Last month we debuted our new Sweeps Week reviews. The last week of each month will feature my four picks on Monday, A.D. Amorosi’s four on Tuesday and Andrey Henkin’s four on Wednesday. On Thursday, we’ll each pick one reissue or historical release of the month as well.
Gregg Belisle-Chi, Slow Crawl: Performing the Music of Tim Berne Vol. 2 (Intakt)
The follow-up to Koi: Performing the Music of Tim Berne (Relative Pitch, 2021) again finds Gregg Belisle-Chi on solitary steel-string acoustic guitar, no overdubs, working through the knotty counterpoint, restless motion and unsettled harmony of the veteran alto saxophonist’s compositions.
The music on Slow Crawl, unlike the title might suggest, is fairly relentless in its technical demands. That Belisle-Chi can not only pull it off but make it sound connected and lyrical — drawing out the contemplative aspect of Berne’s writing on the more chordal pieces, “Cluster” and “Carl(s) Junior” — marks him as one of today’s most striking and ambitious players.
The repertory element recalls Julian Lage and Gyan Riley’s recent acoustic John Zorn albums, although those are mellow by comparison. Miles Okazaki’s solo Monk project of 2018 is relevant as well. Hunkering down with one composer’s work is a lofty guitar tradition that lives on in John Williams’s Bach: The Four Lute Suites of 1975, or Larry Coryell’s seldom-mentioned Stravinsky solo arrangements on Philips from the early ’80s. The darting wide-interval lines and cross-rhythms of Berne’s language do make these tracks sound like through-composed classical etudes, suggesting a new standard for high-level guitar fluency and execution.
Anat Fort, The Dreamworld of Paul Motian (Sunnyside)
Admirers and former associates of the late Paul Motian are legion, and some have explored his compositional legacy at album-length. Pianist Anat Fort joins this exclusive circle with The Dreamworld of Paul Motian, to which she brings a rich history: She featured Motian on her first ECM release in 2007, A Long Story, in a lineup with two notable Motian colleagues, bassist Ed Schuller and clarinetist Perry Robinson.
On The Dreamworld of Paul Motian, Fort enlists bassist Gary Wang from her working trio, as well as guitarist and former Motian band member Steve Cardenas. It’d be hard to pick a drummer better suited than Matt Wilson, who communes with Motian’s spirit while bringing his distinct voice to the material.
Within this supportive framework, Fort lends a polished and lyrical touch. Her voiceover on “Tacho” is refreshing — in Motian’s own words she speaks of an ordinary guy who used to look out for the young drummer, hiring him for odd jobs and such. Though the story is true, in this context it lands almost as a kind of dream narrative.
“Dreamworld,” the ethereal opener, is sparse, Gregorian chant–like, with no drums and Wang in a sensitive contrapuntal role. “Yallah,” in a patient three, is another study in harmonic stasis, while “Mumbo Jumbo” brings more active harmony and unsettled free rhythm to the date. “Riff Raff” finds Cardenas in a vein reminiscent of Song X-era Pat Metheny, while “Arabesque” gives the guitarist another crack at a tune he recorded with Motian back in 2002 (Holiday for Strings, Winter & Winter). “Wonderful One,” a measured waltz, like a standard, ends the album by evoking the Broadway songwriting vein that Motian loved so much.
Linda May Han Oh, Strange Heavens (Biophilia)
The bassist’s 2009 debut Entry arrived with a jolt — a fresh take on the chordless trio format with trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and drummer Obed Calvaire. Oh’s subsequent efforts have involved a fuller lineup, typically with piano or guitar and saxophone, or strings on Aventurine (2019).
Strange Heavens brings Oh and Akinmusire back into the trio space, this time with Tyshawn Sorey on drums. Oh and Sorey have a shared history recording for ECM in a trio with Vijay Iyer, and the chordless environment of Strange Heavens heightens the electricity of their rhythmic connection, from the complex, dancing “Portal” and the harder-charging “Living Proof” to the quasi-mechanical avant-funk premise of “Noise Machinery.”
Akinmusire’s recent solo trumpet work (Beauty Is Enough) and plainspoken Nonesuch trio outing Owl Song have captured his interest in sonic nuance and intimacy on the horn. This informs the sound world of Strange Heavens as well, in the beautiful short piece “Acapella,” or in his lyricism against Oh’s expressive arco playing on the rubato “Folk Song,” but equally in the brash, unsettled gestures in a stormier piece like “Home.”
Oh’s writing for this resolutely acoustic group is varied, at times hard to classify. “Work Song” has free elements but a tightly wound rhythmic design, bringing to mind one of the bassist’s celebrated forebears, Geri Allen, whose “Skin” (from Allen’s 1989 classic Twylight, with Jaribu Shahid and Tani Tabbal) serves as the penultimate track.
The sendoff is Melba Liston’s somewhat Mingusian ballad “Just Waiting.” After a soulful pizzicato intro, Oh cues in the trumpet, with Sorey delicate as a whisper as the trio contemplatively renders a song that Liston herself arranged and conducted for brass on Milt Jackson’s 1963 Riverside date For Someone I Love.
Dabin Ryu, Trio (Endectomorph/La Reserve)
The title of pianist Dabin Ryu’s Trio serves to differentiate it from her 2021 debut Wall, which featured all original music with a fuller lineup (as did her early 2024 single Earworm). In this trio formation, with bassist Joe Martin and drummer Johnathan Blake, Ryu establishes an intention to swing, and swing hard, taking her own “Vertigo” at a gallop as she displays fierce chops and control, matching the intensity of her sought-after rhythm section at every step. There are only two originals more, the lyrical and evocative “The Well” in 3/4 and the plaintive “Sad Song.”
In a decisive departure, Ryu devotes the remainder of Trio to fairly obscure cuts from the masters, beginning with John Stubblefield’s “Baby Man” (recorded in the mid-’70s by Mary Lou Williams). This slower and darker tune, with a bluesier grit and cresting dynamics, brings out Ryu’s deeply felt immersion in the language — it’s all over “In the Land of Oo-Bla-Dee” as well, the Mary Lou Williams novelty number sung by Joe Carroll with Dizzy Gillespie’s big band in 1949. Ryu’s ideas are crisp and her approach authoritative on the Kenny Dorham ballad “Dorham’s Epitaph,” John Hicks’s Latin-tinged “Naima’s Love Song” (at a tempo brighter than the original) and Oscar Pettiford’s D-flat bop workout “Tricotism” (also fast, but no sweat). JT