Ches Smith
Interpret It Well
Pyroclastic Records
★★★★★

THIS album is a sizzler. With percussionist Ches Smith, pianist Craig Taborn, Mat Maneri playing viola and guest guitarist Bill Frisell, it’s a melange of full-blooded musicianship, on-the-cusp melody and ever-inventive improvisation that frees its listeners’ spirits to make their own interpretations after months of creative confinement.

The music’s “open sections told their own stories, revealing unearthed dimensions,” says Brooklyn-based Smith. Taborn’s pianism is like universal drums — listen to the title track — so much so that he and Smith are like two drummers drumming.

Frisell’s guitar explores new musical territory as if he has never before trodden it, new journeys never familiar but always discovering and groundbreaking.

Maneri’s viola is powerfully compelling. A rare enough jazz instrument, yet never an interloper. Seething with invention through Mixed Metaphor alongside Smith’s relentless drums, it never loses its urgency. A fiery quartet indeed, full of now-times exploration.

Brandon Lopez/Ingrid Laubrock/Tom Rainey
No Es La Playa
Intakt Records
★★★★★

No es la Playa by BRANDON LOPEZ – INGRID LAUBROCK – TOM RAINEY

A MARVELLOUSLY inventive trio here: saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock born in Stadtlohn, Germany; Los Angeles drummer Tom Rainey and the young composer and insurgent of the bass Brandon Lopez, a New Yorker of Puerto Rican roots. Together they concoct and converse like three sonic sorcerers.

Rainey is some drummer, conjuring every conceivable surface with a transformative artistry. The New York studio engineer picks up every iota of his sound. Laubrock plays a skittering soprano saxophone on the title track: all through When the Island is a Shipwreck her tenor sax rasps, resonates and guffaws.

Alongside and below all this is Lopez’s gambolling bass. “I try to blind everything out and be totally in the moment,” he says, and such moments abound. His strings bounce sorbo-like through Saturnian Staring and his bow-work crackles in Camposanto Chachacha. The finale, The Black Bag of Want, speaks for us all: a scintillating threesome.

John Taylor Sextet
Fragment
Jazz in Britain Records
★★★★★

ONE of the great, and largely unsung, British jazz pianists was the Mancunian John Taylor (1942 - 2015). Originally released as a cassette in 1975, the recordings on Fragment arose from late-night Capital Radio broadcasts with a sextet including trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, trombonist Chris Pyne, tenor saxophonist Stan Sulzmann, bassist Chris Lawrence and drummer Tony Levin.

The musicianship is superb. Hear Wheeler’s beautifully seamless solo on the title tune, Pyne’s meandering slides on Irene or The Other One and the solos by all members on For Chris, racked with inventiveness in what is a lucid, very identifyingly British jazz sound, founded on Lawrence’s dancing, thinking bass and Levin’s relentless drum universe.

Capital Radio only had an electric keyboard but Taylor plays it like a magician, turning to another studio’s acoustic piano on two tracks, including the memorable improvised lyricism of Room for Improvement. Oh that he were still with us.