This brilliant trio of Anna Webber on saxes and flutes, Matt Mitchell on piano and John Hollenbeck treat us to a fantastic rhythm fest, full of complexities, surprises and well-arranged twists and turns. It’s been ten years since the trio dropped their debut album Simple, and their long-awaited follow-up is finally here. This is not free jazz, yet it's hard to call it mainstream too. It's actually hard to put it into any musical category, and at times classical avant-garde comes even to mind, with long repetitive phrases, or even some jazz fusion with its unison lines at lightning speed.
All three musicians rank among the finest on their instruments—fully at ease with the technical demands of Webber’s compositions, and bringing even more to the table: inventive creativity, joyful expression, and an infectious energy. The music itself is anything but simple, yet the trio delivers it with such natural ease that it almost feels effortless. More impressively, the music truly shines in their hands—radiant and alive—without ever drawing undue attention to its underlying virtuosity.
The music is so meticulously crafted that it leaves little space for improvisation, which in turn slightly diminishes its emotional depth. Even so, listening to it evokes a sense of wonder and admiration—perhaps even joy and delight at its sheer precision and wild inventiveness. It's less about deep emotional expression and more about the playful exuberance of making music itself. And of course, those are meaningful emotions too.
Anna Webber is in a category of her own, and that's a great place to be.
Listen and download from Bandcamp.
Watch a video from a recent performance at the Bop Stop
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