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Will Mason Quartet – Hemlocks, Peacocks

Hemlocks, Peacocks the new album by the Will Mason Quartet is described as ā€˜microtonal chamber jazz’ recorded in a ā€˜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 ā€˜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 ā€˜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 ā€˜Twilight’ proves more ponderous, slowing everything down in keeping with the time of day. The shifting rhythms of ā€˜Turned in the Fire’ provide a showcase for Webber, with the saxophones steadily building off one another, while on ā€˜Hymn’ a duet between Mason and Gray and again on the more celestial ā€˜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 ā€˜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.

Christopher Laws
Christopher Lawshttps://www.culturedarm.com
Christopher Laws is the writer and editor of Culturedarm, currently based in UmeƄ, Sweden.

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