First things first I am not as madly keen on American jazz so far in 2026 as I was last year. Or the year before. Come to think of it… and the year before that… and so on.
Not sure why although more good stuff including this latest from Mark Turner reverses that position at least for now.
I’ll not go into too much detail but this is what springs to mind most listening to Patternmaster.
To set out my ground my favourite Turner album is called Temporary Kings. Very different to this it’s a duo album with Ethan Iverson. There isn’t a pianist on this new one. Is that an issue? No.
I used to hear Turner in terms of Warne Marsh. Now I don’t and haven’t for a long while. I turn to one of the greatest living saxists instead because of Turner’s thoughtfulness, fearlessness at being melodic when he needs to be and equally the laconic, cerebral abstract dimensions that he ruthlessly mines depending on context which manifest themselves in a great deal of his engrossing writing and makes his sound chewy and not at all ersatz.
I also liked a more obscure album back when he did sound more like Marsh that he recorded with English guitarist Phil Robson.
What was it called? Ah, a friendly amanuensis jogs my memory hunting it down. Of course – The Immeasurable Code released in ancient times eg 2011.
Gareth Lockrane pops up on that one which is another plus point.
So Turner is a known and trusted quantity capable of delivering a lot of qualities. He is an abstract melodicist if that isn’t too much of an oxymoron.
Certainly he is a modernist without being an avant-gardist. There’s a subtle difference. But it actually doesn’t matter unless you wish to indulge in a bit of chin striking later before the care home gong goes for dinner at 4pm, dearly dishevelled, and thoughts turn to Tipping Point and the weekly visit of Barry on melodeon who’ll play a few tunes for the gathered oldies to relieve the misery of another night-in held captive by TV and wallpaper.
What do you want from an avant-gardist anyway I hear you mutter rebelliously? Improvising gold at the bottom of a rainbow? Hmmm, that’s a long wait. Many’s a plinky-plonk and nails-on-blackboard scrape of a longueur or three beforehand needs enduring meanwhile. Here’s hoping!
What do you want from a modernist? Knowing how to appeal to both mind and body, being able to play bebop properly, and being a bit oblique and loose with the rules. Yes, all that applies on Patternmaster given the rippling shifts, deft modulations, beefy riffery, repetitions, fills and ambitious shape to the falling soft as rain, sweet as petrichor, pitter patter of the tunes.
A word finally on two other observations. Joe Martin’s bass playing is fully integrated and important on this album both structurally and sometimes crucially in most of the tunes away from his break out runs.
As for Jason Palmer I loved the trumpeter’s album Shorter Songs with soulful pianist Kevin Harris last year which converted me to his sound for the first time. I’m a late adopter. Curses. It largely proved an alter ego and sunlit yin to the tenebral yang of Temporary Kings.
Palmer is lively and spirited here and the way he tangles in blue with Turner is as vivid as The Fighting Temeraire, by another massively admired Turner: one Joseph Mallord William Turner.
Drummer Jonathan Pinson completes the sound, it’s a studio album recorded at the great Gérard De Haro place in southern France renowned for Saturday Morning, the late period Ahmad Jamal masterpiece which was and remains a dream and a joy.
Maybe in years to come Patternmaster will mean as much to me. The odds of this happening will very probably get shorter all the time I would have thought given how it hits the bull’s eye on early listens when your gut is telling you it’s a keeper and lodges itself firmly in the forget-me-not precincts of the auld noggin.
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