This brilliant trio of Anna Webber on saxes and flutes, Matt Mitchell on piano and John Hollenbeck on drums 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
7 comments:
Is it really so important to decide which category to place an album like this in, one that is complex yet pleasant to listen to? Is it really so important, every time a new album strays from certain stylistic norms, to emphasize that it is not a free jazz album, as if there were a single definition of free jazz and an orthodoxy to conform to?
This is an interesting question, because sometimes we do get readers asking (on here and elsewhere) why we aren't covering more traditionally free jazz and free improvisation. In a way, maybe this keeps coming up as something of a knee-jerk defense of our coverage choices.
That said, no I don't think there is much to be gained from struggling over categorization, unless it specifically highlights a critical element of the music.
Of course there is no intrinsic value in putting music into categories or boxes. Music is music and it is free to move into any direction. The only reason I mention it in the review, is to give an idea of what it might sound like to the readers in a broad definition of sub-genres and styles. Some people do not like fully arranged or composed music, others do. So it makes sense to notify them whether it's worth reading on or checking out the music;
Thanks for your reply, Stef.
I didn't mean to criticize your review. I fully understand why it's necessary to try to define music using labels. However, while I viscerally love the golden age of free jazz (what Lee calls “traditionally free jazz,” which to my ears sounds a bit like an oxymoron), I believe that sometimes it is used as a cornerstone of value from which to judge new forms of “free” jazz, which mix composition and improvisation, perhaps using electronics, and hybridize with other genres. I believe we should look at all these forms with a less severe eye, appreciating what they bring to music.
That said, I always follow the blog with great interest and attention, and I am grateful to you for the many musicians I have come to know thanks to you!
I came up with the phrase Our Kind of Music--meaning the kind of music FJB covers--just to sidestep this argument. I sometimes feel like my own writing sometimes falls in ruts of "this sounds like" or "this would be a soundtrack for this kind of movie." Other times I'm fine with that because, as Stef says, I'm trying to give folks an idea of what they'll find in music I love that they haven't heard of. And I'm not egotistical enough to think anyone reads enough of my work to notice a "rut."
FWIW, this review did prompt me to buy the DL.
@ Gary: I bought the album too!
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