Hemlocks, Peacocks the new album by the Will Mason Quartet is described as ‘microtonal chamber jazz’ recorded in a ‘large resonant chapel’ in New England, whose music is inspired by La Monte Young’s solo improvisatory epic The Well-Tuned Piano and modernist works by the painter Joan Mitchell and poet Wallace Stevens. A degree of intimacy with those sources might serve to dispel the notion, but as an introductory brief that could make Hemlocks, Peacocks sound rather academic.
Instead on the album opener ‘Hemlocks’ we are greeted with something slinkily and at times queasily seductive as Mason’s shakers and silt percussion becomes a riverbed, over which Anna Webber, Danny Fisher-Lochhead and deVon Russell Gray play a series of drones and short phrases from the grandfather clock melodies of Gray’s keys – with Hemlocks, Peacocks featuring two keyboards retuned to echo Young’s system of just intonation, while the instruments themselves are modelled to take after the distinctive sound of the Fender Rhodes – to winnowing reeds or held drones and overtones, which might stem from the keys or equally from Webber’s tenor and Fisher-Lochhead’s alto saxophones.
The details differ on ‘The Fallen Leaves, Repeating Themselves’ but the mood lingers and the sense of swing remains the same, as Mason’s smooth skittering drums underlie a series of repetitions and embellishments before ‘Twilight’ proves more ponderous, slowing everything down in keeping with the time of day. The shifting rhythms of ‘Turned in the Fire’ provide a showcase for Webber, with the saxophones steadily building off one another, while on ‘Hymn’ a duet between Mason and Gray and again on the more celestial ‘Planets’ those justly intoned keys, which have previously added a kind of offbeat rotundity to the compositions, now glimmer with a mottled and matte twinkle which is sometimes redolent of dinged gongs. Finally on ‘Peacocks’ the quartet evoke something of Albert Ayler or latter-day Pharoah Sanders as the rhythms become more martial and their jazz takes on more spiritual airs.
