New Music From Quartet Now! and Lea Bertucci
Quartet Now!
Quartet Now!
(Two Rooms)
The new, self-titled album from the Detroit jazz outfit Quartet Now! is the inaugural release on Detroit label Two Rooms Records, and if you’re looking for a single album that completely oozes Detroit jazz, on several levels, then look no further.
Going beyond a cursory listen to this album means delving into jazz history and connecting the dots. Quartet co-founder and drummer Leonard King is known for his band Leonard King and the Soul Messengers, and he took the reins of the Lyman Woodard Organization after Woodard’s passing—original vinyl copies of that group’s obscure classic Saturday Night Special, on which King plays, exchanges hands for hundreds of dollars among aficionados.
Stay with me here. That album is one of the handful of albums released by the legendary Detroit label Strata Records in the ‘70s, and the founder of Strata was keyboardist Kenny Cox, whose “Mandela’s Muse” is covered here.
Beginning with contrabassist Rocco Popielarski rapping his strings with the wood of the bow and making wispy sounds, the track then locks into nimble patterns with a killer vamp emerging from trombonist Vincent Chandler and baritone saxophonist Alex Harding, who returned to Detroit after a long stint in New York City and has played with the likes of David Murray, Lester Bowie and Sun Ra Arkestra; it wraps up with a spirited shout of “Freedom!” and a chaotic, splatter-filled ending.
The funk-inflected, swinging opener “Farid” (composed by Luqman Lateef) is heavy with the low-end, with the sax and trombone going tandem on the melody; however, King’s masterful drumming manages to steal the show—his insistent, propulsive and busy rustling is nothing less than a joy to hear.
Chandler’s own “Closing Doors” is a welcome turn, with an enigmatic bass line and casual sax/trombone dialogue with a nonchalant swagger, and the standard “You Don’t Know What Love Is” (notably covered by Miles Davis on his album Walkin’) is a cool, smoky ballad delivered with ample soul and a few distinctive interjections—a sax cluck here, a vocalized growl there.
Trumpeter Charles Moore—a figure in the ‘60s Detroit jazz scene—penned the album’s closing track “Number Four,” which was featured on Cox’s 1968 debut, Introducing Kenny Cox, and here, the upbeat, post-bop number is given a lively and worthy rendition with a seemingly endless supply of energy, like a perpetual motion machine.
Remarkably, it has the aural illusion of continuously speeding up just from the urgent forces it projects—a stirring ending, and an impressive beginning for a promising record label.
Lea Bertucci
Metal Aether
(NNA)
The new album Metal Aether from composer and saxophonist Lea Bertucci, based in New York City, overlaps the electro-acoustic and modern classical worlds and manages to evoke its own warmth and conscious tension, rather than clinical experimentation, focusing on the sax and enhanced with altered field recordings, prepared piano and vibraphone notes.
“Patterns for Alto” features various reverberating alto saxophone jaunts, punctuated with breaks, each centered on a single note, with occasional flutters to other pitches, acting as the sonic equivalent of eye blinks or twitches.
While certain sax contemporaries come to mind, including Travis Laplante’s circular-breathing sax quartet Battle Trance and Colin Stetson, Bertucci exists on her own plane with her own approach. When it comes to feeling, perhaps a better point of comparison is Charlemagne Palestine’s immersive, minimalist piano piece “Strumming Music,” but with slight disturbances—imagine river rapids packed with ducks, flapping their wings and quacking as they hurtle down the not-so-gentle stream.
For the 13-minute “Accumulations,” drones linger behind clear sax tones that modulate carefully and expressively; a few minutes in, things become outwardly disquieting, with atonality, and eventually squeaks take over, evoking anxiety and desperate gasps.
Field recordings of splashing water turn into disturbing gurgling due to sonic manipulations, as high frequencies are boosted, adding to some obscured, wordless angelic vocals, but all the while, the pure sax tones continue undisturbed, like a peaceful stroll through the remains of a carpet-bombed city street.
“Sustain and Dissolve” subtly distorts its long tones, which create tiny beats from phasing; they’re like warning sirens that are oddly cheerful, and about 10 minutes into the 18-minute piece, the track takes a different direction with watery cascades and low tones.
The album ends satisfyingly with “At Dawn,” with what sounds like artificial bell tower chimes during a hazy morning as people audibly mill about a town’s square; it’s a strangely cleansing piece that brings clarity to the album, like an abrasive scrub used to get clean.