When it comes to what sounds ''really modern'' and what amounts to ''obvious newness'' at the moment - a big subject and it usually doesn't involve (no matter how much we all love to hear them) anyone singing show tunes from the 1940s and 50s or a classic big band approach unless you just want to go retro. Styles like electronica especially couched in a language that allows a lot of space and room for new notions of harmony are making more headway and changing our sound perceptions bit by bit.
Take Of Sight and Sound inspired by abstract painter Ford Crull that boiled down to its raw ingredients is a guitar, bass guitar and drums album moulded via sound design that lifts an album from being something off the peg to a sound that is more customised and potentially new.
Brandon Ross, who has been inspired by Butch Morris' conduction innovations, is here in his band Pendulum with his brother bass guitarist Kevin Ross and drummer Chris Eddleton. Think Jonny Greenwood a bit, Vernon Reid, Bill Frisell perhaps but the whole thing is also avant garde too. Floaty, very detailed harmonic layers, multi directional drumming and roaming bass plus lots of reverb artfully deployed that creates quite a wall of sound are part of the spell conjured. The tense three part 'Toil' suite sets the feel of the album and here you get a sense of dystopia and again that word space.
Ross is a remarkable player who has been active making records since the 1970s notably on an earlier record of his own for Sunnyside almost a decade ago For Living Lovers and as a sideman on some very cult Kip Hanrahan records, the Henry Threadgill Very Very Circus classic Spirit of Nuff… nuff and some of Cassandra Wilson's finest work including the classic Blue Light Till Dawn and in the band Harriet Tubman especially on the remarkable The Terror End of Beauty. An original work that creates its own world and is the sort of release given this that often develops word of mouth traction. Certainly jazz needs change and albums like Of Sight and Sound at least address the issue rather than reheat past glories or even worse fake all feeling. But don't go looking for easy answers here on a challenging work. No one here is in the business of delivering platitudes.
Updated 12 February 2023: Brandon Ross got in touch and says: ''Firstly, thanks for the review! Appreciate the illumination of your take on the music. I wanted to clarify something that was misrepresented, as I understood it - Hardedge - soundesign, is an ensemble member, deploying sonic events/elements in real time - not as a post production participant. ALL the sonic dimensionality in the music, occurred in live performance, as described by my liner notes.''