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.
Devon Welsh has been searching for a sound ever since the breakup of Majical Cloudz, and whether it was the tremulous saxophone loops and strings of Dream Songs, the tenuous sparsity of True Love or the punkier outcrops of ‘New York / Realism’ and Click Here Now! each charted course pretty well stood its ground, serving as a canny enough vehicle for his tender baritone.
Matching his delivery, whose stretched vowels and elongated endings help to blur the borders between torch songs and plainspoken word, as a lyricist Welsh trades in a forthright, brusque and sometimes overbearing intimacy while tending to focus on the permeability of our relationships, presence in absence and all of the volatility, scarcity and buoyancy which is encoded in the inevitable process of change. Mundane and self-effacing, beyond the political screeds of Click Here Now! there is not much that happens in Devon Welsh’s songs, which take the form of entreaties to the present moment while subtly marking the passing of days, months or years. And if the sentiments are universal there is still enough specificity and character behind his steely gaze – which more readily these days breaks into a guffaw or a grin – so that when his songs do turn anthemic the gesture at least feels hard-won.
Now after several cycles of bulking and cutting, the veiny troubadour reemerges with a do-it-yourself action adventure, paying homage to both Jimmy Ruffin and The Terminator as he stands over the burning wreckage with clenched fists on the lead single from Come With Me If You Want to Live. Over clattering breakbeats, on ‘That’s What We Needed’ he brings the ruckus with an ode to knotty self-determinacy, and on ‘Best Laid Plans’ he takes the purple powder and crawls down the toilet hole of self-doubt while seeking succour in friendship and the reverberating embrace of his father, the actor Kenneth Welsh who died a couple of years ago at the age of 80, and was addressed with both poignancy and a sense of foreboding on the Dream Songs track ‘Summer’s End’.
Born at the height of the pandemic, Adnata Ensemble offer a celebration of the bass as the double bassists Scott Colberg, Ari Folman-Cohen, Michael Isvara Mongtomery and Ran Livneh embrace the Japanese concept of oku, a spatial theory which harbours much use in the realms of architecture and urban design, pertaining both physically and psychologically to the idea of inwardness or the search for an intangible middle point. Described by Colberg as a quest of self-reflection, his fellow band member Montgomery says that ‘Oku seeks to bring what is distant closer so that the interior and exterior are unified’.
No strangers to acts of conceptual bravura – their last albums for Nyege Nyege Tapes drew inspiration from the buzz and sting of indigenous bees and took a detour through dankest backwaters, described as the soundtrack to a pitch-black fairy tale about a father and daughter who took perilous steps to avoid gremlins, red swines and crater creatures – the Durban-based gqom futurists Phelimuncasi team up with the beatmaker or sonic landscaper Metal Preyers in a hearty bid to turn each other’s worlds inside out.
The pianist and composer Brad Mehldau unveils a couple of albums which variously interpret or elaborate the works of Gabriel Fauré and Johann Sebastian Bach, with his original composition ‘Between Bach’ almost a switched-on rock concerto with its staggering runs and rippling overtones while his take on the Fugue in A minor from the second book of The Well-Tempered Clavier is more crisp and played-through.
On the title track to New Monuments, the vocalist and harmonium player, bandleader, organiser and activist Amirtha Kidambi and her Elder Ones ensemble with its stellar cast combine clip-clopping, off-kilter, sub-Saharan percussion with a highlands, bagpipes-esque drone. The subject matter offers a similar juxtaposition as Kidambi sings a contemporary screed about authority figures who hide behind their badges, combining the sentiment with scours around paddy wagons in what almost constitutes a turn-of-the-last-century brogue.
A winding sprawl which veers wilfully off the rails, saxophone peals and the see-saw of Kidambi’s harmonium give way to the strained squeals of a bowed cello, sheer distortion and submerged bass, with a canopy of drones and upturned synthesizer serving to summon spectres as much as offer shade from the sun. Accompanied by Matt Nelson on the soprano saxophone, Lester St. Louis on the cello, Eva Lawitts on bass and the Anteloper percussionist Jason Nazary on drums, each of whom laden their instruments with electronics and special effects, Kidambi says that the title of her record – her third album as a leader and her first for the Helsinki-based label We Jazz – summons ‘the tearing down of old colonial and racist monuments and vestiges of power [. . .] in order to build new ones to the martyrs of struggle’.
For the Montreal-based singer-songwriter and folk interpreter Myriam Gendron a mayday signal is a call to collaboration. Her new album, which was assembled shortly after the passing of her mother, follows up on her 2014 debut Not So Deep As A Well which uncorked the poeticisms of the cutting wit Dorothy Parker and the trenchant lyricism and cultural cross-pollination of 2021’s spellbinding Ma délire – Songs of love, lost & found which explored the folk traditions of Quebec and beyond. For her latest commixture she receives ample backing from the guitarist Marisa Anderson and drummer Jim White, with her fellow Montrealer the double-bassist Cédric Dind-Lavoie, the looped-and-screwed guitarist Bill Nace and the Appalachian tenor saxophonist Zoh Amba rounding out the features.
Conceived during a screeching and caterwauling motorcycle ride through Cairo, finding a sort of catharsis amid the suffocating smog in the counterbalance of extreme noise, and carrying their so-called ‘cacophony carbon orchestra’ into overlapping residencies at the Nyege Nyege studios in Kampala, the kindred spirits Nadah El Shazly and Elvin Brandhi yank the curtain on a Pollution Opera through the inquisitive ‘Cairo ???’.
The vibraphonist Joel Ross goes long on a graceful and burgeoning live rendition of his nublues track ‘mellowdee’ alongside Jeremy Corren on the piano, Kanoa Mendenhall on bass and Jeremy Dutton on drums. Takahiro Kido and Yuki Murata of the cinematic ensemble Anoice team up with the versatile percussionist Kenji Azuma for ‘memories of a cave in ancient times, played by stone’. And from his majestic new album The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow, accompanied by the pianist Jason Moran, the bassist Larry Grenadier and the drummer Brian Blade while the visionary saxophonist dances on many shores, you will hear nothing sweeter this week than the stunning close to Charles Lloyd’s record, which recapitulates the theme of the album-opening ‘tender warrior’ with a final flourish entitled ‘Defiant, Reprise: Homeward Dove’.
* * *
Phelimuncasi & Metal Preyers – ‘Gidigidi ka Makhelwane’
* * *
Myriam Gendron – ‘Long Way Home’
* * *
* * *
Dave Sewelson & Ava Mendoza – ‘Do Nothing Man’
* * *
* * *
* * *
Takahiro Kido, Yuki Murata and Kenji Azuma – ‘dance on the wall’
* * *
Brad Mehldau – ‘Between Bach’ & ‘Fugue No. 20 in A minor’
* * *
Devon Welsh – ‘Best Laid Plans’
* * *
Amirtha Kidambi’s Elder Ones – ‘New Monuments’
* * *
Charles Lloyd – ‘Defiant, Reprise: Homeward Dove’
