Here are A.D. Amorosi’s monthly picks, coming to you the last Tuesday of the month.
Fred Hersch, The Surrounding Green (ECM Records)
On The Surrounding Green with bassist Drew Gress and drummer Joey Baron, piano eminence Fred Hersch offers devotees something of callback to his ’80s outfit with Baron and his ’90s band with Gress. The album happily knits together the giddy, asymmetrical harmolodics of Ornette Coleman’s “Law Years” and the lovelorn intimacy of “Embraceable You” without a blink. Baron’s filmic, tom tom–heavy, rim-tickling intro to the timeworn Gershwin classic is worth the price of admission.
Though it is always a thrill to hear what rarities Hersch will cover, such as Egberto Gismonti’s “Palhaço,” it is the original compositions of The Surrounding Green that most capture the imagination. While Baron lets his brushes do the samba-riffic busy work on “Anticipation,” the title track continues that sunny good mood in smiling slow motion. “Plainsong,” however, is no laughing matter. With Baron’s muffled cymbals leading the charge, Hersch moves through its slightly unsteadied melody in a manner both pensive and cautious, then wilder, ticklish, almost beyond rational thought.
Fabia Mantwill Orchestra, IN.SIGHT (GroundUP Music)
Composer, saxophonist, vocalist and bandleader Fabia Mantwill has been to so many places, and through so many vibes, since her 2021 debut EM.PERIENCE — from temperate exotica and mossy folkloric instrumental music to epic jazz on the cinematic tip. To say that her 32-piece orchestra touches all bases isn’t quite saying enough when you get to IN.SIGHT.
IN.SIGHT continues the Berlin-based Mantwill’s curiosity when it comes to the grandeur of film music as her ensemble courses its way through arrangements that seem somehow familiar at first. With “Satoyama,” Mantwill offers her own night-shaded subtone saxophone solo, while “Whirl The Wheel” is cluttered like a Dmitri Tiomkin gladiator film score played by a ’70s fusion-funk ensemble watching a cop show. If Mike Oldfield had written Tubular Bells for a buddy comedy and not the fear-fest of The Exorcist, it might turn out to be Mantwill’s stabbing brass-led “Circular.”
For all of its earworm reminders, Mantwill’s compositions are briskly unique and without parallel. Take her string-laden “Sleeping Giant,” a mood-swung ambient number touched by warm muted trumpet, only to be driven through a Coney Island of the Mind with the sawed strings, prickly vibes and wheezing bandoneon of a Henry Mancini European romance. Who does that?
Emma Smith, Bitter Orange (La Reserve)
When UK jazz vocalist Emma Smith, best known for her role within the close-knit harmonies of the Puppini Sisters, stretches the intonation of certain phrases on “Make It Another Old-Fashioned, Please,” she becomes as smart a phrase-tingler as Londoners Noël Coward and Imelda Staunton. Smith isn’t just a cool, soigné jazz vocalist, but a subtle and showy one as well, a taut nightclub performer without diva attitude, a big-voiced singer who can play silly (as on “Frim Fram Sauce”), yet act her way tearfully through the sadder, quieter moments.
That she takes on Coward’s fine wartime moment “London Pride” is but a continuation of her magical dedication to clever British songcraft, to the comforts of the music hall and canteen that built her flashy style. Bitter Orange finds its trembling footing on Broadway with a minor-key “Tonight” from West Side Story, then enunciates with an elegant sophisticate’s brassiness on “Polka Dots and Moonbeams.” There is an intimacy and theatricality shared between Smith and her co-producer and pianist Jamie Safir, bassist Conor Chaplin and drummer Luke Tomlinson. The singer portrays “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” with a louche sensuality that Rita Hayworth once embodied in the 1957 film version of Pal Joey.
Brandee Younger, Gadabout Season (Impulse!)
Few in the 21st century have done as much to advance the jazz harp as Brandee Younger. Destiny-bound to follow in the footsteps of Alice Coltrane and Dorothy Ashby, Younger began her career with saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, paying tribute to his mother while playing with legacy hip-hop’s brightest lights (Common, Ms. Lauryn Hill) and alt-R&B’s angelic innovators (Moses Sumney). Such vividly diverse role-playing set the tone for Younger’s wealth of leader albums since 2011, yet none run more wildly than her newest project, Gadabout Season.
Recorded with Younger playing its ten tracks on Alice Coltrane’s own harp, Gadabout Season is a radiant thing. Using her road-dog trio members Rashaan Carter on bass and Allan Mednard on drums, the album announces itself as an experimental enterprise with the lovely “Reckoning” and its surrealist blend of harp sounds and cottony-soft electronica. It moves into mother Alice’s warm, homey territory with the Eastern-inspired “End Means,” with modal solo interplay between Younger and Shabaka on flute.
Shabaka changes to clarinet for the title track and aids in lifting Younger’s harmonies to a heavenly realm, in tandem with vibraphonist Joel Ross and touch-sensitive percussionist Makaya McCraven. By album’s end, Younger and her rhythm section find the storm before the quiet as saxophonist Josh Johnson’s swells envelop “Discernment” and that song’s shifting sense of space and time. On “Surrender,” a hymn written for and featuring pianist Courtney Bryan, bassist Carter — Gadabout’s producer and secret weapon when it comes to expanding the sonic palette — is the go-between in the harpist’s holy dialog with Bryan as the three talk church but spit fire. JT