Long tracks. That’s typically the case with a random live album. And so it proves. But there is nothing random about what each of the trio bring to the performance. All are strong on narrative and you feel that there is a shape to each piece no matter how many diversions are taken. The main “voice” is Mark Turner on tenor sax but there is a lot of intertwining, overlapping going on. It’s not collective free improvisation but instead there is a complex band counterpoint formed by curling rhythms, and steady pulsing push and shove occasionally upending your expectations with little silences you never saw coming.
Each of the trio contribute tunes. The recording was made over two nights at a place called Ornithology in Brooklyn in March last year.
Tunes include ‘1946’ which is a tribute to Tom Harrell – the trumpeter and flugel player was born on 16 June 1946.
Gilmore definitely delivers live. Remember his own Vanguard album from last year, Journey to the New? It was stimulating. Far more in the jazz-rock fusion space than here the style on this new one is more post-bop perhaps and nevertheless is just as convincing.
You can easily sense that the album belongs to a recent lineage of modern small-group jazz that values spontaneity over polish and dialogue over display. What makes it compelling is the way the trio builds tension and release through close listening and finely judged interaction.
At its best, the album feels almost conversational. Turner’s tenor lines are likely to bring that cool, searching clarity he is known for, while Martin’s bass gives the music weight and direction, and Gilmore’s drumming adds a fleet, sharply alert sense of motion. Ideas are stated, questioned, reframed and sometimes left hanging in the air long enough for the next player to pick them up and push them somewhere unexpected. That gives the music a sense of real-time discovery.
The record is part of the Modern Masters and New Horizons series curated by jazz trumpeter Jason Palmer and the Giant Step Arts label,
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