#long forms

Such a songbook demands attentive and proactive improvisors. Trumpeter Shane Endsley and guitarist Miles Okazaki quickly assert themselves as key soloists alongside the leader. Drummer Dan Weiss is just as central to the rhythm section, shifting from sticks to brushes with supple facility while keeping the beats porous and plentiful. Pianist Jacob Sacks and bassist Matt Pavolka click in their respective roles, too, with each player managing the balancing act of retaining his voice while adding to the palpable gestalt that Talmor’s music both mandates and facilitates. “Kayeda” is a case in point, rife with space, particularly when everyone but Sacks drops out and he’s left to carry the load alone in a crystalline reverie that gradually invites the others back. 

Listening to the intricate ways Talmor layers composition with improvisation in a weave that preserves the integrity of each eventually reveals one of his chief influences and with that recognition comes a twinge of sadness. Recently deceased altoist Lee Konitz took Talmor under his wing some thirty-years ago. In the ensuing years they moved from a teacher-pupil dynamic to one of peers and collaborators. Talmor plays tenor here save for the concluding suite “Musique Anodine” where flutes, Bansuri and clarinet also enter his palette, and a Konitzian limberness of phrasing and liquidity tone are discernable in his improvisations. 

The disc’s title is also no slapdash signifier. Four of the disc’s pieces take flight from extended itineraries. Talmor packs in lots of action with twists, detours, displacements, and ample avenues for improvisation coloring each outing. Even the penultimate “Groupings”, which is interstitial in both length and positioning, is stacked with compass spinning activity. To the inattentive ear, these constantly shifting canvases can feel busy an even abstruse in the frequency of information. Talmor’s incisiveness of intent and execution recalls the old Warne Marsh composition “Background Music”, meant as both wry commentary on and corrective to those content in considering attention to jazz as it’s made incidental or worse, accidental.