When the baritone saxophone specialist and former Downtown stalwart Dave Sewelson and the visceral guitar virtuoso Ava Mendoza first conceived the idea of a duo album, the expectation was that they’d veer in the tried and true direction of a free jazz squall, heading into the studio one afternoon in the flush of autumn and letting it all hang loose before assembling the results into an hourlong record. Their mutual contact man William Parker however had other ideas.
Sewelson’s relationship with the venerable bassist and bandleader stretches back more than forty years now, to the late seventies when they first met in New York City and his foundational membership of the Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra through recent efforts like The Gate for Mahakala Music, where they made up an impromptu trio with the drummer Steve Hirsh, the wily Sewelson coopting Parker’s bass whenever the free jazz maverick indulged his interests in the Slovakian fujara and Catalan gralla. Mendoza meanwhile joined the fray following a residency at the experimental hub The Stone in Greenwich Village, playing alongside Parker and the drummer Gerald Cleaver on the 2021 album Mayan Space Station, which was Parker’s first ever foray as the leader of an electric guitar trio.
Parker proving the common thread, Sewelson and Mendoza first collaborated in that same summer of 2021, just weeks after the statewide lifting of pandemic restrictions, when Mendoza’s guitar turned Sewelson’s Music For a Free World troupe into a quintet, as they alongside Parker on bass, Dave Hofstra on the tuba and Marvin Bugalu Smith on drums made an appearance at the Vision Festival at Pioneer Works. A review on the jazz blog Now’s the Time described Mendoza as a ‘revelation’, while adding:
The contrast between Mendoza’s playing in the Dave Sewelson Music for a Free World group Thursday night and with Third Landing was astonishing. Her technical mastery is impeccable, ranging from Eddie Van Halen-style double-fingering solos, to slow free drones to funky rhythm guitar, but what’s more remarkable at this stage in her career is that these gifts are deployed in the service of an expansive and gripping musical vision.
Of course the art of improvisation lies in listening to your fellow practitioner, and with none more esteemed, Sewelson paid heed when Parker heard of his impending session with Mendoza and decided to kick in a few last-minute tunes. A couple of lyrics from Parker fundamentally altered the shape of the sessions which would become Of It But Not Is It, changing the direction of travel from free jazz blowouts to shorter song structures, from drinking songs and down-and-out songs to homages and even cris de cœur.
Of It But Not Is It opens with the sloshing turbulence of ‘Mangrove Sea’, a piece composed by Mendoza, before William Parker pries open a cask of turnip wine, interrupting the torrents and currents of free jazz with a sage outpouring of the sweet and peppery stuff. Singing the song with a Waitsian swagger if not quite the same level of gruffness, Sewelson offers a pliant and careening interpretation of Parker’s lyrics over Mendoza’s stonking guitar chords, woozy yet formidably headstrong. Requesting just a ‘sip’ of the ‘old turnip wine’, the singer in the spirit of libation imagines an end to all war and rows of soldiers returning home for a big hoedown come Saturday night, his head screwed on tight as a bit of down-home fermentation greases the wheels that would divide men and nations, Parker’s text ending the song on a note of quasi-Freudian transfiguration as ‘all the girls will turn into trumpets, and all the rifles into trombones’.
‘Don’t Buy the Lie’ separates the wheat from the chaff with a winnowing drive as Sewelson’s baritone saxophone struggles to keep up with Mendoza’s runaway guitar, trailing in its wake then making up ground and orbiting its course like a butterfly or Tails from the second Sonic the Hedgehog, paving the way for an anime-style showdown where an irresistible force meets an immovable object before the guitar tone lifts and the roles reverse in the final moments, Sewelson’s baritone strafing to meet in mutual catharsis. ‘Do Nothing Man’ is the second of the tracks on Of It But Not Is It to bear Parker’s lyrics, the arrangement by Mendoza straying towards Pixies-esque surf rock melodies as the text describes a veritable do-nothing, a layabout who does nothing at all the whole week long but then on Saturday ‘takes the whole day off’. After a honeyed, loquacious and cooly ironic vocal rendering, Sewelson’s baritone then fells into line, with the singer pressed to clarify that this ‘Do Nothing Man’ is moving as fast he can as Mendoza joins in for a wheel-squeaking climax.
The second side of the album breaks on a dolorous horn traced by shards of angsty guitar. Gaining a small head of steam which scarcely punctures the encompassing clouds and general air of ambivalence, finally the overtones of the guitar and a burnished saxophone add a surprising grace note. That leads into the title track, another winnowing duet and the final dual composition on the record.
The final three pieces on Of It But Not Is It are given over to Sewelson, who pays tribute to the Forestville-based composer and guitarist Bill Horvitz, who died at the age of 69 years old back in 2017 and served as a mentor to Sewelson during the early phase of his career. ‘It was fifty years ago you encouraged me to blow. It’s been that long, but you’re going and all we’ve got is a song’ he sings as Mendoza’s guitar sputters and pulls in opposite directions, before holding his notes on the baritone just that little bit longer, each bend expressing a profound depth of feeling. The short ‘Scaribari’ continues in the same vein, carrying the same backroom bluesy theme before a brief cyclonic storm settles into a spiralling motif. That leaves the album closer ‘Where Are You’ whose ringing, shapeshifting guitar summons spectres in the rearview while the unremitting whinnying of Sewelson’s horn serves as an elegy to absence.
Ava Mendoza – who recently bottled lightning as one half of the headline act Mendoza Hoff Revels, shredding atop the deeply simpatico bass of Dev Hoff on an album which drew comparisons with the thrifty punk ethos of Minutemen and the stunning tempo shifts of mid-eighties Black Flag, the harmolodic funk of Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time and the saxophone screeds and lurching sprawl of Fun House-era Stooges; and banded together with Wendy Eisenberg and Shane Parish to flesh out the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet as the veteran noisemaker took the splintering earworms of Music For Four Guitars on the road after a heralded Tiny Desk Concert – contains a bruising angularity on her distortion-laden guitar which perfectly complements the rich and soulful, sometimes ragged and doleful nature of Sewelson’s baritone sax.
Spurred by Parker in the direction of art songs and ardent grooves, after that first stint in the fall of 2021 the duo returned for another session in the recording studio the following autumn, hoping to make Of It But Not Is It hang together as a cohesive whole. Despite the accomplishment of the playing the mournful character of some of its themes, the result still sounds winsome and carefree, as if the fruits of such a collaboration were just ripe for the taking.
