Night and Day, Vincent Herring, Smoke Sessions
The alto saxophonist Vincent Herring projects his sound in a strong, centered beam, and even his most intense moments suggest a controlled combustion. You could chalk that up to experience — Herring, 50, has been playing seriously since his teens — but it probably has as much to do with disposition. There’s footage of him with Horace Silver’s band in the 1980s, sounding like he does now, slashing but calm.
So maybe it’s the suggestion of something held in reserve that has kept Herring from an A-list solo career. Or maybe it’s the idea that he has followed in the wake of Cannonball Adderley, an alto saxophone hall of famer whose style he can willfully evoke (not least in the Cannonball Adderley Legacy Band). Whatever the case, Herring should have a higher profile, as he confirms with a smart new album, Night and Day.
As with Herring’s 2013 album — The Uptown Shuffle, recorded live at Smoke Jazz Club and released on the Smoke Sessions label — the music here puts a contemporary spin on hard-bop, with a rhythm team of Brandi Disterheft on bass and Joe Farnsworth on drums. But whereas that album featured a quartet, this one involves a quintet with the pianist Mike LeDonne and an excellent trumpeter, Jeremy Pelt, out front.
Herring and Pelt have a crisp and jostling rapport, and in moments like a headlong dash through Donald Byrd’s Fly, Little Bird, Fly, each elevates the other’s game. The meat-and-potatoes repertory — some I Got Rhythm changes, some blues, the Cole Porter tune that lends the album its title — doesn’t pose a limitation for them.
And when Herring tips his hat, as on an original, The Adventures of Hyun Joo Lee, named for one of his students and built over a chord sequence by John Coltrane, he sounds unburdened by expectations. Still, there’s no doubting his sincerity on Theme for Jobim, composed by a dearly missed former mentor, Cedar Walton — or on Walton, a swinging homage by LeDonne, which elicits one of the album’s juiciest alto solos.
— Nate Chinen, NY Times News Service
Sprinter, Torres, Partisan
Mackenzie Scott, the songwriter who records as Torres, operates in a primal realm where memories, scars, traumas and new sensations are all still raw. Sprinter, her second album, confronts relationships past and present, in songs that sound bravely open, even if it’s not immediately clear what’s on her mind. Her music is blunt, mercurial rock; it can smolder while she considers exactly where she stands, and it can roar into feedback-edged howls when her rage or despair boil over. “If you do not know the darkness, then you’re the one I fear the most,” she warns after an overpowering buildup in New Skin.
Born in Georgia and now based in Brooklyn, Torres chose seasoned British collaborators for her studio band. Her drummer and co-producer is Rob Ellis, who worked with PJ Harvey, as did her bassist, Ian Oliver; Adrian Utley from Portishead joins her on guitar. The musicians firm up and extend the dynamics that were churning on Torres’ self-titled 2013 debut album. There’s a sinewy indie-rock band at the core of the songs, while other sounds often emerge from shadowy fringes.
Torres sings about struggling for and against the Baptist faith she grew up in, about the bonds and tensions of friends and family, about isolation and about something like romance. In Strange Hellos, she tries to sympathize with someone who has been close to her, then changes her mind as a tsunami of grunge guitars crashes in: “What’s mine isn’t really yours/ But I hope you find what you’re looking for,” she snarls.
The title song of Sprinter, a march through gusts of guitar distortion, revisits childhood lessons in church and comes to an ambiguous realization: “There’s freedom to/ And freedom from,” she sings, “And freedom to run/ From everyone.”
In Ferris Wheel, a slow waltz floating in an echoey haze, she sings about an evasive friend and how she longs “to show you that I’ve got the sadness too.” The album’s finale, The Exchange, is even quieter: It’s just Torres with a squeaky acoustic guitar, thinking about her parents and about mortality: “Mother, Father, I’m underwater,” she sings, almost tearfully, “and I don’t think you can pull me out of this.”
But the tone of Torres’ songs isn’t self-pitying; it’s more a matter of attentiveness, of recognizing consequences. And partway through the album, she steps away from the personal to the oracular, with lyrics that aren’t easily parsed. In Son, You Are No Island, warns a young man about his immaturity in geographical imagery, within a patient drone that ripples and thickens. And A Proper Polish Welcome interweaves ancestry and mythology, imagining “Pale legs straddling the sea.” What’s going on isn’t clear, but the passion is unmistakable.
— Jon Pareles, NY Times News Service
Dumb Flesh, Blanck Mass, Sacred Bones
Blanck Mass is the one-man project of Benjamin John Power, who is half of a rave-y, drone-y English electronica duo founded in 2004 with a name that can’t be published in this newspaper. Four years ago Power started releasing deep, beatless soundscapes on his own; both Blanck Mass’ first record and his performances at the time were enveloping, somewhat abstract listening experiences. Subsequently, and especially now, with Dumb Flesh, his third album, he’s giving you something you might find familiar or even commercial by its basic outlines. But he’s still got ways to make it uncanny: close, loud and abrupt.
Dumb Flesh has dance beats almost all the way through it, and grand, sinister atmospheres made with analog synthesizers; it may remind you of incidental music to an unsettling movie from the 1980s, with bubbling, twinkling, echoey or otherwise pneumatic sounds. There’s been a vogue for this kind of thing recently — soundtracks by John Carpenter and Tangerine Dream and Vangelis — and for obvious reasons: the power of repetition and the chill of dystopia. Power is manipulating old signifiers. He is experimenting with ways to warm up cold music.
The album was announced several months ago with some context explaining that its theme is human frailty. But humanity appears only scrambled or unintelligible: a modified baby’s gurgle (I think) on Lung; a woman’s voice, maybe singing a foreign language, chopped up and quantized in the galloping stomp of Dead Format. It’s social music, though — danceable, basically shareable — up until Detritus, the album’s last track. Here you have almost three minutes of gnarled electronic fuzz until a tune starts to push through. Surprise: voices sing “ahh!” as if breaking a seal, and the grandest, most emotional melody of the whole record begins in earnest.
— Ben Ratlff, NY Times News Service
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