Dancing with Elephants the new album by Gaia Wilmer and Ra Kalam Bob Moses took an unconventional first few steps with the veteran drummer and educator contacting the Brazilian saxophonist and offering her a pick of his pre-recorded solo improvisations or musical ‘beds’. The idea was for Wilmer to compose around these grooves or beds, leaving a bit of room for the improvisations, a task which she took up with relish before her return to Brazil and the onset of the coronavirus pandemic temporarily halted her tread.
Wilmer studied jazz composition at Berklee College of Music and graduated with a master’s from the New England Conservatory while entwining herself with the local scenes in Boston and New York. Her first foray as a leader came in the fall of 2017 with Migrations, an album which she recorded at the head of an octet comprising the friends she had made in Boston including the vocalist Song Yi Jeon, the saxophonist Gustavo D’Amico and the guitarist Leandro Pellegrino, all of whom appear on Dancing with Elephants.
In 2020 she featured as part of the Heart Breath Ensemble on Bob Moses’s record Medicine for the Spirit, but her return to SĆ£o Paulo prompted a deeper engagement with her Brazilian heritage which stretches beyond all-encompassing samba and the cool jazz airs of bossa nova to include carnivalesque frevo, the northeastern rhythmic forms of baiĆ£o which are based around the syncopated accents of the zabumba bass drum and the bucolic folk stylings of caipira, which originated in SĆ£o Paulo and is conventionally performed on the caipira viola, a ten-string guitar.
As one-third of the Rama Trio alongside Mayo Pamplona on the upright bass and Elodie Bouny on the classical guitar, she tackled arrangements by Egberto Gismonti, the cavaquinho player Jayme Vignoli and the guitarist SĆ©rgio Assad while in 2022 she led a sextet for the celebratory Nosso Carnaval. Then at the outset of 2023 she paid a more fulsome tribute to Gismonti at the head of a large ensemble for her debut on the ever-consistent New York jazz bastion Sunnyside Records, with Folia: The Music of Egberto Gismonti drawing especially from his early-eighties albums like CircenseĀ andĀ Em FamĆlia while featuring Gabriel Gross on the harmonica, Jaques Morelenbaum on the cello plus Gismonti himself on the piano as special guests.
In fact Wilmer had befriended the great Brazilian composer, guitarist and pianist at the very outset of her career, when she moved from her hometown of FlorianĆ³polis in the country’s south to Rio de Janeiro and fell in with the woodwind ensemble CoraƧƵes Futuristas, one of his regular collaborative partners. Gismonti wrote a letter of recommendation for Wilmer upon her application to Berklee and the saxophonist returned some of the favour by performing in a series of concerts to mark his 70th birthday in 2018. Following on from her Folia: The Music of Egberto Gismonti she released Trem Das Cores, an homage to Caetano Veloso with the cellist Jaques Morelenbaum, and another suite with her sextet this time inspired by the SĆ£o Paulo poet MĆ”rio de Andrade.
By virtue of those extemporaneous drum captures Ra Kalam Bob Moses is the only ubiquitous presence on Dancing with Elephants as Wilmer otherwise gathered a group of friends to record the album at Big Orange Sheep studios in Brooklyn back in 2023. The opening track and its title piece brings together the whole ensemble, led out by the always elegant and deftly explorative piano playing of Leo Genovese. A rangy attack from the percussionist and some wobble and wah from Leandro Pellegrino, who shreds or spools tumbling harmonics on his electric guitar, then introduce the lulling voice of Song Yi Jeon and a whopping five saxophones, with George Garzone and Neta Raanan on the tenor, Daniele Germani playing alto and Gustavo D’Amico wielding the small soprano while Wilmer shifts between the alto and deep baritone saxophone over the course of the record.
Yulila Musayelyan on a trio of flutes completes the woodwind section, who play in unison for a brief snippet at the close of ‘Dancing with Elephants’ which scarcely prefigures the true nature of their wide-roving advance. On ‘Leaving with the Herd’ those saxophones spread out across the mix playing some of their most dulcet and drone-like resonances, populating a loose composition which also features the peals and pulls of the electric guitar.
An expressive album which maintains a high bar, still Dancing with Elephants really comes to life and finds a deeper sense of focus on the third track ‘Turning the Tide’. And it is the flute of Yulila Musayelyan which takes the lead, soaring above a thronging saxophone section like a lone bird flitting and frolicking steeply above the herd.
Wilmer says that Moses’s improvisation on ‘Finding Water’ reminded her of falling rain, and it’s a hard rain at that whose hefty patter might sound more like hail on a sheet metal roof or tarpaulin. His deft sticks are matched by some rolling arpeggios from Genovese and a thick, dilated horn which is the distinctive tone of George Garzone on his tenor. The liner notes compare his sound to John Coltrane’s soulful warmth and though this ensemble plays without a conventional bassist, as a composition ‘Finding Water’ also reminds me of some of the work by William Parker whether playing alongside the likes of David S. Ware or Daniel Carter or with Hamid Drake and Cooper-Moore as the Heart Trio.
At the midpoint of the album, ‘When We Meet’ is more slender and angular, a construction resting on bamboo stilts whose percussive thread sounds like a Cristal Baschet playing gamelan music. Song Yi Jeon vocalises as the raucous alto of Wilmer and tenor of Garzone wail and rasp in passionate competition. As this eloquent set gains propulsive force it becomes increasingly clear that Dancing with Elephants ploughs a wide furrow.
Breathy vocals inhabit the centre of an encompassing percussive clatter on ‘Blue Desert’, which is full of gongs and chimes and pans before a couple of piano rolls break the headily heightened and even somewhat oppressive atmosphere. Garzone’s thick and furry tenor returns then shares in a bit of whooping and hollering with Song Yi Jeon, the growls and shakes of the saxophone mirroring her rhapsodic vocals, while Leo Genovese shimmers and glimmers in the background.
Melodious steel pans and Musayelyan’s overdubbed flutes wind a course on ‘Jellyfish Lake’, a serpentine piece which the album liner notes describe as shamanistic. ‘Whales Part to Play’ showcases Gustavo D’Amico’s flitting and wheezing soprano sax, before a fuller ensemble arrives over Moses’s hand drums to produce more chugging, steam train rhythms as Jeon issues a stream of lapping, lilting vocalisations while Wilmer, Germani and Raanan complete the wind section.
Bob Moses was a fusion pioneer and there are traces of his past work on Dancing with Elephants, from his formative years as a founding member of the jazz rock group the Free Spirits or as the drummer of choice for the innovative four-mallet vibraphonist Gary Burton to his collaboration at the turn of the eighties with the pianist Steve Kuhn and singer Sheila Jordan, which resulted in three acclaimed albums on ECM Records.
That blurring of genre is especially evident on ‘Chase Machine’, which brings back the full ensemble and serves as the album closer (a twinkling redux of ‘Finding Water’ is included as a bonus feature). The song once again emphasises Garzone’s ferromagnetic tenor, with Moses tapping out a fifteen-beat percussive phrase, squealing burnt tire effects skidding out from the electric guitar and Genovese’s keys carrying all the spring and bounce of a double bass while flutes spiral and saxophones roar into action.
This climactic ‘Chase Machine’ offers the deepest groove on the record, a real blowout which beyond the world fusions of Don Cherry or the raw spurtiness of Mats Gustafsson veers towards post-rock or noise rock in the hypnotic vein of the Boredoms as some squawking from the saxophones and Jeon’s pooling murmurations finally lead us out the other side.
