#hatology

With “Now & Now 1,” the ensemble hurtles at its most reckless level; the piece continually sounds as if it’s about to fall apart, providing high drama as the song persistently energizes while resisting entropic clutter. Melford bangs away, and Nicholson goes wherever he wants. The group never stays erratic for long, hanging close to a more traditional blues and jazz structures. “Between Now & Then” follows the chaos by reminding us of the group's roots. The album works best not as a rejection of bop but as its use as a headquarters from which to recon neighboring landscapes.

Opener “Evening Might Still” (I don't believe it will, based on the music) provides the foundation for the performances, particularly those of the first disc. The trio pushes the tempo, trading solos — each artist deserves their moments throughout, with Horner particularly claiming space — and looping back to their hooks without losing the groove. There's little playful in the approach, though, as it sounds like an attack, as if the trio (even with two albums behind them) has something to prove.  

The second disc (hatOLOGY oddly reissued these two volumes as separate releases) slows down for a moment with “Breaking Light,” a nine-minute stroll to let Melford wipe the sweat away before working herself and her bandmates back into a swing. “Some Kind of Blues” eases the band forward, relying on Horner's lead through much of it. “That the Peace” slowly falls apart, stays there a while, and then returns to a more trad jazz sound. “Live Jump” misdirects. It skitters at the start, with Melford just hinting at jump blues revival; her resistance to that beat that wants to come out is as impressive as it is fun, and when Horner and Nicholson come in to turn the song into a rollick, the formal work reaches completion.

Knowing the paths of Melford's career since then could make Alive in the House of Saints a piece of biography, an essential part of contextualizing the pianist's later, ostensibly more advanced work, but this blast of a set carries about as much fun as it can hold, and does so without sacrificing any artistry. The two discs charm and intrigue without hesitation, making the trio clearly worthy of canonization. 

Comprising four compositions - three of which are related entries in Braxton’s voluminous numerical series - from a concert date recorded in Switzerland in the summer of the titular year the music capitalizes on one of the composer’s most powerful and prestigious groupings of the time. Pianist Muhal Richard Abrams was an old friend and founder of the AACM, present in Braxton’s orbit from nearly the beginning of the latter man’s career. Trombonist George Lewis and bassist Mark Helias, both Yale grads, were a generation younger the former also maintaining strong ties to the AACM. Drummer Charles “Bobo” Shaw was an esteemed delegate of the St. Louis creative music scene having first signed on with Braxton during a mutual sojourn in Paris at the end of the earlier decade.

Time constraints necessitated excising part of the concert’s second set, but the first is preserved in full. Braxton’s compositional grist offers the cohesive paste, but it’s the respective contributions of the musicians that truly bring about the music’s singular stamp. “Composition 69 J” launches almost in mid-tumult with piano, bass and drums churning around a garrulously pugilistic contest between the horns. Lewis’ breaks ranks for a raucous solo answered in turn by Braxton’s chirruping sopranino as Abrams leads a choppy commentary from the flanks before joining Helias and Shaw in provisional silence.  Abrams solos next, his staccato figures skipping across a frothing terrain of roiling bass and drums with horns absent until the very end.

“Composition 69 M” and “Composition 40 B” each revel in the quintet’s more conventionally-grounded jazz chops, although as with all things Braxton convention is a case of extreme relativity. Sopranino and trombone cavort in fleet freebop motif on the first before veering off into terse detours of collective improvisation. The second piece carries an informal dedication to hardbop altoist Lou Donaldson and Braxton does his honoree justice through a sweat-breaking set of calisthenics on the signature reed. Lewis frolics too, working his slide with a rigorous athleticism and indulging in an entire lexicon of brassy slurs. Meriting special mention are Shaw’s efforts particularly during the brief, but memorable duets section on “69 M” in light of the drummer‘s passing last month. Recordings under Shaw’s own name are countable on a single hand making his wily and propulsive percussive patterns in this constantly shifting context consistent evidence of his talent. In the aural textbook of advanced Braxton physics this date rates an especially edifying and standout entry.

Fourteen originals sum to just over an hour of music in a ratio that immediately runs contrary to any sort of inferable Taylor correlation. Shipp constructs the majority of his edifices with economy and swiftly evolving logic in mind. Where the elder pianist would often execute lengthy longitudinal and aggressively percussive flights through his solo recitals, Shipp deviates through a program geared instead to the diversity of numerous discrete statements. “Clocks” investigates intervallic differentials of varying lengths in a dance between fingers and hands that places space and the judicious insertion of delicate melody in a position of paramount prominence. “Harmonic Oscillator”, “Self-Regulated Motion” and “Nerve Signals” offer titular clues to other of Shipp’s thematic and process-derived concerns, each pulling in repetition, dissonance and grandly deployed gestures that stand confidently apart in their originality and sustained exigency.

“Temperate Zone” is the first piece to integrate under-the-hood and pedal enhancements in the manipulation of strings to establish stark timbral variances while the disc’s title piece is rife with rapid displays of digital dexterity along tightly constrained trajectories. “The Highway”, “Bop Abyss” and “Algebraic Boogie” contain the kernels of conventionally-mapped structures. Across each, Shipp never wavers in his concentration or resolve in bringing an idea to fruition. That degree of consistency is one of the discernible areas that Taylor and he do have in common. It’s rooted in the studied ability to give oneself completely over to the instrument while remaining steadfastly true to the self in the contract. That balance of mind, body, spirit and conduit suffuses this set and while it was but the first entry to a corner of his catalog that now numbers eleven with the release of Zero last month on the ESP label his distinctness from Taylor and the underlying respect it implies has never wavered.