Intermezzo is the second album by Wayfaring, a boundary-crossing jazz duo that originally formed in Chicago. The combo emulates the city’s best traditions by simultaneously showing their roots and not sounding much like any other band from Chicago, or anywhere else for that matter. It comprises James Falzone on clarinet, penny whistles and shruti box, and Katie Ernst on double bass and voice. While they were born in different decades, there are strong parallels in their aesthetic and professional pursuits. Both are educators, each has robust experience leading church ensembles, and they are both inclined to combine jazz with elements of classical and folk music. Additionally, they both students of poetry, from which they derive an attunement to spare, concentrated gestures. Since first convening in 2015, Ernst and Falzone have nurtured a partnership that’s survived both the latter’s departure for Seattle, where he is the academic dean at Cornish College of the Arts, and the pandemic.
The titular term, which is also the name of one of Ernst’s compositions, refers to a smaller piece of music situated between larger, related movements. Maybe it’s a humble acknowledgement Wayfaring’s place in each musician’s busy schedule? Or, since intermezzi often perform a connective function, perhaps it’s a way of noting how Wayfaring binds disparate elements into a cohesive musical whole. Falzone and Ernst can cover a lot of ground within a single tune. The inaugural strum of Ernst’s bass on the opening tune, “Bounce,” hints at the blues. But the ensuing string and clarinet figures dip and dart in close formation with chamber elegance and lived-in sense of swing.
The album doesn’t stay in one place emotionally, either. With its jaunty melody and springy rhythm, Jimmy Giuffre’s “Gotta Dance” fully lives up to its name. But “Flow My Tears,” a lament of Elizabethan vintage, plumbs a desolate vein of grief. And Falzone and Ernst know how to extract maximum impact from a good murder ballad; their performance of “Who Put The Blood” imparts a gravity that does full justice to the lyric’s exacting analysis of the web of pain, loss and disruption that can radiate from one violent act. And scattered throughout the record are brief, numbered pieces entitled “Tanka” after the Japanese poetic form, that manifest the compositional minds that guide Wayfaring’s improvisations.
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