012's The Ballad of Sam Langford for Hipnotic) down some blues and gospel-ish corridors. 

Both of these records have much to offer, and show the ongoing vitality of jazz tradition. They also mark Giant Step Arts as a label to watch.

Things we like: Matthew Shipp Trio, Caroline Davis & Wendy Eisenberg, Reeder/Seward/Weathers

It occurs to me that I have been insufficiently attentive to the work of the prolific piano master Matthew Shipp since the time iTunes took a dump and sent 70% of my digital music to the widow maker, including his Art of the Improviser and 4D collections. I was reminded of this while hearing him on 577's Welcome Adventure Vol. 1, with Daniel Carter, William Parker, and Gerald Cleaver, during the lockdown time. The appearance of his New Concepts in Piano Trio Jazz (somewhat retro title courtesy of producer Steve Holtje, whose reviews in The Big Takeover I've enjoyed reading) on venerable free jazz imprint ESP Disk this year prompted me to dive back into the Shipp stream. 

Shipp's led a trio with a revolving cast of bassists and drummers since 1990, the longest lived being the current edition, with Michael Bisio on bass and Newman Taylor Baker on drums. In his maturity, Shipp takes his time developing themes, leaving ample space for his long-standing bandmates to listen and respond. With almost a decade of working together under their collective belt, they know each other's playing well enough to sound as though they're playing a scored piece while they're really extemporizing. Shipp's creative imagination seems endless, and his ability to execute his ideas is flawless. Reminds me I also need to check out the latest fruit of Shipp's multi-decade duo with saxophonist Ivo Perelman, Magical Incantation on Soul City. 

I've written before (and will again) that Wendy Eisenberg is the most elegant noise guitarist I've heard, although my favorite records of hers are the "song" ones (Time Machine, the digital-only Dehiscence, my fave Auto, Bent Ring). Accept When, released by reliable Texas indie Astral Spirits, is a collaboration with saxophonist-synthesis-vocalist Caroline Davis that includes new co-written songs to scratch that itch, as well as skronky improv and other instrumental wonderment. 

Eisenberg's sung melodies continue to soar and surprise, her guitar accompaniments frame them sublimely, and Davis's synth interjections carry them off to otherworldly spaces (as Nick Zanca's did on Auto). Her guitar improvs show more of her hard, percussive attack and tension-building scrape and skitter, which Davis's alto meets with an acerbic tone, fluid facility, and free jazz glossolalia. On the title track, the two intertwine their voices on a tortuously twisting melody that evokes the spirit of Dagmar Krause before an instrumental section where Davis plays long tones in the trombone range over Eisenberg's reverb-drenched arpeggios, glisses, plucked harmonics, and crystalline chords. This meeting of simpatico minds is also, incidentally, a good way to hear most of the elements of Eisenberg's artistry (minus her rocking Editrix side) in one place.

Composer-improviser-educator Kory Reeder continues releasing his digital archives via Bandcamp (the most recent installment is Texas: Vol. XI - B Sides and C Sides). Last month, he spent a couple of weeks touring the Southwest and Great Plains in a trio with a pair of fellow polymaths, one from Colorado Springs and the other from Reeder's home base in Denton. 

Besides composing and performing music, Ryan Seward is also a photographer, videographer, and sculptor; on June 28, Reeder's label Sawyer Editions will release Seward's weathering. Outside of his own music making, Andrew Weathers runs Full Spectrum Records and Wind Tide recording studio. As it happens, I've been listening to a few sides he's worked on, including Wendy Eisenberg's recording of Morton Feldman's The Possibility of a New Work for Guitar, Patrick Shiroishi's I was too young to hear silence, Monte Espina's Pueblo Glortha, and Hayden Pedigo's Letting Go. On his own 2015 album Fuck Everybody, You Can Do Anything, he conjures haunting dreamscapes with a large ensemble.

Two Ballads from the High Plains is the document of the trio's collaboration, recorded last November in Weathers' studio and released on his "vanity label" Editions Glomar. The instrumentation is simple: Reeder plays double bass, electronics, and gongs; Seward plays psaltery (a dulcimer-like instrument that's plucked, not hammered) and electronics; Weathers plays lap steel and tenor sax. The two long pieces are named after archaeological landmarks in New Mexico. Maybe I've been baking my brain in post-climate change North Texas for too long, but these sound worlds -- replete with the pulsing drone of electronics, and layers of overlapping harmonics -- remind me of nothing so much as a long stretch of Texas highway, heat rising off the land in the distance, with events periodically occurring to either side as we travel along our way. Immersive listening at its finest.