Prepositional persuasiveness
Romance and revolution
Both a supergroup in other words ALL the players here are significant players and icons in the making and a label family band (put together by in this case Blue Note) there’s nothing oblique apart from the punctuation in the band name of Out Of/Into.
Slash / burn
These guys burn. Let’s pause for a moment to think of what the band name makes us think. Turning to the dictionary Out Of we think of in the sense of something made from a material, showing proportion and also doing something because of a particular feeling.
We look before and after,
From ‘To a Skylark,’ Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1820
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
With Into we think of physical movement into a space and transformation and involvement being into something. It’s a circle in the round.
To complete the circuit and be human there’s a romance, a revolution and a tenderness the Romantic poets knew and jazz musicians also wrap in blue when you think of a line like Shelley’s Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
For the many not the few
Into what? We’re into this. Because there’s a steady flow. And you enter a world only this band of five know and yet as a listener, just another anonymous stranger in a room of many rooms, are beckoned in to share the experience. No one does any forced exiling. The shrubbery of jazz snobbery is properly pruned back.
Playing originals pianist Gerald Clayton as musical director of the band is important of course. But everyone contributes in one way or another given that the band is the thing.
And I think it works not when you itemise the sum of its parts and realise you need to do a recount as there is more here than you might reckon by the bald numbers because as a collective sound it is well constructed and there is a lot of resource.
Vibes speckled (Joel Ross reliably inhabiting a Bobby Hutcherson-meets-Steve Nelson domain) – and 2024 has been a big year for a range of stimulating vibes flavoured albums – Motion I also manages to sound both contemporary and retrospective which sounds a contradiction but when you listen you will realise that yep somehow the musicians are able to say something for today and say something about the past at the same time. They are not in a bubble or pretend they are inventing the wheel and they are not solipsists. Musicians thinking they are solipsists is a bad look. And yet there are no compromises.
What that bravery of expression amounts to is quite balladic on ‘Aspiring to Normalcy’ when Immanuel Wilkins’ alto is tender and communicative and Matt Brewer’s bass playing comes into its own on his own tune.
So what – and we always do when inspired – did we break off to listen to after absorbing these sounds?
Inspired by what Clayton brings to the table. Of course 2020’s Happening: Live at the Village Vanguard that lit us up inside just as this does was first port of call to a recording made at the greatest of all jazz clubs, the Vanguard in New York.
Scintillating Wilkins
Completed by drummer Kendrick Scott who opens proceedings with a solo on his own tune ‘Synchrony’ there are lucky 7 tunes here: Clayton’s ballad ‘Bird’s Luck’ at the end shares quite a lot in common with the Brewer tune and again Wilkins is used as the main foil. The motion in the title comes more at the beginning on ‘Afafrii’ but really this is more an album of reflections. It isn’t about relentless drive but the currents are important, in the undertow between bass and piano harmonically on ‘Aspiring to Normalcy’ that contains a lot of weight, feeling and hugely considered sax playing from Wilkins is the icing on the cake.
Clayton’s tunes are at the heart of the album and I’d pick out ‘Gabaldon’s Glide’ as the best of all. Clayton, 40, born in the Netherlands, son of the great Monty Alexander bassist John Clayton back in the 1970s and stellar with Diana Krall decades on, placed second at the high calibre 2006 Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Piano Competition and since then has picked up multiple Grammy nominations and put out some formidable records on Blue Note of which Happening we love and revere most.
Super sonics, thoughtfully sequenced
Formed for Blue Note’s 85th the band toured this year backed by Universal’s muscle, the major distributor that owns Blue Note. I wish more record labels would show touring support. Most don’t, won’t or can’t.
‘Bird’s Luck’ is the briefest so I guess will get any radio play that is going given that brevity is all the more commercial a station happens to be. The longest is ‘Aspiring to Normalcy’ at nearly 12 minutes. But its duration is not a barrier at all and jocks should put this on if they can get past the diktats that jobsworth station controllers look to impose.
A lot of thought has gone into the pacing of the tracks and their ordering and there is great sonic depth in the audio. Just let the album play – so many albums don’t allow that and so you end up just choosing one or two tracks because the ordering doesn’t make sense or because some tracks are far too long, pants, or merely a bagatelle.
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