#between all things

OHMA’s two principals are Mia Garcia and Hailey Niswager. Garcia plays a warm, lucid guitar, both electric and acoustic, synthesizing smooth jazz, bossa nova and R&B. Niswanger, a hotly tipped reedist out of Berklee (a Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Award winner and a Downbeat Critics Poll regular), contributes thick swaggering throbs of saxophone and fluttering idealizations of Latin flute. There are also keyboards, percussion and electronics, though it’s not clear who is playing these. The music is sleek, glossy, enveloping and unvaryingly gorgeous–so unvarying in fact, that you might welcome some dissonance. 

The tracks aim at otherworldliness, with their swells of angelic altered vocals, their feverish runs of saxophone. Song titles like “Seeing What Is Beyond,” and “A Portal to All That Is” hint at their gnostic ambitions. The “woo-woo” factor is high and occasionally distracting. The best tracks are the ones that introduce a hint of friction, like the clanging, metallic beat of “In Essence” that sets a languid guitar reverie to dance. “Everything & Nothing” lets a series of breathy, buzzy sax tones ground its space rock explorations, then juxtaposes antic guitar figures with the chilled serenity of flute.  “Between All Things” gains some drama from the staticky bursts of mystical spoken word near the end; the music itself is too bright and breezy to leave much of a mark.  

Not that this album isn’t enjoyable as bright, sophisticated background music of unwavering clarity and skill. The cuts are warm, buoyant and cleanly executed. They just never seem to break a sweat.