We wrap February with another Sweeps Week, featuring top editorial picks of the month.
Asher Gamedze, A Semblance: Of Return (Northern Spy Records)
Asher Gamedze’s first appearance on a commercial recording was with the visionary composer and performer Angel Bat Dawid, which makes a lot of sense. Like Dawid, Gamedze’s albums are consciously sculpted statements, a new kind of liberation music, serious but sociable and singable. The sense of community — specifically Black community — both artists conjure is manifested with multiple voices and multiple styles, coming together more like a neighborhood gathering than a concert program.
In the case of Dawid’s 2019 debut The Oracle, that’s an impressive sleight of hand, as Gamedze is the only other musician on the album, and then only on one track, playing drums on the 15-minute “Cape Town.” Cape Town, South Africa, is Gamedze’s home, his community, and it’s a contemporary Cape Town that’s heard on A Semblance: Of Return, Gamedze’s fourth full-length album as a leader. There are elements of Cape jazz party music and universal consciousness jazz exploration but also urban groove and hip-hop, protest and hope.
Semblance is a thoughtful and effective whole. In addition to being a drummer and composer, Gamedze is a writer and organizer who has taught history at the University of Cape Town. He knows how to make a point. The album opens with voices reading an excerpt from South African freedom fighter Steve Biko’s “On Death,” which dissolves into an a cappella gospel.
At the album’s midpoint comes an inviting, uptempo promise, “We are descendants of the fire / Come on down,” followed immediately by the layered funk of the instrumental “War (of Maneuver).” No false hope, no crushed spirits. The quintet rolls easily through 11 tracks, with heavy bass, squiggly synth, clear trumpet calls and some fine singing. It’s not at all an album weighed down by social concerns; the music is bright and energetic, but the issues are real. — Kurt Gottschalk
Tigran Hamasyan, Manifeste (Naïve Records)
The pianist and composer speaks a dialect informed by music of his native Armenia and the full continuum of jazz and fusion, songwriting, electronic beat-making and so forth. Throughout Manifeste, acoustic piano and synths commingle with Hamasyan’s singing voice (or whistling), ethereal and legato, mostly wordless, at times in Armenian, forming a core of contemplative expression in the music, no matter how relentlessly intricate and rhythmically demanding.
The harmony is dark and foreboding, unfamiliar, the performances never less than transfixing in their virtuosity and power — in particular the crushing rhythm-section work of bassists Evan Marien or Marc Karapetian, and drummers Arthur Hnatek, Arman Mnatsakanyan, Matt Garstka and Nate Wood, handling hyper-complex grooves with a kind of heavy-metal intensity.
Trumpeter Daniel Melkonyan and guitarist Nick Llerandi play a key melodic and soloing role as well. There’s also a choral element (via the Yerevan State Chamber Choir) and a folkloric element (daf or frame drum, blul or shepherd’s flute), a thread of traditionalism in an otherwise futuristic adventure over 70 minutes in length. — David R. Adler
Quinsin Nachoff, Patterns from Nature (Whirlwind Recordings)
Tenor saxophonist Quinsin Nachoff’s Patterns from Nature is ambitious and challenging. It demands attention, patience and a willingness to suspend certain expectations about what jazz should feel like. It’s less a shared musical conversation than a sonic exploration, more akin to contemporary classical composition.
The album occupies an uneasy space between tonal and atonal, between melodic forays and pure experimentation. Tracks that hint at conventional structure dissolve into abstraction before fully committing. The result is a listening experience that feels meandering at times, though occasionally that unpredictability yields moments of genuine surprise.
French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy suggests we are constituted by the experience of listening together; Patterns from Nature, however, feels like an intense solitary exercise rather than an invitation to collective communion.
Classical influences abound. Movement three of the “Patterns from Nature” suite, titled “Cracks,” evokes Steve Reich’s minimalism, while “Convergence,” from the “Winding Tessellations” suite, channels Ravel and Saint-Saëns. The closing “Tessellations” recalls Stravinsky. The instrumentation feels disjointed — violin and piano never quite jell. The leadoff track “Branches,” however, with Matt Mitchell featured on piano, showcases impressive rhythmic complexity with unexpected counterpoint that keeps the listener engaged.
The flute work of Roberta Michel on “Flow” brings an open-ended quality that feels refreshing. Nachoff’s saxophone impresses with technical prowess on “Cracks,” but it’s track four, “Ripples,” that stands as the album’s highlight — the jazziest of the collection, featuring lovely saxophone work and excellent percussion from Satoshi Takeishi that finally delivers the sense of swing and groove the album otherwise resists.
This isn’t background music: It’s confrontational, cerebral and deliberately difficult. If you’re looking to charm your future in-laws, I’d recommend against it. But if you want to explore the outer boundaries of what jazz and contemporary classical fusion can achieve, Nachoff has created something worth wrestling with. — Emilie Pons
Tomeka Reid, dance! skip! hop! (Out of Your Head Records)
Tomeka Reid’s new album comes with strings attached — tightly. dance! skip! hop! is the fourth release by the Chicago cellist and composer’s working band, which includes guitarist Mary Halvorson, bassist Jason Roebke and drummer Tomas Fujiwara.
The players showcase their intuitive connectivity throughout Reid’s five original pieces, locking into tight grooves for extended periods and deftly letting things fall apart in others. The opening, ten-minute title track prances along on an infectious swing groove, with Fujiwara using brushes, and an ear-wormy descending riff. After high-spirited solos by each string player, the music cagily dissolves into a segment of free improvisation, returns to the riff, then introduces a new riff as the bedrock for a drum solo. All told, an impressive high-wire act.
Reid breaks out the bow for “a(ways) For CC and CeCe,” meshing with Halvorson for a more fully formed melody. The cellist’s arco work on the ballad “Under the Aurora Sky” provides some needed warmth, but she undermines the calm by shrilly bowing up and down the neck during her solo. On “Oo long!” Roebke lays down a gritty bass line that drives the funky groove as Reid dances pizzicato all over the neck. It’s capped off by a Halvorson solo that plunges into fuzzed-out chaos. Elsewhere, the guitarist digs deep into her bag and pulls out tinny-toned lines, percussive stutters, prickly chords and (much to the music’s benefit) her trademark swoops and slurs.
dance! skip! hop! is the product of a seasoned ensemble executing its collective vision at peak level. The music is taut, intense, at times nervous. That’s not a criticism so much as a caveat emptor. — Eric Snider