‘I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Theodore Roethke from ‘The Waking’
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.’
Clearly the year’s best jazz album to date – see the marlbank list of the top 10. It’s fitting that some Lyle Mays pieces are included in this formidable release by the great Pat Metheny Group pianist and composer’s niece.
There is a strong Metheny connection not just because of these factors but because PMG and The Impossible Gentlemen bassist Steve Rodby co-produces as he did Johnson’s earlier album Unraveled.
One of the Mays associated pieces chosen is ‘Chorinho’ from 1988’s Street Dreams that has been interpreted by others since including Renee Rosnes and Bill Charlap on their Blue Note album of four handers, Double Portrait – the one with the gorgeous cover art painting of Marc Chagall’s reproduced.
I liked too the treatment of the setting of the Theodore Roethke poem ‘The Waking’ that Kurt Elling sang so vividly on his glorious Nightmoves (2007).
Tuppenny ha’pworth
Both bassist Matt Aronoff and drummer Jay Sawyer contribute strongly to key pieces of Johnson’s on this latest. Also notable is Alex LoRe’s bass clarinet work in the blend.
The style overall is chamber jazz but there’s no real need to be reductive about labelling it as such and other interpretations of the bracket in which it is contained within are possible. Johnson also includes her brother Gentry Johnson’s piece ‘I’ll Never Need To Know.’
A great vocals record of skill and technical strength, obvs – in that regard only Jo Lawry’s in recent years on the incredible Acrobats comes close in terms of sheer inventiveness and pushing the art of jazz vocals on again.
But above all there is a humanity to The Lively Air and a zestfulness and great spirit that makes the difficult seem easy and that transports the listener into another far better world than the vale of tears we all inhabit but do not want to dissolve into. Art like this incalculably helps such a desire for imaginative escapology and that most Metheny & Mays-esque of words, an offramp.
