#pyroclastic

The first project’s first, self-titled iteration wasn’t really the work of a band as much as it was the manifestation of a concept. The musicians at its core were Davis on piano, Trevor Dunn on electric bass, Terri Lynne Carrington on drums and Val Jeanty wielding turntables as a source of sampled speech, natural sounds and scratches. They were supplemented by six other musicians playing electric guitar, saxophones, vibes and voice, who enabled Davis to incorporate blues, rock, hip-hop and classical elements into her already-inclusive vision of the jazz continuum. The two-disc Diatom Ribbons was ambitious, but also a bit exhausting to negotiate.

This similarly dimensioned successor comes from a weekend engagement at the Village Vanguard. The latest material, which hinges around a three-part “Bird Suite,” and the ensemble’s lack of augmentation — besides the core group, there are no horns and just one guitarist, Julian Lage — results in a more cohesive statement of Davis’s thesis, which echoes a point that Charles Mingus already made a long, long time ago; you do Charlie Parker no honor by trying to play like him. He is the namesake of the three-part “Bird Suite,” which is the album’s center of gravity. Buttressed by Jeanty’s snatches of speeches by Sun Ra, Stockhausen, and other visionaries, as well as liberally reinterpreted tunes by Wayne Shorter, Ronald Shannon Jackson, and Geri Allen, the music seems to be arguing that today’s jazz musician, like Bird, need to deal with everything that’s happened, and then come up with something personal.

To that end, Davis makes a hash of old, dualistic notions like inside/outside, improvised/composed or jazz + (one other genre) hybrids. Properly prepared, hash is pretty tasty, and that’s the case with this overflowing platter of pristine lyricism, bebop-to-free structural abstractions, shifting rhythmic matrices and multi-signal broadcasts of sound and voice. This is the good stuff, Davis seems to be saying, and a music maker following a jazz trajectory needs to deal with it all. But, while the music of the Diatom Ribbons ensemble is way more creatively inclusive than all those bebop copycats Mingus used to rail against, it’s a highly personal reordering of what is known, not a total paradigm shift into the new. Come to think of it, however, Mingus’ own undeniably magnificent accomplishments were more on the order of what Davis is doing here than Charlie Parker’s transformation of the music of his time.