The clue is in the album name. But beware this isn’t floaty, unshaped or lazy. There isn’t an obvious beat, the trio play beyond bar lines, it’s legato rather than staccato.
Get the joss sticks out, hug a tree. What’s here is far better for the mental health than listening to the typical drivetime dross spat out out by commercial stations and fed to unsuspecting humans everywhere.
All this was shaped around sessions that the intrepid hippies made around Los Angeles and more unusual places. These are not the sort of places you always find listed as recording locations on record sleeves. Like Ventura county outdoors in the hills of Ojai, or how about a living room in Elysian Park, the Churchill Orchard, in the courtyard of an Echo Park home, or under a pepper tree at Elsewhere in Topanga Canyon I kid you not. But this is more than something that could be seen as a worthy nod to the site specific.
This isn’t at all about easy to guess dramatic arcs, commodified tune shapes or coming up with a reimagining of ‘Autumn Leaves’. It’s more a bang a gong communing with universal vibrations, man. Johnson’s sax playing is loose and painterly and one element of several interesting layers – the birdsong effects are just as important and the synths are warm and organic. The production is first class sonically and we dug the flutey bits. Makes you want – surely dearly disevelled when home from counting trains down the end of platform 7 – to think about not buying your clothes from that boring mailorder catalogue of beigeness that fell out of last week’s Redditch Advertiser, start wearing a kaftan, live in a tent and begin to let your navel hair grow into a great big thatch again. Listen long enough and you’ll be thinking of jacking in your job, selling up, and setting off to find enlightenment somehow however impossibly like the heroic Fern (Frances McDormand) character in the brilliant 2021 film Nomadland who was deeply scalded by the world but inside her spirit remained so full of grace, strength and love. Would that be so wrong?
The loops and chordal chimings offset the more out there voyagings but this isn’t at all an album to be frightened of unless all you listen to is Heart and need familiarity, jingles, ads for dodgy estate agents, inane prattle and traffic information.
There’s not much quality avant-garde jazz around at the moment, clearly all this is a world away from most music played on civilian radio. It’s great that Blue Note are dipping their toes in these waters and take the fight to the man even if it’s not the label’s natural habitat at all with most releases and won’t see it like that. Oh, the irony that the label is owned by a big corporate does not escape us. But you’d more expect this to be on the even more free-jazz loving livery of Impulse also owned by the same megacorp. Nevertheless such eco loving protest lullabies – important when there are no many mad climate deniers and anti net zero tinfoil hat keyboard warriors out there – as an antidote as found on Openness Trio sits well with some of that “house that Trane built” label’s most charismatic signing of recent years Shabaka’s more outré inclinations. It’s a keeper and isn’t at all throwaway, easy to mock, or at all bad faith.
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