No one's lost in a masquerade.
So many jazzers think they need to be cool, the wrong kind of cool, rather than remembering to be themselves. Because on the other side of the curtain listening in is a search for meaning. If you're being fake your tunes just won't fly. How complex do you want this quest to be? Is it even complexity that means something is going to be better than something simple because it is complex. Being cool is about being understated when everyone is shouting. Look, you can hurl epithets at people all day long describing your reactions. The harshest? Who knows. No one likes to be called boring. But boring jazz exists. Some hate being called cerebral, maverick, oblique even. What's ''unparliamentary'' jazz language? Call someone a jazz dinosaur isn't particularly complimentary. But it might be true.
Bassist Ben Wolfe's album The Understated isn't boring. It isn't cerebral if you mean that word in a pejorative sense but is in the sense that everything is properly thought through and intuitively shaped. What's here isn't maverick. Nor is it oblique nor the machinations of a dinosaur mentality. That's what it isn't. What it is - for the facts hungry Gradgrinds among us - involves originals, a good sprinkling of ballads, personnel including classy pianist Orrin Evans, tenorist Nicole Glover, drummer Aaron Kimmel, guitarist Russell Malone and pianist Sullivan Fortner. There are a few tunes from earlier records gussied up a bit. Do I want to go find these? Not really to be honest. What's here is appealing enough. But I remember hearing Wolfe live a long time ago in the big band of Harry Connick Jr at a packed Albert Hall I think it was in the 1990s. He came to swing that night, a far more exuberant kind of occasion.
Clean sound
One of the album's strengths is its weightlessness & lack of show. Clearly, sonically this is apparent in the way it was recorded. It's the absence of rocket science to get a few players together, dispense with headphones, herd the cats into the same room and capture the sound as faithfully as possible. ''Internet sound'' to me especially the more tech is involved is like listening to music from small speakers while standing in the shower as water runs blocking out a whole portion of the sound. That's not the case here. It's all very clean. In our playlist today we picked out 'Anagram' which we thought the most rhythmically dynamic of all the pieces. But this isn't an album to get the party started. But it's not arthritic or for fogeys either. UK readers if you like the sound of Chris Laurence then you'll feel at home with Wolfe. The way Nicole Glover scurries and rummages in the depths of her sax on 'Occam's Razor' sheds light on decades of traditions. What's wrong with that? Tonally the album is strong. Sheer craft, a lot of graft feeds in. It's all so worthwhile and warm.
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