THIS

Album review

Saxophonist, composer, and bandleader J.D. Allen celebrates his tenth anniversary with the Savant label by releasing what amounts to his most experimental album. The music here, according to its creator, was focused on three interchangeable tenets: motivic melody and sonic and rhythmic propulsion. In January 2023, Allen, electronicist Alex Bonney, and drummer Gwilym Jones entered Lightship 95, a solar-powered recording studio in an anchored ship on the Trinity Buoy Wharf in South London. The trio improvised, wrote, and recorded eight originals that disregard jazz conventions; they cut across the tradition and often combine circular and contrasting themes, melodic fragments, modalities, textures, and, most importantly, group improvisation. It's unlike any other recording in Allen's discography. Some pieces sound, at least initially, unfinished. That said, they give way as an intuitive and subtle governing context asserts itself.
The title cut introduces the album with 30 seconds of speculative, pillowy electronics before Allen's tenor asserts a moaning modal melody winding through gospel spirituals and post-bop, framed in overdubs and reverb that carve a wavy, unified sound from ethereal space. That sense of hover and float is interrupted by "The Revelator," a circular modal blues with striated second-line rhythms. It's shot through with accents, fills, and rolls as Bonney threads rumbling, low-end electronics (recalling a detuned bassline), and ghostly, sampled voices as Allen and Jones unhurriedly approach that spectral backdrop with tight phrasing, looping harmonies, and creativity. The single "Boom-Bap" opens with a skittering snare in hip-hop parlance before Allen's tenor challenges the beat head-on. He and Jones dance around one another with feints and tight turnarounds as Bonney showers the mix with creepy sounds. The way the electronics and drums layer upon one another in the midsection opens the song's possibilities endlessly. On "Know Dogs Allowed" and the gorgeous "Mx. Fairweather," Allen's tone and phrasing embrace melodic adventure as optimism, even as his bandmates embellish his rich lyric ideas with a sonic canvas inspired by brute force. "Beeyondsay" is a deceptively tuneful exercise in post-bop. Allen winds out a dark, bluesy melody while Jones' crash cymbal, tom-toms, and snares fill the center of the mix and Bonney adds layers of slowly pulsing sonics. "The Knight of Swords" offers sampled wordless vocals that sound like mutant Gregorian chant. Allen's tenor answers, playing a bluesy spiritual that revels in loneliness. The finger-popping closer, "See It, Say It, Sorted," joins swinging syncopated drumming and wafting electronic ambiences while Allen gradually, then forcefully answers his bandmates with a sweet, complex melody that erects a contrasting textural palette. This is an unconventional album that sounds like it's inspired by many of the same spirits that are extending the jazz tradition in the U.K., while also inserting 21st century post-bop into aesthetic terrains usually not associated with jazz at all.

© Thom Jurek /TiVo