New Music From Three Way Mirror, Ahmoudou Madassane
Three Way Mirror
New Normal
(Southern Crescent)
Sax, tuba, congas—one might think that the instruments of the jazz trio Three Way Mirror were drawn at random from a hat, but when Atlanta saxophonist Jeff Crompton put together this group back in 2015, he took partial inspiration from Arthur Blythe’s 1978 album Bush Baby, which employed the exact same instrumentation.
Crompton is a seasoned, ever-exploring player with several other outfits in and beyond the jazz realm, including the Jeff Crompton Trio, the Edgewood Saxophone Trio and the duo RoboCromp.
Joining Crompton in Three Way Mirror on tuba is Bill Pritchard, an Eastman School of Music graduate and Lee University instructor who navigates the classical, jazz and rock worlds, and completing the lineup is percussionist and artistic polymath John Arthur Brown (a.k.a. Yaya Brown) on congas, who is also a poet and photographer.
New Normal is mostly comprised of Crompton’s originals, including bouncy “Poncey,” which swings unrelentingly; this demonstrates Crompton’s talent for creating memorable tunes that can hold their own, even beside the three jazz classics covered on New Normal by Horace Silver, Marion Brown and Thelonious Monk.
On “Skin,” the lineup is enhanced with the Edgewood Saxophone Trio, playing a slithering, mysterious melody in unison before diverging into prickly, discordant note intervals. Pritchard’s tuba acts as a bass line unless he’s soloing or mirroring Crompton’s melody, like on “Three Way Mirror” with a start/stop tug that perhaps is the aural equivalent of crossing a brook using careful hops on stepping stones, with Brown’s constant beats acting as the rushing water.
Listening to Three Way Mirror’s album New Normal brings to mind certain aesthetic qualities that seem to be borderline contradictory; it has a clean, precise sound but doesn’t feel sterile or clinical. Ostensibly there’s a lightness to it, with a playful approach that’s easy to take in, but it can go deep, beyond expectations, particularly during solos.
With each instrument occupying its own space, the album’s sound is uncluttered and somewhat economical—that said, the songs have ample room to breathe and stretch their arms and legs over the hour-long album. The pace is patient and unhurried but not sluggish; it’s like the musicians are savoring each moment.
Also, the album’s approach doesn’t show any compulsive need to fill every crevice with sound, resulting in a sonic density that varies widely over the album, as if using continuous cycles of palate-cleansing. It’s a refreshing, sleek, clear-headed album, and a welcome change with unconventional jazz instrumentation and nuanced, expressive solos.
Ahmoudou Madassane
Zerzura
(Sahel Sounds)
The film Zerzura, starring West African Tuareg guitarist Ahmoudou Madassane and directed by Sahel Sounds founder Christopher Kirkley, was built on folklore about the mythical oasis Zerzura in the Sahara Desert, guarded by evil spirits but purportedly full of rewards for intrepid desert travelers.
Although unseen by this writer, the film apparently adopts the universal theme that surrounds a mythical paradise, regarding searching for something that is known to be false; sights can be deceptive, whether they are mirages or hallucinations, and hidden treasures are never to be found.
With this in mind, the instrumental soundtrack album for Zerzura seems fitting, which was mostly performed by Madassane while watching footage from the film at the Type Foundry recording studio in Portland, Ore.
With minimal, wandering electric guitar improvisations, Madassane conveys a complicated mood that’s persistent but not overbearing, uncertain and bewildering but not hopeless.
It’s not a stomping rock album, but instead it offers space for rambling thoughts. At times, collaborators join Madassane, including guitarist Marisa Anderson and Kirkley himself, and in addition to the electric guitar, Madassane adds subtle flourishes from studio instruments including a Moog keyboard and a prepared piano.
Rhythm is stripped-down to its barest, most skeletal form with simple, soft drum beats, and various snippets of field recordings—wind, water, animals—act both as punctuation and evocative tools to help set the mood.
The album strolls through its scenes, alternating between the idyllic and the calmly disorienting; the one-minute track “Targhat” is a slice of psychedelia, featuring backwards guitar parts, and “Azal N’emgre” turns up the distortion to bristle and envelope the listener.
One of the album’s highlights is “Derhan,” which offers an electric guitar vamp that’s relaxed and stretched for the track’s duration, to a muted drum pulse.
It’s a delicately sparse album that embraces the adventure of the unknown, conveying a nobility that is upheld even if the goal is never reached.