Sometimes you need to escape into a record. That occurred to me here. Escape from the hostile environment of mainstream commercial radio that wouldn’t dream of playing anything like Ancestral. Escape from the TV and internet that prioritises pop, rock, hip-hop stuff that I’d never dream of going to hear but can’t avoid hearing via the ubiquity of these not always benign channels.
That’s when an album comes into its own. It’s a private space that somehow has got created without any great fanfare, very little support to no great profit by the musicians involved and with little expectations apart from the satisfaction of the fact of creation. It’s a feat it exists at all. As an act of rebellion it is like revenge on neglect, a vision of another world that few ever get to see or hear.
I’ve heard American alto saxist John O’Gallagher, 60, who hails from California, once before. That was back in 2016. He was playing in the band of pianist-composer Hans Koller’s at east London club the Vortex – I think he was studying for a doctorate at the time in Birmingham. It struck me how he had such a very clear vibrato-less style that proved very appealing. The ex- Lee Konitz drummer Jeff Williams was in the band. Later Williams’ wife We Need To Talk About Kevin author novelist Lionel Shriver came into the club and talked to a few of us afterwards as conversation turned spontaneously somehow to jazz in fiction and a mention of Rafi Zabor’s The Bear Comes Home.
Since then O’Gallagher records have included The Anton Weber Project and Beast. But I think this new release is even better. In fact for me it’s up there with some of the finest work not just avant-garde stuff but more generally anything that I have heard this year. It’s pretty hard hitting as is much of O’Gallagher’s work but there are many points of entry and there is a logic to its bumpy contours, spiky diversions, serene demonstrations and free thinking fever. So for instance when you get to ‘Contact’ (where guitarist Ben Monder dominates the sound) it is a long way from meditations on free bop or heritage free jazz approaches that Andrew Cyrille (Unit Structures, 3D Family etc) is so good at negotiating elsewhere and more akin to what David Torn does working with Tim Berne. This also finds Mwandishi legend Billy Hart in a far more experimental situation than found either on his excellent recent ECM album Just or live gem, Multidirectional. Two drummers is unusual – don’t think twice it’s all right. And there’s no bass.
The work blends through-composed pieces, scraps of charts and improvisations seamlessly connected to be a one-ness. There is clearly a vision at all points. O’Gallagher as an academic is massively interested in the music of John Coltrane. And you get that debt to genius bleeding through a bit on a track like ‘Tug’ when the sheets of sound multiply and there is a smashing through the structures measured out by drums and guitar. But at no point is this a tribute to Coltrane in a direct sense. There’s incredible emotion on a track like ‘Postscript’ which is like an epic lamentation. I think of the Shelley lines:
Out of the day and night/A joy has taken flight;
Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1824, published in Posthumous Poems
Thrilling – albums like Ancestral, which was recorded in a Montclair, New Jersey studio in January 2024, make me change the way I think about what is possible in 21st century jazz all over again.
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