Music and Recording Reviews

Weird Of Mouth: Weird of Mouth
Mette Rasmussen, alto saxophone; Craig Taborn, piano; Ches Smith, drums, percussion
Otherly Love OLR009 (auditioned in WAV, available as CD, LP). 2024. Weird of Mouth, prods.; Chris Benham, eng.
Performance ****
Sonics ***½

Stereophile probably doesn't cover enough avant-garde jazz. Consider this review a step toward correcting that. In fact, the trio that calls itself Weird of Mouth is so hardcore that this could count as two steps.

First a public service announcement: Don't try this record at home unless you are a bold listener, willing to endure some pain in order to experience epiphanies. The music of Mette Rasmussen, Craig Taborn, and Ches Smith is mostly in-your-face, deafening, and raw. Yet they are not thrill-seekers. They are serious artists whose work can provide revelations not achievable by more approachable means.

Take the first track, "Wolf Cry." Rasmussen's alto saxophone erupts in long braying calls. Taborn's piano chords crash. Smith's drums bludgeon the music forward in lurches. "Wolf Cry" is under five minutes but contains so many crises it feels much longer. Almost all jazz includes improvisation, but the jazz of Weird of Mouth, driven entirely by collective spontaneous impulse, is exclusively improvisation. It lives only on the knife-edge of the moment. When Rasmussen's strivings suddenly cohere into searing melody, or when Taborn's pummelings coalesce as arcane harmony, it is a rush.

Shorter tunes tend to work best. Nine-minute pieces like "Existension" and "Planisphere" can exhaust the listener's endurance. "Brooders of Joy," at three minutes, becomes a concentrated action, almost a song. It is also startling when, on a track like "In Search of Soul Pane," the amplitude drops, and space opens up. Then you can truly perceive how these three adventurers listen and respond to one another, even as they cast their fates to the wind.

Weird of Mouth is a wild ride. Don't take it just once. There is too much going on here to get it all in one pass.—Thomas Conrad

Andrew Hill Sextet Plus Ten: A Beautiful Day, Revisited
Hill, piano; 15 others
Palmetto PM2011CD (CD, available as LP). 2002/2024. Matt Balitsaris, prod.; Balitsaris, A.T. Michael MacDonald, engs.
Performance ****½
Sonics ***½

Andrew Hill is revered by the jazz cognoscenti for his original brilliance. But he never quite became famous. In the years since his death at 75 in 2007, his name has begun to fade into the shadows of history, partly because he is hard to categorize. His challenging music occupies a no-man's-land between hard bop and avant-garde.

All of which makes this album especially valuable. There is a backstory: In 2002, the Palmetto label released A Beautiful Day, a rare big band project for Hill, recorded live at Birdland in New York. The original producer, Matt Balitsaris, returned to these tapes 20 years later. He says, "I didn't have any mixing automation in those days." Balitsaris discovered that advancements in production and editing technology could be used to address problems like band members playing off-mike. The new album, A Beautiful Day, Revisited, offers improved sound and has become a two-CD set. A previously edited track has been restored, and a second, 16-minute performance of the title track has been added.

No big band has ever played like this. There are fine musicians here, like saxophonists Greg Tardy and Marty Ehrlich, trumpeter Dave Ballou, bassist Scott Colley, and drummer Nasheet Waits. They all play like their hair is on fire, but they do so within the unique context of Hill's intricate, unpredictably evolving, lyrically volatile, harmonically deep, rhythmically asymmetrical music. As for soloists, the most startling of all may be Hill himself. His piano generates huge, looming blocks of sound.

The scope of Hill's imagination is revealed in the two disparate renditions of the title track. They share a melodic line. Everything else is different. Tardy and Ehrlich erupt out of both versions, but they start fresh each time.—Thomas Conrad

Ross McHenry: Waves
McHenry, electric bass; Donny McCaslin, tenor saxophone; Adam O'Farrill, trumpet; Ben Monder, guitar; Matthew Sheens, piano; Eric Harland, drums
Earshift EAR084 (auditioned as CD). 2024. McHenry, prod.; John Davis, Jason Rostkowski, engs.
Performance ****
Sonics ****

This album confirms the strength of the international jazz scene. Waves would be easy to miss because Ross McHenry is not well known outside Australia, even with four of the most talented leading-edge players in the United States on it. (See above.)

Don't miss it. McHenry is an artist with a powerful vision. These seven compositions draw from a single inspiration source: his soul's deepest memories. The solemn songs are tinged with darkness. Often, they have majesty.

As for the sidemen, their first function is to portray his haunting themes and to fulfill his careful arrangements. When they solo, they reveal that they have internalized McHenry's spiritual domain. Trumpeter Adam O'Farrill enters "Love and Obscurity" and immediately intensifies the inherent drama of the melody. The wild yet lucid tenor saxophone catharsis on "1989" could only come from Donny McCaslin. If there is a featured soloist, it is the least-known sideman, Matthew Sheens, the only other Australian in the band. From the opening title track, his heavy block chords and firm, probing touch establish the inward-searching atmosphere of this music.

In liner notes (not included in the CD booklet but available at earshift.com), McHenry offers insights into the life passages and shaping moments that underlie his compositions. "July 1986" came from a photograph of himself and his identical twin brother Angus as infants. Angus died at nine months, in July of 1986. When McHenry wrote this piece, his wife was pregnant with their third child; they named him Angus. "July 1986" is a slow, heartbreaking eulogy for the first Angus and a swell of joy for the second. Everyone in the band is given space within this song to bare his heart.—Thomas Conrad