Booker Stardrum, Close-up On The Outside, We Jazz ***

stephensfgraham

3 months ago

Don’t know much about drummer Booker Stardrum who has been making his own recordings as a leader for a decade and more. He was in SML, a project with bassist Anna Butterss, synth player Jeremiah Chiu, saxophonist Josh Johnson and guitarist Gregory Uhlmann.

Above: A bit of footage of Stardrum from 2020 with Dustin Wong and Chiu recorded at a place called Zebulon in Los Angeles.

Close Up on the Outside involves Butterss and Chiu plus Chris Williams, Lester St. Louis, Logan Hone and Michael Coleman.

But the way it is framed means the sound is more about a single vision. You get a strong sense of production.

Field recordings are fed into a sound that is quite avant garde. But it’s not a maelstrom or very challenging music and yet is intriguing on a certain intellectual level given its freshness.

It’s quite soothing – the use of balafon on the title track sees to that a bit. But it’s not complacent music or under conversation at all and that is to its credit. It’s fundamentally about rhythms and is fine on that level.

But I struggled to find enough top lines to really build on the base of the sound when it appealed in certain passages. So if Close Up on the Outside has a fault – and it is quite flawed – it is that it feels a bit undercooked compositionally. That said, the big track is ‘Hover’. The whole album needs a few more like it to be more substantial and in the end truly satisfying.